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That wasn’t true, Papworth said, and Herbert knew it.

Yes, Herbert did; but who would say otherwise? His mother? Hannah? After Papworth had stood aside and let Mengele do to them what he had done? No way.

Herbert left Papworth and went in to see Kazantsev.

Kazantsev had no diplomatic protection, but he was saying nothing. He had done his job, nothing more, nothing less.

Herbert knew that both men would be hard to break, because spies always were. If a man was trained in interrogation, he would also be trained in resistance to same.

Papworth would fold quicker than Kazantsev, Herbert felt.

With civilians, Herbert would have fired questions seemingly at random, in order to disorientate the subject, confuse him, in the expectation that eventually he would forget what he had said about this or that, because he was bound to have been lying about something, and lies were always harder to remember than the truth.

But this would not work on Papworth, at least not in the short term. Therefore, Herbert had to somehow convince Papworth that his best tactic was to be helpful.

He went back in to see Papworth.

“Kazantsev’s making your average canary seem tone deaf,” he said.

“Do me a favor. That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

“Except when it’s not a trick.”

Herbert put another piece of paper down; an extract from the statute books that the ambassador had given him, specifically Section 2 of the United States Espionage Act 50 U.S. Code 32, which prohibited
the transmission or attempted transmission to a foreign government of anything relating to the national defense.

The offense carried the death penalty. Herbert had helpfully ringed that bit in red.

“What sort of deal?” Papworth asked at length.

“That depends on what you tell me.”

Papworth considered some more.

Like Herbert, he knew that now, when it was just the two of them, circumstances were as favorable as they were going to be. The more people who were brought in, especially from the American side, the less leeway Papworth would be given.

“All right,” he said.

Papworth and Kazantsev had begun working on the defection plan the moment Pauling’s visa for the conference had been approved.

If Pauling’s keynote speech had correctly identified the structure of DNA, however, the information would have been out in the open, and all their advantages would have gone.

The night before the conference, therefore, Papworth had laced Pauling’s food with small quantities of an antimony-based emetic (freely available from pharmacists). It was nowhere near enough to kill him,
or even cause him lasting damage; merely enough to imitate the symptoms of gastric fever, such as vomiting and diarrhea, thus rendering him sufficiently indisposed that his keynote speech had to be canceled.

As it was, Papworth need not have bothered. He had read the speech during one of Pauling’s more extended bathroom vigils, and even a man who was more spook than chemist could see the flaw in Pauling’s argument.

Pauling had gone for three helices on the basis of density—two chains simply left too much space unfilled—and had the sugar phosphate backbones forming a dense central core. But the phosphate groups were not ionized; each group contained a hydrogen atom, and therefore had no net charge. In effect, the structure Pauling was proposing was not an acid at all. He had knocked the
A
off DNA.

It was an error that even a graduate student should have picked up, let alone a genius like Pauling. It just went to show, everybody could have their off days.

Then Stensness had made his offer, and so Papworth had gone along to the Peter Pan statue. He took Fischer—that was how he thought of him then, so best to call him that, if Herbert didn’t mind—along with him to check the veracity of any information Stensness might have brought.

Of course, Kazantsev had told Papworth the time of his own appointment, and together—without Fischer’s knowledge, of course; he of all people would have been horrified to know of Papworth’s true leanings—they had formulated a hasty plan.

Kazantsev demanded to see what Stensness had before committing himself to any deal.

Stensness refused.

Kazantsev and Stensness argued.

Kazantsev stormed off, partly for the benefit of Papworth, who had the next appointment. If Papworth behaved reasonably, they reckoned, then Stensness, perhaps shaken by Kazantsev’s aggression, might prove more amenable.

But when Papworth and Fischer arrived, Papworth saw that the tactics had backfired. Far from shaking Stensness, Kazantsev’s attitude had emboldened him. He was just as intransigent with Papworth as he had been with Kazantsev.

