The Bear's Tears

She mustn't look as if she were waiting for them, she must be caught—!

Cautiously, bent almost double, she crept to Babbington's window. If Paul was dead, she was meekly surrendering… She crushed the rebellious thought. She reached the window, touched the sill with her fingertips and raised her head to look into the room.

Light on her face, light on the gravel around her, footsteps on the gravel—

Snarl of a dog!

Dog — light — gravel — voice. She was frozen with terror. Footsteps running. She listened in horror for the dog's paws beating on the gravel. She heard it growl — footsteps, the noise of heavy boots, running. She waited, frozen, for the dog's attack.

Then she turned her face into the torch's beam. The man who held it laughed with surprise and pleasure. The dog, still restrained by the second man, growled then barked viciously. She glanced away from the torch. Babbington's head had turned. His face seemed white and somehow broken open, as if he were confronted by an accusing ghost. Snow blew against Margaret's cheek, against the window. Babbington appeared shaken from a deep trance by the noise it made, perhaps by the dog's continued barking. Then, slowly and with growing pleasure, he smiled.

And spoke into the telephone, quickly and urgently and with evident triumph on his features. He had seen her held by the man with the torch, his hand gripping her arm.

Her captor spoke: 'Good evening, Mrs Massinger. So nice of you to drop in.'

She turned her head to stare at the dog's open mouth, its white teeth and pink tongue kept away from her by the strained-tight choke-chain and leash. She sagged with relief and weakness against the man who held her arm.

'Margaret — Massinger's wife, she's here!' Babbington blurted into the telephone, unable to consider disguising his relief and surprised delight. 'We've got her! Now, you keep your side of the bargain, Kapustin—!'

'Very well,' Kapustin replied at once. 'Very well. Ignoring your remarkable good fortune — I shall try to persuade both the President and my Chairman to adopt your plan.'

'Excellent—!'

'The scheme will not be popular, but I expect it will be adopted. Yes, I expect so. Have everything ready for tomorrow night. Aubrey and the Massingers. We will dispose of them for you.'

* * *

Godwin watched the neighbour's thin black cat as he might have watched an enemy. Then, he collected his crutches from either side of his chair and struggled upright, finally shuffling away from the dining-table to the corner of the kitchen. Someone must have brought the brand-name cat food back with them after a London leave, Hyde thought. It wouldn't be on sale in Prague. Godwin unwrapped the tin from a polythene bag that contained its odours and knived chunks of it onto a yellow saucer. Then he placed it on the floor for the cat which had, during his careful preparations, rubbed with a sense of the frantic against the legs that could not sense its body. Occasionally, Godwin looked down at its protestations. And smiled.

Hyde wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The cat, stroked by Godwin — how much pain in that bending to the cat's arched back and erect tail? — had begun to eat. Gulping delicately. Hyde pushed back his own chair with a mounting reluctance. He had to bully Godwin, again. And disliked the work. Godwin had almost solved the problem — but communicating it had a price of anger.

He turned on Hyde with a white face and snapped: 'I've worked like a black since I got here — from the moment I got here—!'

He had been preparing the outburst throughout the well-cooked meal, perhaps ever since he had admitted Hyde to his cloistered, lonely rooms. Up thinly-carpeted stairs, the walls pregnant with age and damp, to a loosely- fitting door with English security locks. And the smell of heated, packaged meals and East European vegetables stubbornly cooked, the scent of the neighbour's cat, and the ozone of often used electrical equipment — the in-fi and the desk-top computer. Godwin's thin, eked-out life. Hyde understood, far too well, that only a pair of functioning, fit limbs separated himself from Godwin and his environment.

But Godwin had it, had the answer — part of it, even almost all of it—

'— like a black,' Godwin repeated almost apologetically.

'Sure,' Hyde replied.

