The Bear's Tears (14 page)

The centre of Vienna changed, the lights of modern shops obscuring
then throwing into shadow the old buildings whose ground floors they
had usurped. Side streets became narrower, the traffic lights less
frequent. Wilkes had made no attempt to accelerate, or to turn off. He
was still unaware.

The Citroen turned off, and Hyde moved up. Then the Mercedes
disappeared, and he dropped back again. A Renault overtook him and
filled the gap between the van and the Audi. The black, gleaming
station roof of the West-Bahnhof lay beyond the grimy, streaked window
of the Volkswagen, then Hyde turned into a wide cobbled street behind
the Audi.

The Audi slowed, taking him by surprise. He drove past, consciously
stopping the foot that had been about to transfer itself from
accelerator to brake. He did not glance in the direction of Wilkes's
car, but watched it stop, floating into his rear-view mirror. Its
headlights dimmed, and then it was nothing more than a dark shape
alongside the pavement. Hyde pulled in perhaps sixty or seventy yards
further along the street, opposite a newspaper and tobacco kiosk set in
the featureless ground floor wall of an apartment building. His eyes
returned to the mirror. In a moment of quiet between passing cars, he
heard Wilkes slam the car door. Hyde wound down his offside window, and
craned his head to see Wilkes crossing the street towards high iron
gates. One of the gates opened and Wilkes disappeared.

Hyde scrambled out of the Volkswagen, hurrying between oncoming
traffic across the street. A childish and inappropriate sense of having
been cheated filled his imagination. Somehow, the rules had been
changed; Wilkes was engaged in his own mystery, rejecting his role as
hunted victim. The rain, flung by a gust of wind, slapped across Hyde's
face. His hand reassured itself for a moment on the butt of the Heckler
& Koch beneath his arm.

A wrought scroll of iron set into the tall gates announced
Altes
Fleischmarkt
. Through the gates, receding into an unlit darkness,
Hyde could see a large cobbled expanse surrounded by decaying, lifeless
sheds and warehouses.

He gripped the cold, wet iron of the gates with one hand, slipping
the gun into the pocket of his overalls with the other. He listened.
There was no sound of footsteps. The gates were unlocked. One of them
groaned open as he pushed at it. He left it open.

Meat market. The old meat market. Why? Wilkes, here —?

The cobbles were pooled and rutted and treacherous beneath his feet.
He stood, searching for light, for movement.

Nothing.

His left hand touched the barrel of the torch in his pocket. Then he
moved forward, across the open, rainswept cobbles. Meat market. Empty.
Wilkes had disappeared somewhere, into one of the warehouses. Why?

Traffic rumbled down the cobbled street behind him. One of the gates
moved protestingly, pushed by a gust of wind. There were no other
noises.

He moved towards his left. Flash of a torch —?

He could see an open door, sagging on its hinges. His feet splashed
in a puddle of water. His hand touched the damp wood of the door. His
hearing reached ahead of him, encountering Only silence. No torch, then…

He slipped silently through the open door, into the musty interior
of the warehouse. He listened once more. Nothing. He moved lightly and
carefully, his shins brushing against buckets or perhaps cans.
Somewhere, a rat scuttled, startling him. When his hearing was able
once more to move beyond his heartbeat, it encountered the same
silence. He withdrew the torch from his pocket with the stealth of a
weapon. The pistol, almost ignored, appeared in his right hand at the
same moment.

The door shifted on old hinges, but did not close. No trap, then —

Where was Wilkes?

He listened for a car engine firing, the noise of Wilkes having
thrown him off his tail. Faint whitewashed walls stretched back into
darkness.

Empty —?

He flicked on the torch, pointing it directly ahead of him. Five
yards away, a huge portrait of Lenin glared at him. The sight stunned
him.

Lenin?

"Hello, Patrick," he heard Wilkes say from the darkness away to his
left.

He could not move.

Lenin
—?

His mind refused to release that image, caught in the beam of the
torch. His thumb would not move the switch to turn off the light. He
could not comprehend the voice - Wilkes's voice, he remembered dimly -
coming from the darkness to his left. He could not move the torch in an
arc to reveal the speaker, or move the pistol across his body to
endanger Wilkes.

