The Bear's Tears (23 page)

"You're a good man, Shelley. I prefer to consider you've been
misguided in this matter. Old loyalties, all that." There was a bluff
forgiveness in Babbington's voice that made Shelley hopeful, yet
suspicious. Babbington wore the voice like an ill-fitting mask. "You'll
take a week's leave entitlement, beginning at once. When you come back
to East Europe Desk, things will be different…" Alison was still
watching his face intently, her brow lined with guesses and intuitions.
"… a great many things will be different. I expect you to fit into the
new organisation. Understood?"

"Yes, sir. Sir, I'm —"

But Babbington was gone.

"What was that?" Alison asked.

"A very severe letting-off, I think," Shelley said ruefully,
rubbing
his chin. He put down the receiver, and sighed with relief.

"Mm?"

"A ballocking, but not the sack. As long as I keep my nose
clean."

"Aubrey?"

"Partly. Partly to do with Paul Massinger - providing him with
some
information…" Shelley straightened his legs out in front of him and
rubbed his thighs. "God, Babbington's got eyes and ears everywhere. I
was
careful —"

"Is that the end of it?"

"I've got a week's leave."

"Good."

"While they get on with their shake-up of the service. When I
get
back, I won't recognise the old place. I wonder what Massinger's doing
now?"

"Do you still want to know?"

Shelley looked up. "I don't know."

"Then you'd better make up your mind, Peter. I'm not giving all
this
up —" Alison indicated the room around them, dwelling with unconscious
humour on the coal fire. "— without a very good reason."

"Mm?"

"If you're going to be dragged into this thing again, you'd
better
do it because you really want to - or I shall be very
annoyed!"

Alison looked very serious, he thought, but her brow was clear
and
untroubled. She was giving him permission to go ahead, she wanted only
proof of his commitment.

But, was he committed? Did he, after all, really want
to
risk everything for Aubrey? Babbington had let him off the hook.
Shouldn't he accept that gratefully?

"I don't know, darling," he murmured. "I don't know what I
really
want."

The freight-yards. Hard, cold lights, each haloed by the
beginnings
of a freezing fog. Power lines, overhead cables and telephone wires
were already thickened and white-leaved with frost.

The Mercedes was parked on a sloping track that led down to the
finger-spread of tracks and gantries and signals that constituted the
Frachtenbahnhof Wien-Nord. It huddled amid a few dozen cars presumably
owned by railway employees at work in the freight-yards.

Hyde had driven them into the lightless, deserted Prater Park,
beneath Harry Lime's ferris wheel, the Reisenrad, where memories of the
film had chilled Hyde… if one of those dots down there stopped
moving, Holly old man… because he was one of those insect-like
dots. The Prater had been too empty, too exposed to stop the car for
any length of time. And Massinger needed time; quiet and time.

He'd lost the two cars somewhere in the Prater, bewildering them
amid the fairground
and the numerous roads and tracks that
crossed the
pleasure park. Since he knew they would waste time searching, he
immediately left the park, passing the railway station again and
finding the goods yard and its string of parked cars along the track
down to the railway lines. Massinger had been pressing him to stop. He
considered they were still too close to the pursuit but Massinger had
priorities of his own.

Hyde watched him roll up Bayev's sleeve and inject ten
milligrams of
benzedrine. There appeared to be no effect on the Russian. He was still
slumped in one corner of the car, wet marks on his cheeks where he had
been weeping openly before becoming unconscious, his eyes still open
but sightless.

"Well?"

"It doesn't look good, I'll admit," Massinger said drily.

"Will he come round?"

"God only knows. It's been a rough ride for him." Bayev's face
appeared a deathly colour in the floodlighting falling on the
freight-yards. One thing that might put the KGB off the scent - it was
too light to suggest itself as a place of concealment.

"His eyes rolled then," Hyde said eagerly.

Bayev appeared to be watching him. His face was disgruntled,
mean.

"Karel," Massinger murmured softly in Russian. "Are you all
right,
old man? God, you gave us a turn, then. Passing out like that. You
haven't done that since you were in school - remember, all nose-bleeds
and fainting fits?" Hyde looked at Massinger, baffled, but the American
merely shrugged. Lies and truth, perhaps, no longer mattered. Only
detail, building-blocks of the fictitious, drug-perceived situation.
"We used to think your periods would start any time!"

