The Nazi's Son

by Andrew Turpin

  “Thank you for the information you have given us so far,” Johnson began. “It has been very helpful.”

  “I will kill you bastards when I’m out of here,” Schwartz said, his eyes glazed from the lack of sleep. “Don’t thank me.”

  “I’m sure you will. But there are a few other questions I have.”

  “Go screw yourself.” Schwartz slumped back into the cushions.

  Johnson stood and did a lap of the sofa, then stood in front of Schwartz, his hands on his hips. “Listen, we can put you back on the same diet as you were on previously and tie you back to the chair until you talk again, if you prefer. Just let me know.”

  The German remained silent, which Johnson took as a sign of surrender. He sat down again.

  “We need to know more about the London connection,” Johnson said. “Now drink that coffee.”

  Schwartz reluctantly drank the coffee and sat there, a sullen expression on his face.

  “The SD cards that I pass on to Moscow come from a courier who travels from London to Berlin,” Schwartz said eventually. “The courier deposits them with VIPER, who lives here, and then I collect them and take them to Moscow.”

  “Where do you collect them from VIPER? At his house?”

  “No, at a safe house.” Schwartz gave an address in the Kreuzberg area of Berlin.

  “How do you know about the courier?” Johnson asked.

  “I bumped into him once, by accident. We both arrived at VIPER’s safe house at the same time. There had been some mix-up, a mistake, with the meeting times. We spoke briefly.”

  “Where does the courier collect his SD cards from—do you know?”

  This time there was a long silence. Schwartz’s eyes appeared unfocused, and Johnson wondered if he was about to fall asleep again.

  “Schwartz,” Johnson said in a sharp tone.

  The German blinked slowly and shook his head, as if to refocus. “I do know. There is a dead drop in London. I know because I had to collect a drive from there once, six months ago. There was a problem with the courier. It was urgent, so I traveled there instead.”

  Johnson leaned forward. Now he was getting somewhere.

  “Where is the dead drop? Is it an apartment? Do you know who deposits the items there?”

  “It is not an apartment.”

  “What then? A hole in a wall somewhere?”

  “A motorbike.”

  “A motorbike?”

  “Yes.”

  “How does that work, then?” Johnson said.

  “When needed, it is left locked up near St. Paul’s Cathedral. I was given a code to undo the lock on the pannier bag. One of those fixed fiberglass panniers. The SD card was inside.”

  Very clever, Johnson thought. A flexible, mobile drop site that could be loaded elsewhere, then left along with lots of other motorbikes in a busy, fairly secure location, arousing zero suspicion.

  “Where exactly is the motorbike left?” Johnson asked.

  “It’s in a bay on the corner of Bread Street and Cannon Street, a short distance from the cathedral.”

  “Do you know the license plate number for the bike?” Johnson asked.

  Schwartz closed his eyes. “I did know. I can’t remember all of it. It had a number 11 in it, followed by three letters, PXX. I know that bit. There were also two letters at the start, but I can’t recall them.”

  “All right, that might do,” Johnson said. He had enough information for now on the mole, but there still remained the question of Schwartz’s past with the Stasi in the ’80s and whether he could shed any light on what information Yezhov might have been intending to pass on regarding La Belle.

  “Do the words La Belle mean anything to you?” Johnson asked.

  Schwartz shrugged. “If you are talking about the disco bomb, yes, I know of what happened. It was a long time ago.”

  “Apparently there is information relating to that bomb attack that has not been disclosed previously. An informer was intending to give us that information but has been unable to do so.”

  “Gennady Yezhov, you mean?”

  Johnson could not help recoiling a little. How the hell did Schwartz know about Yezhov?

  “Don’t worry, I know what happened to him a couple of weeks ago,” Schwartz said. “I keep my ears open. I knew Yezhov from the 1980s. He was KGB in Berlin when I was in the Stasi.”

