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“Are you alone?” Herbert asked.

“Of course.”

Herbert opened the door.

De Vere Green looked terrible. A week’s groceries would hardly have filled the bags under his eyes, his hair rose and fell in spiky clumps, and his knuckles were white where he gripped a manila folder whose edges sprouted paper sheets.

Herbert half-ushered, half-dragged de Vere Green inside and steered him to the kitchen table, kicking the front door shut behind him as he did so.

“Coffee?” Herbert asked.

“Please.” De Vere Green’s voice was hoarse. He looked around the room, his eyes seeming to focus only intermittently. When he finally realized that Hannah was there, he stared at her for several seconds before shaking his head, though Herbert could not tell whether this was disapproval or disbelief.

De Vere Green had been drinking, that was clear from the mosaic of burst blood vessels on his nose and in his eyes—not to mention the sweet, slightly high odor which leached from his pores. Herbert wondered whether, drunk aside, he was also on drugs. It seemed unlikely, but then de Vere Green had turned enough suppositions on their head in the past twenty-four hours; nothing about him would surprise Herbert anymore.

When the coffee came, de Vere Green warmed his hands on the mug, visibly collected himself, and began his spiel.

“You have the whip hand here, dear boy. You know my secrets, you could destroy me just like that”—he snapped his fingers—“if you wanted, and heaven alone knows I’d deserve it, after the way I’ve treated you. I could appeal to your kindness, but men like me don’t understand such concepts, not really. So forgive me if I
address you in my language: that of the deal, an arrangement of mutual benefit…”

Herbert did not really know what de Vere Green was talking about, but he nodded anyway:
Go on.

“I have something here which may be—no, let’s be honest, which I think
is
most definitely—germane to your case. It’s something which in the normal course of events you should never see, but under the circumstances I feel it only proper to make an exception. Before I show it to you, however,
you
must in turn give
me
an undertaking: that you will never reveal my secret, that indeed you must take it to the grave, if God forbid you reach that dreadful gate before me.”

It was strange, Herbert thought, and perhaps telling too, that though de Vere Green knew full well that Hannah was there, he seemed not in the slightest bothered by her presence. Perhaps he thought she was deaf as well as blind; or perhaps he was so dismissive of women that he considered her a trifle.

Herbert remembered the calculations he had made about his leverage over de Vere Green; in particular, about when best to use it.

“How do I know that what you have is worth my silence?” Herbert asked.

“You have to trust me.”

After everything that had happened between them, it sounded absurd. “You have to trust me,” de Vere Green repeated, audibly more desperate than before. “It’ll be worth your while, I promise you.”

It was pitiable, to see a man reduced to this; and Herbert was less comfortable with pity than he was with hatred, that was the uncomfortable truth he knew too well.

But there was another truth, equally apparent: he wanted to solve this case. If de Vere Green had the means to help him do so, then it would be the most ridiculous act of self-spiting to reject the offer of aid simply because of its provenance.

And besides, what was to stop Herbert giving de Vere Green the assurance and then, if need be, going back on it?

Information could not be unlearned, after all. The hold he had on de Vere Green expired when he made the truth public, not when he agreed not to do so.

He was becoming harder; he was becoming more pragmatic.

He did not know which.

“You have my word,” Herbert said.

With a smile of such pathetic gratitude that Herbert almost rescinded the agreement on the spot, de Vere Green opened the manila folder he had brought.

Inside were sheets of typewritten paper in various sizes, some foolscap, some little more than scraps, most somewhere in between. De Vere Green fanned them out on the kitchen table like playing cards.

“You told me yesterday that Papworth knew about Max,” he said.

Herbert nodded. “That’s right.”

“And I told you that no one knew about Max; he was my secret.”

“You did.”

“So how can they both be true?”

“One of you is wrong.” Lying or mistaken, it did not matter which; one more falsehood in this investigation could hardly be detected, let alone considered.

De Vere Green shook his head. “No. We’re both right.”

Herbert shrugged. “Then how?”