Trap.

But, Lenin —?

Joke?

He shivered, newly aware of the cold and wet. The shivering would
not stop once it had commenced. He had stepped into some mad theatre,
without his cue. He could only wait for his prompter…

"Hello, Patrick," Wilkes said again. Then the door moved on its
hinges. Heat stung the back of his neck as he tried to overcome tight,
frozen muscles to turn his head. The door slammed shut behind him. He
imagined, almost immediately, that he could hear breathing in the
darkness around him. Two, three, four pairs of lungs, his imagination
counted. Trap. He
knew
they were there. He did not know how
many, but they were plural; collective. They were a trap, and they had
snapped shut on him. "OK, Patrick," Wilkes added confidently, almost
amused, "put down the gun. There's a good chap."

Now
—!

There was the single, elongated fraction of a moment in which his
body would not come unfrozen, would not move - then the torch was out,
and he leapt and rolled, and crashed into something which gave and then
toppled upon him, winding him. Torch beams flashed and played about
him, and someone cursed.

Not Wilkes's voice. He clung to something tapering and moulded or
carved. A torch beam struck as he pushed it away. A model of one of the
towers of the Kremlin.

Kremlin —?

He rolled away. No gunfire, only the searchlight beams of the
torches and lamps licking across the dusty floor of the warehouse,
seeking him. The embrace with the model had threatened the return of
his paralysis, but since he could not explain it, he rejected it. He
scrabbled. Others moved now, converging on the point where his light
had been, where his collision with the model had taken place. He rolled
under a bench, into a corner, hunching against the wall and trying to
control his breathing.

Footsteps, like the slither and rush of rats. Flickering torchlight,
orders —

Silence, filling the bowl of the warehouse. Some children's game,
but played in the dark.
Statues
, was it? When Hyde looks, all
stand still. Make a statue.

Lenin, model —?

"Patrick?" Wilkes said clearly, his voice whispering in the hollow
acoustic. "Patrick. I think you ought to give it up as a bad job."
Silence, then: "Oh, for your information, Clint Eastwood made a film
here. You saw some of the set dressing, the props. A spy film. Very
exciting, I believe."

"Where's the bloody main switch?" someone called out.

"In the office!" Wilkes snapped.

Someone collided with some cans or buckets, setting them rolling on
the cobbled floor. As he moved under cover of the noise, Hyde heard the
man cursing.

Then Wilkes was speaking again. His voice betrayed the subtle,
arcane pleasure of having known it was Hyde tailing him in the
Volkswagen, of having known his every move. Wilkes had trailed him
behind his Audi like a kite.

"Come on, Patrick - there's nowhere to go. We'll have all the lights
on in a minute. We shall all know and be known. Just don't be silly
about it."

Rage enveloped Hyde.

"What the hell do you want with me, Wilkes?" he yelled, at the same
time scurrying along the wall, deeper into the warehouse, almost on all
fours. Weak moonlight seemed to drip with the rain from broken
skylights in the roof above him. Something —?

Nothing.

Wilkes's voice pursued him, and there was movement from ahead of
him. He crouched silently against the wall.

"We have our orders, Patrick. We have to render you harmless,"
Wilkes announced dispassionately.

Hyde was shuddering with exertion, damp, cold and terror.

"Why?" he yelled out in anguish. "
Why
?"

His body had given up, collapsing into spasm and chill numbness.

"You know why, Patrick. London says you're under suspicion."
Wilkes's voice oozed insincerity. "Sorry. You've been a naughty boy."
Then, as if slightly unsure of the endgame, Wilkes shouted: "Where are
those bloody lights?"

Hyde's hand gripped the steel of a girder. Unwillingly, his eyes
traced it aloft. It grew up the whitewashed wall like a tree. Part of
the framework supporting the roof, some reinforcement of the original
wooden structure.

"I've got them," he heard someone call distantly. "Ready when you
are."

