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“Zielinski?”
“Who else?” Cronley asked. “But why didn’t he get on the phone? Why a letter sent through the Austrian postal system?”
“Gut reaction?” Winters asked.
Cronley made a Come on gesture with his right hand.
“He probably thinks he’s being surveilled, that he doesn’t have access to a secure phone, and that there are moles both in the Austrians you’ve been dealing with and even in Colonel Wasserman’s CIC operation.”
Cronley grunted.
After perhaps fifteen seconds, which seemed longer, he said, “That gut feeling you mentioned, Tom?”
“What about it?”
“My gut tells me that we should get in our airplanes and go listen to some Johann Strauss music.”
“We? Now?”
“We. Now. Get on the horn to the airfield.”
“Why do I get the feeling I’m not going?” Janice asked.
“Because you’re not.”
He threw off the sheet covering him and marched naked to a chest of drawers in search of underwear.
[FOUR]
Suite 330
The Hotel Bristol
Kaerntner Ring 1, Vienna, Austria
1405 3 March 1946
“Thank you for coming so quickly, sir,” Cronley said to Colonel Carl Wasserman, the chief, CIC-Vienna.
Wasserman, trailed by Charley Spurgeon, quickly entered the room and closed the door behind them.
Tom Winters and Oskar Wieczorek, an enormous blond-headed Pole who was filling in for Cezar Zielinski as Cronley’s bodyguard, rose from the couch on which they had been sitting.
“If I’d known you were coming, I’d have sent a car to Schwechat,” Wasserman said.
“Take a look at this, sir,” Cronley said, as he handed him Zielinski’s letter, “and then I’ll tell you why I didn’t want you, or anyone, to know we were coming. And as far as ‘we’ are concerned, Colonel, this is Tom Winters and Oskar Wieczorek.”
Both men said, “Sir.”
Wasserman waved them back onto the couch.
“Tom, Oskar, I already told you the colonel is one of the good guys. And this is Charley Spurgeon. We were at the Holabird School for Boys together.”
Wasserman shook his head at the irreverent reference to the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center and School at Camp Holabird, Maryland.
“If you’re who I think you are, son,” Wasserman said to Winters, “I used to work for your dad. And come to think of it, I think I also know your father-in-law. Right, Thomas Winters?”
“Guilty, sir,” Winters said.
