Wentworth-King nodded and offered a half smile. 'And what exactly is your mission, Colonel Bradley? Do we help you with that as well?'

'You already have,' Bradley said. 'We're after an American rocket scientist named John Wilson, who is, according to your reports, working under a false pa.s.sport at a n.a.z.i research establishment at k.u.mmersdorf, near Berlin.'

'Ah, yes,' Wentworth-King said. 'I remember him well. An interesting chap, your Mr Wilson. Not exactly patriotic, but bright, and well looked after by Jerry.'

'We think he may be contributing more than rocket research to the n.a.z.is.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. In the States, as far back as the early 1900s, Wilson was already experimenting with a crude form of atomic propulsion. When, after the Tunguska explosion of 1908, the US government attempted to take over his project, he ruthlessly destroyed most of the evidence of his work, then went underground. After working anonymously in America for a good thirty years, he fled the country and went to work just as ruthlessly for the n.a.z.is. Since it's also believed that he's contributed to the Peenemnde rocket program, we're seriously concerned about what else he's up to and think he has to be stopped. That's why I have to be parachuted in as soon as humanly possible.'

The lieutenant colonel sighed, tapped his teeth with a pencil, and looked decidedly sceptical. 'Germany?' he queried. 'Berlin? You actually think that's possible, Colonel? And how far do you think you would get if you didn't get captured? k.u.mmersdorf is an SS research establishment top secret, well guarded. You wouldn't stand a hope in h.e.l.l, old son. It's just not in the cards.'

'It has to be,' Bradley said.

The lieutenant colonel sighed again, as if dealing with a child, then dropped the pencil and raised his hands in the air in mock defeat.

'I am here to serve,' he said. 'I'll do all I can. In the meantime, let me take you to your lodgings and then, while you're waiting for decisions, I'll ensure that you learn all you need to know. Okay?'

'Okay,' Bradley said.

He was pleasantly surprised to find himself located nearby in a small but cosy private apartment in Shepherd Market, Mayfair. After unpacking, he lay fully clothed on the bed and tried to sleep, but instead, as he often did these days, fell in and out of troubled reveries, in which he vividly relived his happier days with Joan, then their mutual pleasures and triumphs, and finally that ghastly day at Pearl Harbour, when she had died in his arms.

He still cried at remembering that.

Bradley wept. The tears rolled down his cheeks. Lying there on his back, he was consumed by a dreadful anguish, a grief that was mixed up with guilt because he, who had been with Joan at the time, had actually survived. He knew to think that way was senseless, an aberration of wounded emotions, but the thought that he hadn't deserved to live when Joan had died was one that never quite left him. It also brought back the memories, waves of love, pits of guilt, making him see the good and bad in their marriage dreadfully magnified... Yes, the two years since her death would have been h.e.l.l had it not been for OSS.

General Taylor had rescued him, inviting him into the organization, ensuring that throughout the year immediately following Joan's death, Bradley was worked to exhaustion and distracted relentlessly. He'd been reacquainted with marine training, introduced to new weapons, taught espionage, self-defence, and guerilla operations, turned into the kind of fighting machine that murders quietly in darkness. He had become someone else, someone busy, never alone, and when it was finished, when he was fit and highly skilled, Taylor had put him to work. He had spent another year in America, tying up the loose ends on Wilson, and only then had he been shipped out to London... to find himself in this comfortable, private apartment, weeping tears for the dead.

Thank G.o.d, he had work to do.

He slept through the afternoon and awakened in darkness, when he remembered to pull his blackout curtains across before turning the lights on. Then he had a bath, put on his army uniform, poured a drink, and took Gladys Kinder's letters out of his kit bag. There were a great many of them she was a prolific writer and he spread them out in separate years on the bed and then started reading them.

She was part of his guilt.

Her letters formed a vivid picture of the life she had led over the past decade: the Spanish civil war, then Czechoslovakia and Italy, then the fearsome days of the Blitz and London as a city at war, at once defiant and tragic. The letters had told him about all that, but also about her private life the numerous men she had known, her good and bad affairs, her fear of losing her independence combined with the fear of growing old alone and they had told him, in racy jokes with a serious subtext, that she had fallen in love with him the minute she met him, had never quite forgotten him, and even now cherished the memory of him and wrote to him to touch him.

They were extraordinary letters.

It wasn't surprising that his throat became dry when he picked up the telephone.

She answered immediately.

'In my letter I told you to call me at eight-thirty p.m.,' she said, 'and you called on the dot. It can only be Mike Bradley calling. Welcome to London, Mike.'

He was smiling already.

They agreed to meet an hour later in a famous pub in Soho, in the West End, and when Bradley left his apartment, he felt like a nervous schoolboy going on his first date.

With the blackout in force, he found himself in moonlit darkness, walking along with the aid of a torch beamed down at the pavement. He went along Half Moon Street, turned into Piccadilly, and walked toward the Circus, pa.s.sing the Ritz Hotel and the elegant facade of Fortnum & Mason, pa.s.sing inky black doorways surrounded by sandbags and often filled with the shadowy figures of men and women in intimate contact. He heard chuckling and ecstatic groaning, voices calling invitingly to him, and saw cigarettes glowing in that darkness where other women were waiting.

At first he was disbelieving, then shocked, then amused and touched, and soon accepted that a city at war was a place like no other.

This was more evident in Piccadilly Circus, where cars, taxis, tramcars, and buses, all with their headlights dimmed, crawled through a flood of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and their women, as they poured around Eros, mostly drunk and in good cheer, then swept along Shaftesbury Avenue, to tumble, with much shouting and laughing and giggling, between piled-up sandbags and through blackout curtains, into the countless pubs and clubs that were spread liberally, noisily, around the network of packed side streets that led into Soho.

Bradley too eventually slipped between piled-up sandbags and through blackout curtains to find himself in a smoky, old-fashioned pub jam-packed with servicemen of every nationality. Having been warned about this by Gladys, he tried to find her in the jostling ma.s.s of noisy revellers, failed to recognize her, so fought his way through to the bar and tried to order a whiskey. He failed at that also, because the barman was too busy, but then a hand fell on his shoulder and squeezed it affectionately as a woman's voice called out to the barman, 'John! Get my friend here a Scotch! And be quick about it!'

Mike turned and saw Gladys Kinder smiling at him in that vividly remembered, still laconic manner. She was ten years older and had gray in her auburn hair, but otherwise she seemed just the same and he was instantly drawn to her.

'Well, well,' he said, finding himself bereft of better words. Then, feeling ridiculously formal, he offered his hand.

Gladys looked down at his hand, grinned in amus.e.m.e.nt, then took hold of it and vigorously shook it.

'You're too much,' she said. 'You're more formal than the English. I didn't expect to find you tearing my clothes off, but to not even get a kiss on the cheek '

'You're right,' Bradley said. 'Sorry.' He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, feeling childishly embarra.s.sed. Then he was given his gla.s.s of whiskey by the barman and raised it to Gladys. She touched her gla.s.s to his and they both drank, then smiled at one another in a silence that was awkward only on Bradley's side.

'G.o.d,' Gladys finally said, 'it's good to see you again after all these years. You're still the most attractive man on earth, though I know you'll hate me for saying it.'

'No, I won't,' Bradley said, even though he was blushing. 'I'm embarra.s.sed, but I can't help feeling pleased. All men are boys in the end.'