Yalta Boulevard Read Free Page A

you told to get me?”
    The Austrian finally let go of his groin and uncovered his nose. It was beginning to swell. “You’ve been in this business long enough to know that we just do what we’re told, and we seldom know why.”
    “Come here,” Brano said as he walked to one of the stalls. He opened the door. “Come on. Inside.”
    He stepped back as the Austrian entered the stall and turned around.
    “Face the wall.”
    “Christ, Brano. There’s no need to shoot me.”
    Brano swung the pistol into the back of the Austrian’s neck and watched him crumple onto the toilet.
    At the gate, he wondered when the man in the stall would wake up, rush out to his colleague or call airport security, and come to take him away. But over the next twenty minutes no one came, and as he paced he thought about the name the Austrian had told him—Kristina Urban. The name, for some reason, made him think of flight. He tried to work through the details—a dead man, a woman’s phone number, a hotel, a man named Josef Lochert. Brano was a spy, the Vienna rezident , and the Abwehramt were after him.
    He thanked the stewardess who stamped his ticket, then boarded the crowded plane.
    His seat was next to a young Austrian—twenty, maybe—who lit a cigarette as soon as he sat down and refused to buckle his belt. “They make me feel trapped,” he said in a whisper.
    Brano nodded, but at that moment he remembered why the name Kristina Urban evoked flight. Last month, the Abwehramt had tossed her from a high window of the Hotel Inter-Continental.
    “Feeling trapped makes me anxious,” the young Austrian told him.
    “Me, too.”
    “You should try hashish. Settle you down.”
    Brano was no longer listening. The dizziness came back, and he leaned forward, settling his head against the next seat.
    “You all right?” said his companion.
    The stabilizing pressure of takeoff eased his sickness, and when the wheels left the ground he remembered more.
    It had begun at home, in the Capital, in the office of a very old friend, Laszlo Cerny, a man with a thick, unkempt mustache, a colonel in the Ministry for State Security. GAVRILO was the subject of a file open in front of him, and now, on the plane, he remembered its contents. On 6 May, in Vienna’s Stadtpark, a routine money exchange had been stopped by Viennese intelligence before the exchangers could even meet. Then, on 18 June, an apartment used to radio messages across the Iron Curtain had been raided. Three people had been caught—among them Kristina Urban, the Vienna rezident . Two weeks later, she was thrown out the hotel window.
    Brano closed his eyes as they gained altitude.
    He arrived in Vienna just last month to replace Kristina Urban and to uncover the leak that the Ministry had code-named GAVRILO . Before setting up in the cultural attaché office of the embassy on Ebendorferstraáe, he had specialists go over the building again. Seven electronic bugs were found, so Brano, to the dismay of the head of embassy security, Major Nikolai Romek, decided to work out of the Hotel Kaiserin Elisabeth rather than risk more security leaks. From there, he visited three suspect operatives and fed each one false information. Theodore Kraus believed that two men would meet and exchange codebooks inside the Ruprechtskirche on 14 July, Ingrid Petritsch believed that Erich Glasser, an employee of Austrian intelligence, would deliver classified files to a Czech agent in the Hotel Terminus on 28 July. And Bertrand Richter was told that a shipment of automatic rifles would be smuggled from Austria into Hungary near Szom-bathely on the evening of 8 August in a West German truck.
    Bertrand Richter.
    He could see the man now. Short, with dark features, a foolish smile; a drunk. But a wonderful drunk. Worth all the schillings poured into his account, because in social situations information flowed around him effortlessly. So for two years the Ministry on Yalta Boulevard had used this excitable dandy, and