Background to Danger by Eric Ambler

car which stood near the entrance he stopped.
    So far as he could see there were four men in the car besides the two gazing up at the hotel windows from farther up the street, and for a quarter of an hour they sat motionless. He began to get stiff with cold. Suddenly a door of the car swung open and two men got out, walked slowly towards the hotel and went inside. It was too dark to see their faces, but as they disappeared through the frosted glass door, the leading man raised his left hand with an awkward gesture to the inside breast pocket of his coat. His arm seemed slightly stiff at the elbow. If Tamara had been there, she would have recognised the look of stony indifference that spread over her brother’s face. Andreas Prokovitch was feeling pleased with himself.
    The two had been gone about three minutes when the door of the hotel was flung open and they came hurrying out again. Zaleshoff heard a sharp order in German to the driver of the car as they climbed in. He caught only two words—
“der Engländer”
—then the door slammed and the car roared away.
    Zaleshoff went in search of a telephone booth. Five minutes later he was speaking to Tamara, to whom he gave certain instructions. An hour later he stepped out of another telephone booth near the station and asked a man hosing the roadway how to get to the Hotel Werner.
    But as he turned the corner of the street in which it lay, he saw by the cold grey light of the early morning that he was too late. Two men were carrying between them what looked at first like a large limp sack from the entrance of the Hotel Werner to the waiting car.
Der Engländer
had been found.

7

“COLONEL ROBINSON”
    W HEN consciousness began to return to Kenton’s brain it brought with it several varieties of pain. The most immediate was the horrible ache in his head. Then he became in turn aware of cramp in his legs, a hard surface battering his left thigh, and a sharp edge crushing the back of his left hand. He opened his eyes.
    The first thing he saw was a trouser leg made of coarse material in an unpleasant shade of fawn. Following this down, he saw that its owner’s foot was pinning his hand to a fibre mat. Then he realised that he was lying on the floor of a car moving fast over rough ground. Instinctively he made to lever himself into a sitting position. There was an agonising throb in his head and he let out agasp of pain. The sound evidently reached the man on the seat above him, for the foot shifted to his fingers and a hand pushed him down again. Striving to keep his head from contact with the vibrating floor, he lay still and closed his eyes. For a time he slipped into semi-consciousness, and there was only the steady whine of the car climbing fast in lower gear to remind him where he was. Then the car slowed down and he felt his body dragging on the mat as the driver turned a sharp corner. The vibration ceased suddenly, the wheels rolled smoothly over concrete for a few yards and stopped.
    The door at his feet opened and two men clambered over his legs to get out. There was a muttered conversation too low for him to hear and the sound of receding footsteps. He opened his eyes again and, raising his head slightly, looked out through the open door of the car. The back of a man wearing chauffeur’s uniform partly obscured the opening, but what he could see through the gap was sufficiently astonishing. He was looking at a ridge of snowcapped hills, their summits radiant with the halation of the rising sun behind them.
    Kenton was one of those persons, of whom there are many, who find the contemplation of scenery very boring. For him, half an hour in a pavement café at, say, the lower end of the Cannebière was to be preferred to all the peaks in the Dolomites, with a dozen Aegean islands thrown in. He would have exchanged a valuable Corot for a not-so-valuable Toulouse-Lautrec and considered himself the gainer. He preferred Satie to Delius, George Gissing to Richard