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Grell waited, regained his breath, kept an eye on the forest trail they had just climbed in case any unwelcome visitors, delayed by the bad weather, were now making their way up. Not everyone had Anton’s ability to lope along a cloud-streaked mountain track. He had the confidence and the instincts of a chamois; and he knew every metre of ground.
    Grell edged into the cover of a thickly branched tree. Everything seemed peaceful. Yet, the agent who had been caught in Zürich had sent that message to Warsaw: the Finstersee operation might even now be under way. If so, thought Grell, they’ll be using two men. Three would increase the difficulty of concealment, although it had taken three to lower the chest into the lake—himself and a couple of lieutenants, while a squad of five had guarded the picnic ground. He never stood here without remembering that night. And its almost failure.
    They had lowered the chest, expecting it to sink to the depth of fifty metres at that part of the shoreline. (Finstersee wasestimated to be a hundred and twelve metres, just about the same as Toplitz, at its central depths.) Barely four metres down, the chest had come to rest on something solid. And could not be eased off. It was firm on some underwater ledge. And just at that moment, as they prepared to haul the chest up and try some place else, a light had been flashed across the lake from the picnic ground, warning them to move out. He had one of the lieutenants cut the chest free, well below water line so that no strands would be seen floating under the surface, and they had left with two large coils of unused rope and a pneumonia case. The other lieutenant had died, too, but much later; he was suspected of trying to buy his way out of Vienna with his story of that night. For twenty-one years it seemed as if the traitor had been eliminated before he had a chance to talk or be believed. But now? It began to look as if the execution had been too late. Someone must have listened, someone must have believed. And waited.
    Anton was coming back. Grell stepped out of cover to show himself, looked down as his foot brushed something in the underbrush. He pulled aside a low branch and picked up a green loden jacket. It had a Salzburg label, but no name.
    “Nothing at all,” Anton reported, keeping his voice low. “I searched among the boulders and trees. No sign that anyone has been there.”
    “Someone has been here.” Grell held out the jacket, folded it again, and replaced it. “He must be somewhere out on that mountain.”
    “Only one man?”
    Grell could agree with Anton’s disbelief. But nothing made sense at this moment. Any man who was foolish enough toscout around a hillside in a soaking mist without his jacket was hardly the kind of agent that Warsaw would hire. (And why Warsaw? Why hadn’t the message gone to Moscow direct? Nothing made sense.) Irritably, he stared at the track leading eastward along the mountain now beginning to clear of mist. “He must be somewhere out there,” he insisted in a hushed but angry voice.
    “Yes,” agreed Anton very softly. He had his sharp blue eyes on the trees above them, some distance to the west. “But he is coming from the wrong direction. I think I know him. Yes. He’s that Englishman who is married to Johann Kronsteiner’s sister. He’s a photographer in Salzburg.”
    “Kronsteiner the ski instructor who keeps a shop down at Bad Aussee?”
    “Also a guide in the summer season. He’s all right. We checked him out when he brought that bunch of students to stay overnight at the inn last July. Remember?”
    Grell remembered. Johann Kronsteiner was one of those amiable dolts, handsome and charming, who climbed and skied their lives away. “He has a girl in Unterwald, hasn’t he?”
    “He has a girl in every village between here and Salzburg.”
    “Has his brother-in-law noticed us yet?”
    “Yes. He is walking down to meet us.”
    “He is, is he?” Grell turned around slowly to