“It’s unfair, but there it is,” Tensing said. “We were lucky in this case to have found out, though I’m certain we don’t know the full story, and I doubt we ever shall. That will be for the historians to sort out long after we’re dead.”

“I wonder what they’ll make of the Reverend T. W. Ringolsby and the condoms,” Cess said. “Do you suppose that will merit a chapter of its own?”

I hope so, Ernest thought.

“With footnotes,” Cess said. “And—”

“As I was saying,” Tensing interrupted, “what we do know is that you two were responsible for keeping the Fifteenth Army tied down in the Pas de Calais during a critical time. You’ve saved countless lives. The original casualty estimate for D-Day was thirty thousand. We had ten thousand, and every day those tanks have stayed in Calais, even more lives have been saved.”

He and Cess had saved more than twenty thousand lives. And he’d been worried when Hardy’d told him about his saving five hundred and nineteen.

“Congratulations,” Tensing said, standing up and coming around the desk to shake hands with them. “I can’t overstate the importance of what you’ve done. We had only sixteen divisions. If Hitler had brought those tanks up, we’d have been going up against twenty-one. It’s my personal opinion that you may very well have won the war.”

Not lost it. Won it. He’d been afraid every single day since he’d unfouled that propeller, since he’d saved Hardy’s life, that he had somehow irrevocably altered the course of history, the course of the war, and that Hitler would win. And now—

“Does that mean we can go home and rest on our laurels now?” Cess was asking, grinning.

“Not just yet, I’m afraid,” Tensing said.

Oh, no, here it comes, Ernest thought.

“I’ve asked Bracknell to assign the writing of newspaper articles about Patton to someone else, Worthing,” Tensing said. “I have another job for the two of you.”

Oh, God, they were being sent to Burma.

Tensing leaned across the desk and folded his hands. “The Germans have contacted their agents—or rather, our double agents—and ordered them to report the times and places of V-1 incidents.”

“Why?” Cess asked. “Don’t they already know that? I thought the V-1s were remote-controlled.”

Tensing shook his head. “The Germans know where they intended them to go, not where they went. They’re aimed at the target, Tower Bridge—which, by the way, they have thus far not hit—and a mechanism is set to make a certain number of revolutions and then cut off the fuel supply, at which point the engine switches off and the rocket goes into its dive. But whether they reach the target depends on whether that mechanism was correctly set.”

“So they need the times and locations of the incidents to see whether the rockets are reaching their target so they can make the necessary course corrections?” Ernest asked.

“Yes,” Tensing said, “which puts us in a rather nasty situation. If we provide accurate information to protect our agents’ credibility, we’re providing aid to the enemy, and a particularly deadly form of aid at that—obviously an unacceptable situation. If, on the other hand, we give the enemy false information, and it’s disproved by German aircraft reconnaissance, it will—”