The Nazi's Son

by Andrew Turpin

  Bernice did not enter the towpath tunnel that ran beneath Lisson Grove. Instead, she jumped off her bike and, turning right off the towpath, ran with it up a steep concrete alley lined with graffitied brick walls and iron railings, to street level, where she emerged through an archaic wrought-iron gate onto Lisson Grove.

  That was the most direct route to her destination. From Lisson Grove, it was just about a third of a mile to the SVR’s safe house overlooking Lord’s Cricket Ground, on St. John’s Wood Road. No more than a short sprint on her bike.

  If she could just reach the apartment, it would give her a chance to regroup, to call Shevchenko, and to determine whether what she had fled from on Outer Circle really was surveillance. Nobody would find her there.

  She jumped onto her bike and pushed off.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Monday, April 14, 2014

  London

  “She’s run,” the now-cracked voice coming over the squawk box said, his intonation rising. “She’s going like a frigging racing car into Park Road. Suddenly accelerated.”

  Johnson rushed over to the table where Nicklin-Donovan and Vic were sitting at their laptops, the conference speaker in the center of the desk linked to the radio network being used by the surveillance team. Jayne came after him.

  “What the hell happened to freak her out like that?” Nicklin-Donovan asked, his voice staccato.

  “Don’t know,” the officer’s voice came back amid a cluster of crackles and hisses. “Must have seen us or sensed us. Somehow picked us up.”

  Vic thumped the table and tipped his head back, momentarily staring at the ceiling.

  “Don’t waste time discussing what freaked her. We’ve got our mole,” Johnson said, his words tumbling out. “Just get after her. We need to catch her with the SRAC on her.”

  “We are after her,” the voice came again. “Wait. She’s headed down to the canal. The towpath. Gone through a gate and down some steps. She’s carrying her bike.”

  “Which direction?” Jayne snapped. “I know that towpath. I used to run along there.”

  “Don’t know. Just pulling level with the gate now. The steps lead west. Must be west.”

  “Yes, must be west,” Jayne said. “Been along there many times. The canal goes to Little Venice, but she’ll have to come off it before then because there’s a break in the towpath.”

  “Can we head her off?” Johnson asked.

  “Yes. Think we could try.” She looked at Nicklin-Donovan. “Mark, send one of the surveillance cars down to the A5 bridge over the canal, the Edgware Road. There’s an exit off the canal there. Send the other one to the Lisson Grove bridge; there’s also an exit there. Me and Joe will use one of the spare cars and drive to the Warwick Avenue exit—it’s further out, but we’ll go just in case she outruns the surveillance boys.”

  “Yes, makes sense,” Nicklin-Donovan said. He turned to the squawk box, pressed a button, and rapped out a series of instructions to the surveillance team in line with what Jayne had recommended.

  Two MI6 cars, both of them two-liter Volkswagen Golfs, were parked in bays outside the safe house on Rossmore Road, for use in case anyone on the team needed them in a hurry. The keys were in a ceramic bowl on the table.

  Johnson grabbed one of the sets of keys from the bowl and tossed them to Jayne. “You drive. You know the area.”

  He strode to the door and was about to exit the building when Vic, who had followed them, tapped him on the shoulder. Now out of sight of Nicklin-Donovan, Vic removed a Walther from his jacket pocket and handed it to Johnson.

  “Here, take this,” Vic said. “Just in case. Go careful with it.”

  Johnson took the pistol, which he knew Vic must have spirited out of the weapons locker at the London CIA station. He quickly checked the safety and pushed it into his jacket pocket. “Thanks.” He walked out the door.

  “How long to get there?” Johnson asked as he stepped out of the entrance of the apartment block and onto the street.

  “A few minutes to Warwick Avenue,” Jayne said.

  “Fine.”

  They jumped into a silver Golf, and Jayne gunned the accelerator and let out the clutch quickly, making the tires squeal a little. She raced in second gear the short distance to the end of Rossmore Road, cut left onto Park Road, then accelerated hard, overtaking three buses and a string of cars and delivery vans.

  It felt strange to Johnson to be setting out on a chase in which the target was someone he had joined the CIA with thirty years earlier and who was now a senior officer heading the Agency’s London station.

  Could Bernice really have been giving away her country’s secrets to Moscow? He still found it hard to believe. But all the situational evidence pointed to her, including her behavior on the bike, and she was in the inner circle that had access to a whole raft of top secret information and classified files.

  The driver of a black Bentley gave a long blast on his horn as Jayne cut inside to the left lane, forcing him to brake. Then she went straight through a red light at a pedestrian crossing as she neared the traffic circle at the top of Park Road, triggering a stream of verbal abuse from a group of youths who were about to step off the sidewalk.

  At the traffic circle, she turned left into St. John’s Wood Road. The white-and-gray buildings of Lord’s Cricket Ground now lay on their right as Jayne accelerated again, taking her speed to fifty miles an hour, well above the limit of thirty.

  They approached a side street on their left, from where a truck pulled out in front of them, forcing Jayne to brake. As she accelerated again behind the truck, Johnson glanced out the left passenger-side window. His attention was caught by a Lycra-clad woman dismounting from her bike at the entrance to an apartment block.

