The Bear's Tears

CHAPTER ONE: After the Fall

PAUL MASSINGER BALANCED his whisky on the small table and then eased himself, left leg extended, into the deep armchair. His face creased into lines of irritated pain for a moment until he settled his arthritic hip to greater comfort. Ridiculous. Within his aging form, he had felt so much younger since his marriage to Margaret. He had belied his fifty-nine years; defeated them. Now his body persisted in its reminders of his physical age; it was pertinent yet false, just as the elegance of the Belgravia flat occasionally reminded him, falsely, how easily he, a mere American, could be charged with having married for money. In many eyes, he knew he had at first been — still was to some people — little better than a colonial buccaneer, a gold-digger. At least, that was what other gold-diggers said. None of it hurt or even affected him. Margaret had entered his long widowerhood firmly and purposefully, and opened a new door to this.

The Standard lay still folded on the arm of the chair. He dismissed the consideration that he must arrange to have an operation on his worsening hip — not yet, not yet — and pressed the button of the remote control handset. The television fluttered and grumbled to life. Margaret was not yet home. A sense of absence filled him to the accompaniment of the signature tune of the early evening news. Alistair Burnet's comfortable features filled the screen. He heard a key in the lock, and surrendered to the small, joyous sensation at her return. He turned in his chair in order to see her the moment she stepped into the drawing-room. There was an excited tightness in his chest. His hip twinged savagely, as if envious of his emotions and the object of his attention. In the same complex moment he was young and old.

The long fox fur coat and the matching fur hat; a high colour from the evening drop in temperature made her younger than her forty-three years. The confident, unselfconscious step… The smile faded from his lips. Alistair Burnet's voice was that of an intruder upon the scene. She had halted abruptly in mid-step, and the colour had blanched from her cheeks. One gloved hand played about her lips. Her eyes looked hurt, bruised. Massinger turned his head towards the television set, and gasped.

A grainy monochrome picture of a man of forty or so, fair hair lifted by a breeze; half-profile, lips parted in a smile, eyes pale and intent. Handsome. Massinger did not hear what Ailstair Burnet said to accompany the photograph. He did not need to hear the appalled, choked word that Margaret uttered:

"Father…!"

He knew it already. Robert Castleford, almost forty years dead.

Margaret dragged the fur hat from her head, dishevelling her fair hair. Her mouth was slightly open, as if there were other things she wished to say; lines she had forgotten.

Massinger said, stupidly, "Margaret, what's going on…?"

She moved to his chair but did not touch him, except to brush his hand as she snatched the remote control handset from the arm of the chair. Burnet's voice boomed in the drawing-room.

"… the accusations, said to have been made to the CIA by a Russian defector now in America, involve the circumstances surrounding the death in 1946 in Berlin…"

"Why?" was all Massinger could think to say. He looked up at his wife, but she was staring at the screen, her body slightly hunched like that of a child expecting to be struck.

"… the Foreign Office has declined to comment on the matter, and will neither confirm nor deny that any investigation of the head of the intelligence service is under way, as this evening's edition of the Standard newspaper claims…"

Her hand scrabbled near his sleeve like a trapped pet. The crackling of the folded newspaper was followed by a deep gasp that threatened to become a sob. Massinger, suddenly, could not look at her.

D-Notice …? his mind asked irrelevantly, and answered itself almost casually, like a voice issuing from a deep club armchair of worn leather, The British have let it come out. For some reason, they want it known… Aubrey has enemies, then… He loathed his own detachment and wanted to clutch her hand. Alistair Burnet passed to another news story. Bombs in Beirut.

"What — what does it say?" he asked throatily. She did not reply. Aubrey, he thought. Aubrey knew Castleford in Berlin in 1946. But Castleford disappeared in Berlin… His remains were found in — in '5I, beneath the ruins of a house. He'd been murdered, but no one ever thought …

Aubrey?

"Darling," he said with ponderous, eager gentleness, "what does it say?"

She let the paper fall into his lap, and crossed the room to the sideboard. He heard a drink being poured, and breathing like that of someone close to death. Castleford's picture was alongside the headline WHERE is 'C'? Beneath that, a sub-heading, Intelligence Furore — Who Killed Who? He could feel the pain each word must have inflicted upon her, but he could not turn his attention from the article.

Exclusive. Arrest of the Head of Intelligence, 'C', expected at any moment… CIA sources in London… Whitehall refuses to… Soviet embassy sources angered by the accusations of complicity in Castleford's death… Castleford's background, senior and distinguished civil servant, brilliant university scholar, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, until now believed murdered for some undiscovered personal reason — or motivelessly done to death… information in our possession, fourth man, fifth man… Blunt and Long and the others all small fry…

Massinger checked back, tracing his finger up the column. The subject had changed. Aubrey was not merely suspected of Castleford's murder. Russian agent, Russian agent, he read… information in our possession, Russian defector in the US, CIA file delivered to MI5, MI5 to act… arrest of'C' expected at any moment, pending a full investigation of the charges…

He read on until he reached the demonic folk-lore, and the old devils of Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt came to occupy their familiar places. Then he threw the newspaper from him and it fluttered heavily to the pale blue velvet carpet. He turned to look at his wife.

"Well?" she said in a tight, strained voice. He sensed the malevolence in her tone.

"Well?" he could only repeat hopelessly.

"It is Aubrey they're talking about, isn't it? Your friend Aubrey?" He could do no more than nod in admission. "To think that he's been here! Here! Sat here with us, with you…!" Evidently, she believed every word of the report.

"Darling…" he began, hoisting himself out of his chair with the aid of his stick. When he looked up, her face wore an appalled expression, as if his movements were some further species of betrayal. "I can't defend him," he said shakily, moving towards her. She seemed to back, away slightly along the sideboard. Her large cuff slid against the crystal of a decanter, and her gold bracelets rattled against the glass. "I can't tell you anything, anything at all…"

"You've known him… for years you've known him—!"

"Not then…"

"He's your friend!"

"Yes."

"He murdered my father!" Her face was young, urchin-like, abandoned.

"They say he betrayed your father to the NKVD… I don't know what to say to you — it's no more than a rumour."

They wanted it known, he reminded himself, and the future became clear to him in a moment of insight; it loomed over him like a cloud — no, more solid than that, like a great stone that would crush him if he could not learn to carry it. "Only a rumour," he repeated huskily. They wanted it known. The Joint Intelligence Committee, the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Secretary, even the PM — they've all allowed the witch-hunt. Everyone must want Aubrey's head. Then, he realised the truth… They believe it. They believe Aubrey's guilty… they even believe he's a Russian agent.

He opened his arms. She moved into them with the sullen step of reluctant surrender. Her body heaved with sobs. His neck was wet from her tears. Thirty-five years late, she possessed the emotions of a child or a teenage daughter. Her world, her certainties, had been altered and thrown into shadow.

His eyes roamed the large room. He noticed, as if for the first time, the number of framed photographs of her father that almost littered the walls, the sideboard, the occasional tables. As if the place were some weird kind of roadside shrine to a little-known saint. A portrait of the young Castleford stared down at him from one of the walls. Castleford was sacrosanct. Margaret's mother, of course, had been mostly responsible for the veneration her daughter still felt; the unalloyed, immutable admiration of a child remained with her even now. Especially now—

Margaret had been flung back down some time-tunnel to the moment when Castleford had first disappeared, to the moment he had died.

"There, there…"he breathed, stroking her hair from crown to neck. "There, my darling, my darling…"

"After all this time," she murmured, sniffing. He felt her swallow hard, and then her voice was firmer. "I wasn't prepared for anything like this — his face on the screen, suddenly to know that he had been betrayed, not just murdered, but betrayed deliberately…"

He continued to stroke her hair gently. "I know, I know…" He glanced up, into the mirror behind them. He saw a face that had been quickly, and perhaps permanently aged. Deep lines, hunted eyes. His own features. His hip ached with the premonition of effort. He was unready, it was unfair, grossly unfair.

He knew it was false. All of it. Not Aubrey. Aubrey could not be a Russian agent. Never.

But Margaret…?

He could not answer to the siren-call of that priority, even though his whole heart and body required it of him. Her body was against his, asserting its pre-eminence, but a chilly, clear part of his mind held it at a distance. He had to help Aubrey. At whatever cost, he had to help Aubrey now.

At least, he had to offer…

Hyde finished the last mouthful of Wiener Schnitzel and washed it down with a glass of thin red Austrian wine. The cafe was noisier now, more crowded with regulars interested only in wine and beer and coffee. He was almost the last person to have ordered a meal. Now, his stomach was full and his mind had slowed to a half-amused, cynical walking pace. He could no longer seriously accept the idea of collusion between Kapustin and MI5. It was patently ridiculous, even after only a small carafe of wine. Someone had wanted him dead, yes…

But that had been because it was a set-up. Kapustin's game-plan depended upon getting rid of Hyde. Leaving Aubrey alone to face the music. It was neat, clear, hard-edged in his mind, like a piece of coloured glass. No witnesses, no corroboration for Aubrey from the one man who had been at most of the meetings with Teardrop. Efficiency.

He wiped his lips with the soft paper napkin, studied the remaining few sauteed potatoes, and decided against them. He was replete, calm; certain. He looked at his watch. Just after ten. Almost time to call in, arrange to be picked up by the embassy.

Aubrey was accused of treachery. Kapustin was cast, no doubt, as his control. A clever KGB set-up, one which Aubrey had danced along with for two years. Babbington and MI5 had swallowed the story. Clever; specious, but clever. Aubrey had enough enemies in MI5 and JIC and the Cabinet Office for it to tip the scales against him; a cloud was all they needed, not a prosecution.

He must recover the recording of Aubrey's conversation with Kapustin. It would prove that it was the Russian who was refusing to come over, that Aubrey had been engaged in a proposed defection by Kapustin to the West. He must find it — Vienna Station must find it—

He studied the bill, counted notes onto the table, and then moved towards the back of the cafe and the telephones. Now, he was possessed by an urgent curiosity to discover how clever the KGB had been, to talk to Aubrey and even to Babbington. Also, part of him wanted to see Aubrey wriggle and scratch his way out of his dilemma.

He dialled the Vienna Station number and, when the switchboard answered, he supplied the current code-identification. Almost immediately, he heard Wilkes's voice, breathy and urgent, at the other end of the line.

"Patrick — ? Where have you been, man?" Wilkes exclaimed, his urgency creating a ringing suspicion in Hyde's awareness that was immediately subdued by the man's next words. "The old man's been crying out in his sleep for you! Where the hell did you get to?"

"I — a little local difficulty," Hyde replied, reading the felt-pen graffiti on the mirror in the phone booth. Punk rock, the inevitable swastika, telephone numbers promising sodomites paradise. He closed the door of the booth against a burst of laughter from the cafe. Outside, in hard-and-shadowed lighting, tipsy jollity suggested normality. He had been stupid. Even in danger of his life, he had been stupid.

"He's all right?" he asked.

"Furious — you know him," Wilkes replied confidentially. There was a chuckle in his voice. So normal—

A gale of laughter from the cafe was like a concussion against the glass. A waitress passed the booth in a check apron that matched the row of tablecloths.

"What's going on?"

"Christ — Babbington and his merry men haven't confided in me. They're in a huddle with Aubrey now. All sorts of charges are flying around."

"The KGB tried to kill me—"

"What?" Wilkes was incredulous.

"It's their set-up, has to be. Teardrop was watching from the wings…" Wilkes was silent for a moment. Hyde added: "It's all Kapustin's game — the tape will prove that."

"What tape, Patrick?" Wilkes asked eagerly.

"Aubrey was wired—"

"Yes — we saw that. Where's the tape?"

"I dropped the bloody thing in the Belvedere."

"We'll take care of it!" It sounded like relief, even to the sigh that followed the words. Hyde was puzzled. Then Wilkes removed the impression as he said with urgent concern: "Come in, Patrick. This is just what the old man needs. We'll find that tape — you talk to Babbington."

"Have they arrested the old man?"

"Christ knows! The mutual embarrassment's like a fog in here. But everyone looks serious — deadly serious."

"OK."

"Where are you?"

For a moment Hyde studied the number on the dial of the telephone, and the location information. Another gust of laughter concussed the glass. He turned his head. Normal. Aubrey needed his information.

"OK," he said. "Small cafe, in the Goldschmidgasse, near the cathedral. I'll be inside."

"Hang on. We'll have a car there for you in ten minutes. Anyone suspicious in the area?"

"No. I wasn't followed, once I shook them off."

"Good. Thank God you're all right. Everyone was worried…"

"OK, Wilkes. Hurry."

"Ten minutes at the outside."

Hyde put down the receiver. The scrawled-upon mirror was cloudy, and the glass of the booth had become dulled with the raised temperature. He folded back the door and stepped into the cafe. Strangely, the laughter had a mocking rather than comforting ring. He shivered, and returned to his table. The notes had been collected. He left the pile of change and pulled his overcoat from the back of his chair. He hesitated with one arm thrust into a sleeve, because the cafe was warm and because he realised that all he had to do was to wait. A matter of a few minutes. Outside, there had already been sleet riding on a fresh wind when he entered the cafe. Then he continued to put on the coat because he felt shaken into wakefulness by his instincts. He should check the area around the cathedral square. Someone still wanted him dead. Someone who spoke accentless English. That unwelcome realisation bobbed out of the dark at the back of his mind, more real than the lights and the laughter and talk and the reassurances of Wilkes's voice.

He closed the door behind him. Sleet blew down the narrow Goldschmidgasse and through the halo of white light around a street-lamp in the Stephansplatz. The wind had strengthened, and it eased itself through his overcoat. He shivered, then turned towards the lights of the square, shoulders hunched, collar turned up, the melting sleet from his hair insinuating itself between his collar and skin. The west door of the Stephansdom was a gap of dark shadow in the sooty facade of the cathedral. Light burst from the metro entrance to his right. Hyde eased himself into the doorway of a shop and surveyed the square. Three minutes by his watch since he had put down the receiver. He had only to wait.

A group of people emerged from the mouth of the metro station, most of them young; noisy. He watched them bait each other, bait an old man, reel. One youth blundered against the shop's grilled window, pressing his nose flat as he tried to resolve the blurred souvenirs into distinct objects. Then he rolled on, bumping against Hyde before moving away. Hyde's body had flinched from the contact, and he was aware of his heightened nerves. The youth expelled beery breath and a hard laugh and almost returned to reproduce the fear he sensed, but then was towed by the laughter of his friends towards the north side of the cathedral. Couples drifted or were blown like black scraps across the square. Bodies crouched beneath umbrellas. Hyde's breathing returned to normal.

"Come on, come on," he murmured. Six minutes, and his feet were cold through the suede boots. His hands seemed numb in his pockets. "Come on…"

An old woman tottered down the steps into the metro station. The light coming from it appeared now like the open mouth of a furnace as Hyde became colder. He could wait there…?

He moved out of the doorway. Sleet slapped against his cheek. He hurried across the square, head bowed, into the darkness beneath the archway of the cathedral's west door. He pressed his back against the wood, then scanned the square once more.

And saw the first of them. Expected-unexpected. He had been looking for surveillance, something that might prevent him reaching the car. Someone stumbling upon him by chance. He found purpose. He found informed opinion — knowledge. The car in the Goldschmidgasse, coming from the far end of the narrow street, extinguished its lights perhaps seven seconds before it turned into a parking space. And the man he had seen on foot, moving from the Rotenturm towards the side street, had signalled to it. He shuddered, pressing his arms against his sides to still the quivering of his body. Overcoat, sports jacket, woolen shirt, skin. He was intensely aware of his vulnerability.

Second man, third man…

One had come out of the mouth of the metro station in a dark hat and overcoat. The other had come from the cathedral's south side, moving purposefully across the still-lit windows of a men's outfitters. Dark hat, dark overcoat. Dressed for the weather but umbrella-less in the sleet. Erect, unaware of the weather, heads turning like pieces of machinery; oiled, regular, thorough. Point of convergence, the Goldschmidgasse. The first man he had seen paused in the shop doorway where Hyde had first placed himself.

Eight minutes. These people had come for him — by arrangement.

Hyde could not bring himself to admit the idea, even though the accentless voice cried in his head, Kill him, kill him… He was able, just, to hold the idea of collusion simply as an unfamiliar word in his awareness. It did not burgeon into acts, arrangements, betrayals, pain, faces. Eight minutes thirty—

Move, he told himself. Go now. Fourth man. He scanned the Stephansplatz. A dark figure beneath a street-lamp, then another passing across the lights from a coffee-house window. Point of convergence, the Goldschmidgasse—

Then a knot of men appeared at the corner of the narrow street, moving urgently. The figures he had identified spread outwards, like seed cast from a hand. The net spread; men began running. In that moment, it was already too late. A second earlier, they had been evident by their immobility in the wind that hurried the innocent across the square like leaves; now, they were moving more swiftly, projectiles rather than detritus. Hyde was trapped in the doorway of the cathedral, the door locked against him.

His thoughts raced but held no form. Adrenalin offered itself, but with the crudeness of a one-swallow drink. Dark overcoat moving to the cathedral's north side, dark overcoat to the south side, skirting the square. Doorways checked. Two men coming across the square towards the west door and its concealing shadow, two more descending into the light of the metro station. Other, disregarded shapes drifted or hurried across the Stephansplatz, as unimportant as the sleet blown through the light of the lamps. Two men coming towards him, north side man closer than the man on the south side. Eight men altogether; nothing being left to chance. Substitution, collusion — now when he didn't want them the images came to accompany the word. Wilkes's voice, the accentless English in the palace grounds, Kapustin watching, Babbington arresting Aubrey for treason — the arrangement of his own capture and murder.

Now—

South side man perhaps thirty yards from him, the two men crossing the square, one taller than the other, broader, striding more quickly — they were fifteen yards, fourteen, twelve…

He ran.

Hyde's boots skidded on the little accumulation of sleety snow on the bottom step, then he turned to his left, thrust away from the sooty, crumbling stonework, head down. A shout, other shouts like answering hunting horns. The south-side man hurrying almost at once, without noticeable shock-delay. Hyde rounded the west facade into deeper shadow, hearing the footsteps behind him over the pounding of his heart; over the drumming realisation that he was running into a narrowing canyon behind the cathedral where the pedestrianised streets on the north and south sides converged. At that instant, men were running along the north side, beneath the unfinished, capped tower of the Stephansdom, to head him off. It was a race. There would be no doubling back, no luck of deception. Point of convergence — himself. He would have to outrun them.

Lights from fashionable, expensive apartments above fashionable, expensive shops. Shoes gleamed and primped in a soft-lit window. A couple huddled in a chilly passion in the shop's doorway. The shadows along the cathedral wall were deep, almost alive. Hyde skidded again, and his hand rubbed against cold stone as he righted himself. He could hear the beat of footsteps ahead and behind him.

Shop window, doorway, couple, dark side street…

He turned, saw the three men bearing down on him, and then fled down the narrow street, away from the cathedral. Their pursuit resounded from the blank, grey walls of the tall houses. Left into a narrow alley with light at the other end, then right and across the street, hearing a car moving away from him and the sudden, chilling screech of a cat, then another alley, then a lightless street after the loom of a church.

He paused and listened. The car's noise had faded. There was the noise of someone blundering into a dustbin, music from an upstairs window, and the beat of footsteps — splitting up, the noises moving away. He crossed the street and walked swiftly, hands in his pockets. A man emerged from the alley into the dark street. He was alone, and no more than a shadowy lump. Then he moved off in the opposite direction.

Sausages hung in the unlit window of a delicatessen; fat, ripe, Daliesque. His dark, narrow features stared out at him in reflection. He looked abandoned, inadequate. He had no cover, no luggage, no hotel, no back-up. Wilkes had set the KGB on him.

A Mercedes roared past, startling him, making his hand reach instinctively into the breast of his overcoat where the butt of the gun felt damp with his exertions. Then he relaxed, and looked again at his slight, hunched figure and the sallow reflection of his face. He began walking slowly on, with no purpose other than to conceal himself.

"Is this to be the beginning or the end of this — lunacy?"

Sir Andrew Babbington, Director-General of MI5, lowered himself with studied casualness into the armchair opposite Aubrey, and then looked up into the older man's face as if assessing the visible symptoms of a disease. Aubrey waved his glance aside with an angry gesture that underlined his enraged question.

"Kenneth—"

"Babbington, I asked you a question. Pray do me the courtesy of replying."

"This is Colonel Eldon," Babbington said, indicating his companion, "of our Counter-espionage Branch." His smile indicated that he considered he had answered Aubrey's enquiry. Eldon nodded.

"Sir Kenneth," he murmured. Eldon, behind his military moustache, was sleek, handsome, clear-eyed; he was also tall. And Aubrey sensed a tough doggedness just beneath the surface of this senior interrogator. For a moment, Aubrey's heart beat with a ragged swiftness. He gripped the arms of his chair to suppress the quiver of his hands. The game had begun in earnest. There was no room for mistakes, no margin for error.

"I have been held under what I can only consider to be house arrest for two days. My telephone has been tapped, there have been guards at my door. My housekeeper has only been allowed to go shopping after a humiliating search. She is searched again when she returns. Oh, sit down, Eldon—!" He waved his hand towards the unoccupied sofa. Eldon sank into its deep cushions. The interruption had defused Aubrey's angry protest.

Babbington said: "You wish the charges against you to be clarified?" There was something sharp gleaming through the man's urbanity, and it worried Aubrey.

"What charges?"

"Charges of treason," Babbington snapped.

"So you said at the Belvedere, and again at the embassy — and again on the aircraft and in the car from Heathrow. You must be more explicit," Aubrey added with a calm acidity he did not feel.

Babbington grinned. Apparently, a moment for which he had been waiting had arrived. Eldon, too, seemed pleased that a point of crisis had been reached. He was stroking his moustache in a parody of the military man he had once been. His eyes appeared blank and unfocused, and Aubrey realised that the man was dangerously intelligent, dangerously good at his job.

"Very well, Kenneth," Babbington replied.

"You'll have to try very hard, Babbington — even were I guilty!" Aubrey snapped, surprised at his own rage.

"Oh, we realise it will be a very long job, Sir Kenneth," Eldon murmured.

"Why have I been denied all access to the Minister, to the Chairman of the JIC — whom I might expect to be here in your stead, incidentally — and even to the Cabinet Office?"

"Because for the present, and until this matter is resolved — the power of all three lies in me."

"I see," Aubrey replied. He controlled the muscles of his face, which wished to express apprehension, even shock. "Yet another rearrangement of our peculiar hierarchy, I gather," he murmured contemptuously.

Babbington merely smiled. Aubrey had been appointed as 'C' after the retirement of Sir Richard Cunningham. The appointment had coincided with the changes in the Joint Intelligence Committee that the Franks Report on the Falklands campaign had urged. The Chairmanship of the JIC had been lost by the Foreign Office, and MI5, under Babbington, had seized its chance to bask in the sun. MI5 had survived the Blunt, Hollis, Long scandals and emerged in the ascendent under a younger, more virile leadership. SIS was regarded as a country for old men, Aubrey being the oldest among them. Everyone was waiting for his retirement. Sir William Guest, as Chairman of the JIC and with the ear of the PM, had his own plans for a combined security and intelligence service. And Aubrey knew that he intended Babbington to head the new service, SAID. Everyone -

simply everyone — was waiting for his retirement. He could almost see the impatience in Babbington's eyes, sense it in the room. And now, this — this thing that had lumbered out of one of his nightmares had fallen into their hands, and they were all prepared to use it to get rid of him. It almost did not matter to them whether he were guilty or innocent. He would be removed and the new service would be inaugurated, and Babbington would have his place in the sun.

Aubrey controlled his features once more. Babbington was enjoying whatever expression of anger or bitterness played about his lips.

They had him now. Another Russian agent. Babbington was outraged, even vengeful. That latter would be because he was an old family friend of the Castlefords.

Evidently his face had again betrayed his thoughts, because Babbington smiled and said with silky threat: "Whatever else may or may not be true, Kenneth — if you betrayed Robert Castleford to the NKVD in 1946, I will have your head. I promise you that." The anger was cold, well-savoured, decided upon. It was an emotion that had become a motive, a mainspring of action. Aubrey avoided glancing towards Eldon's glittering eyes.

Then Eldon said: "Sir Kenneth…" Aubrey looked venomously in his direction. "Perhaps you would prefer that these conversations…" His hands moved apart, suggesting the passage of a great deal of time; a time without specified term. "… take place at one of our — residences out of town?"

Aubrey shook his head. "I'm sure you realise that I would prefer to cling to the familiar?" he replied with an acid smile. "In this case, however, I would be using my surroundings as a constant reminder of what is at stake for me — what I might lose."

"You would prefer to remain here, too, I suspect — comfort and familiarity can be great betrayers." Eldon nodded his head in acknowledgement. "No, we'll stay here, I think. Coffee?" he added brightly.

"Please."

Aubrey lifted the small silver bell which Mrs Grey had instructed him to buy and use as a proper means of summoning her, and it tinkled softly in the comfortable room whose windows looked north over Regent's Park. The central heating clunked dully. The morning's headlines lay exposed and sharp on the table beside Aubrey's chair.

When he had ordered coffee, Aubrey said: "Why was no D-notice issued, Babbington? Why the hue and cry? I can't see how that can be to your advantage…"

"Not us. The Americans, we're pretty sure. They're impatient for answers, for proof."

"Ah. They'd prefer to see the ascendency of your service completed." His face folded into bitter creases, and his hand plucked for a moment at the fringing on the armchair. "As would HMG, now that there is the slightest doubt about myself. No country for old men, mm?" He looked up at Babbington, whose face was as immobile as if he had suffered a stroke. One eyelid flickered for a moment. Then Aubrey laughed, a short, derisive bark. "My God, Babbington, you really do have a lot to gain from my guilt!"

"And are you guilty, Sir Kenneth?" Eldon interjected.

Aubrey threw down his challenge. "I was using more sophisticated techniques of interrogation when you were still fagging for your house captain, Eldon."

"I'm well aware of your reputation, Sir Kenneth."

"Ah, coffee — excellent. Thank you, Mrs Grey."

Mrs Grey deposited the silver tray on the sideboard, bestowed glances of proprietorial malice upon Aubrey's visitors, and then left the room. Aubrey poured the coffee, fussing over it in a caricature of aged bachelorhood. He flexed mental muscles as he did so. Then he returned to his seat.

"Well, gentlemen?" he asked brightly. "I have the last forty-five years to lose, and the emperor's new clothes…" He indicated the large room and its furniture. "Perhaps you'd better begin."

Immediately, Eldon said: "Sir Kenneth, did you know that at your last Helsinki meeting your controller was wired for sound, even though you were not… by his request, if I remember your report correctly."

Aubrey was silent for some moments. The information had winded him. Suspicions crowded in his mind, just out of the light. "Wired for sound? Controller!" He squeezed contempt into his voice.

"Your KGB contact, if you prefer," Eldon corrected himself. "Yes, wired for sound. We have the tape."

"Then—"

"It seems very conclusive."

"Where is it?"

"We'll let you hear it, Kenneth," Babbington soothed, savouring Aubrey's failure of nerve.

"Conclusive, you say — then why the need for…?"

"Conclusive of treason, perhaps I should have said, Sir Kenneth."

"Then it's faked! Where did you get it?"

"The Finns. They have people in the Soviet apparat in Helsinki. One of them got it out, the Finns handed it straight on to us — to Sir William and the Cabinet Office…"

"You bloody fools — you dangerous fools!" Aubrey snapped.

"We're in the process of submitting it to the most stringent technological tests, Sir Kenneth," Eldon continued, unperturbed. "I may say that, thus far, it holds up. It would appear to be genuine. The meeting took place at the zoo. Near the monkey house, from the background noises."

"Kenneth," Babbington interrupted with what might have been genuine concern, "it's not good. This tape holds up just like the file that fell into the hands of the CIA. They're convinced that file is genuine — and so are we." His voice hardened on the last words, as if he were pressing them in a vice.

"My God…" Aubrey whispered. He saw the way ahead very clearly; a dark path between close, high trees in failing light. It was the only path, and his feet were already upon it.

"The file indicates quite clearly that you were the instrument of Robert Castleford's betrayal," Babbington insinuated. The use of his name brought the man himself back vividly to Aubrey; not the photograph in the newspapers nor on the television, but a haggard, defeated, cunning face — the last occasion they had met. The last time he had seen Castleford alive. An older, surprised, appalled, finally dangerous Castleford. Careful of your face, your eyes, Aubrey reminded himself, as if afraid that the memories would become visible like stigmata.

"I'm afraid that is precisely what the Teardrop file indicates, Sir Kenneth," Eldon agreed.

"What did you call it?" Aubrey demanded, stunned.

"Teardrop." Eldon appeared to permit himself a smile, and a catlike smoothing of his moustache. His eyes glinted with concentration. "Your codename, apparently."

"My codename? My God—!" Aubrey half raised himself from his chair. "You know it was his codename, dammit!"

"Do we? The file now in Washington has Teardrop upon its cover. It was opened in 1946, Sir Kenneth."

"But you've checked the records — dammit, you know that Kapustin was Teardrop…" His jaw dropped. "The records are ambiguous," he admitted in a hoarse whisper. "I could just as easily have been meeting — my controller from Moscow…"

"Precisely, Sir Kenneth."

"And you — have drawn that conclusion."

"Let's say we're proceeding on that assumption, Kenneth," Babbington supplied. "It will be up to you to disprove it, if you can."

"I might add, Sir Kenneth, that we have some film with the Helsinki tape. We're examining that, too, for signs that it might be a forgery. We don't think it is."

Aubrey shook his head weakly, and then looked at them, his eyes moving from face to face. He felt as close to pleading with them to be believed as he felt distant from their sympathy and understanding.