  Johnson lifted his eyebrows. “In that case, you might be more use than I thought you would be. What I would like to know is whether there is anyone who might have some insight as to what Yezhov was going to tell us about La Belle. Who knew about it?”

  Schwartz gave a short, low-pitched laugh. “Everyone knew a little about it. Not many knew much.”

  “Explain.”

  “There were rumors.”

  “What rumors?” Johnson asked.

  “About who was behind it.”

  “The Libyans were convicted in court.”

  Schwartz laughed again. “Yes, they were convicted. The question is whether others should have been too.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. I was at the fringe of it all. But maybe certain Soviet and East German intelligence people.”

  Johnson consciously suppressed his instinct to jerk upward. Instead he calmly leaned forward. This was obviously significant, but was Schwartz telling the truth?

  “Well, who?” Johnson asked. “If you’re saying that, you must have someone in mind.”

  “I don’t know. I just heard that a few individuals in the KGB and Stasi people knew more about La Belle than has come out.”

  Johnson could feel his adrenaline start to pump again.

  “Well, is there anyone who might be able to tell me more?” Johnson asked.

  And if you say “I don’t know” one more time, I’ll punch you.

  Schwartz shrugged. “Have you spoken to Yezhov’s wife, Varvara?”

  Johnson, Vic, and Jayne had discussed at some length about trying to talk to Yezhov’s wife. But she lived in St. Petersburg, and the logistics of getting into Russia were complex: it would have to be done under a false identity. It was also far too risky to call her, as her lines would inevitably be all monitored by the FSB’s communications experts at the Lubyanka.

  “Should we meet with her?” Johnson asked.

  “I think you should,” Schwartz replied. “She was also KGB at that time. That’s how she and Gennady met. They operated together in Berlin—they were a work team, and they were lovers.”

  A KGB work team, and lovers. Even as Schwartz spoke, an idea came to Johnson as to how he could sneak into St. Petersburg undercover to find Varvara Yezhova.

  Part Two

  Chapter Fifteen

  Thursday, April 3, 2014

  London

  “Hello, this is Anna from Private Finance Advice Line,” the electronic voice coming from the synthesizer said. “Have you been sold payment protection insurance at any time in the last three years? If so, we might be able to help. We have four simple checks we would like to run through with you.”

  As usual, there was a quick response. “No, thank you, I’m not interested.” The line went dead.

  Anastasia Shevchenko turned off her burner phone and took out the SIM card and battery. The SIM was consigned to a bin hanging beneath a lamp post near the Baker Street underground station on Marylebone Road, just after she had turned a corner and was confident she was not being observed.

  Her coded message had confirmed the previously arranged meeting—for April 3 at four o’clock—with her agent ANTELOPE.

  Now Shevchenko needed to make her way to the SVR safe house, an apartment in the St. John’s Wood area of London.

  ANTELOPE was the crown jewel in the network of agents whom Shevchenko had recruited in various foreign capitals over several years. The agent, an international operator with years of experience, had only been on board for a few months but had already provided a wealth of extremely high-quality intelligence that had enabled the SVR to
put an end to various damaging operations run against Moscow by the CIA and MI6.

  ANTELOPE had also rooted out a number of SVR traitors who had betrayed the Motherland in return for large sums of money, of which Colonel Gennady Yezhov was the latest.

  Despite the glow of achievement that she currently carried inside her, however, Shevchenko knew that she was taking a lot of risk in continuing to meet and handle ANTELOPE in person: it had to end soon. Yezhov’s attempted defection had been a close call, a wake-up alarm—if he hadn’t been shot in Berlin, she and her agent would have been blown.

  As with all the other agents Shevchenko had recruited inside Western intelligence, she could not continue the meetings herself indefinitely. She had therefore arranged with her colleagues in Directorate S at Moscow Center to be substituted by an “illegal”—a civilian who was not operating under diplomatic cover and who never went near the Russian embassy. Most illegals were expatriate Russians operating under false passports and doing ordinary day jobs such as IT contractors, filing clerks, and even lecturers.

