Another verbal lambasting and a written warning ensued. Once Watson had made up his mind, it was just a matter of time. Johnson was recalled from Islamabad to Langley in the September of that year.
Two days later, just after Johnson celebrated his thirty-second birthday and only six years after he joined the CIA, the game was up. Johnson walked out of headquarters for the final time, carrying his belongings in a black plastic bag.
Johnson shook himself out of his reverie—Pakistan seemed like a lifetime ago in some ways, yesterday in others. He never did find out what had happened to his agent, with whom he had built a good relationship. It seemed unlikely he would have survived, but who knew? Maybe one day he would go back there and try to find out, he mused.
He stared at Fiona’s e-mail on his computer screen and hesitated, of two minds.
Finally, he decided to leave it and closed the e-mail. But he very much doubted it was the last he would hear of this particular request, knowing Fiona Heppenstall.
Chapter Seven
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Buenos Aires
The man sitting on the bare concrete floor aimed his Beretta Bobcat straight at Ignacio Guzmann’s chest. “Boom,” he said, pulling the trigger.
There was a loud click as the hammer dropped onto the empty chamber. One of the two men on the threadbare green sofa sniggered momentarily.
Ignacio, settled on a matching green armchair covered in oil stains and grease, didn’t laugh. “Idiota. I hope you’ve got a snap cap on that, otherwise you’re going to damage the firing pin. They’re expensive,” he said in Spanish.
“Yeah, yeah, of course,” his friend Diego Ruiz said as he pointed the gun at the man on the sofa who had sniggered, Alejandro Garcia, and repeated the procedure. “Boom.”
This time, the others remained silent.
Diego started to strip the weapon.
Ignacio watched him for a few seconds, then jumped up and grabbed Diego by the throat, forcing him backward until he toppled over and his head hit the concrete floor with a thump. “When you’re in my house, you don’t do that. Not ever, you asshole, got it?”
“Okay, boss, okay, sorry. Only joking.” Now he wasn’t smiling.
The men were in an upstairs room in a small two-story house, no more than a rough shack made from cinder blocks, crudely painted an orange-red and capped with a rusty corrugated iron roof.
The property, near the junction of Carlos H. Perette and Prefectura Naval Argentina, was on the edge of the notorious shantytown Barrio 31, a stone’s throw from the busy dockyards and their giant container ships.
It was only three or four kilometers from José’s house in Recoleta, but Ignacio always felt as though he were traveling from first to third world every time he made the trip.
The downstairs front door was protected by a full-length padlocked metal grill. There were more grills across all the windows, one of which had been smashed, and a spiderweb of white plumbing pipework spilled out of the upstairs frontage and down to street level.
The house next door, wedged tightly against its neighbor, was made out of two shipping containers perched precariously one atop the other, with a homemade external staircase of planks linking the two.
Ignacio walked to the window and peered outside. An abandoned old Ford stood rusting in the potholed road. Two chickens squawked as a couple of young boys chased them from an alleyway, and a toothless old man perched on a small wooden stool was offering marijuana to passersby. The driver of a yellow and black taxi stopped to buy some, honking his horn repeatedly as he did so.
Ignacio turned and put his coffee cup down on a rectangular table fashioned from a piece of chipboard.
Alejandro and the other man on the sofa, Luis Castano, were both puffing at cigarettes. Diego briefly ceased cleaning the Beretta to light a joint. He rubbed the back of his head where it had made contact with the floor.
Ignacio had thought carefully about what to tell his old army friends. He decided to keep it brief. They didn’t need to know all the details about how he’d gotten his information or what problems he’d already had to sort out. But he was going to have to give them some background if he was going to get them on board.
“Look at this,” Ignacio said. He spread out a map of London over the table, which was illuminated by a single bare light bulb dangling by a frayed cord from the ceiling, around which swirled a thick fog of tobacco and cannabis smoke.
