The Bear's Tears (47 page)

"Access is strictly limited," he said. "You would have to be me
to
get it. Understand - understand? Only I can get hold of it - you would
have to be me! Understand?"

"Yes." Hyde did not understand.

"I - I have it on file, hidden in the computer… I saw the
advantage
of having an, an, an insurance policy… I suborned a programmer to
create a secret file, stored under their very noses… everything's in it
- dirt, operations, even your precious
Teardrop
- my precious
Teardrop
… do you understand
me?"

"Yes." Hyde still did not understand. He simply accepted that he
must listen to Petrunin until he could speak no more. Hold the man
until he felt the final slump of his body into bonelessness.

"Access is from any remote terminal linked to Moscow Centre… in
any
embassy abroad or in the Eastern bloc… if you knew each of the
passwords, you could find it. Only I know them - only me…" He paused,
his body shifted violently, as if some last part of his human cargo had
shifted in a storm. He sat more upright, and his face appeared haunted.
He could see the end now, and must race his own collapsing body. "I
killed the programmer, of course, for security - before they sent me
here
… it was to be my insurance, even my ticket to the West… I would have
been the most valuable defector on earth, with just a computer
cassette…"

His voice was lower now, but quicker, urgent. "Listen to me,
listen…
you must access Assignment Histories in the Personnel Files of the
computer… access my file…" He paused, his eyes flickered open and
closed against Hyde's cheek, as if he were trying to focus his gaze. Or
remember. Then he said: "There are passwords to remember before that -
listen. Listen… access to the Main Menu is by the password - K-2-U-7 -
stroke - R-S-4-K… repeat it to me!" Hyde did so, then to himself once
more. Yes… "To Personnel, access is by another password, letters and
numbers again… C-7-3-5 - stroke - D-W - stroke - P-R-X… repeat that…"
Petrunin sighed with what might have been exhaustion, or satisfaction,
as Hyde repeated the password. "Good, good…" Petrunin's hand patted
against Hyde's shoulder with the force of falling snow. "Assignment
Histories has the password White Nights - White… Russian,
White Bear, without a break… after that, you request my
assignment history. Then - then use my last three postings, in reverse
order - reverse order, without a break, to access the secret file. You,
you - a poem appears next - it looks like a corrupted data file, it's
meant to put people off… don't cancel it! - let it run, all
fourteen lines… to a girl I once knew… then, out comes everything -
everything…"

He paused, expecting Hyde to reply. Hyde did not understand
anything
beyond the urgency of the communication. Yet he memorised it. Like a
recorder, he would be able to reproduce the information, if requested.
If he ever talked to someone who understood.

"There is - is a short-cut to
Teardrop
…
short-cuts to
everything… wouldn't have much time, perhaps, to cut and run… had to be
sure I could get at the juiciest…
Teardrop
espec - ially… short-cut
—!" He cried out, as if he saw an enemy approaching. Hyde flinched,
almost turning to check his back. Petrunin began coughing. Hyde's neck
and cheek were wet, slimy. "No, no —!"

"Short-cut —" Hyde prompted, shaking Petrunin's arms lightly.

Petrunin's right hand was tapping at Hyde's shoulderblade
furiously,
emphasising words that the Australian could not hear.

Then his hands scrabbled for a finger-hold on Hyde's sheepskin
jacket as if clinging at the edge of an abyss. His voice bubbled.

"Short-cut… short… cut… shor… cu -'t…"

"Yes, yes!"

Petrunin's body slumped against Hyde, boneless and then rigid
almost
at once. As if he had been dead for hours, frozen stiff. Hyde pressed
him back against the rock. His mouth was still daubed with blood, his
chin darkly-painted. Smears on his cheeks and neck. His forehead was
white and dead. His hands were still shaped into claws.

Powerless. His information was as dead as Petrunin. Every Soviet
embassy, anywhere in the world. The only places to have access to the
main computer system in Moscow Centre. It was hopeless. Pointless and
hopeless. He was almost pleased that Petrunin was dead, that the effort
had shortened his life, even if only by minutes.