Hyde's other hand - stuffing the pistol into its holster - climbed
up
the girder, involuntarily. Then his left hand climbed, then right, so
that he was standing upright, pressed against the wall. Right hand
encountering a handhold, left foot a foothold, left hand, right foot,
right hand…

He was climbing, past the lower crossbeam, up towards the roof. The
noises he was making were like the scrabbling of rats, perhaps
discountable by the men below him. The lower crossbeam was below him
now, and the weak moonlight cast the faintest sheen. The black bar of
the upper steel girder was still above him. If it was more than six
feet below the broken skylight, he could never get out that way -

"Everyone under cover?" he heard Wilkes ask, interrupting his
doubts.
It had to be no more than six
—

The others replied; his hearing, choked with his heartbeat and
breathing, could not distinguish direction. They seemed all around him.
 Lights —

A glare of whitish light. He scrambled across the girder, lying flat
for a moment, then rising onto his haunches, hands white as they
gripped the cold, wet steel. He was sitting like a waiting animal, yet
the posture suggested resignation, immobility at the same moment. A
pool of shadow lay below him, cast from his body by the…

No, not his body, Wilkes's body as the man moved out into the open.
They couldn't see him, a gauze of light between him and the ground,
thrown by the lamps suspended on long wires.
He was above the light
—

Rain seeped through the skylight onto his neck. His forearms and
shoulders already ached with the pressure he was exerting through them
simply to remain still and balanced on the narrow girder. Wilkes was
almost directly below him. An animal would have dropped at that point,
that moment - an animal would have ignored the odds of four or five to
one.

"Patrick? Come on, Patrick…" Wilkes was regretting his bravado,
regretting the open and the hard, dusty light.

Hyde looked up. Five, six, six and a half? Jagged glass, but bare
wood in places - rotten wood? One jump, one stretch only. Or wait —?

Perhaps for no more than a minute they would be surprised, confused,
puzzled, inactive. Then the ratlike noises would take shape and purpose
and identity, and when they had scoured the floor area and the
ground-level hiding places, they would look up.

Look up —

Six and a half; wet, dark, paint-peeled window frame; jagged glass,
no footholds - he could imagine his shoulders heaving up and through,
legs kicking, noise of effort, of cracking wood and glass, then the
surprised, upturned faces and the guns aimed at the struggling, kicking
legs…

A shudder ran through his aching arms and shoulders. He steadied
himself, then looked down. Four of them, emerging from the shadows
against the walls, collecting beneath him - Wilkes waving his gun,
miming instructions now… one moving towards a stack of wet cardboard
boxes, another back into the recesses of the warehouse, a third moving
away towards an open door to some disused office.

Apart for a moment, then they'd be drawn back together again —

Now —

No movement —

Stand up.

Hands letting go, reluctantly. Thighs and calves feeling weak,
rejecting the effort. Hands free, fingers numb, slow to flex. Arms
aching. Legs quivering as they straighten, window not coming close
enough. Arms protesting as they stretch above the head, fingers
clenched to grasp. Touch - not enough. Touch; grip.

Yes, close enough. Girder wet, foot slipping a fraction. Wood - wood
sound enough. Grip.

Now.

Hyde heaved at his seemingly laden body, drawing it up towards the
skylight and the rain blowing in. His arms shrieked with cramp and the
pain of his effort. Slowly, his head came through the skylight into a
windy night, ragged clouds being scuttled and bullied across gaps of
stars and the sliver of a new moon. His shoulders passed his elbows,
and he kicked with his legs. The wood of the window frame groaned
loudly, and he scrambled through, leaving the skylight empty, a hole
through which Wilkes's cry of surprise pursued him.

The roof sloped away from him. Splinters of wet wood pained his
fingers and palms. Other shouts below him now, and the concussion of
two shots striking the corrugated iron of the roof, their impact
shuddering through his hands and the soles of his feet.

Quickly, quickly, his mind bullied, echoing Wilkes's cries from
inside the warehouse. He scuttled down the slope of the wet, ice-cold
iron roof towards the guttering. He extended his legs, using his heels
as brakes. The guttering coughed in protest, and shifted, but held.
Hyde lay back for a moment, pressed against the roof listening. Running
footsteps, shouted orders, pauses of intent silence - the hunt. He sat
up, and leaned his body over the narrow alley that ran between the
warehouse in which he had been trapped and its neighbour. Empty. Ten
feet —?