The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1)

by Andrew Turpin

  But although Johnson listened, his mind was focused on something entirely different.

  He left the kitchen and walked back into his office, murmuring to himself. “Guzmann, Guzmann, who the hell were you?” He knew Guzmann definitely wasn’t one of the Nazis on his old target list, but at the same time he was convinced there was some oblique connection.

  At just after three o’clock in the afternoon, he wandered into the garage where he kept his old OSI files, stacked in numbered and dated cardboard boxes on four long wooden shelves. Periodically, he’d been tempted to throw them all out but always resisted the urge.

  For each of the investigations he had carried out, he had started a new notebook and often collected his own copies of any additional documents in thin cardboard folders—in addition to those kept in OSI offices. They had been culled from archives in various parts of Western, Central and Eastern Europe and, thanks to the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War, in the countries of the former Soviet Union, where files were previously sealed.

  There were copies of Nazi Party files from the Bundesarchiv, the German Federal Archives, in Berlin—where Johnson’s former German girlfriend from his student days in the city, Clara Lehman, still worked. Alongside them were German army files from the Deutsche Dienststelle, the German Information Office, also in Berlin. There were copies of microfilmed documents from the U.S. National Archives just outside Washington, D.C., selections from the massive holdings of Soviet-era trial and interrogation transcripts held by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C., and many more. All of them had some significance to the investigations he had carried out over the years.

  Maybe the answer was lying in these files somewhere, he thought. But there were hundreds of files stacked up on the shelves. Where to start?

  He pulled down one of the large cardboard boxes at random, marked 1993, carried it into his office, and started going through it.

  In its entirety, his collection represented the work that he had enjoyed—following the paper trail of archived records, documents, and statements, then backing it up by tracing witnesses to secure interviews and testimonies. It was like putting a jigsaw puzzle together, often with many missing pieces.

  In doing so, he had felt as if he were one-third historian, one-third investigator, and although he wouldn’t admit it openly, one-third spy. There was no doubt his CIA surveillance and relationship-building skills, used in locating suspects, witnesses and holders of information and persuading them to trust him, were a large factor in his success.

  His boss at the OSI, one of the attorneys who carried out the prosecutions, sometimes told Johnson he was lucky. But he believed he had made his own luck through sheer persistence and, often, what he called “unorthodox innovation.”

  Johnson continued to sift through his large, tatty black Moleskine notebooks and to pore over printouts of microfilmed SS memos, SS transfer orders, concentration camp rosters and incident reports, birth certificates, bank statements, and private letters and statements.

  The box was full of memories. But half an hour later, he put it back again. There was nothing relevant to Guzmann. Then he pulled down another box, this time for 1999. Same process. But again, nothing.

  He wandered back into the kitchen and made himself coffee.

  Johnson was sure that in one of the boxes there was a reference to Guzmann, but he really couldn’t recall where, and it wasn’t a name he had indexed.

  He spent the next few hours going through them one by one, scanning the notebooks and flicking through the accompanying papers, with only a forty-five-minute break to make dinner for himself and the children at seven o’clock and then a fifteen-minute break for a quick cigarette after Carrie and Peter had gone to bed at ten.

  Johnson had gone through almost two-thirds of the files when he found it at just after one o’clock in the morning—a dog-eared old red cardboard folder dated September 1996 with a name scribbled on the front in blue felt-tip: Jan Van Stalheim.

  Van Stalheim had been an SS captain known to have committed multiple horrific murders of innocent Jews at the Dachau concentration camp in 1943 and 1944. He had been suspected by the OSI to be living under a false name in Denver, of all places, and therefore was high up on its wanted list.

  But he had disappeared from Denver by the time investigators got there. The subsequent trail had been a tortuous one but had eventually led Johnson to Buenos Aires, where Van Stalheim was by then known to have fled.

  And there the scent went completely cold. There were no more leads and he was never found.

  Johnson’s handwritten notes in black ink from the time were still there in his file. He felt his adrenaline start to pump as he read it.

  Van Stalheim believed to be living in Buenos Aires. Local source, a journalist, notes that Van Stalheim was apparently seen six months ago, several times visiting a gold trader, SolGold, run by José Guzmann. Recommend that OSI allocates resources—either myself or someone else—to visit Guzmann undercover and check out.

  He had circled the comment in red ink and underlined it.

  “We never did, pity,” said Johnson to himself.

  Then he laughed to himself. He should have remembered it. September 20, 1996. His birthday. He was turning thirty-eight that day, and he had flown home from Buenos Aires because Kathy, pregnant with Carrie, was past her due date and had called saying she thought her contractions had begun. It had been a false alarm, but Carrie then had arrived on the twenty-third.

  A yellow Post-it note stuck to the front of the file, in Johnson’s handwriting and also in red ink, stated that nobody in the OSI had ever subsequently visited Guzmann.

  Johnson had taken a couple of weeks off after Carrie’s birth, and then when he had returned to work, he had been sent down to Florida to help on another case instead. Then his boss at the time had received a phone call from somebody at the CIA saying they were pursuing Van Stalheim, and the OSI should back off.

