“May I ask how you know this?” Silvio asked.
“I have an interest in the Tages Zeitung publishing firm,” Castillo said.
Montvale smiled, then while looking at Castillo said: “Actually, Mr. Ambassador, in his alter ego role as Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger, Castillo owns the Tages Zeitung publishing empire.”
Silvio’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
Castillo calmly went on: “I was, when we heard about this, in Washington with a man named Eric Kocian, who is publisher of the Budapest Tages Zeitung. An attempt to murder him in Budapest was made some time ago. Kocian was our man who reopened the Vienna Tages Zeitung after World War Two. And he was an old friend of the Kuhls. And he considered Friedler a close friend. He announced he was going to (a) go to their funerals and (b) find out who had murdered them. There was no way I could stop him, so we got on the Gulfstream and flew to Germany.
“Going off at a tangent, there were, within the twenty-four-hour period I mentioned, two more assassination attempts, both of which failed. One was here—actually in Pilar; that’s about forty-five klicks from here, Mr. Montvale—when Comandante Liam Duffy of the Gendarmería Nacional and his family were leaving a restaurant. . . .”
“I heard about that,” Ambassador Silvio said softly.
“Duffy was in on the operation when we got the DEA agent back from the drug people in Paraguay. The second attempt, in Philadelphia, was on Special Agent Jack Britton of the Secret Service and his wife. They took fire from fully-auto AKs as they drove up to their home. For years, Britton had been a deep-cover Philly cop keeping an eye on an aptly named bunch of African-American Lunatics involved in, among other things, the lunatic idea of crashing that stolen 727 into the Liberty Bell and making mysterious trips to Africa—including the Congo—financed, we found out, with oil-for-food money.
“Britton was on the Vice President’s security detail. When he was informed ‘of course, you’re off that assignment’ and otherwise made to feel he was being punished for having been the target of an assassination attempt, he said some very rude things to various senior Secret Service people, then told them what they could do with the Secret Service and came to see me before we flew to Germany. I sent him and his wife down here—”
“And why did you think you had the authority to do that?” Montvale demanded.
Castillo ignored the interruption and, looking at Silvio, continued: “I was initially thinking Jack would be just the guy to help protect Ambassador Masterson in Uruguay. And since Jack had, so to speak, burned his Secret Service bridge, I didn’t think—and still don’t think—that I had to ask anyone’s permission.”
He met Montvale’s eyes.
“So what happened in Germany?” Montvale said after a moment.
“I was at the Haus im Wald, near Bad Hersfeld—it used to belong to my mother, but now Otto Görner, who runs Gossinger Beteiligungsgesellschaft, the holding company, lives there—when there was a call for me—as Castillo—from quote the U.S. embassy in Berlin unquote.
“When I answered it, a guy asked in Berliner German if he had Gossinger—not Castillo—and when I said ‘yes,’ he switched to English—faultless American accent—and said, ‘Sorry to bother you, Colonel Castillo, but I thought you would like to know an attempt will be made on your life and Görner’s and Kocian’s during the Friedler funeral.’ Sometime during the conversation, he said his name was ‘Tom Barlow’ and that I should be careful as the workers were ex-Stasi.
“And then he hung up.
“Friedler’s funeral, the next day, was in Saint Elisabeth’s church in Marburg. We had reserved seats. Two of my guys checked them before the ceremony. They found an envelope addressed to me—Gossinger—in one of the prayer books. It contained a photocopy of Berezovsky’s passport and four cards with the name ‘Tom Barlow’ on one, and ‘Vienna,’ ‘Budapest,’ and ‘Berlin’ on the others. ‘Berlin’ had been crossed out.
“What it looked like was that Berezovsky wanted to meet me in either Vienna or Budapest and would be using the name ‘Tom Barlow.’ ”
“You mean he wanted to defect?” Montvale asked, his tone now somewhat civil.
“It didn’t say that, but we thought that was likely.”
“And it never occurred to you to contact the station agent in either Berlin or Vienna or Budapest?”
“I considered that and decided against it.”
Montvale shook his head in obvious disgust. “So you went to Vienna to see what would happen?”
“Let me tell this through, please,” Castillo said, and after a visibly annoyed Montvale nodded his assent, went on: “Nothing happened at the church, possibly because my people and the local cops were all over it. Afterward, Kocian said he wanted to go to the Kuhl funeral in Vienna and wanted to go there on the train. I sent the airplane ahead to Vienna, and Kocian and I—plus Kocian’s bodyguard and one of my guys—caught the train in Kassel.”
“Which one of your guys?” Montvale said.
“That’s not germane.”
“The one General McNab sent to make sure you didn’t do anything stupid, as you’re so wont to do? The one sitting in there with the gendarmes? Sergeant Major Davidson?”
“We went to lunch on the train,” Castillo said, ignoring the question. “Berezovsky, his wife and daughter, and Alekseeva were having their lunch. I recognized him from the photocopy of his passport picture and spoke to him. He said he would like to talk a little business, so I invited them to my compartment.
“Thirty minutes later, they showed up—just Berezovsky and Alekseeva—told me who they were, and said they were willing to defect for two million dollars. I asked him what he had that was worth two million dollars, and he promised to tell me all about the chemical factory in the Congo once he was where he wanted me to take them in the Gulfstream.”
“Where did he want you to take them?”
“Next question?”
“Okay. And at no time during all this did it occur to you that you were in way over your head with something like this, and what you should do was take these people to the U.S. embassy in Vienna and turn them over to the CIA station chief? Or call me, for Christ’s sake, and ask me what you should do? I thought we had an agreement.”
“That implies that you have some authority over me, and we both know you don’t,” Castillo said. “We do have an agreement, but I came to understand that this did not fit its guidelines. Berezovsky and Alekseeva were antsy, and it came out they knew that the Kuhls had been whacked, and I decided that’s why they had come to me. They were afraid of what they were going to find in Vienna—from anyone who ultimately reports to you. Thus, the loophole in our agreement.”
Montvale didn’t say anything for a moment as he looked across the room in thought. It was clear he was not happy with what he was hearing. He then said: “How did they come to contact you in Germany?”
“My theory at the time was that Berezovsky went to Marburg to see that the ex-Stasi guys did a good job on Kocian and Göerner. Then—in what sequence, I don’t know—they saw my picture—Gossinger’s picture—in the Tages Zeitung—”
“What was that all about?”
“There was a front-page story that announced that the publisher—Gossinger—had returned to Germany from the States for Friedler’s funeral and was offering a reward—a large reward—for information leading to the people who had taken him out.