The Bear's Tears (8 page)

He sipped at his sherry, watching Massinger's clouded face as he
examined what he had been told. The whisky went unregarded in his
hands. Then he looked up.

"Why should the KGB want you so thoroughly disgraced?"

"To sow confusion —? I really don't know. Mischief, I presume. If
the witch-hunts of the past few years have indeed cleansed both
services of disciples, apostles, fellow-travellers and the like - then
it would serve Moscow Centre's purpose very well to substitute shadow
for substance, raise the bogey again." He shrugged. "I really don't
know, Paul."

Massinger was silent for a time, then he said: "If Charlie Buckholz
was still alive, he'd never have let JIC see that file. He'd have
warned you of it at the very least." Aubrey remembered, vividly,
Massinger's arm supporting him as they stood at the damp, chilly
graveside. The military chaplain had said, his words, Buckholz's coffin
had been lowered and the Deputy Director of the CIA had vanished from
their lives. Their mutual friend. Then Massinger added: "What can I do?"

Aubrey suppressed a small sense of triumph. "Thank you, Paul."

"How are you fixed here? What access do you have?"

"None. The telephone is tapped. I am guarded day and night."

"Fortunately, Babbington has been kind enough to keep the Press away
from my door. There are no other advantages to my isolation."

"Then, what do we do? I have - very unofficial contacts. Nothing I
can use to help."

"If only Hyde were here —!" Aubrey burst out.

"Hyde? Who is Hyde?"

"A good field man."

"Would he help?"

"I think so. But, I can't reach him and neither can you."

"Where is he?"

"He was with me in Vienna when I was arrested. He - fled."

"Why?"

"I don't know. He must have had good reason. What he knows or
suspects, who can say? If only he would come in…"

"Who else?"

"Peter Shelley. He's got East Europe now, you know. I promoted him.
He could be our man."

"Will he have been warned off?"

"Yes. Yes, I think everyone will have been warned off. The situation
is extreme - I am not believed. I am guilty… but I think Peter will
come through. He
has
to come through if I'm to escape this
net."

"Very well, Kenneth. I'll see him."

"Invite him to lunch - today," Aubrey instructed with a dry, hungry
eagerness.

"If you wish - from a call-box, naturally," Massinger replied with a
boyish smile. Yes, he was hooked, Aubrey concluded. He had begun
drinking again, had become addicted to the secret life once more.
"Who's running your whole show at the moment?"

"Babbington - the Cabinet Office, Sir William Guest that is, has
dumped everything in his lap. DG of MI5, chief investigating officer in
the case of yours truly, and acting DG of SIS. An unparallelled array
of finery!" he concluded with surprising venom.

"Do you think I should talk to him - unofficially, of course, as a
friend of Margaret… ?"

"Babbington wants my head, and my job."

"OK," Massinger concluded heavily. He felt manoeuvred; shuffled and
dealt like cards. Aubrey was at his most threatened, and therefore his
most calculating. "What do you want from Shelley?"

"The last two years of my life," Aubrey replied grimly. "He will
have access to the files, the recordings, everything. I need it all.
And he must find Patrick Hyde for me. I must have Hyde's voice - and I
must know why he ran away."

"Can you prove your innocence - with no shadow of doubt?"

"I must. I must break the mirror and show the reality behind it. I
am not
Teardrop.
I must prove that. Otherwise —" His
spreading arms indicated, even embraced, his surroundings. "— all of
this is lost. I am lost."

Massinger perceived that Aubrey felt his whole career, his whole
past, to be in the balance. Forty-five years and more of secret work,
secret loyalty, secret pride. All of it was threatened now.

"And 1946?" he asked.

"That must wait." Aubrey paused for a moment. Massinger saw his
jowls quiver slightly, and the greyness of his face as a gleam of
watery sunlight caught it from the tall window. Motes of dust danced
uncertainly in the beam of light as Aubrey swept doubt aside with a
gesture of his hand. "That must wait - it is the recent past that will
save me. I have to prove that I controlled
Teardrop -
that he
did not control me."

"You're fighting shadows. It doesn't matter to your people, maybe,
that the X-ray machine has a fault. It's snowing up a shadow on your
lungs, and that's enough for them." Massinger's face was bleak. He
appeared out of his depth, even regretful that he had come, made his
offer.

