For a few seconds, somewhat absurdly, all Herbert could think about was why they were opening the bridge. There were other boats which wanted to come through, he remembered; but surely someone would have checked that no one was down there in the chamber?
Then Herbert remembered that it must have been a good minute’s walk from the landing above the chamber back up to the control room; in other words, easily enough time for someone to have looked in the chamber, seen that it was empty, and gone back to give the all-clear, while Mengele and Herbert had fought their way from spiral staircase through tunnel to chamber.
Anyway, none of that mattered now. What mattered was getting clear before several hundred tons of iron and steel crushed them.
The counterweight was traveling pretty much flush to the floor, certainly too close for Herbert to pass beneath its leading edge.
Herbert felt again in Mengele’s pocket, and this time his fingers found the crumpled papers. Mengele’s hand closed over his, and with his free fist Herbert hit Mengele in the face, hard enough to loosen his grip.
Careful not to rip them, Herbert removed the papers from Mengele’s pocket, checked that they were all there, and stuffed them into the pocket of his own jacket.
The counterweight was almost a third of the way down the curve; which, given that the tunnel entrance was a third of the way up it, and that they were at the bottom, meant that Herbert had to move faster than the counterweight if he was going to get there in time.
No time to think. Herbert pushed himself upright.
Mengele’s hand closed round Herbert’s ankle, and pulled him back down.
Herbert kicked Mengele in the chest, twice, but by the time he was free again the counterweight was more than halfway through its arc, and Herbert’s last chance to make the tunnel had gone.
Herbert felt as though he was disappearing; and somewhere deep in the most primitive part of his brain, he knew that there was only one way to keep himself in the world, even if it was only for the next few seconds, and that way was violence.
He set on Mengele with all the fury he could summon.
It was as though the insane frenzy of Mengele’s attacks at Auschwitz had somehow transferred to Herbert. He punched, kicked, stamped, bit, and gouged, each blow some small revenge for all the evil Mengele had done: for blinding Hannah, for shooting Esther, for torturing Mary, and for all the faceless ones, too, the hundreds of twins on whom he had experimented, the thousands of ordinary, innocent people whom he had sent to the crematorium with a flick of his wrist.
Herbert felt alive.
Dear God; he was about to die, and he had never experienced such vitality.
The counterweight, a monstrous wedge intent on destruction, was almost on them.
Herbert looked from it to Mengele, moaning as he lay limp and bloodied against the ledge.
The ledge was two foot high, two foot deep, and stretched all the way across the chamber. Suddenly Herbert understood why it was there: for safety in cases such as this, when someone got caught down here.
Either the counterweight would pass over the top of the ledge and end up against the wall, in which case Herbert could press himself flat to the floor in the lee of the ledge and let the counterweight pass above him; or it would stop against the bottom of the ledge, in which case Herbert could stand on top of the ledge, flush against the wall, and watch the counterweight come to a halt a couple of feet from his face.
But which one?
It should have been easy to judge; but he was exhausted from the struggle, the chamber was in semi-darkness, and the counterweight was coming fast.
Think.
If the ledge had been a deliberate addition, which Herbert was sure it was, it was surely more logical to have the counterweight stop against the ledge rather than against the wall; for who would want to dive for a damp and dirty crawlspace when they could simply have stood upright?
He had a couple of seconds to decide, no more.
Herbert looked down at the ground beneath his feet, where Mengele lay.
If the counterweight had been intended to pass overhead, there would have been a sudden dip in the floor, an extra step down. There was none.
Herbert jumped onto the ledge and pressed himself flat against the wall, praying that he was right, and thinking that he would not be around too long to find out if he was not.
No time to help Mengele up, even if Herbert had wanted to.
The counterweight, brutally and remorselessly unseeing, was right in his face now.
It stopped with an explosion of cracking bones and squelched organs, splattering warm parts of Mengele onto Herbert’s face and clothes; and Herbert was shaking, laughing, crying, shouting, teetering on the edge of delirium, but safe and alive.
