Visibility

by Boris Starling

  Herbert must have looked blank, because Papworth swallowed his own laugh. “Basalt,” he said again. “The woman was standing on a basalt rock, but no one else had noticed, because … Anyway. He’s won just about every award going, bar a Nobel Prize. Few years back, he got the Army and Navy Medal of Merit—the highest military award a civilian can get—for his work with explosives, his oxygen meter, and his invention of a synthetic blood plasma.”

  “You seem to know a lot about him.”

  “It’s my job to know a lot about him. So—he was the government’s golden boy. Then the love affair began to cool. He started to criticize the nuclear weapons program, and from someone like him, no ordinary Joe, that can mean something. He claims he worked out the amount of plutonium in the atom bomb all by himself, with no inside information. Personally, I think that’s hooey, but anyway. People start paying attention. Pauling slams Washington for this and for that, and soon questions are being asked, including the most obvious one.”

  “Whether he’s a fellow traveler?”

  “Exactly. So he’s asked the question—Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?—and he refuses to answer, claiming he believes that no citizen should be required to announce his political beliefs. Ducking the question, if you ask me. That’s basically pleading the Fifth, and we all know what that means, whatever the law says. Anyway, earlier this year he applied for a passport, and the application was rejected under the terms of the McCarran Act. You know the McCarran Act?”

  Herbert not only knew it, he remembered the wording verbatim; another legacy of his days in Leconfield House. “It’s intended to restrict the foreign travel of any Americans with suspect political sympathies on the grounds that secrets might be passed to enemy agents abroad.”

  “Damn straight it is. So there’s this big hoo-hah about the whole thing, people coming out the woodwork in support of Pauling. Einstein himself spoke up. So eventually Pauling’s given a limited-duration passport, good only for specific trips. One of which is this.”

  “And have any enemy agents tried to get in touch with him?”

  Papworth shrugged. “You get too paranoid, you see them round every corner.”

  “Any you know of?”

  “None that I can be sure are agents, but if I could they wouldn’t be very good agents, would they? This one guy, reporter for some Russian paper, Izvestia or something—” Herbert’s heart seemed to miss a beat, though his face remained unruffled—“keeps ringing up asking for an interview with Pauling. Now, I’m as keen on freedom of speech as the next man, but not when it comes to those goddamn commies, you understand? It’s an evil system, my friend, godless and evil, and if I can do anything to keep them from getting their claws into America, then that’s just what I’ll damn well do. I helped take the Rosenbergs down, and I’d do it again, and again, and again. We fought the Nazis to a standstill; the Reds are just as dangerous, mark my words.” Papworth took a deep breath, and laughed sheepishly. “I’m sorry; it gets me worked up, that’s all. My wife’s eyes have taken to glazing over whenever I start on this. Where were we?”

  “You and Stensness—how did you get talking?”

  “Oh, you know, social chitchat, the way people do at these things.”

  “Did you see him after the conference ended?”

  “No.”

  “Were you supposed to?”

  “Sure was.”

  Papworth’s answer was smooth and instant. A man incredibly adept at calculating scenarios, Herbert thought, or perhaps more simply a man with nothing to hide.

  Papworth smiled complicitly at Herbert, a tacit admission: he knew that Herbert knew, or could at least guess, who he really was. Putting spies under embassy cover was pretty much a game. If one suspected every embassy official of espionage, one would never be caught out.

  “Can you tell me where and when?”

  “The Peter Pan statue, seven o’clock.”

  “And Stensness didn’t turn up?”

  “Never showed.”

  “How long did you wait?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  The same as Kazantsev, Herbert thought; or at least, the same leeway Kazantsev had said he gave people when waiting for them. Spies were spies, the world over. You were too late, they were gone.

  “That’s not long to give someone, especially in the fog.”

  Papworth shrugged. “In that cold, fifteen minutes was plenty enough. Besides, where I come from, punctuality equals professionalism.”

  “Do you know what he was going to offer you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “But he intimated something?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Something that would change the world?”

  Papworth nodded. “There’s no use me asking how you know that?”

  Stensness had tried it on with an American, a Brit, and a Russian; the same hook each time. An amateur dealing with professionals, and one of them must have killed him.

  “How long had you known Stensness?”

  Papworth shrugged. “Year or so.”

  Herbert swooped. “But you just told me you only met him at the conference.”

  “I did. But I’d—forgive me, my phrasing was bad. I hadn’t actually known him before. I’d known of him.”

  “How come?”

  Papworth smiled. “The special relationship. Information sharing.” He frowned briefly. “That … You said your name was Herbert Smith, right?”

  Herbert nodded, knowing where this was going.

  “The one who used to work for Five?” Papworth said. Taking Herbert’s silence for assent, he leaned back in his chair and whistled. “Boy, have I wanted to meet you.”

  One could hardly blame him, Herbert supposed. Burgess and Maclean had both spent time in Washington, and the CIA still wondered, not without reason, exactly what kind of American secrets they had taken to Moscow. And whether they were the only rotten apples in the Whitehall orchard.

  The special relationship had been a little rocky ever since.

  When it came to British intelligence, there were two schools of American thought.

