Night Over Water - Ken Follett [99]
The man’s reaction was quite shocking. He jumped back a pace and held up his hands defensively, as if he thought he was about to be attacked.
His companion said: “It’s all right, Carl.”
Mervyn said: “I’d be honored to shake your hand, sir.”
Hartmann dropped his arms, although he still looked wary. He shook hands.
Nancy was surprised at Mervyn’s behavior. She would have said that Mervyn Lovesey thought nobody in the world was his superior, yet here he was acting like a schoolboy asking a baseball star for his autograph.
Mervyn said: “I’m glad to see you got out. We feared the worst, you know, when you disappeared. By the way, my name is Mervyn Lovesey.”
Hartmann said: “This is my friend Baron Gabon, who helped me to escape.”
Mervyn shook hands with Gabon, then said: “I won’t intrude anymore. Bon voyage, gentlemen.”
Hartmann must be something very special, Nancy thought, to have distracted Mervyn, even for a few moments, from his single-minded pursuit of his wife. As they walked on through the village she asked: “So who’s he?”
“Professor Carl Hartmann, the greatest physicist in the world,” Mervyn replied. “He’s been working on splitting the atom. He got into trouble with the Nazis for his political views, and everyone thought he was dead.”
“How do you know about him?”
“I did physics at university. I thought of becoming a research scientist, but I haven’t the patience for it. I still keep up with developments, though. It so happens there have been some amazing discoveries in the field over the last ten years.”
“Such as?”
“There’s an Austrian woman—another refugee from the Nazis, by the way—called Lise Meitner, working in Copenhagen, who managed to break the uranium atom into two smaller atoms, barium and krypton.”
“I thought atoms were indivisible.”
“So did we all, until recently. That’s what’s so amazing. It makes a very big bang when it happens, which is why the military are so interested. If they can control the process, they’ll be able to make the most destructive bomb ever known.”
Nancy looked back over her shoulder at the frightened, shabby man with the burning gaze. The most destructive bomb ever known, she said to herself, and she shivered. “I’m surprised they let him walk around unguarded,” she said.
“I’m not sure he is unguarded,” Mervyn said. “Look at that chap.”
Following the direction of Mervyn’s nod, Nancy looked across the street. Another Clipper passenger was idling along on his own: a tall, hefty man in a bowler hat and a gray suit with a wine red waistcoat. “Do you think that’s his bodyguard?” she said.
Mervyn shrugged. “The man looks like a copper to me. Hartmann may not know it, but I’d say he’s got a guardian angel in size twelve boots.”
Nancy had not thought Mervyn was that observant.
“I think this must be the bar,” Mervyn said, switching from the cosmic to the mundane without pausing for breath. He stopped at the door.
“Good luck,” Nancy said. She meant it. In a funny way she had grown to like him, despite his infuriating ways.
He smiled. “Thanks. Good luck to you, too.”
He went inside and Nancy continued along the street.
At the far end, across the road from the harbor, was an ivy-grown building larger than anything else in the village. Inside, Nancy found a makeshift office and a good-looking young man in a Pan American uniform. He looked at her with a twinkle in his eye, even though he had to be fifteen years her junior.
“I want to buy a ticket to New York,” she told him.
He was surprised and intrigued. “Is that so! We don’t generally sell tickets here—in fact, we don’t have any.”
That did not sound like a serious problem. She smiled at him: a smile always helped in overcoming trivial bureaucratic obstacles. “Well, a ticket is only a piece of paper,” she said. “If I give you the fare, I guess you’ll let me on the plane, won’t you?”
He grinned. She figured