Berlin Reload (The Redaction Chronicles Book 4)

Book summary

In "Berlin Reload," Jack "Gorilla" Grant, a retired assassin turned peaceful businessman, is thrust back into the world of espionage and danger when his daughter is kidnapped in Rome. As unseen forces and dangerous enemies resurface from his past, he's determined to protect his family at any cost. Set against the backdrop of 1960s Berlin and the Cold War, this thrilling spy tale unfolds across the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, forcing Gorilla Grant to make a fateful choice between his daughter's life and the onset of a new East-West conflict.

Excerpt from Berlin Reload (The Redaction Chronicles Book 4)

Jack Grant slumped down in the chair next to the pool. Vogel, tired now from all the standing, had finally given in to the pain and returned to his wheelchair. “Let us retire outside where we can talk freely,” he had said.

They sat in the shade, under a parasol, cooler than the direct burning heat. Drinks had been brought by one of the suits; vodka. Jack Grant took a slug of the vodka and started to work out all the variables and plays in his mind. He was at the centre of a steel trap; a nudge to the left or the right and a spike would cut him in half. The two old enemies, two old men, stared at each other; the blue reflection from the swimming pool gave their faces a serious gravity and intensity. But then again, discussing murder was a serious and intense business.

Finally, Grant said simply, “Who?”

“Aaah… I have intrigued you? Good!” said Vogel.

Grant shook his head. “Not intrigued, no. It’s just that I don’t seem to have much of a choice at the minute. Not if I’m to secure my daughter’s release.”

“And no moral high ground on your part? No angst about taking yet another human life?” queried Vogel. He was genuinely interested; he wanted to know if this man still had an assassin’s heart.

“Not when my daughter’s life is at stake – no!” said Grant sharply.

Vogel thought for a moment, debating how to explain what he had planned for after all this time. “To you he is nothing; a target, a name on a list, nothing more. After that, you and your daughter can go back to your banal lives. I have no interest in either of you.”

“I’m still not hearing a name, or at least what I would be expected to deal with, or why you want this target dead,” said Grant. He was in operational mode now, and if Katy was to have any chance of making it out of this situation alive, he had to view this as just another contract.

“The details of why the target needs to be killed are not your concern, only the how. The target is a powerful man. You should expect security to be the best – bodyguards, secret police, all the trappings of power. It will not be easy for you,” conceded Vogel.

It wasn’t the first time that Gorilla Grant had been contracted to eliminate a ‘powerful’ man with the best security. In his opinion, the more powerful the man, the easier it was to find a chink in his armour. “And when the hit is done, you will help with my escape?”

Vogel cackled. “I won’t deceive you, Grant – I don’t expect you to survive! In fact, that is what I’m hoping for. However, and against my better judgement, if you survive and aren’t taken by my enemies, I will reunite you and your daughter. But that is the limit of my involvement.”

“So, why me? You are Stasi. You have agents and operatives of your own. Why go outside normal channels?”

“I have watched your career over many years, Gorilla Grant. I have made you my private project. I have kept you on a string for many a decade, waiting for the moment when I could use you and ultimately bring about your death. I know what you have achieved – the assassinations, the operations. I know all of it. But sometimes in this great game of espionage we have to step outside of the usual networks for… shall we say, sensitive operations?” said Vogel.

Jack Grant pondered this for a moment. He could see through the lies and deceptions. Vogel wanted a patsy, a trained killer, to go on a suicide mission, so he could portray it as a former British agent that has gone ‘rogue’ to carry out an assassination; plausible deniability. Which was the other bonus for Colonel Ulrich Vogel; he would get long-sought-after revenge by proxy. Well, not if he, Jack Grant, had anything to do with it!

“A rogue western agent sent to kill on contract! Is that how you would sell it?” asked Grant.

“If you were caught or discovered, of course! What could be better?” said Vogel honestly.

Grant shrugged. “So who is the target?”

Vogel closed his eyes as he remembered the details of the contract. “His name is Dimitri Sobolev and he will be attending a meeting in two weeks’ time. We do not want that meeting to take place.”

“A Russian? Is he KGB?” asked Grant. A hit was one thing, but taking out a KGB officer was another matter; after all, he didn’t need that kind of heat for the rest of his life.

“No, he is not KGB,” said Vogel, his voice rising in anger. “He is an apparatchik; a politician.”

Grant nodded, weighing up his options. “And the where? What’s the location of the meeting?”

“Austria. The exact details will be revealed in good time.”

“Okay. Do we have good intelligence on the target and his movements?” asked Grant.

“Of course. The SSD is nothing if not thorough. I have prepared an intelligence briefing pack for you. This is the one location that we have narrowed down where he will be vulnerable. We have a very short window of opportunity,” said Vogel.

Jack Grant considered the parameters of the hit. Single target with a professional security team, a neutral country with numerous options to escape across several borders, restrictive timeframe… not the worst contract he had ever taken, not by a long shot. Grant nodded in appreciation of the intelligence. “Okay. I will need to look into it to see if it is feasible, but in theory it sounds possible. But if this hit is going ahead, I have several conditions.”