Godwin had been restraining himself for hours; controlling himself, as he taught Hyde familiarity with the Cyrillic keyboard he would eventually encounter; taught him the jargon; educated him in the small-talk of computers and security and the Hradcany. Hyde's knowledge of computer terminals and keyboards was minimal. Godwin seemed determined to make him not only skilled, but educated. Hour upon hour, time after time, until he stopped making mistakes, avoided errors, understood what he was doing. And all that time, Godwin had been building to his over-riding, urgent purpose; this outburst. Hyde prepared himself.

'Yes, like a black!' he stormed, as he plugged in the coffee percolator with the wifely nonchalance of an enforced bachelor. 'Do you realise what you and Shelley want from me? Do you?' He ushered Hyde back into the small lounge. The electrical smell was still strong from the keyboard and VDU resting on the old dining-table that Godwin used as a desk. The crutches thumped behind Hyde, the legs shuffled behind them.

Hyde sat down quickly, reducing his own importance. In the kitchen, the percolator plopped. The cat audibly slid food into its gullet. Then began to lap the milk that Godwin had also put down.

'The biggest laugh is, Shelley wants everything for Aubrey — for the old man!' Godwin glared. 'For the old, blind, stupid bugger who wanted nothing to do with the thing I offered him!' Godwin's frame leaned towards Hyde. The small keyboard and screen peeped like a hint of revelations to come from behind his crooked elbow. 'He put it to one side — do you know what he told me? Do you?' Godwin's body echoed in miniature the movements of a fit body in an easy chair, bobbing forward. 'It can't possibly work, Godwin — once we tap in, we've given the game away. That was it. His judgment and the opinion of the tame experts he consulted. He consigned Open Weave to the dustbin without a second thought! And now he wants me to resurrect it to save his skin! What a laugh. What an absolute fucking hoot!'

'What's Open Weave?' Hyde dropped into the charged silence; almost expecting the breath expelled with his words to spark in the heavy atmosphere.

Godwin's grey face narrowed. 'Don't pretend you don't know.'

Hyde shook his head. 'I don't.'

'Don't give me that! Shelley's briefed you!' Hyde rejected interruption. 'Do you even begin to understand, either of you, what Petrunin did when he fixed the computer in Moscow Centre? Do you have even an inkling of what he had to do to make Teardrop available to you?' Godwin's body slumped on the crutches, almost as if he had fallen backwards into a comfortable chair. The cat appeared, indifferent, licking its mouth in the kitchen doorway. The percolator reached a breathless climax behind the cat.

Godwin dropped his body into the chair opposite Hyde. Breath emerged, strangled and painful. Godwin plunged on, undeterred by the massive interruption of seating himself.

'First,' he offered, marking the point on the index finger of his right hand, 'he had to subvert an expert of near-genius — a programmer who was exceptionally smart. Before that, he had to see the possibility! He had to be really far-sighted when he served on that committee… to see the chance and take it. Clever…' Godwin was wistful for opportunity for a moment, then continued: 'Petrunin had to alter the original database, when the central records computer was first fully programmed — back when they started computerising their entire records system. Even then he was watching his back — and aware of the best, most up-to-date way of doing it…'

Godwin's face was flushed with insight, more than with the thin wine they had drunk with their pork. His eyes were inward-looking, staring after a figure following a road he could not take. Hyde realised how thwarted Godwin was by his crippled legs. Perhaps Aubrey had done him no good turn, keeping him inside the service—? A big computer firm might have satisfied his ambitions much more completely.

Godwin cleared his throat, and said, 'Teleprocessing showed him the ease with which he could store information under Moscow Centre's inquisitive long nose and be perfectly safe. And the method of computer access — through landlines — suggested how easy it would be to recover the information he'd stored, from any terminal in any Soviet embassy or consulate or mission, in any emergency. He'd need no more than a few minutes with a remote terminal keyboard and his special passwords. He could go straight to the stuff he'd stored, just like that—' Godwin clicked his fingers. His eyes studied the ceiling. The cat hunched its back towards the one radiator. Hyde