The Nazi's Son

by Andrew Turpin

  Chapter Nineteen

  Monday, April 7, 2014

  St. Petersburg

  The delegates filing out of the bus and beneath the magnificent central arch of the General Staff Building, on the vast expanse of Palace Square, were in an upbeat mood. The idea of two and a half days in St. Petersburg, ostensibly for the city’s International Legal Forum but in reality for a series of convivial meals, some decent wines, and good company, was a major attraction for legal professionals the world over.

  They came from more than eighty countries, according to the welcome pack. Most of those present were law practitioners of one form or another—ranging from barristers in Sydney to corporate general counsels from Madrid and Paris. But there were also a few professors of law and other academics.

  The General Staff Building, built during the 1820s in a 580-meter bow shape in front of the legendary Winter Palace of the Russian tsars, was one of St. Petersburg’s iconic locations. The triumphal arch through which the delegates were walking was designed to mark the Russian victory over Napoleon’s France during the Great Patriotic War of 1812.

  All the delegates were arriving that evening for a semiformal evening drinks reception prior to the official start of the conference the following morning.

  Among those last to leave the bus was a man from the American University’s Washington College of Law, William Cadman, who was the deputy director of the War Crimes Research Office.

  At least, that was the name on his passport and on his conference registration form and entry pass.

  But the passport bearing Cadman’s name was carried by Johnson, along with a credit card, a bank card, and a driver’s license. Johnson had acquired a pair of black glasses similar to the real Cadman and had cut his hair even shorter than normal.

  Johnson paused for a moment after stepping off the bus and glanced around. The Palace Square, where part of the 1917 October Revolution took place, had been the scene of various bloody encounters over the years, including the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre, when hundreds of protesters were killed by the Imperial Guard.

  He had been late to confirm Cadman’s attendance at the conference, having done so just before the deadline the previous Friday night following a series of secure calls between the Berlin team and Nicklin-Donovan in London.

  Before Johnson and Jayne had departed from Berlin, they had set up GPS tracking devices so that each of them could monitor the other’s position if needed. It was something they had used on a previous job in Afghanistan to extremely good effect, and both of them viewed it as a sensible insurance policy to deploy the technology again here.

  The trackers, costing a few hundred dollars each, were tiny: only an inch and a half square and very thin. They had a battery life of about two weeks and could be monitored anywhere in the world using an iPhone app.

  The devices were concealed in a cavity cut into the honeycombed rubber midsole of their shoe heels and were undetectable unless the heel was dismantled. The system had enabled Jayne to mobilize a US Army unit to rescue Johnson from incarceration in a cellar in Kabul the previous year.

  Apart from the trackers, the registration of Cadman for the St. Petersburg conference had triggered a flurry of other activity over the weekend within the CIA station at Pariser Platz, where arrangements had to be made at short notice to manufacture his passport and driver’s license.

  Johnson, Vic, and their tight team across both CIA and MI6 functions were determined to keep details of his visit to St. Petersburg as secure as possible, and distribution of the intel report about the operation was therefore kept confined. The report contained few details, with no accommodation addresses, no operational plans, and no details of aliases or cover stories. It was limited to the individuals who had previously been briefed on a need-to-know basis.

  Nevertheless, it triggered requests for more details and explanations from a number of those people via emails or phone calls to Vic, Johnson, and Nicklin-Donovan. A few offered advice based on their previous experiences in Russia’s old imperial capital.

  But ultimately the flow of missives became irritating. When Johnson reported his list of contacts to Vic, his friend rolled his eyes and told Johnson he was of the mind to delete any further information requests and not answer his phone. He advised Johnson to do likewise.

  When, eventually, Johnson arrived at passport control at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport following his two-hour ten-minute Aeroflot flight from Schönefeld Airport south of Berlin, his documentation under the Cadman alias was heavily scrutinized. But that was normal. There was no heavy interrogation, and he was allowed through.

  Johnson’s biggest concern was to check for any sign of surveillance as he journeyed by taxi to his hotel, the Taleon Imperial on Nevsky Prospekt, just a stone’s throw from the General Staff Building.

  A car followed him into the city from Pulkovo and had been easy enough to spot, but that had vanished after he had been dropped off at the Taleon, which was a former palace turned luxury hotel. During Johnson’s short walk from the hotel to the General Staff Building and at the reception, any number of people could potentially have been observers from the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, which was responsible for internal intelligence and security within the country. Johnson assumed that some of them were watching.

  He had an address for Varvara Yezhova that he had been given by the operations team at Pariser Platz. It was for a fourth-floor apartment on Bolshoy Prospekt, in the Petrogradsky district of the city, about a mile and a half northeast of the General Staff Building.

  Johnson had no prearranged appointment with her, just a couple of photographs. Because of the security concerns about FSB surveillance, he had not even been able to notify her that he was coming. Although he had a phone number, he remained too worried to use it. Certainly the family of a defector who had just been assassinated—presumably on the directions of the SVR, or most likely the president’s office—would be monitored around the clock.

  Instead, he would have to find a way to reach her unannounced. Johnson had devised a plan. But first he needed to get black.

