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

by Andrew Turpin

  Next to the workbench stood a large black cabinet with two large tubular steel vessels in the center, one on top of the other, with other strangely shaped steel and glass vessels positioned around them. From them a tangle of pipes emerged.

  On the front were a number of colored operating switches and a timer dial, together with a digital screen. The machine was turned off.

  Against the other wall stood a large metal unit with a circular opening in the middle, inside which another metal vessel sat.

  “Gold-refining unit. A friend has one,” whispered Bomber.

  One yellow sign with red writing on the wall stated Warning—Extremely High Temperatures 1093°C. There was a skull and crossbones symbol next to the lettering. Another sign read Personal Protective Equipment Compulsory.

  The unit appeared as though it had not been used for a long time. He ran a finger along the top. It was covered in a fine film of dust.

  On another unit against the window lay a series of shallow bowls, large ladles, and molds, also covered in a layer of grime.

  It was the molds that caught Johnson’s attention. He quietly picked up one of them and examined it more closely.

  Then there was the sound of two gunshots from downstairs.

  After the gunshots, Johnson and Bomber sat silently in the workshop for another three quarters of an hour. Johnson instructed Bomber to sit out of sight of the door, around the corner of the L-shaped room. Johnson held the Walther in his right hand and rested on the edge of his seat, covering the entrance.

  There were a few distant sounds and the occasional muffled voice. Then there was the sound of a door slamming from right outside in the corridor, followed by at least two sets of footsteps and men’s voices whispering.

  Spanish. Johnson realized these men were the Argentinians—not the CIA or the Mossad.

  There was no mistaking where they were heading. The direction of their footsteps followed by the long squeak of a door told him they had entered the managing director’s office where Johnson and Bomber had been just a short time before.

  There was more conversation, with the occasional raised voice, and then a few thuds and a crash, which sounded like a filing cabinet drawer being banged shut.

  The Argentinians, assuming it was them, were being a lot less careful than Johnson and Bomber had been. The risk was that they would attract attention from security or someone else outside, with potentially dire consequences for Johnson and Bomber, as well as for themselves.

  One thing Johnson was almost certain of: they wouldn’t have an expert safecracker with them. He was also quite sure they wouldn’t have found anything particularly useful, unless they had somehow come across something he had missed. That seemed unlikely.

  Johnson thought about the bug he had planted underneath the writing desk in Jacob’s office. Since placing it there on his previous visit, he had checked it a few times using an app on his phone, but the device, which operated using a 3G data service, had not registered any activity.

  He fleetingly thought he might give it another try. It might be useful to listen in to the other intruders’ conversation. But that would create noise, and he didn’t have any headphones, so he immediately discarded the idea. His second thought was that the Argentinians might find the bug and remove it.

  Ten minutes later, there was another loud squeak from the managing director’s office door and another trample of footsteps heading in the other direction.

  A door banged shut. Presumably the connecting door.

  Then silence again.

  Johnson felt as taut as he ever had.

  It was 5:30 a.m. by the time Johnson dared to think of leaving the workshop. “Think they’ve gone,” he whispered.

  Bomber nodded vigorously.

  They inched out of the workshop door. It was dark and silent on the landing.

  This time, after they passed through the connecting door to the car-parts business, Bomber left it unlocked and also didn’t bother resetting the burglar alarm.

  “We might need an escape route,” he whispered.

  Johnson took baby steps as they moved down the corridor and through the storeroom, remaining right next to the wall to minimize the risk of creaks from loose floorboards. Every few seconds, he paused and listened.

  Silence.

  The stairs remained ahead of them. Johnson knew it was going to be impossible to descend to the ground floor quietly.

  If there were people down there, they would have plenty of warning of the two men approaching, simply from the unavoidable creaking of wooden planks.

  He just had to hope that whoever had been there really had gone.

  It took them until 5:50 a.m. to make it to the bottom corridor near the bathroom. Still silence.

  Johnson pushed back the sliding door to the car workshop an inch at a time, until the gap was large enough for them to squeeze through.

  They had just entered the workshop when, in the gray gloom, Johnson saw Bomber step sharply to one side and hold out his hand, palm up. He pointed upward with his forefinger and looked up.

  “Wet,” he whispered.

  Johnson held out his hand and also felt a drop of something fall onto his palm. Weird, he thought. It now seemed certain the other intruders had gone, so he decided to risk flicking on his mini flashlight.

  Immediately, he saw a pool of red liquid on the floor, at least two feet wide.

  And only then did he shine the flashlight upward.

  A man’s body, naked apart from a pair of blood-soaked underpants, was hanging ten feet above their heads, suspended from the high workshop ceiling by a rope attached to his wrists.

  Blood dripped from his bare feet, and wounds were visible on the man’s torso, from which blood was still oozing.

  His head was slumped forward, his chin resting on his chest, his eyes wide open, his stare frozen forever. There were two holes in the man’s forehead, also oozing blood.

  Johnson momentarily felt bile rising in his throat but managed to quell the reflex. Instead, he indicated with a movement of his forefinger that they should get out quickly and walked toward the boiler room door. After a second, Bomber followed.

