“Far enough!” a voice warned him, and a man stepped through the kitchen door into the room.
Johann measured him with his eye. He was of good height, strongly built, bundled against the cold of the house in a heavy coat. He had a smile on his face, a revolver in his hand. If I can get near enough to grapple with him, Johann thought, that coat of his won’t help him at all. Or if I could throw something and duck and make for the front door? But it opened behind him even as he took another step nearer the stove and that poker. He turned to see a second man, as capable-looking as the first, dressed and armed like his friend, younger, even more powerful. Hell, thought Johann, he wasn’t out there waiting when I came up the path; there wasn’t a movement, or a sound except my own footsteps. He must have slipped around from the kitchen when they heard me come in.
“Back to the road!” the newcomer said, and gestured with his revolver. “You have some questions to answer.”
“I’ll answer them here,” Johann said, and headed towards the stove. “We need some heat in this place. It’s colder than the night outside. “
“One more step and I’ll shoot your knee out.” The first man’s smile had faded; his revolver looked dangerously ready.
“Do as you’re told,” a third voice said. “Back to the road!” It was an older man, with greying hair and a dark moustache, who came through the doorway that led from the shop and storage room. He looked lean and fit. He carried a hunting rifle in one hand, a slashed rucksack in the other. He lifted it high to let Johann recognise it. “Out!”
There was no arguing with a rifle. Johann turned to leave. His thoughts raced. The moon was favourable, so was the ground outside—he knew every metre of it by heart—so was the shadowed side of the house, so was the short distance to the trees at the back; yes, there was a chance, if he could trip the young man at the door and let him block it for the few moments needed. There was a chance. He said, “You’ve some questions to answer. What the hell do you think you’re doing? Mucking up my place, all for an old rucksack that’s been left for repairs.”
“A rucksack with water stains and lake slime dried on it? Come on, move out! We’ve waited long enough for you this evening.” He nodded to the man at the kitchen door, who moved quickly across the room, pocketing his revolver, to stand behind Johann. “Hands at your back!”
The chance was fading, Johann thought as he obeyed slowly. Handcuffs? These strangers had come well prepared. He brought his elbows smartly up against the man’s chest before the handcuffs could be fixed, knocked down the raised wrist of the young man blocking the door so that his shot splintered the wooden floor, shouldered him aside. Yes, there was a chance.
But the man behind Johann ended it. He brought down the handcuffs on Johann’s head, sending him staggering to his knees. Roughly, quickly, the handcuffs were snapped around Johann’s wrists. Half-dazed, he was pulled to his feet.
The man with the rifle was giving the orders. “Take his other arm,” he told the one who had used the handcuffs. “We’ll get him to the car, and you—” he looked hard at the young bungler who had fired the shot—“follow us in his jeep. You know where to hide it. And no more mistakes.” He swung the rucksack over his shoulder and, with help from Johann’s other side, began taking him through the door. “Lose no time,” he warned the young man as they passed him. “Switch off the lights, put the key back where we found it.” Everything had to be spelled out nowadays, he thought bitterly.
“What about this mess?” The young man looked at the room; the kitchen and shop were equally disordered. So was upstairs. A whole night’s job of putting things back into reasonable order. Luckily, there wouldn’t be any intrusions; Kronsteiner’s assistant had fallen for a hunting trip over the week-end and had left cheerfully this morning.
“No time. Get out of here!” Didn’t the young fool know how far the sound of a shot could travel by night? And we had arranged it all so carefully, the older man thought with growing anger; with speed, yes, but with the utmost caution. Certainly, the house search had been thorough, and even if it had not turned up the first prize, there was a pretty good consolation one over his shoulder. A piece of real evidence. Before, they had been acting only on the strength of a deduction. As soon as they had found the broken stalks and grasses by the three boulders, the evidence of green slime dragged off a heavy object as it had been pulled out of its hiding place, Johann Kronsteiner had moved up the list of suspects, to take first place over his sister. Now he was no longer a suspect, but a certainty. They’d get the full truth out of him. If not, they’d raid the Bryant house in Salzburg itself. Kronsteiner had spent the last few days there, perhaps had taken the box with him. The woman would talk to save her brother. Or vice versa. Two captives were better than one when it came to questioning.