Whatever break in the fog there had been was over; the mist was rolling over the barges again, and settling like snow on the roads.
Herbert sent two uniformed officers back to the American Embassy with Pauling; he himself took Papworth and Kazantsev to the Borough police station, halfway to the Elephant & Castle.
Papworth was, of course, still protesting his diplomatic immunity; Herbert had no right to do this, he was in breach of the law, Papworth would make him pay for this, and on, and on, and on.
“One murder, maybe two. Kidnapping a police officer—me. Aiding and abetting actual bodily harm: Mengele’s assault on my mother. When your government finds out what you’ve been doing,” Herbert said, “your diplomatic immunity will go in a flash. But that will be the least of your problems.”
Herbert commandeered an interview room: bare, no windows, but no bright lights in the face either. He posted three constables to stand guard, and instructed them not to say anything to Papworth at all. He would be back as soon as he could.
He rang Guy’s and spoke to Angela, who assured him that Mary and Hannah were both OK; pretty shaken, unsurprisingly, but no permanent harm done.
He would try and come by later, he told her; but it looked as if he had a long afternoon ahead of him.
Then he phoned Tyce, and gave him the latest.
“If the film rights to your life ever come up, Herbert, I’ll be first in line,” Tyce said. “You want me to come down there? Or come see Sillitoe with you?”
“The latter, please. And if you can find the commissioner …”
Herbert met Tyce and Sir Harold Scott at Minimax, where Scott’s presence allowed them to bypass, in turn, a security guard, a secretary, a Six branch director, and then Six’s deputy director-general on the way to seeing Sir Percy Sillitoe.
With Sillitoe, Herbert knew, they had one priceless advantage: Sir Percy was a career policeman, and the unofficial brotherhood of Scotland Yard ran deep.
Sillitoe listened, nodded, listened some more while Herbert told him what had happened. At no time did he doubt Herbert’s word.
When Herbert had finished, Sillitoe rang the home secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, made an immediate appointment with him and the American ambassador, Walter Gifford, and took the three policemen round to Whitehall so that Herbert could repeat his story.
Herbert anticipated trouble. Maxwell Fyfe was part of the traditional right wing of the Conservative party; Gifford was a personal friend of Eisenhower’s. They were hardly the two people Herbert would have chosen to try and wheedle special treatment from.
As it was, he need not have worried.
The moment he said that Papworth had murdered at least one British citizen, he had Maxwell Fyfe’s attention.
When he pointed out that Papworth had been betraying the United States for almost a decade, Gifford fell into line as well.
You understand, Gifford said, that a man who did what Papworth had done could be considered American only by virtue of his passport, rather than his mores. That kind of behavior was the diametric opposite of what America wanted in, and expected from, its citizens. There were many millions of good, solid, upright, Godfearing Americans who would be disgusted at what Papworth had done; they s
hould not all be tarred with the same brush as one man in one department of the American government.
Herbert said that he couldn’t agree more. And he meant it.
Under the circumstances, Maxwell Fyfe and Gifford agreed to a temporary waiver of Papworth’s diplomatic immunity pending investigation, allowing Herbert to continue his questioning without the Home Office needing to go through the rigmarole of declaring Papworth persona non grata and the State Department kicking up seven shades of transatlantic stink. The Agency’s own investigators would move in once Herbert had finished.
In other words, a private, semi-unofficial, and eminently sensible solution to what could otherwise have been a knotty problem.
Herbert returned to Borough station bearing the order on Home Office notepaper, and slapped it on the table in front of Papworth.
“Am I supposed to be impressed?” Papworth asked.
“I’ve been authorized to consider some sort of deal if you cooperate.”
“That’s not what it says there.”
“They’re hardly going to put that in writing, are they?”
Papworth was silent.
Perhaps, Herbert said, he would make it known that Papworth had been fully aware of Mengele’s real identity all along.
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 valv
e 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.
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