Watson glanced at the papers lying at the side of his desk. There was an invoice from his gardener, another from his cleaner, both of whom were indispensable. He had to admit, the six-bedroom property, in Wynhurst Lane, Wolftrap, was far too large for someone living by himself.
But it was private and not too far from Langley. In any case, he needed to demonstrate that he was using his six-figure CIA salary for some tangible purpose. Watson viewed property as a good long-term investment, and the house, bought for more than $1.5 million five years earlier, would be his daughter’s one day.
His mortgage statement, which he had just filed away, stated that $171,549 remained outstanding. But that was just for appearances’ sake. Watson’s fortune, like the bulk of an iceberg hidden below the waterline, remained mainly invisible. Indeed, he had gone to extreme lengths to ensure the vast majority of it, quietly accumulated from a handful of side ventures in different parts of the world, would never come under the penetrating scrutiny of his CIA colleagues.
Nearly all of it was stashed in numbered accounts in various tax havens, but principally Switzerland.
One of his Swiss accounts, in Zürich, was where Peretz had channeled the annual bonus paid unofficially to Watson in return for keeping a close eye on Brenner and ensuring that nothing happened to disrupt the status quo that had suited everyone—apart, perhaps, from Brenner—for so many years. Over the years, it had added up to almost $2.3 million: very significant for someone on a CIA salary.
There were other accounts elsewhere, too, containing significantly more money from other long-running projects. Although Watson sometimes found it frustrating that he was unable to make use of the money now, it would be there, ready for future use, when he no longer worked for the U.S. government.
He was increasingly unclear when that day would come; not everything was going to plan. In particular, he felt increasingly anxious about the way things were going with Brenner. He knew that his intermediary in Miami, Simon, had given a thorough briefing to Agustin Torres, the CIA case officer who was their main asset in Buenos Aires.
But Simon had just told Watson that the plan to get Brenner out of Argentina and into Chile had failed. The old man hadn’t shown up for his flight to Santiago the previous evening, nor had he made the expected check-in call to Miami.
Even more worrying, the GPS tracking technology that Watson used told him Brenner’s phone was on the move. It seemed to be in a vehicle heading north from Buenos Aires toward the borders with Paraguay and Brazil. And presumably, the old man was moving with it.
Simon, not knowing Brenner’s current circumstances, deemed it too risky to call the phone, and Watson agreed.
Watson tapped on the screen of his encrypted cell phone and dialed a number in Argentina for Agustin, a longtime CIA employee within the Latin American Division whom he had dealt with several times over the years on operations spanning both their divisions.
“Hello?”
“Agustin. It’s Robert Watson here.”
“Robert. You’re calling about VANDAL?”
“Yes, I know Simon’s briefed you, but I’m just checking on things. I can see VANDAL appears to be heading north.”
“Yeah. Plan A didn’t work, unfortunately. I assume the son’s got him and is going to do the necessary. VANDAL’s company has a business unit in Puerto Iguazú—which is another story. But my bet is the son’s taking the old man there.”
Watson scratched his chin. “Right. Yes, but ideally, I don’t want the son to do the necessary, as you put it. I’d like VANDAL out of there intact. But the most important thing is that Johnson doesn’t get to VANDAL, or our friends in Tel Aviv will have a fit. You know how critical that is.”
He thought for a second. “You’re going to have to get up to Puerto Iguazú yourself, Agustin, and sort it out. We’re still obligated to VANDAL, so I want you to find a way to exfiltrate him. I’m relying on you.”
Agustin groaned. “I’m crazy busy here, Robert. We’ve got Operation SNOWCAP due to start next week: cross-border into Chile, very complex, involving six agents who I need to coordinate. I mean, VANDAL’s in his ’90s now. How important is this?”
“Just do it. I can’t take any asshole-fashion excuses on this one.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. Then Agustin said, “Okay, okay. I’ve got a high-level police mole, Carlos Campos, who’s on our payroll. Simon knows about him. Carlos tells me Johnson’s traveling with two women, and they’re well behind VANDAL. So that gives us a little time.”
“Two women? You sure he said two?”
“Yes. One of them is an American journalist, Fiona Heppenstall. Carlos says he hasn’t got a clue who the other is.”
“Hmm. How far behind VANDAL are they?”
“Not sure. Couple of hours would be my guess,” Agustin said.
“I want you to delay him further. Is there a way of doing that?”
“There’s a police checkpoint heading up toward Puerto Iguazú,” Agustin said. “I can get Carlos to pull a few strings.”
“Yes, that’ll do. Good. And you need to get a plane up there, fast as you can.” Watson said.
“There’s a flight in an hour and a half. If I move, I’ll make it,” Agustin said.
“Yes. Make sure you’re on it. And I’m authorizing you to do whatever you need to do to keep Johnson away from VANDAL. That’s an order. Just do it—no need for any more clearances from me. Keep me updated. Understood?”
“Okay. Will do,” Agustin said.
“Thanks.” Watson ended the call.
Two women? Who’s the second, then?
