"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.