Visibility (41 page)

Papworth and Mengele stopped alongside a cargo boat, the
Ellen & Violet
, a seventy-footer with a tall central stack and a copious sprinkling of rust throughout. Smoke from her engine was rising to melt into the fog, and a short gangplank connected deck with shore. Two deckhands stood on board, one fore and one aft, looking ready to cast off.

The fog was denser down here than it had been by Guy’s, and in the football field length visible Herbert could see no other boats moving. Had the
Ellen & Violet’s
captain got permission to set sail, or was he just going to chance his arm?

Kazantsev and Pauling suddenly emerged from the café, and walked straight up to Papworth and Mengele.

Of the four, only Papworth and Kazantsev knew what was going to happen, Herbert saw. He had a sudden, sinking feeling that he did, too.

The body language gave it away. Papworth and Kazantsev were tensed on the balls of their feet, while Mengele and Pauling were standing with the slightly hunched aspect of the confused.

Papworth may not have known Mengele’s true identity, but he had clearly kept one final trick up his sleeve: the reason why going via Guy’s had so suited him.

This was what Papworth had planned all along, Herbert saw. The
Ellen & Violet;
that was why he had hurried Mengele in the hospital. The microdots were a bonus, albeit a bonus he had wrenched into being by his hunch that he would find Herbert at Leconfield House. Papworth had spent four days trying to get his hands on the microdots, but, if it had come to it, he would surely have left without Stensness’ secret, as long as he had something much more important.

The scientists.

Never deceive a deceiver, Herbert thought, they’ll just deceive you right back.

Papworth grabbed Mengele, twisting his right arm up behind his back, just as he had done to Herbert in Guy’s.

Kazantsev stepped behind Pauling and wrapped an arm round his neck.

The agents hustled their captives up the gangway and onto the
Ellen & Violet.

The moment they were on board, the deckhands cast the ropes off and pulled the plank up, and they were motoring, downstream toward Tower Bridge, the horn sounding a loud, long blast to signal that they were under way.

The Thames flowed east; out past grimy suburbs, through the busiest port in the world with cranes crowding both banks in long lines from the Pool of London to Tilbury, and all the way to the sea beyond Southend and Shoeburyness.

The fugitives might switch boats at Tilbury, Herbert thought, if they had a proper deepwater vessel lined up. Or else they might just keep going in the
Ellen & Violet
, uncomfortable though presumably seaworthy, all the way across the North Sea and into the Baltic.

All the way to the Soviet Union, in other words.

The Pool of London was absolutely still, save for the
Ellen & Violet
chugging up the river, and the lone figure running down the towpath in a frantic effort to keep abreast.

Throughout the fog, Londoners had been bombarded with medical advice: stay inside whenever possible; keep the house shut up tight; put a handkerchief across your face when outside; and, most of all, avoid unnecessary exertion.

Herbert seemed to be in breach of every single one of these strictures, and with something of a vengeance.

The tide was high, and the
Ellen & Violet’s
funnel reached into the brumal skies.

They would have to open Tower Bridge for her.

It was no more than half a mile from London Bridge to Tower Bridge, but with the filthy air scouring his lungs and the screaming worry that he would be too late to stop the
Ellen & Violet
, Herbert felt like Pheidippides running from Marathon, and feared that he would share his fate to boot, dropping stone dead on arrival.

Papworth and Kazantsev had not just wanted the science; they had wanted the scientists, too. Pauling, a suspected communist sympathizer and the world’s premier chemist, and the man previously known only as Fischer, a former Nazi.

Both would be enormous propaganda victories for Moscow; one man from each of the two systems of government most implacably opposed to communism, democratic capitalism and Nazi fascism.

Both men would doubtless be paraded as ambassadors for peace and harmony, portrayed as having seen the light and defected to the promised land.

Not to mention Papworth, Herbert thought. Like Burgess and Maclean, he was surely never coming back.

The
Ellen & Violet
sounded its horn again; one long blast, two short, another long.

