The Bear's Tears kaaph-4

by Craig Thomas

  The Bear's Tears

  ( Kenneth Aubrey and Patrick Hyde - 4 )

  Craig Thomas

  The trap was baited and waiting. Waiting for forty years and MI5's Aubrey to step right into it… And then one of British Intelligence's most formidable figures would be heading for disgrace and British Intelligence would be heading for disaster.

  But Aubrey still had one or two tricks up his sleeve. And one or two friends determined that things would not go according to plan. Friends, like, Hyde his Australian right-hand man, who were prepared to risk everything on the bloody killing fields of Afghanistan and on the unsafe streets of Prague to seek the secret of Teardrop — the secret buried in the black heart of Moscow Centre.

  Craig Thomas

  The Bear's Tears

  Dedication

  The tenth like the first is for JILL with all my love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Apart from my habitual thanks to my wife for her editing of this, my longest novel to date, I wish to especially thank Peter Matthews for his invaluable assistance with the theft of information from the KGB's central computer which appears in Part Three of the book. Any errors, distortion or license of method or terminology are my responsibility, not his.

  Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

  Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,

  A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:

  Those scraps are good deeds past: which are devoured

  As fast as they are made, forgot as soon

  As done.

  — Shakespeare: Troilus & Cressida, III, iii

  PRELUDES

  I have done the state some service, and they know't -

  No more of that.

  — Shakespeare: Othello, V, ii

  Quick—

  Remember what they told you, the front cover of the file first. A proper sense of occasion, and the laying out of your wares…

  Camera joggle. Remember that. You must be in a hurry, and nervous… It must all be slightly out of focus, especially at the beginning.

  The electronic flash flared onto the paper he could see through the lens, a small sunburst but much whiter than sunlight. Teardrop, the file proclaimed in the Cyrillic alphabet. The other words and reference numbers signified its importance, and the fact that it was consigned for immediate incineration, its contents having been transferred to tape and stored in Moscow Centre's principal security computer.

  Teardrop. A man's history. A special history.

  He turned the cover of the file, exposing the first of the pages it contained. A digest. Photograph that, they had said. No matter the urgency or the effects of your fear, you would have obtained at least that much in the way of bona fides. The earliest date was 1946, the last as recent as a month before. And the file was still not closed.

  Camera joggle, he reminded himself. It had already become too mechanical, too skilled and unhurried. Pages one to five without a break, without a tremor. Perhaps practice did not make perfect. How many times had he done this…?

  Make certain the grey metal shelving appears in the top corner of some of the shots. Authenticity. Skip pages…

  He flicked over the seemingly ancient sheets, the torn-out pages of notebooks, the letters, the carbons of signals received, splaying them like cards against the background of the buff folder and the dusty floor of the cold records basement. No need for induced joggle, induced fear; he was shivering with cold now.

  Live through it — they will ask you about these moments, again and again… they will ask, seeking to verify, to prove…

  Fear — footsteps? He tried to imagine the hostile ring of bootsteps in the concrete, striplit corridor outside the door. Flick on the pages. Flash, flash, flash — white light glaring on the passing, momentary sheets of paper. His knee would be at the edge of one shot — he congratulated himself for that simple, homely, authentic touch. Part of the series of interrogations from 1946. Then he flicked on quickly, the pages now becoming very distressed, spread untidily on the concrete between the racks of grey metal shelves…

  Then it was no longer 1946, it was the last two years…

  Joggle the camera — but not too much…

  Remember what you feel at each moment, associate feelings and experiences with some of the pages…

  What was that? A meeting in Helsinki last year. Footsteps on the concrete outside, halting…? He managed to frighten himself in the darkness, his eyes still dazzled from the last exposure.

  On again, flash, flash…

  The last page. No, not the last one nor the penultimate, not even the one before that…

  Then he had finished. He shivered with the cold and the returning darkness. His legs, up to the bent knees, were invested with an aching cramp. He could hear his own breathing. It might, after all, have all been real — all his, emotions.