Chapter Fifty-Two
Monday, December 5, 2011
Puerto Iguazú, Argentina
Johnson, now taking another turn behind the wheel, banged on the dashboard in frustration. He slowed to a crawl up a long, curving incline behind a massive logging truck loaded with tree trunks.
A steady flow of trucks came from the opposite direction, making it impossible for Johnson to pass.
Thankfully, dawn was starting to break, but the rain continued to beat down hard.
Then, just as Jayne had predicted, there were two police checkpoints along the way that cost them a total of four hundred U.S. dollars.
The second of them, not far from Puerto Iguazú, delayed them for nearly an hour. When they had driven a few hundred yards up the road, Johnson quietly uttered a single word, “Bastards.”
Jayne folded her arms. “Never had that before. Not an hour. Usually it’s five or ten minutes, if that, and a quick money exchange. Something’s going on. I specifically asked Carlos to sort that out for me, given I’m paying the bastard. He’s useless.”
She checked the GPS device. “The Mercedes stopped moving some time ago. It’s southwest of the city, I think a couple of kilometers out at least.”
At a T-intersection, they took a left toward Puerto Iguazú. The road to the right led to the city’s airport. As they turned left, they were almost deafened by the noise from a large passenger jet that roared low over their heads, descending as it prepared to land.
“That’ll be the morning flight up here from Buenos Aires,” Jayne said.
They passed the entrance to an army base, marked by a large, disused armored car complete with a rocket launcher on the top. An Argentine flag stood behind it on a pole, lying limp in the morning sunshine.
Now they were on the fringes of the city. There were a couple of hotels with rough homemade signs, a half-built restaurant, crumbling houses, and abandoned cars.
Then, as they went further into the center, the buildings gradually became nicer, the houses more upmarket. A sign reading Hilton Iguazú Golf and Resort pointed to the right.
Johnson, his head now feeling foggy from lack of sleep and overdoses of caffeine, pulled in outside a supermarket near the point where the Paraná and the Iguazú Rivers met.
Jayne checked the GPS app again. The green dot was still in the same place, out of town to the south
west. She pointed across the River Iguazú. “That’s Brazil across there, and that’s Paraguay there to the left. You can see why the underworld likes it here. They can just move across the borders in a blink.”
She looked at the sat nav again and began to give Johnson directions.
“We’ll need to make some sort of plan,” Johnson said. “We can’t just barge in, wherever they are. They probably think they’re in the clear, but they must know we’re trying to find them. They could have set a trap.”
He accelerated down the road, heading southwest through a grid-like network of increasingly rough, potholed roads, all of them tinged red from the iron-rich dust that lay everywhere, its particles covering homes, cars, and sidewalks.
Soon, the blacktop road gave way to an unsealed red-dirt track. They drew nearer to the green dot, which still blinked away on Jayne’s phone screen, unmoving.
Now the occasional houses were no more than shacks, roughly built from different colored planks of scavenged wood and with roofs made of mismatching pieces of corrugated iron. Old tires and bits of scrap metal lay at the side of the road.
Here the ground was dry. It appeared the rainstorm which had hit them further south had bypassed the city altogether.
The Hilux bounced across one hump and then another, tossing up puffs of dust into the air behind it and sending Jayne and Fiona lurching in their seats.
The green dot was now, by Jayne’s calculations, no more than half a kilometer away, farther down the track.
Johnson promptly started to feel butterflies fluttering in his stomach. His chest tightened.
To the right, the Paraná River swung into view, wide and brown. On the other side of the water lay Paraguay.
A little farther on, an area of gravel lay behind some trees that provided some natural screening from the road.
“There, I’ll park behind those trees,” Johnson said. “I don’t want to alert them with the engine noise. We’ll walk from here.”
“Just making sure, but you know I’m going with you,” Fiona said. “Don’t try and persuade me otherwise. I need to be there when we get to Brenner.”
Johnson glanced at her. She meant what she said. Jayne was looking at him for a decision. Fiona was his responsibility in this case. He said nothing but pulled up and switched off the engine, then got out of the pickup and looked down the track.
Jayne cast him a disapproving look but shrugged, as if to say he could make the mistake if he wanted.
There was silence apart from a few birds singing and insects humming. Now the air felt hot, humid, and sticky. Johnson could feel himself begin to sweat.
Just visible down the track, past a clump of trees, was the red-tiled roof of what looked like a large outbuilding, and behind it was another roof.
Johnson peered at Jayne’s phone. The green dot was flashing away, right where the buildings were.
Jayne retrieved the two Berettas from their hiding place underneath the rear seat and handed one to Johnson, along with a spare magazine. Thankfully the police hadn’t done a thorough search of the vehicle but had only wanted to waste their time.
“Thanks,” Johnson said. He strapped a holster to his hip and put the gun in it, noticing his right hand shook a little as he did so. “Let’s think this through. I’ll go with Fiona, given she’s so insistent. You’d better hang back here and wait. You can give me some cover, which I might need if the worst happens. Just keep your ears open. See what happens. They don’t even know we’re here, I’m assuming.”
Jayne nodded. “Yeah, makes sense. I’ll cover you. I think they must be half expecting us.”
She made her way to a thick clump of bushes, twenty yards left of the dirt road, where there was plenty of cover.