Johann stumbled as he was pulled through the doorway, but the unexpected shift in his weight didn’t loosen their grip. He opened his mouth to yell instinctively, idiotic as it seemed in the emptiness of the night. But a quick hand went over his lips, clamping down painfully. “Gag him!” the older man said, and a scarf was forced between his lips, tightly knotted behind his head. Then the two men were crossing the meadow obliquely, dragging him in a drunken run towards the upper curve of the Unterwald road, where their car had been safely hidden.
“There’s the road!” She pointed to their left as their car came up from the outskirts of Bad Aussee. “Johann Kronsteiner’s house is about a hundred—” She stopped abruptly, her grey eyes wide as they stared at the driver beside her. “Did you hear that? It was a shot.”
The driver, whom she knew only by his code name of Lev, must have agreed, for he finished turning the abrupt corner, edged the car on to the shoulder of the narrow road to Unterwald, cut the engine, jammed on both brakes, switched off his lights. In silence, they listened. There were no more shots. “We’ll get back to Bad Aussee,” Lev said, taking command.
“No! We’ll wait. I’d like to go farther up this road.” There was little view of the house from here.
“Too dangerous.”
“I meant on foot,” she said sharply. Supercautious, she thought, and an angry frown hardened the pretty features of her face. Bill Mathison would scarcely have recognised his soft-eyed Elissa at this moment; or Eric Yates his trusted and yielding Eva Langenheim; or the people in Salzburg who knew her as the amiable but aimless Elisabetha Lang. “Wait here,” she told Lev, re-establishing her authority. She opened the car door, and found they were drawn so close to the edge of the road that no foothold had been left for her. There was a ditch below her outstretched leg. The light from the half-moon wasn’t good enough, and her town clothes, unchanged from Zürich, would hamper her. She pulled her foot back into the car. “You get out,” she told Lev. “You’ll have a clear view of the road and the house once you are on top of that bank. It’s safe enough with those bushes and trees to hide you,” she couldn’t resist adding.
He didn’t like the idea much. But he hadn’t liked the idea, either, of bringing her to Johann Kronsteiner’s place at this time of night. “He only picked up his jeep at the parking place half an hour before we left Salzburg,” Lev had warned her. “If you arrive on his tail, he will guess we’ve been following him.” And she had said, “Not Johann. That’s why he likes me: I’m the girl who does unpredictable things. He’s an incurable romantic. By morning, I’ll have him agreeing with me that his sister—for her own safety—had better confide in him, tell him whatever her husband told her. She’s the real key, not Johann. But it is through Johann I’ll reach her. So this journey is necessary. If you don’t get me to Kronsteiner’s place as quickly as possible. I’ll hold you fully responsible for the failure of this mission.” And that had produced results.
But now, as then, Lev was a hard man to persuade. He was getting out of the car slowly, obviously against his better judgment. Sometimes, she thought, watching his deliberate movements as he climbed the bank, it seemed as if Lev was more in the habit of giving commands t
han of taking them.