"Where's Hyde?" he asked unexpectedly. "Why did he flee the scene?"

Babbington appeared taken aback.

"We — we're looking for him now."

"He hasn't called in?"

"No."

"Why not? What smell's in his nose, Babbington?"

"Hyde could be on a binge for all we know, Sir Kenneth," Eldon said dismissively.

"Good God, man — you're not even interested!" His outburst was directed at Babbington. "I have been cleverly — very cleverly — framed, and you are going along with it out of personal ambition!"

Babbington stood up quickly. His eyes glared at Aubrey.

"If you want a personal motive, Kenneth," he said, "then I should try revenge rather than ambition. You betrayed Robert Castleford — you've betrayed everybody and everything for the last thirty-five years and more!" Babbington's mouth clamped into a thin line, then he added in a quieter voice: "We'll leave you for a few hours now, Kenneth. Shall we say two-thirty this afternoon? We'll be taping, naturally."

Babbington strode to the door. Eldon followed him with an easy, relaxed step. At the door, however, the colonel turned to Aubrey and said: "You will recall, Sir Kenneth, that the emperor had no new clothes." Then he shut the door behind him.

Aubrey heard Mrs Grey usher the two men coldly from the flat, and consciously suppressed his sudden desire for alcohol. A large cognac would be craven, not medicinal. The wall lights in the drawing-room, switched on because of the lowering grey sky outside, glinted on the crystal decanters next to the silver coffee pot.

For two days they had left him alone and unvisited. And uninformed. Alone with his growing suspicions and his imaginings. Now, a series of detonations had damaged, perhaps destroyed, his foundations. He was like an old building that tottered from the concussions. Tapes, films, files — Teardrop. Above all, that clever, clever, clever codename — calm down…

All he had known before that morning had been gathered from the newspapers, and the television the previous evening — early news, Nine o'Clock News, News at Ten, Newsnight, the endless repetition of a growing nightmare.

Two species of treachery, separate yet interwoven. In December 1946, he had betrayed Robert Castleford, a distinguished civil servant working for the Allied Control Commission in post-war Berlin, and ever since then he had been a double agent, at first for the NKVD, then later the MVD, finally the KGB. For more than thirty-five years he had led a secret life. He was Philby, he was Blunt, he was Burgess — he was worse than any of them.

Mrs Grey's head appeared at the door, and hastily withdrew as he turned a baleful glance upon her.

And he had done none of it.

And he could never prove his innocence.

He could never tell the truth, not about December 1946, not about Castleford.

Impatiently, leadenly, he paced the room. The emperor had no new clothes. Silver, white napery, jade, velvet, wool, crystal, china, porcelain, oak, walnut. The emperor had no new clothes. KCVO. Sir Kenneth. Director-General. The emperor had no new clothes.

He could never tell the truth. There was a crime, but he could never reveal it. He would not be believed. He would never be believed innocent. He would only compound his guilt if he told the truth, because he had killed Robert Castleford.

In a grey tin box, in the safe keeping of one of the few people who had never lost his trust, his motives lay bound in leather, inside a buff envelope. He had written the account immediately in the wake of Castleford's murder. After the war, it had lain in a deposit box in his bank. His secret, his bane. His leather-bound guilt and conscience. Then, in 1949, when he had met Clara Elsenreith once again, in Vienna during his service there with the Allied Control Commission, he had surrendered the journal — confession? — into her safekeeping. She still possessed it. All the reasons were there, he had fully explained them; but now those reasons would never excuse the crime. The truth would finish him as effectively as the KGB's lies. He had killed Robert Castleford.

The emperor had no new clothes, he thought bitterly, anger vying in his chest and stomach with growing fear, so that he felt inflated; asphyxiated. His head had begun to pound with a sudden headache, and the chill grey light from the tall windows pained his eyes. The trap was perfect. Teardrop — Deputy Chairman Kapustin — had set him up to perfection, had led him by the nose for two unsuspecting years while his damnation was arranged. His heart pumped, his head beat with his impotent rage and accusations of failure and gullibility. He had been tricked — he had been tricked…

He banged his fists against his thighs as he paced back and forth across the length of the lounge. The icing on the cake was to make him appear to have been activated as a Soviet agent; it clinched the guilt they had suggested for him in 1946. The emperor had no new clothes.

The KGB had him. Teardrop was now his codename, the codename of a traitor, a traitor who was Director-General of SIS. The trap had closed. In his mind, he could distinctly hear the slamming of steel doors.

Crystal, jade, silver; presents for the nativity of his promotion. The emperor's clothes. Unreal, like the new flat overlooking Regent's Park, like the new housekeeper, like the new office at Century House, overlooking the river; like his knighthood, which he had been so long in taking. He had been moated with fulfilled ambitions, but now they had him, inescapably, finally. For he had killed Castleford, and they evidently knew that, and upon their knowledge the whole strategy turned. He had killed him and had hidden the crime for thirty-five… for so many years…

His heart pumped and his head throbbed. His body felt too frail to support his emotions and their physical manifestations. The doorbell rang, startling him. He heard his old, weary breathing in the silence that followed, and surrendered to hopelessness. Mrs Grey answered the door as he experienced dread at the possible return of Babbingtpn and Eldon with all the virulence of an aging woman unprepared by make-up and rest for the arrival of visitors.

Into Aubrey's mind a clear, high, pure treble voice floated, an almost unearthly sound; a boy's voice. The words of the hymn or anthem, whichever it was, were indistinguishable in the echoing innocence of the voice. Perhaps Abide with me, perhaps the Nunc Dimittis. He did not know which words he was singing in his vividly remembered childhood. A cathedral nave, but other churches and chapels crowded their architecture upon him, too. White surplices were no more than ghostly in an incensed gloom. His father, the disgruntled, vicious, bigoted cathedral verger, was there, smiling; his lips drawn back over his teeth in the demonstration of a snarl.

Aubrey was frightened of the memory; not because of its potency, but because it seemed to herald an incontinence of mind that endangered him. It was an involuntary retreat from the present when he needed all his energies, all his concentration, simply to survive.

He looked up, visibly shaken, as Paul Massinger appeared at the door, unannounced. Aubrey's eyes narrowed in calculation and surprise — Castleford's face as they struggled was vivid and unnerving in his mind. He saw Massinger's handsome face register shock and he recalled Massinger's wife; Castleford's daughter. Then Aubrey pushed himself firmly to his feet.

"Paul, my dear fellow! How good of you to come…"

"Kenneth — you're all right? You look—"

"Yes, yes," Aubrey replied testily. "A little tired. Sit down, sit down."

Massinger chose Eldon's place on the sofa, opposite Aubrey.

Aubrey noticed the walking stick and the moment of discomfort as Massinger lowered himself into the cushions. The man's breath escaped in a sigh.

"I—" Massinger began.

"A drink?" Aubrey suggested, almost involuntarily beginning to control the situation.

"Thank you. Scotch and soda." When Aubrey had poured the drinks and reseated himself, Massinger blurted: "I — came to offer my help. I don't know how — it seems almost crazy now — but I wanted you to know—"

Aubrey leaned forward and patted Massinger's knee. "I know, my dear fellow. And — thank you." Then the past two days welled up in him uncontrollably, and he said: "They've abandoned me, Paul. The Cabinet Office, JIC — abandoned me."

"The ingratitude of princes?" Massinger's Bostonian accent had almost been eroded by his twenty years' domicile in London.

"Perhaps. They want to get rid of me, of course — they'd like to see the reins in Babbington's hands."

"I — see…" Aubrey saw in Massinger's face a keen hunger. His expression wore a sheen of excitement. Good. Massinger, despite having resigned from the CIA more than twenty years ago, was being drawn back into the secret world. The alcoholic who, years after his cure, takes the first drink. Massinger was eager once more for the gossip of the secret world, its machinations, perhaps even for its power. He saw help, too, of course. Massinger intended to help him if he could. There was in him an erect and certain loyalty to friends, and an almost priggish sense of right and wrong. In his desperation, Aubrey would take and use Massinger's help if he could. He prepared himself for another interrogation. Massinger said, his face gloomy, wrought-up: "There's nothing to all this nonsense, I suppose?" As Aubrey began emphatically shaking his head, he added: "You know why I'm asking, of course?"

"Yes. I give you my word on it. I did not betray Robert Castleford to the NKVD. That is a complete fabrication." Aubrey moulded his features to an expression of honesty, to an intimate gravity suiting his words and the friendship between himself and the American scholar. Massinger studied his face, and then nodded.

"Thank God," he whispered. "But what about the rest of it?"

In Massinger's face, he saw a reflection of the past; signals of debt. Massinger was perfectly well aware that Aubrey had once saved his career after an operation had gone seriously wrong. Massinger had been blamed for the exposure and arrest of a whole network he had run. Aubrey had proven treachery by another rather than Massinger's incompetence, and the debt had never been repaid. Now, perhaps, it would be. Aubrey suppressed the eagerness he felt, rose and crossed to the sideboard, bringing the whisky decanter when he returned. He began speaking urgently even as he poured. Also, the man's wife would not wish him here; Massinger had come despite her disapprobation, even hatred if she believed the media. Therefore, he might prove a staunch ally.

"… and the original Teardrop was the Deputy Chairman himself. He — set me up for this — all of it," Aubrey concluded a few minutes later. Massinger had remained silent throughout the narrative. "And the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Cabinet Office have decided that they believe this cock-and-bull story, down to the last fabricated detail. Even to the extent of not muzzling the press. They do not intend I should wriggle out of this, Paul — they do not!"

He sipped at his sherry, watching Massinger's clouded face as he examined what he had been told. The whisky went unregarded in his hands. Then he looked up.

"Why should the KGB want you so thoroughly disgraced?"

"To sow confusion—? I really don't know. Mischief, I presume. If the witch-hunts of the past few years have indeed cleansed both services of disciples, apostles, fellow-travellers and the like — then it would serve Moscow Centre's purpose very well to substitute shadow for substance, raise the bogey again." He shrugged. "I really don't know, Paul."

Massinger was silent for a time, then he said: "If Charlie Buckholz was still alive, he'd never have let JIC see that file. He'd have warned you of it at the very least." Aubrey remembered, vividly, Massinger's arm supporting him as they stood at the damp, chilly graveside. The military chaplain had said, his words, Buckholz's coffin had been lowered and the Deputy Director of the CIA had vanished from their lives. Their mutual friend. Then Massinger added: "What can I do?"

Aubrey suppressed a small sense of triumph. "Thank you, Paul."

"How are you fixed here? What access do you have?"

"None. The telephone is tapped. I am guarded day and night."

"Fortunately, Babbington has been kind enough to keep the Press away from my door. There are no other advantages to my isolation."

"Then, what do we do? I have — very unofficial contacts. Nothing I can use to help."

"If only Hyde were here—!" Aubrey burst out.

"Hyde? Who is Hyde?"

"A good field man."

"Would he help?"

"I think so. But, I can't reach him and neither can you."

"Where is he?"

"He was with me in Vienna when I was arrested. He — fled."

"Why?"

"I don't know. He must have had good reason. What he knows or suspects, who can say? If only he would come in…"

"Who else?"

"Peter Shelley. He's got East Europe now, you know. I promoted him. He could be our man."

"Will he have been warned off?"

"Yes. Yes, I think everyone will have been warned off. The situation is extreme — I am not believed. I am guilty… but I think Peter will come through. He has to come through if I'm to escape this net."

"Very well, Kenneth. I'll see him."

"Invite him to lunch — today," Aubrey instructed with a dry, hungry eagerness.

"If you wish — from a call-box, naturally," Massinger replied with a boyish smile. Yes, he was hooked, Aubrey concluded. He had begun drinking again, had become addicted to the secret life once more. "Who's running your whole show at the moment?"

"Babbington — the Cabinet Office, Sir William Guest that is, has dumped everything in his lap. DG of MI5, chief investigating officer in the case of yours truly, and acting DG of SIS. An unparallelled array of finery!" he concluded with surprising venom.

"Do you think I should talk to him — unofficially, of course, as a friend of Margaret…?"

"Babbington wants my head, and my job."

"OK," Massinger concluded heavily. He felt manoeuvred; shuffled and dealt like cards. Aubrey was at his most threatened, and therefore his most calculating. "What do you want from Shelley?"

"The last two years of my life," Aubrey replied grimly. "He will have access to the files, the recordings, everything. I need it all. And he must find Patrick Hyde for me. I must have Hyde's voice — and I must know why he ran away."

"Can you prove your innocence — with no shadow of doubt?"

"I must. I must break the mirror and show the reality behind it. I am not Teardrop. I must prove that. Otherwise—" His spreading arms indicated, even embraced, his surroundings. " — all of this is lost. I am lost."

Massinger perceived that Aubrey felt his whole career, his whole past, to be in the balance. Forty-five years and more of secret work, secret loyalty, secret pride. All of it was threatened now.

"And 1946?" he asked.

"That must wait." Aubrey paused for a moment. Massinger saw his jowls quiver slightly, and the greyness of his face as a gleam of watery sunlight caught it from the tall window. Motes of dust danced uncertainly in the beam of light as Aubrey swept doubt aside with a gesture of his hand. "That must wait — it is the recent past that will save me. I have to prove that I controlled Teardrop — that he did not control me."

"You're fighting shadows. It doesn't matter to your people, maybe, that the X-ray machine has a fault. It's snowing up a shadow on your lungs, and that's enough for them." Massinger's face was bleak. He appeared out of his depth, even regretful that he had come, made his offer.

"Dammit, Paul—!"

"OK, Kenneth. I'll help — if I can."

Massinger sighed involuntarily, even shook his head. Then he looked up at Aubrey, grimaced as if with pain, then nodded. His features seemed to clear of doubt, become heavy with a decision already made. "I owe you, Kenneth," he said.

Aubrey waved the remark aside, murmuring: "Not that old matter…"

"Nevertheless," Massinger persisted, "I owe you my career — at least, until I changed it for college teaching. I don't know if I can help. I just know I have to try. There isn't anyone else who will, is there?" Aubrey shook his head. "Though what a retired professor of European history has to bring to this thing, I'm not sure." Massinger's smile was rueful, and he added: "Though I was a good operations controller in the field, back before the Flood!" His face darkened when he said: "You always involved yourself too personally in operations. You should never have gone near that Deputy Chairman — not within a mile."

"Meals with the Devil and the virtues of a long spoon, you'll be telling me next."

"Exactly."

"Another drink, Paul?"

"Mm? No thanks. I guess I'd better be going—" He looked at his watch. " — if I'm to talk to Peter Shelley today." He hoisted himself stiffly to his feet. Aubrey rose. Massinger, leaning on his stick, looked down on the older man. He smiled slightly, sardonically. His eyes were lidded and he appeared weary. "OK, Kenneth. I'll do what I can…" Something evidently still nagged at his mind. He said diffidently: "I feel — like a traitor myself." Aubrey winced at the word. "Margaret wouldn't forgive me, even though you didn't do it…?" He ended on an interrogative note.

"I swear to you, Paul, I did not betray Robert Castleford to the NKVD," Aubrey said with finely-judged solemnity.

Massinger seemed relieved. "I know."

"Tell Peter to find Patrick Hyde," Aubrey instructed urgently. "And — and tell him I shall need a transcript of that file our defecting friend took to the CIA — that damned Teardrop file, as it's called! I need to see that."

"Very well. I'll be in touch tomorrow." He looked once more at his watch. An expensive gold watch on a thick gold bracelet, Aubrey noticed. Subtle wealth. Castleford money.

Aubrey shook Massinger's hand. Light flashed from the face of the watch.

"Thank you, Paul — thank you!" he said.

The upstairs room of Antoine's in Charlotte Street was almost empty. Peter Shelley watched Massinger over the rim of his glass, and then sniffed the armagnac. He sipped at it, savoured it, and sensed his moment. He shook his head firmly. Massinger's hand, about to pick up his demi-tasse of black coffee, quivered. The tiny cup rattled in its saucer.

"I'm sorry, Professor Massinger — there's nothing I can do. There's a shutdown order on everything. Christ, I'd like to help the old man — but he's out of bounds. They're watching me, for God's sake!"

"Who?"

"Babbington's chums. I'm near the top of the list of potential help the old man might try to employ. I couldn't fart without them knowing about it."

Massinger stared into his coffee, then absently swilled the pale armagnac in his glass. From the moment the lobster had been served, he had known this would be the outcome. Aubrey's fall had left Shelley still in the directorship of East Europe Desk, but his hold upon his new office was precarious. He was an Aubrey man. He might yet go. Shelley was keeping his head down until the gunfire stopped.

"Babbington intends to control both services, finally?"

Shelley nodded. "Oh, yes. He's ambitious, and he's favoured. It's happened before, in the sixties, and since then. One man doing both jobs. Babbington's the man, apparently."

"You must owe Aubrey a great deal," Massinger suggested.

"I do," Shelley replied frostily, his face twisted into an ugly grimace as he drained his glass. He evidently disliked being reminded of his debts, especially by someone outside his service, and an American, at that. Massinger controlled his anger. "And I'm aware of it, and I'm grateful. But, I can do nothing." He leaned confidentially towards Massinger. "To begin with, JIC has impounded all the papers, the tapes, everything. Sir William sent in some people and they took stuff away by the lorryload. And I just can't get you a transcript of the Teardrop file. It's much too hot and much too jealously guarded. I haven't even seen a copy. Any one of the few copies in existence would be missed immediately. I can't do it. The old man's being sent to the wall, Professor. There's nothing to be done about it."

Massinger sighed impatiently, admitting inwardly that Shelley was right. He was not even craven, simply right. "What about Hyde?"

"Mm. Vienna Station say he's disappeared. They've heard nothing from him."

"You don't believe that, do you?"

"Patrick Hyde's a funny bloke — but he wouldn't leave the old man up to his eyeballs in the shit without a very good reason."

"Then what does he know, or suspect? What did he see or hear that night?"

"I've no idea."

"And you're not curious?"

"I can't get hold of him without going through Vienna Station. And I can't do that with any hope of secrecy. Hyde's cut off. He might even be dead."

"Why should he be dead?"

"I don't know," Shelley whispered fiercely with growing exasperation. "But unless he calls in, no one is ever going to find out what spooked him."

"What's his home address?"

"I—" Shelley paused, then added: "I'll write it down for you." He scribbled on the back of an envelope. Massinger pocketed it without reading the address. "He won't be there."

"Would there be anyone else at home?"

Shelley looked thoughtful. "There's a woman upstairs — she actually owns the place. His landlady. I've no idea what their real relationship is. Most odd…" He shrugged.

"Would he trust her? In trouble, would he try to contact her?"

"I don't know. Perhaps…"

Massinger leaned forward. "Look," he said, "you don't believe any of this nonsense against Aubrey, do you?"

Shelley shook his head. He looked young and cunning and ambitious and embarrassed. "No, of course not—"

"Then—?"

"I can't—!" he protested. His long index finger tapped the tablecloth, then stirred the crumbs from his bread roll as he continued. "There's nothing that can be done to help him, Professor. I know that. I'm there every day. No one is going to help him buck JIC, the Cabinet Office, and HMG. No one wants it to happen, but they can't fight it." He looked up from the curling comet's tail of crumbs on the white cloth. He shook his head emphatically. "Nothing can be done. The old man's beyond saving."

In the foyer of the Inter-Continental Hotel, Hyde passed a row of long mirrors which reflected a man he might not have recognised had he not created him. The glass windows of the souvenir shop mirrored him more palely than wide-skirted dolls and curved wooden pipes. Then the window of the newspaper shop caught and held him again. But the face that stared back at him from the front page of the evening newspaper suddenly exposed the truth, masked only by the moustache, the clear spectacles and the three-piece business suit. His own face — the familiar one that confronted him in his shaving mirror and the face of the man who had slept rough for two nights in Vienna, by the river and then in an alley behind a restaurant — stared at him from the rack. His disguise was at once useless and foolish. Gingerly, he took one of the newspapers, flinching as a large, middle-aged Austrian did the same before passing into the shop to pay for it. Hyde opened the paper. The small headline and the story lay below the photograph. The snapshot was official. It matched his passport photograph. It was his passport photograph. SIS must have supplied it.

He felt the weight of the falling net upon his shoulders.

Upstairs, in the suite he had booked with the passport he had stolen on the metro, the rest of his new clothes, the too-large suitcase that was part of his cover, the new toothbrush and comb and after-shave all waited like props he could no longer use because the play had closed. He had booked into one of Vienna's most expensive hotels because it would be among the small hotels and pensions that they would look for him first.

Now, drugs. He was a police matter. He shuffled the clear-glass spectacles on the bridge of his nose, fingered the pads in his cheeks; his disguise seemed pitiful, amateurish. He thrust the newspaper back into the rack, and walked away from the shop. Arabs lingered over coffee in the foyer, a group of Americans queued at Reception, there was laughter from the bar. He reached the lifts, then paused.

What—? Who—?

He had not dared attempt to hire a car, or try the airport or the railway stations. Now, he might have to. Now he had to get out of Vienna before his face began to stare nightmarishly at him from lamp-posts and newspaper and metro station walls and trolley-bus windows. This was only the opening bombardment. The pressure would increase, the crimes grow in enormity, his capture become more essential.

Savagely, he stabbed his finger on the button to summon the lift. He needed to retreat to the hideously expensive suite on the tenth floor which he could not use any of his own credit cards to pay for. The doors sighed open and he stepped in. The lift ascended, smooth and swift, as if rushing him away from possible identification and arrest. He felt fear; pure, undiluted and inescapable. He knew he was beaten.

Train, car, bus, boat…

The lift doors sighed open. He hurried along the corridor, passing an open suite door. Two Arab women and two children sat there, a tray of fruit and biscuits outside the door. They were prisoners of the hotel, like himself. He fumbled his key into the lock, opened the door, and closed and locked it behind him.

His breathing was loud and ragged. His body was heavy, wanting only to sink into the cushions of the sofa or lie upon the bed in the next room. His hands were shaking. There was no way out, his body urged. Give it up…

Train, car, bus, aircraft…

All watched. All watched.

The telephone lay on the writing desk. He could ring, call Parrish or Wilkes at the embassy, play along, ask them what they wanted—

Or just walk in. They couldn't execute him in cold blood. Whatever they wanted or didn't want from him, he could listen to them, agree to do it, forget what had happened…

That would be as easy as telling them about the tape he had dropped, the tape they undoubtedly had by now. He damned his stupidity, his gullibility, once more. Easy -

For them, killing him would be just as easy.

"Christ—!" he exclaimed in an explosion of breath. "Christ—!"

Then, involuntarily, he picked up the telephone and flicked over the directory of international code numbers on the desk, running his finger down the column of figures. He began dialling, first the code for the UK, then the London number. He could see the telephone — perhaps his cat was sitting by it, or looking lazily up at its summons. It was no doubt ensconced in Ros's flat, above his own.

"Come on, come on…" he breathed.

Give up, some part of him suggested seductively.

"Sod that," he muttered, then: "Come on, Ros, come on, girlie…"

She knew where the other passports were, the money, the credit cards in another name. Would she bring them? At least she could send them.

"Come on, darling…" he muttered urgently as the telephone went on ringing in her flat in Earl's Court.

CHAPTER TWO Meat Market

THE TAXI DROPPED PAUL Massinger at the corner of Philbeach Gardens and Warwick Road and he walked quickly, his limp easing with exercise, along the crescent of the Gardens. Through the spaces between the houses he glimpsed the Earls Court Exibition Building that lay behind the crescent. St. Cuthberts Church, though elaborately Gothic, seemed shrunken and dwarfish by comparison as he passed it.

He felt a cold trickle of danger in his stomach as the afternoon closed in. Gaps in the darkening cloud were blue-turning-black already. There was a chilly sliver of fear in the small of his back. What he had suspected in the taxi was now confirmed. He had collidid with reality and the impact had snatched away his breath and his wits, but he was certain that he was under surveillance.

The blue Cortina had stopped by the Church. It had pulled out behind the taxi in Charlotte Street and, from time to time, he had seen it during the journey to Earl's Court. Now, there could be no fudging, no postponement of certainty. He could not remember having seen the same car in the vicinity of Aubrey's flat, nor on the way to Antoine's. But it had been there when he and Shelley left, and it was still with him.

God, he had done no more that call on an old friend and eaten lunch with a second man, and someone already thought him worth tailing-

Shelly-? he thought, and dismissed the idea. Babbington? The KGB? Who?

He shook his head, ridding himself of the questions as a dog might have done water from its coat. He studied the house numbers in the crescent. Bare trees flanked the railings of the gardens themselves, trunks black as iron. The grass beyond them was patchily white with old snow.

He climbed three steps to a front door, and studied the discoloured cards below each doorbell. P. Hyde claimed one of them. On the second floor, he was informed in a more flowing script, lived R. D. Woode. He pressed the top floor bell. There was a delay, and then a tinny voice with a distinct Australian accent issued from the grille of the speaker above the bells.

"My name is Massinger — a friend of Kenneth Aubrey," he enunciated clearly in reply to the enquiry. "Am I speaking to Patrick Hyde's landlady?"

"You are, sport. He's away on business." Even through the distortions of the speaker, the voice seemed pinched and tense with knowledge.

"I know that. You know the name Aubrey, maybe?" Shelley knew nothing of Hyde's relationship with the woman. But he had felt Hyde trusted her — she might know Hyde's work…?

"I know it."

"He's in trouble. He wants to know Mr Hyde's whereabouts, urgently." Massinger felt the cold of the late afternoon seeping into him, mingling with the chill knowledge of the watchers in the blue Cortina. He was tempted to turn around, but remained hunched near the grille of the speaker.

"I know that, too," the voice admitted. Then, rallying: "Shit, what do you want, mister?"

"I'd like to talk to you. I assure you Kenneth Aubrey, Patrick Hyde's — er, employer — sent me."

There was a long silence. Massinger heard a crow coughing in one of the naked trees. Then, in a graceless, churlish tone, the woman said: "I'll meet you outside his flat. First floor." There was a buzz, and he pushed open the door, letting it close behind him on its security springs. The hall smelt of cooking, but was carpeted and quiet. He went up the stairs as confidently as he could, wincing at the pain each tread caused in his hip.

Hyde's door was painted a garish crimson. Standing in front of it was a woman of perhaps thirteen or fourteen stone in a kaftan that billowed around her. She appraised him with keen brown eyes. Her dark hair was dragged back from a broad forehead and held in a pony-tail. She held a bunch of keys in her hand.

"Massinger?" she said.

"Yes." He held out his hand.

"Ros Woode," she acknowledged, gripping his hand firmly and then letting it drop. He studied her face. It was impassive almost to the point of boredom, but he sensed that the expression was adopted; a mask.

He gave up the puzzle. Carefully, he said, "Could I ask you to do something for me?"

"Depends."

"Just listen, then," he instructed. "If you should hear from Mr Hyde—" He held up his hand to stifle her protest. " — if you should hear from him, would you please tell him of my visit, and tell him also that I am trying to help Aubrey. Tell him — mm, tell him that I am trying to establish why the KGB should have framed Aubrey, and that I believe it is a frame-up." Massinger cursed inwardly. He needed something, a token of good faith, a password that would convince Hyde. Yet he knew nothing about him. What—? "Has Hyde worked for Aubrey for long, do you know?"

"He has — why?" The woman seemed subdued now. She appeared to wish to believe him. He realised that she had been in touch with Hyde, and had been warned against visitors.

"I'm trying to find something that will convince him I'm a genuine friend, not a trap. But I can't. All I can tell you is that I'm the husband of the daughter of the man Aubrey is supposed to have betrayed to the Russians."

"Christ, mate…" the woman breathed.

"That either makes me Aubrey's bitter enemy, or his one real friend. Hyde must decide. If he contacts you again, or if you can reach him, please tell him everything I've told you — and that I must speak with him. I'll do it from here, even from the call-box on the corner to keep him secure. Will you do that?"

The woman hestitated for a long time, and then she finally reluctantly nodded.

"I'll do it-if I hear from him," she grudgingly agreed.

"Thank you. Now, I'll leave you. Good afternoon, Ms Woode." He inclined his head, and turned to leave the room. The woman made no effort to recall him and Massinger was dubious as to his success. She might just as easily warn Hyde off.

He closed the door of the flat behind him and went down the stairs. A young woman passed him in the hallway, then opened the door of the ground floor flat. The commentary of a Test Match issued into the hall, together with the smell of pipe tobacco. The radio informed him of an imminent English batting collapse before the door was closed upon the commentator's voice. He had never learned the English trick of passionate interest in such a sleepwalking game; especially not in a recording of a game being played on the other side of the world.

He opened the front door.

The blue Cortina was clearly visible in the failing light, against the black railings of the gardens. Two men, driver and passenger. He noted the number, then descended the steps.

He had walked three or four yards in the opposite direction from the parked car when he heard its engine start. A noise harsher than the crow's coughing earlier. His body suffered a violent spasm of shock, as if he had been dreaming the falling-dream and then suddenly awoken. The car passed him. He forced himself to turn his head, and felt a chill of recognition. A type, not an individual. A professional. The driver's glance was vivid with threat.

The car turned out of Philbeach Gardens, and disappeared. Massinger walked on in the chill dusk, his heart refusing to adopt a calmer, more regular beating.

Margaret was perched on the edge of the armchair which faced the door of the drawing-room. Her hands comforted and strengthened each other on her lap. Babbington was in half-profile to Massinger until he turned his head in greeting. Or perhaps it was no more than an acknowledgement of his presence. Massinger felt himself an intruder, the shoulders of his overcoat sparkling with melted snow that had blown along the orange-flaring darkness of the street outside. The warmth of the central heating seemed a barrier; a border he had yet to cross.

Babbington stood almost at once, and held out a hand. Massinger moved towards him, conscious of an ache in his hip. Margaret's features betrayed a little anxiety. Babbington seemed to weigh and discard him, and to be almost amused at his infirmity.

