Katya explained that the Lada belonged to one of her father’s friends who had moved to Hong Kong to work for a couple of years and had left the car and his apartment in Katya’s care while he was away.
“I drive it once a week to keep it going. Now it will get a longer run, it seems,” she said as they climbed into the vehicle.
Five minutes later, they were back on the highway—the Western High Speed Diameter toll road—heading through the northern suburbs of St. Petersburg. The speedometer indicated a steady 110 kilometers per hour—exactly the limit that showed on the digital displays mounted on overhead gantries.
This was a very new high-quality, fast highway, with three lanes in each direction and lighting mounted on arches that curved over the traffic like giant elephants’ tusks. Metal barriers on the right side of the road blocked the traffic noise from reaching nearby housing.
Soon they were out of the city; the highway was now flanked by green fields and trees that stretched across a flat, featureless landscape to the east and west.
After about thirty kilometers, Katya slowed as they approached a set of eight tollbooths that stretched across the highway. She headed for one of the five booths that required payment by either cash or credit card. She stopped next to the booth, wound down her window, and leaned out to insert several coins into the machine.
Within seconds, the red-and-white boom had lifted, and they were on their way again. Soon they filtered right to join the M10, the highway that ran right up to the border with Finland.
“We travel fast, and we are long gone by the time they realize we are in a different car,” Katya said. “That’s if they realize at all. The police here are idiots. It will take them twenty-four hours at least. Maybe a couple of days.”
Johnson said nothing. But he could not help thinking that though the police might be idiots, Severinov definitely was not.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
St. Petersburg
Frustratingly, it took more than an hour for the FSB’s head office at the Lubyanka to pinpoint the license plate for a red Škoda Octavia that was registered to Katya Yezhova. Once he had it, however, Pugachov wasted no time in ensuring that his senior police contacts had distributed it to all patrols across the city of St. Petersburg and the sprawling Leningrad oblast, or political region, that surrounded the city in all directions.
Severinov refrained from expressing his irritation at the delay. It wouldn’t help, and it was better for him to focus his energies on trying to outthink Johnson rather than worry about bureaucratic tangles at the FSB or police service—or indeed the consequences from the Kremlin if he failed to deliver on the president’s instructions.
He paced up and down the hallway of the FSB apartment, leaving Pugachov in the living room on a long call with his headquarters team.
What route will Johnson and Katya use to get out of Russia?
The airports and ports had been locked down—all officials and security people there had been given Johnson’s details and photograph. He couldn’t get through that way. So what was their plan?
Severinov stopped and stared out the window at the far end of the hallway at the line of cars and vans streaming along the street below, but he wasn’t focusing. His thoughts were still crystallizing.
The pair could be headed south to Moscow or even right down to the Black Sea, where the options for escape by water opened up. But the Black Sea would be a three-day drive, and that would not be feasible with the FSB and police closing in.
Rather, the overwhelming probability was that the pair was headed for the land borders with Finland, Estonia, or Latvia, Severinov figured. They were the nearest. It was possible to get to the Finnish border, about 140 kilometers away, in roughly two hours and the slightly more distant Estonian border in maybe two and a half hours.
But Pugachov had already alerted the FSB’s Border Service, the heavily armed security division responsible for preventing illegal entry into and exit from Russia, as well as customs and passport control.
Checks by Pugachov had shown that nobody by the name of Joe Johnson or Joseph Johnson had recently entered Russia, so he was obviously traveling on a false passport. Pugachov had instructed his teams to work with police and immigration officials to find out what identity Johnson had used to get into the country, but no progress had yet been made.
Severinov knew that unless Johnson and Katya had a way of smuggling themselves in a vehicle, they would be unlikely to try crossing at one of the official checkpoints. They would rather look for an illegal route through, which would be far from easy.
The 1,300 kilometer border with Finland had a seven-and-a-half kilometer security zone on the Russian side. Entry to the zone required a special permit, and it was covered by a mix of surveillance, both electronic and human. Very few attempts at illegal crossings were successful, and there were tough controls at the official border checkpoints at Vaalimaa and Nuijamaa.
The Latvian border was shorter, at about 214 kilometers, and although there were seven official checkpoints, surveillance at the crossings and in the security zone was just as tough as along the Finnish border. Severinov dismissed the likelihood of them getting right up north to the Norway border—it was just too far. Belarus was a possibility, but the border was about 300 miles away from St. Petersburg.
The other question was, How would they travel?
Severinov assumed it would be obvious to Johnson that his chances of making it in Katya’s red Škoda were probably zero. The car would be easily traceable. So, what would he do in Johnson’s position? He would switch to another vehicle.
Would he and Katya buy a car? Severinov considered it unlikely, unless they made a cash purchase and didn’t register the vehicle. They wouldn’t want to leave an electronic footprint of the transaction. But buying a car would be time-consuming, and time was not a commodity they had much of.
Would they steal one? That would be a quick solution, but again, not very likely since, unless they were lucky, the owner would report it stolen and alert police very quickly, raising the likelihood of being caught.
