The Nazi's Son

by Andrew Turpin

  Johnson snorted and stabbed his finger on the sheet. “See that, Vic? Schwartz seems more concerned about a bomb disrupting trade with the West—not about killing Americans. Bastard.” He continued to read.

  LH recommended that YS take steps to alert KGB hierarchy and also recommended that SSD/KGB jointly work to prevent bomb attack. YS replied that his objective was to do all possible to destabilize and disrupt West Germany. American deaths would be incidental. AS agreed with him and said Moscow would be informed but she and YS would recommend that no action be taken to prevent bomb attack. YS said he expected the SSD to act only in line with KGB objectives.

  “This is appalling,” Vic said. “My brother and the people who were killed that night, were just victims of some KGB and Stasi effort to—what? Disrupt West Germany?” He spat the words out. “It was so pointless. It was never going to achieve anything.”

  He looked as close to despair as Johnson had ever seen him. Johnson put his hand on his friend’s shoulder for a few seconds, remaining silent: words were not enough.

  Johnson scanned farther down the page. “Look at this. There’s more. It gets worse,” he said. He pointed to another paragraph.

  YS asked whether Eter had indicated that the bomb attack was ordered by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. RS said Eter had not been specific but had said the attack would be carried out jointly by Libyan and Palestine Liberation Organization people.

  YS said that President Reagan was known to be looking for an excuse to bomb Gaddafi. He said he would be recommending to Moscow and to Honecker that if the La Belle bombing went ahead, a disinformation campaign should be launched to show it had been carried out by CIA agents to create an excuse for Reagan to launch an attack on Tripoli.

  YS and AS would observe the operation from a KGB safe house on Hauptstrasse, which would give them useful intelligence regarding West German police response processes to such incidents.

  Johnson remembered that those exact rumors about the US being behind the bombing had been circulating in the months after the La Belle attack. “Now we know where that filth all came from,” he said. “Whichever way you look at this, Severinov was throwing shit in all directions.”

  “This must have been the material that Gennady Yezhov was going to bring over when he defected, then,” Vic said. “It’s interesting that Yezhov seems to have said very little at that meeting, according to the minutes. Maybe he opposed what they were doing?”

  “Hmm. Maybe. He didn’t actually say so. And it did then take him twenty-eight years to decide to do anything about it,” Johnson said pointedly.

  There were a few more paragraphs, but the meeting had moved on to discuss routine joint security operations along the Berlin Wall, and they contained nothing of significance.

  Johnson stopped reading the minutes and picked up the photographs that were in the envelope. The first was an exact copy of the photo that Helm had showed to him in Leipzig. But the second was from a different angle, taken lower down at the same level as the heads of the people shown in it. This time, the other faces were clearly visible, not cast in shadow.

  Johnson studied it carefully. There was Schwartz, Helm, and Yezhov. Now he could also see the man and the woman on the right quite clearly. Indeed, as Helm had said, the man was Severinov; there was no mistaking his face and outline, and his arm was drooped around the shoulder of the woman next to him.

  But then, as he stared at the woman’s face, Johnson again felt a little punch-drunk.

  Helm’s words at the apartment in Leipzig came back to him.

  “That is also a KGB officer . . . His girlfriend . . . Her name was Ana . . .”

  Her last name had not come back to Helm before the gunfight with Balagula. But despite the woman being more youthful, with smoother skin, and a little slimmer in the old photo than she was now, the face was easily recognizable to Johnson. He knew who it was.

  Her name was Ana. But that was an abbreviation. Her full name was Anastasia Shevchenko—the current London rezident for the SVR. And apparently, the then girlfriend of Yuri Severinov.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Saturday, April 12, 2014

  London

  The Defense Department report was classified as top secret and had gone to a restricted list of people in the defense, intelligence, and political communities: people who would be impacted by the inevitable tidal wave of media coverage and political spewing that would follow, both in Russia and the West.