  She was wearing an orange helmet.

  “It’s Bernice,” Johnson yelled. “Over there. Near the apartments.”

  He turned and looked over his shoulder as they went past.

  It was definitely her.

  Jayne hit the brakes and pulled onto the side of the street about forty yards past the apartment entrance.

  Johnson opened the car door, jumped out onto the sidewalk, and began jogging toward the apartments, his eyes focused on Bernice, who was now standing at the front door removing something, presumably a key, from the black tool bag on her bike’s handlebars.

  Bernice closed the bag and lifted her head, then glanced to her left before swiveling right, checking the street. It was at that point that she saw Johnson running toward her, about thirty yards away.

  Without hesitation, the CIA’s London station chief immediately jumped on her bike and began pedaling across the forecourt in front of the apartments, onto the sidewalk, and toward the side street.

  She had moved extremely quickly, and although Johnson continued running after her, he knew he wasn’t going to catch her. He could hear Jayne’s footsteps pounding after him.

  Johnson had to do something. They couldn’t just let her disappear. He stopped and glanced swiftly around, just as Jayne caught up to him. There were no bystanders apart from a couple of teenage boys smoking cigarettes well behind them. He took the Walther from his belt and flicked off the safety, then dropped to one knee, taking careful aim.

  He knew he couldn’t shoot at Bernice.

  “Hit the bike,” Jayne said.

  Johnson nodded. That was exactly what he was thinking—it was all he could do.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The round smashed into somewhere near the center of the bike’s rear wheel, wrecking the hub, several spokes, and the derailleur gear mechanism. Bernice by that stage was pedaling furiously, but the impact caused the rear wheel to collapse, catapulting her off to her right and onto the concrete surface.

  She threw out her arms and landed on her front, sliding across the sidewalk and coming to rest in front of a lamppost. Her wrecked bike skittered into a low brick wall.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Monday, April 14, 2014

&nb
sp; London

  Shevchenko began to get anxious when one hour after the time that ANTELOPE had said she would be uploading data to the base station, she still hadn’t sent a confirmatory text message.

  After three hours, she knew that something had gone badly wrong.

  ANTELOPE was too reliable an operator, too much of a professional, not to do what she had promised.

  Had ANTELOPE done the drop by car, on foot, or by bike, as she had suggested she might? Shevchenko had no way of knowing.

  The bike had seemed a sensible option. ANTELOPE was a regular and very fit cyclist, with a fast bike, and even if any observer did manage to stay with her, there should be nothing to arouse suspicions. It would almost certainly appear as if she were out for one of her regular training rides. Despite Shevchenko’s initial concerns, after she had thought it through, it did seem to be an almost perfect cover.

  There had been no indication that the MI6 or CIA teams had any inkling there was a base station buried in Regent’s Park and even less indication that ANTELOPE was under any kind of suspicion.

  But such a long delay without any form of communication was definitely a major negative signal. And there was a huge amount at stake.

  True, Shevchenko had sent the basic outline about the US president’s planned visit to the USS Donald Cook to Moscow Center already. But the detail contained in the naval document procured by ANTELOPE would add a great deal of value to that. It was crucial that it was dispatched safely.

  Shevchenko had been working at the Russian embassy since half past nine in the morning, trying to clear some of the backlog on her desk in advance of her scheduled departure back to Moscow from Heathrow Airport that evening. Most of the work was purely administrative and routine rather than urgent. Her bags were packed, and she simply needed to return home and collect them.

  Shevchenko decided to head back to her apartment and try to make contact with ANTELOPE from there before heading to the airport. She closed her laptop, put it in her bag, and headed down the stairs to where her driver was waiting in the Mercedes to take her back to Dorset Square.

  This was one of the journeys where she didn’t have to worry about checking too hard for surveillance, unlike some of her other movements around London.

  The traffic was light on the short trip home. Her driver pulled onto the side of the street outside the black double doors of her apartment building, and she got out.

  It was only after she had removed her door key from her bag that she noticed the dark-blue station wagon that was parked at the end of the bay, beyond a builder’s van. Its doors were opening.

  Three men rapidly got out and began to walk toward her.

  That was when her stomach flipped over inside her. The one on the left of the group was Joe Johnson, whom she recognized from the photo that ANTELOPE had showed her, and next to him was Vic Walter. She also thought she recognized the third man from the diplomatic circuit and from profiles kept in the rezidentura, although they had never spoken. Wasn’t it Mark Nicklin-Donovan, from MI6? Yes, it was.

  This didn’t look good. Not when coupled with ANTELOPE’s failure to make contact.

  Nicklin-Donovan strode up to her. “Anastasia Shevchenko?”

  She nodded. “Yes, that’s me.”

  He introduced himself and the two others.

  “We think you might want to come and talk to us,” Nicklin-Donovan said.

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “We have someone you know well in one of our offices. We have had a very interesting conversation with her this afternoon—quite enlightening.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. She tells us you have been helping her to pass classified British and American intelligence and military documents to Moscow.”

