The Salzburg Connection Read Online Free PDF Page A

or at the picnic ground. Nothing.”
    “Keep watching.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And the weather?”
    “The lake is clear so far, but some streaks of mist are beginning to drop down on this side. Might be bad.”
    “Even so, keep watching.” Bad weather could come quickly in these mountains, but it could clear just as unexpectedly. “And don’t call me for any reason after five-thirty.”
    “Not if I see—?”
    “It will have to wait. I’ll call you the first moment I can. Got that?” The message from control came first. And it could be delayed; that had happened before. He would be given a standby signal, and stand by was what he had to do.
    “Understood,” Anton said, not debating the point.
    Anton was a good lad, August Grell thought as he replaced the telephone, then the disguising front of pigeonholes, before he rolled down the lid of the desk and locked it. He was a cautious man; extra trouble was no bother at all if it ensured success, and it usually did. He shaved and washed in ice-cold water from the ewer in his room, dressed in heavy clothing, locked his old grey coat safely in the wardrobe—the marks on its shoulders and collar, where he had cut off his insignia, barely showed after all these years; and although it was now faded and tight, it was a comforting reminder of the best years of his life. SS Oberstandartenführer, equal and more to a lieutenant colonel in the army. Not bad for a man thirty-two years old.Only three years older than Anton was now. And what was Anton? A corporal in the East German army. Well, that was hardly fair, even if it was comic. Anton had “defected” to West Germany, picked up a new identity in Stuttgart which got him into Switzerland, received a new set of papers in Lucerne which took him to Milan, set off from there for the Dolomites, and then, with all the documents needed to establish him as the “son” of August Grell, he had made the usual surreptitious trip from the old South Tyrol over the mountains into Austria as a “refugee” from Italian domination. The politics and power struggles of Europe had been a great help to Anton and the young men like him in disguising the purpose of their various journeys. They were all good lads, if the stories Grell heard were true, and he had heard plenty of quiet stories. He wasn’t completely isolated up in Unterwald. In the summer, along with the usual mixture of climbers and hikers, he had his special visitors. When skiing started in late December, he had more. This grapevine was important: not just reports and rumours, but something to keep hope alive and morale high.
    What was Anton’s real name? Grell had often wondered, just as Anton must have wondered about his name. It made no matter. The important thing was that they got on better than Grell had expected when Anton had arrived here five years ago to replace Grell’s “brother”. He missed Anton’s help in getting a good hot breakfast ready on the kitchen table. (In between seasons, there were few visitors; the two men managed by themselves, with a local woman—who was reliable in the sense that she was too stupid about politics and too much in need of extra money—to cook a solid dinner and scrub the floors.) He had to settle for a slab of cheese on a hunk ofbread and some heated-up coffee, which he carried through to his cold bedroom. He locked its stout door, got both his radio transmitter and his schedule for transmission out of their hiding place along with his decoding equipment, had time to put another call through to Anton (mist thickening steadily all along this south side of the lake; visibility probably zero in five minutes; nothing seen on the mountainside opposite), switched on a small electric heater near his legs, drank the coffee as he checked the schedule for the exact wave length according to the day (this was Monday) and month (October).
    The first signal came through exactly on time. The message was brief. He knew before he decoded it