Yet he felt a curious reluctance to release the body, as if his
chilled hands had somehow become frozen to the material of Petrunin's
greatcoat. The Russian stared lifelessly at him, and past him at the
still falling snow and the stunted trees. Then Hyde removed his hands
and the body slid a little sideways, to loll untidily like a forgotten
toy against the rock. Hyde breathed deeply a number of times, then
crawled out from beneath the overhang. The wind and snow against his
face were fresh rather than icy. He felt himself waking from a light
trance, disorientated and suddenly fearful of this strange place. He
remained on his hands and knees, like a dog sniffing the air. He could
not hear the soldiers, but there was a distant noise of helicopter
rotors, an indistinct buzzing like that of a television left on after
the last programme had finished.

Instinct rescued him before noises alerted him. Instinct, or
memory.
He remembered what had been called out by the last of the three
soldiers who had passed their hiding place. Something about distance,
about the limit of their patrol, about the time and about reporting in…

He shook his head but could not recall the words. His
subconscious
mind, however, had remarked a sense of limit, or return …

They would be returning —

Hyde scrambled to his feet. Dying images of sympathy for
Petrunin
faded in his mind. The man who wanted to bomb and burn his way back to
favour in Moscow, the man who had had to face the wild animal in
himself, the shadow of the urbane, intelligent, over-proud man. He
began to move on sluggish, almost-giving-way, cramped limbs. He
blundered like a drunk, staggered, then began to achieve locomotion.
The details of Petrunin's description of
Teardrop
became
unimportant the moment he heard the first voice - a backward glance and
call for someone to hurry which almost at once became a yell of
surprise and command and delight. He heard the scratch of a transmitter
being switched on, then a gabble of Russian as his position was
relayed. He ran through the deep snow at the edge of the clearing,
labouring almost at once as the slope steepened above the overhang.
Sounds came to him, the cry of discovery, the yell of orders to pursue,
the more distant and inhuman noise of a reply from the R/T the first
soldier was using. He was bent almost double, knees coming up beneath
his chin, hands jabbing down into the soft snow at every step to
stabilise his leaden charge up the slope. Dwarf trees crowded around
him, as if he were scuttling through a toy forest. Snow flew as he
brushed whippy branches; his face stung from their recoil. He was aware
of the gun in his belt. More noises from behind, the half-shouts, the
straining of voices struggling with bodily effort. They were climbing
after him.

He was perhaps four or five miles from the border. He paused,
his
breath smoking around him, mouth open like that of an exhausted dog,
and looked up. The mountain seemed to go on forever, white with the
grey creases of bare ledges and steep cliff-faces. He could not make
out the peak or the fold near the peak where they had crossed from the
valley to come down to the fort. The snow seemed invested with
something of the approaching dawn's greyness. The noise of rotors
seemed louder.

The first bullet ripped through close-packed, low branches near
his
head. He scrabbled away on all fours, then leaned again into his
blundering run. The snow was deep and loose and he floundered on, his
feet and legs numb, his chest heaving, pressed by a tightening steel
band. Two more shots, both wide. Fear made him aware of every inch of
flesh on his back and buttocks, even though he did not know whether
they wanted him alive.

He turned to his right, running like a fairground target along a
humped ridge which climbed towards a shoulder of the mountain.
Underneath the snow, Mohammed Jan had assured him, were tracks, Pathan
routes. Hyde knew he was following the route they had taken when they
had crossed into Afghanistan, but there was no track. He could not
believe in a track, did not consciously choose his path. Some detailed,
trained memory guided him, prompted his changes of course, his upward
movement. More shots, again wide. He heard the bullets whine in the
air, skip off the bare cliff-face twenty yards from him. He raised his
body slightly, arms akimbo for balance. It was as if he were running
across a tightrope of snow. On either side of the ridge, the mountain
fell away - forty feet or more to his left, thousands of feet to his
right. He wobbled forward, terrified of slowing, of losing his balance.

He was climbing again, the ridge broadening like a
flying-buttress
at its point of closure with the cathedral. He spurred his numb, leaden
legs to more effort. One, two, three, four, climbing more steeply now,
he remembered this section, the ridge and beyond it the narrow path
across the cliff-face, then a winding, slow climb up to the fold in the
mountain which concealed the entrance to the long, narrow valley where
Petrunin had burned the Pathans to death.

