The Bear's Tears (64 page)

And spoke into the telephone, quickly and urgently and with
evident
triumph on his features. He had seen her held by the man with the
torch, his hand gripping her arm.

Her captor spoke: "Good evening, Mrs Massinger. So nice of you
to
drop in."

She turned her head to stare at the dog's open mouth, its white
teeth and pink tongue kept away from her by the strained-tight
choke-chain and leash. She sagged with relief and weakness against the
man who held her arm.

"Margaret - Massinger's wife, she's here!" Babbington blurted
into
the telephone, unable to consider disguising his relief and surprised
delight. "We've got her! Now, you keep your side of the
bargain, Kapustin —!"

"Very well," Kapustin replied at once. "Very well. Ignoring your
remarkable good fortune - I shall try to persuade both the President
and my Chairman to adopt your plan."

"Excellent —!"

"The scheme will not be popular, but I expect it will be
adopted.
Yes, I expect so. Have everything ready for tomorrow night. Aubrey and
the Massingers. We will dispose of them for you."

Godwin watched the neighbour's thin black cat as he might have
watched an enemy. Then, he collected his crutches from either side of
his chair and struggled upright, finally shuffling away from the
dining-table to the corner of the kitchen. Someone must have brought
the brand-name cat food back with them after a London leave, Hyde
thought. It wouldn't be on sale in Prague. Godwin unwrapped the tin
from a polythene bag that contained its odours and knived chunks of it
onto a yellow saucer. Then he placed it on the floor for the cat which
had, during his careful preparations, rubbed with a sense of the
frantic against the legs that could not sense its body. Occasionally,
Godwin looked down at its protestations. And smiled.

Hyde wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The cat, stroked
by
Godwin - how much pain in that bending to the cat's arched back and
erect tail? - had begun to eat. Gulping delicately. Hyde pushed back
his own chair with a mounting reluctance. He had to bully Godwin,
again. And disliked the work. Godwin had almost solved the problem -
but communicating it had a price of anger.

He turned on Hyde with a white face and snapped: "I've worked
like a
black
since I got here - from
the moment I got here —!"

He had been preparing the outburst throughout the well-cooked
meal,
perhaps ever since he had admitted Hyde to his cloistered, lonely
rooms. Up thinly-carpeted stairs, the walls pregnant with age and damp,
to a loosely-fitting door with English security locks. And the smell of
heated, packaged meals
and
East European vegetables stubbornly cooked, the scent of the
neighbour's cat, and the ozone of often used electrical equipment - the
in-fi and the desk-top computer. Godwin's thin, eked-out life. Hyde
understood, far too well, that only a pair of functioning, fit limbs
separated himself from Godwin and his environment.

But Godwin had it, had the answer - part of it, even almost all
of
it —

"— like a black," Godwin repeated almost apologetically.

"Sure," Hyde replied.

Godwin had been restraining himself for hours; controlling
himself,
as he taught Hyde familiarity with the Cyrillic keyboard he would
eventually encounter; taught him the jargon; educated him in the
small-talk of computers and security and the Hradcany. Hyde's knowledge
of computer terminals and keyboards was minimal. Godwin seemed
determined to make him not only skilled, but educated. Hour upon hour,
time after time, until he stopped making mistakes, avoided errors,
understood what he was doing. And all that time, Godwin had been
building to his over-riding, urgent purpose; this outburst. Hyde
prepared himself.

"Yes, like a black!" he stormed, as he plugged in the coffee
percolator with the wifely nonchalance of an enforced bachelor. "Do you
realise what you and Shelley want from me? Do you?" He ushered Hyde
back into the small lounge. The electrical smell was still strong from
the keyboard and VDU resting on the old dining-table that Godwin used
as a desk. The crutches thumped behind Hyde, the legs shuffled behind
them.

Hyde sat down quickly, reducing his own importance. In the
kitchen,
the percolator plopped. The cat audibly slid food into its gullet. Then
began to lap the milk that Godwin had also put down.

