The Bear's Tears

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