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is owned by another Yugoslav company. You guessed it — forty-nine percent of that is owned by the very same Italian company. In the end, the only domestic ownership we could find was some lawyer in Varaždin who owns less than one percent. You won’t be surprised to hear that he’s only holding on behalf of a company based near Venice. Illegal, but what can you do? Lawyers. Anything to do with you, Mr. Strumbić?”
    Strumbić shrugged sympathetically. “What our country’s coming to.” He shook his head sadly. “All the ills of capitalism have already filled in the cracks left by the noble but failed Communist experiment.”
    Brg felt his head nod forward. He needed sleep. He knew that dwelling on stupid details was a sign of how tired he was. The villa’s ownership? Who cared about the complicated scheme designed to hide the owner? Strumbić owned it. And Strumbić was there, sitting in front of him.
    Brg needed to be sharp to deal with Zagreb. And he needed to be even more on the ball to handle as wily a character as Strumbić.
    Four hours of solid shut-eye. If he left for home now, he’d get that much rest and be awake again by lunch, have a bite to eat, and then get back to the station, refreshed. Call Zagreb, tell them he’d wrapped up the whole of the mystery, found the missing woman, had the lead suspect in a jail cell. Formally charge Strumbić with everything from smuggling to murder to fraudulent property ownership.
    Hell, how could it hurt to delay calling them by a couple of hours? The woman wasn’t going to get any more dead, and Strumbić, well, he’d already been sitting around in prison for more than two weeks. Another quiet morning wouldn’t do any harm. Just in case, Brg would have a cop stand sentry outside Strumbić’s cell. Keep an eye on him the whole time.
    Four hours. Brg thought. What could possibly go wrong in four hours?

ZAGREB, LATE SEPTEMBER 1991
    MARKO DELLA TORRE sat at his desk looking out over the city’s red-tiled rooftops, half hoping the air-raid sirens would go off so that he’d have an excuse to leave the office tower. Zagreb was a city of low buildings, and this was one of the few to stand out, some forgotten committee’s hopeful stab at modernity. Its height and central location made the building a landmark, and thus an appealing target for Yugoslav MiGs. So far, all the alerts had been false alarms. But the war was in full flower out east. It would come to them eventually.
    He turned back to the stack of papers on his desk and lit a Lucky Strike. Maybe the nicotine would help him get through the drudgery. At the very least, the cigarette would distract him while he pretended to read. His masters had reduced him to whittling away at empty bureaucracy during this time of general paralysis. No, this was worse than that. The files crossing his desk had already been drained of any significance; these were documents the regime would be happy to pass on to those it no longer fully trusted but whose fate had yet to be decided on.
    As it should be , he reflected. Because he was not trustworthy.
    Della Torre had been an officer of the recently defunct UDBA . But now that Yugoslavia had broken apart, UDBA ’s people had drifted into different shadows. In a Croatia struggling for independence, della Torre had resurfaced as a senior member of military intelligence, recently seconded to a covert American government operation. The one that had left three of its team dead.
    It dawned on him that his life could be measured by the whims of others. Half a decade ago, he had been co-opted by UDBA from his job as a young lawyer in the Zagreb prosecutor’s office. He’d had no say when they handed him the intelligence job after UDBA ’s Croatian operations were quietly shut down. And then he’d been loaned to the Americans by a government minister, as a minor noble might solicit favour by proffering a useful family retainer to a powerful liege duke. The Americans had used him to