"The biggest laugh is, Shelley wants everything for Aubrey - for
the
old man!" Godwin glared. "For the old, blind, stupid bugger who wanted
nothing to do with the thing I offered him!" Godwin's frame leaned
towards Hyde. The small keyboard and screen peeped like a hint of
revelations to come from behind his crooked elbow. "He put it to one
side - do you know what he told me? Do you?" Godwin's body echoed in
miniature the movements of a fit body in an easy chair, bobbing
forward.
"It can't possibly work,
Godwin - once we tap in, we've
given the
game away.
That was it. His judgment and the opinion of
the tame experts he consulted. He consigned
Open Weave
to the
dustbin without a second thought! And now he wants me to resurrect it
to save his skin! What a laugh. What an absolute fucking hoot!"

"What's
Open Weave
?" Hyde
dropped into the charged
silence; almost expecting the breath expelled with his words to spark
in the heavy atmosphere.

Godwin's grey face narrowed. "Don't pretend you don't know."

Hyde shook his head. "I don't."

"Don't give me that! Shelley's briefed you!" Hyde rejected
interruption. "Do you even begin to understand, either of you, what
Petrunin
did
when he fixed
the computer in Moscow Centre? Do
you have even an inkling of what he had to do to make
Teardrop
available to you?" Godwin's body slumped on the crutches, almost as if
he had fallen backwards into a comfortable chair. The cat appeared,
indifferent, licking its mouth in the kitchen doorway. The percolator
reached a breathless climax behind the cat.

Godwin dropped his body into the chair opposite Hyde. Breath
emerged, strangled and painful. Godwin plunged on, undeterred by the
massive interruption of seating himself.

"First," he offered, marking the point on the index finger of
his
right hand, "he had to subvert an expert of near-genius - a programmer
who was exceptionally smart. Before that, he had to see the
possibility! He had to be really far-sighted when he served on that
committee… to see the chance and take it. Clever…" Godwin was wistful
for opportunity for a moment, then continued: "Petrunin had to alter
the original database, when the central records computer was first
fully programmed - back when they started computerising their entire
records system. Even then he was watching his back - and aware of the
best, most up-to-date way of doing it…"

Godwin's face was flushed with insight, more than with the thin
wine
they had drunk with their pork. His eyes were inward-looking, staring
after a figure following a road he could not take. Hyde realised how
thwarted Godwin was by his crippled legs. Perhaps Aubrey had done him
no good turn, keeping him inside the service —? A big computer firm
might have satisfied his ambitions much more completely.

Godwin cleared his throat, and said, "Teleprocessing showed him
the
ease with which he could store information under Moscow Centre's
inquisitive long nose and be perfectly safe. And
the
method of computer access - through landlines - suggested how easy it
would be to recover the information he'd stored, from any terminal in
any Soviet embassy or consulate or mission, in any emergency. He'd need
no more than a few minutes with a remote terminal keyboard and his
special passwords. He could go straight to the stuff he'd stored, just
like that —" Godwin clicked his fingers. His eyes studied the ceiling.
The cat hunched its back towards the one radiator. Hyde got up and
passed Godwin's chair towards the kitchen. Godwin seemed almost
relieved. Immediately, in a raised voice, he began talking over the
noises of coffee cups and pouring liquid.

"He must have altered the schema of the database - just in case
someone stumbled onto his material by the purest fluke… when you dial
up his doctored file, you get almost the same thing, except that the
normal channels to the personnel records have been bypassed and you're
really getting the prologue to all the dirt he's stored away."

"Sugar?" Hyde asked.

"No. But, when they sent him to Afghanistan as persona non
grata,
he must have added a low-level patch to the compiler…" Hyde handed him
his cup. "Thanks." Godwin appeared relaxed. He had adopted the momentum
and the confidence of his monologue. Here, he was the expert, the fit
man.

Hyde regained his seat. "He must have killed the poor bastard
who
assisted him straight afterwards - or could he have added this - this
patch?"
Godwin nodded. "After he'd killed the programmer?"

