She looked anxiously at her watch, then said: “Okay, girls, we’d better go to work.”

Bobby and George left the White House and a car drove them the few blocks to the Justice Department. In the gloomy weekend lighting, the statues in the Great Hall seemed to watch the two men suspiciously. George explained to the security staff that an important visitor would shortly arrive to see Bobby.

They went up in the elevator. George thought Bobby looked exhausted, and undoubtedly he was. The corridors of the huge building echoed emptily. Bobby’s cavernous office was dimly lit, but he did not bother to switch on more lamps. He slumped behind his wide desk and rubbed his eyes.

George looked out of the window at the streetlights. The center of Washington was a pretty park full of monuments and palaces, but the rest of it was a densely populated metropolis with five million residents, more than half of them black. Would the city be here this time tomorrow? George had seen pictures of Hiroshima: miles of buildings flattened to rubble, and burned and maimed survivors on the outskirts, staring with uncomprehending eyes at the unrecognizable world around them. Would Washington look like that in the morning?

Ambassador Dobrynin was shown in at exactly a quarter to eight. He was a bald man in his early forties, and he clearly relished his informal meetings with the president’s brother.

“I want to lay out the current alarming situation the way the president sees it,” Bobby said. “One of our planes has been shot down over Cuba and the pilot is dead.”

“Your planes have no right to fly over Cuba,” Dobrynin said quickly.

Bobby’s discussions with Dobrynin could be combative, but today the attorney general was in a different mood. “I want you to understand the political realities,” he said. “There is now strong pressure on the president to respond with fire. We can’t stop these overflights: it’s the only way we can check the state of construction of your missile bases. But if the Cubans shoot at our planes, we’re going to shoot back.”

Bobby told Dobrynin what was in the letter from President Kennedy to Secretary Khrushchev.

“And what about Turkey?” Dobrynin said sharply.

Bobby replied carefully. “If that is the only obstacle to achieving the regulation I mentioned earlier, the president doesn’t see any insurmountable difficulties. The greatest difficulty for the president is the public discussion of the issue. If such a decision were announced now it would tear NATO apart. We need four to five months to remove the missiles from Turkey. But this is extremely confidential: only a handful of people know that I am saying this to you.”

George watched Dobrynin’s face carefully. Was it his imagination, or was the diplomat concealing a rush of excitement?

Bobby said: “George, give the ambassador the phone numbers we use to get to the president directly.”

George grabbed a pad, wrote down three numbers, tore off the sheet, and handed it to Dobrynin.