“Because Papworth is a Soviet agent.”

Impossible, Herbert said. He had met Papworth, and the man had taken virtually every opportunity to launch into a tirade against the mortal evil that was communism.

“Come on,” said de Vere Green. “You leave Five, and instantly forget everything you know about reading people’s motives? Of course Papworth would say that, if he was a Soviet agent, of course he would. He’d lambast them at every turn, to make you think exactly what you’re thinking now, that there’s no way he could be anything other than America’s finest.”

“Prove it,” Herbert said.

“These papers are decrypts from the Venona program,” de Vere Green said. Yes, the very ones that had first alerted London to Maclean’s treachery. Venona covered only the war and the few years afterward, but there was such an enormous backlog that most of the transmissions were only now being decoded.

That was by the by. The point was this: double agents did not simply stop. Once they were in, they were in, and they were terminated only by death or discovery.

Venona was implicating hundreds of people, mainly in Washington and New York. There were informants in the State Department, and Agriculture, and Justice, and the Treasury, not to mention the Office of Strategic Studies, the Army Signal Corps, the Office of National Intelligence, and that was before you got to General Electric, Standard Oil, and U.S. Rubber.

The West was crawling with closet Reds, in other words.

But the decrypts which de Vere Green had brought were more scientifically orientated than most, and concerned a Soviet agent known only as Achilles.

They had been sent to him under the auspices of the counterintelligence committee on which he sat with Papworth, and spanned a period of four years, on and off, 1944 through 1948, and various branches of science: non-ferrous metals, three types of engineering (aeronautical, chemical, and manufacturing), crystallography, physics, biochemistry—and, of course, atomic energy.

The rub was this: Papworth had been involved with all of these.

Times, places, areas of expertise; they all matched. Here were transmissions made from Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project; there were outgoings from London just after Papworth had arrived. Each different decrypt in itself could have applied to several people, sometimes even scores. But take them together, and one by one the possibilities were whittled down until only Papworth was left.

It had taken de Vere Green a while to be sure, and even then he had shied from it. He was a patriot, and he liked Papworth, so both in terms of friendship and ideology, he did not want to believe that the truth was the truth, as it were.

“You’re sure?” Herbert asked.

“Positive.”

“There’s no doubt?”

“Papworth is the only man who fits all the decrypts. The only one.”

“And you think he was somehow running Stensness, too?”

“I don’t know. But if he was there, and he is who he is, then …”

“Well, there’s only one thing for it.”

“What’s that?”

“We must go and talk to Papworth.”

De Vere Green sighed. “I knew you’d say that.”

“You don’t seem thrilled by the prospect.”

“I’m … Well, it’s not as simple as all that.”

“Why not?”

“Because all these decrypts I get, Papworth receives them, too.”

The fog was black and gauzy, like a widow’s funeral veil. It hung in cold, clammy sheets, scummy and tight. It wanted to suffocate, that was obvious enough. It was no longer simply a meteorological phenomenon; it was a sentient, malevolent being.

Hannah had demanded to come, too. De Vere Green had refused—she had already heard too much—but when he and Herbert went out of the flat, they could see so little that for long moments they did nothing but stand still and try to orientate themselves, clinging on to the door frame as a child would clutch the side of a swimming pool.

So Hannah had come, too. Besides, Herbert felt that she might be useful as more than a guide; if she was half as perspicacious about the case as she had been about him, perhaps she would uncover some piece of evidence, or make some connection, which had hitherto eluded him.

Herbert had no doubt that he was breaking the rules in bringing her along, but if the best the Met
could offer him from their own resources was Elkington, then perhaps the rules needed fracturing in the first place.

Hannah walked with extraordinary assurance, much faster and more confidently than anyone else shuffling along uncertainly in the mist; the only person for whom the fog was not debilitating. Hannah alone, handicapped in everyday conditions, could now bestride this strange world without pause or worry.