"My dear Paul," he murmured.

"Sir Andrew," Massinger replied stiffly. Babbington smiled sardonically and with infinite confidence.

Margaret stood up jerkily, her body that of a faint-hearted conspirator in the moment of flight. "I–I'll leave the two of you to talk," she murmured. Massinger allowed a look of pain to cross his face. It was evident Babbington and she had been talking. She knew — if not everything, then a great deal about how he had spent the day. He could not but be hurt, and guilty, in the moment before other thoughts crowded in. Blue Cortina. Babbington's people—? Why? He felt breathless.

"Don't forget to leave yourself time to change," Margaret added as she moved to the door.

Flowers — he was aware of a number of new flower arrangements that must have been delivered that afternoon. The sideboard was laden with drink and glasses.

"Why—?" he asked stupidly.

"Covent Garden," she murmured in a tight little voice, indicating displeasure. Then she closed the double doors to the dining-room behind her. Immediately, he could hear her supervising the activities of the butler and housekeeper.

"Sit down, my dear Paul," Babbington murmured, indicating a chair. It might have been the man's own room. Massinger lowered himself into his armchair as vigorously as possible, casting the stick and his removed raincoat aside. Babbington watched him with what might have been greed rather than curiosity. "You're not well?"

"Fine, thank you, Andrew — and you?"

"Good health, thank God."

Massinger quailed inwardly. It was not knowledge of Babbington's position, authority and reputation that made him do so. Rather, Babbington exuded those things, they were palpably present in his frame, his features, the room.

"You seem serious, Andrew?" he asked as lightly as he could.

"I am, Paul — I am. This Aubrey business. This affair of your friend Aubrey. Deeply distressing." Babbington shook his head as an accompaniment to his words. The scent of winter roses from near the windows, where the central heating was opening the tight buds, was sharp and warm in Massinger's nostrils. He had not noticed the scent when he had come in from the cold, wet street. Now, he heard the sleet patter against the windows behind the heavy curtains and, through one window at the far end of the room where the curtains had not been drawn, he saw it blow in a gust through the orange light of a street-lamp. The image was almost identical to that of one of the two Turners on the wall above the sideboard.

"Yes. My friend, as you say." It sounded like a confession of weakness or guilt.

"I'm sorry for you, Paul. It must be very upsetting, caught in the middle as you are."

"Yes."

"Especially when one is impotent, useless." The words had been carefully chosen. "When one can do nothing to help, even though one wishes to — however much one wishes to." Babbington spread his hands on his thighs.

"You think nothing can be done?"

"I'm certain of it," Babbington replied sharply. His eyes held Massinger's. "I'm sure of it," he repeated softly.

"You think he's guilty?"

"Perhaps. It doesn't look good. In fact, it looks very bad, from whichever angle the light strikes it. Very bad."

"But you know he's not a traitor—!"

"I know nothing of the sort, neither do you. You don't believe he is. Nothing more than belief."

"Nonsense."

"My God — if he is allowed to remain as DG of the intelligence service, Paul — the havoc, the absolute, irreparable harm of it!"

"I don't believe it. Any of it. You shouldn't believe it either."

"Aubrey's day is over, Paul, whatever the final outcome. I assure you his sun has set." Babbington's eyes gleamed with an undisguised ambition.

"Whatever the truth really is?"

"I'm sorry," Babbington murmured insincerely. "I realise he is a very close friend…"

"And if it is a KGB set-up, as Aubrey believes?" Massinger asked, feeling warmth ascend to his cheeks. He felt foolish, hot and angry and not in control of his situation. And he felt insulted and unnerved by the threats that had underlain each of Babbington's remarks. "Don't you wonder why the KGB might want to help you achieve your ambitions — why they should want Aubrey ditched like this?"

Babbington was silent for a time, as if genuinely considering Massinger's theory. Then he studied the cornice, and the central moulding above the chandelier. Plaster pastoral, shepherds and shepherdesses against pale blue, like a piece of Wedgwood. Then he returned his gaze to Massinger.

"You're not going to go on with this, of course?"

"What?"

"This misguided attempt to assist someone who cannot be helped."

"The truth doesn't matter?"

"That is the second time you have asked me that. It still sounds just as naïve."

"My God—"

"Aubrey is as guilty as hell!" Babbington snapped. His powerful hands were bunched on his knees as he leant forward in his chair. "When we get to the bottom of it — to the centre of the web — Aubrey will be seen to be as guilty as hell. He's a Soviet agent, dammit, and he has been for nearly forty years. Ever since he betrayed your wife's father, and had him disposed of by the NKVD."

"Why should he have done that?" Massinger disputed hotly, his face burning with anger and with the effect of Babbington's unsheathed determination.

"A proof of his loyalty — or because Robert Castleford was a convenient way to save his own skin — take your choice."

"That's crazy—" Massinger replied, a perceptible quaver in his voice.

Babbington sat back as if weary of the discussion. His eyes, unlike his cheeks and lips, were not angry. They studied Massinger in a cold, detached manner.

"As you will," he said finally. "But he did it — your wife's father. A man whose bootlaces Aubrey wasn't fit to tie."

"Is that blackmail?" Massinger asked quietly. His voice was breathy, nervous.

"Just remember your happiness, and that of Margaret, Paul. Please…" It was no more than the mockery of a plea.

"As I thought — blackmail."

"No, Paul. Sound advice. If, in your Harvard, CIA and King's College priggishness, you wish to see real blackmail — then think of this. You might expect a number of City directorships to come your way. You might expect a decent number of Quango appointments. None of it will happen if you go on with this. I can assure you of that. Belgravia, everything that might have come with the job, so to speak—" He gestured around the room. It was obscene. Massinger choked on his silent anger. " — will come to nothing. I really do assure you of it."

"Great God," Massinger breathed.

"But, above all, you will lose your wife's love. I am certain of that. As you must be." Babbington stood up quickly. "Don't bother to see me out. Say goodbye to Margaret for me. Tell her that Elizabeth will be in touch — a dinner party, perhaps? Good evening, Paul."

And he was gone before Massinger could clear his throat of accumulated bile and fear. He watched the door close, as if half-fearful the man would not leave. He felt his hands twitching on his thighs, but did not look at them. His body felt hot and without energy. Babbington had threatened to take his wife from him.

The doors to the dining-room opened and she posed, the light and bustle behind her like a natural setting. He was terrified, as if she had shown herself to him before being taken away to some place of confinement; or before she voluntarily departed. The butler and housekeeper busied themselves behind her, part of the tableau vivant. Crystal, gleaming napery, silver. Candlesticks and candelabra. Caviar, smoked salmon, canapes, asparagus. Champagne, Burgundy, claret, hock.

She released the door handles and moved out of her setting towards him. Her face began to mirror his as she moved, and she hurried the last few steps then knelt beside his chair, taking his proffered, quivering hand at once.

"Oh, my dear, my dear…" she murmured over and over, her cheek against the back of his hand. Massinger listened to the note of sympathy in her voice, clinging to it, afraid to lose it. And he heard, above the sympathy, like static spoiling broadcast music, something he could only comprehend as necessity. She knew what had been said, and she knew it had been necessary to her happiness. She had allowed Babbington to threaten and blackmail; to frighten him off. Her father existed in some sacrosanct part of her memory, deeper rooted than himself.

Class, too, he thought miserably. Damned English class. She had taken sides, and she expected him to join her. Nothing else would make sense to her. Aubrey had been a verger's son, and a scholarship boy. A choral scholar with, a brilliant First. A verger's son.

He shifted in his chair. "It's — all right, my dear," he muttered. She looked at him, the gleam of her satisfaction slowly becoming absorbed in affection.

"I know, darling. I know." She stood up. "Are you — ready to change?"

"Yes, of course," he replied with studied lightness. His hip stabbed him like a painful conscience as he moved, and his limp was more pronounced. Without looking at her, he said as he reached the door: "There'll be no trouble, my love. No trouble." He heard her sigh with satisfaction.

He crossed the hall to his dressing-room, avoiding the long, gilded eighteenth-century mirror on the wall above the telephone, avoiding the cheval-glass in one corner of the dressing-room. The long modern mirror on the inside of the fitted wardrobe door caught him by surprise, revealing the irresolute, dispirited shame on his features. He turned away from it, slamming the door. He took off his jacket and tie, uncrooked his arm and dropped his overcoat to the carpet. The hard seat of the divanette looked inviting.

The telephone rang, startling him out of his recriminations. He looked at the extension on the wall, then snatched at the receiver.

"Professor Massinger?"

Peter Shelley's voice—?

"Yes. Who is that?"

"Shelley, Professor."

Massinger's head turned so that he could guiltily watch the door. The shadows in the dressing-room enlarged, moving across the carpet like the progress of a conspiracy. He slumped onto the divanette.

"What — what do you want?"

He listened for the second click of an eavesdropper. His hand shook.

"I–I'd like to help," Shelley blurted. "I — think I can get you the file, just for a couple of hours, you can photocopy it and I can get it back…" The plan spilled out. Shelley had gone over and over it, it was obvious, overcoming his reluctance and ambition and fear. "It's a transcript, of course, not a copy of the original photographs in Washington… it's all I can do, I won't be able to do anything more."

Massinger listened. No one else seemed to be listening on another extension.

"I.."

"Professor — you said you wanted it. Do you want it?"

Click? Telephone being picked up? Margaret—? Massinger was enraged, and his anger spilled onto Shelley. Shelley was part of the conspiracy to separate him from Margaret—

"I don't require it now," he said as unemotionally as he could. "I'm sorry, but it's nothing to do with me. Thank you for calling."

Shelley put down his receiver at once. Massinger listened. Above the purring tone, he heard a slight click as one of the extensions in the flat was replaced. He slapped his own receiver onto its cradle as if it burned his hand. Then he waited until Margaret should open the door, a smile of sympathy and congratulation on her lips. Misery occupied his chest and stomach like water that threatened to drown him.

Margaret glowed. There was no doubt of it. Happy, confident, secure once more. She received the sympathies of her guests concerning the news of her father's betrayal and murder almost with equanimity. Order had returned to her universe. Massinger watched her moving amid the guests at her apres-opera gathering with a love that seemed renewed. Refreshed. And as a perpetual stranger to this kind of social intimacy.

Eugene Onegin, with a Russian soprano and conducted by the soprano's more famous husband, had failed to lift him from his mood. Only Margaret's silent glances of approval and satisfaction throughout the evening in their box had stilled the nagging self-criticisms. Yet now, after whisky and good Burgundy and very little to eat, he could begin to accept and live with the choice he had made. His priorities were reasserted. He had slightly adjusted the focusing ring of his moral and emotional lens, and Margaret's image was precise and clear in the eyepiece.

He was standing near the window, and the scent of the roses was clearer than the cigar and cigarette smoke. Already, two or three people had spoken warmly to him of directorships; another had murmured an enquiry concerning an imminent Royal Commission and his willingness to serve; yet another had dangled the prospect of a lucrative Quango appointment. All of it had pleased Margaret immensely; all of it appealed to some hidden instinct in himself to increase his Anglicisation — to become, now that he was no longer a respected university teacher and merely an emeritus professor of King's College, London, a useful, even powerful member of the closed community in which he moved and lived. He felt a need to strengthen his roots in England, to give himself a more appropriate weight as Margaret's husband. Now, it was beginning to happen. Anything was possible now. Were he younger, and a British citizen, he might have sought, and found, a safe parliamentary seat. He was being courted. Everyone knew, and everyone was pleased with him. He smiled bitterly into his glass.

The scent of the roses was momentarily nauseous and the room too hot. Then Sir William Guest, senior Privy Councillor, formerly Head of the Diplomatic Service and presently security and intelligence co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was standing beside him.

Caviar speckled the corner of his mouth until the tip of a pink tongue removed it. Moselle glowed palely in his tall glass. He was beaming at Massinger with evident satisfaction. Of all people, of course, Sir William would know he had withdrawn from the contest — given Aubrey up. Sir William's eyes moved to Margaret, who waved over heads to him and Massinger. Margaret, waving to her godfather and her husband.

"You are blessed, my boy," Sir William murmured.

"I know it."

"Your continued — your uninterrupted happiness." Sir William raised his glass and drank off a toast. "My goddaughter's looking so well, so — happy these days." He sighed like a large dog before a blazing hearth.

"Yes, William."

"Lucky man — lucky to have been able to draw that much from a woman." Sir William chuckled. His jowls moved slightly out of sequence with the sound. Then he appraised Massinger. "Can't imagine how you've done it. It must be something you Americans have." He laughed. The noise seemed bellicose. "A great shame this business of her father ever reached the public domain," he continued. "Very upsetting for Margaret."

"I think she's coping," Massinger replied, studying his glass.

"Naturally, as her godfather, I worry about her. Her father was my closest friend, and he would have been a great man. A future head of the Diplomatic Service — he might even have kept me out of the job!" He laughed again, briefly. "A bloody disgrace—"

"If it's true."

"Oh, of course, if it's true." Sir William's heavy eyebrows almost touched above his nose as he frowned at Massinger. The expression was a warning-off. "Even so, very upsetting. As for the thought that one of our people… Still, this is not the occasion. Leave it to time, eh?"

"And Babbington?"

Sir William's eyebrows closed upon each other again. His eyes were hard as he shook his head slightly. "We'll leave that. It's out of our hands, mm?" He watched Massinger over his glass. A gold-rimmed Venetian glass, a little florid for his own taste. Apparently, Castleford had bought a set in Venice before the war. There were four left. Sir William might almost have chosen it deliberately to further his arguments and threats.

The piano sounded in the next room. A soprano began a Schubert song, slow and delicate and moving. An der Mond, Goethe's song to the moon.

"We must lunch soon," Sir William announced. "My bank requires one or two new directors — fresh blood, and all that. I want men I can trust." He smiled and patted Massinger's arm. What remained of the Aloxe-Corton in Massinger's glass stirred but refused to catch the light. An der Mond continued. One of the Covent Garden chorus singing, perhaps—? A small, sweet voice. The song became almost unearthly.

The noise in the room slowly stilled, as if every guest had been caught in the fine mesh of the melody — or because they wished to overhear the catalogue of Sir William's bribes.

"And that Royal Commission," Sir William continued, "just the sort of thing you should be seen to be doing at the moment." He drained his glass and added: "Schubert — overrated, I'm afraid. Far too flighty for me." The bellicose laugh moved away with him, into the crowded room.

Massinger finished his wine, and listened. The room applauded as the song ended, and there were calls for others — Mozart arias which the singer would be wise not to attempt, Schubert again, Wolf, Victorian fireside ballards. Massinger propelled himself through his wife's guests in search of the Aloxe-Corton. A young man hired for the evening by Stephens, the butler, refilled his glass. He turned towards the sound of the soprano, now singing a modern pop song. The way we were. She followed Streisand's floating and swooping more than adequately.

The KGB Rezident at the Soviet embassy was standing in front of him, smiling and raising a glass of cognac in salute.

"Pavel!" Massinger exclaimed in surprise, almost with pleasure. Pavel, ostensibly the Russian Cultural Attache, was usually drunk at social gatherings, and often amusing. Massinger had found him attached, even bound, to Margaret's musical and cultural set almost from the time he had met her. Everyone seemed to know his real position. Massinger believed that Pavel used Margaret's parties and occasions not for intelligence-gathering but for relaxation, under the pretence to his masters, no doubt, that important people, people with secrets and with influence, frequented Margaret's salon.

"Paul, my good friend!" Pavel exclaimed thickly. It was evident that he was drunk again. Yet he was neither aggressive nor morose in his cups. Only louder; the Russian beneath the Party man.

The girl in the next room caressed past and present without touching them.

"You're enjoying yourself, Pavel?" Massinger enquired archly, nodding at the brandy balloon.

"Of course, of course! Your parties are always splendid — splendid! So good for spying!" He burst into laughter again. His English was good, cosmopolitan and assured like his slim figure and expensive clothes. He was urbane, amusing, passionate. His appearance was deceptive, and Massinger suspected the ambitious Party functionary beneath the silk shirt and the skin. Pavel drank more cognac, then passed his glass to the young man. It was generously refilled. More applause, then immediately another Schubert song, one of overblown romantic longing.

I have that, Massinger told himself. I have achieved what that song aches for. The sensation was warming, like drink. Pavel silently toasted Massinger once more then ostentatiously sniffed the cognac and sighed with pleasure. And I daren't risk losing it, Massinger added to himself.

"Did you enjoy the opera?" he asked.

"Enjoy — what is enjoy? It is — so pale, so Western, my friend. I lived it, lived it!"

"Good for you."

"And this song is like the opera, mm? So unreal. A romantic dream." Massinger had forgotten that Pavel spoke German as well as French and English. "Operas of power interest me more. Like Wagner. Though I trust you not to report me to the Central Committee for my pro-Nazi sentiments!" He roared with laughter, creating little whirlpools of re-assumed conversation as guests were distracted from the singing in the next room.

"Power — yes," Massinger murmured. Then he saw Margaret at the door, having detached herself from the party around the piano. Her finger made circulating motions in the air, and he nodded, smiling. He was neglecting his duties as host. Escort, he thought, might have been a more accurate description. Nevertheless—

"And falls from power," Pavel added as Massinger was on the point of excusing himself. "Like that of your poor friend Aubrey."

He watched Pavel's eyes. Slightly glazed, the pupils enlarged. His trim figure was unsteady, beginning to rock with the current of the alcohol.

"Yes."

"Tears, idle tears," Pavel quoted.

"Quite." Massinger's back felt cold, his mind as icy as the pendants of the chandelier above them. "Maybe we ought to shed tears, even for an enemy?"

Pavel shook his head and spread his arms. Cognac slopped onto his wrist, staining the cuff of his white silk shirt. His face was red. Then he laughed.

"Not one," he said, vehemently. "Not one for him. These people here aren't crying. Why should I — why should we?" He laughed again. "They've abandoned him, haven't they?"

"I'm afraid they have, Pavel." Then Massinger said, quickly and lightly, "But you should mourn him as one of yours — surely?"

Pavel's eyes cleared, hardened into black points. Then he laughed once more, with genuine amusement. "I heard all about his arrest, you know," he said. "From my — colleague in Vienna. My opposite number there tells a most amusing story — quite anecdotal." His features sharpened around his gleaming eyes. Massinger sensed triumph exuded like an odour. His arm waved his glass around the room. Massinger tensed himself for revelation. Pavel was on the point of indiscretion, already certain of Aubrey's fate. "Aubrey has been gathered in like a good harvest," he said. "My colleague saw his face, at the moment of his arrest. Quite, quite crestfallen! It must have been so dreadfully embarrassing for poor Aubrey," he added venomously.

"Yes," Massinger said after a long silence. Why am I doing this? he asked himself. I have abandoned him, too.

Pavel raised his glass once more, and murmured something inaudible. He knows all about it, Massinger recited to himself. He knows. His — the Vienna Rezident was there …? He wanted to shake the truth from the Russian. Instead, he raised his own glass and left Pavel, who seemed complacent at his own indiscretion, unworried. His indifference had to spring from complete and utter confidence. And it was as if he had needed to tell, to boast of it to a man who had been Aubrey's friend… and, as Pavel must know, had abandoned him in company with everyone else. Massinger felt nausea rise into his throat.

If only I could make him talk, make him tell, Massinger thought. If only I could — he knows it's all faked, that it's a set-up — he knows what's going on… The Vienna Rezident saw it all.

He realised that he had left the party, glass in hand, and had walked through the dressing-room into their bedroom. He studied his glass, his reflection in the dressing-table mirrors, and his swirling thoughts, and decided he would not return to the drawing-room immediately. He sighed, and looked at his watch. A masochistic urge prompted him to turn on the portable television on the table opposite the bed. He sat down, hearing the slither of silk beneath his buttocks. Soft lights glowed upon silver brushes, crystal jewellery trays, pale hangings, deep carpet. A late news magazine programme bloomed on the screen.

He could not believe what he saw. Aubrey, in front of a monkey cage. A tall, bulky man standing next to him. Summer, blue sky. A distant, hidden camera.

"… film sold to RTF, the French broadcasting service, which purports to show the head of British Intelligence and his Soviet controller during one of their meetings. The French television service have refused to name the supplier of the film…" Massinger was stunned. He saw his blank face and open mouth in a mirror. An idiot's expressionless features. "… Foreign Office has tonight refused to comment on the veracity or otherwise of the film. We have been unable to confirm the identities of the two men…"

It was Aubrey. Body, head, build, profile, full-face — Aubrey. And the other was Kapustin, no doubt… Teardrop himself. He moved quickly to the television set and switched it off, almost wrenching at the controls. An image of Pavel's satisfied, confident features floated in front of his eyes, then melted and reformed into the features of Sir William, then Babbington and then the others, followed by Aubrey's shrunken, defeated old face. Finally, the professional mask of the driver of the blue Cortina.

They had him now. Aubrey. Tape, film, public exposure, trial by television and newspapers. They had wrecked him. Anger rose like a wave of nausea in Massinger.

He moved into the dressing-room, piled with coats and umbrellas and raincoats and furs and capes. He picked up the telephone swiftly and dialled Peter Shelley's number. The tone summoned, again and again. Massinger perspired impatiently, guiltily. Sir William's face appeared again in front of his eyes, but then he saw Margaret — a multiple image of her face that afternoon, before she left him and Babbington alone, and her face that evening, glowing.

He felt sick with betrayal.

"Come on, come on—!" he urged, as if afraid that the new and unexpected determination would desert him, seep away down the telephone line. "Come on." His head kept swivelling towards the door.

Why, why? he asked himself. Why am I calling?

"Yes?" Shelley answered. He sounded the worse for drink.

"Have you seen the late news programme?" Massinger demanded.

"Yes." Shelley's voice was young and bitter, almost sulky. "What do you want?"

Massinger knew he was poised above a chasm. All he had was an anger caused by some faked film and the smug, insulting, deliberate indiscretions of a KGB Rezident — and threats and bribes. They did not seem to justify this — this commitment. His shame had been revitalised, but, even as he had dialled Shelley's number, bribery and love had reappeared to restrain him. Then he leapt over the chasm.

His old debt to Aubrey gave him some of the energy he needed to make that leap. But anger, pure hot rage, finally drove him. They had threatened him, threatened his future with Margaret, his happiness with her… Babbington and Guest. Threat and bribe. Stick and carrot… and he had been prepared to go along, to begin to forget… and it was a lie! Pavel knew that—! Buried professional instincts, wider loyalties than the personal one to Aubrey, began to surface. He thought of Margaret, hesitated, swallowed, clenched his free hand. Then he said, "I want that file tomorrow."

"Why the sudden change of heart?" Shelley asked haughtily.

"Never mind. Tomorrow, at eleven. Meet me outside— outside the Imperial War Museum — yes?"

"I–I'll have to have the file back by one."

"You will. Just be there, Peter. It's very important."

"Have you heard from Hyde?"

"No — you?"

"No."

"I'll talk to the woman again tomorrow. Now, good night."

The door opened as he put down the receiver. His hand jumped away from it as from an electric current. He automatically adjusted his tie in the cheval-glass before turning. Margaret stood there, with Pavel.

"Pavel wanted to say good night," she announced. The noise of the party swelled through the open door behind them. Her hand was on the Russian's arm like the touch of a fellow-conspirator. Yet it was he who was the real conspirator, the real traitor.

"Good night, Pavel."

"Good night, my friend — good night, and thank you."

Pavel turned away as he approached, poised to be escorted to the door. Then Massinger said, before he could weigh or recall the words: "Not one teardrop, Pavel?"

The KGB Rezident's shoulders stiffened. Then he turned a bland and smiling face to him.

"Perhaps just one," he said. There was an amusement in his eyes. Then he laughed. "No, I really must be going." He held out his hand. "Take care, my friend." The warning was precise. "Take good care of yourself. Good night, Margaret."

His handshake was firm and hot. He pecked Margaret's cheek, and was gone. Massinger closed the door behind him. The noise of the party loudened. His head had begun to beat. Impulsively, he put his arms around Margaret and pulled her to him, holding her tightly against him.

Eventually, she pulled gently away, smiling. Glowing, he thought once more with black, ashy bitterness.

"Back to the party for you," she instructed humorously. "You're becoming much too self-indulgent."

She took his hand, and led him back towards the drawing-room.

God, he thought with the fervency of prayer, don't let me hurt her. Don't let me lose her — don't let me hurt or lose her…

"Hyde?"

The word seemed to hang somewhere in the air between London and Vienna. The static and distance seemed like eavesdroppers. Paul Massinger hunched over the telephone receiver in the woman's flat as if to conceal his voice and movements from prying ears and eyes.

The call from the woman, Ros, had come while he was shaving. The dressing-room extension had been nearest; the receiver of betrayals. He had picked it up fumblingly with a wet hand, the mouthpiece immediately whitened by his shaving foam. He had been aware, like a fear along his spine, of Margaret's still-sleeping presence in the bedroom. The call had not woken her.

The woman had persuaded Hyde to talk to Massinger, when could he come…? Would ten—? Hyde seemed nervous, on edge, wanted to talk to him urgently… He had swallowed all betrayals, all fears, and agreed to come to Earl's Court before ten.

… to sit in a large room decorated in deep warm colours, the walls of which were hung with prints of Australian landscapes, often bleached and bleak, his body already half-turned to the telephone beside the sofa, anticipating the call.

He had seen no blue Cortina; he had seen no other tail. They had accepted his surrender, they did not guess at this renewed rebellion. Betrayal…

Beyond this telephone call, Peter Shelley and the transcript of the Teardrop file lay ahead of him like an ambush in the bright, cold morning.

Then the call had come. Ros had answered, nodded and handed the receiver to him. He had taken it like a thing infected or booby-trapped. At the other end of the connection, Hyde waited like a malevolent destiny. He was certain of it; certain no good would come of it. Then he plunged.

"Hyde?" he repeated.

"Massinger? Is that phone bugged?"

Involuntarily, he looked up at Ros, and repeated Hyde's question. Ros stood like a guardian near the sofa, arms folded across her breasts. She shrugged, and then she said, "I'm just his landlady. He knows that, so do they."

Massinger nodded. "We don't think so — we're pretty sure."

"Who's we?" Hyde asked in a worryingly unnerved way, then he added: "Oh, Ros. OK. I've heard of you, Massinger. You were CIA, a long time ago, but you've been out of things since then. You're a teacher now. What's your angle?"

Hyde mirrored his own emotions, Massinger realised. He, too, anticipated exposure, capture, the death of something. In his case, his own demise. Why? Why was Hyde so evidently at the final extremity, in fear of his life? Damned, betraying professional instincts prompted him to reply. He was helpless to contain or suppress them.

"I'm trying to help Aubrey. Why are you afraid for your life, Hyde? Who's trying to kill you?"

Ros's large, plump hand covered her mouth, too late to hold in the gasp she had emitted. Her body seemed to quiver beneath the kaftan with a sudden chill.

"You don't know, do you?" Hyde replied. Massinger sensed that he, too, had come to a decision, but his had been made out of desperation.

"No, I don't."

"How is the old man?"

"Aubrey? Afraid — running out of hope, I think," he replied with deliberation.

"Aren't we all, sport?"

"Hyde — why can't you come in? It is a question of can't, isn't it?"

Hyde was silent for a moment. The morning spilled pale sunlight across the dark green carpet of Ros's lounge. It touched the back of the sleeping tortoiseshell cat. Massinger sensed immediately that the woman had brought Hyde's cat to her flat for safety — from what she would not have been able to explain.

Then Hyde blurted out: "I'm running from our side — comical, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean — collusion between the KGB and SIS. Look, Massinger, I'm as good as dead—!" Hyde's voice broke on the word, like a dinghy against a rock. Massinger sensed the utter weariness of the Australian, his collision with the brick-wall dead-end of hope and will. He was at the end of his tether.

"I don't understand you…"

"You don't fucking well understand?" Hyde yelled. His voice seemed to move closer, be in the room together with the scent of his fear and the desperation that must be on his face. "I don't give a fuck if you understand! Vienna Station tried to terminate me — terminate, as in finish, bump off, kill …!" Massinger heard Hyde's dry throat swallow, then: "I tried to come in… I knew the old man wanted help… I rang the Station, gave the proper idents…" There was no way in which Hyde could stop himself talking now. His boat was leaking, and he was drowning. He had lost control of his situation and himself, now that the faint possibility of escape had gleamed; help had whispered down the international telephone lines. "Ten minutes later, the KGB turned up, and they were loaded for 'roos. They wanted me dead — they must have wanted me silent on the subject of Kapustin's watching the whole arrest…"

Some dramatist's instinct warned Hyde that he had laid out sufficient of his mysterious wares for the present, and he left the sentence unfinished. Massinger could hear his harsh breathing down the line. The information whirled like sparks from a windblown bonfire in his mind.

Collusion… Kapustin… Vienna Station… collusion…

"I–I can't believe it, Hyde…" he managed to say at last.

"Then try," Hyde sneered.

"You must — must…"

"What? Stay alive? I want to! How can you help me to achieve my ambition?"

"Your papers?" They were in one of Ros's plump, beringed hands, clutched against her breast. She seemed to offer them towards Massinger. The cat stirred, then fell asleep once more, the tension in the room insufficient to disturb it.

"This city's sewn up — I need those if I'm to get out. Let me talk to Ros about that — where to send them."

Collusion — Kapustin — Vienna Station — KGB — SIS — collusion.

"I'll — bring them to you. I must talk to you," Massinger offered suddenly, surprising his rational, conscious brain, unnerving his objective self.

"You'll come…?" Hyde was suspicious, and relieved.

"I'll come. I'll bring them. We must talk."

"When?"

"Tomorrow, two days — I'll have to be — careful."