  There was the official one, which held that the British were the most sagacious, experienced, and successful spies in history, and therefore the transatlantic alliance should be nurtured with care.

  Then there was the unofficial one, which cast the British as supercilious snobs worthy only of the disdain they themselves showed.

  Or perhaps it was a mixture of both: Our liaison with the British is one of our greatest assets; don’t tell the bastards anything important.

  The Agency, Herbert knew, were playing for high stakes.

  Eisenhower had won the American election by a landslide the previous month, and was due to be inaugurated next month, when he would face the question which would surely dog not only him but every future president at the start of their administration. Was he running the CIA—or were the CIA running him?

  In the past four years, the Agency had multiplied their overseas stations sevenfold, their staff by ten, and their budget by a factor of seventeen. It was unlikely they would be willing to slow down now.

  “Did Five give you access to my testimony to the Maclean inquiry?” Herbert asked.

  “Of course.” Papworth sounded insulted, as though even the implication that his reach did not access all areas was mortally offensive.

  “Then you know that I was stitched up.”

  “You were in charge of watching him, you lost him. Pretty clear, in my book.”

  “De Vere Green did for me.”

  Papworth made a moue. “Richard and I go back a long way.”

  Herbert was conscious that he had let the conversation drift away from Stensness’ murder, but he also had the feeling that he was still making progress, albeit in a more obtuse manner. “How long?”

  “Six years. Los Alamos.”

  “Counterespionage?”

  “You got it.”

  That made s
ense, Herbert thought. Los Alamos, in the high New Mexican sierra, had been the location for the Manhattan Project: the atom bomb. A joint Anglo-American enterprise, perhaps the most clandestine ever to be managed on such a large scale, and therefore packed with almost as many spooks as scientists. De Vere Green, and clearly Papworth too, had been among those tasked with ensuring that no atomic secrets had found their way to Moscow.

  “And since then?”

  “In and around DC after the war, then moved here, to London, in ’48. Ran into Richard again when we interrogated Fuchs a couple of years back, and then last year we started working on a joint committee. The bosses are paranoid that secrets are still going to Moscow, so it’s—”

  “What kind of secrets?”

  “Science secrets. The MGB have recently ramped up Line X, and—”

  “Line X?”

  “Informal name for the MGB’s Directorate T: Science and Technical.”

  “And what have you found?”

  “That I can’t tell you.” Papworth looked genuinely regretful, Herbert thought; brotherhood of spooks, and all that. Spies were no different from everyone else. They preferred to be among their own kind.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s classified.”

  “It may be relevant to this inquiry.”

  “Trust me; it’s not.” De Vere Green had said much the same thing, Herbert remembered. “Now listen, Herbie”—Herbert bit back his natural response, that no one ever called him Herbie. He was not a Herbie—“we’re the good guys, right? We’re all on the same side. I’m doing all I can to help you here, but I can’t go opening up files just on the off chance that you might find something in there that’ll help you. You ask me what you like, I’ll tell you all I know.”

  That was fair enough, Herbert conceded, and as much as he could have reasonably expected to get. In any case, Burgess and Maclean or not, Papworth was being more helpful than de Vere Green had ever been. Perhaps it was the American commitment to the concept of freedom of information.

  “What did you know about Stensness?”

  “He gave Five information now and then.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Stuff concerning his work. What other kind would there have been?”

  Papworth clearly did not know about Stensness’ informing on the CPGB.

  “Can you remember what kind of stuff?”

  “Crystallography—X-rays, that sort of thing. I’m sorry if that sounds vague, but I get so much of that across my desk every day that I lose track of any but the most important stuff—which I guess also tells you that his information was pretty mundane.”

  “Then why keep using him?”

  “Ask Five. He was their asset, not ours. But I guess they kept on using him for the normal reasons: you never know when someone will turn up gold, and better too much data than too little.”

  “Was Stensness under suspicion for passing secrets to Moscow?”

  “Not as far as I know. But maybe he should have been.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He made a rendezvous with me at the conference. I wasn’t the only one, I guess. How else would you have known what he said to me, unless he was pitching it to others, too, and unless you’ve talked to them? Either way, he was a scientist. And he was killed. You do the math.”

  You do the math indeed, Herbert thought.

  De Vere Green had lied to him about his rendezvous, or lack of it, with Stensness. Now, it seemed at least possible that he had also lied about what he thought Stensness might have had to offer him.

  Kazantsev and Papworth both had no doubt that the material in question was in some way scientific. If they were right, the Coronation was a blind, a code, or simply a mistake on Herbert’s part, because he had been too keen to see connections where there were none. And because de Vere Green, eager to send Herbert off chasing wild geese, had spun seven leagues of yarn about terrorist plots and the like.

  Herbert was just working out what next to ask Papworth when there was a knock on the door, and two men walked in. They were both in their forties.

  One had a high forehead and a hairline which receded sharply on the right side of his crown, as though it had been burned away.

  The other’s head was like a cat’s, wide at the temple. Dark brown hair slicked back from a widow’s peak, and his eyebrows described a circumflex accent. Herbert saw a mark on his left ear, a flat round disc on the cartilage, and a triangular cleft between his upper front teeth.

