The Bear's Tears (12 page)

Beyond this telephone call, Peter Shelley and the transcript of the
Teardrop
file lay ahead of him like an ambush in the bright, cold morning.

Then the call had come. Ros had answered, nodded and handed the
receiver to him. He had taken it like a thing infected or
booby-trapped. At the other end of the connection, Hyde waited like a
malevolent destiny. He was certain of it; certain no good would come of
it. Then he plunged.

"Hyde?" he repeated.

"Massinger? Is that phone bugged?"

Involuntarily, he looked up at Ros, and repeated Hyde's question.
Ros stood like a guardian near the sofa, arms folded across her
breasts. She shrugged, and then she said, "I'm just his landlady. He
knows that, so do they."

Massinger nodded. "We don't think so - we're pretty sure."

"Who's we?" Hyde asked in a worryingly unnerved way, then he added:
"Oh, Ros. OK. I've heard of you, Massinger. You were CIA, a long time
ago, but you've been out of things since then. You're a teacher now.
What's your angle?"

Hyde mirrored his own emotions, Massinger realised. He, too,
anticipated exposure, capture, the death of something. In his case, his
own demise. Why? Why was Hyde so evidently at the final extremity, in
fear of his life? Damned, betraying professional instincts prompted him
to reply. He was helpless to contain or suppress them.

"I'm trying to help Aubrey. Why are you afraid for your life, Hyde?
Who's trying to kill you?"

Ros's large, plump hand covered her mouth, too late to hold in the
gasp she had emitted. Her body seemed to quiver beneath the kaftan with
a sudden chill.

"You don't know, do you?" Hyde replied. Massinger sensed that he,
too, had come to a decision, but his had been made out of desperation.

"No, I don't."

"How is the old man?"

"Aubrey? Afraid - running out of hope, I think," he replied with
deliberation.

"Aren't we all, sport?"

"Hyde - why can't you come in? It is a question of
can't
,
isn't it?"

Hyde was silent for a moment. The morning spilled pale sunlight
across the dark green carpet of Ros's lounge. It touched the back of
the sleeping tortoiseshell cat. Massinger sensed immediately that the
woman had brought Hyde's cat to her flat for safety - from what she
would not have been able to explain.

Then Hyde blurted out: "I'm running from our side - comical, isn't
it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean - collusion between the KGB and SIS. Look, Massinger, I'm as
good as
dead
—!" Hyde's voice broke on the word, like a
dinghy against a rock. Massinger sensed the utter weariness of the
Australian, his collision with the brick-wall dead-end of hope and
will. He was at the end of his tether.

"I don't understand you…"

"You don't fucking well understand?" Hyde yelled. His voice seemed
to move closer, be in the room together with the scent of his fear and
the desperation that must be on his face. "I don't give
a fuck
if you understand! Vienna Station tried to terminate me - terminate, as
in finish, bump off,
kill
… !" Massinger heard Hyde's dry
throat swallow, then: "I tried to come in… I knew the old man wanted
help… I rang the Station, gave the proper idents…" There was no way in
which Hyde could stop himself talking now. His boat was leaking, and he
was drowning. He had lost control of his situation and himself, now
that the faint possibility of escape had gleamed; help had whispered
down the international telephone lines. "Ten minutes later, the KGB
turned up, and they were loaded for 'roos. They wanted me dead - they
must have wanted me silent on the subject of Kapustin's watching the
whole arrest…"

Some dramatist's instinct warned Hyde that he had laid out
sufficient of his mysterious wares for the present, and he left the
sentence unfinished. Massinger could hear his harsh breathing down the
line. The information whirled like sparks from a windblown bonfire in
his mind.

Collusion… Kapustin… Vienna Station… collusion…

"I - I can't believe it, Hyde…" he managed to say at last.

"Then try," Hyde sneered.

"You must - must…"

"What? Stay alive? I want to! How can you help me to achieve my
ambition?"

"Your papers?" They were in one of Ros's plump, beringed hands,
clutched against her breast. She seemed to offer them towards
Massinger. The cat stirred, then fell asleep once more, the tension in
the room insufficient to disturb it.

"This city's sewn up - I need those if I'm to get out. Let me talk
to Ros about that - where to send them."