“I’ve spent the past few months doing a lot of work to find out why my father’s business is such a pile of shit. The biggest problem is that he’s been overpaying for his gold.”
He locked eyes with Diego, the man who had been his biggest ally in the army and had remained his most trusted friend once they became civilians. He had also worked on army budgets and was the only one among them who had a business brain.
“He’s been paying 6 percent above market prices. And guess what his profit margin should be, if it was a properly run business? About 6 percent. That’s why he’s losing money. He just pays up. If he keeps that up, he’s going to go bust,” Ignacio said. He put his forefinger to his throat and slashed it across to underline his point, then folded his arms. “Our job is to find out where the gold comes from, how it’s being sourced and transported, and exactly which individuals are doing it. And we need to find out fast. I need to put a stop to the overpaying, and if we can screw the supplier, then so much the better. If it’s illegal, maybe we can get a slice of it. Blackmail them or something.”
He explained that the gold destined for his father’s business was sent by a car-parts company in London to a supplier in Argentina called Oro Centro. He pointed to a location on the map to show exactly where.
“And also, I’ve discovered payments from SolGold to Oro Centro go into a Guatemalan numbered bank account. Looks like dirty money to me.”
Diego, puffing away on his joint, cocked his head. “A car-parts business?”
Ignacio nodded. “I’ve seen invoices.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe while we’re in London we can put one over on the Brits to make up for what they did to us in the Falklands. Goose Green and Port Stanley.” The other three men, all veterans of the 1982 war against the British, gazed at him silently. They had all lost friends in that conflict.
Ignacio said, “You, Diego, need to get yourself and Alejandro over to London straightaway. Do a recce. The next available flight, if possible. You’ll need to find someone who you can persuade, by whatever means, to give us the information we need on the gold source.”
Diego stood up. “Before we get into that, I think you’d better give us some idea of what’s in it for us. And who’s paying.”
“Yeah, needs to be a good day rate,” Alejandro said, leaning back on the sofa. “Sounds risky.”
Ignacio pushed his right fist into his left palm. “You’ll all get a cut if we can do this right. I’m going to put this business back on track, and you’re all going to be the first to get jobs. If we screw some gold out of the supplier, we’ll share that too.
“Luis, sorry, you will have to stay here and look after things at this end. We’ll need someone on the ground here. Then I’ll head to London myself, as soon as I can finish tying up a few loose ends. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of days.”
Diego took a few more pretend shots with his Beretta, this time without pulling the trigger. “I’m going to need a grand up front, in U.S. dollars, and in cash, okay?”
The other two men nodded.
Ignacio hesitated. “Okay, okay, I’ll sort it. I’ll buy the tickets and get the cash for you, and then you can go.”
Diego said, “You said we’ll get jobs. What about your old man, José, if we get what we want? He’s the boss.”
Ignacio bent forward. “This business is worth shit all the way he’s running it. If we can fix it, I’ll sort my father out in my own way.” He tapped a finger against his temple.
His mind drifted back to his childhood, as it often did when discuss
ing his father. Memories of beatings, hours spent in a darkened cupboard, and crying himself to sleep were the ones that formed the darkest, most vivid images in his mind.
“I’ve been in this shithole for two years now, since I split up with the wife,” Ignacio said. “I went from having two kids, a nice house, four bedrooms, and a decent car to this, a stinking hovel next to a sewer. Haven’t seen my kids for months. You guys are the same. We’ve all got to get out of this piss-flooded fleapit. I’m desperate, guys. What is it now, six years since we all left the army? And how much have we earned between us since?”
He made a circle out of his forefinger and thumb and held it up. “Just about that much. We’ve got nothing to lose and a lot to gain, provided we move fast.”
Chapter Eight
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Portland, Maine
The wind whistled through the fractionally open car window and blew horizontal the Stars and Stripes in front of Portland Head Light, as if in a salute to the old landmark. Behind it, dark clouds skimmed in from the north and the waters of Casco Bay worked themselves up into a frenzy of whitecaps.