She closed her eyes wearily. She had been travelling for almost six hours and they felt like sixty. First, the precipitous flight from Zürich, her suitcases left in her room (that should keep the thrifty Swiss hoping as they waited for her return), her only luggage a large handbag and a bundle of magazines. Then the brief stop at Munich, using an English passport and a voice to match, just enough time for two telephone calls: one to an emergency number in Salzburg, using the innocuous sentence that ensured safe transportation and special attention when she arrived there; the other to Zürich for news on Operation Bergstrasse. (Mission completed, but unpleasant complications. Poor Willi and his obedient group of Peking Progressives! Small matter to her. She had bowed out of Zürich and of Eric Yates’s depleting circle of devoted followers.) In Salzburg (out came Elisabetha Lang’s passport again), she had stopped only long enough to grab the suitcase of clothes she kept ready for any sudden trip to the mountains, and to fold one magazine neatly so that it would fit safely into her handbag. A valuable little magazine, brought through customs so casually among the bundle she had carried. Its odd pages between numbers twenty and thirty had enough micro-dots scattered through their punctuation to give a fairly complete copy of Eric Yates’s secret files. At least that was one part of her report on Zürich that would be self-explanatory, perhaps even justification for the “unpleasant complications”, whatever that meant.
What was keeping Lev? She ought to have gone herself. She slid across the front seat to climb out on to the road, and then paused, the door half-opened, as she heard the sound of a car. It was somewhere up that road, now travelling away from her towards Unterwald. She gave a small sigh of relief and relaxed. For a moment, she had thought it would come downhill and see her. Then once more she went tense as a second engine started up. This one sounded nearer to her, but it, too, began to climb towards Unterwald. She struck a match, glanced at her watch. It was almost midnight.
Lev returned at a quick scramble. And there was a change in his manner. “That house might be worth a visit, but I don’t know it we can risk it. It seems deserted, but we had better wait and see. Are there any other houses near that could have heard the shot?”
“If they did, they’ll find it was a poacher. Is Johann’s jeep still out in front?”
“No. It was the second car to leave. A man locked the front door, and then drove it away. Tall, light-coloured hair, fairly young. He wore a heavy coat. I couldn’t see much else.”
“What kind of coat?”
“Just a dark overcoat.”
Not Johann, she thought. Johann might wear a hooded jacket or his laden cape, but not an overcoat. “Then he came from some town or city, not from around here. Who drove away in the first car?”
“Possibly two or three men. They were vanishing into the trees as I reached the top of the bank. The car was parked farther up the road, well out of sight.”
And who was shot? she wondered. Johann? “Let’s get to the house,” she said quickly.
“We can’t start until they are out of earshot. Listen! If we can hear them, they could hear us. Besides, we can’t risk being seen here. Hasn’t Kronsteiner an assistant? If he is out, he may be coming back any—”
“I can handle him,” she said, climbing out of the car. “You can bring the car up when you think it’s safe enough and have it turned around ready to leave. Keep an eye on this, will you?” She dropped her bulky handbag into the back seat beside her suitcase. “Don’t worry. I’m armed.” She tapped her coat pocket lightly, and left. Her exhaustion was quite forgotten. Johann might not be dead; he might still have a few coherent words left in him. She broke into a run as she left the steep slope of greyish-white road and started through the moon-silvered meadow.
She found the key in the usual place, but she had to fumble for the lock in the shadowed doorway. Again she wondered about Lev. This supercaution, this instinctive preservation of his identity—could he be much more than he seemed? She had only met him twice before, always in matters of great urgency, and in each case he had been able to relay her requests for immediate help in phenomenally quick time. Could he be close to the top? One of the assistants to the director of the Salzburg network? That nameless, faceless man who controlled them all from some hidden address? Or even the director himself? Not so ridiculous as it sounded. She had heard of instances where directors of networks had made anonymous checks on their agents. If that were true of the reticent, cautious Lev, he could be of great use to her tonight. She would need the most immediate help to establish herself at Unterwald. The key caught at last in the lock, turned heavily. She pushed the door open and closed it behind her as she groped for the light switch, noting with relief that the inside shutters had been closed over the windows. Then she looked around her, and gasped.
With haste, she made a tour of inspection through the whole house, shop and workroom included. The disorder spelled only one thing: she had underestimated Johann’s importance. He must know more than she had realised. And by the manner of the search, she could guess the men had been looking for something bulky, something that needed space for its hiding place. The Finstersee chest? At least they hadn’t found it. If they had, Johann would now make a very handsome corpse stretched out on that rug. He had not even been wounded by the shot; the bullet had splintered the wooden flooring near the door, and there were no bloodstains anywhere. So they had taken him for questioning, she thought. Poor fool, he would try to hold out. He was just that bull-headed type... Yet his stubbornness might just give her enough time to find him. And once he was found, he’d talk out of gratitude. He was that type too.
