“There is one other thing,” Johnson said. “There’s also two burglar alarms in there, the kind with keypads where you put a code in. Here, I’ve got a photo of one of them. They’re both the same.”
He showed Bomber the picture of the unit.
Bomber scratched his chin and hesitated. “Hmm, I think I can do that. I’ve got a piece of kit I can use . . . ” His voice trailed off and he looked at Johnson.
“You sure?” Johnson asked. “I had a close look at the keypads, and I’ve got the numbers. They had grease marks on them and were worn a little, unlike the others, which were clean.”
Bomber eyed Johnson. “You’ve done this before?”
“Not exactly, but I know a bit.”
“You do, yes,” Bomber said, with a new tone of respect in his voice. “That makes it a hell of a lot easier.” He seemed somewhat relieved.
“Yes, but how do we know what order the numbers come in? That’s the hard part, isn’t it?” Johnson said.
“It’s hard if you don’t have the tools. But fortunately, I’ve got a device that gets around that. You connect it and it works out the order, goes through all the possible combinations in a flash. If you know the numbers, that dramatically reduces the number of permutations. So it works a hell of a lot faster.”
Johnson smiled. “I see.” He turned to Fiona. “Just one thing, Fiona. I think three of us going into this workshop is just too many. It would be better, less risky, if I just go with Bomber. I don’t want to put you at risk unnecessarily or get you into trouble if it all goes wrong.”
Fiona seemed surprised. “No, Joe, it’s my story, and I need to go in there. It’s the most exciting job I’ve had for a long time. Remember, we’re paying you.”
Johnson shrugged, but Bomber tapped his fingers on the table. “I agree with Joe. It needs to be a silent, professional job with as few people as possible. We can give you all the detail you need afterward. Just me and Joe here on this one.”
Before Fiona could speak, Johnson’s phone beeped. It was a message from Jayne.
I’ve got the goodies you asked for last night. Meet me at Embankment tube station at 3pm. Don’t ask. xx
Fiona seemed to have given up on arguing her case for going to the workshop. Instead, she decided to go back to her hotel and write a commentary article on Obama for her website. She would take Bomber with her and leave him to wander around by himself while she was working.
Later, Bomber would meet Johnson near Jayne’s neighborhood. Then, later that evening, probably after eleven o’clock, Johnson and Bomber would walk together to the warehouse. There was no point in taking the car, which might draw attention. Fiona would remain at her hotel.
It was a plan, of sorts. Johnson left them at Euston and lit a cigarette before catching the tube.
He sat on a bench outside the station, smoking it. One of his main concerns was getting into the warehouse yard, but they would sort that out at the time.
The other was working with an eccentric criminal with a sore ankle whom he didn’t know on a job involving an illegal break-in for which silence and speed were essential. But Bomber was a pro, he told himself. What could possibly go wrong?
Chapter Twenty-Six
Saturday, November 26, 2011
London
The temperature was hovering around the freezing point when Johnson eased himself off the top of the wall and landed softly on the concrete floor of the warehouse yard.
He was followed a few seconds later by Bomber Tim, who seemed to have shrugged off his sore ankle. Or maybe adrenaline had dulled the pain.
Johnson took a pair of thin rubber gloves from his pocket and put them on. Bomber was already wearing his own set of gloves.
Most of the heavy clouds that were hanging over London had rolled away during the evening, leaving the sky clear, with some of the brighter stars visible even through the capital’s permanent mask of orange and white light.
Then the dogs started barking. There were two of them, their deep-bass barks interspersed with low-pitched, insistent, growling and snarling.
Big bastards, Johnson thought. But then he realized the dogs weren’t in the yard, but behind a fence belonging to a neighboring business a little farther up the narrow alleyway.
Johnson led the way silently to the section of the warehouse wall where he guessed the entrance to the coal bunker was.
He was wrong, though. And after another few minutes of searching, the dogs were still barking. Bomber tapped Johnson on the shoulder and pointed to the high wall of the warehouse, which was being periodically lit up by flashlights. The guards in the neighboring premises were checking what was disturbing the dogs.
Every sound seemed magnified. The traffic noise had faded almost to nothing, so there was no background noise. Then a nearby church clock struck midnight: twelve deep, sonorous tones.
Then at last, Johnson found the exterior entrance to the coal hatch, hidden in a brick enclosure where the warehouse’s trash was stored. He had to carefully move two of the bins to one side to get to it.
Then he gave the hatch door a small pull. It was still unlocked, and Johnson felt a wave of relief.
The two men had had a long discussion before approaching the warehouse about how to handle the burglar alarm. Johnson knew they had around thirty seconds, maybe a minute, to act before the alarm went off, all hell broke loose, and the police came running.
Bomber’s earlier words floated into his mind. We’ll have to be ready to exit quickly if it goes wrong—or if you’ve screwed up the numbers you gave me.
Johnson opened the door fully and crawled through on all fours. Bomber was close behind, a leather tool bag strapped to his back.
They stood up inside. There was silence. No beeping alarm.
Johnson moved quickly across the boiler room, brushing past large cobwebs. A rat scuttled across the floor in front of him. Johnson imagined Fiona squeaking in surprise if she’d been there.