"They're onto you!" Hyde accused.

"No. I've been warned off Aubrey — nothing to do with you. There's no connection between us." He saw the blue Cortina parked in Philbeach Gardens very vividly in his imagination. "I — give me a little time to cover my tracks. I have to talk to Shelley anyway—"

"No—!"

"It's all right. I won't mention you. It's about Aubrey — the frame…"

"How have they done it — who's done it?"

"KGB — I don't know much more. Shelley has — some information for me."

"So have I. Watch yourself, for my sake. I said collusion and I meant it." Hyde had recovered something of himself; a patient who has been bled and is weakened but more clearheaded. A boil had been lanced, pressure eased, by his outburst. He would now last, perhaps, as long as it took Massinger to reach him in Vienna. "Watch your back. Someone wants me dead and Aubrey out of the game. It could be anyone. It's someone who can give termination orders concerning his own people and expect to be obeyed, and someone who has established two-way access between SIS and the KGB in Vienna. You understand?"

"I understand the implications," Massinger murmured. Blue Cortina, Aubrey framed, blue Cortina, collusion … The word pained him like a blow. A rumbling headache had begun in his left temple. He rubbed it. "I understand," he repeated,

"You're my only hope," Hyde said flatly.

"I know. Give me a little time. Ring — ring your landlady tomorrow, at the same time…" He looked up questioningly. Ros nodded. "At the same time," he repeated. "She'll have information for you. Try — try to stay out of trouble until then."

"Just believe it, mate." Hyde paused. The connection seemed distant, unreal, tense once more. "All right," he said finally, "I'll trust you. Everyone always said you were a bit too nice for our kind of work, but you're Aubrey's closest pal. All right — I trust you." Then he cackled in an ugly, fearful way. "After all, I can kill you when you get here, can't I?"

"You can — if I'm not what you need or expect."

The connection was broken at that point. The telephone purred. Hyde was gone, almost as surely as if the call had never been made; as surely as if he had been taken.

He gingerly put down the receiver. Ros was glaring at him, but her lips moved with a silent, involuntary fear.

"I'll try — as hard as I can, I'll try," he soothed. "Meanwhile, you know nothing. You have not heard from Hyde, you don't expect to. As his landlady, you're angry enough to let his flat to someone else. Understand?"

Slowly, uncertainly, Ros nodded. "OK."

"Good. Now, I must go." He glanced at his watch. Ten-twenty. He would have to hurry to meet Shelley. The sunlight lay chill and pale across the carpet, cold on the cat's fur. Massinger shuddered, as at an omen.

"What will you do?" Massinger asked.

"Hide the car and keep a look-out," Peter Shelley's breath curled around him like grey signals of distress.

"You say you lost the tail?"

"I lost one car by hiding in a coal merchant's yard," Shelley replied without amusement. "But I only spotted one car, I'm not Hyde — not a field man. I don't trust my judgment that much. Neither should you."

"Very well. To photocopy this—" He indicated the buff envelope, thickly filled with paper, that the younger man had given him. " — I'll need at least half an hour."

Shelley looked at his watch with a feverish little gesture, fumbling back the cuff of his dark overcoat. When he looked up again, his face seemed to Massinger even paler and more drawn than before.

"I have to have that file back at Century House by one," he pleaded. "The meeting is immediately after lunch — the copies will be collected…"He seemed to be damming a small flood of reluctance, excuses.

"Very well — I'll hurry," Massinger replied stiffly, and opened the car door, climbing out as quickly as he could from the bucket seat. He slammed the door of the BMW without looking back at Shelley.

Shelley watched him ascend the steps to the portico of the Imperial War Museum, its huge dome threatening to topple and crush him in the now grey, low-clouded morning. His slightly limping figure was dwarfed by the two fifteen-inch naval guns in front of the portico. Bedlam, Shelley thought. The Bethlem Royal Hospital for the Insane was what the building had once housed. It seemed an apt meeting place, after he had crossed the river and passed the weatherstained concrete of the South Bank buildings only to find a tailing red Vauxhall in the driving mirror. It had been a long time before he shook the tail. It was Bedlam. He had volunteered his own incarceration in this insane, dangerous situation.

Massinger entered the museum's doors in search of the photocopier in the Reference Library. In the moment of his disappearing, he was the image of the historian he really was. He fitted the place, would be anonymous and unregarded inside its doors. Yet he was old, he limped… he wasn't an agent, a professional.

Angrily, Shelley started and revved the car's engine. He paused for a few moments, foot hard down as if receiving the engine's determination into his body. He consciously had to use the gears, force himself to drive back towards the gates and Brook Drive. He had to make himself expose the car, leave it parked in the street so that his tail might pick it up again. He had to make himself want to see his tail.

He parked the car and left it, re-entering the Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park towards the museum. He unfolded his copy of The Times on a cold, damp bench and sat on the newspaper. The chill struck through his overcoat and the trousers of his grey suit. He slid into a lounging position, his BMW visible through the railings of the park, and considered Paul Massinger.

Was he frightened, like himself? Frightened and old and weak like Aubrey? The huge weight of class, of social context, of his marriage and friendships. Massinger could lose patronage, friendship of a powerful, beneficial kind — even his identity. He could lose his wife because Aubrey was presumed to have betrayed her father. Shelley, too, could lose everything, take the same losses — his own marriage apart — if he continued this investment in Aubrey's cause.

He wanted to walk away from it. He saw a red Vauxhall almost immediately, hadn't really lost them, then. He feared that Massinger's present mood of resolution could not last and he would be left holding the grenade. Massinger vacillated, saw round things, into and through them. The red Vauxhall passed the gates, wrong car, then. His breath sighed smokily into the cold air. It was possible that Massinger was doing no more than marking time, making the appearance of an effort simply to assuage guilt and for friendship's sake — as he was himself…? Just doing a little bit, looking good, then dropping Aubrey like a live coal when things got rough.

He kicked at a stone in self-disgust. It narrowly missed a pigeon, which fluttered a few feet then settled to inspect the gravel once more.

The red Vauxhall was coming back, slowly. It stopped outside the gates. Shelley drew in his long legs, hunching into the cover of a bush growing beside the bench. He'd first spotted the red car as he crossed Waterloo Bridge, the Vivaldi on the cassette suddenly becoming more chilly, echoing coldly in a vacuous acoustic. He'd tried to shake the Vauxhall through the narrow, terraced, ugly Lambeth and Southwark streets, and then thought he had lost it after he had turned into the coalyard amid the blackened lorries. Now he suspected that there had been two cars, and a radio link.

He watched the red Vauxhall. A man in an overcoat — who? — got out and crossed to inspect the BMW. Almost at once, he turned and nodded to his driver. Then the passenger returned to the Vauxhall, climbed in, and the car pulled away, leaving the smoke of its exhaust to disperse in the chill, windless air. Shelley listened to its engine note retreat, slow, louden, and then stop. Parked. They would wait — who would wait? He shivered.

He had to get the file back to Century House — it was his most urgent priority — because the JIC meeting under Sir William's chairmanship scheduled for tomorrow had been brought forward to that afternoon. Shelley had been caught on the hop.

Who, in the red car who …?

MI5, SIS, KGB…?

He did not know. His body felt feverishly warm beneath his jacket and overcoat. When he had the file back, and had returned to his office, that would be that, wouldn't it? No more need for red Vauxhalls, no more need…

His nose would be clean. Very clean. Twelve-twenty. Come on, Massinger, come on…

There was weakness in Massinger, weakness in himself, too, for that matter. Weakness of the same kind, like cracks hidden behind heavy wallpaper, cracks that went down to the foundations and boded trouble.

Blue Cortina -

Massinger's blue Cortina, his tail—?

The blue Cortina stopped outside the BMW, then pulled forward and away. Shelley shivered violently and stood up, rubbing his arms and the backs of his thighs. He gazed towards the fasade of the War Museum almost with longing. There was no one on the steps. He crunched along the gravel, hands thrust into his pockets. They had him now. Perhaps they did not know why he had met Massinger — perhaps they had not followed the American… But they had him. He was under suspicion, under surveillance. His breath smoked around his head like a gauzy hood. He was breathing harshly, as if afraid or spent. He hadn't recognised any of the faces in the two cars, which meant they were more likely to be MI5 than KGB — Babbington's troops. They had him, then.

Massinger emerged from the doors as he reached the top of the steps. Massinger turned to look back over the railings. He could distinguish the red Vauxhall, but there was no sign of the blue Cortina.

"Finished?" he asked eagerly.

"My God — yes, I've finished." Shelley snatched the buff envelope which contained the Teardrop transcript, its pages protected by stiff polythene. "I was careful, Peter. No one will realise it's been copied." He smiled, but some other emotion removed the expression from his lips almost at once. "I — just glances, you know. It's incredible. Even talking to Aubrey didn't prepare me for it. Nearly forty years of treachery documented there. Aubrey's being turned in 1946, being woken from his long sleep two years ago, the information he's passed, his promotion and the prospects and plans — dismantling SIS, turning it into… my God, it's so — so convincing!"

"Especially the last two years."

"But Hyde was there — most of the time he was there."

"And Aubrey often went off by myself — unlogged. Or he wasn't wired for sound, or he didn't make full reports of his contacts. Who could defend him adequately against this?" Shelley's face was set in a stony, lifeless expression. To Massinger, he looked young, afraid, vulnerable — unreliable.

"Any activity?" he asked, gesturing towards Brook Drive with the gloves he held in one hand.

"The Vauxhall's back with me," Shelley muttered, then he burst out: "Christ, I'm shit-scared at having anything to do with this!"

"What do we do?"

"Walk. I — can collect the car later. Lambeth's the nearest tube station in the other direction. OK?"

"OK. Who are they?"

"I — don't know."

"You suspect—?"

"Babbington's people."

"Damn — you're sure they're not KGB?"

"Not sure — not sure they are, either. Veering towards MI5." Shelley's voice was almost inaudible above the crunching of their footsteps on the gravel.

"I thought a great deal about this last night," Massinger murmured as they passed out of the gates, heading towards the Kennington Road. Massinger recollected Margaret's quietly-breathing form next to him throughout the night. The awareness of it was vivid, almost a physical sensation against his arm and side. The memory pained him deeply. He turned his head, but no red car appeared to be moving.

"And—?" Shelley replied reluctantly, listening to the older man's hard breathing and the tap of his stick on the pavement. Both noises were dispiriting.

"I spoke to Pavel Koslov, the KGB Rezident, last evening."

"Where?"

"He was at the flat. A social occasion."

"And?"

They passed an eighteenth-century house with a grand door and an iron balcony to the first and second floors. It appeared aloofly unaware of the neighbouring launderette and Indian restaurant. Shelley seemed distracted by the odours of Tandoori cooking.

"He let something slip — drunk, of course. He knew exactly what was going on. That it was a frame. He even knew what had happened in Vienna. It amused him. His opposite number there had told him the whole story of Aubrey's arrest."

"What can we do about it?" The question surprised Shelley himself.

Massinger halted, and the two men faced one another. Shelley knew he was being weighed and was affronted and sick with uncertainty. Why had he said that? Why hadn't he been able to walk away? He had to get the file back, that was what really mattered.

"Do you mean that?" Massinger asked finally. A turbaned Sikh brushed lightly and apologetically against them. A shopping trolley dragged behind a large woman banged painfully against Shelley's ankle. Behind Massinger, a car showroom burst from the ground floor of a once-elegant house like a mutant, leaving the upper storeys stranded in the past. A Labour Party poster glared from one window, as if to proclaim the entirety of change throughout the house.

"Yes," Shelley replied reluctantly, unable to prevent the answer he gave, shrinking from it even as he did so.

"Good man."

"But what can we do—?" Shelley protested as they walked on.

Massinger slipped on a patch of ice and Shelley steadied him. Foreboding overwhelmed him.

"Do you realise we have no time left?" Massinger asked. "Already, we're both under surveillance — if it is MI5, then we have no time at all, and if it's Pavel who's set the dogs on us, then we may have even less time. Pavel wouldn't hesitate…"

"I know!" Shelley snapped. "There is no need to scrawl the message on the wall. So? What hope is there?"

They had reached the entrance to the tube station. Massinger paused, facing Westminster Bridge Road. On the other side of the thoroughfare, whitewashed racist slogans had been daubed on a wall beside the poster of a cowboy smoking his favourite brand of cigarette, a packet of which obscured the grandeur of Monument Valley. Massinger received a fleeting image of John Wayne lying prostrate on the roof of a racing stage-coach, of a crowded, child-noisy movie theatre. His youth.

"I realise Pavel's too well protected — and on guard," he murmured. Shelley had to bend his head to hear distinctly. "There'd be a God-awful stink if anything happened to him. But we have no time!. There are the three of us, and one of us is trapped in Vienna with no hope of getting out. The agent — our field agent — cannot come to us. I have to go to him."

"What then?"

"Someone may be planning to stop us because of what we've already done. If we can do something quickly, something decisive — then maybe we can win. Slowly means we lose — altogether."

"I realise that. But what—?"

"Bear with me, Peter. We need Hyde, and that means going to him. Which means Vienna. I want everything Registry has on the KGB Rezident in Vienna — the Rezident and his senior staffers."

"Why?"

"Will you get it for me?" Massinger's eyes gleamed with daring rather than reason.

"Why?" Shelley repeated.

"If we could make him talk — if we had proof!"

"The — Rezident, in Vienna… madness." Shelley's anger was fuelled by fear. "It's absolutely insane!"

"It's quick. Speed is our only hope."

"That's not hope, it's lunacy."

"And the entirely unexpected. Get me everything on the current Rezident. There must be something, some time when he's virtually alone, unattended, off his guard… a moment in which we can — talk to him?" Massinger's smile matched his eyes. Shelley quailed. It was the most desperate, monstrous lunacy, a four-in-the-morning solution to the problem. It should have dispersed in the light of day.

"You can't!" he felt obliged to say.

"At least we can try, man!"

"And this KGB senior staffer — he'll just answer your questions politely?"

"No. Which is why we will need pentathol and a man with a needle."

"What—?"

"You control East Europe Desk, Peter. You must have someone, somewhere in Europe, someone you can still trust, who can inject the necessary drugs? There must be someone…?"

Shelley felt himself mocked. More, he felt himself endangered. Too close to the bone, to vital organs. Massinger was in the process of flinging him over a precipice.

"I — can't do what you ask," he murmured. "It's too risky, leaks like a sieve…"

"My God, man — don't you realise that your precious job may not exist if this goes on much longer!" Massinger stormed through clenched teeth. It was a superior, cold anger. "There is collusion between elements in your service and the KGB. Everything we know and everything that has happened to Hyde tells us that much. You must want to know who, and why — you have to try and stop it. We must establish the truth, Peter. We must discover what this awful co-operation means, how far it extends — what and who is behind it. It's your job, for God's sake!"

Shelley half turned away, his hands flapping feebly at his sides. "I don't want to realise that," he muttered.

"But it's necessary — crucial. It's the reality of this business."

"I know. It's standing beside you like a bloody shadow. Duty. God, Queen and Country. I know I have to. I know it." Shelley's lips twisted in a sneer.

Massinger looked at his watch. "You'd better get that file back, Peter," he instructed gently. "And the other material — can you get it for me today?"

"Today?"

"Hyde is in constant danger. Your people in Vienna Station threw him to the wolves. He's running and he's afraid. He may have even less time available than we do."

Shelley nodded in accompaniment to Massinger's grave words. Then he looked up from the pavement and his shuffling feet, and said: "I'll try. I'll try, and call you tonight?" He left the statement as a question and studied Massinger's face. The American glanced at the buff envelope under Shelley's arm, then nodded.

"Yes. Do that. I — we have to go on with it — whatever."

"Yes. Now, I have to go."

Shelley turned away abruptly, and entered the tube station, leaving Massinger staring at the cigarette hoarding across the street.

"You're certain it was massinger?"

"No, sir — not certain."

"But Shelley — yes?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you lost them?"

"They shook us off, sir. Didn't use the car."

"Where are they now?"

"Massinger's at home. Shelley's at Century House. He's been there since a little after one."

"Why did they meet? I don't see the significance of the War Museum."

"Sorry, sir — can't tell you."

"Why did they meet?"

"Sorry, sir — didn't quite catch—"

"It doesn't matter. It can't add up to anything much. Old loyalties having a day trip, chickens scratching around in the dust. Mm. Shelley will have to be watched more closely. I'm certain Massinger doesn't have the stomach for this — he'll run out of steam fairly soon."

"I see, sir."

"Maintain surveillance on both of them, until we can be certain what they're up to — if anything."

"Sir."

Hyde recognised that he had passed through both fear and the oppressive sense of isolation. They had worn themselves away, like an over-familiar lust. Finally, he was left with no more than a desire for action. It was his simplest emotion; whenever he encountered it, he felt he had arrived at a destination or a new beginning.

The rain slanted in the gusts of wind across the street. Car headlights glared onto the windscreen of the Volkswagen van, and brake lights splashed on the road like ruby paint. He had hired the van from a small backstreet garage and had borrowed the stained grey overalls he now wore. Almost six in the evening. He was waiting for Wilkes to leave the SIS offices on the Opernring. The van was parked beneath the trees, alongside the tramlines, thirty yards from the door of the office building. Wilkes had not yet left. Impatience filled Hyde, gratifyingly, in itself a signal of purposeful activity. His fingers drummed against the greasy touch of the steering wheel.

Wilkes would tell him the truth. Wilkes, the man who had sent the KGB for him in the cafe, in the cathedral square. The purposeful men in the heavy overcoats. Wilkes—

Wilkes stepped from the door, turning up his collar, glancing to left and right, crossing the pavement to his parked car. Hyde started the engine of the Volkswagen with a fierce tightness in his chest and throat. Now, now it begins, he could not avoid thinking.

Wilkes's Audi pulled out into the traffic flow, and Hyde slid into the line three vehicles behind it. Was he going home, back to his apartment? Going for a drink, meeting someone? To Hyde, it did not matter. Eventually, Wilkes would be alone, and then…

Hyde damped down the suddenly rising anger. He had not realised, until that first moment of secret surveillance as he pulled out into the traffic behind the unsuspecting Wilkes, how much he wanted to hurt him, make him talk. He had been too isolated, too endangered and for too long. Wilkes was going to repay him for that frightened, hunted, wasted time.

Wilkes's car turned off the Opernring, into Mariahilferstrasse, following a tram that flashed blue sparks from the wire above it. The Hofburg Palace loomed to Hyde's right for a moment, then they were passing the massive elegance of the Kunsthistoriscbes-museum. Audi, Mercedes, small Citroen, then the Volkswagen. Hyde considered moving up, anticipating being caught by one of the sets of traffic lights. He decided against it, however. There were sufficient sets of lights to keep Wilkes in sight, even if he missed one of them. Action itself assured him. He would not lose Wilkes. He was there, three cars away beyond the wipers and the slanting rain.

The centre of Vienna changed, the lights of modern shops obscuring then throwing into shadow the old buildings whose ground floors they had usurped. Side streets became narrower, the traffic lights less frequent. Wilkes had made no attempt to accelerate, or to turn off. He was still unaware.

The Citroen turned off, and Hyde moved up. Then the Mercedes disappeared, and he dropped back again. A Renault overtook him and filled the gap between the van and the Audi. The black, gleaming station roof of the West-Bahnhof lay beyond the grimy, streaked window of the Volkswagen, then Hyde turned into a wide cobbled street behind the Audi.

The Audi slowed, taking him by surprise. He drove past, consciously stopping the foot that had been about to transfer itself from accelerator to brake. He did not glance in the direction of Wilkes's car, but watched it stop, floating into his rear-view mirror. Its headlights dimmed, and then it was nothing more than a dark shape alongside the pavement. Hyde pulled in perhaps sixty or seventy yards further along the street, opposite a newspaper and tobacco kiosk set in the featureless ground floor wall of an apartment building. His eyes returned to the mirror. In a moment of quiet between passing cars, he heard Wilkes slam the car door. Hyde wound down his offside window, and craned his head to see Wilkes crossing the street towards high iron gates. One of the gates opened and Wilkes disappeared.

Hyde scrambled out of the Volkswagen, hurrying between oncoming traffic across the street. A childish and inappropriate sense of having been cheated filled his imagination. Somehow, the rules had been changed; Wilkes was engaged in his own mystery, rejecting his role as hunted victim. The rain, flung by a gust of wind, slapped across Hyde's face. His hand reassured itself for a moment on the butt of the Heckler & Koch beneath his arm.

A wrought scroll of iron set into the tall gates announced Altes Fleischmarkt. Through the gates, receding into an unlit darkness, Hyde could see a large cobbled expanse surrounded by decaying, lifeless sheds and warehouses.

He gripped the cold, wet iron of the gates with one hand, slipping the gun into the pocket of his overalls with the other. He listened. There was no sound of footsteps. The gates were unlocked. One of them groaned open as he pushed at it. He left it open.

Meat market. The old meat market. Why? Wilkes, here—?

The cobbles were pooled and rutted and treacherous beneath his feet. He stood, searching for light, for movement.

Nothing.

His left hand touched the barrel of the torch in his pocket. Then he moved forward, across the open, rainswept cobbles. Meat market. Empty. Wilkes had disappeared somewhere, into one of the warehouses. Why?

Traffic rumbled down the cobbled street behind him. One of the gates moved protestingly, pushed by a gust of wind. There were no other noises.

He moved towards his left. Flash of a torch—?

He could see an open door, sagging on its hinges. His feet splashed in a puddle of water. His hand touched the damp wood of the door. His hearing reached ahead of him, encountering Only silence. No torch, then…

He slipped silently through the open door, into the musty interior of the warehouse. He listened once more. Nothing. He moved lightly and carefully, his shins brushing against buckets or perhaps cans. Somewhere, a rat scuttled, startling him. When his hearing was able once more to move beyond his heartbeat, it encountered the same silence. He withdrew the torch from his pocket with the stealth of a weapon. The pistol, almost ignored, appeared in his right hand at the same moment.

The door shifted on old hinges, but did not close. No trap, then—

Where was Wilkes?

He listened for a car engine firing, the noise of Wilkes having thrown him off his tail. Faint whitewashed walls stretched back into darkness.

Empty—?

He flicked on the torch, pointing it directly ahead of him. Five yards away, a huge portrait of Lenin glared at him. The sight stunned him.

Lenin?

"Hello, Patrick," he heard Wilkes say from the darkness away to his left.

He could not move.

CHAPTER THREE: For the Record

Lenin—?

His mind refused to release that image, caught in the beam of the torch. His thumb would not move the switch to turn off the light. He could not comprehend the voice — Wilkes's voice, he remembered dimly — coming from the darkness to his left. He could not move the torch in an arc to reveal the speaker, or move the pistol across his body to endanger Wilkes.

Trap.

But, Lenin—?

Joke?

He shivered, newly aware of the cold and wet. The shivering would not stop once it had commenced. He had stepped into some mad theatre, without his cue. He could only wait for his prompter…

"Hello, Patrick," Wilkes said again. Then the door moved on its hinges. Heat stung the back of his neck as he tried to overcome tight, frozen muscles to turn his head. The door slammed shut behind him. He imagined, almost immediately, that he could hear breathing in the darkness around him. Two, three, four pairs of lungs, his imagination counted. Trap. He knew they were there. He did not know how many, but they were plural; collective. They were a trap, and they had snapped shut on him. "OK, Patrick," Wilkes added confidently, almost amused, "put down the gun. There's a good chap."

Now—!

There was the single, elongated fraction of a moment in which his body would not come unfrozen, would not move — then the torch was out, and he leapt and rolled, and crashed into something which gave and then toppled upon him, winding him. Torch beams flashed and played about him, and someone cursed.

Not Wilkes's voice. He clung to something tapering and moulded or carved. A torch beam struck as he pushed it away. A model of one of the towers of the Kremlin.

Kremlin—?

He rolled away. No gunfire, only the searchlight beams of the torches and lamps licking across the dusty floor of the warehouse, seeking him. The embrace with the model had threatened the return of his paralysis, but since he could not explain it, he rejected it. He scrabbled. Others moved now, converging on the point where his light had been, where his collision with the model had taken place. He rolled under a bench, into a corner, hunching against the wall and trying to control his breathing.

Footsteps, like the slither and rush of rats. Flickering torchlight, orders—

Silence, filling the bowl of the warehouse. Some children's game, but played in the dark. Statues, was it? When Hyde looks, all stand still. Make a statue.

Lenin, model—?

"Patrick?" Wilkes said clearly, his voice whispering in the hollow acoustic. "Patrick. I think you ought to give it up as a bad job." Silence, then: "Oh, for your information, Clint Eastwood made a film here. You saw some of the set dressing, the props. A spy film. Very exciting, I believe."

"Where's the bloody main switch?" someone called out.

"In the office!" Wilkes snapped.

Someone collided with some cans or buckets, setting them rolling on the cobbled floor. As he moved under cover of the noise, Hyde heard the man cursing.

Then Wilkes was speaking again. His voice betrayed the subtle, arcane pleasure of having known it was Hyde tailing him in the Volkswagen, of having known his every move. Wilkes had trailed him behind his Audi like a kite.

"Come on, Patrick — there's nowhere to go. We'll have all the lights on in a minute. We shall all know and be known. Just don't be silly about it."

Rage enveloped Hyde.

"What the hell do you want with me, Wilkes?" he yelled, at the same time scurrying along the wall, deeper into the warehouse, almost on all fours. Weak moonlight seemed to drip with the rain from broken skylights in the roof above him. Something—?

Nothing.

Wilkes's voice pursued him, and there was movement from ahead of him. He crouched silently against the wall.

"We have our orders, Patrick. We have to render you harmless," Wilkes announced dispassionately.

Hyde was shuddering with exertion, damp, cold and terror.

"Why?" he yelled out in anguish. "Why?"

His body had given up, collapsing into spasm and chill numbness.

"You know why, Patrick. London says you're under suspicion." Wilkes's voice oozed insincerity. "Sorry. You've been a naughty boy." Then, as if slightly unsure of the endgame, Wilkes shouted: "Where are those bloody lights?"

Hyde's hand gripped the steel of a girder. Unwillingly, his eyes traced it aloft. It grew up the whitewashed wall like a tree. Part of the framework supporting the roof, some reinforcement of the original wooden structure.

"I've got them," he heard someone call distantly. "Ready when you are."

Hyde's other hand — stuffing the pistol into its holster — climbed up the girder, involuntarily. Then his left hand climbed, then right, so that he was standing upright, pressed against the wall. Right hand encountering a handhold, left foot a foothold, left hand, right foot, right hand…

He was climbing, past the lower crossbeam, up towards the roof. The noises he was making were like the scrabbling of rats, perhaps discountable by the men below him. The lower crossbeam was below him now, and the weak moonlight cast the faintest sheen. The black bar of the upper steel girder was still above him. If it was more than six feet below the broken skylight, he could never get out that way -

"Everyone under cover?" he heard Wilkes ask, interrupting his doubts. It had to be no more than six—

The others replied; his hearing, choked with his heartbeat and breathing, could not distinguish direction. They seemed all around him.

Lights—

A glare of whitish light. He scrambled across the girder, lying flat for a moment, then rising onto his haunches, hands white as they gripped the cold, wet steel. He was sitting like a waiting animal, yet the posture suggested resignation, immobility at the same moment. A pool of shadow lay below him, cast from his body by the…

No, not his body, Wilkes's body as the man moved out into the open. They couldn't see him, a gauze of light between him and the ground, thrown by the lamps suspended on long wires. He was above the light—

Rain seeped through the skylight onto his neck. His forearms and shoulders already ached with the pressure he was exerting through them simply to remain still and balanced on the narrow girder. Wilkes was almost directly below him. An animal would have dropped at that point, that moment — an animal would have ignored the odds of four or five to one.

"Patrick? Come on, Patrick…" Wilkes was regretting his bravado, regretting the open and the hard, dusty light.

Hyde looked up. Five, six, six and a half? Jagged glass, but bare wood in places — rotten wood? One jump, one stretch only. Or wait—?

Perhaps for no more than a minute they would be surprised, confused, puzzled, inactive. Then the ratlike noises would take shape and purpose and identity, and when they had scoured the floor area and the ground-level hiding places, they would look up.

Look up—

Six and a half; wet, dark, paint-peeled window frame; jagged glass, no footholds — he could imagine his shoulders heaving up and through, legs kicking, noise of effort, of cracking wood and glass, then the surprised, upturned faces and the guns aimed at the struggling, kicking legs…

A shudder ran through his aching arms and shoulders. He steadied himself, then looked down. Four of them, emerging from the shadows against the walls, collecting beneath him — Wilkes waving his gun, miming instructions now… one moving towards a stack of wet cardboard boxes, another back into the recesses of the warehouse, a third moving away towards an open door to some disused office.

Apart for a moment, then they'd be drawn back together again—

Now—

No movement—

Stand up.

Hands letting go, reluctantly. Thighs and calves feeling weak, rejecting the effort. Hands free, fingers numb, slow to flex. Arms aching. Legs quivering as they straighten, window not coming close enough. Arms protesting as they stretch above the head, fingers clenched to grasp. Touch — not enough. Touch; grip.

Yes, close enough. Girder wet, foot slipping a fraction. Wood — wood sound enough. Grip.

Now.

Hyde heaved at his seemingly laden body, drawing it up towards the skylight and the rain blowing in. His arms shrieked with cramp and the pain of his effort. Slowly, his head came through the skylight into a windy night, ragged clouds being scuttled and bullied across gaps of stars and the sliver of a new moon. His shoulders passed his elbows, and he kicked with his legs. The wood of the window frame groaned loudly, and he scrambled through, leaving the skylight empty, a hole through which Wilkes's cry of surprise pursued him.