  Chapter Twenty

  Tuesday, April 8, 2014

  St. Petersburg

  It was a strategy that Johnson had used once before in Russia, many years earlier, when he needed a cover story and a plausible disguise while gathering evidence against an alleged war criminal who had subsequently obtained refuge in the United States under a false identity.

  Johnson went along to the conference as scheduled on the Tuesday morning and signed in at the registration table. The sessions that followed, between nine o’clock and one o’clock, were a boring mixture of presentations about legal developments of global interest, mainly given by people who seemed intent on raising their own profiles as much as discussing the issues at hand.

  But when the conference broke up for lunch, Johnson returned to the Taleon Imperial and embarked on his own private tour of the building—one that took him down to the hotel basements in search of a room, or series of rooms, that he knew existed somewhere.

  There was nothing of the kind he was seeking on the first basement level, so he continued down another flight of concrete stairs, this time uncarpeted and less maintained, that echoed under his shoes.

  Once on the second basement level, he went through a set of double swing doors and along a corridor until he found what he was looking for. Two doors, both marked in Russian: Komnata dlya personala. Staff room. One had another sign below that read Muzhskoy, men. The other said Zhenskiy, ladies.

  He took a breath, then opened the door to the men’s room and strode in, his head high. Swiftly, he took in the scene ahead of him. Metal lockers lined the walls, and around a line of benches in the center of the room, a handful of men were buttoning smart white shirts, donning black waistcoats, knotting ties, and polishing black shoes.

  At the rear of the room was a long hanging rail with uniforms that had just come back from cleaning. They were hanging in flimsy polyethy
lene protective covers, all with labels attached.

  Without hesitation, Johnson strode to the rail and, copying another man who stood there, rifled through the sets of uniforms. In his case, he wasn’t looking at the name labels but rather the sizes. He needed one in large.

  He grabbed a uniform from the rail and, like the others, moved to a bench and began to get changed. Within four minutes, Johnson looked like any one of the scores of hotel staff that lined the lobby, corridors, dining rooms, and bars of the Taleon. His waistcoat fitted snugly, and his tie knot was perfect.

  Johnson put the clothing he had taken off inside the plastic cover, rolled it up, and nodded at a couple of other men on his way out. He took the staff elevator directly to the fifth floor, where his room was located. He emerged from an elevator shaft tucked away next to an emergency staircase at the rear of the building rather than the main guest elevators in the center.

  As soon as he walked into his room, he caught a glimpse of his image in the full-length mirror that was attached to a wall.

  “You look like a penguin,” he said out loud to himself. “But I think this could work.” He had noticed groups of uniformed hotel staff waiting for taxis at the rear of the hotel, presumably after completing their shifts. They had emerged from a staff door close to the kitchens. Providing he used the staff stairs and elevators, took the usual precautions, and checked for signs of coverage, the chances of being followed by FSB surveillance from the taxi stand were lower than by exiting the grandiose front doors through the lobby, he figured.

  It was time to go.

  Johnson sent an email to the legal forum’s delegates coordinator, apologizing that he would not be able to attend that day’s proceedings because he had been incapacitated with some kind of food poisoning after breakfast. There was little doubt that the FSB would eventually be notified of his absence.

  Forty minutes later, a taxi dropped him in front of a men’s clothing store on Bolshoy Prospekt, a broad street lined with five-story buildings housing a variety of smart restaurants, fashion shops, banks, and electronic goods outlets on the ground floors, with apartments above.

  There seemed to be no shortage of disposable income for shopping in this area of St. Petersburg.

  He entered the store. From his vantage point, where he stood examining a selection of jackets, the clothing shop gave him a perfect view of the apartments across the street where Varvara lived. There was a heavy wooden door at street level, sandwiched between a Greek restaurant and a music shop, with push-button buzzers to the right.

  Every so often, pedestrians entered the apartments using their own keys, or cars or taxis pulled up outside and people got out and went in. It was a busy residential building.

  Johnson, still wearing his hotel waistcoat and tie, spent some time moving from one shop to another, browsing and drinking the occasional coffee, all the time checking for any sign of surveillance. There was none. Any observer would probably have assumed he was an off-duty waiter or concierge.

  A black Mercedes had been standing outside the apartments for a while, with a man in a dark suit in the driver’s seat behind darkened windows. But it looked as though it was waiting for a resident to emerge.

  After a while, Johnson was satisfied enough. He waited in the music shop next to the apartment’s entrance until another taxi pulled up outside, then timed his arrival at the door to coincide with that of the woman passenger who got out.

  Johnson exchanged a couple of good-humored words of thanks in fluent Russian with the woman, who was middle-aged and wearing what looked like a white nurse’s tunic, insisting that she go first. He followed in her slipstream while she unlocked the door, pushed it open, and slipped inside.

  Johnson headed past the elevators and through the door to the stairs at the rear of the entrance hall. He began to climb, his footsteps echoing up the concrete steps.

  The stairwell had a strong smell of disinfectant and cement dust. It was obviously not well used, unlike the elevators, which Johnson noticed on the way past had well-worn call buttons set into a brass plate.

