James Becker - Echo of the Reich

22 July 2012

They’d followed the dark blue articulated truck ever since it had pulled out of the industrial park on the southern outskirts of Prague. Three cars, two men in each, swapping places at irregular intervals. It hadn’t been a difficult task. The truck was simply too big, and too slow, to miss.

The complicated bit came after it had crossed the Czech Republic border near Waidhaus and headed west into Germany. The Germans knew they had two options: either they had somehow to divert the truck off the autobahn onto the quieter country roads or they had to wait until the crew stopped for fuel, or a break, or whatever. In the end, it proved to be easier than they’d expected.

A few kilometers to the west of the Schonschleif interchange, the truck had pulled into a service area. The three cars had followed, the drivers getting out and topping up their tanks just in case the truck pulled out again immediately. But it hadn’t. After filling the tank with diesel, the driver of the truck had pulled away from the pumps and driven the vehicle over to the truck parking area, where he’d stopped and switched off the engine. Then he and his companion had climbed down from the cab, locked the vehicle and walked over to the cafeteria for a meal.

If the men in the cars had scripted the events themselves, it could hardly have worked out better for them. Forty minutes after the truck had pulled off the autobahn, it was on the move again, this time with two different men in the cab. The stiffening bodies of the original crew were locked in the cargo section behind, each wrapped in heavy-duty plastic sheeting sealed with tape, because it was important that the smell of decomposition shouldn’t be detected for some time.

As they drove away from the service area, the passenger in the cab of the truck made a thirty-second phone call to a Berlin number to arrange the rendezvous for the next phase of the operation.

Six hours later, in a busy industrial park near Erfurt, where dozens of trucks arrived and departed every hour throughout the day and night, they made the switch, uncoupling the trailer from the Czech Republic truck and leaving it in a line of other unhitched trailers. Two hours after that, the sides of the trailer had a fresh coat of paint to conceal the original markings, and new heavy-duty padlocks had been fitted to all the external doors. It would be days, probably weeks, they hoped, before anybody took any interest in the vehicle.

One of the men attached the tractor unit to an entirely different trailer, which had been positioned in the park over two weeks earlier, the sides of which had already been painted with the appropriate logos, but which contained equipment of an entirely different nature to that loaded into the other trailer. It was now fitted with the registration plates from the Czech Republic trailer to complete the deception. The articulated truck drove out of the park as soon as all the phases of the operation had been finished, its route and destination preplanned and fully understood by all those involved.

It would actually take only a couple of days to make the journey, but the drivers knew they’d have to spend quite long periods parked en route because the arrival time had already been determined, and for several reasons it was very important that the vehicle didn’t arrive too early or-far worse-too late.

22 July 2012

Bronson didn’t immediately walk toward the pub. He’d asked Eaton to drop him some distance away because he wanted to be sure that there were no nasty surprises waiting for him in or near the building. With both his own mobile and the phone Curtis had given him disabled, he was reasonably sure that the police wouldn’t know where he was at that precise moment, and he’d never told Curtis or anyone else where he was staying.

But if there was a tracking chip in the police mobile, and the Met had been following his position over the last few days, it was possible that they could have worked out where he’d taken a room. So he wanted to be sure of the position before he opened his front door, and that meant checking that there were no surveillance units in the area. He hoped he’d be able to spot them-after all, he’d been involved in enough operations of that sort himself while he’d been in the force.

Then another thought struck him. An old trick, but it might work, or at least serve to muddy the waters a bit.

He glanced down the street. A bus was just approaching him, perhaps a hundred yards away, and there was a stop fairly close to where he was standing. He ambled across the pavement and joined the end of the short queue. While he stood there, he reinserted the battery in the police mobile, snapped on the back cover and switched it on.

When the phone played the slightly irritating melody to indicate that it was working, the elderly lady directly in front of him swung round to stare at him in a hostile manner. Bronson shrugged and smiled at her, and she turned away again.

He accessed the menu system and selected “silent” for incoming calls and texts. That suited him perfectly.

When the bus arrived, Bronson bought a ticket and then moved to the back of the vehicle, to an area where no other passengers were sitting. He sat down, then bent forward and felt under the seat. There was some kind of a mesh under the seat itself, and metal struts forming the frame. On one side was a kind of pocket formed by the base of the frame; it was just about the right size. He checked that nobody was watching, then bent forward again, slipped the phone into the space and sat back up. A cleaner or somebody would eventually find it, he supposed, and if the bus braked hard it might well fly out and clatter across the floor, but he really didn’t care what happened to it. If there was a tracking chip inside it, that would divert police resources away from where he would actually be.

He got off at the next stop and walked back in the direction the bus had come from, back toward his lodging. There was a small cafe, more accurately a greasy spoon, about two hundred yards away from the pub and on the opposite side of the road. Bronson walked inside, picked a table right beside the window, which offered a clear view down the street, and ordered a coffee and a slice of Madeira cake, which looked like the safest thing on the menu. Then he settled down to watch.

Half an hour later, he stood up and walked out. He’d seen no sign of anything that looked even slightly like a surveillance operation. In fact, the only sign of a police presence at all was a patrol car that had driven slowly down the road after he’d been sitting at his table for about ten minutes. That didn’t bother him, because he supposed the street was a part of a regular police patrol route. But he’d seen no parked vans-or none that didn’t stop, load or unload something and then drive away again-and no indication at all that the pub was the subject of anyone’s scrutiny but his own. But still Bronson was cautious. He walked past the pub on the opposite side of the road, checking everywhere as he did so, then crossed the street lower down and headed back the way he’d come. And again he saw nothing suspicious.

Then he walked steadily around to the rear entrance of the building, a part of the pub that wasn’t overlooked from any of the adjacent buildings or any possible vantage point that he could identify, opened the door and stepped inside. He walked quickly up the stairs to his room, unlocked the door and stepped inside, relocking the door behind him.

The room was untouched, as far as he could tell. It took him only about ten minutes to pack all his possessions into a soft-sided bag fitted with a long shoulder strap. Then he walked down the steps and out of the back door. He’d paid for a week in advance, so there was no need for him to see the landlord or any of his staff, and he wouldn’t have done so anyway, precisely because of the publicity he’d had. To be recognized by one of the bar staff and arrested in the pub would have comprehensively ruined his plans.