  Looking back, Johnson remembered feeling frustrated and wishing the OSI had a wider reach to investigate former Nazis outside the U.S. He recalled how his investigator’s instinct had been piqued by the possibilities.

  Johnson continued reading through the file, checking for other relevant details, but then gave up.

  The caffeine that had kept him going until the early hours had finally ceased to have an effect; the garage was cold, and he needed his bed.

  “Van Stalheim—a shark that got away,” Johnson said to himself.

  He had a sudden realization. Previously, he had been unsure about taking on the Kudrow story. But now? There was no decision to make.

  He flicked his computer on and began to write an e-mail to Fiona. It didn’t take long.

  Fiona, I’ve been thinking about the Kudrow job. Okay, I’m going to do it, provided I can do it my way, to my timetable and without any interference from you. My rate for this job is $1,100 per day, in view of the risks and complexity.

  Joe

  He pressed the send button and then wrote another equally short note to Vic to tell him what he was planning.

  Johnson climbed the stairs and sank into his bed. As he drifted off to sleep, he had a surge inside him of, what? Yes, adrenaline, but also something else. Optimism? Anticipation?

  For certain, it was something that lifted his mood.

  The more he thought about it, the more certain he became. Professionally, it felt as though he were back in business. A journey into his future beckoned—or was it his past?

  Chapter Ten

  Friday, November 18, 2011

  CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia

  By twenty past nine, Vic and Neal had already spent three hours revising and tweaking a report compiled by some of their more junior officers about the unexpectedly close cooperation between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, who were trying to inflict maximum damage on U.S. forces withdrawing from Afghanistan.

  Vic stood up. “Right, Neal, ready for a break?”

  The two of them made
their way to the CIA’s Starbucks coffee shop just outside the main cafeteria, known by many of the staff as the Stealthy Starbucks. Unlike at other Starbucks outlets, the baristas here were not allowed to ask for customers’ names and write them on their coffee cups; management at Langley deemed it too much of a security risk. The till receipts named it only as Store No.1.

  “Look at this line! Ten minutes just to get a drink and a croissant. Ridiculous,” Neal said.

  Eventually, they were served and went to a free table in the far corner.

  Neal, also a supervisor, although one rung below Vic, took a sip from his latte and put his cup down on the table. “So, how was your junket in Portland?”

  “Junket? Come off it. Portland is Portland. I just got the interview out of the way as quick as I could, then caught up with Joe for an hour or two. Didn’t have much time, actually; I was running late for the airport. Thanks for helping me out with the stuff for him, by the way.”

  “No problem. Was it okay?” Neal asked.

  “I think so. He seemed happy. The financials stuff on the Kudrow business were just about what he wanted, and I talked him through that up-and-down earnings volatility you spotted,” Vic said.

  He stirred his drink. “One interesting thing was the name of that jeweler guy we unearthed in Buenos Aires, José Guzmann. Joe thought it rang a bell with him, something from one of the Nazi hunts he did at the OSI, so apart from the David Kudrow investigation, I think he’s going to check out the Guzmann business, too. He sent me an e-mail this morning saying he was going to do the job.”

  Vic picked up his coffee and nodded at a svelte middle-aged woman with long red hair who was walking past, a latte in one hand and a muffin in the other. “Hi, Helen,” he said, smiling.

  She grinned back, winked, and continued on.

  “How does Watto manage to get a secretary like that?” Neal asked.

  “Doesn’t deserve her.”

  “I know. You should get her a transfer to our section. I’ve seen her giving you the eye. You be careful. Anyway, what was I going to say?” Neal said, trying to refocus his gaze on Vic. “Ah yes, Guzmann, the customer of the Kudrow business, I remember. Yeah, I hope Joe gets a result. He’s definitely felt left out on a limb since leaving D.C.”

  Vic nodded. “That’s the thing with Joe. Up in Portland he feels like he’s isolated. That’s probably why he’s interested in this Kudrow thing. When he picked it up he was in D.C. at a Republican fund-raiser with that political journalist he had a thing with a few years back, after his wife died, remember? Fiona Heppenstall—you must remember.”

  Neal fell back in his chair, grinning. “Yep, I remember.”

  “Fiona asked him to help her with the Kudrow story,” Vic said. “It’s given him something bigger to sink his teeth into. Got his mojo going again. It might mean a trip to the U.K.; one of the Kudrows has a business there.”

  He drained his coffee. “Actually, I think he misses the Agency still, after all this time. You can take the man out of Langley, but taking Langley out of the man’s another thing. That’s why the OSI suited him. I think some of our techniques were very useful to him.”

  Neal stood up. “Yeah. You’re right. I wonder how I’d get on outside the Agency. Not well, I suspect. Look, we’d better get back and get stuck into that report. Time’s marching on.”

  Both men had spent their entire careers in the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine service. Together they had built a formidable knowledge of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the various factions operating in the Near East and Middle East.

  As they walked off, Neal glanced briefly at a tall, gray-haired man who seemed to be in his late sixties and was sitting by himself at the table directly behind them. The man put down his coffee and the newspaper in which he had appeared to be engrossed.