  ANTELOPE, who was sitting at a wood-paneled desk at home, scrolled down the report on the laptop. The computer screen and the desk lamp sitting on the surface next to it provided the only illumination in the room and cast a ghostly white layer across ANTELOPE’s face and forehead, highlighting the lines of worry wrinkles.

  The report, which extended to four pages of densely typewritten script outlining rationales and strategies and tactics, could have been summarized in a couple of lines, ANTELOPE thought.

  At last, the timing of the USS Donald Cook’s arrival in the Black Sea: the guided missile warship would be there the day after tomorrow, Monday, April 14, early in the day. Furthermore, a frigate, the USS Taylor, was to join the Donald Cook later in the month.

  But that wasn’t the real dynamite contained in the report. No, the really explosive revelation, the golden nugget, was contained in the second paragraph: the US president was going to divert from a scheduled visit to the Romanian capital, Bucharest, to pay a secret visit to the Donald Cook as it sailed into the Black Sea on Monday.

  ANTELOPE had to read the document twice, eyes narrowing as they scanned downward. A quick summary of this had to go to Shevchenko immediately, and the entire document would also need to be transmitted as quickly as possible: it was incendiary.

  The precise timing of the arrival of a US destroyer and a frigate close to Russian territorial waters in itself was twenty-four-carat military intelligence, particularly when coupled with the information about three French warships heading for the Black Sea that had been passed on to Shevchenko three days earlier.

  But the added detail that the president would be on board was something that would send shock waves through Moscow Center and the Kremlin.

  This looked inflammatory: President Putin would want to prepare a military response to it instantly. ANTELOPE’s first thought was that it would not be a surprise if Russian air force jets were scrambled in response. Would Putin want to fire warning shots across the bows of the oncoming ships? Might he even go one step further?

  The SRAC equipment, which Shevchenko had handed over by Shevchenko when the two of them had met three days earlier, was safely concealed in ANTELOPE’s apartment in Maida Vale and was easy enough to operate.

  This seemed like the right opportunity to try out the kit. Certainly, there was no time to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Shevchenko in the next couple of days, and the Russian had made it very clear she wanted to wind down the face-to-face meetings anyway.

  ANTELOPE walked to a concealed wall cupboard, opened it, and removed a burner phone from a safe attached to the wall inside. Then the agent tapped out a short message to a similar burner phone owned by Shevchenko, summarizing the top line in the report about the destroyer entering the Black Sea in two days, with the US president on board, and the frigate soon afterward. ANTELOPE followed it with another message.

  Will transmit entire MoD document via SRAC and base station as soon as feasible. Good chance to test new kit.

  A couple of minutes later, the phone pinged as a reply came back.

  Thank you for information. Remarkable content. And agree regarding main document transmission. Please inform me when you have done it. I will also download it and so will our mutual assistant.

  ANTELOPE used a microcamera from the safe to photograph the document on the laptop screen, then took the tiny memory card out of the camera and transferred the file onto the SRAC.

  Now all that remained was to find an opportunity to get undetected and surveillance-free to the
vicinity of the base station so the file could be uploaded for subsequent collection by Shevchenko’s illegal.

  That might prove to be a challenge, as the agenda was very full for the next couple of days. ANTELOPE was also doubtful about the wisdom of trying to upload data to the base station on foot. Going for walks and strolling in parks had never really been part of the daily routine, and it might seem odd to suddenly start doing something out of the ordinary.

  ANTELOPE stood and walked to the window and stared at the street outside. It was busy with shoppers returning home, children playing games, and a couple of old ladies standing on the corner, talking.

  What was the best way to do this? Using a car, as Shevchenko advised, was definitely one way. But the idea of having to slow down at a certain spot, even by just a few miles per hour, to ensure a proper connection had its disadvantages and might attract attention.