"That wasn't me, that was that little squirt Voris - Vos
-Vorisenko!" Bayev snapped back. "Bloody fairy in the making, he was!"

"Yes, poor old Vorisenko," Massinger laughed. "Are you all right
now?"

"Headache."

"Just the drink, I expect."

The fog was thickening around the floodlights, so that they
became
sheets of white light, no longer glaring circles hung in bunches. The
windscreen of the Mercedes was misting over outside and Hyde switched
on the wipers. Through the cleared arc, he could see no one moving.

"Shut up," Bayev grumbled. "Shut up, Pavel. I'm sick of your
bloody
voice, sick of the sound of it. I want to sleep."

"Kapustin would be pleased with you, Karel. You must be getting
old."

"Piss off. Let me sleep."

God, Massinger thought, he's slipping away. The next ten
milligrams
won't bring him back. He's exhausted. What could he do—?

"All right?" Hyde murmured.

"I don't think we've got long."

"Christ, get on with it, then."

"How?"

"Give him a ballocking - that always works with the KGB. They're
all
scared of some big Red chief sitting on their necks."

"How can I? I'm Pavel Koslov - same rank, same function. His
friend."

"Tell him you're talking on behalf of someone else —"

"Kapustin?"

Hyde shrugged. "Why not? Why not Petrunin, even… ?" Hyde's face
twisted in dislike.

"I'll try Kapustin." He turned to Bayev, leaning closer to him.
"Karel, the reason I came to Vienna…"

"Shut up. I'm tired."

"Kapustin especially asked me to come. As a friend of yours, he
thought it might be easier for me to tell you…" Massinger's tone was
insinuating, even sinister.

A goods train shunted below them, its lamps enlarged by the
thickening fog. The wagons rattled and grumbled together.

"Tell me? Tell me what?" The first spots of fear, forerunners of
the
infection, had appeared in Bayev's tone.

"Kapustin's disappointed…"

"With what? In me?" Bayev was sitting upright now, his eyes wide
and
alarmed, though even now they remained unfocused. "What do you mean?"
His reluctance, his weariness were both gone for the moment. He was
tensely alert within the fictitious situation.

"I'm afraid so. You've been letting the British control too much
here in Vienna." Massinger saw, from the edge of his vision, Hyde's
knuckles whiten on the back of his seat as he watched them. He could
hear the Australian's breathing, hard and urgent. "He doesn't want the
British in control here."

"They're not in control."

"They are - the man running it, the link man… oh, what's —"

"Wilkes doesn't run anything. We liaise, that's all. Wilkes does
as
we want. That's always been the understanding."

"What understanding?"

"How the hell do I know? Kapustin doesn't confide in me! I deal
with
Wilkes. What else goes on I know nothing about."

"Shit," Hyde murmured slowly.

"Why haven't you got hold of this Englishman, Hyde? Kapustin
wants
to know that. What are you playing about at?"

"Wilkes wanted to handle that. I thought everyone agreed they'd
do
it!" Bayev protested. "It isn't my fault," he whined. "He must
understand that…" His voice had begun to slur, and Massinger looked at
Hyde, shaking his head.

"Nothing more."

"Ask him why, dammit!"

"What's behind it all, Karel?" Massinger demanded, still
maintaining
the voice but not the person of Pavel Koslov. Bayev was evidently
confused. His head wobbled slowly in puzzlement on his shoulders. His
body was already sliding slowly back into the seat. Massinger realised
that he was slipping away once more, and that this time he would, in
all probability, remain unconscious and unreachable, despite benzedrine.

Hyde glanced at the windscreen. Like the side windows, it was
misting over again. He reached for the wiper stalk. The car was silent,
isolated, almost unreal. In the goods yard, couplings clanked weirdly.

"What's behind it, Karel?" Massinger persisted. "Why are we
running
our tails off? What are we doing it all for?"

"Who knows… ?" Bayev replied faintly.

Hyde tensed, staring at the Rezident. His hands gripped - the
back
of his seat, squeezing the plastic hard. Come on, come on…

"Why? Karel - why, man, why?" Massinger shouted.