“Go on.”

“First, I do my own planning. I don’t want any outside interference,” said Grant.

Vogel nodded. “Agreed. Continue.”

“I get regular phone calls to my daughter, so I know that she’s okay. That doesn’t happen and I walk away from the mission instantly. They are my conditions.”

Again there was a nod from Vogel. “That can be arranged. But I, too, have a condition of the contract.”

Jack Grant frowned. “Go on.”

“To ensure that you do not deviate from the plan and don’t try to derail this operation, I’m going to have my best operative assist you. He’ll be there to watch your back, get you what you need, drive, run surveillance,” said Vogel. It would be a good way of keeping track of Gorilla Grant, by having a spy inside his camp. Besides, if he wasn’t killed on the mission, the Harlequin would be ordered to eliminate him at the end of it, anyway.

“Is this the bastard that hunted us in Rome? The Harlequin?” guessed Grant.

Vogel raised an eyebrow at that. “I see that you are well informed?”

“I try. I still keep an ear to the ground. It keeps me alive,” growled Grant.

“Then yes, the Harlequin. He has had the best training. He can assist you and provide logistical support. Is that acceptable?”

And put a bullet in the back of my head once the contract is completed, thought Grant. He considered the proposal for a moment and then said, “If he gets in my way, Vogel, I’ll take him out, too. I’m not fucking around here. The only thing that matters to me is my daughter!”

Ulrich Vogel merely smiled at the irony of life and the games that he played; wheels within wheels. He said, “Go back to your hotel. You return to London tomorrow evening. We will contact you there with further instructions.”

Jack Grant raised himself off the chair. In truth, he was glad to be out Vogel’s company; the man repulsed him. He was halfway back to the interior of the villa when he had a thought. He turned and looked back at the crippled old man.

“The baby. What happened to him?” asked Grant.

Vogel turned the wheelchair around, the sun catching him in the eyes. He raised a hand to block out the light. He thought it would help hide the devious expression on his face. “Baby? What baby? I do not understand,” he said.

“The baby! Don’t toy with me,” said Grant, barely holding his anger in check.

Vogel thought for a moment, as if he was retrieving a long forgotten memory. “Ah, I see. The baby. Well, it was a difficult time, a confusing time. The decision was taken out of my hands. I believe my superiors placed him in an orphanage away from Germany; Ukraine, I heard. Yes, Ukraine, that sounds about right. That was the last I ever saw of him.”

Jack Grant glared at the vile man in front of him for a moment, the hate seething within him. Then he nodded, accepting the explanation. He lowered his head and took a breath and when he had composed himself, he said, “Just get the information to me in London. I’ll take care of the target.”

Then he turned and left.

*

The drive back was a carbon copy of the initial journey; the hood, the hands of the bodyguards manoeuvring him around and into the vehicle. The darkness gave him the time to focus and calm his mind. With so much information to process, it was vital that he was able to look at all the angles uninterrupted.

He was being dragged back into a profession he swore he had left behind and, while the feeling was that of familiarity, it was not something he thought he would ever have to do again, taking up weapons and killing on contract. But his daughter’s life was at stake and that superseded anything else. She was all he had and he would fight and kill to get her back with him.

And Vogel! After all this time, it had been Ulrich Vogel, SSD Operations Officer, who was pulling the strings. In the years since he had last seen Vogel in the flesh, Jack Grant had had no idea if the man was alive or dead. Over the years in the intelligence world, Grant had kept a close ear to the ground to listen out for whispers or rumours about the man. This man who had shattered his life almost thirty years ago and who had wounded his family in the worst way possible was playing with him like a puppet. Whatever Vogel had been up to and had become, he had been clever enough to stay off the radar of most of the Western intelligence networks. One thing for sure was that Vogel had been patient, good at staying hidden and proving that he was without a doubt a ruthless and professional operator.

And what of the target, Dimitri Sobolev?

Grant had never heard of him, knew nothing about him. So why would an aging and crippled SSD officer use an outsider for the assassination of a minor politician? To keep his hands clean and the Stasi out of the loop? Probably. Or was it a two-handed play; eliminate a target and use Jack Grant, an old enemy, to take the fall for it? It was a plan of Machiavellian proportions, and one that Grant didn’t have all the information about yet.

Not that he didn’t have a few aces up his sleeve still. He hoped that his final question had been enough to convince Vogel that he had given up hope about the boy. Vogel had seemed to enjoy his pain, which Grant took as confirmation that Vogel believed that he believed what he had been told.

But Jack Grant didn’t believe him. In fact, he knew better and wasn’t above having his own wheels within wheels moments himself.

The anomaly in the whole agreement was the inclusion of the Harlequin as part of the hit-team and that presented an interesting opportunity. If he could get close to the Harlequin and get inside his head, make a connection, he might just be able to turn this thing around and exploit what information he knew about the man behind the mask of the Harlequin.

He had a counter-plan forming in his head. Much of it was still fragmented and haphazard, but to make it work he would need more information than he had now. He would need outside help and to do that he needed to be back on home ground, in London.