The Salzburg Connection/Assignment in Brittany/The Double Image/Agent in Place [antikvár]

Chapter One The lake was cold, black, evil, no more than five hundred yards in length, scarcely two hundred in breadth, a crooked stretch of glassy calm shadowed by the mountainsides that slipped steeply into its dark waters and went plunging down. There were no roads, no marked paths around it; only a few tracks, narrow ribbons, wound crazily along its high sides, sometimes climbing up and around the rough crags, sometimes dropping to the sparse clumps of fir at its water line. The eastern tip of the lake was closed off by a ridge of precipices. The one approach was by its western end. Here, the land eased away into gentler folds, forming a stretch of fine alpine grass strewn with pitted boulders and groups of more firs. This was where the trail, branching up from the rough road that linked villages and farms on the lower hills, ended in a bang and a whimper: a view of forbidding grandeur and a rough wooden table with two benches where the summer visitor could eat his hard-boiled eggs and caraway-sprinkled ham sandwiches. But now it was the beginning of October, and the tourists had gone from this part of Austria. Each July and August, they came pouring through the Salz-kammergut, the region of innumerable lakes that stretched eastward from Salzburg toward the towering mountains of Styria. Some were beginning to penetrate this remote section of the Styrian Salzkammergut although the other lakes offered more in ready-made pleasure: boats for hire, swimming pools and picture-pretty inns, petunias in window boxes, waitresses in dirndls, folk music and dancing and general Gemütlichkeit. A few visitors lingered into September. And a few is just too many, thought Richard Bryant as he came over the last rise in the trail and saw the dim outline of the picnic table near the edge of the water. September might have been safe enough; it certainly would have been warmer, made things easier for me. Still, I wanted no risk of even a single tourist camping out with some mad notion to see the sunrise. This is one dawn which I would like to have very much to myself. So far, there had been nobody following. He had driven through the little village of Unterwald, his lights out, his engine running gently, and had left it as deep in its predawn sleep as when he had entered it. Just beyond the last dark house he met the trail, at an almost right-angled turn, that climbed eastward to the lake. There, he had to put on power to get him up the steep grade past the inn - Waldesruh it was called appropriately, even if it was mispelled: its final e had been lost somewhere in the eighteenth century and never found its way back. And once past Waldesruh's sloping meadow, he could switch on his parking lights to keep him from sideswiping the dense trees that now edged the narrow way. He had only hoped that the sound of his engine would be smothered enough by the forest of larch and beech through which he was traveling. Half a mile from the lake, he had parked the Volkswagen in a gap between the trees that the foresters had made to get the timber down to Bad Aussee's lumber