  The more ANTELOPE thought it through, the more it seemed a better method was needed.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Sunday, April 13, 2014

  London

  There was silence around the briefing table in the safe house on Rossmore Road as Johnson outlined the story he had been told by Ludwig Helm and displayed copies of the papers and notebook he had retrieved from the safe-deposit box in Vienna. One of the MI6 staff had made them for him, using photographs he had taken on his phone.

  When he had finished, Johnson looked at Jayne, Nicklin-Donovan, and Vic in turn.

  Johnson and Vic had arrived in London on the first flight out of Vienna that morning and had gone directly to the safe house. It had been almost a week since he had seen Jayne, but it felt like longer given his narrow escape out of Russia via the Saimaa Canal, and then the encounter with Balagula in Leipzig.

  Nicklin-Donovan was the first to speak. “What a bunch of bastards. I’m glad I twisted your arm to do this investigation. Though obviously I get the credit now.”

  Johnson nodded but didn’t smile.

  “If that damned woman Shevchenko didn’t have immunity, we could hit her with charges of conspiracy to murder, in my view,” Nicklin-Donovan said as he flicked through Helm’s meeting minutes. “We’ll have her kicked out of the country at the very least. But—not yet.”

  “Indeed,” Jayne nodded. “Not until we’ve used her to get to the mole. I agree.”

  “Speaking of which, what’s the latest on that front?” Johnson asked.

  Nicklin-Donovan called in Bennett to the meeting. The group then spent the next half hour discussing the progress made by the ongoing surveillance operation involving the B1 and B2 teams.

  The B2 team had successfully tailed the Southern Europeean woman who had made a drop into the motorcycle pannier.

  From the license plate of the aging green Nissan Micra that she drove and from her property details, she was identified as Natalia Espinosa, a single mother of two teenage children who was working legally in the UK as a language teacher.

  Natalia lived in Wembley, only a stone’s throw from England’s glitzy national soccer stadium, in a house next to a run-down pub called the Green Man.

  She held a Spanish passport and had a Spanish father, but a deep dive into her background by GCHQ showed that she had a Russian mother and had spent most of her formative years in Moscow. She also held a Russian passport, but that had never been used to enter the UK or the US, which she had visited on a number of occasions.

  “Good work,” Johnson said.

  “Yes, good work by the team,” Nicklin-Donovan agreed. “But so far, it’s still not got us close to finding our mole. We still don’t even have any actual evidence that Shevchenko is part of the chain, although to me it seems obvious.”

  Vic leaned back and surveyed the other four around the table. “Thank you, Mark,” he said. “But I’m afraid there is something else to discuss. Gary, would you please excuse us?”

  Bennett nodded and left the room.

  Vic leaned forward, cupping his chin in his hands. “I only learned this yesterday, but there is a situation looming that if leaked to Moscow could potentially put the US president at risk. This is deeply restricted. The report I saw was for US eyes only, but the situation dictates that I have to tell you, and I have cleared it with my director.”

  “Okay, then, what is it?” Johnson asked.

  “The president is currently on a visit to Romania, as you all know.” The presidential visit to Bucharest had been well covered in the media, not least because of its proximity to the Crimean Peninsula. Romania bordered the eastern side of the Black Sea and was just 180 miles from Istanbul and only a little more from the Crimea.

  “The president has made a last-minute decision to take a helicopter flight from Bucharest to join the USS Donald Cook in the Black Sea tomorrow,” Vic continued. “Director Veltman tells me he has tried to persuade the president to drop the ship visit, but he is refusing. If this leaks to Moscow . . .” Vic let his voice trail away.

  There was silence around the table.

  “There’s no sign that it has leaked so far,” Nicklin-Donovan said eventually. “At least, not at this end.”

  He was correct about that, Johnson mused. After the Russian illegal Natalia Espinosa had loaded the dead drop site, the motorbike pannier had been emptied later the same day by a man who was tailed to Heathrow Airport and then flew to Berlin. He was identified as Alexander Litvyak, traveling under a Russian passport, although it was assumed that that was a false name and a false document. The team had allowed him to go, not wanting to raise any suspicions before the trail led them to the unidentified mole.

