The Bear's Tears (48 page)

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 officer 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…

In the 'fifties, he could not turn to America - had they been
the
enemy in whose ranks he could have secretly enlisted, he would have
done so - and thus he had turned East, to Moscow. To the Soviet Union,
to the KGB, he was as important as Kapustin, as important as the
Chairman, almost as important as First Secretary Nikitin. For that
secret pinnacle, for that value to be placed upon him, he had waited
for almost thirty years. For that he had worked, for that he had made
his original choice, treachery rather than loyalty. He was one of the
most important figures in the hierarchy of a superpower. England, now
bankrupt and laughable as she was, proved every day to his immense
satisfaction that he had chosen wisely.

He crossed the narrow, linoleumed landing almost blithely, and
opened the door. The musty passageway was unlit, but there was a dim
light from the lounge beyond. Yes, Oleg would be sitting there with his
silly little headphones on, his foot perhaps tapping in rhythm to some
unheard jazz.

Babbington smiled. Twenty-four hours, no more than that. That is
what Oleg would want to hear, and that is what Babbington felt himself
able to guarantee.

"Babbington played a very uncharacteristically minor role in the
ensuing investigations… His absences, his pattern of behaviour - they
could be regarded as suspicious with ease, my dear
fellow."

Zimmermann watched Massinger carefully slicing at his portion of
apfelstrudel
with a small pastry fork. The American deliberately would not look up,
nor would his wife. It was infuriating. Even their mutual choice of the
homely German dessert seemed like a species of insult.

The dining-room of the Königshof was almost deserted. They were
some
of the last guests enjoying - no, not that word, Zimmermann instructed
himself… enduring a late supper. Behind them, the river
glittered with, lights reflected from both banks of the Rhine.
Navigation lights moved on the river apparently without solid forms
beneath them. Rain pattered against the huge windows.

When Massinger did not reply, Zimmermann pursued: "I have made a
great many telephone calls this evening, since I left you…" He had
rushed, in an unseemly way, from the hothouse of that hotel room,
escaping the tense, violent, heady emotions sparking between the
American and his wife. He had plunged into the pursuit of his
intuitions regarding Babbington as into a cold, refreshing swimming
pool. Babbington had indulged a brief affair with a married woman
during his residence in Bonn in '74; it was the perfect cover, if it
was a cover. "There is a woman in prison in Cologne…"

Massinger looked up. His eyes were abstracted, hardly focused.
"What?" was all he said.

Margaret Massinger continued to devote her attention to her
dessert,
picking at it without appetite. Zimmermann realised that the woman was
determined. For her, there were no more decisions to be taken. They had
all been made. Zimmermann cursed himself once more for giving them the
address of Clara Elsenreith as a peace-token between them when he
returned to the Königshof to join them for supper. The instant, greedy
lights in their eyes had predicted the manner of this conversation and
its outcome. He was no more than a boring pedagogue on the last day of
term, insisting on unremitting study while the sun shone outside and
the holidays stretched ahead.

"Prison. She was arrested two years ago, on charges arising
from…
for war crimes. She still has not been brought to trial. I intend to
see her. She was the secretary assigned to Babbington during his
residence here… he used her flat for - his assignations, you see."
Zimmermann spoke without pause or interruption, as if speed and
emphasis would attract their deeper attention.

Massinger stared with little interest across the table.
Margaret,
Zimmermann could tell, was alert but stubbornly refusing to accept the
importance of the subject he had broached.

"What - what do you expect to learn?"

"The truth of Babbington's story - what else?" Zimmermann
snapped.
He dabbed his lips with his napkin, his own dessert of cheesecake
finished.

"You think Babbington's the man?"

"I don't think, I merely suspect."

"But that's nonsense —!" Massinger burst out, as if all that had
been said to him had only just impinged on his reason. "That's too
fantastic to be true."

Margaret looked up, shaking her head. "The idea of Andrew being
a
traitor is ridiculous," she said calmly, with utter, dismissive
certainty. "Impossible," she added as she saw his expression change to
one of anger.

Zimmermann remembered the murmured promises, over and over
repeated,
that the American had made to this woman. It had been like overhearing
the whispers of approaching climax, having strayed into a darkened
bedroom where copulation was taking place. Promises, adorings,
devotion, deep passion. It had made him flee the room. Now, he realised
it blinded and determined them. Tomorrow, they would travel to Vienna
to see Clara Elsenreith.

Zimmermann had sent no one, had not spoken to the woman himself.
It
was cowardice, he acknowledged. He did not wish to know.

But they did. More than anything; more than safety, more than
friendship, more than the future, they had to know. Who killed
Castleford, and why.

Zimmermann understood the woman. She was behind it. Her whole
being
rejected the idea that her father could have been, might have been, was
ever a Nazi. To disprove that monstrous fiction, she had to know from
Clara that, if he was killed by Aubrey, it was a crime of passion. That
she would accept, her father's death as an adulterer. But never a Nazi,
at one with the beasts of the past.

It was hopeless. He would never convince them.

"Will you promise me to come back - once you have spoken with
Frau
Elsenreith - and help me?" he pleaded.

