Brigadier Dougal Munro and Captain Jack Carter (recurring characters in several novels by Higgins) of the Special Operations Executive, arrange for Steiner to be relocated to a 'safe house' in a St Mary's Priory in Wapping, where he can be held whilst recuperating from surgery.

Learning of Steiner's survival, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler summons SS General Walter Schellenberg, the chief of intelligence of the Ausland-SD to a gothic castle.

In London and now under the guise of Father Harry Conlon, an army chaplain, Devlin seeks sanctuary at the home of an Irish republican and old friend Michael Ryan.

In need of an army radio, Devlin and Ryan make the mistake of buying the communications equipment from the Carver brothers, vicious London gangsters and black marketeers.

Leaving Munro behind, Vaughan flies Devlin and Steiner to occupied France and make a dangerous landing near the headquarters of Erich Kraemer's detachment, also badly fog-bound.

In 1975, the author, Higgins, meets an American historian in London, who gives him a photocopy of an illegally obtained secret dossier, with a one hundred-year hold, from the Public Record Office.