"Who knows… who - knows… Petrun… runin… i-i-i-n- n…"

His head lolled forward. Instantly, they heard him snoring.

"Damn —" Massinger groaned.

Hyde cursed aloud and snapped down the wiper stalk. The blades
slithered frostily across the windscreen.

"He didn't know - he bloody didn't know!" Hyde yelled
accusingly. "Oh, fuck it, he didn't know!"

He turned in his seat. Through the cleared windscreen, he could
see
the bulk of the approaching man, no more than a few yards from the car.
His hand came out of his overcoat and he had fired two shots through
the windscreen even before Hyde began reaching for his pistol.

"You simply cannot continue to deny everything, Sir Kenneth,"
Eldon
admonished him in a voice that was reproving, wise and sinister. "You
have admitted your signature, you have admitted your capture, your
imprisonment in the Russian sector, your interrogation at the hands of
Colonel Zalozny, whose methods and successes are well-documented…"
Eldon paused, passing his hands like a magician over the papers on his
lap. Self-evident, the gesture repeated. Conclusions, proofs are here…

Aubrey could no longer disguise his signals of frailty and
hopelessness. Wearily, he rubbed one hand across his forehead, as if he
intended soothing some fierce ache.

"You think not?" he replied softly. The tone was pale, lifeless.

"It would, of course, assist everyone - including yourself, Sir
Kenneth - if you would confirm the accounts presented in these
documents?"

"I can't."

"I see."

"No, you do not see. Keeping me from my bed, agitating my
nerves,
giving me violent indigestion - none of these things can extract
additional, confirmatory information which I do not possess." Aubrey's
voice soothed him. Calm, quiet, soft; as if he retained control of the
situation.

"Very well, Sir Kenneth - let us go back to the coincidence
of
events - the fact that Robert Castleford was last seen alive on the
very day, the very evening, that you made your successful
return to the British sector of Berlin, mm?"

"Yes. Yes. By the time I had - recovered from my imprisonment,
he
was missing. No trace of him. The morning after I returned, apparently,
he was not to be found."

"Did you lead the NKVD to him?"

"No."

"But you told them where to find him?"

"No."

"But —?"

"Despite what it says above my forged signature there, I did not
place the onus of SIS secret operations against the NKVD in Berlin and
the Russian Zone of Germany at Castleford's door. Castleford was a
wealthy, brilliant, ambitious civil servant making the most of his
posting to the Control Commission. He aimed very high. I did not like
him, we did not get on together. I did not betray him - I did not have
him killed." ,

"But - you would agree, would you not, that if you had painted
this
colourful picture of Castleford as some kind of masterspy, the NKVD
would have had very good reason to - cause Castleford to suspend
operations against them?"

"If I had, then yes. If they thought of him in that way, then
yes.
None of it, however, is true."

"When did you last see Robert Castleford?"

"I - I'm not certain —"

Eldon consulted his notebook. The tape-recorder on the coffee
table
continued to hum in the room's lamplit silence. Shadows and soft light.
Aubrey could not rid himself of a persistent sense of menace. Eldon
looked up once more.

"There was a meeting between you the day before you entered the
Russian sector - in pursuit, as you claim, of your double agent."

"Was there? Perhaps there was. I don't remember it."

"Could you try, Sir Kenneth? Could you try to remember what you
discussed at that last meeting?"

"I don't think I can," Aubrey murmured, but in his mind he
clearly
heard Castleford's voice. Yes, it had been that occasion; that
penultimate occasion.

"Damn you, Aubrey, I think you're out to ruin me!"

"No—"

"Yes! Your insane jealousy —"

"Mine, or yours, Castleford?"

"Damn you with Clara, too. You've been investigating me, you
arrogant little man. Me? What do you expect to rake up about me? What
can you rake up? You intend to smear me, to get me out of your
way. I won't let you do that, Aubrey. I won't let a bigot like you take
more power than you already have. I warn you, Aubrey - unless you drop
this ridiculous, vindictive investigation of me, I'll take steps to see
that you are ruined. Understand me? Finished. You'll be finished!"

It was difficult for Aubrey to control his breathing; as
difficult
to avoid the conclusion that, almost forty years later, Castleford's
prophecy of his ruination was about to come true. He watched Eldon
watching him, eager for his reply. He shook his head.