Even now they hesitated, as if they could not see that far
ahead;
cautious investors in an uncertain future, machines programmed for one
simple, immediate task. It was as if they mutually assumed everything
would be over, ended, once they knew the truth of Berlin in 1946. He
sighed inwardly. Anger and frustration were as palpable.as indigestion.
Why could they not see -?

"We'll - yes, but we can't promise until we - we've been to
Vienna,"
Massinger replied lamely after a long, embarrassing silence. Margaret
touched his hand, as if to strengthen a flagging resolve.

God, Zimmermann thought - God in Heaven!

"I see," he said coldly, rebuffing them. He laid his
napkin
on the table. He wished to be cruel, so added: "Remember you are known
in Vienna. Be careful. Employ your old professional
instincts, my friend." He stood up, nodded a stiff little bow towards
Margaret, who remained silent, then announced: "I shall go to Cologne
at once. I am concerned to hear this woman's story. Good night - and
good luck."

Massinger made as if to rise. Zimmermann waved him back onto his
chair, and left with a firm military step.

The snow in his mouth and nostrils was choking him. It hadn't
melted
and run icily into his throat. His eyes were caked with snow and he was
blind. He brushed at them, opened them, coughing out the snow and
sneezing. He sat up quickly to clear his nose by violent blowing. He
was white from head to foot, encrusted with snow.

The soldier was standing over him, Kalashnikov pointed towards
the
middle of Hyde's form. The Australian looked up, searching the pale
young face for nerves, for apprehension and doubt and the need for
prompt support. He found everything he sought, and rolled over slowly,
clutching his right arm with his left, groaning.

"Stay still," the young soldier warned. Hyde continued to roll
slowly until his right arm was masked by his body. Melted snow trickled
down his back like a trail of fear. His chest and stomach were icy with
the melted snow he had swallowed. He reached carefully behind him and
drew the Makarov automatic that had once, long ago, belonged to the
young lieutenant he had killed. He sat up, gun masked by his thigh,
then shot the Russian soldier twice, once in the stomach, bringing his
head forward, then a second time through the forehead, just above the
left eye. The Russian's body sprang away from him, as if in surprise at
some electric shock, and lay unmoving in the snow.

He had killed the man without calculation as an immediate
response
to the threat of capture. He looked up the furrow of disturbed snow
that indicated his fall. The flying-buttress of the ridge stretched up
and away from him and was empty of other troops. They'd split up, then
- probably on orders from the nearest helicopter; the one he could hear
clattering up the side of the mountain, still well below his own
altitude. The sky was now uniformly grey.

He scrambled to his feet and fought his way up the slope,
slipping
and staggering in the deep drifted snow, eventually reaching the ridge
once more. Still no one. He skirted the hidden crevasse and climbed the
buttress to the point where it joined the face of the mountain. Slowly,
with caution that memory advised, he edged his way along the narrow,
snow-hidden ledge that climbed around the mountainside, no wider than a
goat-track, its precise dimensions fattened and masked by the snow. He
rubbed his back against the rock for the sense of security its contact
gave him as he moved.

Gradually, he moved out of sight of the place where he had
fallen,
where the dead Russian lay. He was perhaps a couple of hundred feet
above the overhang where Petrunin lay. He was exposed above the tree
line. After twenty minutes, he could see the most distant and higher
peaks, beyond Parachinar and in Pakistan, tinted with gold.The sky had
lost its leaden greyness. The cloud was wispy and thin and the snow had
stopped. The ledge broadened ahead of him into a path where two men
could have walked abreast, climbing steeply to the sharp crease in the
mountain that gave access to the long, narrow valley at the other end
of which lay Pakistan.

He began moving more quickly now, wishing he had stolen the dead
Russian's R/T and so enabling himself to keep in contact with his
pursuers, monitoring their progress, their distance from him. He was
bent and worn, leaning forward as he jogged desultorily, his head
beginning to fill with the noises of his own heartbeat and breathing,
emptying of everything else - Petrunin, the computer retrieval that was
no more than a pipe-dream unless you were Petrunin himself or a KGB
Deputy Chairman; Miandad, Mohammed Jan, the Pathans, the dead young
Russian below the ridge - whose Kalashnikov he had forgotten, like his
R/T - his last footsteps, the noise of helicopters…

All faded. To each step there were numerous heartbeats. One
ragged
breath each time a foot was lifted and moved - the snow was thinner
here, because the wind sliced it off the path like a knife, cutting
through him too, freezing him - and almost ten hurried beats of his
heart before each step was complete and the next one begun. He laboured
upwards with increasing slowness, staggering from time to time, those
times when he failed to lower his foot quickly enough to keep his
balance. His breath came more and more quickly because the air seemed
so thin and cold. He couldn't get enough of it into his lungs with a
single deep breath, and yet did not want to breathe deeply because of
the searing pain caused by its coldness. His stubble was frosty where
his breath had frozen on his skin and hair. He did not look at his
watch - he did not become or remain aware of his wrist which wore his
watch at the end of his left arm unless he needed that arm to drive on,
to adjust his balance, to plunge into the thin snow and lever his body
forward…