No. The most likely scenario, in Severinov’s view, was that Katya would borrow another car from someone she knew. And that would be someone in St. Petersburg.
But who?
Another thing that was puzzling Severinov deeply was why Katya Yezhova had teamed up with Johnson and was helping him to escape. By doing so, she must know she was putting her life at risk.
It was of course possible that Katya’s father had given her information that would be of use to foreign intelligence agencies, which she could pass on to Johnson, Severinov thought.
But he very much doubted it. Surely, Gennady, as a defecting SVR officer, would not put his family members in danger by entrusting them with secrets that could see them tortured or worse—with the inevitable result that the secrets would eventually be given up. No, that wasn’t likely.
So if she didn’t have such information, why was she doing it? That was a difficult one.
Had this been some sort of prearranged meeting in which Johnson had come to St. Petersburg in order to exfiltrate her? Probably not. Johnson was almost certainly trying to reach Varvara, not Katya; he would not have known that the mother was dead.
The more that Severinov thought it through, the more he was inclined to believe that Katya must be taking or directing Johnson toward someone else who could help him or who had the information he required.
Katya would be furious at her father’s death and would know that the long arm of the SVR or FSB lay behind his murder. For that reason, she was likely willing to do what she could to help a genial, likable Westerner, which Severinov had to begrudgingly admit was the way Johnson presented himself.
Severinov had an idea. He strode back to the living room, where Pugachov had finished his call.
“Leonid, if anyone is going to help these two escape, it’s probably going to be someone in her father’s network around h
ere—people with resources and money,” Severinov said. “Can we get a list of the candidates and get them checked out?”
Pugachov sat up straight. “I was thinking of that too. We already have a list of that kind—a counterintelligence standard process.”
“It might be a good idea to use it, then.” Severinov felt a flash of irritation—it was a knee-jerk reflex that he always felt when he perceived someone to be not moving proactively enough.
Pugachov glanced at him. “We’ve only just started this process and—”
“How many on the list?”
“About twenty. There might be more.”
“Can you get the police to visit them all?”
Pugachov nodded and grabbed his phone.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Leningrad Oblast
The strip of flat, recently laid tarmac that comprised the M10 highway curved northeast through a flat expanse of fields and pine trees that stretched as far as Johnson could see, beneath a chilly ice-blue sky. Despite the warmer spring weather, there were still patches of snow on the fields, particularly up against the hedges, where it had drifted.
A blue signpost read Vyborg 56, Helsinki 311. Katya kept the Lada moving at a steady 110 kilometers an hour. Once they had reached beyond the city limits of St. Petersburg, the traffic had become light; there was little to hold them up.
Johnson checked the map on his phone. From the town of Vyborg, situated near the head of the Gulf of Finland, it was about sixty kilometers to the border crossing at Vaalimaa and about forty kilometers to the other main border post at Nuijamaa.
But by now he was becoming anxious and irritated at her continued reluctance to tell him her planned route out of the country. It seemed a dogmatic approach, doubtless something that her father had ingrained into her rather than something she was actively thinking about in the current situation. She was young, and he had to assume she had little experience in assessing and dealing with potential threats from Russian counterintelligence officers.
On the other hand, she obviously did have a proper plan that had been set up by her father, who had known what he was doing.
They bypassed Vyborg to their left and then, rather than continuing along the M10 to Vaalimaa, Katya turned right onto the 41K-84, which led to the alternative Nuijamaa border post.
To their right lay the silvery waters of the head of the Gulf of Finland, which by that stage was no more than a series of lakes connected by narrow channels.
At a Tatneft gas station on the left side of the highway, a solitary customer was standing next to his pickup beneath a large overhead canopy. A pump assistant who was filling the truck with fuel for him looked up at the sound of the Lada’s engine—there were few cars on the highway, and he was probably hoping for another customer, Johnson surmised.
But Katya braked hard opposite the gas station and, with a slight squeal of tires, turned off the highway and accelerated sharply in the opposite direction, down a narrow tree-lined lane.
They rounded a bend, and there in front of them to their right was the lake, with a long jetty that stretched far out into the blue-black waters.
To Johnson’s surprise, moored to the jetty and dwarfing everything around it was an enormous ship, which he estimated must have been about 240 feet long and 30 feet high. He stared at the ship—a boat of this size was the last thing he had expected to see in the middle of rural Russia, surrounded by trees. The ship was heavily laden with timber; tree trunks were stacked high on deck, dwarfing the men he could see walking alongside them.
To their left was a canal lock, perhaps forty or fifty feet across—this was a an industrial-sized lock the scale of which far eclipsed the smaller versions Johnson had seen in the States. A crane stood on the jetty.
Johnson glanced at Katya, who drove straight over a hinged road bridge that spanned the canal beneath them. It could obviously be raised to allow tall ships, such as the one currently moored at the jetty, to pass through. A large sign on the side of the bridge read Brusnitchnoe.
“What’s this?” Johnson asked.
“Saimaa Canal,” Katya said. “It runs from here north into Finland.”