  Johnson assumed that “Litvyak” was probably the same courier whom Schwartz had described who ferried flash drives to the mysterious handler code-named VIPER in Berlin for onward transportation to Moscow. It obviously wouldn’t be Schwartz who was taking the flash drive to Moscow this time. The SVR must have found another courier, while the actual identity of VIPER remained unknown.

  Since then, however, Natalia had not appeared to take any further suspicious actions, had not held any meetings, and had not picked up any more material from anywhere. There had been no more pickups from the motorbike.

  Vic’s phone rang, and he left the room to take the call.

  “All we can do is continue to keep watching Shevchenko and the illegal,” Johnson said. “It’s a waiting game. We’ll get them. Something will give. If we see a sign of action, we can assume that the president’s visit might have leaked.”

  “Yes,” Vic said as he reentered the room, catching the last of Johnson’s words. “And if that happens, we can get Veltman to try again to persuade the president to cancel. But that was the Berlin station. They had some more news. This time about Reiner Schwartz.”

  “What?” Johnson asked.

  “He’s dead. Shot inside his own house.”

  The Berlin station had learned from German police that Schwartz had been killed by an unknown gunman, Vic said. A neighbor had seen the man step out of a white Volkswagen and was able to give police a description.

  “It must have been Balagula,” Johnson said. It was obvious. The Spetsnaz killer must have been under instructions, almost certainly from Severinov, to take out one valuable witness of events in Berlin in 1986 before traveling to Leipzig to try and take out the other.

  Vic nodded. “Yes, it seems it was Balagula. The description certainly tallies with that.”

  When they had concluded the briefing session, Johnson took Jayne by the arm. There was a lot he needed to discuss about the operation with her, and apart from Vic, she was the only one he trusted completely. But there were more than just work issues to resolve: he also needed to try and sort out his feelings for her.

  “Let’s go for a walk and find somewhere to talk,” he said. He picked up his jacket and stood there, giving her little option.

  Jayne looked at him quizzically for a couple of seconds but then simply nodded, grabbing her jacket and walking out the door of the conference room.

  They stroll
ed out of the Rossmore Road safe house, which was on the ground floor of an eight-story redbrick building.

  After checking carefully for surveillance, as usual, Jayne suggested they take a taxi to the Lancaster Hotel, a classy five-star place at the junction with Bayswater Road. There they found a corner table in the Island Grill next to full-length picture windows that overlooked Hyde Park on the other side of the street and ordered two lattes. There were only a few other occupants in the room.

  “What’s on your mind?” Jayne asked.

  “There are a couple of things I want to discuss,” Johnson said. “Business first.”

  “What kind of business do you have in mind?” She winked at him.

  “That would be telling—although I will tell you later.”

  “I’ll look forward to that.” She smiled.

  “But seriously, the first issue is the identity of the mole,” Johnson said. “Everything is leaking right now—I mean, how the Russians knew I was at Helm’s apartment in Leipzig is beyond me, given the tightness of our information flows. How did they know I was visiting Yezhov’s widow in St. Petersburg?”

  Jayne shrugged. “I don’t know the answers, but it’s definitely a lot messier than the two-week job we thought it would be.”

  “That’s an understatement. But it’s got to be coming from somewhere close to home. We have to assume this surveillance operation itself is compromised, don’t we? And God knows what other secrets are being channeled to Moscow out of all the other classified documents that are circulating.”

  “Yes. The whole thing feels compromised.”

  “So, although I feel we’ve made huge strides in pinpointing what Severinov and Shevchenko did in Berlin, the big prize is still eluding us. I feel we owe it to Gennady Yezhov to complete the job given that he gave his life trying to hand us the identity of the mole and that his daughter damn near gave her life getting me out of Russia.”

  “Agreed. Maybe we should tighten our information flows even further, then,” Jayne said.