  Behind them, blood continued to drip to the floor.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Sunday, November 27, 2011

  London

  Bomber pocketed the envelope full of twenty-pound bills that Fiona had instructed Johnson to hand over upon completion of a successful mission.

  “Thanks, you did a great job,” Johnson said. “Now let’s get out of here.” He peered around the corner of the alley in which they were standing. “We need to move quickly now before police or someone else turn up here.”

  They moved out into the Whitechapel Road, where every other car seemed to be a taxi. Bomber hailed one and turned to shake Johnson’s hand.

  “You’re a pro,” Bomber said. “Let me know if you ever need another job done.”

  He climbed into the cab, and then he was gone.

  Johnson pulled a wool hat down over his ears and forehead, then turned around. Down Plumbers Row, a couple of hundred yards behind him, two men were arriving on bicycles at the main gate of the jewelry workshop. They unlocked it and let themselves in.

  The day shift obviously started early. They had gotten out just in time, he thought.

  He realized he felt completely drained. It was almost six o’clock in the morning, and he hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours.

  Johnson set off at a brisk walk toward Jayne’s flat. A few minutes later, two police cars hammered past him in the opposite direction, sirens blaring and flashing lights strobing the whole of Whitechapel Road alternately blue and red as they went.

  He watched as they screeched onto Plumbers Row, then disappeared from view in the direction of the workshop.

  Johnson took out his pack of cigarettes and lit one. In the freezing cold December air, the smoke mingled with the vapor from his breath to form a foggy jet in front of him as he exhaled.

&n
bsp; He couldn’t get the picture of the bloody body out of his mind.

  The unanswered question remained: who was it?

  Johnson turned his phone back on. He had kept it switched off during the workshop break-in, partly because he didn’t want a repeat of his scare on his previous solo visit, partly because he wanted to reduce the chances of anyone tracking him using GPS or triangulation.

  Two minutes later, the phone rang. It was Fiona.

  “Hi, Joe, how did it go?”

  “Call me back on Skype,” Johnson said. “It’s more secure.” He didn’t want to discuss details of a burglary over an open cell phone connection. Fiona didn’t have encryption on her Inside Track cell phone.

  Fiona duly called back, and Johnson spent the next few minutes giving her a summary of events at the workshop, including a no-holds-barred description of the body hanging from the beam, which triggered a series of questions he was unable to answer.

  “Put it this way,” Johnson said, “Your friend Bomber definitely earned that envelope.”

  “Three grand,” Fiona said. “Better be worthwhile. Let me know when you’ve read the notebook. I’d like to get a feel for what’s in it. I think it’s going to be the centerpiece of any story I write.”

  He promised to call her back later when he’d had some sleep and read through it, then ended the call.

  Johnson tried to think through his next steps but couldn’t get his brain to function.

  Jayne had already left for work when he walked in. Or maybe she hadn’t even come home.

  Johnson didn’t care.

  Sleep came as soon as his head made contact with the pillow.

  Ignacio normally had no problem sleeping. Apart from the odd stressful period when fighting in the Falklands and the Gulf during his Argentine army days, he had always been able to catnap at will.

  But now he found himself unable to drift off after he and his men had returned from the Kudrows’ workshop, despite his exhaustion. Things weren’t at all going according to plan.

  The first problem was Johnson, the man who appeared to be threatening to sink his father’s business and, with it, Ignacio’s financial future.

  The scheme to remove Johnson using an explosive device in his car was fine in theory. But Johnson hadn’t used the BMW since the bomb had been placed, and who knew when he might do so again.

  Ignacio got out of his narrow single bed, lit a cigarette, and paced up and down the bedroom at the back of the converted pub, replaying the events of the last day or so over and over in his mind.

  He hadn’t originally intended to dispose of Keith, knowing it would inevitably bring police swarming all over both the car-parts business and the neighboring jewelry outfit. A typical half-hearted police search for a missing person would become a full-blown murder inquiry.

  And that at a time when Ignacio still didn’t have the location of the gold being supplied to his father’s business nor any clarity on exactly how Jacob Kudrow was getting away with overpricing it.

  He knocked half an inch of ash into an empty flower vase.

  Why did I kill him? He kicked the carpet, asking himself the question.

  But then, he told himself, he had no choice. Diego and Alejandro had not stuck to his instructions to keep Keith blindfolded at all times. Idiots, both of them.

  After Keith’s near-escape, Ignacio had driven the man to the Kudrow workshop in the middle of the night in a rage. It infuriated him that the man had come so close to escaping. It infuriated him that he didn’t know where the gold was. And fury tended to blind Ignacio to reason.

  As his old colonel in the Argentine army had told him, Ignacio, you’re hard enough, but the red mist gets you.

  In his rage, he had ordered Diego to put two bullets into Keith’s forehead and they had strung his body up on a beam with some rope.

  Now, only hours later, he was berating himself. You always have to make the big statement . . .

  He picked up an empty plastic water bottle and threw it hard against the wall, then lit another cigarette and continued pacing up and down.