  The illegal in this case would be Natalia Espinosa, a raven-haired single mother of two. She was the same person who was currently collecting Shevchenko’s own dispatches of leaked documents and placing them in a dead drop near St. Paul’s Cathedral for a courier to collect and ferry to Moscow, usually via Berlin.

  Shevchenko had never met Natalia and normally left Directorate S to pass on messages, but she had seen her file. She held Spanish and Russian passports, thanks to having a father from Barcelona and a mother from Moscow, where she had grown up. The Spanish passport enabled Espinosa to enter and live in the UK quite freely, and she had worked in London for the previous two decades as a freelance language teacher.

  The illegals were tasked with collecting information from agents either via occasional personal meetings or more normally by using short-range agent communications units, or SRACs. This technology enabled encrypted data to be transmitted wirelessly over short distances in very short concentrated bursts between small, portable individual devices, making it difficult to intercept. Sometimes the receiving device would be permanently buried in a secure location so files could be uploaded and downloaded by means of simply passing near to the unit on foot or in a slow-moving vehicle. The information would then be dispatched onward to Moscow either electronically or more likely on micro SD memory cards that were transported using old-fashioned couriers.

  Shevchenko had already ordered the necessary SRAC kit from Moscow Center for ANTELOPE to use.

  Once Natalia was in place and operating as intended, Shevchenko would head back to Moscow. Indeed, she had notified the Russian ambassador in London of her intentions to move back in eleven days’ time, on April 14.

  She expected that ANTELOPE would then be able to continue operating completely undetected for years to come, doing indescribable damage to Russia’s rival intelligence operations globally.

  Shevchenko set off on her surveillance detection route. She was certain that there would be coverage of some kind. It was rare for them to leave her alone. But she mostly managed to find a way to see them off, and if she didn’t, she just aborted and tried again the next day.

  Mostly she went on foot and used underground trains and the ubiquitous red buses that went everywhere in the capital, but sometimes she used her car, a black BMW 5 Series sedan, that she kept parked near her apartment in Dorset Square, close to Marylebone station.

  Today her route took her into the Baker Street underground, where she rode two stops southbound down the Bakerloo line to Oxford Circus, walked around the labyrinth of tunnels and corridors for twenty minutes, then swapped lines and went straight back north again, returning to Baker Street.

  One of Shevchenko’s greatest assets was a more or less photographic memory for faces. Coupled with a ratlike sense for danger, it was something that had gotten her out of trouble on many occasions during her career.

  Now there were a couple of faces she thought she’d seen at Baker Street previously: a middle-aged man carrying an umbrella and a girl in her late twenties wearing a denim jacket, seemingly engrossed in a book. So she repeated the same exercise, this time heading north two stops to Edgware Road, where she again changed lines and went back the way she had come. This time, she got off one stop down the line, exiting the car just before the doors closed, and waited for the next train before continuing back to Baker Street.

  Now there were no repeating faces, nobody behaving remotely surreptitiously, turning to avert their faces or swiftly entering stairwells or ducking down corridors. Nobody who she would have bracketed as possible MI6 surveillance candidates. But she needed to do much more to be certain. She exited Baker Street station, walked past Madame Tussauds, and turned left into Regent’s Park.

  The open acres of the park, with its array of avenues, pathways, and sports fields, would flush out any observers, and she took a long, long walk right up past London Zoo, pausing to sit on a bench, drink a coffee at a café, and watch a game of soccer. Eventually, she began to loop back westward, making her way toward her destination.

  She hailed a taxi and got the driver to drop her at the northwestern corner of the park. There she entered an apartment block with eight floors, slipping in as a resident came out of the security door. She bypassed the elevators and began climbing up the stairwell, pausing for a minute or two at each landing. This was her final check. If nobody came running up the stairwell after her now, she was clear.