  Bljad. Son of a bitch.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Shevchenko said. “I am the declared rezident in London for the SVR. I wish I did have access to classified British documents, but sadly MI6 hasn’t included me in their daily email distribution list. I can’t think why. So I don’t think I need to come and talk to you about anything. In any case, I have a flight this evening back to Moscow. So if you will excuse me, I need to go and get ready.”

  She knew that she had diplomatic immunity, so the damned British couldn’t touch her on legal grounds. They weren’t going to arrest her. However, her mind began whirring with images of her being escorted to Heathrow Airport, ejected from the UK, and sent back to Moscow Center under a cloud.

  But that paled in comparison to the fact that it now seemed certain that her twenty-four-carat asset, Bernice Franklin, had been well and truly blown.

  How the hell had that happened?

  Bozhe. God.

  What a mess.

  Moscow Center would be incandescent with rage when they found out, as would the president. Only in the past couple of weeks, ANTELOPE had provided massively valuable military intelligence relating to the Black Sea. Now Shevchenko would likely take the blame for her demise, and with that the lost prospects of a decade or more of future priceless intelligence.

  Shevchenko could feel her promotion aspirations evaporating into the gray skies above London.

  Although Shevchenko was well practiced at maintaining an inscrutable, emotionless face at times like this, inside she felt as though she had been stabbed by a dagger.

  “Yes, you will be going back to Moscow,” Nicklin-Donovan said, glancing up and down the street. “But it probably won’t be tonight.”

  “Get lost,” Shevchenko said dismissively. She needed to sit down inside and think through what to do next. She turned her back on the trio and began to insert her key into the lock.

  “There are other things we need to discuss too,” Johnson said.

  Now what’s he going to throw at me?

  “Like what?” she asked, turning her head back toward Johnson.

  Johnson stared at her for several seconds before speaking. “Berlin, April 1986. I want to discuss your lover Yuri Severinov and the part you both played in the La Belle disco bombing.”

  This time, Shevchenko had to battle hard to keep her glacier expression intact. It was the last thing she had been expecting to hear. That had been twenty-eight years ago.

  And worse, now she was dragging her old operational partner into it. Yuri, too, would be more than furious, especially since he had been alienated from the president and the prime minister recently.

  Where had Johnson gotten this information from?

  “We know what you did,” Johnson said. “We know you ignored the warnings, even the warnings that came from the Stasi, and you let that bombing go ahead simply because it would kill Americans.”

  Shevchenko stared at Johnson, who was eyeballing her back, his gaze unblinking.

  This was enough, especially out in the street. “All right. Let’s go somewhere indoors and discuss this dermo, this shit that you are spreading around.”

  Chapter Fifty

  Monday, April 14, 2014

  London

  The television monitor hanging on the wall in the nondescript brick office building that housed an MI6 remote office was showing news coverage from Istanbul when Johnson walked in with Vic, Nicklin-Donovan, and Shevchenko.

  After the surveillance team had been through Bernice’s belongings, Nicklin-Donovan had opted to take her to the satellite office building, just north of the Euston railway station and a ten-minute drive away from the Rossmore Road safe house, in an attempt to keep the situation low-profile. This made sense to Johnson, given that his inquiry wasn’t officially taking place.

  Johnson also assumed that Nicklin-Donovan would not want Shevchenko to see the safe house for obvious security reasons, and taking her to Vauxhall Cross would have increased the likelihood of a leak, leading to uncontrolled and potentially damaging media coverage.

  But it was the news coverage from Istanbul that was currently holding the room’s attention. The three men paused to watch.

  The footag
e showed the USS Donald Cook, apparently on patrol of the western Black Sea near to Russian territorial waters, being repeatedly buzzed by a Sukhoi Su-24 “Fencer” attack aircraft that was flying very low and very close to the destroyer.

  Johnson was stunned to see a ticker beneath the picture that read, “Russians attack destroyer carrying US president.”

  The news anchor who was providing a somewhat excited commentary on the confrontation said the US president had decided to visit the Donald Cook as it entered the Black Sea. But no sooner had the president’s helicopter landed on board than the warship had come under a series of sustained approaches by the Su-24.

  Johnson turned to Vic. “It frigging leaked,” he said, his voice rising. That had to have been Bernice’s work.

  Vic stood, rooted and speechless, watching the monitor screen.

  The anchor, speaking in an excited machine-gun style delivery, reported that after initial concerns that there might be an exchange of fire between the two sides, it had become clear that the Su-24 was not carrying weapons.

  However, the maneuvers were being interpreted as an obvious threat directly from President Putin’s office to the US president as well as to US and NATO forces. Putin was clearly telling them to back off.

  The report cut to a military expert who said that the Su-24 was probably carrying Khibiny electronic warfare technology that could disable the Donald Cook’s Aegis naval weapons control system that was designed to detect, track, and destroy targets.

  Another expert said he thought that was unlikely, as he understood the Su-24s didn’t carry the Khibiny technology.

  Then a former intelligence officer was interviewed, arguing that Russia must have had some advance warning of the Donald Cook’s arrival and the president’s visit to the Black Sea in order to respond so quickly. There must have been an intelligence breach, most likely in the US camp, he said.