"Dammit, Paul —!"

"OK, Kenneth. I'll help - if I can."

Massinger sighed involuntarily, even shook his head. Then he looked
up at Aubrey, grimaced as if with pain, then nodded. His features
seemed to clear of doubt, become heavy with a decision already made. "I
owe you, Kenneth," he said.

Aubrey waved the remark aside, murmuring: "Not that old matter…"

"Nevertheless," Massinger persisted, "I owe you my career - at
least,
until I changed it for college teaching. I don't know if I
can
help. I just know I have to try. There isn't anyone else who will, is
there?" Aubrey shook his head. "Though what a retired professor of
European history has to bring to this thing, I'm not sure." Massinger's
smile was rueful, and he added: "Though I was a good operations
controller in the field, back before the Flood!" His face darkened when
he said: "You always involved yourself too
personally
in
operations. You should never have gone near that Deputy Chairman - not
within a mile."

"Meals with the Devil and the virtues of a long spoon, you'll be
telling me next."

"Exactly."

"Another drink, Paul?"

"Mm? No thanks. I guess I'd better be going —" He looked at his
watch. "— if I'm to talk to Peter Shelley today." He hoisted himself
stiffly to his feet. Aubrey rose. Massinger, leaning on his stick,
looked down on the older man. He smiled slightly, sardonically. His
eyes were lidded and he appeared weary. "OK, Kenneth. I'll do what I
can…" Something evidently still nagged at his mind. He said
diffidently: "I feel - like a traitor myself." Aubrey winced at the
word. "Margaret wouldn't forgive me, even though you didn't do it… ?"
He ended on an interrogative note.

"I swear to you, Paul, I did not betray Robert Castleford to the
NKVD," Aubrey said with finely-judged solemnity.

Massinger seemed relieved. "I know."

"Tell Peter to find Patrick Hyde," Aubrey instructed urgently. "And
- and tell him I shall need a transcript of that file our defecting
friend took to the CIA - that damned
Teardrop
file, as it's
called! I need to see that."

"Very well. I'll be in touch tomorrow." He looked once more at his
watch. An expensive gold watch on a thick gold bracelet, Aubrey
noticed. Subtle wealth. Castleford money.

Aubrey shook Massinger's hand. Light flashed from the face of the
watch.

"Thank you, Paul - thank you!" he said.

The upstairs room of Antoine's in Charlotte Street was almost empty.
Peter Shelley watched Massinger over the rim of his glass, and then
sniffed the armagnac. He sipped at it, savoured it, and sensed his
moment. He shook his head firmly. Massinger's hand, about to pick up
his demi-tasse of black coffee, quivered. The tiny cup rattled in its
saucer.

"I'm sorry, Professor Massinger - there's nothing I can do. There's
a shutdown order on everything. Christ, I'd like to help the old man -
but he's out of bounds. They're watching me, for God's sake!"

"Who?"

"Babbington's chums. I'm near the top of the list of potential help
the old man might try to employ. I couldn't fart without them knowing
about it."

Massinger stared into his coffee, then absently swilled the pale
armagnac in his glass. From the moment the lobster had been served, he
had known this would be the outcome. Aubrey's fall had left Shelley
still in the directorship of East Europe Desk, but his hold upon his
new office was precarious. He was an Aubrey man. He might yet go.
Shelley was keeping his head down until the gunfire stopped.

"Babbington intends to control both services, finally?"

Shelley nodded. "Oh, yes. He's ambitious, and he's favoured. It's
happened before, in the sixties, and since then. One man doing both
jobs. Babbington's the man, apparently."

"You must owe Aubrey a great deal," Massinger suggested.

"I do," Shelley replied frostily, his face twisted into an ugly
grimace as he drained his glass. He evidently disliked being reminded
of his debts, especially by someone outside his service, and an
American, at that. Massinger controlled his anger. "And I'm aware of
it, and I'm grateful. But, I can do
nothing
." He leaned
confidentially towards Massinger. "To begin with, JIC has impounded all
the papers, the tapes, everything. Sir William sent in some people and
they took stuff away by the lorryload. And I just
can't
get
you a transcript of the
Teardrop
file. It's much too hot and
much too jealously guarded. I haven't even
seen
a copy. Any
one of the few copies in existence would be missed immediately. I can't
do it. The old man's being sent to the wall, Professor. There's nothing
to be done about it."

