The Bear's Tears

'Yes, sir.'

Kapustin and Aubrey were now standing in front of the monkey cage, engaged in what was evidently an urgent conversation. The distance the cameras had had to adopt because of Hyde's presence assisted the deception. No one could blow these images up enough to lip-read, They could identify Aubrey when he was full-on or in profile, but they'd not be able to lip-read what he was saying. It was good. On the tapes, they could make Aubrey say anything they pleased. Out of his own mouth, apparently, he would condemn himself.

'It looks good,' Kapustin murmured, tapping his teeth with his thumbnail. The smoke from his cigarette caught the gleam from the projector. 'Yes, good…' he luxuriated. He could almost hear in his mind the doctored, edited, stitched-together conversation that would accompany the film. When Aubrey had agreed, at Kapustin's presence of nerves, not to be wired for sound, it had been difficult for the KGB Deputy Chairman not to pat his own tiny microphone in self-congratulatory pleasure at the Englishman's trusting naivety. At the recollection of it, Kapustin chuckled quietly. 'Let me have a look at the next bit of rehearsal film,' he said.

The projector slowed and stopped. The other projector threw an image of Kapustin and the actor onto the screen. Yes, the film was necessary, he told himself. Of course, Aubrey was officially logged to meet Kapustin in Helsinki, and the film was not necessary as proof that they met. But -

Kapustin smiled. The actor had paused. He passed a package to Kapustin. There was guilt in the angle of the head, the set of the shoulders. Kapustin, on the screen, acted gratitude and almost immediately satisfaction, followed by assertiveness; command. The tiny scene was over in perhaps six or seven seconds. It unmistakably portrayed Aubrey as a double agent; a traitor.

Teardrop.

'OK — satisfactory so far. Let's go to the tape, shall we?'

The lights came on. The image on the screen faded, as if seen through a curtain of light or snow, and then the projector was switched off. Kapustin studied the young, eager, competent faces that turned towards him like plants towards the sun. He was their sun. His own technical team. His special Teardrop team.

'What do you want, sir?'

'The boat, first. The ferry. What did you get there, and what have you done with it?'

'You'll like it, sir.' The young man grinned. There was suddenly complete silence in the room as he switched on the cassette players. Japanese; expensive. Commercial tapes of rock music lay heaped beside it on the table, amid the mikes and leads and in front of the reel-to-reel recorder and tape editor. His young men had been buying in Helsinki.

'I'd better,' he said good-naturedly; fatherly.

Seagulls, then voices. The team leader handed him a typed transcript. In underscored letters were the questions and observations he had previously recorded and which had been edited into his conversation with Aubrey. Kapustin listened intently.

'It is increasingly difficult for me,' Aubrey insisted from the speakers. Seagulls, water, wind, the noise of the ferry's engines. He had gone on, in reality, to explain to Kapustin that his vacillations were irritating London. Aubrey was having difficulty persuading his colleagues that Kapustin was serious about defecting. Now, with an inserted question regarding Cabinet papers and the minutes of the Foreign Affairs Committee, it appeared evident that Aubrey was providing his KGB control with highly secret information.

Aubrey was a traitor. Kapustin smiled, tapped his teeth, and listened.

'I realise that,' he heard himself saying, 'but this information is very important.' Beneath the words he could hear his own heartbeat, fainter than the pulse of the ferry's engines. 'You must try…' he insisted.

'I am doing everything asked of me!' Aubrey replied with querulous and frightened anger. At least, it could have been fear. Where had that conversational snippet come from— Paris, Vienna, Berlin? This year, last year?

'No,' he announced. 'Switch off.' The team leader appeared stoical, other and younger faces were crestfallen, one or two distinctly irritated in the hot, smoky room. 'Sorry, lads— my heartbeat's not exact in the inserts. And there's something about the perspective of Aubrey's voice — he's got to be a little nearer.'

'What about the background sound?' someone asked.

