by Craig Thomas
Petrunin cackled, and coughed. No blood, but his head lolled as if his body were sinking in something; or filling. His whole form lolled. Ballast shifting, Hyde thought, then: Nothing … I don't have … not even paper, no tape, no record, nothing…
It was if the Russian could read his thoughts. "You see?" he asked. "You have no proof. You have nothing. You cannot even escape, I think…" He leaned back, as if trying to sink into the rock. His face was colourless, his eyes, unfocused, studied the rock above their heads.
"Then help me," Hyde replied desperately. "Help me to screw the bastards. Help me screw the people who want you dead — who've already done for you." He leaned his head towards Petrunin until their faces almost touched. He could feel no breath from the Russian warming his cheek. "Help me. They've killed you. Help me spoil their bloody game."
"How?" Petrunin asked, and then the realisation of what Hyde had said gripped him. He was afraid. Even knowing, he had not wished to hear it pronounced. Hyde had sentenced him. "No—" he spluttered. Blood poured from his lips, staining his chin, staining Hyde. It felt warm, ugly and final. Hyde gripped the Russian's arms, almost hugging him like a lover.
"Come on, you clever, clever bastard — where's the proof? Tell me where the proof is and I'll spoil their fucking game for them. Come on…" He was holding Petrunin now, the man's head against him, mouth pressed to Hyde's ear. Wet. His chin was resting on Hyde's shoulder. "Come on," the Australian whispered urgently, afraid of time unravelling utterly in the next few moments. Only minutes now — less perhaps…
"It's all on computer — you couldn't get hold of it… only I could do that — from — from inside a Soviet embassy…" Hyde groaned. He wanted to push Petrunin's body away from him in protest, but some instinct made him hold on. Or perhaps it was merely sympathy. Petrunin, unnoticing and undeterred, continued to murmur against Hyde's ear. His lips were frothily wet. Hyde shuddered. His stomach felt hollow with loathing and disappointment.
Babbington was unassailable — he was British Intelligence, just as Aubrey had been. Hyde had nothing. In itself, without proof, the knowledge was worthless, futile. Babbington was the man in the high castle; impenetrable. Petrunin continued, as if with some litany of confession. It was evident, in his remote and inhuman whisper, that he was mocking Hyde even as he wished him to know and to be able to do something. Revenge and amusement.
"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.
Babbington again smiled to himself, moving one or two steps nearer the head of the staircase. Moscow Centre was nothing if not pragmatic. Even he could be risked in order to test his quality. Well, he'd done it. This little crisis, just a hiccough, would last no more than another twenty-four hours — especially if they killed Petrunin and Hyde in Afghanistan, as should have been done with Petrunin in the first place.
He'd liked Tamas Petrunin when he had been London Rezident. He was the sort of KGB staff o
fficer one could admire, admit as an equal in mind and taste and dedication. Unlike the peasant Kapustin. Nevertheless, sentiment would not have interfered. The moment Teardrop was activated, that should have been the end of it. No dropped clues, no loose threads. Petrunin would have disappeared.
Babbington reached the head of the staircase and looked back. There were muted noises from the traffic outside, and a ratlike scrabbling from some ground floor storeroom behind the importer's offices. Otherwise, silence. All would be well… There was no real emergency, only individuals; stings, not a swarm. Pieces of little value to be removed from the board; a small matter with the power he now possessed.
Moscow Centre would assume him satisfied now. He had reached the pinnacle. What they had never understood was his motive. He had joined them in the wake of Suez. 1956. They assumed, as they always did when ideology and money were not involved — as they were not in his case — that power was the answer. The secret, convoluted, game-playing power that Philby and Blunt and the others had enjoyed, whatever their ideological protestations. Their gratification was not his. His was subtler, more refined.
The warmth of self-congratulation spread through his strong frame. He would indulge it, keep Oleg waiting a moment longer.
It was to avoid being powerful simply and only in a third-rate way. To avoid being no more than a secret, powerful cog in the machinery of a third-rate world power. He despised the pinnacle of secret power on a mountain-top where those who ruled felt the appropriate and glorious last move in the Great Game was the reinvasion of the Falkland Islands. The brouhaha of that incident had nauseated him — even made him shiver with self-regarding embarrassment now, as he stood at the head of the stairs — and left him more than ever confirmed in his chosen secret path.
He might never have been a traitor, as they termed it, had he been born a century earlier. England would then have been able to offer him everything he wanted. He would have been vital, crucial, to a first-rate power, to the world power…