The roof sloped away from him. Splinters of wet wood pained his fingers and palms. Other shouts below him now, and the concussion of two shots striking the corrugated iron of the roof, their impact shuddering through his hands and the soles of his feet.

Quickly, quickly, his mind bullied, echoing Wilkes's cries from inside the warehouse. He scuttled down the slope of the wet, ice-cold iron roof towards the guttering. He extended his legs, using his heels as brakes. The guttering coughed in protest, and shifted, but held. Hyde lay back for a moment, pressed against the roof listening. Running footsteps, shouted orders, pauses of intent silence — the hunt. He sat up, and leaned his body over the narrow alley that ran between the warehouse in which he had been trapped and its neighbour. Empty. Ten feet—?

He lowered himself over the gutter, clinging to it, wincing at every groan and squeak of protest it uttered. His legs dangled for a moment, and then he dropped.

"Here!" someone yelled, only yards away. "Come on—!"

Inexperienced, some cold and previously unused part of his brain informed him. The man was slow, undecided, afraid. Kill it—

Hyde was on his haunches, absorbing the impact with the ground, and he fought the momentary weakness after effort and the trauma of surprise and shock. The pistol was in his hand with only a fractional delay — kill it — danger — trap closing, insisted the cold, now-admitted, now-controlling part of him. Kill it.

Hyde fired twice, and the body to which the voice had belonged, the body that had prompted vocal chords to utter a cry for help, bucked away against the wall of the warehouse, then slid into a patch of deep shadow, losing shape, identity, volition. Then Hyde pushed himself to his feet and ran.

Broken wooden slats over a glassless window. He clambered up onto the sill, and kicked at the rotten wood. It gave inwards, instantly disintegrating into wet sawdust. He hesitated for a moment, hunched and staring into the interior of the dark, wet-smelling warehouse, and then he jumped, colliding almost immediately with cardboard that gave soggily, and rolled and tumbled through a stack of boxes and cartons.

No way back, another part of his brain informed him. The icy part had retreated momentarily. This part was nervy, feverish, close to panic. He had killed one of his own. Now, he was no longer one of their own, one of them.

They were going to kill me…

No way back. It's over. You're out. You're dead. He could smell the recently-fired gun in the damp warehouse air. He thrust it, warm-barrelled, into his pocket.

He scrambled out of the wreckage of old packing-cases and empty cartons, arms outstretched, and blundered across the warehouse. He could hear footsteps, then silence, then a curse. The elimination order on himself was now precisely defined and endorsed. There was now no possibility that they would not kill him if they had the opportunity.

Gate—

A minute, perhaps two, and then they would guard the gates against him. The only direction in which he could be certain there was not a blind alley lay towards the gates through which he had followed Wilkes. Perhaps he had less than a minute.

His claw-bent fingers collided with the opposite wall. Now he could almost see the faint gleam of its whitewash. Direction—? There were no noises from outside the window, from the kneeling group around the dead thing slumped in the shadow. Door, then—?

This warehouse was closer than the first to the gates, he would not have to cross their line of fire, they would be behind him from the start of his run.

He moved slowly, carefully towards the doors. To his adjusted night-vision, the warehouse now possessed a pallid gleam. The floor space was empty. He reached the double-doors, touching them with the urgent delicacy of a blind man. One huge, rusted bolt above his head and below it the doors rested slightly ajar from one another. One bolt—

He listened. His advantage was draining away. He touched the bolt, trying to ease it. It squeaked, then grumbled. He let it go, as if it contained a charge, held his breath, and then jerked at it. It slid noisily out and he heaved open the.drunkenly-leaning doors.

Voices—?

Traffic, then his own footsteps beating across the slippery cobbles, splashing noisily in puddles. Other footsteps, then the first shot. He began to weave in his running, slipped once, regained purchase. The gates ahead of him wobbled in his vision, but he could discern no one outlined against the street-lamps beyond. He collided with them then propelled himself through the gap he had left. A shot struck one of the scrolled ornamentations, and careered away. Then he was in the wide, cobbled street, and a trarn flashed sparks at him like a signal of assistance. He dodged one car and ran across the street, just as the tram stopped.

A very old woman was climbing painfully aboard, helped by a younger woman. Hyde, his breath escaping and being recaptured in great sobs, watched in a fever of impatience — left foot, stick, hip swung, right foot, totter, the young woman's arm braced against the weight that threatened to topple back off the platform. There was a figure at the gates, then a second shadow. Come on, come on—

The old woman heaved her centre of gravity forward into her habitual arthritic hunch again, and then tapped a step forward. The younger woman placed her left foot on the platform. Someone — a tall figure, not Wilkes — was pointing towards the tram. Come on, come on—

He had to clench his teeth to keep the words in. The tall figure began running across the road. The younger woman had both feet on the platform. Through the lighted glass of the rear of the tram, two figures were moving across the road like fish in a bowl; black, shadowy fish, hunting.

Three steps, and the old woman had still hardly mounted the lowest of them.

Trap, trap—!

Hyde turned his head wildly, realising his stupidity, his meek acceptance of the first assistance he had recognised. On the tram, he was trapped. There was nowhere else -

Trap, safe — trap — safe…

He pushed past the two women as gently as he could, squeezing past the surprised malevolence of the old woman's face and her hunched, tottering form. He passed down the tram. Now he was the fish in the lit bowl. Timing, timing. He could take them all the way on the tram, but they'd still be there when it emptied. They could wait. It had to be timing, but he was already beginning to realise that the information was erroneous. Its origins were fictional.

Two men hopping on and off the New York subway — a film, Christ, nothing but a film—! Wires crossed, not training, just a bloody film—! French Connection, man with a beard, jumping on and off…

He should never have got on the fucking tram—!

Standing opposite the centre door of the tram, he watched the door by which he had entered. Both doors were open. Wilkes's face, lighting up and hardening in the same moment, bobbed into view behind the two women, still not seated. Where was the other one? Wilkes's expression promised him full retribution; malevolent, full of hate, full of pleasure. Where was—?

Wilkes's smile was broadening, and the tall man was standing on the pavement opposite the centre door. They'd seen the film, too. Hyde let his shoulders slump. The tall man stepped onto the platform, raised a foot to the step.

The driver waited. The tall man stepped back. He'd follow in the car, having blocked Hyde's escape. The driver pressed the bell, and the door moved fractionally. Hyde went through without touching it and the Heckler & Koch's barrel struck the tall man across the forehead. He staggered back, blinded by pain and sudden blood.

Inside the lit glass bowl of the tram, Wilkes's mouth opened like a fish's. Hyde stepped over the tall man's still form, and ran, at first as if to catch the tram, then into a narrow, ill-lit street, guessing it headed towards the West-bahnhof and light and crowds.

He ran. The noise of the tram faded behind him. There was no noise yet of a car engine firing or of pursuing footbeats. It was enough of a gap.

He ran.

Peter Shelley remembered looking out across dark, light-pricked London on numerous earlier occasions from the broad windows of his office in Century House. The river wound like a black snake between two borders of light, its back striped by the lamps of bridges. Increasingly, his last, reluctant, half-ashamed cogitations of the day had come to concern Kenneth Aubrey. He could not help but consider himself as some kind of betrayer. Aubrey and the old order — he owed them everything, including his latest and most gratifying promotion to the directorship of East Europe Desk. That office was a recognised stage on the road that led to the very top: part of the Jacob's Ladder of SIS mythology. He should repay, honour his debts to Aubrey. Yet whenever he decided that, an image came to him of a sunlit garden in Surrey, and his wife pushing the swing which held and delighted his small daughter. He was always the observer of the scene, and he seemed to himself to lurk beneath the apple trees like an intruder, someone who intended harm to that secure and loved couple. The feeling of danger posed to them was so intense it was as if he held a weapon in his hands, or the two people were naked and vulnerable and he, a stranger, obscenely desired sexual violence.

Paul Massinger had hinted darkly at SIS collusion with the KGB, on Hyde's word. Shelley trusted both men, and could not ignore them. But Babbington, with Sir William's blessing, now controlled SIS along with MI5, and Shelley was in danger — his family was in peril along with his mortgage and his promotion and his career and his ambitions — if he did more than nothing. He must do nothing, nothing at all.

He turned from the nighttime view of the city, and the telephone seemed immediately at the focus of his vision. He all but removed his right hand from his pocket to reach for it, then relented. His breathing was audible, almost a gasp. There was one more moment of reluctance, and then he picked up the receiver and dialled an outside line. The telephone purred. He watched the door, as if afraid of being surprised in some guilty act. He had to, no matter what the cost. The calculation, the selfishness he had hoped would come to him, had not materialised. He was helpless before his obligations to Aubrey. He had to help -

He dialled his home, and waited. His wife's voice gave their number.

"Darling…" he began.

"Peter — where are you?" Then testiness creeping in, tones of a dinner postponed or spoiled. "You're not still at the office, are you?"

"Yes — sorry. Something's come up. Can dinner be kept?" he added hopefully.

"No!" she snapped, then: "Oh, I suppose so. Honestly, Peter, you said you'd be early this evening."

"I know," Shelley soothed. A hard lump of guilt appeared in his throat. "I'm sorry. Look, it won't take me very long. I'll be with you by—" He studied his watch, a birthday present from his wife. " — oh, eight at the latest. OK?"

She sighed. "OK. Don't be any later." Her voice had hardened again, as if being mollified had left her feeling cheated. "Please don't be any later," she repeated with heavy irony.

"I promise—"

The receiver clicked and she was gone. Reluctantly, he put down the instrument. Her testiness, he felt, was entirely justified; he felt more bereft at it than he might have done had they been more affectionate. He was betraying her, all the more so because she was not an ambitious wife, not pushing. She might even have supported his decision to assist Aubrey, to repay his debts. That knowledge was almost insupportable.

Swiftly, he left and locked his office, and made for the lifts. The corridor was empty except for a cleaner with a noisy vacuum. She did not look up as he passed, as if to mirror his shifty guilt. The lift arrived almost immediately, surprising him, and it did not stop until he had reached the basement level which housed Central Registry.

He stepped out into an echoing concrete corridor. He waved his ID quickly at the duty security officer opposite the doors of the lift. The man nodded, even smiled briefly. Shelley was known, Shelley was senior…

The refrain ran in his head like a mocking jingle. Shelley was recognisable to everyone at Century House, Shelley was a coming man, Shelley was known, Shelley was senior, senior, senior…

Known came back at him out of the darkness in his head. It was easy to get into Registry, easy to fulfil Massinger's request. And easy for others to remember he was there, what he wanted.

A second duty officer, then the doors opened automatically to admit him.

The cavern of Registry retreated before him, the strip-lighting in the ceiling shedding a dusty light. There was a musty, underground chill to the place, too, despite the efficient heating. Registry was a sterile, low-ceilinged library, even a cathedral nave. The confessionals of partitioned booths lay to his left, each of them containing a microfiche viewer and a VDU terminal with access to the main computer files. It was a place to which Aubrey very rarely came; he dispatched emissaries if he required files, digests, or information. Shelley shivered with his own nervousness. The place repelled him, too, at that moment.

Registry retreated into shadows where rows of ceiling-high metal shelves held the hundreds of thousands of low-grade files that had not yet been sifted for transfer to computer tape or for shredding. The place was almost deserted. He showed his identification at the desk, and the clerk gestured towards an empty booth. Shelley hurried to it like a man on whom it had suddenly begun to rain.

The VDU screen was blank and coated with a film of dust. Shelley's fingers touched it reluctantly. He sat down in front of it, and switched on. Immediately, a request for his security classification and identity code appeared on the screen. His hands poised over the keyboard. Once he tapped out his code and identity, he was logged into the computer. On record, for anyone who looked to see, would be his name, the date, the files he had asked for. He had thought of disguising his request, approaching the information regarding the Vienna Rezident obliquely. Hurriedly, he identified himself, and a few moments later the screen accepted him with its permission to proceed.

He could still postpone, or avoid, identifying himself with any particular file, any area of information. He cleared his throat; a weak, dry little noise.

Garden swing, daughter passing through a white beam of sunlight, haloed… Aubrey on the rack… Hyde at risk… collusion—

He looked at the ways of escape — Reset key, Control key, Escape key; the ways out.

The screen cleared, and then the request for his orders tiptoed across the screen again.

Why do it? Why even be here? The commuter train is waiting — get on it, retreat to Surrey. Did Massinger have the nerve to go through with this? Wouldn't he be left, Joe Muggins, holding the baby or caught with his trousers down when the lights went on? Why be there at all?

Massinger, he understood, had been drawn back to the secret life. There was something beyond friendship towards Aubrey or a concern with truth. Another junkie of the secret life, as Hyde had once described it to Aubrey, who had pursed his lips in disownment of the colloquial epithet. Massinger, Hyde, Aubrey, most of all… and himself. Junkies. Secrets direct into the vein; pure, uncut, as Hyde had said. Yes…

It was simple to explain his being there. The smell and taste and touch of a secret. The passion that swept away reason, caution, nerves, sometimes even self.

Shelley typed in his request with eager fingers. First, the general code. Visitors. Then the more precise identification, KGB. Then, London. Then Home Base to identify the Soviet Embassy. Finally, Team Manager to identify the Rezident, Pavel Koslov. Then he typed in the request for All Information — Digest.

The screen went blank for a moment, then began spilling its information in a green water fall. Age, place of birth, education, training — Shelley watched the past unroll with indifference. The VDU screen filled and emptied, filled and emptied again and again like a glass bowl, with green, luminous water.

The years fled — early postings, successes, contacts — Paris, Cairo, Baghdad, Washington. Each place had its appropriate reference number for extracting the full files on each period of operational residence.

Vienna—

Shelley looked at his watch after he had stopped the progress of the information. Then he entered the request for the full Vienna file. It was a childish precaution; someone enquiring into Shelley's logged use of the computer, however, might just be put off by the London Rezident's idem and look no further. Now, he had jumped sideways, into Vienna Station's records.

He was aware of the clatter of another keyboard in a neighbouring booth, and could not shrug off the sense that he was being checked upon by whoever was operating that second terminal. He shivered. In the distance, the central heating clunked.

Vienna, during Pavel Koslov's period as deputy Rezident. Shelley knew that the current Vienna Rezident, Karel Bayev, had been Koslov's superior during that time, and his friend. He tapped the keys, demanding access to Koslov's biography and record in Vienna. Then, he summoned information on Koslov's relations with his superior, then information on that superior.

Finally, he called for an update on the Vienna Rezident, under contacts with Koslov in recent years. Trips by one to Vienna, the other to London, holidays, meetings throughout eastern Europe…

The information unrolled, cancelled, sprang up again; none of it betrayed what Shelley had hoped for. He summoned surveillance reports by SIS on Koslov and the Rezident in Vienna — as recently as the previous year, a long weekend visit by Koslov.

Women — professional? Reference earlier reports, same woman — ? Yes. Regular visits by the Vienna Rezident, a long-term strictly professional arrangement. A file number was supplied.

Shelley exhaled, inhaled deeply. If someone followed him this far, they would guess. If they took the next step with him, they would know—

And he might kill Hyde and Massinger, because he had found what he wanted, and he knew what they would put into effect on the basis of this information; Massinger's crackpot plan.

He demanded that section of the Vienna Rezident's file dealing with Social/Sexual Contacts, looking once more at his watch. His tension flickered in his mind, short-circuiting him to an image of his wife waiting to serve dinner, and the clock at eight-thirty; it wasn't important, but expressed his desire to leave Registry, get out of the place, finish this.

There it was. The girl's name, address, security check, together with the decision that she could not be used. The Vienna Rezident visited her once a week; a prostitute. No other involvement, no leverage. Payment in US dollars, equivalent to a hundred and fifty pounds sterling. The girl supplied him with nothing but her body and her ersatz passion. Even the sex was uncomplicated. No deviations; no kinks. Sex without strings, sex without danger of compromise.

Shelley memorised the address and the other details, and then pressed the Escape key. He had to force himself to return the screen's interest to Pavel Koslov. His fingers trembled. It was a futile bluff, but it might just confuse a bored officer assigned to keep surveillance on Shelley. The screen supplied information concerning Koslov's relationship with the Vienna Rezident until the section of file was completed.

Shelley logged off and shut down the terminal. He had read none of it, simply sat there until the programme had ended; a man waiting for the end of a previously-seen and not-much-liked film.

He stood up, feeling cramped and chilled. He had to force himself to walk at a leisurely pace past the desk, to nod a goodnight to the clerk, to pass the two duty men in the corridor with a neutral expression on his face, hands thrust casually into his pockets. He felt cold, suppressing an almost feverish shiver until the doors of the lift had closed behind him.

Thursday. The day after tomorrow. The Vienna Rezident visited his whore on Thursdays, without a security escort.

Thursday.

Shelley realised he would have to hurry to catch his train.

Eldon had lost patience with him, but Aubrey could not begin to exercise any control over the situation. He had, instead, to hold his hands together in his lap to still their tremor. He was desperately tired, lost in a maze of protestations and evasions and denials. He was increasingly edgy and uncertain. It was the third day of his interrogation by Eldon — his 'debriefing' as they persisted in labelling it, with manifest irony — and they had no intention of lessening the pace or increasing the time-span. He was to be worn down as quickly as possible, made to admit, agree…

To confess and confirm, Aubrey reminded himself as he watched Eldon's darkened, handsome features. Yes, the man had lost patience; but his anger was groomed and fresh-looking, not shirtsleeved and weary. It might be no more than pretence, but Aubrey did not think so. Eldon believed in his guilt, and he was now angry that the old man opposite him wriggled and lied and evaded evident truths — the facts of the case. During the past few days, Aubrey had seen the glow of Eldon's righteous indignation. He was passionate in his loyalty and honesty. He despised traitors, and he was convinced that Aubrey belonged to that detestable species. His passion made him the most dangerous adversary Aubrey could have encountered, and revealed how well he had been chosen by Babbington. Eldon was Aubrey himself, but younger and stronger.

"Sir Kenneth," he observed in a clipped, even tone which yet managed to sound repressed, held back, "you have lied and prevaricated for two days. You ignore evidence that points to your complicity — you deny everything, you answer only the questions you choose." Aubrey summoned an ironic bow of the head. Eldon's eyes glittered. "You have, in fact," he continued, "no friends or allies — anywhere…" Aubrey realised that the anger had at first flared up like a spot-fire but was now under control and being used by Eldon. "Of course, we monitored all your calls yesterday." Eldon employed a smile.

The information did not surprise Aubrey, but to be reminded of it weighed on his weariness like an immovable stone on his chest. Increasingly desperate telephone calls, all the previous afternoon. Grasping at straws, or lifelines. The Foreign Office, the Cabinet Office, the PM's office. All had fended him off or turned him aside. Each individual, each department; not at home. Only Sir William Guest had received his call in person. That in itself had alerted Aubrey. Contempt, rejection, dislike had come down the telephone line to Aubrey; seepages from his life-support system, fatal damage to it. Sir William had abandoned him as all the rest had done.

And this man knew it, this dangerous, clever man opposite him. Eldon knew and approved, and felt his own obligation to produce the admissions and agreements which would confirm the evidence against him.

He could not hold Eldon's gaze, and dropped his eyes. His feet shuffled irresolutely on the carpet, a signal which Eldon did not fail to notice. Aubrey was daunted — frightened, yes, he could even admit to that — by his sense of isolation. He was unnerved by the subtlety and cleverness and completeness of the trap into which the KGB — Kapustin! — had led him.

"It isn't quite like 1974, is it, Sir Kenneth?" Eldon enquired silkily.

"I don't understand—" Aubrey blurted, startled.

"We should have had you in 1974," Eldon said, his hand closing slowly into a fist on his knee. "We must have been within a hair's breadth of exposing you then."

"What—?"

"Bonn, dammit!" Eldon snapped, his impatient contempt revealing itself again. "In April — after they arrested Gunther Guillaume. You recall the fuss?"

"That was a ridiculous rumour," Aubrey protested.

"It lacked proof, but not credence. Someone in your service tried to tip off Guillaume just before the Germans got him. I became convinced of that during my enquiries."

"You were forced to clear every member of the SIS staff at the Bonn embassy," Aubrey retorted, feeling a landslip of confidence within himself. Another old bogey now to be laid at his door. It was true, there had been rumours that an officer in British Intelligence had tried to help the Russian double, Guillaume, to escape the net closing around him. Gunther Guillaume had been Willy Brandt's closest adviser during his period as Chancellor of West Germany — and Guillaume had been a Russian spy. His arrest had caused Brandt's downfall. Eldon had been part of the

MI5 team of investigators who had been drafted to Bonn at the end of April to enquire into the truth of rumours that there was a British double-agent in league with Guillaume. Nothing except the innocence of Aubrey's officers in Bonn had been proven.

"We were evidently looking in the wrong place, Sir Kenneth. You were not, yourself, subject to investigation."

"No, I was not."

"Evidently a crucial omission."

"It was never more than a foolish rumour."

"I wonder."

"I was in Bonn at the request of both the END and the BfV — you know the circumstances. German security and intelligence required — oh, information, instruction, coaching, call it what you will. They were afraid that the World Cup in Munich that year might end up entertaining the same kind of tragedy that attended the Olympic Games in 1972. They did not want more dead on their hands. Representatives of almost every Western intelligence agency were in and out of Bonn that year in advisory capacities."

"And that's all there was to it?" Eldon enquired with heavy irony.

Aubrey nodded tiredly. "It was all you could yourself claim at the time." He waved a hand in dismissal. "Guillaume is back in the East now — all the matter seems to be good for is more mudslinging. Put it aside, Eldon. There was no double-agent in my service helping Guillaume to avoid arrest."

"It's a matter we shall go into again — very thoroughly," Eldon warned.

"Really?" Aubrey remarked contemptuously. "However, for today, perhaps we should return to the events of 1946?"

Aubrey realised that the subject of 1974 had been broached to soften him, to expend yet more of his dwindling resistance and energy. This was to be the meat of the repast — Berlin, 1946.

"Very well, Eldon," he replied at last. Sunlight was reaching across the room, catching motes of dust and turning them to gold. "Very well. Proceed."

Eldon inclined his head in a mocking gesture of thanks. "You arrived in Berlin, attached to the Allied Control Commission, as an SIS officer — in April '46, yes?" Eldon made a business of consulting his notes. His briefcase lay, open-mouthed like Aubrey's Pandora box, next to him on the sofa.

"That is correct."

"Robert Castleford was, at that time, a senior civil servant transferred from Whitehall to the Commission, and had no links whatsoever with SIS?"

"Again, correct. He did not. He was not a member, nor an associate member, of the intelligence service." Aubrey's lips pursed as he finished speaking, and Eldon's eyes gleamed.

"It seems to me that even now you speak with some disparagement, Sir Kenneth? But, of course, there was friction between yourself and Robert Castleford from the very beginning, was there not?" Without waiting for a reply, he continued: "You resented the authority of any — civilian? You resented any interference with your work. With your rather high-handed methods, you crossed swords with Castleford more than once. Your various encounters are a matter of record."

"I did object on occasion, yes… it would seem I possessed remarkable foresight in being wary of him, considering my present situation."

Eldon did not smile. Aubrey's attempt at nonchalance irritated him.

"You immediately disliked, and resented, Robert Castleford?"

"No—"

"Sir Kenneth," Eldon breathed with evident, malicious irony. "That, too, is a matter of record. There were other complications later, but your antipathy towards Castleford was evident to colleagues from the very first. You complained, time after time, of the manner in which the civilian authorities presumed to override what you considered to be important intelligence work. You seemed to consider your work of more significance than the huge task of getting Germany back on its feet once more. Catching ex-Nazis and spiking the Russians' guns seemed of more importance to you than the rebuilding of Germany?"

"If you say so…"

Aubrey gripped his hands more tightly together in his lap, and averted his gaze. Castleford's dead face had presented itself to his imagination in hideous close-up, the blue eyes going blank and glazed, the head beginning to tilt backwards. The noise of the revolver was in Aubrey's ears. As his eyes found the carpet near his feet, Castleford's face, too, fell sideways and the man's body was vividly before him, stretched on his carpet — so vividly that he was afraid that Eldon, too, would see it; see the flow of blood from his temple staining the white shirt-front. He shook his head and the image retreated.

"Something wrong, Sir Kenneth?" Eldon asked.

"Tiredness," Aubrey managed to say.

"You wanted, from the very beginning, to fulfil your own ambitions in Berlin," Eldon pursued. "You were building your own career, and you would brook no interference from outside your service. Your ambitions dictated that even a very senior member of the Commission such as Castleford was not to be tolerated if he interfered with your work." None of the observations were interrogative. For Eldon, they were merely statements of fact.

"If you say so…" Aubrey replied wearily.

"You went about establishing your own network, did you not, within weeks of arriving in Berlin?"

"Yes."

"Setting out thereby to prove your superiority to brother officers in SIS? You were not the senior officer there, I take it?"

"Of course not!" Aubrey snapped.

"Then why did you begin to behave in this — cavalier fashion?" Eldon's hands moved apart in a shrug. "Towards officers more senior and experienced than yourself," he added darkly.

"Because their networks were suffering from rigor mortis. Most of them were established during the early days of the occupation of Berlin. We were finding out less and less, we were catching fewer and fewer Nazis — we had no real access in the Russian sector…"

"You're suggesting that you had all the right answers — only you, no one else?"

"Not that — simply a fresh mind, fresh links." Aubrey looked up at Eldon. There was only sunlight on the carpet now. "Surely you can understand how networks become moribund?"

"Perhaps. But you spared no one's feelings, no one's pride, as you went about this fresh approach of yours. You made yourself deeply unpopular in intelligence circles at the time."

Aubrey shrugged. "All that summer we were afraid that the Russians would try something like a blockade of Berlin — we had to pull out all the stops to try to discover what they meant to do. In fact, they postponed their intention for two years, until '48."

"And your new networks began to produce results?"

"Not at once. But, slowly — yes, they did."

"Castleford objected, on many occasions, to your high-handed, even illegal treatment of German nationals, did he not?"

"Yes, he did," Aubrey sighed. "There were a number of cases—"

"Where he reprimanded you for over-zealous behaviour? Such as detaining German nationals without charge — or blackmailing German nationals into assisting you? Bribery, black-market goods supplied for favours and information. Castleford objected most strenuously to most of the methods you used, did he not?"

"He did."

"Increasing the antipathy between you?"

"Naturally. He — got in my way on every possible occasion. I was looking for Nazis and for Russian agents being funnelled into the other sectors of the city, then to the West, under the guise of displaced persons and even German soldiers. There was — little time for niceties."

Eldon's lips pursed in contempt. "Perhaps Castleford thought that the war was over by the summer of 1946?" he said with heavy irony.

"Perhaps. We simply did not agree as to priorities."

"You were caught by the NKVD in the Russian sector of Berlin in December of '46?"

"Yes."

"Why were you there?"

Aubrey hesitated for an instant. Stick to your original debriefing, he instructed himself. Eldon will have seen the reports. Give him what he expects. He said: "Following a lead — a suspected double in one of the new networks. Not a very spectacular operation. The double knew I was coming, apparently, and proved his real loyalties by turning me over to the NKVD."

Aubrey sat back in his chair. The sunlight on the carpet had reached the round toes of his black, old-fashioned shoes, lapping at them like water. A hateful vision of himself as an old man at the seashore who has slept too long in a deckchair, unaware of the incoming tide, occurred to him. He dismissed it.

"You were interrogated, of course?"

"Yes — for three or four days."

"And released?"

"I escaped."

"During your interrogation — which could not have been gentle, by any standards — you supplied information to the NKVD."

"I did not." Aubrey was suddenly too weary and dispirited to inject any force into his denial.

"But — you did…"

Aubrey, sensing the clear anticipation in Eldon's voice, the knowledge of surprise, narrowed his eyes and steeled himself. What—?

"What do you mean?"

"Castleford disappeared the very day you — escaped — back to the British sector," Eldon said. "No one ever saw him again. He vanished from the face of the earth — utterly and completely. His remains were eventually found in 1951, during the digging of the foundations for a new office block, and finally identified by a ring, his dental record, and a fracture of the leg sustained in a rugby match at Oxford. Remember, Sir Kenneth?"

Aubrey could not disguise a shudder.

"There was a bullet hole in the skull. His remains were brought home, and honourably interred. And that was the end of the story — was the end…"

"Was?" The skull grinned up from the carpet, from the spot where Aubrey had seen the dead face minutes earlier. His hands were shaking.

"We now know what happened."

"You know?"

"Read this if you would, Sir Kenneth."

Eldon removed a number of enlarged photographs from his briefcase and passed them to Aubrey. They goldened in the sunlight, as did Eldon's hand. Aubrey took them with a premonitory shiver.

"Perhaps you would confirm that this is your signature, Sir Kenneth?" Eldon murmured.

Aubrey turned to the final print. What kind of transcript had been photographed? Old, certainly… yes, that was his writing, his signature. He flicked back through the sheaf of prints, rapidly reading the faded Russian, the badly-aligned, inexpert typing — question, answer, question-answer, answer answer answer—

It was an account of his interrogation by the NKVD — and it purported to be signed by himself as being supplied voluntarily and freely, for use in evidence at some unspecified future trial.

Fake, fake—!

"It is, isn't it?" Eldon prompted. There was almost a purr of satisfaction in his voice. "That, of course, is part of the Teardrop file, supplied by our friends in Washington." He smiled wintrily beneath the moustache, "Your file. Experts have confirmed the genuineness of the signature. If your Russian is still as expert as it once was, you will see that you are represented in the text as having supplied Castleford's name and his current whereabouts in Berlin to your interrogator."

Aubrey looked up. "Patently a forgery," he managed to say. His chest felt tight. He could hear his racing heartbeat in his ears, feel its thump in his chest.