'That's OK — no difference. That's good. I'm sorry, but Finnish Intelligence is going to be given this when the time is right, and the first thing they're going to suspect is that it's a fake. They're going to try to find what's been put in and what's been taken out. I can hear it. It's not good enough. OK — run on to the zoo…'

The cassette tape whirred, then the Play switch clicked again. The lion roared as if on cue. The monkeys chattered at the children, the children at the monkeys. Kapustin listened.

'Your real work can begin then,' he heard himself saying.

'No more than my duty,' Aubrey replied stiffly. Then he continued: 'I've waited patiently — for a very long time, Dmitri — now its's within our grasp…'

'Again!' Kapustin snapped, clipping the excitement from his voice.

Rewind than Play. He listened. Snippits of conversation from Berlin, from Vienna, from Rome. Background filtered out, new background supplied. The zoo. He listened. All that chatter — he had not believed thay could do it. They wanted it to disguise the inital filtering out of traffic, of wind or rain. Yet he had disbelieved them. Until now. This was…

'Marvellous,' he breathed. A collective sigh of relief seemed to fill the room. Lion, monkeys, children. A seamless, flowing background, natural, lifelike; undoctored.

It had happened. This was the best it had ever been, on all the tapes they had doctored. The best in the last two years. The most curcial moment of betrayal, the springing of the trap.

Aubrey was Teardrop — was, for certain, Teardrop. Aubrey was a traitor to his service and his country. It was there, on the tape. Teardrop unmasked.

'Again,' he whispered, luxurating in his sensations of complete, infallible success. 'Again.'

* * *

There was a video projection at the far end of the first floor of the shop. On it, in somewhat blurred colours, a ballet dancer impersonating Squirrel Nutkin bounced across a leaf-carpeted glade to the inappropriate accompaniment from wall speakers of a disco tune. The image caused him to smile, then he turned his back on the screen and went up the stairs to the cassette department. He was early for his apointment, for this final contact in the HMV Shop on Oxford Street.

He had come out of Bond Street tube statoningoa hot September afternoon that made the whole of crowded, sweltering Oxford Street seem to smell of frying onions from an invisible hotdog stall. Ground floor, he had been told. At foru precisely. At four, you come over. A pity you couldn't have posted to Washington or even New York — but, from Isford Street we can get you the couple of blocks ot the embassy in Grosvenor Square. The HMV Shop's always good and crowded. That'll be the pickup point. Be early, move around the shop. We'll want time to look for any tail. Be careful.

He should not have felt real tension, he knew. There should be only the feelings he had practiced and learned in readiness for this moment. Remember, they will expect fear, tension, sweating. Just as with the file, you must be sure of your emotions. They must be correct — what is expected in a defector on the point of going over. The smell of frying onions after the smell of hot dust in the tube station had revolted his stomach. It was an image to hold, to bring out later like a pressed flower. A proof of honesty.

A young-old boy with pink hair, eye make-up and an earring sat lounging behind the cash desk. Grigori Metkin moved slowly along the racks of cassettes, appearing to browse, finger running along the shelving, following the alphabet of pop singers and rock bands that were, almost without exception, unfamiliar to him. His eyes sought and found his shadow from the Soviet embassy, intently studying the bargain-priced cassettes. He carried two green Marks & Spencer bags. There was nothing Russian about him. He was dark and pot-bellied enough to be an Arab or an Iranian. Metkin glanced at his watch. Two minutes before four.

A man in a light suit brushed past him and stared knowingly into his face. There was the merest hint of an encouraging smile, then he was gone. After a moment, Metkin followed him down the stairs. On the video screen, to the accompaniment of Bach supported by the alien groundswell of electric guitars from the floor below, Raquel Welch in an animal-skin bikini fled from a dinosaur. Again, Metkin smiled. Then, as he looked back from the stairs leading to the ground floor and the wailing guitars, he saw his shadow with the green bags coming unconcernedly