Chapter 1
Little Odessa
Brooklyn, New York
May, 1976
The crimson Cadillac Coupe DeVille glided at a slow and steady pace down Coney Island Avenue towards the beach. The neighborhood the car drove through was known as Brighton Beach. This part of Brooklyn was created as a beach resort a hundred years earlier. The neighborhood had then been restructured into a residential community in the 1920's. Since the 30's, Jewish immigrants had drifted to this patch of New York. Many of the resident bore marks on their body, scars and reminders of their time in concentration camps.
Since 1970, the demographic of the neighborhood had begun to shift again. Although plenty of Jews still found their place in Brighton Beach, more and more of them were coming from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. The shops in the area were accommodating, the writing in the store windows in Cyrillic script as well as English. Like Little Italy and Chinatown in Manhattan, the growing influx of immigrants gave rise to the nickname of Little Odessa.
The Coupe DeVille sped past kosher butcher shops, makeshift synagogues, and jewelry and appliance stores that lined both sides of the avenue. Red, white, and blue streamers were hung from lightposts and storefronts in celebration of the America's bicentennial anniversary.
The car contained five men. They were stern-faced and silent, the only sound coming from the car was the steady drone of the engine. Today marked their fifth day in America. They had all flown in from West Berlin, their passports marking them as residents of various cities in West Germany. In actuality, the names and locations on the passport were a grand fiction. The names and identities were just one of many the men used for their work.
The man driving was the oldest by at least twenty years. His steel-colored hair had been grown out from its usual military crew cut. He wore a thick mustache matching the color of his hair. He wore ray-bans on his face and dressed in the current American fashion, a burnt orange turtleneck with a checkered sports jacket and a golden medallion. In truth, he felt ridiculous and foolish in this get-up. It was too flashy and ostentatious, like something a clown would wear.
The other men dressed in similar clothing of various colors, each article of clothing chosen to help them blend in with the current styles and trends of the country. The driver and two of the men in the back smoked cigarettes, their brand was not the common Marlboro or Pall Malls. These were Turkish brands purchased from a special store many miles way from Brooklyn. The foul-smelling smoke of the cigarettes spread through the car and out the cracked windows.
The car turned right on to Brighton Beach Avenue and sped along with the traffic. The Cadillac turned off the Avenue and swooped into a parking outside a four-story apartment building. The driver kept the car running as he looked at the three men in the back of the car. His hard eyes sized up the men. Excitement glittered in his eyes as he gave his men one last look.
"Bewegen," he said in the harsh tongue of German. Move.
Quickly, the four men exited from the running car. They spread out on to empty the sidewalk, the two men on the end walking towards the opposite ends of the block while two went up the concrete steps into the apartment building's foyer. The man in the car checked his wristwatch. It was 2:14 in the afternoon.
The next five minutes were the most crucial of their operation. The five men had practiced, trained, and prepared for months. They had committed the map of the area to memory, knew the schedules of the NYPD patrolman who passed by the apartment once every fifteen minutes, knew who would be in the apartment building at this time of day and when others would be back. The two men on the street would run interference if any of the apartment's residents attempted to go in, waving them away with a forged detective badge and speaking in perfect American English that there was a gas leak in the apartment and it was not safe to go inside.
Short of an epic fuck up by the two men inside, this operation would go off without a hitch. A successful operation today would be their sixth such outcome in the past two years. The five men were the best of the best their service had to offer. Clever and ruthless, they were the proverbial sword for the party. While other directorates and sections did more acceptable work to protect the GDR, the five of them were the unseen knife that those in control slipped between the ribs of the state's enemies. They were the necessary evil that the politicians that ran the world did not want to face.
The two men inside came off the stairs on the third floor landing, their cigarettes gone from their mouths. The older of the two was a squat, chubby man with a wrinkled face and watery eyes. Sweat clung to his brow. His black hair had traces of gray in it. The grayness, mixed with the wrinkles, made him look ten years older than his current age of thirty-three. The man beside him was taller by at least four inches, coming in around six-foot three. His dark blonde hair was close to his scalp in a buzzcut. His cobalt blue eyes stared straight ahead calmly, never once betraying the nervousness he felt.
The fat man looked up at his younger comrade and nodded. The man tall returned his nod. Today was the young man's first time doing work of this sort. He had been part of the unit for six months now, acting as runner and lookout for the others. But now, it was time for him to truly become one of them.
As they approached the apartment marked 3H, the two men reached into their sports coats and produced weapons from hidden shoulder holsters. They each had a Browning Hi-Power nine millimeter. Screwed on the end of the barrels were two suppressors. The older man nodded as they stopped outside the apartment. With no further words, the tall man thrust a shoe forward at the door. His foot crashed at the base of the doorknob, splintering the door jamb and snapping the lock in two. He led the way into the apartment, rushing in with the short man close behind him.
They came through the door and into the dirty, dimly lit apartment that reeked of the same sour cigarettes they used. Standing in front of a television set, wearing only an undershirt and a dirty pair of underwear, was a thin bald man with a ginger mustache. He held his left hand up while his right hand stayed by his waist where he cupped a velvet bag. He looked at the two men in front of him with no fear or defiance in his face.
"Stasi," he said in a thick German accent. It was a declaration and not a question.
"Ja," said the fat man. "Schild und Schwert der Partei."
"Verpiss dich, du kommunistischen bastarde," the bald man sneered.
Without hesitation, the tall man opened fire with his Browning. The gun kicked three times, three soft pops accompanying the bullets. The bald man fell to the floor, the three shots striking his head and chest. The tall man ventured forward to the body and looked down. The bald man stared up at him, his eyes opaque and his dingy shirt stained with dark red blood. What caught his eye was the bag beside the dead man. The bag had dropped beside the body, its contents spilled out on to the floor.
"Fritz," the tall man said urgently. "Ich habe etwas gefunden. Diamanten."
Ian Fleming's
James Bond
007
in
Last Killer Standing