  Shevchenko could not afford to make a mistake. But by the fifth floor, she was finally satisfied that all was well.

  Carefully, she put on a woolen hat and a pair of nonprescription glasses, turned her double-sided jacket inside out, making it look blue instead of beige, and descended to ground level. She exited the building and continued on a zigzag route that took her to the apartment building where ANTELOPE should be waiting.

  She just hoped that ANTELOPE had taken just as much care with surveillance detection precautions as she had.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Thursday, April 3, 2014

  London

  When Shevchenko finally arrived, ANTELOPE was sitting in an armchair in the apartment on the seventh floor of a modern nine-story building on St. John’s Wood Road, overlooking Lord’s Cricket Ground. The SVR had acquired the apartment on a long lease through an anonymous front company, and it was the location where Shevchenko most often met her agent.

  Shevchenko did not understand cricket but had been to a couple of games at Lord’s in an attempt to find out more and to give her something to discuss with her British contacts, particularly the male ones, who seemed to think of little else, especially in summer. She had done the same with football and baseball when she had been based in the rezidentura in Washington, DC, and had been to see a few of the Washington Redskins and Washington Nationals games. Conversations about sports were definitely an icebreaker in diplomatic circles.

  Today, as was normally the case, it was just the two of them at the safe house, which was less than a mile from where ANTELOPE lived in Maida Vale.

  “Congratulations,” Shevchenko said as she removed her jacket. “The information you provided on Yezhov was outstanding. There was much at stake.”

  “Probably both of our jobs,” ANTELOPE said in a dry tone. “Thank you. It’s what you’re paying me for.”

  “Yes indeed.” It was precisely why on the first day of every month thirty thousand euros were transferred from an SVR account and deposited in ANTELOPE’s numbered account in Zürich. So far, the agent had earned it.

  “I am guessing that there was a nuclear explosion at Vauxhall Cross and Grosvenor Square when the news about Yezhov came through?” Shevchenko asked as she sat down in an armchair facing directly toward her agent.

  Grosvenor Square in the exclusive Mayfair district was the site of the US embassy and CIA station in London, although work was already underway to move it to another location three miles away south of the River Thames, at Nine Elms.

>   “I hear it went ballistic,” ANTELOPE said in a level tone of voice. “There is a witch hunt going on already for the source of the leak, as you might expect. But the fact that it was a joint operation does help to muddy the waters, so to speak. They don’t know which direction to look in.”

  “Good. The strategy is working, from that point of view.”

  “Yes, there is a lot of embarrassment that such a valuable defector was not brought in successfully. It was a massive failure. But there is a downside to that too.”

  “What?”

  “My understanding is that they have got an outsider to run an unofficial independent inquiry. I think they want deniability and don’t want a full high-profile internal inquest going on, which might be more damaging if knowledge of it were to become public. They might have to brief the politicians. So they seem to have opted for something lower key but potentially dangerous. However, so far no progress has been made, as far as I understand.”

  Shevchenko didn’t like the sound of this investigation. She poured a glass of water from a jug on the coffee table in front of her and topped up ANTELOPE’s, then glanced around the room, silent for a few moments. The apartment was sparsely but comfortably furnished with flat-pack items mainly bought from IKEA. It was a typical SVR safe house, not designed for long stays but rather shorter meetings.

  “Who is running the inquiry?” she asked eventually, leaning back in her chair.

  “It’s a strange one. He is a friend of Vic Walter, the CIA’s new operations directorate chief. He’s an independent war crimes investigator, used to work for the CIA years ago. Name of Joe Johnson. He has a strong track record. He got fired by the CIA in 1988 but then worked very successfully from 1990 to 2006 as a Nazi hunter for the Department of Justice in the States—their Office of Special Investigations unit. He’s got unorthodox ways of working, apparently, which I also don’t like.”

  “Why did the CIA fire him?”

  “An operation in Afghanistan went wrong,” ANTELOPE said.