  When he reached the third-floor landing, from somewhere out of sight above him came a crack that was almost explosive. Johnson immediately realized it was a door handle smashing back against the wall of the stairwell on the fourth floor above. Someone was on the move, and fast.

  Then came multiple sets of running footsteps echoing down the stairs. Seconds later, two men dressed in black jackets and black trousers burst into view around the banisters of the next flight of steps.

  They both hammered down the stairs toward Johnson. The first man was stuffing a bundle of black cloth into a pocket as he ran.

  Johnson stopped still. He began to brace himself, and his heart rate automatically shot up as a flow of adrenaline rushed through him. These two were muscly, barrel-chested military types, with similar short-cropped dark hair.

  The man in front ran straight past Johnson without a glance. The second, who was swarthier, with tufts of black chest hair showing where his top two shirt buttons were undone, threw Johnson a sharp look. But they didn’t pause, rushing and clattering down the next flight of stairs toward street level.

  A chill ran down Johnson’s spine. Had his biggest fear about this trip just come true?

  Shit.

  Johnson turned to watch the men disappear. The second man’s face had rung a bell in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t place him. He made his way up to the next landing and opened the stairwell door.

  Ahead of him was a dimly lit hallway next to the elevator shaft with corridors leading off at either end. At an open apartment doorway opposite, a woman lay on her back, her head inside the apartment, her bare legs spread-eagled across the doormat.

  Johnson moved closer. He could see a stream of blood trickling its way across the terra-cotta tiled floor of the apartment. He recognized the face from the photographs he had seen: it was Varvara Yezhova. There was a bullet entry wound in the center of her forehead.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Tuesday, April 8, 2014

  St. Petersburg

  Johnson hurried over to Varvara’s body on the floor. Although he knew he was wasting his time, he knelt and felt her wrist for a pulse. The wrist was still normal body temperature, but there was not a hint of a beat.

  She was gone.

  “Shit,” Johnson said out loud.

  He put Varvara’s wrist back down on the floor and for a few seconds considered what to do next. The two men he had seen running down the stairs had killed her.

  Johnson’s mind raced. Had someone leaked details of Johnson’s plan to try to meet with her? Even more critical, did they know what secrets she might have been able to pass on?

  Johnson looked up and down the hallway. He was surprised that no other residents had emerged from their apartments. Surely, they must have heard the gunshot. That is, unless the killers had used a suppressor, which was quite possible, because Johnson himself had heard nothing while climbing the stairs.

  One thing was certain: he didn’t want to just stay there and be caught next to a dead body. Should he drag Varvara’s body into the apartment and see if he could find anything? Or just leave and abort the operation entirely?

  Just then, the elevator doors behind him opened, and out stepped a slim young woman with shoulder-length dark brown hair. She took in the scene in front of her and let out a piercing shriek.

  “Mother!” she screamed in Russian. “Bozhe Moy. My God, what did you do to my mother?”

  Johnson stood, realizing as he did so that she was almost as tall as him. He spoke to her in Russian. “No, I just arrived and found her like this and—”

  But the woman shrieked again, rushed to Varvara, and cradled her head in her arms, oblivious to the blood that was splattering over her jeans, black denim jacket, and white T-shirt.

  Johnson swore inwardly. At this rate the entire apartment building would be emerging from behind their locked doors and blaming him for Varvara’s death. So mu
ch for keeping his visit low-key.

  “I promise you I did not kill your mother,” Johnson said. “I just arrived to visit her, only a minute before you got here.”

  What the hell to do next?

  “Call an ambulance. Call a doctor, quickly.” The woman was struggling to get her words out between sobs. This was clearly the twenty-five-year-old daughter.

  “I am so sorry,” Johnson said. “She’s gone, she’s gone. There’s no pulse. We can call a doctor, but they can’t help her now. I am sorry.”

  Johnson knew he had to get the body inside and shut the door as quickly as possible. He was by now fearful that someone else would arrive, and before they knew it, the police and the FSB would be called, and he would be thrown into a cell for questioning.

  He also didn’t want to introduce himself out in the corridor within potential earshot of other residents.

  “Listen,” Johnson said, trying to think of how to phrase the need to move her mother’s body without causing an even larger scene. “I will help you to get your mother into the apartment. She shouldn’t stay here in the doorway. You can decide what to do inside. Come on, I can help you. You must be Katya?”

  “Yes, I’m Katya,” the young woman wailed. She gently laid her mother’s head on the floor again, which Johnson took as a signal of acceptance of what he had said. She stood and sobbed in the doorway, hands clasped to her head, tears trickling down her face and dripping to the floor. “Who are you?”

  “I was coming to visit her,” Johnson said as he stood. “I am a friend of your father, and I needed to talk to your mother about what happened to him.”

  At the mention of her father, Katya doubled up, and her sobbing became uncontrollable.

  Johnson exhaled. Two bullets, two deaths a couple of weeks apart. And an entire family blown apart, literally.

  Johnson took a hold beneath Varvara’s armpits and pulled her body into the tiled hallway of the apartment, where he laid it to rest on a long, narrow red rug. Katya didn’t offer to help, but she didn’t object either; she backed into the hallway ahead of him, too overwrought to speak.