  Later that morning, while he was driving from Langley to a meeting on Capitol Hill, the same tall, gray-haired man pulled off the road and dialed a number in Miami from a prepaid burner cell phone.

  “Simon, it’s GREYHOUND here in Washington. I’m checking in with some information.”

  “Okay, thanks. Information about whom?” the man who called himself Simon asked.

  “Someone on our list of protected people in Buenos Aires, VANDAL,” the gray-haired man said. “Somebody on our watch sheet is apparently renewing his interest in VANDAL. A man called Joe Johnson, lives in Portland, Maine. Worked for the Agency in the ’80s, Near East division, got fired, and became an OSI investigator, which is why he’s on our radar. He’s been on our sheet since the early ’90s. We need to let VANDAL know. It’s a potentially dangerous situation for him.”

  “Right, got it, that’s Joe Johnson. Anything else on him?”

  “It’s been a while since he was active,” GREYHOUND said. “He left the OSI five years ago, but he’s obviously still got an interest in our group. Sounds as though he’s looking to investigate VANDAL, from what I’ve heard today.”

  “And how did you pick this information up, exactly?” Simon asked.

  “It was curious. Not my normal channels. A conversation between a couple of operatives, former colleagues of Johnson going years back. It was difficult to get a proper feel for what was going on; it was a short exchange, but there was also something about an investigation into David Kudrow, the Republican running for the nomination. They also mentioned that Johnson was planning a trip to London.”

  “Interesting. Anything else to add?”

  “That’s about all I have,” GREYHOUND said. “I thought I should pass it on. Perhaps you can add it to the file we have on Johnson.” He ended the call, then waited for a moment and dialed the number for another burner phone.

  When the line picked up, he identified himself.

  “It’s GREYHOUND here.”

  There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. “What have you got for me,” asked Robert Watson, chief of the Near East division in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

  “It’s about one of your former operatives, Joe Johnson. You may recall him?”

  Another silence, followed by a quiet snort. “Yes, what’s he up to?” Watson asked.

  “I’ve just had to put a call in to Miami about him. He’s active again, chasing one of our old assets in Buenos Aires, VANDAL.”

  Watson, whose main focus was now on Syria after a spell in the Special Activities Division working on the Pakistan drone strike program, swore quietly. “Okay, thanks for letting me know. Anything else?”

  “No, that’s it.”

  “Okay, that’s going to complicate things. I’ll talk to Miami and Tel Aviv. Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it,” he said. Then he hung up.

  Buenos Aires

  “Not bad for ninety-one, although I think your blood pressure needs watching. It’s quite high, which at your age we need to be careful with,” Dr. Hernanz said in Spanish. “But it’s more your state of mind I’m worried about.”

  José shrugged. For several years he had been visiting his doctor saying he was feeling depressed, lethargic, and irritable. He had tried various types of antidepressants, but none had any lasting effect. Indeed, some had made him feel worse.

  Dr. Hernanz folded his arms and placed them on the desk. “You know, I think it might be worth going to see a psychologist, with a view to some cognitive therapy. With some of my other patients, cognitive therapy has worked quite well, particularly where the psychologist looks at the person’s past.”

  José’s eyebrows flicked upward at the suggestion. “I really don’t think so. Not at my age.”

  Dr. Hernanz put up his hand. “Hang on a minute. I was going to say that the psychologist would get the patient to talk a little about the patterns of thinking they are in, why they have occurred, key influences over the years, particularly when young, to see if there is any underlying cause, and then hopefully help with some techniques to get the patient into a different pattern of thought. I think even at your age, you could benefit from this.”


  Almost imperceptibly, José shook his head. “I doubt that it’s something I’d find helpful. Not talking about my past.”

  “Okay, Señor Guzmann, I still feel you should think it over. Just let me know if you change your mind.”

  José stood and limped toward the door.

  “How’s that knee?” Hernanz called after him.

  “Still the same. I put up with it,” José said without turning. He made his way out of the doctor’s clinic, just around the corner from his house in the Recoleta barrio, and blinked in the glare of the sunlight, which reflected off the pavement.

  He made his way slowly onto Ombú Street and stopped several times to rest. It was a hot afternoon. Once he was back inside his house, he went into his living room and sat down in his favorite black leather armchair in front of his television. He stared at the blank screen.

  At around half past five that afternoon, his cell phone rang. An unidentified number. José shook his head impatiently and awkwardly jabbed with his forefinger at the screen.

  “Hello? Guzmann here.”

  “Señor Guzmann. Hello, it’s Simon here in Miami. I have a question for you. Did your dog enjoy his walk this morning?”

  José sat motionless and said nothing for several seconds. He hadn’t received a call from Miami for probably ten years at least, maybe twelve. It was never good news. He had to stop and think what the correct response to the question was; it had been so long.

  What was the reply? He scanned his living room desperately. Come on, think, think . . .

  Eventually he remembered. “Hello, Simon. Yes, my dog had a good walk, thank you. He’s now asleep in the kitchen in front of the fire.” José had never owned a dog and didn’t have a fireplace in his kitchen.

  “That’s good to know, Señor Guzmann. Do you still have your encrypted phone? I’ve tried to call it but it’s switched off. I don’t want to take any risks.”