“So he wasn’t paranoid, was he? You did kill him.”
“Not me. It was Colonel Laszlo Cerny.”
“Of your ministry?”
“He’s leaving as well, but I thought this might help get you out of Accounting.”
“What are you up to?”
“Just trying to return your hospitality.”
Ludwig grunted. “You really are a queer one, Brano.”
When he returned, Cerny was at the head of the line, flirting with the girl behind the counter. Brano tapped his shoulder and watched the fog of surprise seep into his face. “Brano?”
He shook his head. “I can’t do it.”
Cerny rapped the counter with his knuckles, regaining his composure. “Well, I can’t say I’m disappointed. It would be a terrible thing to lose you.”
They were squeezed into their cramped seats, thirty thousand feet above the Austrian border with Hungary, sipping from cans of Zipfer beer. Cerny stared out the window at clouds. “It’s funny.”
Brano saw nothing of interest out the window. “What is?”
“Up here everything looks the same.”
“You’re sounding as sentimental as my father.”
“It’s true, though. And when we land we’ll forget what it was like up here. We’ll get back to work. We’ll interrogate the Lieutenant General and search the poor bastard’s belongings until we’ve come up with the evidence.”
“We don’t need the evidence.”
“You want to just shoot him? Brano, there are some legal issues involved, you know.”
“We both know the Lieutenant General isn’t the man we’re after.” Cerny looked at him.
“I’m sorry, Laszlo. It’s you.”
The colonel brought his eyebrows together. He smiled. “You need sleep, Brano.”
“You shouldn’t have trusted my father. He’s too sentimental. He wanted me to stay in Vienna so badly that he blew the entire operation.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
Brano had known it ever since his father’s hotel room, but only later, in bed, was he able to work backward through each moment to convince himself of what he could hardly accept. “My father knew I was coming to visit him. He prepared for it by inviting Dijana. How did he know?”
Cerny didn’t answer.
“Only two people knew I was going to visit him. Romek and you. You called my father and told him to expect me.”
Cerny clapped a hand on the armrest. “This is incredible, Brano! Of course your father knew-don’t you see? We both know how loyal Romek is to the Lieutenant General. He lied to me and called him anyway. The Lieutenant General contacted your father.” He shrugged, as if this were simple mathematics. “ That is how your father knew you were coming. And that’s why we’re going to have to be careful when we land.”
Brano sighed. “Romek is a nuisance, but more than anything, he’s honest. We all listened to the recording together-he believed that the Lieutenant General was guilty. If Romek had contacted him, he would have warned us before we left.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. But more importantly, my father let me think that the Lieutenant General was the man. He was prepared to do it.”
“Like you said, he’s sentimental. He’d admit anything to keep you.”
“And it doesn’t matter how much history we have-I would never give you the opportunity to defect. Both of us could give away too much.”
The colonel’s face loosened, and he turned to look through the window at the bed of clouds beneath them. “Your father’s a good man, but he’s a fool.”
“I know,” said Brano.
Cerny pursed his lips.
“Maybe you can clear up some things for me, Laszlo.”
The colonel shrugged.
“Why did you want Lutz dead? He wasn’t selling anything that I know of.”
He puffed up his cheeks and exhaled. “No, Filip Lutz was always loyal. But it had to be done. Because of Bertrand Richter.”
He watched as the colonel’s features relaxed; he was settling into a serene shock. “The Russians knew Lutz’s name,” said Brano. “So he had to be sacrificed in order to keep you above suspicion. But Lochert could have done it.”
Cerny surprised Brano by smiling. “If Lochert killed him, the Americans would think the operation was eating itself up. They’d take back our funding. The only way was to find someone else to do it. It was your father’s idea to bring you over. He’d tried to make you stay in August, and he wanted to try it again. I told him it was too much of a stretch, but he can be very persuasive. He was afraid that if the operation failed, you’d be executed along with me. It made a kind of sense at the time-we get you into the West, and you take care of our problem. He already knew about Jan Soroka approaching the Americans for help. Sometimes circumstances come together in surprising ways.”
Brano touched the back of the seat in front of him, counting the levels of conspiracy. He dropped his hand. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why you? ”
The colonel considered that. “Remember when Irina killed herself? Of course you remember. You were a great help to me then, and I’ve never forgotten it. But that was when it started.”
“When what started?”
“The doubt.” Cerny straightened in his chair and glanced over the seat at the heads of the other passengers. “I can’t say I didn’t see it before, but in truth I didn’t care. I saw the corruption. I was aware of how we throw around our power, stick our own people in prison, send them to camps, shoot them. Why?”
“You know why.”
“Remember back in the war, when we talked about the coming age of socialism?”
Brano nodded.
“Well, forget about it, One-Shot. Because it’s never going to happen. The only thing going on east of the Curtain is a series of power struggles. The workers of the world don’t even exist. We’ve become a three-class society-those who are in prison-”
“Yes, yes,” said Brano. “I know the joke.”
Cerny shifted his knees against the next seat. “I knew this before I ran into your father a couple years ago. He had already placed his first fifty or so in villages here and there, but he needed help from the inside. I made myself available.”
“And a year later,” said Brano, “you were walking around with my father at that reactor in Vamosoroszi, doing reconnaissance. But you didn’t expect someone would actually come to work on a Saturday.”
“You never expect that kind of work ethic in our country.” He shrugged. “Jan’s friend had a lot of questions.”
“So you killed him.”
Any hint of a smile disappeared. “This operation is much larger than the lives of a few men-larger, even, than mine.”
“And the Americans paid Jan to keep it a secret.”
“The Americans know very little because they don’t want to know. Despite what you think, they don’t enjoy lying to their senators. Jan’s payment was from your father, from the Committee. The embassy was just a meeting place.”
Brano looked past him through the window. Above the clouds, the sky was bright blue. “You were the one who gave away our Viennese network. You were GAVRILO.”
