The Bear's Tears

Castleford's face. His whining, pleading, ashamed face— then his slow-cunning, wary, treacherous, dangerous face. Then his dead face, lying in a spreading pool of blood on the floor of his apartment.

His face in the bombed cellar — no, first his face lolling slackly and abruptly out of the back seat of the car — then his face in the weak torchlight in the bombed-out, ruined cellar as Aubrey obscured it with shovelfuls of rubble. Aubrey remembered the effort, the strain, of levering the fragment of wall so that it fell into the hole of the cellar, burying Castleford's stiff, white, staring face.

They were traveling north-east through the Landstrasse district of Vienna, towards the Danube. Clara had been in Vienna, they had met once more, he'd helped establish her there in business and—

Memory disallowed success. Instead, he heard Castleford's broken voice, confessing. Voicing the trap that had closed about him when one of the bright, scintillating, glamorous young men, now with broken fingernails and a starved look about him, had pleaded to be saved from the authorities. Then another of the group Castleford had know at Cliveden and other great houses during the thirties had come, and then a third

And then Elsenreith had come and announced the conditions of Castleford's new employment. And he had done the work because there was no alternative; helping war criminals escape, evade justice and revenge.

The trap had closed on Aubrey now just as certainly as it had shut upon Castleford.

The Massingers — he glimpsed their shadowy heads once more as the cars crossed the river by the Praterbrucke — had achieved their calm, all passion spent, and for that, too, he envied them. It would be better to lie down and wait quietly for the inevitable — would be better…

In a matter of hours, a few hours at most, they would come for him. Killing those left, duped, to guard them at the safe house. Or leaving one survivor, like Ishmael, to tell the tale. And he and the Massingers would board the flight to Moscow before dawn.

The river gleamed with lights and then the BMW left the bridge and turned north. He began to watch the passing buildings, the oncoming lights. Numbing his mind with fleeting sensations.

* * *

In the darkness, Hyde held the luminous dial of his watch close to his face; it clouded with his breath. He wiped the glass to read the passage of time. Suk, the supervising cleaner, had been gone too long — far too long. The sour smell of drying mops, of half-closed old polish tins, of dust and cold, was the room's only reality.

The odour of detergent was strong and acrid. His stomach was watery. He had been waiting too long for a report from Suk, waiting too long to be taken down to the lower levels of the building… the penetration operation was on the point of being aborted…

However often he tried to dismiss that idea, it returned insidiously, always with greater strength. He was nothing more than a child hiding in an old dark house, playing sardines. But the game was long over, no one had come to find him and the darkness was growing more and more intense—

He shook his head, almost vehemently, clearing it. Around him lay the now unseen shipwreck of a hardware shop. Old vacuum cleaners, mops, brooms, buckets, tea-chests, shelving. The pistol lay near his thigh as he sat with his back against the wall.

He looked again at his watch. Time was running away. Suk had been gone three-quarters of an hour now on his scouting job… it should have been fifteen minutes maximum before he came back to report. The engineer would have been in the Hradcany computer room for more than half an hour by now, perhaps more than an hour… Where was Suk?

The corridor outside was silent, empty.

Suk had buggered it up, got himself suspected, caught… even chickened out. Delaying until it was too late, anyway.

It isn't going to happen, he heard his mind announce with solemn clarity. It isn't going to work.

It isn't going to work — and you're trapped…

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: In the Labyrinth

Light switched on—

Hyde, startled into movement, slid upright against the wall, the gun coming up immediately, the barrel quivering slightly from reaction until he stilled it, aiming it at—

— at Suk's stomach. Suk's stomach—!

His legs felt weak. Suk's face mirrored his own shock and relief.

'For Christ's sake—!' Hyde hissed venomously. 'Where the fucking hell have you been?'

'Come, come quickly,' Suk urged, pressing his thin, stooping form against the door he had closed furtively behind him. 'Please—'

'It's over an hour since you — Christ, man, where were you?'

'You must come at once, please, you must come now—!' the supervising cleaner pleaded.

Hyde moved on stiff legs.

'Why? What's gone wrong?'

Suk shook his head vehemently. 'No, nothing is wrong… I—'

'What?'

'It — it was difficult for me to approach, to know… eventually, I–I did not tell you this, but when I came last, the engineer…'

'Yes?'

'He had already arrived — I did not know how long before — I had to find out, I could not come sooner —'

'And?'

Suk seemed to stoop to Hyde's height, as if to diminish himself as a target for blame or blows. He was sweating. Hyde smelt him, too, intruding upon the smells that had filled his nostrils for the past hours.

'Only ten minutes before — I swear it, only ten—!' Suk cowered.

Hyde nodded, then looked at his watch.

'One hour and twenty — OK, take me down.' He stared at Suk, but a threat seemed superfluous, even wrong. And his own tension threatened to interfere with his articulation, and he merely added: 'Come on, Suk — take me down.'

Hyde climbed into the white lab coat Suk had provided, clipping the ID card with his name, photograph and details enclosed in clear plastic, to the breast pocket. He pocketed the pistol, and tested the weight of his briefcase filled with files and forms in his left hand. Then his right hand fiddled for the other documents in his pocket. The cover seemed as thin and unprotective as the white coat. Joke scientist — did they really expect him in that guise? Godwin nodded, smiling sardonically in his mind. Suk opened the door with exaggerated caution, almost comically. Then slipped through the crack into the corridor. Hyde followed.

Suk's whisper enticed him like the tune of a snake-charmer along the corridors, down the flights of stairs to the cellars of the Chancellery building where the KGB had installed their high-security computer room, protected by the rock of the high Hradcany ridge.

Now, the man wanted to talk, to babble away tension, letting it leak out in words.

'The engineer was delayed by a job outside Prague — a military installation, I think… complained much, but I did not think he was coming, sorry, but I missed him… I have glimpsed the room only once since his arrival… it seems he is still occupied…'

Hyde wanted to order him to keep quiet, but was afraid of a crack in his voice. Suk's words were like a strong light, making the weave of the operation transparent and fragile. Shut up, man, shut up—

Then, the last flight of steps. The shoulder of a uniformed guard at the bottom, jutting beyond a turn in the corridor. Hyde dodged back out of sight, feeling Suk's shallow, quick breathing on his neck and cheek. He shivered, turning to face the supervising cleaner.

Then looked at his watch.

'He was delayed?' Suk nodded. Already, the beads of perspiration on his pale forehead were drying. He had