The Bear's Tears (2 page)

"We'll make a computer comparison, Comrade Deputy Chairman," the
leader of the technical team offered. "We can do something about the
shadows, I'm certain - even if there aren't any tomorrow when we do the
inserts for real."

"Mm." Kapustin watched the film for a moment longer, then said:
"Show me the film from this afternoon."

The projector slowed into silence. A second projector alongside it
threw images at the screen, then he and Aubrey were again walking away
from the camera, identically with the rehearsal they had staged the
previous afternoon. Sunlight, yes. Clothing to be copied, naturally.
Manner. The actor would have to be rehearsed. There was an irritation
about Aubrey that was infrequently displayed but was here now, on this
piece of film, shaping his body, moving his limbs. The Australian
drifted along the path behind them, hands in his pockets, apparently
bored.

"OK, sir?" the team leader asked at his elbow. Kapustin nodded.

"Not bad."

"We can solve the problem. The film quality will look identical,
once the computer's finished setting up its comparisons." The man was
less ingratiating than proud - of his skills and his equipment and
reputation, presumably. "We'll be able to stitch in anything you want,
as long as the actor's right."

"He will be."

"Yes, sir."

Kapustin and Aubrey were now standing in front of the monkey cage,
engaged in what was evidently an urgent conversation. The distance the
cameras had had to adopt because of Hyde's
presence assisted the deception. No one could blow these images up
enough to lip-read, They could identify Aubrey when he was full-on or
in profile, but they'd not be able to lip-read what he was saying. It
was good. On the tapes, they could make Aubrey say anything they
pleased. Out of his own mouth, apparently, he would condemn himself.

"It looks good," Kapustin murmured, tapping his teeth with his
thumbnail. The smoke from his cigarette caught the gleam from the
projector. "Yes, good…" he luxuriated. He could almost hear in his mind
the doctored, edited, stitched-together conversation that would
accompany the film. When Aubrey had agreed, at Kapustin's presence of
nerves, not to be wired for sound, it had been difficult for the KGB
Deputy Chairman not to pat his own tiny microphone in
self-congratulatory pleasure at the Englishman's trusting naïvety. At
the recollection of it, Kapustin chuckled quietly. "Let me have a look
at the next bit of rehearsal film," he said.

The projector slowed and stopped. The other projector threw an image
of Kapustin and the actor onto the screen. Yes, the film was necessary,
he told himself. Of course, Aubrey was officially logged to meet
Kapustin in Helsinki, and the film was not necessary as proof that they
met. But -

Kapustin smiled. The actor had paused. He passed a package to
Kapustin. There was guilt in the angle of the head, the set of the
shoulders. Kapustin, on the screen, acted gratitude and almost
immediately satisfaction, followed by assertiveness; command. The tiny
scene was over in perhaps six or seven seconds. It unmistakably
portrayed Aubrey as a double agent; a traitor.

Teardrop.

"OK - satisfactory so far. Let's go to the tape, shall we?"

The lights came on. The image on the screen faded, as if seen
through a curtain of light or snow, and then the projector was switched
off. Kapustin studied the young, eager, competent faces that turned
towards him like plants towards the sun. He was their sun. His own
technical team. His special
Teardrop
team.

"What do you want, sir?"

"The boat, first. The ferry. What did you get there, and what have
you done with it?"

"You'll like it, sir." The young man grinned. There was suddenly
complete silence in the room as he switched on the cassette players.
Japanese; expensive. Commercial tapes of rock music lay heaped beside
it on the table, amid the mikes and leads and in front of the
reel-to-reel recorder and tape editor. His young men had been buying in
Helsinki.

"I'd better," he said good-naturedly; fatherly.

Seagulls, then voices. The team leader handed him a typed
transcript. In underscored letters were the questions and observations
he had previously recorded and which had been edited into his
conversation with Aubrey. Kapustin listened intently.

"It is increasingly difficult for me," Aubrey insisted from the
speakers. Seagulls, water, wind, the noise of the ferry's engines. He
had gone on, in reality, to explain to Kapustin that his vacillations
were irritating London. Aubrey was having difficulty persuading his
colleagues that Kapustin was serious about defecting. Now, with an
inserted question regarding Cabinet papers and the minutes of the
Foreign Affairs Committee, it appeared evident that Aubrey was
providing his KGB control with highly secret information.