"I see. You will also discover, as you read on, that you explain it was Castleford who operated all your networks, presenting yourself only as a minion in SIS's organisation. You deliberately suggested to the NKVD that it was of the utmost importance for them to stop him. Even to get hold of him. You claim in that document that Castleford was your senior officer in SIS. You lied so effectively to the NKVD that they had Robert Castleford murdered as a British agent!" Eldon cleared his throat, then added quietly: "It was at that point, when you had betrayed Castleford, that you decided to throw in your lot with the NKVD and become a Russian agent!"

Aubrey felt choked. He could not speak.

They had him.

The telephone rang and Massinger snatched up the receiver. Ros's plump hand hovered near his for a moment, and then she stepped away from him, as if to dissociate herself from the conversation to come. She gathered the tortoiseshell cat to her large breasts.

"Yes?"

"Massinger?"

"Yes." It was Hyde. He felt flooded with relief. He had spotted no tail on his way to Philbeach Gardens, but he wondered at the extent of his own competence. It had been too long since he had needed those old skills to be certain he still possessed them.

Hyde was evidently using a call box, yet there was the sound of music in the background which Massinger strove to identify. A string quartet — Mozart? "Where are you? Are you safe?" he asked.

"Just. They're getting closer. I'm at a recital, chamber music. No one would look for an ignorant Ocker in a place like this."

"You're keeping off the streets?"

"Yes. And away from the bus depots and stations. Last night, it was close."

"How close?"

"Inches. A coat of varnish."

"But you're all right?"

"I'm still operational, if that's what you mean. But it can't last much longer. Vienna Station tried to kill me again last night."

"My God, you're certain? Sorry, yes, you're certain. I — must come to Vienna. I'm seeing Shelley later today. He should have some information for me that could be of use. Tomorrow. I'll arrive tomorrow."

"A room at the Inter-Continental, then."

"Is there anything else? Anything I should be aware of?"

"No…" Hyde replied relucantly.

"Anything?" Massinger demanded.

"All right — last night, I had to kill one of them. One of ours."

"Damn!"

"It wasn't open to choice."

"I understand. Look, I have a copy of the file on Aubrey — the frame-up. It looks very bad for him."

"It's bloody worse for me, mate!"

"Yes, I know that, I have a plan, something we might be able to do to change things. In Vienna — "

"Christ, mate, all I want to do is get out of Vienna!"

"I'll have papers to make that possible, Hyde. But, perhaps you won't be able to leave at once."

"Christ—!"

"Look, hold on. This matter is — it's so big, Hyde, that we may have to take risks, greater risks than ever, if we're going to help Aubrey. You understand? It's not simply a question of your life any longer."

Yes, Mozart. One of the 'Haydn' quartets. A door had opened somewhere near Hyde and the music had swelled out. The B flat quartet, the 'Hunt'… door opening…?

"Hyde? Are you all right?"

"Yes. Don't get jumpy. Just hurry it up, will you?"

"OK. Tomorrow." Aubrey's signature at the bottom of a full confession, naming Castleford. For a moment, the document he had read at his club — so that Margaret would have no idea of what he was doing — was vivid in his mind. Very clever, very tight; noose-like. The document had taken his breath away, removed for perhaps ten minutes any facility to believe it a forgery. In Vienna, the Mozart quartet had ended. He could hear muted applause.

"Tomorrow," he repeated. "The Inter-Continental."

He heard Hyde's exhalation of relief.

"See you."

The connection was broken and the telephone purred. Slowly, Massinger replaced the receiver, unaware that he was not alone in the room; unaware of the room.

"Is he all right?" Ros asked.

"Mm — what?" Massinger looked up. The cat nestled against Ros's breasts like a stole. "Oh, yes. For the time being."

"Can you help him?"

"I think so."

Ros's face was restrained momentarily then a naked and complete fear possessed it. "Then for Christ's sake do it!" she wailed.

Massinger turned his back upon the sharp, cruel — and now so personalised — satire of Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode. His eyes caught the timeless glances of Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews, their tranquil security evident to him in a moment, before settling upon Constable's Salisbury Cathedral, white and green and blue, colours of an innocence he could not pretend. Room XVI of the National Gallery was quiet except for the mutterings of a troop of schoolchildren being shepherded through part of their undesired heritage.

He and Shelley stood side by side, almost caricatured in their identical dark overcoats.

"First thing," Shelley said, "Hyde's new papers. They've been carefully checked. They should remain secure for at least a few days, perhaps longer." He passed a small flat package to Massinger, who guiltily hurried it into the breast pocket of his coat. It was as if he had finally accepted membership of some subversive organisation. Shelley's face looked pale and strained with worry and lack of sleep. "Another thing," Shelley added, "there's a recent snap of the Vienna Rezident — his name is Karel Bayev, by the way — included with Hyde's papers."

"Thank you, Peter. I've spoken to Hyde."

"How — is he?"

"He's killed one of your people in Vienna."

"God—"

"He had to."

"I see. Are they that close to him?"

"He can't have long."

"We have to have Hyde's testimony."

"I know. But, it won't be enough. We have to have everything."

"I know," Shelley replied glumly.

"Then what do you have for me? Shall we walk?"

They began to patrol the room. Massinger regretted leaving the impossible cleanliness of Salisbury cathedral, reaching out of the placid green meadow. Even its illusory peace was something to be treasured.

Gainsborough and Reynolds portraits; satisfied, aristocratic eighteenth-century faces. Their exuded security irritated him as his glance lighted on them while Shelley recited what he had — gleaned from Registry. Massinger nodded from time to time, absorbing each fragment of information. Turner's Fighting Temeraire, then the misty, swirling rush of his Rain, Steam and Speed. The schoolchildren trooped out of the room; silence returned. Shelley's voice dropped to accommodate itself to the renewed hush. An attendant's heels clicked on the tiles. Finally, they confronted the obscure shapelessness, the formless half-world of Turner's Sun Rising in a Mist. Its reduction of the world to muted colour and pearly, bleared light echoed Massinger's mood.

And Shelley's final words.

"… if, if you go on with this, then Cass is a good man with pentathol. He can get to Vienna tomorrow afternoon. Remember, unless you're skilled at this or familiar with the techniques—?" Massinger shook his head abstractedly. " — then you can make mistakes. You can close the oyster-shell as easily as you can open it. The whole thing is very risky, Professor."

Turner's wan sun struggled in the mist.

"I know."

"Then, do you think you can do it? Why not just bring Hyde out?"

Massinger shook his head, vigorously. "No, Peter. This has to be done. Desperate remedies. We must know what's behind it. Vienna Station is working for someone other than you. Hyde is right about collusion. We don't know friend from enemy. We don't even know if we have any friends."

Shelley shrugged. "Very well. Then you must gain this man's confidence. Pavel Koslov is his closest friend. You speak Russian, Professor — you know Koslov. When you talk to the Vienna Rezident, under pentathol, you must be Koslov." Shelley announced this in the manner of an examination, a test for his companion.

Slowly, Massinger nodded; the abstracted, detached agreement of an academic conceding an argument. "I see that. Very well, if that is what is required."

"But can you do it?" Shelley asked in exasperation.

"I have to, don't I?" Massinger smiled humourlessly. "Quit worrying, Peter. It's our only chance — isn't it?"

"Do you think it's one of their 'House of Cards' scenarios actually being put into operation?"

"It'd have the same effect, maybe, if it succeeded," Massinger replied. "Throw your service into total confusion, sow discord at all levels — I guess that's possible. But it could as easily be a vendetta against Aubrey."

"But our people are helping them to carry it out."

"The last twist of the knife. That's why I have to succeed in being Pavel Koslov. Why I have to get the Rezident to talk to me."

"Couldn't we go to JIC, even the PM, with what we have? With Hyde?"

"I've been warned off once."

"What about Sir William?"

"It was Sir William who warned me off. We wouldn't be believed. Just Aubrey's old friends and colleagues. Interested parties. No, it has to be a fait accompli or nothing." He looked once more at the Turner painting. "Let's walk, Peter. That picture is giving me a chill."

"You're still relying on a lunatic plan, Professor—"

"I know it. But, if we can get at even some of the truth and tape it — then we can go to Sir William, or even the PM, and show them what good little boys we've been on their behalf." His smile was both self-mocking and grim. "There's no other way, Peter. We must have corroboration."

Massinger felt dwarfed by the large Renaissance canvases lining the walls on either side of them as they moved towards the main staircase.

"What can I do while you're in Vienna?" Shelley asked, as if requiring some form of self-assertion between the huge paintings.

"Check Vienna Station — anything, any means. We must know how rotten the barrel is — and whether it's the only rotten barrel in town."

Shelley nodded. He appeared relieved to have been given some task; relieved, too, to be obeying orders. Massinger had become a surrogate Aubrey. The weight of the realisation burdened Massinger, and his feet felt uncertain on the marble steps down to the entrance hall. He felt old, rather tired, very reluctant. Ahead of him lay danger, doubt, and perhaps an unsatisfactory outcome. More than those professional risks, however, his wife lay ahead of him in time. As he envisaged her, she seemed unsubstantial, about to vanish like his own tormenting, betrayed Eurydice. If she even so much as suspected, she would never forgive him. She would not remain with him; she'd leave and never return. He was so certain of that that there was a sharp physical pain in his chest.

He would tell her he had been invited to a Cambridge college for a couple of days by the Master; a former academic rival, a present friend. She would accept that. She had a great deal of committee work during that week; she would be relieved that he, too, would be busy, in company.

The lying had begun. He had taken the road he profoundly wished he could have avoided.

He and Shelley parted on the steps. Across Trafalgar Square, a flock of pigeons rose into the cold sunlight like a grey cloud.

"Be careful," Shelley offered. Then, as if unable to let the matter take its course, he added: "It doesn't seem sufficient!" His protest was deeply felt, almost desperate. "It can't be enough to guarantee success — surely?"

"I don't know, Peter," Massinger replied gravely. "We simply can't sail a better course or grab a bigger stick. We have to do it this way. There isn't a choice. Take care yourself."

The words of each seemed comfortless and empty to the other.

It was almost dark when Massinger reached the house. He let himself into the ground floor hallway, and began climbing the stairs. He had studied Hyde's new papers at the club, had sat at an eighteenth-century writing desk jotting down everything he had been told, and everything he knew and could remember concerning Pavel Koslov. And he had booked his seat on the British Airways morning flight to Vienna, and a room at the Inter-Continental Hotel. The ascent seemed to become steeper as he mounted the stairs, as if a weight of guilt and reluctance pressed against his head and body. Margaret was there, waiting for him. She would have begun preparing dinner; supervising the housekeeper but preparing the sauces and the dessert herself. There was a hard lump in his chest which would not disperse.

He fumbled his key into the latch and pushed open the door. He listened, but there were no noises, no wisps of conversation from the kitchen. He opened the door of the drawing-room.

Margaret and Babbington were both sitting, apart yet somehow subtly united, facing the door. Babbington's face was serious to the point of being forbidding. The man was charged with the electricity and danger of disobeyed authority. He was still wearing his overcoat. Massinger had passed his hat and gloves unnoticed on the hall stand.

Margaret's face was angry. Betrayed, flushed. Her eyes were hard, accusing.

She knew — somehow she knew…

Babbington had told her.

Told what?

He was acutely aware, like some schoolboy pilferer, of the evidence of Hyde's new papers in the breast pocket of his coat.

CHAPTER FOUR: Into Exile

After the initial shock, it was the tense, unaccustomed silence that struck Massinger. There was so often music in this room; records Margaret might be listening to, Margaret doodling at the piano, even singing—

Music and the idea of it brought back the 'Hunt' quartet over the telephone and the guilty knowledge of Hyde and the palpable bulk of the package.

Then she burst out; "Paul, where have you been?" It was matronly yet somehow desperate. Babbington had introduced her to subtle nightmares. "What's going on, Paul?" she continued. "Andrew's been telling me all sorts…" She looked down, then, her voice trailing into silence. She sensed herself as part of a conspiracy against him. He saw Babbington watching her with what might have been an eager hunger — a suspicion of some former relationship between them stung him inappropriately at that moment — then the man looked up at him. His eyes were satisfied.

"What's the matter, darling?" he asked as soothingly as he could.

Her face had hardened again when she looked up. "You know what's happening!" she accused. "Andrew didn't want to tell me — I made him…" She was ashamed at that. "You're still trying to help that man!"

"My dear," he said, moving towards her. Her knuckles were white against the velvet of the arms of her chair. She was wearing only her engagement ring and narrow gold wedding ring. Babbington's face indicated that he had been sufficiently warned, that the consequences were now of his making. "How can I have been helping him? At the club, at my stockbroker's?" The lies came fluently. He turned to Babbington. "Andrew — would you explain this, please? How have you upset Margaret?"

"I'm not upsetl I hate that man!"

"For God's sake, Margaret!" His eyes never moved from Babbington's face. The directorships, the Quangos, the circles that might have admitted him, the respect — they all paled. This was Babbington's real power — this … a woman in tears, almost hysterical with fear and anger and hate. Babbington could, he was amply demonstrating, poison Margaret's mind incurably.

Castleford—

He was made aware once again of how many pictures of her father this room, other rooms, contained. The portrait watched from the wall. Castleford was here, in the room with them, assisting Babbington. He felt nausea and guilt sourly together in his throat.

Then he remembered Aubrey. The pictures stared at him, the portrait watched. Aubrey, in the back of his awareness, pleaded for, demanded help.

Aubrey—

"My dear," Babbington murmured, touching Margaret's hand, his large fingers tapping at the two rings, at the knuckles of her left hand. Massinger clenched his fists at his sides. "My dear, go and calm down a little. I think I may have — well, let me talk to Paul about this… mm?"

She looked at Babbington, nodded, sniffed, and got up. It was mesmeric, a further demonstration of Babbington's power over her mind. She left the room. Massinger pulled off his overcoat, careful of the package as he folded it and placed it across the back of a chair. The wall lights appeared gloomy, the room large and vacant.

"Well?" he accused Babbington. "What the hell are you up to, Andrew?"

He stood over Babbington, who did not attempt to rise.

"What the hell are you doing, Paul? It's my right to ask, I think, not yours. What are you doing, man?" Even then, his hand indicated the door by which Margaret had left. It was as if he had struck her. "What were you doing in Earl's Court, at Hyde's address? Who did you talk with — his landlady? Why, man? What were you doing at the Imperial War Museum, with Shelley? Why did Shelley have to throw off surveillance in order to meet you?" His eyes glinted, but Massinger suspected that he had no answers to his questions, using them as he was simply in the form of accusations. Please don't let him know, he thought, and realised the weakness of his position. He and Shelley and Hyde. The sum total… Inadequate.

"I—" Careful, careful, he told himself, trying to rid himself of images of his wife, trying to press down upon his anger, create a mood of apologetic explanation. Not too weak, not too quick, but start to give in. "I don't see what it has to do with you, Andrew. I really don't think it needs you to come here and poison my wife against me—" He had walked away from Babbington soon after he began speaking, and now he turned to face him. Deliberately, the whisky decanter in his hand as he did so. "Do you?" he finished.

"Poison?" Babbington smiled. "You never possessed much sense of proportion, Paul, did you? I'm not poisoning Margaret against you. I'm just trying to establish what you think you're engaged upon, that's all." The remark invited explanation.

Not too quickly, Massinger instructed himself, pouring a large whisky without offering one to Babbington. Margaret kept intruding, tightening his chest with a physical pain. It was difficult to concentrate on fending off Babbington. "Do I owe you any explanation, Andrew?"

"I think you do, yes. You don't even know this man Hyde. Of what interest is he to you?"

"I—" Massinger looked thoughtful, slightly guilty; almost determined. "Aubrey asked me to check…"he admitted slowly.

"What?"

"Aubrey asked me to check," he blustered. "It's as simple as that. He wanted to know whether Hyde had been heard from. Does that satisfy you?"

Enough bluster, too much—? Had he hooked Babbington, used the man's poor enough opinion of him? Dodged and paltered enough to be dismissed?

Babbington smiled. His eyes almost seemed to form words — errand-boy, pet dog… Babbington's contempt for him was evident. Massinger wondered whether the man might not destroy his happiness simply out of amusement?

"Aubrey asked you," he repeated with heavy sarcasm. "And what, pray, did you find out?"

"His landlady hadn't heard from him."

"And the matter of Shelley — your little assignation with the head of East Europe Desk?" Babbington made it seem a very temporary appointment.

"Much the same," Massinger snapped, irked by Babbington's interrogation. "Look, dammit, I was asked by an old friend, a very old friend, if I would seek help for him. Can't you understand? Aubrey was desperate, isolated, afraid. I had to do as he asked. I couldn't turn him down!"

Yes, yes, yes, he thought, his eyes watching Babbington as he held the tumbler to his lips. Loyalty, old friendships — the futility of it was expressed in Babbington's eyes. He had successfully placed him now, understood and dismissed him as a sentimentalist. It confirmed what he thought of Margaret and Massinger together, and the leverage any threat to personal happiness would exercise on him. Massinger held his body unmoving, though a wave of relief swept over him. He'd done it…

For the moment.

"I see," Babbington murmured. "But, with what result?"

"Enlistment isn't fashionable these days," Massinger replied bitterly. "Leastways, not for lost causes."

"Ah. And you — do you feel Aubrey's cause is lost?"

"I don't believe he's guilty."

"That's not what I asked."

Massinger shrugged. "There's — nothing more I can do, either way," he admitted grudgingly.

"I agree." Babbington stood up. "Thank you for being frank with me," he said, crossing to Massinger and extending his hand. Massinger held his drink for a moment, as if in defiance, then Babbington added: "I'll just pop and have a word with Margaret. Don't worry. She'll be fine. Her father was a very special man, you know," he added. "Especially to her." Massinger shook his hand. "I'm glad things are — cleared up, Paul. Thank you for being so honest." There was an evident, cruel amusement in his eyes. And visible contempt—

"Margaret's been through enough already, Andrew," Massinger warned.

"Quite. Goodbye, Paul."

He went through the door to the dining-room, closing it behind him. Massinger swallowed at his drink. Yes — the contempt of power for emotion, for sentiment — yes. He was warmed by the passage of the drink and by a fierce delight in his own skill and intuition. He resented Babbington's returning Margaret to him like a borrowed gift, but he waited for her to come through the doors, smiling.

"Paul," she said. Yes, she was smiling. "Paul, Andrew's explained everything! I understand what you've been trying to do." There was a superiority about her understanding, almost a maternal, comforting sense of his being patronised. He ignored it, holding her close against him, feeling her breathing against his throat and neck. He had beaten Babbington.

And Babbington had shown him his power over Margaret and, once more, the power of dead Robert Castleford. Babbington would use Castleford without hesitation against him as he was using him against Aubrey; to fulfil his own ambitions. What he held, he would keep; the joint Director-Generalship of MI5 and SIS. Absolute power in the secret world. Babbington would stop at nothing to retain that power. The KGB had provided him with the means to finish Aubrey. Babbington cared nothing for the truth of the matter, for the KGB's motives, for the rot that might have set in, for collusion …

He'd see none of it. He'd see only his chance, his success.

Massinger felt anguished. Slowly, he held her at arms' length. Her eyes were still bright with dismissed tears. Her face glowed. He ached with love for her, with fear at losing her. He couldn't let her go — wouldn't…

Had to.

"Darling," he murmured.

Her left hand, the one with the rings he had given her, the diamond flashing in the subdued lighting, reached up and stroked his temple, then his cheek. It could not help but seem to him to be some kind of final, parting blessing. He caught her hand as she murmured: "Darling…" Her lips pouted. He was aware of her sexual attractiveness in a swift, piercing way. He knew that she had begun to entertain images of their lovemaking. He could envisage her face smoothed, whitened, dreamlike at climax, and felt roused.

He clutched her hand, but prevented her from moving close to him again.

"Margaret," he began guiltily. "Margaret, listen to me, please."

"What is it?"

He led her to the sofa, made her sit down. She was half-puzzled, half-amused. He lowered himself into the cushion, his body separated from hers. He held her hands solemnly.

"It's not over — whatever I told Babbington, it's not over," he murmured. She looked struck, even wounded. "No, just listen to me before you say anything, please—" He held up one hand to silence her. "Please listen before you say anything, before you judge me."

Eventually, she nodded stiffly, a little bob of her head. Her fair hair fell across her cheek, her brow. "Very well."

"This isn't about Aubrey," he began. "At least, it's not just about Aubrey. No, don't make that face, you can't hate him that much…" He abandoned the argument, and continued: "I have evidence — from Aubrey's man in Vienna, and Peter Shelley's convinced too — that the KGB are behind this business. Whatever the truth of the matter, they're using it. More than that, Aubrey's man could well be killed by his own side." He paused. There was little reaction other than puzzlement, a sense of unfamiliarity; then a sense of dismissal, of the light of common sense falling on this dark corner of experience and making it seem ridiculous; incomprehensible and incredible. "No one else believes it. No one else is interested. Babbington is blinded by his own ambition, Sir William is content to see Aubrey go to the wall because he's persuaded the Cabinet Office and the Joint Intelligence Committee that they want and need a unified security and intelligence service." Her eyes revealed that she was dismissing each of his statements even as he made them. He waved one hand loosely to indicate his helplessness. "You see," he pleaded, "why I can't give up on this?"

She was silent for a long time, and then she said simply, "No, I don't see."

"But, you must—!"

"I can't! All I can see is that you're still willing to help the man who betrayed my father — who caused his death!"

"You don't even know if it's true!"

"And you don't care! You'll help him anyway!"

"My darling, I promise you — I promise, that if I find it is true, I'll abandon him like everyone else. If Aubrey helped to kill your father, then to hell with him. I won't lift a finger to help him."

"I can't bear this…" she murmured.

"There's nothing else I can do."

"Why can't you talk to William about this — please?"

"Because he's convinced that Aubrey's a traitor. Just like everyone else. They don't want to look any deeper into it."

"But you do—" she accused.

"I must."

"So, only Paul Massinger can be right, only Paul Massinger's priorities are important."

"You know that isn't true—!"

"How do I know? Dear God, it isn't even your country!"

He stood up, unable to bear her hot gaze, her accusing mouth. He crossed the room, then turned to look back at her.

"I'm trusting you with my life," he said quietly. "I've told you because I had to. I promised Babbington that I'll go no further. Only you know I'm continuing with it. I — have to go to Vienna for a couple of days, to see this man of Aubrey's." She averted her face. His body had taken on a supplicant's stoop, arms akimbo. "I ask you to tell no one. If anyone asks, then I'm in Cambridge for a couple of nights. Out of harm's way," he added cynically. "When I get back, I'll tell you everything. I'll let you decide—"

She turned to him, her face reddened, her hands clenched on her lap. She shook back her hair.

"Don't come back," she said. "Just — don't come back." She, too, stood up. Her body was rigid with determination. "If you leave this flat on that man's behalf—" He groaned inwardly. She had accepted nothing of what he had said. " — then you need not bother to come back. I don't care if I'm being unreasonable, or stupid, or even malicious — but I can't bear it! If you go on helping that man, then we're finished. It's over."

Immediately, she left the room, closing the doors to the dining-room behind her with a firm, quiet finality. Massinger's eyes immediately transferred their gaze to the portrait of Castleford. It watched him with what he could only consider malevolence, accusation. Castleford's eyes were her eyes. They had always had the same eyes; now, they possessed the same stare. He rubbed his forehead and groaned aloud.

Finished—

The British Airways Trident dropped towards the snowbound landscape amid which the south-eastern suburbs of Vienna straggled out towards the pattern of Schwechat airport's runways. The scene was uniformly grey and white to Massinger's red-rimmed, prickling eyes. Bodily, he was little more than a lump that had sleeplessly occupied a hotel bed near Heathrow and then a taxi and then a departure lounge and then an aircraft seat next to a window; a lump that had previously performed, like an automaton, the tasks of packing, gathering passport, credit cards, wallet, Hyde's papers, ordering a taxi, avoiding all sense of Margaret in other rooms in the flat, avoiding him.

His mind was numbed. Not free, or released, merely numbed. He could no longer think of her or about her. He had lost her. That realisation was like a wall in his mind, preventing other images and thoughts.

The wheels bumped, and snow-covered concrete and grass rushed past the window; a moonscape produced by snowploughs. Then the aircraft was taxiing, turning right then left, back towards the strangely provincial, miniature airport buildings. Schwechat was like any airfield in eastern Europe; a bare, flat child's model of a grown-up's real airport. He and Margaret had flown into Schwechat often, visiting concerts, operas, galleries in Vienna…

The thought drifted away, as if he had no powers of retention left. The landing music switched off and the hostess wished him a pleasant stay. People began to gather baggage hurriedly, tumbling it out of the overhead lockers as if prompted by an escape timetable limited to split-seconds. He followed them slowly across the pooled, windy tarmac into the terminal building.

Passport control, luggage, customs; a largely empty hall, echoing, modern, aseptic. He tried to anticipate the events to come, the evening and night ahead, but all he gained was a sense of foreboding and weakness, and he surrendered the idea. He had begun, he knew, to lose interest, not to care. Teardrop, Hyde, Aubrey the old man, the KGB, all became figments of a melodramatic dream, as they had been for Margaret. There was only one thing he now cared about, one fragment of the truth upon which he must lay hold; had Aubrey betrayed Robert Castleford, had him killed in Berlin almost forty years ago?

That could animate him; that question obsessed him. That he would pursue, whatever else…

The doors slid back and he walked into the freezing air outside the arrivals hall. Immediately, a grey Mercedes displaying a taxi sign pulled out from a parking space and, jumping the queue of vehicles drawn up, halted directly in front of him. He was startled into clutching his suitcase more tightly.

"Massinger," Hyde said. It was a recognition, not a question. "All right. I'm Hyde. Note the accent?" Hyde smiled grimly at Massinger's relief.

"How did you—?"

"Money. What else? Just borrowed it. Get in." He pushed open the rear door and Massinger climbed in, sliding his suitcase in front of him. The moment he shut the door, Hyde pulled the Mercedes away, down the ramp towards the main road. "I thought a taxi might come in useful — oh, better be kosher and put the clock on." He turned his head to glance at the American. "You strong on tipping, Massinger?"

"What? Oh—"

"What's the matter?" Hyde asked urgently.

"Everything," Massinger began, then noticing Hyde's alarm, he added, "And nothing. No need to worry. I wasn't spotted and followed."

"I know that. I've been here two hours waiting. No face I know, not even one I suspect I ought to know, has shown up." Hyde grinned suddenly, showing his profile once more. "You're not doing too bad for an old man."

"And you — how are you doing?"

"Ahead. Just. It's only real professionals we have to worry about. Brought my papers?"

"Yes."

On the wide empty road raised above flat white fields, they passed a grey, lumped-together factory complex. A red and white chimney belched dark smoke.

"Good. Well, what's the plan?" Hyde was clearly enjoying a human contact he did not have to fear or suspect. He was almost blithe.

"We — we're going to kidnap the KGB Rezident in Vienna. A simple job—"

"You what?"

Massinger was offhand, almost satiric, because he did not care. He was unable to concern himself closely with the matter. It was no more than a preliminary task to be executed before he could return to London to discover the truth concerning Aubrey and Castleford; he might even confront Aubrey, after he had dug around, yes he might…

Hyde was stunned by his apparent nonchalance. "Did I hear you correctly, Massinger? Did you say kidnap the Rezident? Hands up everybody in the Soviet Embassy, all right, come with us, sunshine? You're talking through your backside!"

"There's no other way. The Rezident must know — I am certain he does know what's going on here. He knows about Teardrop, and what's behind it."

"Of course he bloody does! So what?"

"I know where he will be tonight, and I know he will be alone."

"Without a screen." Massinger was amused, in a detached manner, at the signals of competence and superiority he was hoisting. "Shall I go on?"

"Oh, please do," Hyde replied with thickly spread sarcasm.

"Very well."

Small, peeled-paint houses and farms, a flour mill, then newer bungalows, pebble-dashed or faced with grey concrete. Pink or light green, many of them. Then the city began rising to two and three storeys and closing in around the car. The river was dark and sluggish to their left. The wheels of the Mercedes clunked over tramlines. Dingy shops bearing weather-beaten nameboards and advertisements, new cars, tall new buildings. Then the heavy, monumental buildings lining the Ring.

They were in the Johannesgasse and close to the Inter-Continental before Massinger had completed his narrative.

"Well?" he asked finally as Hyde passed the hotel and slid into a parking space fifty yards beyond it. The Australian switched off the car engine and turned, leaning his arm on the back of the bench seat. His eyes studied Massinger over the sleeve of his stained overcoat.

Speaking almost into his sleeve, he said: "So there's me, you and Shelley. That's the entire army, is it?"

"Yes." He felt dry-throated from talking without pause or interruption; weary from lack of conviction in what he was doing.

"And you couldn't give a bugger. What about Shelley?"

"What do you mean?"

"Your scheme is harebrained, but it doesn't seem to frighten you. You don't care enough. I can't see us getting away with it unless you wake up."

"I see." Massinger wanted to explain, but then said bluntly: "Unless you help — unless we get to the bottom of this — you're living on borrowed time."

"Sure — and interest rates are going up and up. I know. But — you watching my back? I don't think so, mate. Thanks all the same."

"You know Aubrey is supposed to have betrayed my wife's father to the NKVD in 1946. She believes it, anyway. Does that answer your question? I may not seem to care — but if I want my own answers, my own peace, then this has to be the first step. Now — do we go or not?"

Hyde studied Massinger's drawn and tired face for a long time, then he said: "This bloke Cass — he's laid on, is he?"

Massinger nodded. "He arrives this afternoon. He knows where to contact me."

"Do you know enough to play the Rezident's pal — just through having a couple of drinks with him and watching the opera from the same box?"

"I'll have to, won't I?"