  He sighed aloud.

  "Well done," came a voice from the darkness. So he had been convincing, he told himself, his body jumping at the sudden words. "You'd like a drink now, I expect?"

  The last white sheets in the Teardrop file had acquired a faint, snow-reflected gleam as he recovered his night vision. Yes, you are committed now, he told himself. Your fate is in these pages, with his.

  Him. The subject of the Teardrop file.

  "Yes," he replied, clearing his throat in the echoing dark. "I would like a drink."

  * * *

  Patrick Hyde watched Kenneth Aubrey as he and the Russian left the ferry in the wake of holidaymakers intent on reaching the gates of the zoo. Hyde disliked the fact that Aubrey was not wired for sound, in deference to the Russian's unaccustomed nervousness. He felt cut off from his superior, hampered in his task of protecting Aubrey.

  He waited until the ferry was empty of passengers. There did not appear to be any contradiction between Deputy Chairman Kapustin's given word that he was alone and Hyde's own surveillance. If there were KGB bodyguards, they were unusually unobtrusive. Hyde strolled down the gangplank and along the quay towards the pine trees that masked the Korkeasaari Island Zoo. Behind him, across the breeze-ruffled, gleaming water, Helsinki was white and pink and innocent in the summer afternoon.

  Hyde was still irritated by the fact that Aubrey had forbidden him to search Kapustin for a weapon or a microphone. Aubrey's face, as he unwound the lead from his waist and undipped the microphone from his shirt, had been smug with trust. Hyde's blunter sensibilities did not enable him to trust Kapustin, even though these meetings were almost two years old.

  Nothing new. A long, unfruitful courtship. Kapustin, by his words but not his actions, wished to defect to the West. A full Deputy Chairman of the KGB, Inspector-General of First Chief Directorate, Operations and Personnel. The glittering prize which dazzled Aubrey.

  Ahead of him, fifty yards away against the backcloth of summer shirts and bright dresses, Aubrey and Kapustin strolled towards the turnstiles at the entrance to the zoo. A lion roared in the distance. Children gasped or squeaked with anticipation. Nothing dangerous moved beneath the heavy, aromatic pines, yet Hyde could not relax. There was no danger, nothing more than his persistent, recurring sense of wrongness. Everything was wrong about this — what, perhaps the tenth or even fifteenth meeting between Aubrey and Kapustin? Kapustin the reluctant virgin. Kapustin vacillating, refusing to commit himself, worried about the money, the new identity, the place of residence. Leading Aubrey by the nose.

  A red and yellow ball rolled across the path at Hyde's feet. A small boy in shorts, freckled and palely blond, chased it, then trotted away towards his parents, picnicking beneath the trees on wooden benches where sunlight poured down on them. Midges hung in the air like visible motes of their laughter.

  He queued behind Kapustin and Au
brey, then kept twenty yards back as they walked the narrow paths between goat pens. A llama watched Hyde with the superior stare of a civil servant and bison grazed against a high mesh fence.

  Wrong, he reminded himself. Disgruntled, too. Fed up with acting as Aubrey's bodyguard on this periodic tour of European capitals. The meetings were arranged to coincide with Kapustin's visits of inspection to the Soviet embassies of Western Europe — Berlin, Vienna, Bonn, Stockholm, Madrid, London, Helsinki. Each time, Kapustin supplied high-level gossip, Politburo insights, evidence of shifts of power and opinion — and excuses for not coming over. Demanding twice the money or twice the security, perhaps even twice the flattery.

  Kapustin and Aubrey had halted in front of a monkey cage. Small, furry, whiskered faces watched them, small hands clutched towards them through the bars. Harsh voices demanded and insulted. Aubrey appeared earnest; Kapustin, taller and heavier, seemed to lean over him, a schoolmaster over a pupil trying to rush at a solution. Aubrey's expression was a mirror of the cross, pinched face of the Capuchin monkey that watched the two men through the bars. Hyde watched the crowd around them, watched the cameras and the eyes. Nothing.