Collusion - Kapustin - Vienna Station - KGB - SIS -
collusion
.

"I'll - bring them to you. I must talk to you," Massinger offered
suddenly, surprising his rational, conscious brain, unnerving his
objective self.

"You'll come… ?" Hyde was suspicious, and relieved.

"I'll come. I'll bring them. We must talk."

"When?"

"Tomorrow, two days - I'll have to be - careful."

"They're onto you!" Hyde accused.

"No. I've been warned off Aubrey - nothing to do with you. There's
no connection between us." He saw the blue Cortina parked in Philbeach
Gardens very vividly in his imagination. "I - give me a little time to
cover my tracks. I have to talk to Shelley anyway —"

"No—!"

"It's all right. I won't mention you. It's about Aubrey - the frame…"

"How have they done it -
who's
done it?"

"KGB - I don't know much more. Shelley has - some information for
me."

"So have I. Watch yourself, for my sake. I said collusion and I
meant it." Hyde had recovered something of himself; a patient who has
been bled and is weakened but more clearheaded. A boil had been lanced,
pressure eased, by his outburst. He would now last, perhaps, as long as
it took Massinger to reach him in Vienna. "Watch your back. Someone
wants me dead and Aubrey out of the game. It could be anyone. It's
someone who can give termination orders concerning his own people and
expect to be obeyed, and someone who has established two-way access
between SIS and the KGB in Vienna. You understand?"

"I understand the implications," Massinger murmured. Blue Cortina,
Aubrey framed, blue Cortina,
collusion
… The word pained him
like a blow. A rumbling headache had begun in his left temple. He
rubbed it. "I understand," he repeated,

"You're my only hope," Hyde said flatly.

"I know. Give me a little time. Ring - ring your landlady tomorrow,
at the same time…" He looked up questioningly. Ros nodded. "At the same
time," he repeated. "She'll have information for you. Try - try to stay
out of trouble until then."

"Just believe it, mate." Hyde paused. The connection seemed distant,
unreal, tense once more. "All right," he said finally, "I'll trust you.
Everyone always said you were a bit too
nice
for our kind of
work, but you're Aubrey's closest pal. All right - I trust you." Then
he cackled in an ugly, fearful way. "After all, I can kill you when you
get here, can't I?"

"You can - if I'm not what you need or expect."

The connection was broken at that point. The telephone purred. Hyde
was gone, almost as surely as if the call had never been made; as
surely as if he had been taken.

He gingerly put down the receiver. Ros was glaring at him, but her
lips moved with a silent, involuntary fear.

"I'll try - as hard as I can, I'll try," he soothed. "Meanwhile, you
know nothing. You have not heard from Hyde, you don't expect to. As his
landlady, you're angry enough to let his flat to someone else.
Understand?"

Slowly, uncertainly, Ros nodded. "OK."

"Good. Now, I must go." He glanced at his watch. Ten-twenty. He
would have to hurry to meet Shelley. The sunlight lay chill and pale
across the carpet, cold on the cat's fur. Massinger shuddered, as at an
omen.

"What will you do?" Massinger asked.

"Hide the car and keep a look-out," Peter Shelley's breath curled
around him like grey signals of distress.

"You say you lost the tail?"

"I lost one car by hiding in a coal merchant's yard," Shelley
replied without amusement. "But I only spotted one car, I'm not Hyde -
not a field man. I don't trust my judgment that much. Neither should
you."

"Very well. To photocopy this —" He indicated the buff envelope,
thickly filled with paper, that the younger man had given him. "— I'll
need at least half an hour."

Shelley looked at his watch with a feverish little gesture, fumbling
back the cuff of his dark overcoat. When he looked up again, his face
seemed to Massinger even paler and more drawn than before.

"I have to have that file back at Century House by one," he pleaded.
"The meeting is immediately after lunch - the copies will be
collected…"He seemed to be damming a small flood of reluctance, excuses.

"Very well - I'll hurry," Massinger replied stiffly, and opened the
car door, climbing out as quickly as he could from the bucket seat. He
slammed the door of the BMW without looking back at Shelley.