“Why the hell have you brought me here, Doc? It’s just a lighthouse, isn’t it? And it’s freezing.” Vic appeared slightly bemused as he stared at the tall white structure towering over the red-tiled former keeper’s cottage in front of it.
“It’s one of Portland’s sights, over two hundred years old.”
Johnson had picked up Vic outside the Hilton hotel and had then driven the fifteen minutes across the Casco Bay Bridge to the old lighthouse.
“I sometimes come here to walk and think. It also has the advantage that nobody can hear us,” Johnson said.
They sat on a bench along a path left of the lighthouse overlooking the bay, where ferries were busily transporting their passengers to the nearby islands: Cushing Island, Peaks Island, Little Diamond Island.
As a boy Johnson had spent hours sitting on those ferries with his friends during school holidays, sailing off to imaginary lands far away and doing bold deeds.
Still the same dreams. Nothing’s changed, he thought.
“How was the interview this morning?” Johnson asked.
“Fine. Routine—just data collection, really,” Vic said. “I’m not sitting here for long, so I’ll get to the point.” He ran his hand through his receding light brown hair, which was gray around the temples. “I’ve had some luck with your stuff.”
He took a small notebook out of his pocket, adjusted his metal rimmed spectacles, then turned his head to Johnson. “We’re not having this conversation at all. We didn’t meet up, you didn’t ask for anything, and I’m not giving it. Understood?”
Johnson nodded. “Come on, Vic, agreed. Just spit it out.”
Vic flicked his notebook open. “Good. Right, first on the financial side: it’s interesting. The Kudrow U.S. business all seems aboveboard. They have a jewelry shop chain with fifteen shops, mainly in cities on the West Coast, and then a couple of manufacturing units. However, they also seem to have a sort of one-man subsidiary in Buenos Aires. It doesn’t feature on the credit report at all, but we picked it up from banking records. It operates its banking facilities out of Guatemala, and then there are periodic transfers of cash onward to Los Angeles.”
“Hang on a minute.” Johnson reached into his jacket pocket, took out his own notebook and mechanical pencil, and began to scribble, holding the page down with his free hand to stop it flapping in the wind. “Okay, go on.”
“The Buenos Aires arm, called Oro Centro, has an erratic turnover but high profitability when it does business. Maybe its purchasing costs or raw material costs are low or something. I don’t know; it’s an odd one. It’s only got one or two customers, the main one being a gold manufacturing and retailing business in Buenos Aires, SolGold, run by a guy named José Guzmann.”
“Guzmann, did you say?” The name sounded vaguely familiar.
“Yeah.” Vic turned the page of his notebook. “That’s about it in a nutshell. Except that, overall, profit margins are very high, at around 25 percent, because of the Argentine business pulling them up. So the business as a whole made a pretax profit of about $8 million U.S. dollars last year, which in itself was quite high. But some years it’s been much higher. For example, in 2005 it was $45 million. Amazing numbers. Then other years, absolute peanuts by comparison, a few hundred thousand and a couple of times making losses.” He scratched his head.
“The volatility from year to year is the odd thing. Don’t know why that is. The U.S. business trades on margins of around 5 percent, which looks normal enough. The U.K. business—well, here’s the weird thing. There’s nothing listed under the Kudrow name, and yet you said David Kudrow’s brother operates there, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Nathaniel was over in London quite recently, visiting his uncle Jacob,” Johnson said. “He said he’d found out a few things while he was there, the implication being that there was something wrong. They definitely have a business there. And given the hint about a Polish trust fund and a Nazi connection to the money, it may mean a trip to the U.K., as a starting point, if it stacks up. Although that is probably a big if.”
“Okay, leave it with me,” Vic replied. “I’ll see if I can find out some more on the U.K. I haven’t had enough time to delve into it properly yet.”
