Then he left without even looking at the luggage the pilot and copilot had carried down the stair door.
"Thanks for the ride and the cockpit tour," Castillo said, in English, offering his hand to the pilot.
"My pleasure, Colonel," the pilot replied, also in English-American English.
"Maybe we can do it again."
"Any time. You've got our number." There had been no other passengers on the flight from Leipzig, which made Castillo wonder if that was coincidence or whether the Cessna Citation III had been sent to pick him up because there would be no smaller aircraft available for some time and Montvale had ordered them to put him at the head of the line.
Just after they had gone wheels-up, he had made his way to the cockpit and asked, in English, "How's chances of sitting in the right seat and having you explain the panel to me?"
The copilot had exchanged glances with the pilot, who nodded, and then wordlessly got up.
"Thanks," Castillo said to the pilot as he sat down and strapped himself in.
"Anything special you want to see, Colonel?" the pilot had asked, in English, making it clear that there was no reason to pretend he was anything but an employee of the agency or that Castillo was a German businessman named Gossinger availing himself of Eurojet Taxi's services.
"How long do you think it would take to show a pilot-several hundred hours in smaller business jets-enough to make him safe to sit in the right seat?"
"These are nice airplanes," the pilot said. "They come in a little hot, and sometimes, close to max gross, they take a long time to get off the ground, but aside from that they're not hard to fly. How long it would take would depend on the IP and the student. But not long."
"I'd really be grateful to be able to sit here and watch until you get it on the ground in Budapest. Is that possible?"
"You know how to work the radios?" the pilot asked and when Castillo nodded the pilot motioned for him to pick up the copilot's headset and, when Castillo had them on, pointed out on the GPS screen where they were-over the Dresden-Nurnberg Autobahn, near Chemnitz.
I think Montvale will learn that I wanted to sit in the cockpit, but I don't think he'll think it's anything but my boyish enthusiasm for everything connected with flying. "Good afternoon, Ur Gorner," Sandor Tor greeted them inside the civil-aviation building. "The car's right outside."
"Sandor, this is Herr von und zu Gossinger," Gorner said. "And this, Ur von und zu Gossinger, is Sandor Tor, who was supposed to keep Kocian from falling over his goddamned dog and down the stairs."
"Ur Gorner…" Tor began, painfully embarrassed.
"And also, incidentally, to telephone me immediately, at any time, if anything at all out of the ordinary happened to Ur Kocian."
"Ur Gorner…" Tor began again, only to be interrupted again by Gorner.
"Why don't we wait until we're on our way to the hospital?" Gorner said. "Then you can tell us everything."
"I wish God had put me in that hospital bed instead of Ur Kocian," Tor said, emotionally.
I think I like you, Sandor Tor, Castillo thought. In 2002, Otto Gorner had reluctantly concluded Eric Kocian, in his eighties, needed protection-protection from himself.
The old man was fond of American whiskey-Jack Daniel's Black Label in particular-and driving fast Mercedes-Benz automobiles. A combination of the former and his age-reduced reflexes and night vision had seen him in half a dozen accidents, the last two of them spectacular. The final one had put him in hospital and caused the government to cancel his driver's license.
Otto Gorner had come to Budapest and sought out Sandor Tor right after he'd been to Kocian's hospital room.
"We're going to have to do something or he's going to kill himself," Gorner had announced. "It won't take him long to get his driving license back-he knows where all the politicians keep their mistresses. We have to get this fixed before that happens."
"You mean get him a chauffeur?"
Gorner nodded.
"Good luck, Ur Gorner," Tor had said. "I'm glad I'm not the one who's going to have to tell him that."
Gorner had smiled and, obviously thinking about what he was going to say, didn't reply for a moment.
Then he said, "Let me tell you what he said in the hospital just now. Not for the first time, he was way ahead of me."
Tor waited for Gorner to go on.
"'Before you say anything, Otto,' he said, the moment I walked in the door, 'let me tell you how I'm going to deal with this.'"
"I can't wait to hear this," Tor said.
"'Sandor Tor will now drive me around,'" Gorner quoted.
"No," Tor said, quickly and firmly, not embracing the idea at all.
"I told him you were the director of security, not a chauffeur," Gorner said.
"And?"
"'Did you think I don't know that?'" Gorner quoted. "'As director of security, he carries a gun. I'm getting too old to do that anymore, too. Further-more, Sandor can be trusted to keep his mouth shut about where I go and who I talk to. I don't want some taxi driver privy to that or listening to my conversations. And, finally, Sandor's a widower. Driving me around may interfere with his sex life, but at least he won't go home and regale his wife with tales of what Kocian did today and with whom.'"
"No, Ur Gorner," Tor repeated, adamantly.
"I told him you would say that," Gorner said. "To which he replied, 'I'll handle Tor.'"
"No. Sorry, but absolutely not."
"Do you know, Sandor, how far back Eric Kocian goes with Gossinger, G.m.b.H.?"
"Not exactly. A long time, I know that."
"He was with Oberstleutnant Hermann Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger at Stalingrad," Gorner said. "They met on the ice-encrusted basement floor of a building being used as a hospital. Both were very seriously wounded."
"I've heard that the Herr Oberst had been at Stalingrad…"
"Eric was an eighteen-year-old Gefreite," Gorner went on. "He and the colonel were flown out on one of the very last flights. The colonel was released from hospital first and placed on convalescent leave. He went to visit a friend in the Army hospital in Giessen and ran into Kocian there. Eric had apparently done something for the colonel in Stalingrad-I have no idea what, but the colonel was grateful-so the colonel arranged for him to be assigned to the POW camp he was going to command. The alternative for Kocian was being sent back to the Eastern Front.
"They ended the war in the POW camp and became prisoners themselves. Kocian was released first. He went home to Vienna and learned that the American bombs that had reduced St. Stephen's Cathedral and the Opera to rubble had done the same to his family's apartment. All of his family, and their friends, were dead."
"Jesus!" Tor exclaimed, softly.
"His only friend in the world was the colonel. So he made his way back to Germany and Fulda. The presses of the Fulda Tages Zeitung were in the basement of what had been the building. Eric arrived there a day or so after the colonel had been given permission by the Americans to resume publishing. They had found his name on a list the SS had of people they were going to execute for being anti-Nazi and defeatist and he was thus the man they were looking for to run a German newspaper.
"The problem was the presses were at the bottom of a huge pile of rubble that had been the Fulda Tages Zeitung building. Eric Kocian began his journalistic career making one whole Mergenthaler Linotype machine from parts salvaged from the dozen under the rubble.
"A year later, when the Wiener Tages Zeitung got permission from the Americans to resume publishing, Eric was named editor in chief primarily because he had already been cleared by the de-Nazification courts and also because their Linotype machines had to be rescued from the rubble of the Wiener Tages Zeitung building. It was understood that Eric was to be publisher and editor in chief only and that older, wiser, bonafide professional journalists would really run things.
"When the colonel went to Vienna for the ceremonies marking the first edition, he found that Eric had fired the older, wiser, etcetera people, hired his own, and was sitting at the editor in chief's desk himself."