Papworth had felt the situation slipping away from him.

He and Stensness struggled. Fischer joined in, somehow managing to lose his ring in the process—they’d come back to that in a moment—and then, between them, Papworth and Fischer had dragged Stensness down to the water and held his head under, to try and make him submit.

But the water was very cold, Stensness’ gasp reflex was very strong, and Papworth and Fischer overdid it.

Then they were interrupted by someone else arriving.

De Vere Green? Herbert said.

Must have been, Papworth agreed, but they had not known that at the time. So they had hightailed it.

Herbert realized that Papworth and Mengele had not known that Stensness was still alive, albeit unconscious. Herbert’s first intuition when Hannah had found the coat had been spot on: Max must have come to and struggled free, but, fatally weakened, had collapsed again, and this time he had drowned.

But de Vere Green was already at the statue; so he must have waited in the fog for a while before realizing what the splashing meant, and by that time it had been too late.

If only he had been quicker, Herbert thought, de Vere Green could have saved his lover, and therefore himself, too, and none of this would ever have happened.

Two murders; and there could have been, should have been, none.

Too late, on every count.

Papworth went on. De Vere Green’s accusation in the church on Sunday morning had shaken him, because of course it had been true. Papworth had turned the accusation back with what even Herbert had to admit was quick thinking, but he had also known that this advantage was temporary at best; and all the more so come Sunday afternoon, when he saw the decrypt concerning Operation Paperclip.

So Papworth had gone round to de Vere Green’s, held a knife to his throat—he had known de Vere Green long enough to know that he could not stand the sight of blood, as Herbert himself had seen when he had resigned from Five—forced him to write the suicide note, then chloroformed him, turned the gas-fire valve open, and left, knowing that de Vere Green would be dead long before the anesthetic wore off.

Of course Papworth had known that an autopsy would pick the chloroform up, but by the time it did, and by the time anyone had assembled all the pieces and put them together, he would have been halfway to Moscow, because the fog was supposed to have cleared by then.

When Herbert spotted Mengele’s ring mark, Papworth had left him to continue interrogating Mengele in Wheeler’s, while he went back to the Embassy, took off his own ring, and put it by the side of the bath.

Herbert remembered that he had not looked at Papworth’s hands when he brought Mengele back; why should he have? He had been observant, but not observant enough.

Then, Papworth added, Mengele had followed Herbert back through the fog to Hannah’s flat, waited until Herbert and Hannah were asleep, attacked them, and when he could not find the formula, had set the flat alight, hoping both to cover his tracks and to kill them. Papworth had not known until afterward. Had he known, he would of course have tried to dissuade Mengele.

Or accompanied him in order to maximize their chances, Herbert thought.

In that particular instance, therefore, Papworth was innocent. But, set against everything else he had done, it would count for precious little.

Had Mengele known who Hannah was before she had identified him? They would never know.

Yes, Papworth said, of course their planning had been imperfect; they had been forced to work some things out more or less on the hop.

But what else could they have done? Stensness had made the offer, and they couldn’t have risked de Vere Green getting his hands on it.

It would have been all right if none of them had possessed it, but how could he have been sure that was the case?

That was what the race did to people, Herbert thought. It forced intelligent men to rush things, both
through fear that the other fellow was on the cusp of a breakthrough, and through the eternal desire for fame.

Fame was self-feeding; the more one had, the more one wanted, and too much was never enough.

When scientists in the future managed to read humanity’s DNA, Herbert thought, they would find everything that Mengele had mentioned the previous night at dinner, but they would also unearth plentiful quantities of man’s less appealing qualities: folly, hubris, ambition, and greed.

The fog had thrown up enough of all these, even as it had worked both for and against Papworth and Kazantsev. Against them, in that it had kept them in London when they had wanted to make their escape. For them, in that it had given them the chance to try to get the material Stensness had promised, an offer of whose existence they hadn’t even been aware until pretty much the end of the conference.