Massinger sighed impatiently, admitting inwardly that Shelley was
right. He was not even craven, simply right. "What about Hyde?"

"Mm. Vienna Station say he's disappeared. They've heard nothing from
him."

"You don't believe that, do you?"

"Patrick Hyde's a funny bloke - but he wouldn't leave the old man up
to his eyeballs in the shit without a very good reason."

"Then what does he know, or suspect? What did he see or hear that
night?"

"I've no idea."

"And you're not curious?"

"I can't get hold of him without going through Vienna Station. And I
can't do that with any hope of secrecy. Hyde's cut off. He might even
be dead."

"Why should he be dead?"

"I don't know," Shelley whispered fiercely with growing
exasperation. "But unless he calls in, no one is ever going to find out
what spooked him."

"What's his home address?"

"I —" Shelley paused, then added: "I'll write it down for you." He
scribbled on the back of an envelope. Massinger pocketed it without
reading the address. "He won't be there."

"Would there be anyone else at home?"

Shelley looked thoughtful. "There's a woman upstairs - she actually
owns the place. His landlady. I've no idea
what
their real
relationship is. Most odd…" He shrugged.

"Would he trust her? In trouble, would he try to contact her?"

"I don't know. Perhaps…"

Massinger leaned forward. "Look," he said, "you don't believe any of
this nonsense against Aubrey, do you?"

Shelley shook his head. He looked young and cunning and ambitious
and embarrassed. "No, of course not —"

"Then —?"

"I
can't
—!" he protested. His long index finger tapped
the tablecloth, then stirred the crumbs from his bread roll as he
continued. "There's nothing that can be done to help him, Professor. I
know
that. I'm there every day. No one is going to help him buck JIC, the
Cabinet Office, and HMG. No one wants it to happen, but they can't
fight it." He looked up from the curling comet's tail of crumbs on the
white cloth. He shook his head emphatically. "Nothing can be done. The
old man's beyond saving."

In the foyer of the Inter-Continental Hotel, Hyde passed a row of
long mirrors which reflected a man he might not have recognised had he
not created him. The glass windows of the souvenir shop mirrored him
more palely than wide-skirted dolls and curved wooden pipes. Then the
window of the newspaper shop caught and held him again. But the face
that stared back at him from the front page of the evening newspaper
suddenly exposed the truth, masked only by the moustache, the clear
spectacles and the three-piece business suit. His own face - the
familiar one that confronted him in his shaving mirror and the face of
the man who had slept rough for two nights in Vienna, by the river and
then in an alley behind a restaurant - stared at him from the rack. His
disguise was at once useless and foolish. Gingerly, he took one of the
newspapers, flinching as a large, middle-aged Austrian did the same
before passing into the shop to pay for it. Hyde opened the paper. The
small headline and the story lay below the photograph. The snapshot was
official. It matched his passport photograph. It
was
his
passport photograph. SIS must have supplied it.

Drugs. Wanted for suspected drug offences.

KGB - SIS - Viennese police.

He felt the weight of the falling net upon his shoulders.

Upstairs, in the suite he had booked with the passport he had stolen
on the metro, the rest of his new clothes, the too-large suitcase that
was part of his cover, the new toothbrush and comb and after-shave all
waited like props he could no longer use because the play had closed.
He had booked into one of Vienna's most expensive hotels because it
would be among the small hotels and pensions that they would look for
him first.

Now, drugs. He was a police matter. He shuffled the clear-glass
spectacles on the bridge of his nose, fingered the pads in his cheeks;
his disguise seemed pitiful, amateurish. He thrust the newspaper back
into the rack, and walked away from the shop. Arabs lingered over
coffee in the foyer, a group of Americans queued at Reception, there
was laughter from the bar. He reached the lifts, then paused.

What —? Who —?

He had not dared attempt to hire a car, or try the airport or the
railway stations. Now, he might have to. Now he had to get out of
Vienna before his face began to stare nightmarishly at him from
lamp-posts and newspaper and metro station walls and trolley-bus
windows. This was only the opening bombardment. The pressure would
increase, the crimes grow in enormity, his capture become more
essential.