He opened the boiler room door, and that was when the loud, intermittent beeping began, coming from the direction of the corridor, behind the white sliding door.
He stepped past the two old VW vehicles, across the filthy workshop, and through the door to the burglar alarm unit, which continued to squawk loudly. Bomber followed.
Johnson flicked on his mini flashlight and held his thumb partially across the beam to limit the amount of light being emitted.
On the display screen of the alarm unit, a counter was going down with every second that passed. A red light flashed on the unit next to a label that read Armed.
Twenty-one, twenty, nineteen, eighteen . . .
Bomber whipped a small screwdriver out of one pocket and from another pocket took a small black box the size of a cigarette packet, from which two wires protruded with small alligator clips on the end.
In a flash, he unscrewed a panel at the base of the unit and took it off. Then he connected the clips to two nodules, pressed a button, and held the box in front of him, waiting. Johnson watched, mesmerized, as the numbers on the unit continued to descend.
Eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven . . .
Then five digits appeared on the screen of Bomber’s little box. He rapidly tapped the numbers into the wall unit, his fingers moving in a blur.
He let out an audible sigh of relief as the beeping stopped. Johnson glanced at the readout on the front of the unit. Two, it said.
The red LED light went out, and instead, a small green LED began to flash next to the label that read Not Armed.
The two men stood motionless for several seconds, although to Johnson it seemed like an eternity. He could feel his heart pounding.
Bomber removed the wires and replaced the panel he had unscrewed from the alarm unit. Then Johnson pointed up the staircase.
Their footsteps as they ascended the wooden stairs sounded to Johnson like a herd of cattle in the darkness, and he winced with every step. The plank that had made a cracking sound like a rifle shot on his last visit did t
he same again, this time under Bomber’s foot.
They arrived at the connecting door between the car-parts business and Kew Jewellery U.K., and Johnson pushed gently at it with his fingertips. It didn’t move.
The door was locked.
He turned and shrugged at Bomber, who gestured to the lock, then to his bag. Johnson gave him a thumbs-up sign.
Bomber took a canvas roll-up tool holder from his bag and revealed a variety of picks: mainly long, thin metal tools with differently shaped hooks on the end. A separate set of pouches contained a few L-shaped tension wrenches.
He also took out a tiny LED flashlight and an eyepiece shaped like a mini telescope, no more than an inch or two long. He removed his glasses and instead attached the eyepiece to his right eye with an elastic headband.
Bomber then turned on the flashlight, peered into the lock through the eyepiece, and selected one of the hooked tools, which he inserted into the keyhole, followed by one of the smaller L-shaped tools. From there, he spent a few seconds minutely adjusting the position of the tools, occasionally pushing one downward and twisting with the other.
The door swung open, and the second alarm system began to beep. Johnson realized he had been holding his breath. Now he let it go with an audible sigh. Bomber had opened the door surprisingly quickly.
Johnson and Bomber half ran across to the other alarm, where Bomber repeated his performance with the small black box. This time, he managed it with seven seconds to spare. He gave a self-satisfied smile.
They continued across the pitch-black landing. Johnson opened the door to the managing director’s office, which squeaked for an alarmingly long time as it opened. Nothing seemed to have been moved since Johnson’s previous visit.
He pulled the curtains and shut the door, and using his mini flashlight for illumination, he opened the cupboard hiding the safe and indicated to Bomber that he could start work.
Bomber said nothing. He studied the safe for several seconds. Then he reached into his bag and pulled out a doctor’s stethoscope, which he attached to the front of the safe, right next to the round combination dial, using a rubber suction cup.
Johnson knew a little about safecracking. Years before, at the OSI, he had spent a week in San Diego hunting down a brutal Latvian SS commander who had a holiday home near the beach. Johnson had gone to the empty property with an OSI colleague and a locksmith who had been hired to open the man’s safe. They had found nothing, but he had picked up a few pointers from the locksmith.
Bomber took the wooden chair from behind the writing desk and sat down in front of the safe.
With the stethoscope earpieces in position, he spent a long time turning, extremely slowly, the numbered dial of the safe first clockwise, then counterclockwise. At regular intervals he changed the direction of the dial.
From what Johnson recalled of the San Diego locksmith’s on-the-job tutorial, Bomber was trying to work out exactly where on the dial a lever inside the lock was making contact with notches cut into the rotating wheels. Tiny clicks and vibrations would give him the clues he needed.
There was silence in the room, apart from the occasional rustle of Bomber’s clothing as he changed position and one unconsciously whispered expletive. Outside, there was a distant hum of the occasional vehicle passing up and down the Whitechapel Road.
Johnson checked his watch: 1:15 a.m.
While Bomber worked away, Johnson turned his attention to a fresh search of the room. He started with the floorboards and worked his way around, looking for loose or freshly screwed boards that might indicate a hiding place. There were none. The skirting boards and bookcases also yielded nothing, and neither did the rear and side panels of the drinks cupboard. With a built-in safe, Jacob Kudrow probably felt in no need of secondary secret storage places in his office.
It was 1:55 a.m. when Bomber turned around and spoke for the first time. “Three wheels. Makes it easier. Pen?”
