Free A Death in Vienna by Daniel Silva

Please don’t call me again.”
     
    T HE SURVEILLANCE VAN was parked on the edge of the Augarten, on the Wasnergasse. The photographer sat in the back, concealed behind one-way glass. He snapped one final shot as the subjects separated, then downloaded the pictures to a laptop computer and reviewed the images. The one that showed the envelope changing hands had been shot from behind. Nicely framed, well lit, a thing of beauty.

7
VIENNA
    O NE HOUR LATER , in an anonymous neo-Baroque building on the Ringstrasse, the photograph was delivered to the office of a man named Manfred Kruz. Contained in an unmarked manila envelope, it was handed to Kruz without comment by his attractive secretary. As usual he was dressed in a dark suit and white shirt. His placid face and sharp cheekbones, combined with his habitual somber dress, gave him a cadaverous air that unnerved underlings. His Mediterranean features—the nearly black hair, the olive skin, and coffee-colored eyes—had given rise to rumors within the service that a Gypsy or perhaps even a Jew lurked in his lineage. It was a libel, advanced by his legion of enemies, and Kruz did not find it amusing. He was not popular among the troops, but then he didn’t much care. Kruz was well-connected: lunch with the minister once a week, friends among the wealthy and the political elite. Make an enemy of Kruz and you could find yourself writing parking tickets in the backwoods of Carinthia.
    His unit was known officially as Department Five, but among senior Staatspolizei officers and their masters at the Interior Ministry, it was referred to simply as “Kruz’s gang.” In moments of self-aggrandizement, a misdemeanor to which Kruz willingly pleaded guilty, he imagined himself the protector of all things Austrian. It was Kruz’s job to make certain that the rest of the world’s problems didn’t seep across the borders into the tranquil Österreich . Department Five was responsible for counter-terrorism, counter-extremism, and counterintelligence. Manfred Kruz possessed the power to bug offices and tap telephones, to open mail and conduct physical surveillance. Foreigners who came to Austria looking for trouble could expect a visit from one of Kruz’s men. So could native-born Austrians whose political activities diverged from the prescribed lines. Little took place inside the country that he didn’t know about, including the recent appearance in Vienna of an Israeli who claimed to be a colleague of Eli Lavon from Wartime Claims and Inquiries.
    Kruz’s innate mistrust of people extended to his personal secretary. He waited until she had left the room before prizing open the envelope and shaking the print onto his blotter. It fell facedown. He turned it over, placed it in the sharp white light of his halogen lamp, and carefully examined the image. Kruz was not interested in Renate Hoffmann. She was the subject of regular surveillance by Department Five, and Kruz had spent more time than he cared to remember studying surveillance photographs and listening to transcripts of proceedings inside the premises of the Coalition for a Better Austria. No, Kruz was more interested in the dark, compact figure walking at her side, the man who called himself Gideon Argov.
    After a moment he stood and worked the tumbler on the wall safe behind his desk. Inside, wedged between a stack of case files and a bundle of scented love letters from a girl who worked in payroll, was a videotape of an interrogation. Kruz glanced at the date on the adhesive label—J ANUARY 1991—then inserted the tape into his machine and pressed the PLAY button.
    The shot rolled for a few frames before settling into place. The camera had been mounted high in the corner of the interrogation room, where the wall met the ceiling, so that it looked down upon the proceedings from an oblique angle. The image was somewhat grainy, the technology a generation old. Pacing the room with a menacing slowness was a younger version of