The microdots had always been a bonus, unexpected but desirable. In the end, it was Papworth’s determination to seize them that had got him caught, for without that he would have left this morning when the fog had first partially cleared, and Herbert would never have found him.

Had he settled just for the defection and the scientists, he would have got clean away; and that would have been enough, for surely Pauling would have discovered the secret eventually. Scientific progress might not be linear, but it was inexorable.

Herbert looked at Papworth, thinking that something was missing. After a few seconds, he knew what it was.

Papworth had told him what had happened, and
when, and where, and how; what he had not told him was
why.

Not why he had killed Stensness and de Vere Green—that was obvious. But why he had chosen to spy for the Soviet Union in the first place, why he had chosen to betray his country.

And even as he studied Papworth, Herbert realized where the answer lay.

Not in the merits of communism over capitalism, or in the preference for world peace over Cold War, but in Papworth himself.

Any question of loyalty came down to something very simple. To betray, one must first belong; and Papworth had never belonged. He was a vain misfit for whom there was only one cause worthy of his loyalty: Ambrose Papworth and his God-given right to have the world arranged the way he wanted it.

The answer lay, for lack of a more precise phrase, in Papworth’s DNA.

Perhaps deep down Papworth had always wanted to be caught, Herbert thought, if only because now the whole world would know his name. There would be a trial, and even the kind of mass opprobrium he could expect would, for such a man, be better than the alternative: an anonymous exile in a Moscow apartment where, after a couple of years, few people would know what he had done, and even fewer would care.

“So,” Papworth asked, “what kind of deal are we talking?”

“You’ll have to sort that out back in Washington.”

Papworth’s jaw dropped. “But you told me …”

Herbert spoke in a language Papworth could understand. “I lied.”

*  *  *

It was past nine when Herbert made it back to Guy’s, and by then both Hannah and Mary were asleep. Loath to wake them, he told Angela that he would be back in the morning.

The fog was a strange patchwork quilt: a black nightmare on the Strand but bright and clear at Piccadilly Circus, fine at Marble Arch, and impenetrable in Bayswater.

Three thousand people were queuing for tickets at Stratford tube station because the buses had stopped.

River traffic was locked down again.

The opera at Sadler’s Wells had been halted after Act One because the audience could no longer see the stage.

Everybody had a fog story, just as everybody used to have a bomb story.

No one had a fog story as good as his, Herbert thought.

On the way home, Herbert realized what had been nagging him at Rosalind’s flat the day before.

Rosalind had been speaking about the way in which she ascertained her facts and fitted the theory around them, and she had compared this with the tactics of Watson and Crick, who started with a theory and saw where the facts fitted.

Herbert had been following Rosalind’s path, and he should have gone with Watson and Crick instead. He had let the facts cloud his judgments; no, not the facts, but rather what he had
seen
to be the facts.

Like Rosalind, Herbert had trusted in what he had seen, and he had been mistaken. Time and again, even after Hannah had shown him the error of his ways, he
had looked without seeing.

In some ways, he had been as blind as Hannah.

No wonder scientists did what they did, Herbert thought; they preferred science’s exactness and the perfection of its truths. Humanity was rather messy in comparison.

Stella was waiting for Herbert when he got back.

He looked at her, and could not for the life of him read the expression on her face.

There could have been admiration, surprise, jealousy, or uncertainty; there could have been all, or there could have been none.

Stella’s favors did not come for free, Herbert thought, so why should her emotions? Her makeup was designed to hide as much as to accentuate. Whatever she had learned in her life had doubtless come the hard way; she wasn’t about to make the path of knowledge easy for anyone else.

He felt a strange desire to screen his face from the scorching blaze of Stella’s eye.

“Well, my love,” she said at last, “good luck to you.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Herbert, don’t take this the wrong way; it’s good that you’ve found a woman, you know? Now you don’t have to come and visit me no more. You understand?”