Johnson pulled a pen from his jacket pocket, somehow knocking his pocket notebook on the floor with a small thud as he did so, triggering an irritated look from Bomber.
Bomber took two sheets of graph paper from his bag, on which he drew a rough table with numbers up one axis and across the other. He went back to the dial and every so often marked a point on the graph.
Johnson surveyed the room. It was sparsely furnished, and minimally decorated. A real old man’s office, he thought. On the wall behind the writing desk were two large, faded color photographs, both taken in bright sunshine following heavy snowfalls.
The first was of a castle with a large copper-topped bell tower, the metal bright green after years of oxidation, that was partly covered in snow. It stood high on a rocky outcrop, dominating the surrounding white-forested landscape and town.
Underneath the photo, a small label read Książ Castle. Johnson had no idea where that was but assumed it was somewhere in Poland.
The second photograph showed an elegant church in a village set against a backdrop of snow-covered wooded hills, its tower consisting of three tiers of decreasing size. In the foreground to the right was a road sign: Gluszyca.
Johnson again noticed the strange sculpture standing on the desk. It reminded him of one of the odd postmodernist artworks made from pieces of industrial metal that were sometimes in town centers in the former manufacturing heartlands of the United States’ Rust Belt, like The Workers statue in Pittsburgh. On one side was a small engraving of an old Roman chariot pulled by horses.
Then at around quarter to three, Johnson’s attention was diverted when Bomber put the pen down. He had written three numbers on the sheet.
Bomber concentrated on the dial again. Not long afterward, there was a click, and Bomber turned, a broad, lopsided smile on his lips. Behind him, the safe door hung open.
Johnson stood and silently shook the diminutive safecracker’s hand. He read his watch: 3:13 a.m. He moved to the safe. Inside was a bundle of papers in a clear plastic folder, a black jewelry box, and an old red notebook.
He picked up the papers and quickly sifted through them: receipts, order forms, and some photocopies of invoices. He read a couple. They included some sales dockets from Oro Centro to SolGold for similar amounts to the ones he had photographed previously between Classic Car Parts and Oro Centro.
The sales dockets again only specified the sale as “services.” There were too many to look at in detail now.
He opened the black jewelry box. Inside were two gold rings, both of them very worn, with scratches and tiny dings. Possibly wedding rings, Johnson mused.
And the red notebook. Then, Johnson remembered.
It’s all going to be in his book. Jacob’s writing a memoir—in his little red book.
He flicked open the notebook. It had a bent and slightly rusted black wire spiral binding. The cover was battered and worn, as if it had been carried in many briefcases and written in on many desks.
The first page carried a title at the top in large letters: Survival and Redemption—My Memoirs. It had a date at the top, 21 September 1994, which was underlined.
Inside, the lined paper was covered with dense, somewhat shaky handwriting in a variety of colored ballpoint pens: black, blue, green.
The entries were all dated, starting in 1994; the most recent was only a fortnight earlier. It clearly wasn’t a diary but rather some sort of narrative.
No time to read it now, though, Johnson thought. He quickly checked inside the safe again. That was it. Nothing else. He had to decide what to do with these items. Quickly, quickly, make up your mind . . .
He replaced the jewelry box in the safe and put the bundle of papers and the red notebook in his backpack. There were too many papers here to photograph them one by one, and time was running out.
Johnson closed the safe and nodded to Bomber.
A minute later, they were back out on the landing, treading softly over the carpeted floor and toward the connecting door to the car-parts business.
Johnson immediately f
elt quite relieved.
He’d had visions of being trapped in the building when the first employee, or security or someone, arrived in the morning. In fact, he was surprised there were no overnight interior security patrols in a business like this. Obviously, Jacob and Leopold assumed the electronic security system, with its link to the police, was sufficient.
Johnson opened the connecting door and turned toward Bomber, who signaled his intention to switch the alarm system back on. But before Bomber could move, a loud metallic crash echoed from somewhere in the Classic Car Parts section of the building, followed by a muffled but unmistakable yelp of pain that sounded like a dog that had been kicked.
The two men froze.
Then they heard the faint sound of two men speaking to each other.
Johnson reached into his jacket pocket and took out the small Walther pistol Jayne had given him earlier. He looked at Bomber, then pointed at the connecting door and shook his head.
Johnson quietly closed the connecting door again and looked around. There were three other white painted doors off the landing, which he hadn’t had time to explore on his previous visit. He opened the nearest and put his head around the door. It was some kind of workshop. Beckoning Bomber, he walked in, then closed the door behind them.
Whatever the noise was downstairs, it wasn’t good news. The first thought Johnson had was that CIA operatives were on his tail—Watto’s stooges. He discounted that idea because of the noise and the talking; it seemed unprofessional.
Johnson indicated with his forefinger that they should stay put until whoever was downstairs had gone. Bomber nodded, visibly chewing the inside of his cheek.
The workshop was L-shaped: a section disappeared around a corner out of sight at the window end. At least that would give some cover if needed. A workbench on the left-hand side of the room was lined with tools, and there was a computer, its plug hanging loose, at one end.
The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1) Page 18