"He might have been able to. He'd have had to study manuals and
dumps of the application programmes to find a way of bypassing the
computer's security… what I think he's done, from your description, is
to add a patch to the compiler which translates the password routine in
the database management system. This would have the effect of adding an
extra line to the normal password routine in the machine code version.
I'll show you later. It would have been easier for him, since he
wouldn't have had much time after they decided to send him to Kabul, if
the programmer was still alive."

"Perhaps he anticipated disgrace, along with everything else?"

"He was that clever?"

"He was."

Godwin shifted painfully in his chair.

Hyde stood up and went into the kitchen and placed his cup in
the
crowded sink. Then said, "You have to teach me, Godwin. Everything I
need to know."

Godwin called, "How much do you know about
Open Weave
?"

"Nothing."

"Shelley told you nothing?"

"No."

Godwin's anger was quashed. Hyde raised his face to the kitchen
ceiling and held back the sigh of relief that threatened to escape from
his chest. Godwin was hooked. When he walked into the lounge, Godwin's
face greeted him eagerly, almost wanton with excitement.

"Tell me about it," Hyde said.

"Later. It's just a way of tapping into the landline that links
the
computer room here to Moscow Centre."

"What —?" Hyde began, hardly needing to act surprise.

"Later," Godwin repeated with affected modesty. "It'll help get
you
into the computer room in the Hradcany as a system tester. We'll set up
a fault on the landline… later. I'll keep you in suspense for a bit."
He grinned. Godwin's face was animated with something akin to triumph;
the face of an eminent actor, assured of the applause that would greet
his entry from the wings.

Hyde smiled. "OK. Keep me in suspense, then."

"You sure you wouldn't like a little lie-down before we begin?"
Godwin asked jokingly. "This is going to take the rest of the night.
Are you sure you're ready?"

"When you are. My cover's as a system tester. Who or what gets
me
inside the Hradcany?"

Godwin waved the question aside. "That's taken care of. You'll
be
helped in - and concealed."

"OK. I'm inside."

"They'll be expecting you. That's the beauty of it. They'll want
a
system tester. Not a technician, you understand, just someone with a
high security clearance. From the Soviet Embassy. Your clearance will
be higher than that of most of the people you'll run into. They'll be
wary of you."

"Why do they want this - system tester?"

"The fault on the landline. It'll be such that they'll have to
check
that their data-files taken from remote terminals aren't at fault -
been corrupted or damaged. They'll be worried - they'll need you to
check responses from Moscow to requests you make in sensitive areas…
OK?"

"OK."

"So - you're in the main computer room. With guaranteed use of
one
of the remote terminals - keyboard, printer, back-up peripherals…
everything."

"You're pretty sure of this —"

"I am sure, mate - bloody sure! You're using the best stuff I've
got
- people, ideas, cover. I'm giving you everything."

"OK."

"The computer terminals in the Hradcany are standard stuff - they
use
a pirated version of IBM's CICS system - Customer Information Control
Systems, that means. The terminal is permanently linked to Moscow
Centre and the computer is continually asking for its services to be
used. It's called polling. All you'll need - apart from enough time to
yourself - is Petrunin's passwords when the computer asks you for them."

"Why do I
need
to be a
system tester?"

"Because that way —" The cat had moved, and was rubbing against
Godwin's legs. As if his excitement had animated his senseless shins,
Godwin looked down, smiled, and lifted the cat onto his lap. It padded
as if shaping his lap like a pillow, and then settled itself. Godwin's
large hand stroked methodically, firmly along the cat's back. "— that
way you can get into the personnel records. Education, military,
criminal, anything you like, while checking that the landline, the
modems and scramblers have not affected the data or the data transfer.
If that's happened, they'd need to use back-up to restore the files.
You can be there for - perhaps three or four hours, all night if the
job
takes that long… and no one, no one at all, will be asking
you to leave or asking you what you think you're up to! Can't you see
what a
gift
it is?"

Three hours —

Hyde nodded. Godwin's scenario was daring and brilliant, and too
dangerous.

But unavoidable, Hyde concluded, suppressing his rising fears.
Too
late. But, Christ —