"You will." Then Hyde shrugged. "I don't have any choice, anyway. Argument's just a lot of finessing crap. I don't have anywhere to go. The body in the alley decided that for me." He held out his hand. "OK, Massinger — light the blue touch-paper and stand well clear."

"You understand, Professor? I'm sure Pete Shelley warned you of the dangers of pentathol interrogation — opening and closing doors?" Massinger nodded. Cass's face was a mere white blank in the darkness of the car. Hyde had left them once more to patrol the street, adrenalin-alert, senses and intelligence heightened to the point where Massinger sensed excitement, even pleasure in him. "Good. You have to be this man Pavel Koslov and you mustn't step out of character, not for a moment. At least, it would be wise not to."

Cass was about Shelley's age, an old school friend of the head of East Europe Desk, clever, fluent in at least five languages, apparently, a good field agent, and totally lacking the other's ambitions. Madrid Station was simply another enjoyable and easy posting on a covert tour of the world. Shelley's assessment of and liking for Cass were both deserved.

"Do you think it'll work?"

"It might — I say only might. I won't be there to increase the dose, or direct you. Shelley made it clear that I should scarper as soon as I've filled his veins."

"Yes, you must get away at once."

"All right. First of all, I'll knock him out with sodium pentathol. Twenty minutes later, I'll inject enough benzedrine to bring him round again. Then he's all yours. I'll stay long enough to check the first couple of questions, to make sure he doesn't need any more benzedrine. He'll be somewhere between waking and sleeping, then. Almost comatose, but bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the same time. OK?"

"Yes."

"Good. This is a form of narcotherapy. There are other and better drugs that could be used with a greater chance of success, but they're harder to handle. I couldn't leave you to do the whole thing by yourselves."

"I see."

"Now — lull him at first by talking slowly, sleepily if you like — the old-fashioned hypnotist's voice. Mm?" Massinger nodded. "Then come across as strongly as you can in the guise of Koslov. Create an atmosphere for him, a conversation. Now, if he begins to doze off, don't slap his face or shake him about. You might start waking him up properly. I'll leave you a syringe. Ten milligrams of benzedrine if he falls asleep. OK?"

"How long do I have with him?"

"Perhaps an hour, even an hour and a half. But if at any time ten milligrams doesn't bring him back to you, leave it. Unless you don't mind what happens to him."

"I don't want him — harmed," Massinger replied.

"OK, that's that, then. All we have to do now is wait."

Cass settled back in the seat, arms folded across his chest. He seemed sublimely unconcerned. Massinger scanned the street for Hyde and eventually saw him drifting back towards the car from the direction of the Michaelerplatz and the massive facade of the Hofburg Palace. The girl's apartment was on the second floor of an elegant nineteenth-century house, the ground floor of which was a jeweller's shop.

Hyde thrust his head inside the Mercedes, and announced: "Not a bloody sausage, Massinger. The street's clean for three blocks, and the square's strictly kosher. OK? Can I get warm now?"

"Thank you, Hyde."

Hyde got into the car, looked at Cass's dozing form, then settled down in the driving seat. He had brought the smell of cold into the car, together with the scent of excitement. Massinger was aware of his own adrenalin, sluggish at first like melting ice, now prickling and prodding him into alertness. He was aware of how little he had considered Margaret in the past hours, and was abashed and grateful. He and Hyde did have something in common — the drug of the secret life. Temporarily, at least, his wife had receded in his heart and mind. Now he did want this, he did want to know.

"What time do you have?" he asked Hyde.

Hyde slanted his watch to catch the light of a street-lamp.

"A couple of minutes to nine. If, as you tell me, this bloke's as regular as a sergeant-major's bowels, he'll be here in a mo."

"Quite." Massinger's smile, hidden by the darkness, was eager and almost childish. "Cass?" he whispered. Cass sat upright.

"Here's a black Mercedes — no official plates," Hyde reported. "Probably his own car."

The car passed them and pulled in at a vacant parking meter on the opposite side of the Herrengasse. It was less than twenty yards from the front of the jeweller's shop and the discreet, narrow door between its window and the next shop, where jackets and skirts, cardigans and trousers lay like the victims of a skirmish, softly-lit from the ceiling. All three men leaned forward in their seats.

A short, plump man got out of the car. He was alone, and little more than a dark overcoat and trilby hat. He locked the car and, as he passed the boutique, they saw his face for a moment. Massinger sighed.

"That's him," Hyde said unnecessarily.

"We'll give him ten or fifteen minutes. He mostly stays until after midnight. Her only client on Thursday evenings. Drinks first, I guess," Massinger almost drawled.

"Open a couple of tinnies, eh?" Hyde murmured. "Gives him wind while he's performing, I'll bet."

"Hyde—?"

"I know. Is your joking really necessary? No, it isn't. But I haven't had many laughs lately."

The Vienna Rezident of the KGB rang the bell and the door opened a moment later. They had seen him bend forward to speak into a grille set to one side of the door.

"Damn," Massinger muttered as the door closed behind the Russian.

"Don't worry. Speak Russian," Hyde instructed. "He'll let us in if he thinks it's official. Sound annoyed at being dragged out on a night like this. It'll work wonders."

"No, I think German. The police," Massinger replied. He looked at his watch. "Ten minutes, then we'll go in while he's still drinking his second glass of champagne." His voice was light, filled with an unaccustomed excitement.

"You're the boss," Hyde said. "You're the boss."

"Anything in today's airport snaps?"

"Couple of girls with big tits — LOT hostesses."

"All right — bring them over. I'd better look them over before I initial the docket."

"There. Couple of wasted rolls. Oh, those two in that shot. RGB back from London leave. See the M & S bags full of goodies. Should guarantee them a good time in Moscow when they next go home."

"We know those two. Log them back in."

"Wilkes?"

"Yes?"

"Why are we after Hyde — I mean, really after him?"

"You don't believe he's been turned?"

"I've worked with Hyde before. He's a barmy Australian, I grant you, but he'd never take orders from some KGB control. Too bloody-minded for that."

"Look, you weren't there the other night. He didn't hesitate to kill that poor sod Philips."

"I know that—"

"There you are then. Would he do that if he wasn't working for the other side?"

"I suppose not."

"He's been on the run ever since they took in that old bugger Aubrey. He's Aubrey's man, all right."

"I have my doubts about Aubrey, too."

"For Christ's sake, Beach! London arrested Aubrey, the DG himself. They wouldn't dare if they didn't have a good case. Now, be a good lad and pour some coffee while I glance at these snaps."

"OK, Wilkes."

"Mm… nothing there… big knockers is right… Boris and Doris, the terrible twins. Caught London just right for the January sales… no, nothing in those two… thanks — mm, not bad for a beginner. Too much sugar."

"So sorry, Wilkes. What did your last servant die of?"

"I don't recognise him — ah, Ivan the Dreadful, on duty-go at Schwechat again, I see. It must be his boils they don't like… no, no… nothing, nothing, nothing… stop bloody whistling, will you, Beach, it goes right through my teeth… no, no, and no… almost done — hello, do I know you from somewhere?"

"Found something?"

"No, shouldn't think so. Just a face I thought I knew… mm? Can't place it. Just a look-alike, I expect… where's that bloody glass? Ah, let's blow you up a bit… no? Now, who the hell is that? I'm sure I know him."

"Let's have a look, then—"

"You're too young to remember. I think this face goes too far back for you… there. Recognise that bloke with the small suitcase, tall one?"

"Looks British to the core. Banker? Company director? Civil servant? I don't recognise him."

"Back in time… years ago… civil servant, you said? Like us or the 'Yes, Minister' mob? Now, who the bloody hell are you? No — I don't think he's anything to do with us. Come to think of it, I don't think he's British. But I'm just sure there's some connection with Aubrey."

"More coffee?"

"Oh, Christ!"

"What is it?"

"I've just remembered who this bloke is!"

"Go on, let's have another look."

"You won't know him. Paul Massinger — yes, that's right, he's a Yank — CIA years ago. A friend of Aubrey. I've seen him with the old man. Aubrey's used him unofficially as an adviser from time to time. Paul Massinger."

"What's he doing here, then?"

"I don't know — but I'll bet London would be interested. What time was this — bloody hell, he's been here half a day already. You hang on here, I'm going to signal London now. Someone's bound to think this isn't a coincidence."

The silences between their words were little islands of civilised living. As soon as either of them spoke, the mellow whisky and the subdued lighting and the rich velvet curtains retreated, and Aubrey was once more fighting for his survival and Andrew Babbington was his declared enemy.

Staring into his crystal tumbler, Babbington said with a pleasurable finality: "I really came to tell you that JIC and the Cabinet Office and myself are to meet the PM early next week to formalise the setting up of the new Security and Intelligence Directorate. SIS and MI5 will no longer continue their separate existences." He looked up. There was a flinty, satisfied calm in his eyes. "And I have been instructed to prepare papers in your own case for the DPP as soon as possible." His eyes gleamed like those of a cat.

Aubrey felt winded. He studied his own whisky greedily, but did not drink. He silently cleared his throat and drew saliva into the roof of his mouth from his cheeks so that his voice would not betray him when he spoke. Then he said, "So, you have it all. King, Cawdor, Glamis, all as the weird women promised."

"Do you fear I have played most foully for it?" Babbington countered, his teeth appearing mirthlessly between his lips.

"No. Foolishly and dangerously, perhaps."

"How so?"

"Andrew, if you do not see that I cannot be guilty of these things, then I cannot persuade you. You are blinded by your own supreme ambition, and your blindness has served you well. What you may, by omission, have done to my service and your own, I can't say."

"Your service?"

"My former service. They mean to send me to trial, then?"

"Perhaps. Cooperation could forestall that…?"

"How can I cooperate? I do not know the script of the play!" Aubrey snapped, getting up from his chair and topping up his whisky. Babbington refused the proffered decanter.

"I see," he said.

"How far will they take this matter?" Aubrey asked, his back to Babbington, shoulders slightly hunched as if he were leaning heavily on the sideboard for support.

"I'm not sure — no one is at the moment."

"I don't want a trial. I don't think I could face that," Aubrey murmured.

"Then—"

"I have nothing to offer as cooperation!"

"Then — let me say this to you. There are elements — not necessarily in the majority — who consider a trial, in camera, of course, but certainly a prosecution before the law, could be useful. A cleaning of the stable, purification of the house — reconsecration, so to speak. Good for Security and Intelligence Directorate at its inception."

"And, of course, there is always the PM's stern, Noncomformist morality to deal with. The PM would be inclined to a trial, no doubt. After all of them, all the old bogeymen who've been let off, allowed to go free, brushed under the carpet, kicked upstairs and even honoured for treachery — the buck stops here!" He turned to face Babbington. His face was drawn and tired, but animated. "The wrong place at the wrong time. One traitor too many to stomach, mm?"

Babbington shrugged. "Perhaps…"

"And, of course, my background isn't quite what it might have been."

"That is nonsense—"

"Is it? Is it really?"

Aubrey appeared about to continue, but the telephone, ringing in the hall, silenced him. Babbington got up immediately.

"Probably for me. I gave them your number—"

Aubrey shrugged and Babbington crossed swiftly to the door, closing it behind him. It moved ajar slightly, but Aubrey had no desire to listen. There was no motive for suspicion. Babbington was keeping nothing secret from him. His end had been prescribed; etched in clean, deep lines. They were determined that he should be finished, and that he should be seen to be finished. The king must die. His ashes would fertilise the new seed — SAID. And Babbington, who would be Director-General of the new organisation, would then possess supreme power in his country's secret world.

Resentment died, to be replaced by a hollow, deflated feeling. Emptiness.

He realised that they had succeeded in taking his life from him. Not simply his past, or his reputation and credibility; not his achievements or his probity; not his rank or his honours. His life. More important even than his good name. He was not Othello. He could no longer do as he had always done, he could no longer involve himself, belong…

They had taken away his reason for living.

"I warned him — I warned him," Babbington was saying heavily in the hall. There was a brutal power in the man's voice; naked strength. Babbington was too strong an opponent and Aubrey had no will or allies with which to fight him. Kapustin had known all this, had known everything that would follow from the instigation of his damned Teardrop!

Aubrey's eyes were damp with rage and self-pity. Damn Kapustin. He had guessed correctly at every turn of the cards, every throw of the dice. Teardrop was cast-iron, watertight, unsinkable. There was nothing he could do.

"You've done that? Good," Babbington was saying. "Yes — oh, no, it was no coincidence. He went deliberately, to make contact. Yes. No risks. Yes."

The receiver clicked back onto its rest. Aubrey straightened his slumping tired old body, forcing it to replicate a former self.

Babbington entered the room again, his face dark with anger. A domestic tyrant facing a squeaking, fearful little rebellion from one of his children. Not endangered or unsettled, simply enraged at the enormity of defiant words or disobedience.

"Your friend Massinger—" he began, then swept his hand through the air in a dismissive gesture. "Why concern ourselves with him? The man is a fool!"

"A sentimentalist. They are only the same thing once in a while, usually over women or small animals. Paul is no fool."

"If he tries to help you, he is."

"Has he—?" Aubrey could not prevent himself from asking.

"Inadequately, yes. There's no comfort in it, though."

"No," Aubrey admitted.

Babbington crossed to his briefcase, and removed a buff file.

"Read these," he said, pressing them into Aubrey's hand. "They contain the details of your arranged escape from NKVD custody in Berlin, and Soviet instructions to ensure that you reached the British sector safely." The papers shook in Aubrey's grasp, and he could not prevent them doing so. Babbington seemed delighted.

"Your ambition's blinding you to everything except the surface…" Aubrey began.

"You had Castleford killed. You're a Russian agent — my God, to think what might have happened if we hadn't got hold of this! — and we'll have you for that. Especially for that." Babbington collected his briefcase, and made for the door. Looking at his watch, he said, "I'll send Eldon along in a little while. I'm sure you won't object to a late night? I doubt you could sleep, anyway."

"There. he's ready for you now." Cass inspected the dilated pupils of Karel Bayev, KGB Rezident in Vienna, as his plump, still fully-dressed form lolled in a deep armchair. The light of the room fell on Bayev's blank, dead-yet-alert features. The man looked capable of reason and speech at one moment, incapable even of movement at another. Massinger was disconcerted by proximity to such total imprisonment. "Try him out," Cass suggested as he filled another syringe with benzedrine. Hyde slipped silently back into the room through the door to the bedroom. Presumably, he had tied the girl and gagged her. A call from the Vice Squad had persuaded her to open the door, and shock had prevented her from having to be hurt or disabled as they pressed through. Hyde had gagged her with his hand and bundled her up the stairs in front of him. Bayev had been sitting idly drinking champagne, and at once called out to the girl as they opened the door of the lounge. He had recognised a type in Hyde almost immediately but Cass, holding Hyde's pistol, had quelled protest.

Simple preliminaries, Massinger reminded himself. Almost too easy. Now, begin—

Hyde had crossed to the window, almost unobserved. Bayev's pupils had not followed his progress. He was staring into some unknown middle distance.

Margaret—

Begin.

"Karel, old friend — so good to see you again!" Massinger exclaimed in Russian, attempting as close an impersonation of Pavel Koslov's ringing tones as he could. "Karel!" he tried again, catching in his memory the echo of Pavel's usual enthusiastic greeting. "It's Pavel — your old friend, Pavel!" He chuckled, imitating Pavel's delight, clear in his mind, from the darkened back of an opera box.

"Embrace him," Cass whispered. "Call his name again."

"Karel — come on, Karel!" Massinger bent forward and took Bayev by the sholders, kissing him on each cheek. "It's Pavel. I want you to show me Vienna, old man!"

Bayev seemed to snap into wakefulness. His eyes watched Massinger, who could not but believe that the fiction would be exposed in a moment, that Bayev would protest, attempt to rise from the chair, threaten, become frightened—

"Pavel — Pavel…"he muttered, his voice thick with phlegm.

"That'll clear in a minute," Cass observed nonchalantly. "Once the station's tuned in properly. Go on."

"I've four whole days in this beautiful city, and I'm ready for anything. Just like the school holidays, eh, old man? Tallinn — do you remember Tallinn? The girls?"

Cass was smiling broadly when Massinger glanced up at him. He nodded encouragingly. Hyde was also smiling, then he tossed his head towards the door and went out.

"Ah… aaah…" Bayev sighed. His hands moved in slow-motion, describing the female form in the air. "Yes — the girls in Vienna, too! Wait till you see some of them. Meet them, Pavel! Oh, yes—"

"Very well, old friend. And how are you — busy?"

"Too busy. Much too busy. But, I will give myself a special assignment for a few days — we'll enjoy ourselves!"

"Good, good." Massinger could not see the conversation unfolding any further. He had established the circumstances, the fiction of himself as Koslov, but he could not force his own imagination to ignite. He could not be Koslov.

"What now?" he whispered.

"You've got the script," Cass replied.

"Damn," Massinger breathed, then he said: "London is a pig, Karel, old friend. Trouble, trouble, trouble. I can't tell you how they're keeping us on our toes…" His voice and ideas trailed off once more.

Then Bayev said: "You complain? We had that bloody Deputy Chairman here again last week! My God, that operation is never-ending—!" Bayev was animated, waving his arms slowly like the sails of a windmill or the slow circling of a lighthouse beam.

"My God," Massinger whispered. Then: "Kapustin always was a real shit!"

"Too right, my friend, too r- right… y-es, oh… y-e-ss…"

"What's happening?"

"He's not lasting long, is he?" Cass replied. He moved towards Bayev's form, which now had slumped back in the armchair, his pupils tiny and hard like currants, his eyes staring blankly. His hands and legs lay like those of a dummy about to be folded into its case.

Cass injected benzedrine, and stood back. "He could be overtired or half-cut. I can't tell. Looks like you'll have to keep waking him." He looked at his watch. "If I want to catch the Frankfurt flight, I'd better go, I'll leave you the syringe. Remember, if he doesn't come out of it at any time, leave him alone."

"Very well."

Bayev snapped awake once more.

"Kapustin's a real shit," Massinger said at once.

"Who are you?" Bayev replied in a suspicious voice.

"Oh, Jesus—!"

"What is it, Wilkes? You told London. What did they say? What did they come back to you for?"

"Never mind — look, go out and get some chocolate cake, will you? I'm starving."

"Now? Everywhere's shut—"

"Not that little delicatessen on the corner. Go on, do as you're told for a change."

"Money first. I know you."

"Here — and don't be long."

"OK. See you."

"Thank God for that. Now, six… seven… four… eight… nine… three… one… five… Come on — Christ, if this hits the fan, Wilkes old son, you can forget a cushy berth next time out — come on… thank God — give me Savin — at once. Never mind, just put me through. Yes, yes, the bloody code of the day is Volgograd — bloody imaginative, isn't it? Hurry up! Savin, is that you? Listen. London just signalled. If you know where your Rezident is, check up on him and keep him secure. Why? Because someone's been into our Registry files, and they've been checking on your boss. Yes, and that someone's in Vienna now — probably with Hyde… yes, that's right, Hyde. So, if you know where he is, I should check up on him if I were you!"

"Pavel — It's Pavel," Massinger said hesitantly.

"Pavel?" Bayev was still suspicious. Massinger had been attempting to re-establish the fiction of his circumstances for more than five minutes. Cass, as if supremely indifferent, had left to catch his flight; Frankfurt then onward to Madrid, his job now simply to make himself secure. Massinger's task was proving difficult, if not impossible. It had been too easy, like a gleam of sun before fog returns.

"Yes, Pavel — come on, Karel, what's the matter with you? Pissed again?"

Bayev laughed. "Pavel!" he exclaimed. "You old rat, how are you? What are you doing in Vienna?"

"Holiday — fun! And business, of course."

"Not more orders — not more of this business. Does Kapustin never sleep?"

"Thank God," Massinger breathed.

The telephone began ringing. Startled, Massinger stared at it. He did not dare to pick it up. Bayev's round head swung slowly, and bobbed like a bird's on his thick neck as he attempted to focus on the ringing telephone.

"Don't bother with it—!" Massinger said, inspired. "No time for business now. I want you to show me some of the sights!"

Bayev's head swung back. "But, what if—?"

"It's not Kapustin, and who else are you afraid of? I've got Kapustin's instructions. Come on, we'll talk as we walk, eh? I've got a hell of a thirst on me!"

Bayev laughed. The telephone stopped ringing but he did not seem to notice.

A customer, a customer, Massinger prayed in the silence, then he said: "God, I'm thirsty!"

"Same old Pavel!"

"Well, why not? I do my job. Anyway, being a party drunk is a good cover. London society loves me!"

"And so they should. I know a nice new bar — the girls are delightful?"

"When was Kapustin here last?"

"Two weeks ago. We were running round with our arses hanging out trying to keep up with him. He was meeting the Englishman—"

"Aubrey?"

"Of course. Who else?"

Massinger paused. Here was the Pandora-box. Aubrey's ills lay inside it. And then he wondered: Is Aubrey in there, too? Is there something more? He could not bring himself to continue the conversation. Bayev sat patiently, hands folded in his lap, body upright, a machine awaiting a current of electricity. Massinger's hands quivered. He did not wish to discover…

The door opened. Hyde, preceded by a draught of cold air, entered the room. Massinger heard his ragged breathing and turned to him at once.

"Three cars," Hyde struggled to say, clinging to the door handle. "Three cars, and they're not friendly. What the bloody hell do we do with him?"

CHAPTER FIVE: An Evening on the Town

"Well?" Hyde repeated. "What do we do with him? Not to mention ourselves?"

Massinger turned his gaze back to Bayev's face. He seemed unaware, untroubled by the collapse of the situation in which he believed himself to be; as if he had been switched off until required.

"I don't know — how close are they?"

"They're watching at the moment, cars drawn back maybe thirty yards on either side of ours. They'll be looking for our car first — then us. They'll try not to harm him, but don't you reckon on walking away."

"How did they—?"

"Christ knows — it doesn't matter! Get that bugger on his feet, Massinger."

"He can't be moved—"

"He'd better bloody well be, if you haven't finished with him!" Hyde moved into the room and through rather than across the heavy white carpet. He studied Bayev's simpleton expression and vacant eyes, which had not followed him as he moved. "Christ, he's well away. Have you finished with him?"

"By no means—"

"Then we'd better keep our hands on him. We might be a little bit safer in his company. Help me get him down to the car. We can't barricade ourselves in here."

"It might be dangerous to move him."

"And fatal if we don't!" He looked up at Massinger. He was bending still in front of Bayev like an exhausted runner or an animal tensed to spring. "You can ask him questions in the car. He's not going to bloody well know the difference!"

"Very well—"

"Get his coat — it's hanging up in the hall."

Hyde crossed to the window and peered through a crack in the curtains. Their car appeared unguarded, undetected. Massinger returned with Bayev's coat.

"You talk to him in Russian," Hyde instructed. "Keep him calm."

Massinger nodded, and then bent to lift Bayev by the arms.

"Come on, Karel, old man — you've had one too many, again!"

Hyde raised his eyebrows in what might have been a compliment as Massinger laughed and patted Bayev on the shoulder-blades. They shrugged him into his overcoat.

"Right — weight on you, please," Hyde instructed, loosening the pistol in its shoulder holster. "Just in case."

"Come on, Karel — you need a breath of fresh air!"

"It's cold!" Bayev exclaimed like a child.

"Where did he get that from?" Hyde murmured as they slipped sideways through the door into the apartment's small hallway. "Is he coming round?"

"I don't know — damn! The benzedrine syringe. I've forgotten it — wait here, old man! Haven't paid the bill!" Bayev sagged against Hyde and did not move, as if once more switched off. Hyde watched the front door of the flat, hand hovering near the breast of his overcoat. Massinger reappeared, thrusting a small black case into his pocket.

As soon as Bayev saw the second figure in the hall, he said, "It's cold, Pavel — bloody cold out there!"

"You need to wake up, old man. Come on!"

"Keep the bloody noise down when we hit the street. Put your hand over his mouth if you have to. Right?"

"Right."

Hyde leaned forward and unlatched the door. He levered it open with one foot. The narrow staircase was empty.

"Right, then. Quick as you can, down the little wooden hill."

"Forward march, Karel old man!"

They bundled Bayev down the stairs, Hyde leading, the weight of the Russian across his shoulder and back, while Massinger leaned backwards, taking the strain. He tried to ignore the stabbing pain in his arthritic hip. Bayev seemed drunk in his inability to negotiate the individual stairs, stumbling and giggling. He had evidently accepted the suggestion that he had drunk too much, and Massinger inwardly cursed this further complication. They leaned heavily against the front door to the street, breathing hard. Bayev was still giggling. Massinger's hip was burning with pain.

"Straight across the street to the car. The drunk act might just fool them, but don't let him start bawling in Russian. Don't stop, don't even hesitate — they won't shoot if they do recognise us, not with him between us. Ready?"

"Ready."

Hyde drew the Heckler & Koch. The plastic of the butt was warm from his chest and arm. He levered a round into the chamber, and then nodded.

"OK, here goes…"

He opened the street door slowly then peered round it. The small area of the Herrengasse he could see showed his car and one of the Russian vehicles. The driver was still behind the wheel but there were no passengers. He listened — was startled by a passing car which went on, past the Hofburg — and heard one set of slow footsteps echoing. Other side of the street—?

Moving away—?

There was too little sensory information, and the adrenalin was already dangerously underemployed.

"Come on!" he whispered fiercely, and they dragged Bayev into the street, moving across the pavement onto the cobbles as quickly as they could. Bayev's feet slipped and skidded and stumbled on the icy road.

"It's cold—!" he cried out, and Massinger squashed his hand over the man's mouth. His face winced with shock and the pain in his hip.

"Shit—" Hyde breathed. Bayev slipped heavily, almost bringing them down. Hyde felt the cold of the cobblestones through his trousers as he went down on one knee, Bayev's weight across his back until Massinger took the strain.

One man, two… three—

All now alerted by the brief Russian exclamation, two of them already certain of the small stationary group in the middle of the Herrengasse. The third man focused on them. Movement—

"Don't waste time, they know! Get him to the car as quick…" They rushed Bayev across the road, his toes dragging swerving lines like black snailtracks behind them. Hyde thrust the Russian against the boot of the Mercedes, then heaved open the door. "Get the bugger in!"

Massinger began bundling Bayev into the back of the car, heaving at him as the man protested by kicking out, finally throwing himself, with a stifled groan at his own pain, on top of the Russian and wrestling him across the rear seat.

Closest man ten yards, running now, mouth open to shout—

Second and third coming fast, fourth even closer, but approaching warily, trying to outflank…

Hyde weighed it, then slammed the rear door and jumped into the driving seat, locking the door behind him.

"Lock the bloody doors or they'll—!" Massinger snapped down the locks.

Hyde started the engine. A face appeared at his side window, pressed flat, smearing the glass with his lips. A gun angled across the window, held by white knuckles, threatened them. Now they could shoot him, Hyde realised, without endangering the Rezident. The Russian outside the car straightened up and stepped back a pace from the window. Rear-view mirror, the second and third men closing — a bump as one of them skidded and collided with the boot of the Mercedes — now Massinger, too, was separable, easier to kill.

Hyde pressed his foot down on the accelerator, and spun the wheel. The car slid sideways, lurched, wheels spinning, and then shot away towards the Michaelerplatz and the Hofburg. The KGB man at Hyde's window staggered back and was left behind. A fourth man began running out into the Herrengasse, but Hyde swerved the car around him.

"It's all right, Karel — just some noisy drunks," Massinger was saying as firmly and soothingly as possible in the back of the car.

"Who are you?" Bayev replied suspiciously. "What are you doing!"

"For God's sake, stop struggling, Karel!" Massinger snapped. "You must be having the DTs, old man!"

Hyde swung the wheel — two cars already moving in the Herrengasse, threatening shapes slipping in and out of the light of successive street-lamps — and the Mercedes turned ninety degrees and roared into the narrow, dark archway of the Hofburg's entrance, beneath the cupola. A pedestrian whisked out of their way, dragging a small dog on a leash behind him. The noise of the engine was magnified by the bowl of the cupola's roof, and then they were into the principal square of the palace leading to the Ring, with traffic lights ahead.

Red.

Mirror — first car turning into the archway already.

"Karel, Karel, wake up, old man! Do you feel better? Come on, you're not drunk, just tipsy!" Massinger was shaking Bayev gently, the two men now propped up on the back seat.

"I can't go back to the hotel," Hyde said, "not until I've shaken all three cars."

"This is no good—" Massinger protested. "He's totally disorientated."

"I'll drive around."

Green. The lights changed as they passed beneath the War Memorial, and Hyde turned right onto the Burgring, opposite the huge, dark, frosty bulks of the arts and natural history museums. Maybe only two of the cars would catch the light—?

Radio. They'd have radio. They were as vulnerable in the Mercedes as they had been in the girl's flat.

Two cars, yes. He accelerated. Karl Renner Ring, Karl Leuger Ring, each set of lights thankfully green.

"Where?" he asked.

"Anywhere!" Massinger snapped.

Schottenring. Red lights ahead, strung over the middle of the wide thoroughfare. The first car was no more than twenty yards behind them, in the thin traffic. The road was shining with frost.

Green filter.

Hyde swung the wheel hard to the left, and the Mercedes skidded, its back end floating away, then he accelerated and the car bounced heavily over tramlines and he was into a narrower street. He took the first right, then right again. The lights of the Schottenring were ahead of him. He turned into it a block further north from where he had left it, and accelerated again.

"Aubrey's people," Massinger was saying loudly and firmly. "Aubrey's people. He's fighting for his life, Karel. He's desperate. He hasn't got a chance!"

"No chance," Bayev agreed, but there was something mechanical and listless about his voice. Massinger pressed him.

"We can't afford any slip-ups — the pair of us have to stay safe. After two years, we can't afford a cock-up now."

