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Tracts of jade-colored slime clung to the wall. Herbert shivered as the dampness wafted up.

Through the silence came a hushed, echoing clanging: the sound of feet on metal.

Herbert ran to the side of the landing.

A spiral staircase spun down and away from him, and there was the top of Mengele’s head, a quick glimmer of light bouncing off the balding patch on his crown as he moved.

He was no more than a quarter of the way down, a third at the most.

Herbert went after him, taking the steps first two and then three at a time, his outside hand bouncing off the banister with every impact. One misjudgment and he would have turned his ankle, and he was right on the very edge of control, to the extent that stopping seemed a far more hazardous alternative than keeping going.

Down and down they went, the unyielding rungs jarring Herbert’s knees, down into the bowels of the bridge, past gargantuan stanchions and girders studded with thousands of gray-painted rivets, and even as Herbert looked frantically for Mengele, he twinged with admiration for the sheer achievement of building such a bridge.

Mengele was near the bottom now. Herbert was closing, but not fast enough.

Mengele had the secret in his pocket: the helix, shaped exactly like the spiral staircase they were on.

Like the helix
, Herbert thought, the staircase repeated its shape again and again, which meant that anywhere more than a full turn in from either end, there were identical spirals both above and below him.

Below him.

Herbert looked down again. Mengele was perhaps two-thirds of a turn ahead.

When Herbert’s hand next skimmed the banister, he grabbed at it hard and swung his body up and over, so that he was dangling outside the staircase.

With his right hand still on the banister, he gripped the nearest step with his left, and then brought his right hand down to join it.

Now he was hanging entirely below the level of the flight he had been on.

Jumping straight down would have been pointless, as he would have landed on the banister directly beneath. The staircase ran vertically, so he needed to jump inward.

With his arms extended to narrow the distance, it was perhaps ten feet, and the only way it would not hurt was if he landed on Mengele as he came around the corner.

Herbert jerked his legs forward, dropped, and hit Mengele like a depth charge.

Mengele crumpled forward and down, and Herbert heard something crack as he did. They rolled the last few steps together, clawing at each other. Then, by luck or judgment, Mengele smacked Herbert’s skull against the central pillar of the staircase at the point where it reached the floor.

The blow was not especially hard, but in the few seconds it took Herbert to clear his head, Mengele was gone again, down a tunnel to the right.

The tunnel gave onto the chamber which Herbert had seen from the top of the staircase. From up close, he saw that the curved surface was not perfectly smooth; in fact, it was ridged across its breadth in regular terraces,
each one about eighteen inches high. They had entered the chamber perhaps a third of the way up the curve.

Mengele was limping badly, dragging his right leg behind him. That must have been the crack Herbert had heard.

Herbert jumped on Mengele once more, and once more they rolled downward, this time down the terraces, all the way to the bottom, where they came to a halt by a low ledge which abutted the vertical wall.

Mengele’s doctor’s coat was streaked with grime. Herbert rummaged in its pockets, feeling for the material Mengele had stolen, tipping his head back to keep out of range when Mengele tried to punch him.

Mengele was yelling in pain and anger. In his fury he had reverted to German, so Herbert could not understand a word he was saying.

Several stentorian peals rang out high above them, echoing around the chamber.

They sounded like outsize bolts being shot; and, as the first squares of faint gray began to appear at the edges of the ceiling, Herbert realized that they were exactly that. Brakes, pawls, and bolts: the mechanisms to lock and unlock the bridge.

Herbert knew with a rush what this chamber was. They were in the depths of the pier under the South Tower.

The vertical wall faced north, across the river. The ceiling was the underside of the road, the outside end of the south bascule. The bascules were far too large simply to hinge, he realized; they needed a counterweight, something to go down as they went up, and what better than the last quarter of their own length?

Hence the curved surface, to accommodate the
counterweight in its arc; an arc that would end up against the wall where Herbert and Mengele were. And to judge from the speed at which he had seen the bascules operate earlier, it would take less than a minute.

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 should 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.