Ten, eleven, twelve…

His left leg blundered deeply into the snow, up to his groin.
His
right leg bent, balanced him, and he thrust with it, toppling himself
to his left, over the edge of the ridge, the snow pouring like a
waterfall with him as he fell, his head spinning - stars, snow,
greyness, snow, snow in his eyes and nostrils, in every opening and
crack in his clothing. He tried to reach for the gun, then like a
vessel out of control he struck against a rock submerged in snow and
lay winded, consciousness coming and going, his body incapable of
further effort.

He paused in the secret darkness on the narrow staircase, and
wondered whether the ghost of the old maiden aunt had observed his
arrival. Not even a maiden aunt, he reminded himself. At the top of the
staircase was a flat that had belonged to a reclusive, aged spinster
without living family. She had died entirely alone. Her death had been
unmourned, even unrecorded. Her property had never been sold. The cat
and the canaries, of course, had been disposed of. The flat provided an
ideal meeting-place; a safe house. On the ground floor were the offices
of a small and unsuccessful importer of plastic novelties from the Far
East for inclusion in Christmas crackers. A KGB cover.

Already, he could smell the mustiness of the little used flat
reaching down the stairs towards him. Mothballs, the long-ago
urinations of successive cat companions, the smell of unchanged and
uncleaned bird-cages, the smell of mothballs in old tweed skirts and
out-of-date dresses and rubbed-bare, patchy fur coats. Yet he waited on
the stairs. Upstairs, his contact would be waiting. It was not that he
was reluctant to begin the meeting - far from it. Pausing for a moment
between the noise of traffic from the street outside and the pervading
old-maid scents from above, Babbington was confident. Of course,
treachery was like an old, wounded elephant. Threatened, it had to
blunder to its own defence, unable to move quickly or decisively. The
cut-outs, the drops, the contacts, the letter-boxes, all the subtle
means of contact, prevented speed and decisiveness. Security - the
security designed to protect him - was a wound when speed was required.
Yet it needed only locomotion; a few moments for the elephant to gather
its strength in order to make its enemies instead of itself seem puny
and wounded. There had been shock-delay, of course.

And the fact that Petrunin's scheme had been too clever. He had
warned them about that. Dazzlingly clever. Aubrey, solitary as he was,
had never lacked friends, willing hands. Which had brought the
Massingers into the game, and Hyde and Shelley, and now Zimmermann.

And yet, it had taken the work of only a few hours - would he
admit
to the sweaty, uncertain, tense nature of those hours, now he was safe
again? Perhaps yes, just a little unnerving, but only a few hours to
right the balance, to restore the fortunes of the board. The Massingers
were in Bonn with Zimmermann - the woman, Clara Elsenreith, was in
Vienna. If he read Massinger's stupid, caring American character
aright, he and his wife would go to the woman. Vienna Station, in all
important respects, was his. They would be walking into a neat and
certain trap; the conclusion of their enquiries. Full stop. Period,
as Massinger might put it.

Babbington smiled to himself in the darkness. The wallpaper was
old,
pregnant in a dozen places with damp and time. Zimmermann would hold
back so long as one frightened him sufficiently. And Aubrey - yes,
Aubrey, too, might make for Vienna, for that woman with whom he had
once been involved… ?

Babbington shook his head. That was, perhaps, too optimistic a
view.
Whatever, Aubrey would be found soon - And silenced.

It would be well, all manner of things would be well, just as
long
as he acted quickly. And he had done so.

He looked up towards the head of the stairs, the landing, and
the
door into the musty passageway of the flat. Oleg would be there, the
irritating portable cassette-player in his lap, narrow headphones at
his ears, passing the time with Mahler and modern jazz while he awaited
his arrival; a man sitting in self-contained silence in a barely
furnished room in need of decoration. Babbington shook off the clinging
lack of importance and status about the room and Oleg.

The KGB were standing back on this, of course, and for two good
reasons. Firstly, they had no wish to compromise or even expose him by
violent response. And secondly, they regarded it as a test for him.
Could he cope with this emergency? Now their man possessed the power,
could he use it to protect himself.