Vic took a pack of Marlboros out of his pocket. “Want a smoke, for old times’ sake?” Years ago they had chain-smoked their way through Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“Kept us sane back then, these smokes, didn’t they. Light up and forget the shit and the bullets,” Vic said.
Johnson hesitated. “Shouldn’t really—trying to keep myself fit. But what the hell.” He took one of the last two cigarettes remaining in the pack and the lighter that Vic held out. “Zero chance of being able to light these things in this wind.”
He tried five times, hands cupped protectively, before his cigarette eventually lit. “Out of practice. Maybe I should smoke more.”
Vic chuckled. “Yeah, well, sounds like you’ve got plenty on your plate.”
“Yes, I’ve got plenty on my plate, all right. Including a certain Fiona Heppenstall. Remember her? The political journalist? I told you about her a few years back.”
Vic gave Johnson a sideways glance. “Ah yes. Can’t forget her. What’s happening there, then?”
“She’s trying to persuade me to look at this Kudrow issue,” Johnson said. “We picked it up between us at a Republican fund-raiser in D.C. last week. She wants me to do some investigative work on it, basically. I’ve been a little dubious, although what you’ve said is interesting.”
Vic nodded. They puffed away in silence for a few minutes.
“So how are the guys back at Langley?” Johnson asked. “Is old Watto still there? Not that I give a rat’s ass about him.”
“Watson? I can’t stand him. He keeps going on. He must be sixty-five now, still irritating the crap out of everyone, smoking even more than I do. His wife left him ten years ago, and his daughter moved to Australia, I’ve heard: work and money are all he’s got. Someone told me he bought a huge house a few years back and just rattles around in it by himself.”
Johnson gave Vic a sidelong glance. “Even now I still don’t get what his problem was with me in Afghanistan.” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, then added, “I still think about what happened in Jalalabad. Do you think he could have been the mole in Islamabad, that he could have tried to pull the trigger on us?”
Vic shrugged and bent his head to keep his cigarette out of the wind. “I doubt that, Doc. Watson is a CIA lifer, not a mole—that’s my view. He’s an unfair, entitled hard-ass and a pain in the balls to work with, but that’s about it, I think. We’ll probably never know who was the mole now. You screwed up, though, having that fling with the British girl, Jayne. That gave him the excuse he was looking for. Anyway, you shouldn’t still be chewing over that twenty years later. You’ve got another job, another life. N
ever looked back, I thought?”
“Yes, I know, you’re right,” Johnson said. “Dented my pride at the time, I guess.”
It had been the hypocrisy in Watson’s criticisms that had hurt the most. Johnson knew that Watson had run a few operations that had for various reasons resulted in the deaths of innocent Afghan civilians, let alone armed gunmen. And nobody was going to convince Johnson that the drone strikes Watson had run in Pakistan had been as precise as PR statements claimed.
“He’s always done what he’s wanted, Watto,” Vic said. “It’s like he runs a CIA within the CIA, his own empire. And nobody does anything about it. All well above my pay grade, but it’s strange. The director’s office seems to tolerate it. I’d like to know why.”
Before Johnson could reply, Vic threw his cigarette butt on the floor and ground it out with his heel. “Okay Doc, we’re going to have to scoot. My flight leaves in just over two hours, and I need to get to the airport. Me and my missus are meant to be at my brother’s house tonight for a big party. She won’t be happy if I’m late back. And with Thanksgiving coming up next week as well, we’ve got a lot to do.”
Johnson said, “I know the feeling. Thanks a bunch, Vic. That’s a great help.”
As he drove Vic to the airport, Johnson replayed parts of their conversation in his mind. His thoughts kept returning to the business in Buenos Aires the Kudrows were selling to.
The name Guzmann definitely rings a bell.
Chapter Nine
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Portland, Maine
Carrie and Peter were chattering away about Thanksgiving. As always, they were both excited about the prospect of the now-traditional family visit to their Aunt Amy’s house for lunch, even though the day itself was still a week away.
The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1) Page 7
