DURING HIS TESTIMONY at the Nuremberg trials, an SS oficer becomes flustered and mentions someone he should not. 'Klingsor', the inquisitors discover, is the codename for Hitler's personal scientific adviser: the man who provided the-skulls of Jews so that German anthropologists could allege their physiognomical inferiority, and who controlled the Nazi atomic programme, but whose identity no one knew.

With the Allies and Soviets racing one another to recruit the FiihreJs finest minds, the SS ;an's slip is erased fiom the court transcript and Francis Bacon, a young and brilliant physicist, is drafted hm the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (Einstein's academic base) as an undercover agent to