Tower Bridge, invisible for most of the run, had taken on the aspects of a mythical kingdom. No matter how far and how fast Herbert ran, it seemed to get no nearer, until suddenly there it was, with the fog like a cape round its shoulders, the famous Gothic towers and swooping aquamarine suspension chains emerging shyly from the gloom.

He slowed to catch his breath, and at that very moment, the bascules began to rise; the road slicing in half and opening up so that the
Ellen & Violet
could pass beneath.

There were steps up from the towpath to the bridge.

Herbert took them two at a time, and when he emerged onto the roadway, perhaps twenty seconds later, the bascules were already halfway up.

Next to the South Tower, on the downstream side, he saw a cabin that looked vaguely official. There were railings around it, and a gate from which a padlock hung disconsolately unlocked; perhaps it was supposed to have been shut, but this was the first time the bridge had been open in four days, so he supposed security was not as tight as it might have been.

At any rate, he was not complaining.

He banged open the gate, leapt the short flight of stairs up to the cabin, and hurled himself through the door.

Levers sprouted in neat rows from the floor, and the far wall was studded with dials. He had come to the right place.

“Shut the bridge!” he yelled through heaving breaths. “Shut the bloody bridge!”

There were two men in there, both looking at Herbert in understandable astonishment; with the blood from Papworth’s slash running down his face, he must have looked a sight.

“Calm down there, sir,” one said.

Herbert pulled his police badge from his coat.

“Shut the bloody bridge,” he repeated.
“Now.”

The men moved with quiet economy, but there was no mistaking their purpose, nor their professionalism. They pushed back levers, glanced at dials, and spoke to each other in monosyllables:
pawls, bolts, brakes.

When Herbert looked out of the window, the bascules were down again.

It had taken less than a minute.

He ran out of the cabin, across the road, and peered over the upstream side of the bridge. The
Ellen & Violet
was within view, and the churning of the water round her hull indicated that she was already hard in reverse, trying to stop in time.

Quite a shock for the captain, Herbert thought, to see the bridge close again like that.

The fog meant that the boat had been traveling on light throttle, and the
Ellen & Violet
stopped with her funnel twenty feet or so from the bridge.

Herbert glanced down. The bow had just about gone under the bridge, and he was standing directly above her foredeck.

There was a small crowd round him now. Mainly engineers and mechanics, he guessed, come to see what the fuss was, but also two police constables.

Herbert had clean forgotten; there was a small police station on the bridge itself. He turned to the constables and showed them his badge.

“We need to get down to that boat,” he said. “There are fugitives on board.”

“There’s a rope ladder in the north cabin,” one of the mechanics replied.

Herbert nodded. “That’ll be fine.”

A couple of men in overalls ran off.

“Police! Stay where you are!” Herbert yelled down to the
Ellen & Violet;
somewhat superfluously, he thought, as there was nowhere they could go, save for shuttling endlessly between Tower and London Bridges.

The men were back inside a minute with the rope ladder. They fastened one end to the railings and hurled
the other out away from the bridge in a tumbling parabola.

Herbert watched it unravel as it fell, swaying in alarmingly wide arcs before fading to slack.

“Is everyone on board a fugitive, sir?” said one of the constables.

“Not everyone.” Pauling was clearly a victim, not just from the evident shock that the abduction had represented, but also because there was a world of difference between challenging U.S. government policy and defecting to Moscow. The crew’s guilt was also perhaps debatable, depending on how much they knew about their cargo. “But arrest anyone you see,” Herbert continued. “We’ll sort out the sob stories later.”

“How many are there?”

Papworth, Mengele, Pauling, Kazantsev, the two deckhands, plus a captain—the boat had set off the instant the ropes had been slipped, which meant that neither of the deckhands could have had time to cast off and then take the wheel. “Seven, minimum. Maybe more.”

“We’ll need more than the three of us then, sir.”

Herbert looked at the assorted Tower Bridge staff.

“Anyone fancy making a citizen’s arrest?” he asked.

There was no shortage of volunteers, that was for sure.