  The exasperation was clear on Aubrey's face beneath the straw trilby. Kapustin gestured broadly, a non-committal shrug. Hyde moved closer to the barrier in front of the cage. A small grey monkey skittered away from him along a branch that led nowhere, as if he represented a palpable threat.

  "Double agent? We are not asking you to be that, Dmitri," Aubrey was saying in a quiet, urgent voice. "Why do you persist with the idea? It was your request — you contacted me, Dmitri. Directly. Personally."

  "As if I were waking a sleeper?" Kapustin murmured.

  "Quite." Aubrey refused to smile at the remark. "Ever since then, you have toyed with us, with me."

  "I apologize." Kapustin watched Hyde for a moment as the Australian drifted closer, his eyes looking away from the monkey cage. In the distance, the lion roared again. Then Kapustin returned his attention to Aubrey. "You have been very helpful, you have done everything…" he murmured.

  "My duty, no more than that," Aubrey observed stiffly. "What you offered could not be ignored. But why hesitate now — again and for so long?"

  "I cannot decide between you and the Americans."

  "Money? Is that it?"

  "Would it be money with you?"

  "No. The situation would not arise."

  "Obviously not, now that Cunningham is to retire."

  "You know, of course."

  "You are confidently expected to take his place as the Director-General. You will, of course?"

  Aubrey brushed at the air with his hand. "That's irrelevant."

  "Your real work can begin then."

  "Perhaps. Listen to me, Dmitri. The period of courtship is over. Your decision is awaited. You must decide. You must act."

  Hyde drifted away from the two men. Their voices became lost in the screeching of the monkeys and the noise of children. The same conversation, the endless tape-loop of persuasion and hesitancy. Kapustin playing with Aubrey, wasting everyone's time. Elaborate verbal games, continual amusements…

  Hyde let the thought go in the babble of a school party of pigtailed girls and crop-headed boys, bustled past him by an efficient schoolmistress. A blob of vanilla ice-cream appeared on his brown corduroy trousers. He grinned and wiped it away. The idea of ice-cream appealed to him as he vented his irritation on the two old men behind him.

  Teardrop. Kapustin's codename, suggested by the Russian himself at that first meeting in Paris. He looked back. The two men were surrounded by the shuffling party of schoolchildren. The strident voice of their teacher lectured them. The image of Aubrey and Kapustin was harmless, even risible. Nothing would come of Teardrop. Hyde did not expect the KGB Deputy Chairman to defect — not this year, not next year nor the year after that. Aubrey was still not even certain of the man's motives for wishing to defect. A vague disillusion seemed insufficient to explain him. Teardrop. It didn't mask some personal tragedy, as far as SIS could establish. It meant nothing, just a codename.

  Mechanically, Hyde watched the cameras and the eyes, then the paths and the trees. Nothing. He yawned, felt bored, and wished for action.

  Kapustin and Aubrey passed him then, returning to the gates, deep in urgent conversation. Unimportant. Nothing. Teardrop was a waste of everyone's time.

  Slowly, unalert, he began to follow the two old men.

  * * *

  "This is now the actor, from yesterday?" Kapustin asked in the darkness at the back of the room. The film whirred in the projector. Cigarette smoke drifted in the beam of white light that reached towards the wall screen.

  "Yes, Comrade Deputy Chairman."

  "The cloud shadows don't look right to me. You've got the time of day OK, and the glare of the sun. But there was more of a breeze today. There aren't enough shadows."

  Kapustin watched his own back moving away from the camera, accompanied by a figure apparently that of Kenneth Aubrey. The actor bore little facial resemblance to the Englishman, but from this viewpoint he was identical. The walk was good, very good, the attitude of the shoulders and the head slightly on one side, like a listening bird. The straw trilby was habitual summer wear with Aubrey, and it was fortunate he had worn it that afternoon.

  "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.