A half-dozen combatants, two cars, and two motorcycles comprised the surveillance team. Throughout, none of the operation’s planners at Novgorod had any idea where Lacher would stay. Would he choose the apartment of a friend, or a hotel room? Now they knew where they had to act. Lacher was followed from his first moments in what had been the Austrian capital until the Anschluss eight months earlier. A spear team, as Novgorod’s assassination squads were known, had been waiting for Lacher in the hotel lobby. They had tailed him up to his room and waited while he unpacked, showered, and dressed for the evening. The surveillance was so heavy Lacher realized he was being watched. He contacted an acquaintance within German intelligence and requested protection. Lacher was told there would be none available until the next morning. He was on his own.
The Whites waited in ambush outside the hotel. They assumed Lacher would go out for dinner. When he returned, tired and contented, they would act. The late hours of the night, when the streets are quiet and empty, were always best for covert operations. The final decision would be in the hands of the two assassins, “Peter” and “George.” The point man, Peter, would pull the trigger. Up until the last instant, he would have the authority to call off the operation: he would raise his weapon only when certain that his team would emerge unscathed.
Rudolf Lacher was a target because he was the last surviving participant in the murder of the Romanov family, in 1918. Even though it was twenty years after the Yekaterinburg massacre, the Russian All-Military Union had a long memory. Aleksei Smirnov wanted him to pay the price for participating in the killings—he was determined to avenge the Romanovs, and anyone connected to the murders was, in his mind, a legitimate target. Still, it was an odd distraction. At this point, the NKVD had mounted numerous successful operations against the ROVS. Europe had seen a series of crises—the Anschluss, the carve-up of Czechoslovakia, the violence against Jews on Kristallnacht. The ROVS had far more pressing intelligence needs than killing people for atrocities they had been involved in two decades earlier. Nonetheless, ROVS chair Aleksei Arkhangelsky, who had himself led Operation Shimmering Light in Saratov back in 1919 to kill three of the regicides, re-endorsed the kill order for Lacher and gave the mission his blessing. The ROVS was on the verge of closing its case against another one of the “bastards,” as they were known in the Intelligence Service, who took part in the murder of the Romanovs.
Lacher did go out to dinner. The Novgorod surveillance team shadowed him, undetected, the whole time. Lacher and an unidentified Hungarian woman spent a pleasant night at the nearby Schweizerhaus beer garden. It was after midnight when Lacher picked up the tab and returned to the Opel. He sat in the front seat while his friend drove. They had a very loud, animated conversation in German. A short drive brought them to the entrance of the Nordbahn. The Praterstraße was quiet; few cars passed by.
Lacher got out and said goodby to his friend. He took one step back, preparing to move in the direction of the hotel. A few seconds later, two “European-looking” young men in black open-collared shirts, striped blazers, and black casual trousers approached him. Their walk was loose, casual. Peter, the point man, raised his hand and pulled the trigger while George kept guard. The Browning 7.65mm issued its shots in silence, the retorts muzzled by a silencer. The five bullets hit Lacher in the head. He fell on the spot, next to his friend’s car, his final inhalation a gurgle. The hot cartridges were caught, along with the clues they held, in a small, sturdy cloth bag attached to the pistol. Within seconds, the assassin and his backup were rapidly retreating down the street, disappearing into the night.
“Sasha,” the commander of the squad, waited for them near the corner, 260 yards away. He watched them cross to the other side of Rotensterngasse and, from the other side of the street, at a more casual pace, watched their backs. This standard procedure was meant to thwart a mishap during the escape phase of a mission—a highly unlikely scenario, since it takes bystanders many long seconds, if not minutes, to realize that an assassination has just taken place. Nonetheless, the possibility couldn’t be ignored. Within twenty seconds the point man and his number two were at the corner of a one-way street. According to Intelligence Service procedure, the getaway car would always wait two 90-degree turns from the scene of an operation. The pair made a left onto Weintraubengasse, where the waiting car had kept its motor running.
Sasha suddenly noticed two figures coming after his men. They were breathing heavily and speaking animatedly. This was a fast-approaching threat; they needed to be stopped. They could not be allowed to turn the corner and see the escape vehicle, or, even worse, commit the license plate to memory. Sasha started toward them, his quick pace authoritative and threatening. When he was within fifteen feet of the pair he pulled out his Browning. Holding it in front of their faces, he shouted: “Stop!” The weapon froze them in their tracks. They put their hands in the air, stumbled backward, turned around, and broke into a run in the direction of the hotel. Sasha pocketed his gun and walked down Rotensterngasse. He watched his men turn left onto the narrow street and got into a second car waiting for him. He checked his watch: fifty-five seconds had elapsed since the first shot was fired. He smiled to himself. The account was squared; the mission, a success. He pushed a button, sending confirmation to the commander of Novgorod. In less than two hours, the point man, his number two, the squad leader, the commander of Novgorod, his staff officers, and Aleksei Smirnov, had all left German soil.
***
Major General Dmitry Kriuchkov, Chairman Aleksei Arkhangelsky’s military aide, lay awake in bed waiting for the red, top secret telephone to ring. He picked it up quickly and heard a familiar voice say, “Dmitry, it went according to plan.” He recognized “Sergei,” Aleksei Smirnov’s chief of staff, on the other end of the line.
“Thanks, I’ll pass it on.”
Kriuchkov sat up in bed and dialed Arkhangelsky’s number. The chairman picked up on the first ring. “Your High Excellency, I just got word from Smirnov’s office, the Vienna affair went smoothly.”
“Thank you,” Arkhangelsky said, and hung up.
Kriuchkov put down the phone. Arkhangelsky, he thought, had nerves of steel. He and Smirnov were two of a kind. Kriuchkov went back to sleep thinking about how Die Presse’s headline might read the next morning.
Officers at the Intelligence Service’s Berlin station were shocked. “Aleksandr,” a high-ranking officer in Novgorod, hurried up the stairs to see “Ivan,” his superior.
“Didn’t we take this guy off the list?” Aleksandr asked.
“We took him off. I don’t know what’s going on.” Ivan shrugged.