Aubrey was a traitor. Kapustin smiled, tapped his teeth, and
listened.

"I realise that," he heard himself saying, "but this information is
very important." Beneath the words he could hear his own heartbeat,
fainter than the pulse of the ferry's engines. "You must try…" he
insisted.

"I am doing everything asked of me!" Aubrey replied with querulous
and frightened anger. At least, it could have been fear. Where had that
conversational snippet come from — Paris, Vienna, Berlin? This year,
last year?

"No," he announced. "Switch off." The team leader appeared stoical,
other and younger faces were crestfallen, one or two distinctly
irritated in the hot, smoky room. "Sorry, lads — my heartbeat's not
exact in the inserts. And there's something about the perspective of
Aubrey's voice - he's got to be a little nearer."

"What about the background sound?" someone asked.

"That's OK - no difference. That's good. I'm sorry, but Finnish
Intelligence is going to be given this when the time is right, and the
first thing they're going to suspect is that it's a fake. They're going
to try to find what's been put in and what's been taken out. I can
hear
it. It's not good enough. OK - run on to the zoo…"

The cassette tape whirred, then the Play switch clicked again. The
lion roared as if on cue. The monkeys chattered at the children, the
children at the monkeys. Kapustin listened.

"Your real work can begin then," he heard himself saying.

"No more than my duty," Aubrey replied stiffly. Then he continued:
"I've waited patiently - for a very long time, Dmitri - now its's
within our grasp..."

"Again!" Kapustin snapped, clipping the excitement from his voice.
Rewind than Play. He listened. Snippits of conversation from Berlin,
from Vienna, from Rome. Background filtered out, new background
supplied. The zoo. He listened. All that chatter - he had not believed
thay could do it. They wanted it to disguise the inital filtering out
of traffic, of wind or rain. Yet he had disbelieved them. Until now.
This was...

"Marvellous," he breathed. A collective sigh of relief seemed to
fill the room. Lion, monkeys, children. A seamless, flowing background,
natural, lifelike; undoctored.

It had happened. This was the best it had ever been, on all the
tapes they had doctored. The best in the last two years. The most
curcial moment of betrayal, the springing of the trap.

Aubrey was
Teardrop
- was,
for certain,
Teardrop
. Aubrey
was a traitor to his service and his country. It was there, on the
tape.
Teardrop
unmasked.

"Again," he whispered, luxurating in his sensations of complete,
infallible success. "Again."

There was a video projection at the far end of the first floor of
the shop. On it, in somewhat blurred colours, a ballet dancer
impersonating Squirrel Nutkin bounced across a leaf-carpeted glade to
the  inappropriate accompaniment from wall speakers of a disco
tune. The image caused him to smile, then he turned his back on the
screen and went up the stairs to the cassette department. He was early
for his apointment, for this final contact in the HMV Shop on Oxford
Street.

He had come out of Bond Street tube statoningoa hot September
afternoon that made the whole of crowded, sweltering Oxford Street seem
to smell of frying onions from an invisible hotdog stall. Ground floor,
he had been told. At foru precisely. At four, you come over. A pity you
couldn't have posted to Washington or even New York - but, from Isford
Street we can get you the couple of blocks ot the embassy in Grosvenor
Square. The HMV Shop's always good and crowded. That'll be the pickup
point.
Be early, move around the shop. We'll want time to look for any tail.
Be careful.

He should not have felt real tension, he knew. There should be only
the feelings he had practiced and learned in readiness for this moment.
Remember, they will expect fear, tension, sweating. Just as with
the file, you must be sure of your emotions. They must be correct -
what is expected in a defector on the point of going over
. The
smell of frying onions after the smell of hot dust in the tube station
had revolted his stomach. It was an image to hold, to bring out later
like a pressed flower. A proof of honesty.

A young-old boy with pink hair, eye make-up and an earring sat
lounging behind the cash desk. Grigori Metkin moved slowly along the
racks of cassettes, appearing to browse, finger running along the
shelving, following the alphabet of pop singers and rock bands that
were, almost without exception, unfamiliar to him. His eyes sought and
found his shadow from the Soviet embassy, intently studying the
bargain-priced cassettes. He carried two green Marks & Spencer
bags. There was nothing Russian about him. He was dark and pot-bellied
enough to be an Arab or an Iranian. Metkin glanced at his watch. Two
minutes before four.