  Papworth was on his feet, every East Coast inch the genial host. “Linus! We were just talking about you.” He made the introductions: the man with the high forehead was Linus Pauling, the cat’s head Fritz Fischer, a colleague of Pauling’s from Caltech.

  “Police?” Pauling said, when Papworth explained who Herbert was.

  “Purely routine,” Papworth said soothingly. “We pride ourselves on maintaining good relations with local law enforcement, of course.”

  Pauling had a slight squint, his right eye veering to the outside. He turned to Herbert. “You have a beautiful city; what I saw of it before the fog came down, at any rate,” he said.

  “Thank you. How long are you staying for?”

  Pauling shrugged eloquently, a man undone by nature’s vicissitudes. “How long is a piece of string?”

  “There’s a scientist’s question for you!” Papworth exclaimed.

  “We—” Pauling indicated Fischer—“my colleague and I were supposed to have flown home this morning. But of course all flights out of London are canceled. PanAm and TransWorld have been completely grounded. So we go when we go.”

  “And in the meantime, I’m trying to keep them amused,” said Papworth. “We’re off to have a look at the Tower; show them where they’ll end up if they get on the wrong side of the Metropolitan Police, huh?” He laughed. “Then this evening, we’ve got tickets to The Mousetrap.”

  “The new play at the Ambassadors? I’ve heard good things about it,” Herbert said.

  “Me too. And I promise not to tell you who did it.”

  Herbert laughed. “Assuming it’s not canceled, like everything else seems to be in this fog. Right, I must be getting on. You’ve been most helpful.”

  “Anytime.” Papworth shook Herbert’s hand in both of his. “I mean it. Our business shouldn’t mean that we forget basic humanity, you know.”

  The doorman at Leconfield House greeted Herbert like an old friend. Hardly surprising, Herbert thought, given that this was his third visit here in just over twenty-four hours. Any more of this, and they would be giving him his old pass card back.

  De Vere Green wasn’t there, the receptionist said. Herbert was just wondering how best to get to whichever vast country estate was that weekend playing host to de Vere Green, when the receptionist added: “I think he’s gone to a funeral.”

  Herbert asked to see Patricia, who proved, as usual, the fount of all knowledge.

  “What funeral?” she said. “The poor chap who drowned the other night.”

  “What?”

  Herbert grabbed Patricia’s phone and dialed the Murder Squad.

  “Tyce.”

  “It’s Smith. What the hell’s going on? Max Stensness is being buried, and no one told me?”

  “I only found out myself an hour ago. If I’d known where you were, I’d have called you.”

  “Who authorized this?”

  “Scott.”

  “Scott?”

  “Old man Stensness called in some favors, put pressure on the right people … you know how these things work, Smith.”

  Herbert sighed; he knew all too well.

  “It’s the old school tie, and I don’t like it any more than you do. Look; if you really need to, we can always exhume him afterwards.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “Don’t take it out on me, Smith. I had nothing to do with this.”

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry.” Herbert thoug
ht for a second. “You don’t happen to know where the funeral’s taking place, do you?”

  “Highgate Cemetery.”

  Of course.

  * * *

  Herbert stood at the edge of the cemetery and watched, finding the role of observer to be unexpectedly satisfying, like shrugging on an old, favorite coat and feeling it settle just so on one’s shoulders.

  There was a score of people huddled by the graveside, shrouded in lung-shaped plumes of breath as they followed the order of service. De Vere Green was right in the middle, as though he had somehow been a major part of Stensness’ life. Perhaps he had, Herbert thought, chiding himself for his lack of charity, for there did not seem to be many people of Stensness’ own age there, not many who looked like friends.

  Herbert wondered what the clientele at his own funeral would be like.

  He let his gaze roam over the mourners. Sir James was there, of course, with his arm round Lady Clarissa, and she looked every bit as bad as he had intimated to Herbert; her features were sunken and birdlike, markers of the terminally ill.

  Max had been an only child, so there were no siblings.

  Herbert spotted Wilkins and Rosalind, she looking rather magnificently severe in black. Next to them were others whom Herbert pegged as fellow scientists: a man with a strong jaw, features as sharp as they were open, and the merry, knowing eyes of the super-bright; another with wispy hair and protruding eyes who kept looking around with the horizontal scanning gaze of radar, and seemed to have dressed not only in a hurry but also in a darkened room, as his garb was a scruff of mismatched clothes and trailing laces.

  The scientists were all men, apart from Rosalind. In the sidelong glances they gave her, even in such circumstances, Herbert saw their suspicion of her. There was something slightly off-kilter about a woman who would choose a field of research so demanding, where absolute dedication was a given. Dedication in a man suggested a priestlike quality, a willingness to selflessly serve a higher cause; but in a woman, it smacked of failure—failure to marry, failure to reproduce, failure to fit comfortably into the boxes society decreed.

  Marie Curie apart, Herbert could not call to mind a single woman scientist, and he guessed that the same held true for most people. Science seemed such a male profession, in the most British sense of the word; not simply masculine but a specific type of man—upper middle class, a product of one of the older, provincial universities.