Sea Leopard

'You must believe me, you must!'

'I don't, Dmitri. Now, what bloody game are you playing?' The girl was obviously going to bath with tassels on her nipples. She slid down into the supposed water.

Then Vassiliev's eyes began moving, darting round the room. Hyde forced himself not to turn round. It did not mean there was someone in the room, only that there were others, either nearby or simply giving orders. Hyde gripped his thigh with his free hand, forcing the calm of angered puzzlement into his frame and face and voice. 'What bloody game are you playing, mate?' The girl had divested herself of the' negligee, but not the tassels. She was stroking herself with the loofah.

'No game, Mr Hyde, no game!' Vassiliev was leaning towards him like a lover in the hot darkness, but he could not keep his eyes on Hyde's face. Escape, help, answers. He repeated the formula they had taught him. 'Three men left in that plane for Paris. Yes, they want the girl, but they have Quin in Moscow — I'm certain of it.'

'You don't know who the third man was. It couldn't have been Quin — ' Hyde found himself engaged in an attempt to justify the suspicions he had voiced to Aubrey; as if he believed Vassiliev. The girl was on the point of engaging in intercourse with the loofah. Soon she would be dropping the soap. 'No,' he said, 'you're lying, Dmitri. Why should they want you to lie?'

'They? What do you mean?' Too innocent.

'You weren't lying or mistaken at lunchtime. You knew, then. Now, you're working for them. Did they ask you how much you told me? Did they?' Hyde's face was close to Vassiliev. He could smell the man's last meal on his breath, and the brandy after dinner. Too much brandy — no, they wouldn't have allowed him more than one or two. 'They knew about you all the time, but they didn't let on. Not until they realised you must have told me more than was good for me.' He was shaking Vassiliev's hand, in anger and in community. The girl had dropped the soap, which did not slide across the stage. Her enormous breasts were hung over the side of the bath as she attempted to retrieve it. The trio was playing palm court music. The prissy, virginal sweetness of it assailed Hyde. 'You were doing all right until you told me you thought they didn't have Quin. And you know it!'

'I — must go,' Vassiliev said. Now the soap was back in the bath, but lost again. The girl was looking for it on her hands and knees. Snake-charmer music, and she rose to her feet, backside to the audience, buttocks proffered, swaying.

'You're going nowhere. Where are they?'

'Not here, not here!'

'You're coming in, Dmitri.'

'No!'

'You have to. We'll take care of you. I can't behave as if I believe you. You're the one in danger now.' Vassiliev had thought of it, but had ignored it. He shook his head, as if the idea was only a pain that would move, dissipate. The girl had the loofah again, standing up now, in profile to the room. The loofah was being energetically applied. 'Come on,' Hyde added.

'No! I can't leave with you, I can't!'

'Why not?'

'I can't!' He was pleading now. They were outside. If he emerged with Hyde, they would know Hyde had not swallowed the tale. The almost religious silence of the room was broken by hoarse cries of encouragement, underscored with what seemed like a communal giggle. The girl's body acknowledged the response to her performance.

'You can!' The gun, the gun — he'd left it at his flat, held it in his hand, almost amused, for a moment before stuffing it under a pile of shirts in a drawer. The gun —

'No, no, no — ' Vassiliev was shaking his head vehemently.

'It's your only chance. Come on, the back way.' Hyde got up, stood over the Russian, willing him to his feet. Vassiliev rose, and they shuffled through the tables towards the toilets. The door into the concrete, ill-lit corridor sighed shut behind them.

Vassiliev immediately turned to him. 'No,' he said.

“They concocted this story, right?' Vassiliev nodded, nerveless, directionless now. 'Why?'

'I don't know. They told me they had known, that they had fed you the information about Quin through me, deliberately. Then yesterday happened, and while they were deciding what to do about me, we talked. I–I told them everything.' A sense of shame, as sharp as a physical pain, crossed his features.

'It's all right, it's all right — was there anyone in the club?

Vassiliev shook his head. There was applause on the other side of the door. 'Come on.'

Hyde half-pushed Vassiliev towards the emergency exit beyond the toilet. He heaved at the bar, remembered letting in friends by similar doors in Wollongong cinemas just before the start of the main feature, then the door swung open. The windy night cried in the lightless alley. He paused momentarily, and looked at Vassiliev. Then he nodded.

They went through the door almost together, but even so the man with the gun must have been able to distinguish between them. Vassiliev cried out — Hyde hardly heard the brief plopping sound of the silenced gun before the Russian's murmured cry — then he slumped against Hyde, dragging at his clothes, smearing the front of the Australian's shirt with something dark and sticky. Then he fell back, for a moment his face green from the exit sign's light, then all of him was simply a barely distinguishable bundle of clothes on the other side of the alley. Hyde waited for the noise of footsteps above the wind's dry call, or the sound of another stone-into-water plop that would be the last sound he would ever hear.

Chapter Three: INTRUDER

The gilded French clock on the marble mantelpiece chimed twelve, a bright, pinging, musical sound. Aubrey paused in his narrative, and he and Sir Richard Cunningham, Director of the Secret Intelligence Service, listened to the sound, watching the blue-numeralled face of the clock. When the chimes had ended, Aubrey stared into his brandy balloon, aware of how out of place his employment of technological and military jargon seemed here, in the study of Cunningham's flat in Eaton Place. Books and paintings — Cunningham had a small Braque and two Picasso etchings in that room — heavy furniture, civilisation. A conspiracy to belie the reality of detection systems, anti- sonar, satellites and distress signals in broken codes. Aubrey, for a moment, wished devoutly for a double agent, for the intimacies of a debriefing or an interrogation, for the clear boundary between SIS and MoD. Clark had pushed him across that border.

Cunningham had hardly spoken throughout Aubrey's recital of events, suspicions, fears. He had assiduously filled and refilled Aubrey's glass and his own, refrained from smoking a cigar, and listened, his half-closed eyes regarding his slippered feet crossed at the ankles. The book he had been reading when Lady Cunningham had shown in Aubrey lay on the occasional table at the side of his chair, the Bach to which he had been listening lay still on the turntable, his half-glasses rested on the end of his patrician nose, and his lips were set in a firm, expressionless line. Aubrey felt extremely reluctant to continue.

Then Cunningham spoke. 'What, exactly, do you wish to do, Kenneth?'

'Go in there — assess the situation for myself.'

'I see. You know how MoD regards us. You know how the navy regards itself. It's tricky. You' ve no just cause or impediment, after all.'

'I realise that, Richard. However, there is a mutuality of interest that might be stressed. Quin —'

'Ah, yes. MoD will tell us that he is our proper concern, one of Her Majesty's submarines more properly their sphere of authority. They will not take kindly to you suggesting they should reverse their decision. Nor will Brussels, nor will Washington. Sure you're not simply acting the old warhorse smelling the battle afar off?'

Aubrey smiled. 'I don't think so.'

'Mm. Neither do I. Devilish tricky, though. I can quite well see the importance of this anti-sonar system, and of Quin, and of keeping both out of Soviet hands. But we are not the experts, we are not the military. They don't seem to believe there is any risk — this man Clark, the American. Trust