A man in a light suit brushed past him and stared knowingly into his
face. There was the merest hint of an encouraging smile, then he was
gone. After a moment, Metkin followed him down the stairs. On the video
screen, to the accompaniment of Bach supported by the alien groundswell
of electric guitars from the floor below, Raquel Welch in an
animal-skin bikini fled from a dinosaur. Again, Metkin smiled. Then, as
he looked back from the stairs leading to the ground floor and the
wailing guitars, he saw his shadow with the green bags coming
unconcernedly after him. For the briefest moment, he understood
intensely what he was leaving behind and the dangers of his new role;
his stomach became hollow and weak.

The man in the light suit was waiting for him. There was a second
man, then a third. All in well-tailored suits, perhaps intending to
advertise the sartorial benefits of America to him, their newest
recruit. The conflicting noises of three or four different hit records
seemed to increase in volume as he hesitated on the bottom step. The
sunlight glared outside the doors of the shop.

Make it good, he thought.
Make it convincing
, he
remembered.

Where was his instructor now, from which Oxford Street window would
he be watching this? Then Metkin saw a flicker of recognition on the
face of one of the Americans. His shadow had given himself away. The
light suit moved towards him, and a strong brown hand grabbed his arm.
The man's other hand began reaching into the breast of his jacket. A
second American had moved swiftly towards the doors. Metkin could smell
the frying onions again. He felt nauseous.

"Come on, come on," the American urged. Men in patterned shirts, all
highly-coloured, moved towards himself and the CIA officer. The
necessary counter-activity, the threat that the prize might yet be
snatched away. The American bustled him to the doors, his right hand
still inside his jacket as if seeking a missing wallet. "Come
on
—"

Sunlight, hard and dusty, collided with Metkin as he emerged. He
bumped into an Arab woman and knocked over her child. He recognised
that he would possess all the necessary emotions to recall under
debriefing interrogation. A cry from behind them. Three suits, one next
to him and two guarding the black limousine. The real door was opened.
He was bundled in like a bag of washing. The American who had pushed
him, the one in the light suit, slid into the seat next to him.

Look around, look frightened
, he remembered. He saw the
sweating, angry faces gather on the pavement. The Arab woman picked up,
dusted off her child. The patterned shirts retreated, then disappeared
as the car turned out of Oxford Street. The Americans were arguing.

"Neither of you picked those guys up - neither of you!"

"Sorry —"

Thank them
, he remembered,
thank them profusely
…

"Thank you! Thank you!" he exclaimed breathily, feeling the sweat
run freely beneath his arms, on his chest. "Oh, thank you, thank you…"

The American next to him smiled, then nodded. "You're safe now, pal.
Safe."

And suddenly, ahead of the car, the weather stained white concrete
of
the US Embassy, surmounted by the eagle with its spread wings. To
Metkin, it possessed the appearance of a prison and the associations of
a minefield. Safe? His danger was only just beginning —

Their hands moved in and out of the pool of light that fell upon the
desk, making skirmishes at the heap of photographic blowups. The
ceiling of the darkened room was washed with pale light, much of it
filtering through the uncurtained windows from the moonlit snow lying
deep on that part of the Virginia countryside. Their shadows bobbed and
swelled and lessened on the ceiling.

"How much of this can you verify?" The Deputy Director of the CIA
sounded reluctant to believe and yet equally reluctant to adopt a
skeptical attitude.

"A lot of it."

"From Metkin, our defecting friend?"

"No. He knows nothing about this. He grabbed it as a bargaining
lever. It was too secret for him to handle. But, look here —" Hands
shuffled the gleaming, frequently over-exposed pictures, then tapped
one of them. "We know this style of classification and secrecy grading
has never been used by the KGB. It belonged to the NKVD, at
least thirty years ago. And this…" The hands shuffled once more. The
Deputy Director was struck by their confident, trained movements. The
hands were indeed dealing cards - a bad hand. "… this is his
handwriting all right. It's been checked again and again. A lot of
experts have seen it. It's been scanned and examined by computer. It
may be almost forty years old, but it's his handwriting."