Herbert felt they were almost certainly motivated less by the prospect of social justice than by the possibility of a good old-fashioned scrap, and he could not have cared less.

A sailor would doubtless have swarmed down the rope ladder like a monkey. Herbert took his time,
making sure that, of his four extremities, at least three were in contact with a rung at all times.

He imagined the bridge staff laughing at him, the landlubber picking his way down as though stepping through a minefield, but he was past caring.

He half-jumped, half-fell the last few feet to the deck. There was no one around.

The constables arrived, followed by the engineers and mechanics.

“One of the fugitives has a knife,” Herbert said.

They shrugged; stout British yeomen, it would take more than that to put them off.

Herbert made them fan out, half down each side of the boat.

It was easier than he had expected. There were only a limited number of hiding places on a boat, even one as sizeable as the
Ellen & Violet
, and none of the fugitives had had the time or inclination to conceal themselves very effectively.

Papworth and Pauling were still in the engine room.

Kazantsev and Mengele were farther forward in the foc’sle, where the smell was terrible—engine oil, damp cloth, and the high odor of men who had gone too long in close company without washing.

The deckhands looked bewildered, the captain slightly less so.

Papworth shouted that he had diplomatic immunity from arrest. No one listened.

There were other boats downstream of the bridge, queuing up to come through.

Herbert herded all seven occupants of the
Ellen & Violet
back up the rope ladder, ensuring that there was
someone he could trust—a constable, an engineer, or a mechanic—both ahead of and behind them on the climb.

One by one they reached the top, and were grabbed by strong and unyielding arms.

Mengele was the last up, Herbert directly beneath him.

On the bridge, two engineers hauled Mengele off the rope ladder; and without warning he slumped in their arms, mouth frothing.

They laid him on the floor, slightly panicked by the way his eyes were rolling; and Herbert, coming up over the parapet, knew even as he shouted that he was too late with the warning.

The moment the engineers’ hands were off Mengele, he sprang to his feet and set off down the road, heading south, off the bridge.

The traffic barriers were still down, though he could have leapt them without difficulty.

Beyond, however, fanned out across the road, was a line of pedestrians, waiting for the bridge to reopen. They had watched the others being escorted off the boat, and enough of the onlookers were now shouting for Herbert to know that they would not let Mengele through.

Mengele stopped dead and whirled around. Herbert followed his gaze, and saw a similar phalanx of pedestrians arrayed on the other side of the river, toward the City.

Blocked to the north, blocked to the south, Mengele went the only place he could: into the control cabin.

The two men who had shut the bridge were among those who had come to help detain the fugitives, so there was no one in the cabin to stop Mengele.

Shouting at the others to stay where they were—there was no point losing more than one of the escapees—Herbert followed Mengele into the cabin.

Mengele was nowhere to be seen.

The cabin was small, perhaps twenty feet by ten. It took Herbert only a few seconds to be sure that Mengele was not hiding anywhere inside.

There was a flight of stone stairs on the left, leading downward. It was the only place he could have gone.

Herbert followed, mongoose to Mengele’s snake.

The stairs kinked right twice and emerged into a long, low room with concrete walls. Machinery was everywhere, metallic behemoths in black and orange which sprouted pipes thicker than a man’s torso and valves as large as a human head.

Had it not been for the door on the far side of the room that was still swinging, Herbert could have wasted minutes hunting Mengele in this mechanical forest.

Herbert ran for the door, wondering as he went through whether it was some kind of trap, but it was too late to worry about that; this was the quick, where one either gave it or one did not.

The door gave onto more stairs, a short flight only, and at the landing where the stairs stopped, Herbert caught his breath, both literally and figuratively.

Below him was a vast, magnificently forbidding chamber, patched here and there in darkness where some of the metal-grilled lamps had given out.

The chamber was shaped like the quadrant of a wheel. The roof ran horizontal and the nearside wall vertical, but the third side, the one which connected the floor to the farthest extremity of ceiling, described a long, graceful curve, ninety degrees of a circle.