To the left, through the trees, Johnson could now see the buildings more clearly. Nearest to the track stood a rough brick structure with a large green garage door at the front and a small side door.
Behind that was a run-down single-story house, its white paint peeling and walls stained green and gray with mold in places. One front window was boarded up.
There was a ten-foot-high wooden fence running to the right and left of the house at the rear, forming what looked like a compound. On top of the fence was a continuous loop of tightly coiled razor wire. The roofs of several smaller buildings were just visible over the top of the fence.
A large, neatly painted sign stood on a plinth outside. Its message, in large red letters, was unmistakable.
SolGold Argentina
Propriedad Privada, Prohibido Pasar
Underneath it was the ubiquitous red circle with a white horizontal line across it. No entry.
SolGold. So it’s part of Brenner’s jewelry business, Johnson thought to himself. What a bizarre location.
He took a couple of steps, with Fiona right behind him. Then he heard the faint sound of music drifting from the direction of the large garage. It sounded like a chorus to a marching beat, backed by an old-fashioned brass band.
They inched closer, crouching behind a short brick wall that had been half demolished to allow vehicles to enter an area in front of the house.
Now the music that came from inside the garage was clearer. The singing was in a foreign language that Johnson recognized immediately.
It’s in German. A Nazi marching tune.
The green garage door at the front of the building was shut, but a small pedestrian door at the side was open a fraction. Johnson hunched over and signaled to Fiona to do likewise. Then they ran across a short section of grass and flattened themselves against the garage wall next to the pedestrian door.
Up close, the music was now much clearer, though somewhat crackly. An old recording, then.
Johnson applied his eye to the tiny crack where the door was ajar and drew an involuntary, sharp inward breath at what he saw. There, sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of the garage, a large red Nazi flag draped around his shoulders, was a white-haired old man.
Erich Brenner.
The white circle and central black swastika on the flag lay across the middle of the old man’s chest. His eyes were half closed. Black bindings held his wrists to the arms of the wooden chair.
But to Johnson’s relief, he could see Brenner was alive. His chest rose and fell with each breath.
What the hell?
The music came from a portable CD player that stood on an old wooden table.
The garage was filthy, with oil stains, grime, and mud all over the concrete floor and cobwebs on the rough brick walls. The building was lit by a bare fluorescent light attached to the wooden beams.
Johnson grasped the Beretta. There was no car in the garage, and there had been no sign of the black Mercedes outside, either. Yet the GPS signal was definitely coming from this spot.
Was this Ignacio’s bizarre way of preparing his father for some sort of ceremonial execution, or was it simply a trap?
Johnson signaled to Fiona to remain outside the small garage door. He edged backward and stepped lightly to the farthest corner of the garage, then peered around. There was nobody in sight.
There was a momentary lull in the music as one track finished and the next began. During the gap, Johnson was sure he heard the faint sound of women’s voices coming from behind the wooden fence at the back of the garage.
He moved cautiously down the side of the garage toward a small window at the far end. Then he crouched below the windowsill and lifted his eyes until he could see inside.
There was Brenner in his chair, but there was still no sign of anyone else. No noise. No movement.
Johnson found himself of two minds. His quarry was sitting a few yards away, there for the taking. If there were nobody else in the garage, he knew he could slip in, grab the old man, and frog-march him down the road to the Hilux. A big if . . .
He couldn’t risk leaving Brenner there to be executed. He had to make a decision. There seemed only one option.
Johnson crept back around the outside of the building
to the door and indicated with a nod of his head to Fiona that they were going to enter. He raised his Beretta, pushed the door open a fraction, and took a cautious step forward, preparing to sweep the room.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Monday, December 5, 2011
Puerto Iguazú
Johnson had no sooner pushed the door open enough to walk through than it slammed back toward him, knocking him off balance and into the opposite wall.
As he recovered his balance, the voice came from behind the door, level, calm, and menacing in heavily accented English.
“Drop it. Drop the gun. Now. And you, woman, stand next to this idiota, and don’t move.”
Ignacio stood there pointing a semiautomatic Glock at Johnson’s head.
Johnson briefly tried to calculate the chances of getting a shot in. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Fiona step forward until she was beside him.
He realized he had no choice and let the gun fall.
“Ah, Señor Johnson. Nice to meet you at last, after coming close a few times. I have to say, you’re persistent, chasing me across two continents. But anyway, you’re just in time to see the denouement. Perfecto. Put your hands on your head and stand against the wall.”
Patronizing bastard.
Johnson didn’t move for a moment. His carefully thought-out plans, what he would say to Brenner, how he would present the “proof of the truth,” how he would secure him and drive him back to the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, and how he’d have him extradited—they all evaporated like steam from a kettle.
“Quick, come on, move. Against the wall, now! You too, woman,” Ignacio’s voice rose in pitch by a few notes.
Johnson moved and placed his back to the wall, hands on the top of his head like a naughty child in the corner at school. Fiona did likewise next to him.
“Okay, Luis, check their pockets. I’m covering you,” Ignacio ordered, keeping his gun trained on Johnson’s head.
The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1) Page 37