She gripped her cane with thumb and three outer fingers, index pointing down the shaft toward her feet, and swept the stick before her like an antenna or the beam on a radar screen, low across her front and to each side, touching the ground every stride, in front of the foot that was about to come forward.

Arm, hand, and cane: lines of protection.

At first, it almost scared Herbert to keep up, convinced as he was that at any moment they would run headlong into someone coming the other way, or perhaps an object even more unyielding, such as a lamppost or a wall. Then he pulled himself together; if a small, blind girl could go at that pace, then so could he.

The only time they missed a beat was when Herbert tried to speak. Hannah stopped, muttered something which he took to be a reminder of where they were, and turned to him.

“Please,” she said. “Blind people walk with their heads as well as their feet.”

“I’m sorry?”

“A draft of air which change mean to me a revolving door. Sudden smell of exhaust is passing car. Leather in the air, a shop for shoe repairs is nearby. I know route we take, but I must concentrate hard. So, I cannot listen to
you. Every second, I must remember how far we are gone, and so how far is still left for us. I know, from A to B, it take me certain minutes. I can’t do it quicker. I try to do it slower, I get lost. So always maintain same speed.”

They walked on in silence after that.

They were almost at the door of the American Embassy when Papworth came out.

He was no more than two or three yards from them, but still he did not see them, partly because of the fog, and partly because he was intent on where he was going. He turned left out of the door and set off.

When de Vere Green made as if to call out, Herbert clamped a hand across his mouth. Better to follow Papworth, his eyes said silently, and see what he was up to, than beard him here and now.

Papworth walked with a strange mix of purpose and slowness, the urgency in the set of his body undone by the restrictions of progressing through such gloom.

It was Herbert rather than Hannah who now led the chase, making constant, minute adjustments to their pace. They had to be close enough to Papworth to keep him in sight, but far enough away to remain undetected.

With any other quarry, pursuit would have been well nigh impossible; but the metallic clacking of Papworth’s heel inserts helped them track his progress as surely as a homing beacon.

Papworth headed right at the first corner, so that he was going down the east side of Grosvenor Square; all the way down, across an intersection, and into Carlos Place.

He stopped without warning.

Herbert flung out his arms to stop de Vere Green and Hannah in their tracks.

This was what it must feel like to be Hannah, he thought; doing everything by sound alone.

Papworth began to turn slowly.

Herbert took a couple of steps backward, forcing the others into reverse, too, and grabbing at Hannah when, startled, she began to stumble.

Papworth was still turning; and then Herbert lost sight of him, obscured by a particularly thick finger of fog which floated across the pavement.

Footsteps sounded muffled in Herbert’s ears: Papworth, coming back to check.

If he found them, he would know they had been following him. It was hardly the weather for a Sunday-morning stroll, after all.

Herbert took another pace backward, willing them to melt into the fog.

The footsteps stopped, and then started again, this time receding.

Perhaps Papworth had just thought himself lost, and had retraced his steps to check. Or perhaps he had heard something suspicious, and after a moment dismissed it as paranoia. Following someone through this fog was no task for the fainthearted.

Herbert hurried forward again, concerned that they shouldn’t lose Papworth.

It occurred to him as he did so that if the situation had been reversed and he had wanted to flush out a follower, this was exactly what he would have done: stopped, resumed, and then waited for the trackers to come careering out of the mist so as not to lose their quarry.

No; Papworth was still walking, several paces ahead.

He passed through a pair of gates beyond which
the fog seemed even blacker than elsewhere. It took Herbert a moment to realize that it was the outline of a building.

More precisely, according to the sign, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, Mayfair.

It was neither much warmer nor much clearer inside the church than it was outside. Matins would be sparsely attended, Herbert thought, when it began in an hour or so. Today was a morning where communing with God would best be done from home.

Papworth entered at the altar end, and immediately turned right, into a small alcove where three statues clustered. Herbert saw Our Lady Montserrat, with a golden ball in one hand and a child in her lap; a group at Calvary; and St. Francis Xavier, rather magnificent in flowing robes.