She locked the door after switching off the light, replaced the key on the window ledge. If any of those searchers came back to the house, they’d better find it as they had left it.
Thoughtfully, she walked back across the meadow, hands in pockets, head slightly bent so that her dark hair swung over her cheeks, slender legs striding out from under short skirt, low-heeled shoes hidden in the stiff frozen beard of autumn grass. Cool crisp silence around her, a feeling of sleeping peace as undisturbed as the view that stretched in front of her—a broad, seemingly endless valley walled only in the far distance by jagged moon-struck peaks. She glanced back at the quiet house with its dark background of pointed trees and curving hills, sharp edges of soaring mountains black against a glittering sky. Poor fool, she thought again, we could now have been making love. What gave you away, Johann?
Lev had the car running, its door open and ready. “Well?” he demanded, his eyes watching the road as if Johann’s assistant might appear there at any moment. He relaxed visibly as they started downhill. “What did you find?”
She didn’t have to report to him, not if he was really what he said he was. His questions might have been asked out of natural curiosity, but even that was overstepping his job. He was simply a trusted courier who conveyed important messages or people. “Nothing. Only evidence of a very thorough search. Get me back to Bad Aussee. I’ll have to sleep there. Beyond the town, past the lumber yard on its other side, there’s a safe house. You know it? Good.” She settled back into her seat, drew her collar more closely around her neck. It had been cold in Johann’s house. Or perhaps it was her disappointment that helped to chill her. If things had gone as she had planned, it would have been so easy... Well, I’ll just have to replan, she thought, and fell silent.
“You are expected back in Salzburg. You have a report to file.”
“I have the first part ready to deliver by you,” she said impatiently. “The rest of it can wait. Our first problem now is Unterwald.”
“You are moving too quickly.”
“So are the men who carted off Johann Kronsteiner.”
“I was instructed—”
“We’ll talk once we are safely through the town. I’ll let you do the driving and you let me get my thoughts straight. Trust my judgment more. I was right tonight, wasn’t I? It wasn’t any whim that brought me up to visit Joha
nn Kronsteiner.”
Lev’s thin white face was tight, noncommittal. But she got the silence she needed.
“This will do,” she said as they passed the lumber mill, its neat stacks of sawed timber rising house-high over its deserted yard, and entered a narrow twisting road of trees and small gardens and sloping roofs where the moonlight was blotted out and all windows were dark. She waited until he had eased the car into the black shadow of a heavy cluster of trees, cut the engine, switched off the lights. “Now,” she said, “here is what I need. First, adequate cover and credentials to get me safely established in Unterwald for a few days. I suggest a faked affiliation with some foreign tourist bureau specialising in Austrian winter sports. I shall say I am making a survey for them of possible accommodation in Unterwald and its surrounding area. That will raise no questions; there is already much talk about a plan to turn the place into a ski resort. Second, I shall need a car. Third, a small two-way radio with which I can reach Salzburg in an emergency. Fourth, I need two men stationed in Bad Aussee or some other neighbouring town, ready to get up to Unterwald once I have found what we are looking for.”
Lev was sitting very still. “You intend to go in by yourself?”
“Yes. We can’t risk any complete strangers blundering around. The Austrians would pick them up and deport them. They’ve been doing that all summer. So this is what I intend to do: use the Austrians. Let them supply the manpower, do the work, face the risks. When they’ve found what we want, we can take it. That will be easier than it sounds. I have a contact among them—an important one. Everything he learns, I will learn.”
“You can handle him?” Lev asked with the slightest touch of irony.
The Salzburg Connection Page 31