Hyde turned the car onto the Franz-Josefs Kai, alongside the Danube Canal. The traffic was almost non-existent, the strung-bead lights of a bridge ten blocks away from them. Cross the canal, something told him. Into the narrow streets, the darker streets. Two cars still behind him. The third one would be hanging back, waiting for directions; for some pattern to be placed on the movements of the Mercedes, some possibility of a trap.

"Two years? You're a latecomer," Bayev said in the same mechanical toy's voice. "Pavel—"

"Thank God," he heard Massinger breathe.

"Pavel, it's been a plan for maybe five years…" Hyde sensed that Bayev's drugged, confused awareness had slipped back into his drunk's role. His voice was slightly slurred, his tone confiding, nose-tapping. Bridge coming up.

Lights red—

He ran through them and a lorry loomed up on the right, the driver's face clearly visible as he stared down at the Mercedes rocking on its springs, leaning drunkenly to one side as Hyde spun the wheel. The car skidded, turned half-round, then reversed behind the lorry, finally pulling away from it and running across its path onto the bridge. The lorry's horn sounded angrily behind them as the car shuddered across the cobbles of the bridge and jolted along the tramlines.

"Five years — my God!" Massinger exclaimed, his voice still shaky from their encounter with the lorry. "Five years. You're obviously a lot more trusted than I am, Karel."

"Gossip — only gossip," Bayev slurred. Then he yawned.

"Kapustin's always been in charge — yes?" Massinger pressed.

"Is all this on tape?" Hyde asked.

"Yes. It's still running. The recorder's in my hand."

"Thank God." He turned the Mercedes right. The rear-view mirror was clear for four seconds before the first of the pursuing cars appeared. He accelerated again. The kph climbed dramatically on the speedometer. Seventy miles an hour. "We could be getting somewhere," he murmured.

"Kapustin's always been in command," Bayev repeated like a lesson he had learned.

"Brilliant — a brilliant plan. What a mind, what insight—!"

"Balls."

"What—?"

"Kapustin — balls, Pavel! Kapustin's just the operator, the controller. It's not his plan. Just 'cause you're sucking up to him at the moment, looking to stay in London…" Bayev belched, so convinced was he of his own drunkenness. He was argumentative now, restless, and he moved himself into the corner of the Mercedes. His arms waved slowly once more like windmill sails. "Oh, yes, I know you. You'd kiss anybody's arse to stay in London."

"Karel, old man—" Massinger protested.

"It's not Kapustin's scheme, you ponced-up fart!" Bayev screamed, as if at an enemy. He was now in a violent, enraged, heightened mood, for no reason other than the effects of the drugs. "Petrunin created it! Bloody Petrunin — who's a better man than you any day — he created it!" Bayev was screaming at the top of his voice.

"Who?" Massinger murmured in the ensuing silence.

Two cars in the mirror, slowly closing the gap. The dark, ugly hump of the Nordbahnhof rose to their left. Hyde shuddered. Glaring, cold lights over the massive freight-yards beyond the station.

"Petrunin. Tamas Petrunin," Hyde said, unnerved. "That clever bastard."

"Shelley?"

"Yes."

Peter Shelley indicated to his wife to turn down the television set. Alison Shelley pressed the remote control handset. Laughter at a repeat of Porridge softened. Ronnie Barker was being berated by the short, dapper martinet prison officer. Shelley was still smiling at the last remark he had heard when he realised it was Babbington's voice at the other end of the line. Immediately, he was intensely aware of the back of his wife's head as she sat on the sofa, of the television beyond her, of the bay window still revealing the moonlit, snow-covered back garden. The images pressed upon him accusingly; claiming their rights.

"Shelley — I won't beat about the bush, not with one of my senior men," Babbington began, and then paused for effect before adding: "You've been working unofficially, Shelley. You have provided confidential information for people without security clearance."

Shelley drew in his breath sharply. Alison's shoulders twitched, as at the shock of static electricity in the room.

"I'm — sorry, sir…?"

"Don't play games, Shelley. Massinger asked you for certain information and you provided it, from Registry."

"Sir—"

Alison looked round at the tone of his voice. Her face was immediately concerned. He waved a hand to suggest there was no necessity for concern. But there was—

"You're a good man, Shelley. I prefer to consider you've been misguided in this matter. Old loyalties, all that." There was a bluff forgiveness in Babbington's voice that made Shelley hopeful, yet suspicious. Babbington wore the voice like an ill-fitting mask. "You'll take a week's leave entitlement, beginning at once. When you come back to East Europe Desk, things will be different…" Alison was still watching his face intently, her brow lined with guesses and intuitions. "… a great many things will be different. I expect you to fit into the new organisation. Understood?"

"Yes, sir. Sir, I'm—"

But Babbington was gone.

"What was that?" Alison asked.

"A very severe letting-off, I think," Shelley said ruefully, rubbing his chin. He put down the receiver, and sighed with relief.

"Mm?"

"A ballocking, but not the sack. As long as I keep my nose clean."

"Aubrey?"

"Partly. Partly to do with Paul Massinger — providing him with some information…" Shelley straightened his legs out in front of him and rubbed his thighs. "God, Babbington's got eyes and ears everywhere. I was careful—"

"Is that the end of it?"

"I've got a week's leave."

"Good."

"While they get on with their shake-up of the service. When I get back, I won't recognise the old place. I wonder what Massinger's doing now?"

"Do you still want to know?"

Shelley looked up. "I don't know."

"Then you'd better make up your mind, Peter. I'm not giving all this up—" Alison indicated the room around them, dwelling with unconscious humour on the coal fire. " — without a very good reason."

"Mm?"

"If you're going to be dragged into this thing again, you'd better do it because you really want to — or I shall be very annoyed!"

Alison looked very serious, he thought, but her brow was clear and untroubled. She was giving him permission to go ahead, she wanted only proof of his commitment.

But, was he committed? Did he, after all, really want to risk everything for Aubrey? Babbington had let him off the hook. Shouldn't he accept that gratefully?

"I don't know, darling," he murmured. "I don't know what I really want."

The freight-yards. Hard, cold lights, each haloed by the beginnings of a freezing fog. Power lines, overhead cables and telephone wires were already thickened and white-leaved with frost.

The Mercedes was parked on a sloping track that led down to the finger-spread of tracks and gantries and signals that constituted the Frachtenbahnhof Wien-Nord. It huddled amid a few dozen cars presumably owned by railway employees at work in the freight-yards.

Hyde had driven them into the lightless, deserted Prater Park, beneath Harry Lime's ferris wheel, the Reisenrad, where memories of the film had chilled Hyde… if one of those dots down there stopped moving, Holly old man… because he was one of those insect-like dots. The Prater had been too empty, too exposed to stop the car for any length of time. And Massinger needed time; quiet and time.

He'd lost the two cars somewhere in the Prater, bewildering them amid the fairground and the numerous roads and tracks that crossed the pleasure park. Since he knew they would waste time searching, he immediately left the park, passing the railway station again and finding the goods yard and its string of parked cars along the track down to the railway lines. Massinger had been pressing him to stop. He considered they were still too close to the pursuit but Massinger had priorities of his own.

Hyde watched him roll up Bayev's sleeve and inject ten milligrams of benzedrine. There appeared to be no effect on the Russian. He was still slumped in one corner of the car, wet marks on his cheeks where he had been weeping openly before becoming unconscious, his eyes still open but sightless.

"Well?"

"It doesn't look good, I'll admit," Massinger said drily.

"Will he come round?"

"God only knows. It's been a rough ride for him." Bayev's face appeared a deathly colour in the floodlighting falling on the freight-yards. One thing that might put the KGB off the scent — it was too light to suggest itself as a place of concealment.

"His eyes rolled then," Hyde said eagerly.

Bayev appeared to be watching him. His face was disgruntled, mean.

"Karel," Massinger murmured softly in Russian. "Are you all right, old man? God, you gave us a turn, then. Passing out like that. You haven't done that since you were in school — remember, all nose-bleeds and fainting fits?" Hyde looked at Massinger, baffled, but the American merely shrugged. Lies and truth, perhaps, no longer mattered. Only detail, building-blocks of the fictitious, drug-perceived situation. "We used to think your periods would start any time!"

"That wasn't me, that was that little squirt Voris — Vos — Vorisenko!" Bayev snapped back. "Bloody fairy in the making, he was!"

"Yes, poor old Vorisenko," Massinger laughed. "Are you all right now?"

"Headache."

"Just the drink, I expect."

The fog was thickening around the floodlights, so that they became sheets of white light, no longer glaring circles hung in bunches. The windscreen of the Mercedes was misting over outside and Hyde switched on the wipers. Through the cleared arc, he could see no one moving.

"Shut up," Bayev grumbled. "Shut up, Pavel. I'm sick of your bloody voice, sick of the sound of it. I want to sleep."

"Kapustin would be pleased with you, Karel. You must be getting old."

"Piss off. Let me sleep."

God, Massinger thought, he's slipping away. The next ten milligrams won't bring him back. He's exhausted. What could he do—?

"All right?" Hyde murmured.

"I don't think we've got long."

"Christ, get on with it, then."

"How?"

"Give him a ballocking — that always works with the KGB. They're all scared of some big Red chief sitting on their necks."

"How can I? I'm Pavel Koslov — same rank, same function. His friend."

"Tell him you're talking on behalf of someone else—"

"Kapustin?"

Hyde shrugged. "Why not? Why not Petrunin, even…?" Hyde's face twisted in dislike.

"I'll try Kapustin." He turned to Bayev, leaning closer to him. "Karel, the reason I came to Vienna…"

"Shut up. I'm tired."

"Kapustin especially asked me to come. As a friend of yours, he thought it might be easier for me to tell you…" Massinger's tone was insinuating, even sinister.

A goods train shunted below them, its lamps enlarged by the thickening fog. The wagons rattled and grumbled together.

"Tell me? Tell me what?" The first spots of fear, forerunners of the infection, had appeared in Bayev's tone.

"Kapustin's disappointed…"

"With what? In me?" Bayev was sitting upright now, his eyes wide and alarmed, though even now they remained unfocused. "What do you mean?" His reluctance, his weariness were both gone for the moment. He was tensely alert within the fictitious situation.

"I'm afraid so. You've been letting the British control too much here in Vienna." Massinger saw, from the edge of his vision, Hyde's knuckles whiten on the back of his seat as he watched them. He could hear the Australian's breathing, hard and urgent. "He doesn't want the British in control here."

"They're not in control."

"They are — the man running it, the link man… oh, what's—"

"Wilkes doesn't run anything. We liaise, that's all. Wilkes does as we want. That's always been the understanding."

"What understanding?"

"How the hell do I know? Kapustin doesn't confide in me! I deal with Wilkes. What else goes on I know nothing about."

"Shit," Hyde murmured slowly.

"Why haven't you got hold of this Englishman, Hyde? Kapustin wants to know that. What are you playing about at?"

"Wilkes wanted to handle that. I thought everyone agreed they'd do it!" Bayev protested. "It isn't my fault," he whined. "He must understand that…" His voice had begun to slur, and Massinger looked at Hyde, shaking his head.

"Nothing more."

"Ask him why, dammit!"

"What's behind it all, Karel?" Massinger demanded, still maintaining the voice but not the person of Pavel Koslov. Bayev was evidently confused. His head wobbled slowly in puzzlement on his shoulders. His body was already sliding slowly back into the seat. Massinger realised that he was slipping away once more, and that this time he would, in all probability, remain unconscious and unreachable, despite benzedrine.

Hyde glanced at the windscreen. Like the side windows, it was misting over again. He reached for the wiper stalk. The car was silent, isolated, almost unreal. In the goods yard, couplings clanked weirdly.

"What's behind it, Karel?" Massinger persisted. "Why are we running our tails off? What are we doing it all for?"

"Who knows…?" Bayev replied faintly.

Hyde tensed, staring at the Rezident. His hands gripped — the back of his seat, squeezing the plastic hard. Come on, come on…

"Why? Karel — why, man, why?" Massinger shouted.

"Who knows… who — knows… Petrun… runin… i-i-i-n- n…"

His head lolled forward. Instantly, they heard him snoring.

"Damn—" Massinger groaned.

Hyde cursed aloud and snapped down the wiper stalk. The blades slithered frostily across the windscreen.

"He didn't know — he bloody didn't know!" Hyde yelled accusingly. "Oh, fuck it, he didn't know!"

He turned in his seat. Through the cleared windscreen, he could see the bulk of the approaching man, no more than a few yards from the car. His hand came out of his overcoat and he had fired two shots through the windscreen even before Hyde began reaching for his pistol.

"You simply cannot continue to deny everything, Sir Kenneth," Eldon admonished him in a voice that was reproving, wise and sinister. "You have admitted your signature, you have admitted your capture, your imprisonment in the Russian sector, your interrogation at the hands of Colonel Zalozny, whose methods and successes are well-documented…" Eldon paused, passing his hands like a magician over the papers on his lap. Self-evident, the gesture repeated. Conclusions, proofs are here…

Aubrey could no longer disguise his signals of frailty and hopelessness. Wearily, he rubbed one hand across his forehead, as if he intended soothing some fierce ache.

"You think not?" he replied softly. The tone was pale, lifeless.

"It would, of course, assist everyone — including yourself, Sir Kenneth — if you would confirm the accounts presented in these documents?"

"I can't."

"I see."

"No, you do not see. Keeping me from my bed, agitating my nerves, giving me violent indigestion — none of these things can extract additional, confirmatory information which I do not possess." Aubrey's voice soothed him. Calm, quiet, soft; as if he retained control of the situation.

"Very well, Sir Kenneth — let us go back to the coincidence of events — the fact that Robert Castleford was last seen alive on the very day, the very evening, that you made your successful return to the British sector of Berlin, mm?"

"Yes. Yes. By the time I had — recovered from my imprisonment, he was missing. No trace of him. The morning after I returned, apparently, he was not to be found."

"Did you lead the NKVD to him?"

"No."

"But you told them where to find him?"

"No."

"But—?"

"Despite what it says above my forged signature there, I did not place the onus of SIS secret operations against the NKVD in Berlin and the Russian Zone of Germany at Castleford's door. Castleford was a wealthy, brilliant, ambitious civil servant making the most of his posting to the Control Commission. He aimed very high. I did not like him, we did not get on together. I did not betray him — I did not have him killed.",

"But — you would agree, would you not, that if you had painted this colourful picture of Castleford as some kind of masterspy, the NKVD would have had very good reason to — cause Castleford to suspend operations against them?"

"If I had, then yes. If they thought of him in that way, then yes. None of it, however, is true."

"When did you last see Robert Castleford?"

"I–I'm not certain—"

Eldon consulted his notebook. The tape-recorder on the coffee table continued to hum in the room's lamplit silence. Shadows and soft light. Aubrey could not rid himself of a persistent sense of menace. Eldon looked up once more.

"There was a meeting between you the day before you entered the Russian sector — in pursuit, as you claim, of your double agent."

"Was there? Perhaps there was. I don't remember it."

"Could you try, Sir Kenneth? Could you try to remember what you discussed at that last meeting?"

"I don't think I can," Aubrey murmured, but in his mind he clearly heard Castleford's voice. Yes, it had been that occasion; that penultimate occasion.

"Damn you, Aubrey, I think you're out to ruin me!"

"No—"

"Yes! Your insane jealousy—"

"Mine, or yours, Castleford?"

"Damn you with Clara, too. You've been investigating me, you arrogant little man. Me? What do you expect to rake up about me? What can you rake up? You intend to smear me, to get me out of your way. I won't let you do that, Aubrey. I won't let a bigot like you take more power than you already have. I warn you, Aubrey — unless you drop this ridiculous, vindictive investigation of me, I'll take steps to see that you are ruined. Understand me? Finished. You'll be finished!"

It was difficult for Aubrey to control his breathing; as difficult to avoid the conclusion that, almost forty years later, Castleford's prophecy of his ruination was about to come true. He watched Eldon watching him, eager for his reply. He shook his head.

"I — can't remember," he murmured. "No doubt it was another occasion for reprimand. It usually turned out to be like that, whenever we met. Castleford taking a high-handed moral line towards SIS's work."

"Yours in particular, I gather."

"Perhaps."

"You disliked each other."

"Yes. Our enmity, however, was not strong enough for me to betray him. I did not wish him dead."

They do not know about Clara, do they? Aubrey asked himself. They must know, some other part of his mind answered. It was known to others — the quarrels, the courtship, the victory — people in Berlin knew of Castleford's interest in Clara, of my interest—? Why hasn't it been brought up?… Don't let it be brought up…

"I see."

"Eldon?"

"Yes, Sir Kenneth?"

"What is the mood — of your masters?" Aubrey hated himself for asking the question, but it had eaten at him from the moment that Babbington had broached the subject. "Will they require a trial? A charge of treason to be answered?"

"Yes, Sir Kenneth — I think they will."

"Rather late in the century for it, wouldn't you say?"

"Some might say, long overdue rather than late."

"I suppose they might."

"You did hate Castleford, didn't you?" Eldon asked quickly.

"He hated me," Aubrey replied.

"You hated him, also."

Aubrey stared at Eldon's quietly implacable features. It was a matter of days, no more. He would know how close he was to being charged with treason the moment they gave him access to his solicitor. At that moment, his interrogation would be over and his trial on the point of beginning.

Trial, trial, his mind echoed. Zalozny had offered him that, often. In the intervals between the bouts of cold water, the bucket over his head being beaten with wooden sticks, the blows of huge peasant fists, the standing to attention in the freezing, snowbound yard of the prison, teeth chattering, body shuddering with ague; if he gave in, they promised him a quick trial and execution. The situation was an almost exact parallel.

One of his most vivid memories was of having to defecate into a bucket while an eye watched him through the spyhole in the cell door. Stained, torn trousers around his ankles, buttocks perched on the icy rim of the iron bucket — all dignity gone, only the reduced, tormented, pained animal left.

He dismissed the past. Of his present situation, he knew that whatever he had to do — except confess — he would do to avoid a trial. He would never be led into court, never hear the charge of treason, never face a jury. Whatever he had to do, he would avoid that.

He watched Eldon. Eldon would never understand about the trial. He would never assume that Aubrey the traitor had left to him anything with which he could not bear to part in public.

Hyde raised his head above the level of the dashboard. Glass prickled his neck and the backs of his hands and slithered from his overcoat onto the driving seat. Behind him, he knew that Bayev was dead — one glance at the doll slumped in the corner of the Mercedes had told him that. He had not even looked at Massinger. There was no time to consider him. The Russian was coming on now, heavily jogging the last few strides between himself and the car. Hyde fired through the crazed remains of the windscreen and the man disappeared sideways below the bonnet.

Only then did Hyde turn his head. Massinger was sitting bolt upright in the back, evidently in shock.

"Come on, mate! Time's up."

"What—?" Massinger might have been drugged himself, so slow and unfocused were his movements. Hyde reached over the seat and grabbed his arm.

"Bayev's dead — we're next. Get out of the car!"

The top of the incline, where the road passed the freight-yard, was blocked by a long black saloon. Two men were standing by it, one of them already advancing the first few paces down the slope. A glance in the wing mirror had shown Hyde that much.

"Out—?"

"I can't move the car!"

Massinger began to move, groaning as he levered himself out of the door. Hyde saw the walking-stick, and his chest and stomach felt hollow with foreboding. Massinger's bloody hip!

Massinger looked up the slope, appearing to Hyde to lean heavily, breathe hard. "How many of them?" he said urgently.

"Just the one car. They didn't wait for reinforcements. Someone told them to shut Bayev up as a first priority. Tape?"

"Yes." Massinger patted his pocket. "For what it's worth, dammit! We both know it's worthless — he knew nothing—!"

"Come on — this way."

He watched the two men who had halted at the top of the rutted, frosty incline. They were mere dark lumps in the fog, revealed only because of the powerful floodlights. Fog danced and moved around them. Twenty-five yards. The kamikaze had had to come in close in order to pick out his targets. A tactic of desperation, the impetus of a high-ranking order behind him, pushing him on. Now that he was dead, the other two wanted to wait for reinforcements.

"Down?"

"Yes, down. They're not eager to follow. Come on."

Massinger moved ahead of Hyde, who walked carefully backwards, his heels seeking the ruts and frozen puddles. A goods wagon's couplings clanked in the fog, startling him. He could hear Massinger moving away, limping, sighing with effort.

The cautious footsteps of the two Russians reached him, too. Then the sound of a car arriving, braking hard.

"Hurry it up," he called to Massinger. "The cavalry's arrived."

He turned his back, caught up with Massinger, and took his arm. He studied the man's face. Tired and lined, hardly handsome any longer. He nodded.

"I'm all right—" Massinger protested.

"No you're not. Just doing all right. We're going to have to hurry."

He forced Massinger to break into a limping jogtrot. The American used his stick like a drunken, uncertain third leg, and he groaned once or twice; but he did not attempt to slow Hyde until they reached the bottom of the incline. A gate in a wooden fence, then the tracks on either side and ahead disappeared into the fog. A locomotive was moving slowly somewhere in it like a circling, invisible shark. Its headlight flashed occasionally, and its passage made the fog roll and billow. Hyde shuddered with cold.

"All right?"

Massinger nodded, recovering his breath. "I'm OK, Hyde. I'm just angry as hell."

"Never mind. They'll be consulting and planning for a couple of minutes. There's time enough."

"What do we do now?"

"Get out of Vienna. There's nothing else we can do." He pushed open the unlocked gate. Warning signs forbade them to cross the tracks. Massinger passed through the gate and Hyde closed it behind them. The incline retreated into the fog. Hyde could not see the Mercedes or the body in front of it, but nothing appeared to be moving on the slope. "OK. Be careful — I don't know whether there are any live rails or whether it's all electrified overhead. Just watch where you put your feet."

Massinger was aware of the momentary confidence in Hyde's voice. He was a hundred yards ahead of the pursuit and shrouded by the fog. It was enough, apparently, to satisfy him. Massinger recognised Hyde's quality. He'd controlled only a few men like him all those years ago. One or two, but very few. The nerve-enders, the jack-in-the-boxes. Good field agents.

He crossed the first set of tracks, listening attentively. Scrapings, clanks, the roll of flanged wheels, the movement of locomotives. Strangely, a cow lowed somewhere in the fog and was answered by other cattle. It was unnerving for an instant, then became comfortingly innocent.

A line of goods wagons loomed out of the fog.

"Underneath and through," Hyde instructed.

Massinger grasped the icy buffer of a wagon, then bent down into a crouch. His hip protested as he waddled forward. It hurt badly, and at the centre of the pain was a light, almost floating feeling of weakness, as if he had little more than air or a vacuum to rely upon. He was afraid that his hip might give out at any moment. He straightened up with great difficulty, and his breath escaped in a misty, smoky gasp.

"You OK?" Hyde asked anxiously.

"I'm all right, damn you!" he replied fiercely, leaning on his stick, watching Hyde with a twisted, angry face. "I'm all right."

"OK." Hyde shrugged. "Let's keep moving."

Four more sets of tracks, snaking towards their feet and slithering, so it seemed, away again into the chill-lit whiteness of the fog.

"Hold it!" Hyde snapped suddenly.

Noise of a locomotive, coming towards them. Massinger studied his feet, his heart racing. Between tracks—? Beyond, between—? The fog swirled, writhed, then parted to admit a looming black shape with a headlight struggling to cut a swathe through the curtain. Massinger leaned away, feeling the rush of the air and the bulk of the engine and the thudding of it through his shoes. He could see Hydenowhere.Wagons clanked past, allowing little slats of white light to appear between them.

The noise was deafening.

Eventually, it had gone and the fog had closed in behind the guard's van and the dim red light it carried.

"Hyde?" Massinger asked fearfully into the fog.

"Keep your voice down! Come on."

Three, four, five more sets of tracks. Sheds, repair and maintenance shops, points, gantries, lights. Then a high stone wall with frost thickly riming weeds and ivy, and the dim glow of street-lamps above and beyond it.

"Look for some steps," Hyde instructed. "And be careful."

The flight of steps was two hundred yards away, towards Lassallestrasse. Hyde climbed it first, then waved to Massinger to follow him. At the top, a gate barred their exit to the street. It was unlocked. Hyde gestured Massinger through.

Icy puddles, poor street-lights, blank-faced warehouses. A narrow, grubby, cobbled street empty of people and cars.

"Can you walk a bit more?" Hyde asked defensively, his hands raised, palms outwards.

"Yes. How far?"

"The station. We'll get a taxi back to the hotel. Just take it easy and stay alert."

As they walked, Massinger's stick tapped the cobbles and echoed from the blank walls and doors of the warehouses. The noise of it reminded Hyde of the American's age, his infirmity, and his determination. Nevertheless, he could not avoid the feeling that he was carrying the older man; even though Massinger had adopted the role of his field controller almost naturally and by right. Massinger would make the decisions, but he would be left to carry them out; put himself in jeopardy.

"Have we got anything out of that?" he asked.

"Mm?" Massinger was silent. No, no, no, his stick tapped out in the fog, then echoed its negative. "Tell me about this Petrunin," he said eventually. "You know him, don't you?"

"Too well."

"Sorry—?"

"One-time London Rezident. Later, he tried to screw me again in Australia and Spain. We don't get on — quarrel all the time!" Behind the banter, there was a quiver in his voice that Hyde could not eradicate.

"He's a field man?" Massinger asked in surprise.

"No. He's been a general in his time."

"In his time."

"Word is, he got demoted back to colonel last year…"

"Because of you?"

"No. But I helped. He couldn't keep the lid on something."

"Part of the lid being your death?"

"Right."

"His scheme, apparently, wasn't discredited with him," Massinger commented bitterly.

Hyde stopped the American then moved ahead and checked the well-lit street that lay ahead of them. Cars passed now, moving slowly in the fog, there were one or two pedestrians, dog-walkers or night-shift workers. It felt to Massinger both safe and dangerous at the same moment. More, he sensed an excitement in himself. Dangerous, foolish, desperate. Hyde returned.

"It's clear, as far as I can tell. I don't imagine they've given up, but it's a big area down there behind us. They may not be covering the station yet. But be careful. If I move, you move. I shan't wait for you. OK?"

"OK," Massinger nodded.

"The station's just a couple of hundred yards down the street," Hyde continued. "What do we do when we get back to the hotel and the car you hired?"

"Take the autobahn to Linz, and then maybe Munich. We can get there by morning, with luck. Unless this fog lasts all the way."

"And then—?"

"I must talk to Peter Shelley again. We must consult. I wish I could talk to Kenneth again… but that's too dangerous." He turned to face Hyde. "You see, neither of us has anywhere to go at the moment. Babbington forbade me to go on with this — someone informed Vienna I was here, someone wants me dead along with you."

"Babbington?"

"I doubt it. But — someone. Wilkes can't be the only rotten apple. Wilkes takes orders from someone else. This collusion is too smooth, too efficient and, according to our dead friend back there, too long-standing to be run by people like Wilkes. Someone, in Europe or in London — a senior officer, at least as senior as Shelley or one of Shelley's deputy directors, has to be in the KGB's pocket."

"Christ! I hadn't thought about it… Shelley?"

"Well?"

Hyde shook his head vigorously. "No, not Shelley."

"I thought not."

They had reached the portico of the Nord-bahnhof. A rank of taxis stood alongside the pavement. There seemed no one concerning themselves with Hyde and Massinger. Hyde's relaxation was evident.

Obsessed with his theory, he had forgotten their narrow escape, forgotten the dead body of Bayev in the back of the Mercedes; forgotten the men who wanted himself and Hyde similarly disposed of. Hyde would have to watch his back for him. He had to think—

He had to know. There was a KGB double in SIS, and it had to be someone fairly senior — it was the only explanation that made sense.

"OK, in you get." Massinger struggled into the back of the taxi and ordered the driver to the Inter-Continental. He sighed with relief as he lay back in the seat.

"You accept the hypothesis?" he said as they crossed the Danube Canal. Hyde was silent for a moment, then he nodded. "You have to be right. It has to be one of the high-ups. But who!"

"Yes, who indeed? The KGB have someone important in their pocket, helping to carry out Teardrop, If we knew why, we might know who."

"You haven't any theories about that?" Hyde asked with evident irony. Beneath that tone, there was the indifference that springs from sudden and unexpected well-being. Hyde, out of danger, was shutting himself down like a complex series of circuits and relays.

Massinger, knowing that he was doing little more than thinking aloud, said, "To make sure that Aubrey is finished off? To throw the service into confusion? To assist some huge operation we know nothing about? It could be any or all of those — and maybe other reasons. We've got who and why, and no answers to either question—"

But, I have an answer, he thought. Even more crazy than this Viennese business. And it needs you, he added to himself, glancing sideways at Hyde's lolling form. And you won't like it, not one little bit.

Margaret returned to him, then. He shut her out. Later, later, my darling, he told her image. This matter first…

Why? That's the real question. Who could be anybody — perhaps one of fifty, even a hundred… and they had no access, no leverage. There was no one who could, or would, tell them. Shelley might be able to draw up a list of possibilities, but it would be a long one.

And there was one man, just one man, who knew everything — who knew why—! Who knew the traitor's name… Petrunin knew everything. Teardrop was his creation.

He glanced at Hyde from slitted eyelids. "Do you know where Petrunin is now — in disgrace, you said?"

"More than one report's confirmed he's in Afghanistan. At the Kabul Embassy. The roughest posting they could find for him, I suppose." Hyde replied without considering the implications of either the question or his answer.

The taxi turned into the Johannesgasse. Hyde was relaxed. In a couple of hours, with luck, they'd be half-way out of Austria.

He patted his overcoat pocket. His new papers lay there, against his breast like a talisman. He did not consider the future beyond the next few hours, which were decidedly hopeful.

He was getting out of Vienna, where he might easily have died.