“A canal? And that is—”
“Yes, the Saimaa. This will be our route out. This is Brusnitchnoe lock—the first one heading north.”
“Right,” said Johnson. “But explain how that works.”
“Don’t worry. We will get over the border. As for how we will do it, I will show you later.”
Johnson pressed his lips together but said nothing. He considered sending a quick text message to Jayne to update her but continued to hold back given the likelihood that all cell phone activity was being monitored by the FSB.
Katya drove on down the lane, the lock now out of sight behind them. After about a kilometer, she turned left off the pavement down a rough dirt track between the trees, which she followed for a few hundred meters, then made a right along a similar track. After a few minutes, she stopped outside a single-story wooden shack built in a clearing in the woods with a long double garage next to it, also made of wood. The shack looked deserted, although it was in good condition and had clearly been used. There was an old chair on a narrow veranda and a pile of firewood stacked beside the door.
“Get out. We’re leaving the car at this dacha,” Katya said. Johnson complied.
“Who does this belong to?” Johnson asked.
“The same friend of my father who owns this car—the one in Hong Kong. It’s his vacation dacha. He loves his boats; he sails them on the lake and the canal.”
“It looks a bit run-down,” Johnson said, gazing at the shack.
“It’s an old one, built during the 1970s—there were strict restrictions on the size you were allowed to build and also on what you could put in them at that time during the communist era. No permanent heating, all that kind of thing. They didn’t want people living out of the cities for long. There was no point spending a lot of money on them.”
Katya went to the garage, opened a padlock on the double doors, and swung them open. On the left side was a small sailing boat on a wheeled trailer, its mast folded down. Presumably the owner towed it to the lake and launched it from there. There was also a workbench down the right-hand side, along with two dusty mountain bikes. She pushed the bikes out and leaned them against the garage wall, then drove the Lada in, walked out of the garage, and padlocked the doors shut.
“Now we ride back to the ship,” Katya said.
“That timber ship?”
“Yes,” Katya said, a note of impatience in her voice. “Its owner is expecting us.”
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
St. Petersburg
Severinov found his hopes rising every time Pugachov received a message to update him on the search for the red Škoda, but so far, hope had not been translated into positive progress.
Police were working their way down the FSB’s list of Gennady Yezhov’s close acquaintances in the St. Petersburg area. Officers were grilling the individuals and searching the areas around their properties for any sign of Katya’s car. After checking thirteen of the twenty men on the list, they were still drawing blanks.
Police patrols on the main highways had also not reported any sightings of the Škoda.
By this stage, another hour had passed, meaning that if Johnson and Katya were heading out of St. Petersburg by road, they had at least a two-hour head start. Severinov could feel his anxiety levels mounting.
There was little they could do apart from wait.
“That car will turn up,” Pugachov said. “It’s just a matter of time.”
“It could be in a garage, hidden away. Then we are screwed,” Severinov said. His hope was that given most of the people listed were at addresses in apartment buildings, they would not have garages. And if Johnson and Katya were in a hurry, which he was certain would be the case, they might not have the time or the means to quickly find a secure hiding place for th
e Škoda. They would likely just dump it.
Twenty minutes later, Pugachov’s phone rang. He answered it within two rings and listened carefully to the caller, fingering his white mustache as he did so.
“Thank you, my friend. We will get there immediately,” Pugachov said as he ended the call.
Severinov took a step nearer to his old colleague. “They have found it?”
Pugachov nodded. “Yes, in a parking lot at some apartments in the north of the city, not far from the river. We will go there now.”
En route in the Mercedes, Pugachov continued to make calls to his headquarters staff, who were now tracing other vehicles registered to the address where they were heading on Serebryakov Pereulok.
The street outside the redbrick apartment building was alive with St. Petersburg police vehicles, roof lights flashing red and blue, when they arrived. A group of kids stood watching as the two men climbed out of the car and walked through an archway beneath the apartments that formed an entrance to the parking lot.
There, standing in a bay and surrounded by several officers, was a red Škoda Octavia. The car doors were open, and another officer sat inside. Presumably the police had forced their way in, Severinov thought.
Severinov held back and watched as Pugachov made his way to a senior police officer whom he appeared to know. They held an animated conversation, and Pugachov returned holding a piece of paper.
“Well?” Severinov asked.
Pugachov waved the paper. “My police friend there, Fedot, has got the license plate and the model.”
“Now we’re making progress. How did you get it?”
“The known associate of Gennady Yezhov who lives in these apartments is currently working in Hong Kong. His car is not visible around here, but neighbors whom Fedot’s team have interviewed say it normally is parked in these bays. It is a gray Lada Kalina, a hatchback. The neighbors also say that sometimes a girl comes here and visits the apartment and drives the car. Maybe that is to check everything and just keep the car going, I don’t know. But I assume the girl is probably Katya Yezhova. Fedot thinks that the Lada is the vehicle Johnson and the girl have left in. They have put out an urgent search call for the vehicle and are checking the inputs from their license plate cameras at various places in the city.”
The Nazi's Son Page 18