  Stopping again, he remembered that although he had failed to find any useful maps or documents at the workshop, he had noticed something in Jacob Kudrow’s office—something he felt sure was a point in the right direction. He just needed to check it out.

  As Ignacio calmed down, he recalled another thing: although Keith had been largely useless, the man had let slip one piece of information before he died.

  And Ignacio intended to make full use of it.

  He gave up on the idea of sleeping and went into the kitchen, where he found Diego.

  “Jefe, I’m just thinking about Johnson,” Diego said. He extinguished his cigarette in a dirty coffee cup.

  “Don’t want to hear it. I need coffee.” Ignacio sat down and propped his elbows on the table and his chin in his cupped hands. “All right, what are you thinking?”

  Diego explained what he had in mind.

  Ignacio shrugged. “Yep, try it then. Sure.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Sunday, November 27, 2011

  London

  Johnson didn’t wake until almost two o’clock in the afternoon.

  By that time, the low-lying late November sunshine poured almost horizontally from a cloudless sky straight into Jayne’s south-facing flat.

  Johnson made himself a coffee and two slices of toast and picked up his backpack, which he had slung on the floor near the door.

  He parked himself in one of the black leather armchairs and took Jacob’s red notebook out of his bag. The warmth and the creeping sensation of the caffeine that flowed through his system was already making him feel much better.

  In the daylight, the notebook appeared even more battered and dog-eared than it had in the faint light of his flashlight the previous night.

  The text inside seemed largely intact, as far as Johnson could make out, but the twisted, rusted wire binding made it difficult to turn the pages. It looked as though water had been spilled on the cardboard cover at some point, making it swell and split at the edge, and there was a large ink stain on the front.

  A white six-pointed Star of David had been roughly painted on the cover, probably with correction fluid or something similar. The white paint had become grimy and worn away in places but was still very clear.

  It was a familiar symbol to Johnson. His mother had often worn a silver version of it on a chain around her neck, despite converting to Christianity in her forties.

  Johnson opened the balcony door off Jayne’s living room, went outside, and smoked a cigarette. He then returned to the kitchen, poured another large mug of coffee, and settled back down on the sofa to read Jacob’s memoir.

  Monday, 18 December 1944

  Wüstegiersdorf Camp, Lower Silesia, Poland

  That morning, at the snow-covered Wüstegiersdorf subcamp of the Gross-Rosen complex, in the village of Gluszyca, I and the other 2,000 or so inmates were woken up at 5:30 a.m. by the usual deafening blasts on a horn. As was the case every morning, a significant number did not wake—and never would again.

  As always, I gazed at Daniel, my twin, and gave thanks that he was still alive. I reached out and touched his hand.

  Eight months earlier, in April 1944, we had both been moved from the Pawiak jail in Warsaw to the camp twelve kilometres southeast of Walbryzch in the Owl Mountains.

  It was a miracle that we had been able to remain together. Otherwise, neither of us would ever have recognized the other. I weighed around seventy-two kilos when I arrived at Wüstegiersdorf and around fifty-five kilos when I finally got out.

  Sometimes I caught a glimpse of my face in a pane of glass. It was shrunken to my cheekbones. My ribs protruded like rails through my skin, and large sores oozed pus and blood.

  Daniel was down to fifty-one kilograms when we got out. His eyes, bloodshot and yellow, stuck out slightly from sunken sockets as if they had been inflated with a pump.

  We were both twenty years
old, but with our shaven heads and gaunt appearance, we could probably have passed for men in their fifties.

  I told Daniel to use the toilet quickly before Appell—the roll call. Otherwise we would risk instant execution by having to pee somewhere unauthorized.

  The three-story former factory building that comprised the camp, which now had coiled barbed wire surrounding it, contained around one hundred rough wooden toilets: circular holes in a board with no privacy.

  Then came the Appell. There were around eighty guards at the camp, and they used Appell as a kind of torture game.

  All prisoners had to line up in the yard, including those who had died during the night. This meant bodies had to be dragged outside by the survivors.

  The prisoners then had to remain motionless while they were counted, and often recounted, and probably recounted again. It normally took over an hour and a half. Only then were the bodies dragged off to the camp crematorium to be burned.

  Sometimes prisoners died during the roll call itself.

  Just a few days before, the camp commanders had forced a woman in her fifties to run around the freezing compound for almost an hour until she dropped dead, simply for being ten seconds late to the roll call.

  Daniel struggled even more than me in that camp. Often he would dream in the night that I had been hauled off to the camp’s crematorium to be burned alive, only to wake up in a sweat.

  Then there had been the time at the end of May, not long after Daniel and I arrived at the camp, when a young woman was given the fünfundzwanzig, as they called it: twenty-five strokes with an ox whip. She was then left in the Appell yard for a whole day with no food or water, despite a hot sun.

  Her offense? She had apparently failed to make eye contact with the SS first lieutenant when he spoke to her. That’s what he accused her of.

  Toward the end, she lost consciousness. We saw her lying there and fully expected the guards to shoot her for that, but they didn’t.