Free Snare of the Hunter by Helen MacInnes Page A

except the older ones like McCulloch and Krieger. Perhaps the man who had tried to follow her this morning hadn’t taken her seriously either—until she had vanished. “Well,” she said, cool and detached once more, “I’ve given you a warning.”
    “And I’ll take it,” he promised, and signalled to the waitress. “I’ll walk around Vienna with my radar working.”
    At least, she thought, Krieger would find nothing comic in her story. He would be pleased with her progress: she was learning fast. She felt very good indeed as she remembered the man who had kept close on her heels, even managing to follow after she had changed taxis, and then—as she slipped out of the second cab and bolted through a crowd to disappear behind the trolley car’s closing door—had stood glaring in the wrong direction.
    She glanced at David, now waiting for the bill. He would soon learn all these little dodges, and not even laugh at himself. Here we are, she thought, without a weapon or listening device or an electronic gadget between us. Two very with-it agents, if we are to be judged by current trends in thought: no violence, no ideology, no cold-war mentality. We’re just giving a helping hand to some victims of the cold peace. Aren’t we the sweet obliging idiots?
    Still, it would be worth it, she admitted more seriously. It was a job that someone must do. Using what? Brains and common sense, Walter Krieger had said. These were what mattered in any emergencies. And he ought to know. He had spent four years right in the middle of Europe when the Nazis were all over the place. The less you depended on gadgets, he said, the more you were forced back on your own ingenuity. You’d be twice as cautious if you didn’t carry a two-way transmitter disguised as a cigarette lighter, if you hadn’t the feeling you could always call on others to help you out of a mess. The important thing was to rely on yourself, and know your limits. That way, no mess. But thank God, she thought, that old hand Krieger was in the background calling the shots.
    David added a large tip to the total, and they left the table with a small chorus of auf Wiedersehen echoing behind them. (Act III, final scene. Village women sing a farewell song. All ends happily on ascending major chords.) “I rather liked it here,” David said. Sunlight through vine leaves. “Pity we didn’t have the time after all.”
    “Time for what?” She looked at him sharply.
    “For getting to know a little about each other,” he quoted back to her.
    “Didn’t we?” she asked, and smiled.
    He changed over to safer talk. “How did you hear about this place?”
    “I came here last year with an Austrian friend. I wanted to see some local colour, tourist-packed or not: zither playing, singing, the whole Gemütlichkeit bit. He was amused by the way I liked it. But sort of pleased too.” She was thinking over that evening. “Oh,” she said, “it’s good to stop being sophisticated every single waking hour. Isn’t it?”
    He nodded. A strange mixture, this girl: she confounded first impressions. Make a note of that, he told himself, and stop stiffening your jaw every time she takes charge. If she hadn’t been passing out instructions today, where would you be? Wandering into Vienna, blind. “There’s more to Krieger than chocolate,” he said. “What’s his real business?”
    “Chocolate.” She frowned, trying to find a reason behind his question. This man might be difficult at times, but he was not a fool. Her brow smoothed out. “Oh, he was in the OSS.”
    “That takes us way back. No intelligence work since then?”
    “No. But some of his best friends are with the CIA or MI6. Does that damn him?”
    “Not enough to matter,” he said, remembering the Reuter’s dispatch from Prague. (And there had been more reports in the Salzburg papers, backing up his theory.) Then he grinned, turned the whole thing into a joke, had her smiling too.
    The light mood was kept as