Shelley watched him ascend the steps to the portico of the Imperial
War Museum, its huge dome threatening to topple and crush him in the
now grey, low-clouded morning. His slightly limping figure was dwarfed
by the two fifteen-inch naval guns in front of the portico. Bedlam,
Shelley thought. The Bethlem Royal Hospital for the Insane was what the
building had once housed. It seemed an apt meeting place, after he had
crossed the river and passed the weatherstained concrete of the South
Bank buildings only to find a tailing red Vauxhall in the driving
mirror. It had been a long time before he shook the tail. It was
Bedlam. He had volunteered his own incarceration in this insane,
dangerous situation.

Massinger entered the museum's doors in search of the photocopier in
the Reference Library. In the moment of his disappearing, he was the
image of the historian he really was. He fitted the place, would be
anonymous and unregarded inside its doors. Yet he was old, he limped…
he wasn't an agent, a
professional
.

Angrily, Shelley started and revved the car's engine. He paused for
a few moments, foot hard down as if receiving the engine's
determination into his body. He consciously had to use the gears, force
himself to drive back towards the gates and Brook Drive. He had to make
himself expose the car, leave it parked in the street so that his tail
might pick it up again. He had to make himself want to see his tail.

He parked the car and left it, re-entering the Geraldine Mary
Harmsworth Park towards the museum. He unfolded his copy of
The
Times
on a cold, damp bench and sat on the newspaper. The chill
struck through his overcoat and the trousers of his grey suit. He slid
into a lounging position, his BMW visible through the railings of the
park, and considered Paul Massinger.

Was he frightened, like himself? Frightened and old and weak like
Aubrey? The huge weight of class, of social context, of his marriage
and friendships. Massinger could lose patronage, friendship of a
powerful, beneficial kind - even his identity. He could lose his wife
because Aubrey was presumed to have betrayed her father. Shelley, too,
could lose everything, take the same losses - his own marriage apart -
if he continued this investment in Aubrey's cause.

He wanted to walk away from it. He saw
a red Vauxhall almost
immediately, hadn't really lost them, then
. He feared that
Massinger's present mood of resolution could not last and he would be
left holding the grenade. Massinger vacillated, saw round things, into
and through them. The red Vauxhall passed the gates,
wrong car,
then
. His breath sighed smokily into the cold air. It was possible
that Massinger was doing no more than marking time, making the
appearance of an effort simply to assuage guilt and for friendship's
sake - as he was himself… ? Just doing a little bit, looking good, then
dropping Aubrey like a live coal when things got rough.

He kicked at a stone in self-disgust. It narrowly missed a pigeon,
which fluttered a few feet then settled to inspect the gravel once more.

The red Vauxhall was coming back, slowly. It stopped outside the
gates. Shelley drew in his long legs, hunching into the cover of a bush
growing beside the bench. He'd first spotted the red car as he crossed
Waterloo Bridge, the Vivaldi on the cassette suddenly becoming more
chilly, echoing coldly in a vacuous acoustic. He'd tried to shake the
Vauxhall through the narrow, terraced, ugly Lambeth and Southwark
streets, and then thought he had lost it after he had turned into the
coalyard amid the blackened lorries. Now he suspected that there had
been two cars, and a radio link.

He watched the red Vauxhall. A man in an overcoat -
who? -
got
out and crossed to inspect the BMW. Almost at once, he turned and
nodded to his driver. Then the passenger returned to the Vauxhall,
climbed in, and the car pulled away, leaving the smoke of its exhaust
to disperse in the chill, windless air. Shelley listened to its engine
note retreat, slow, louden, and then stop. Parked. They would wait -
who
would wait
? He shivered.

He had to get the file back to Century House - it was his most
urgent priority - because the JIC meeting under Sir William's
chairmanship scheduled for tomorrow had been brought forward to that
afternoon. Shelley had been caught on the hop.

Who, in the red car
who
… ?

MI5, SIS, KGB… ?

He did not know. His body felt feverishly warm beneath his jacket
and overcoat. When he had the file back, and had returned to his
office, that would be that, wouldn't it? No more need for red
Vauxhalls, no more need…

His nose would be clean. Very clean. Twelve-twenty. Come on,
Massinger, come on…