The Titanic Enigma (10 page)

There was a rap at the door. Newman closed the laptop and turned to the Mac keyboard as the door opened and the flabby guy came in with a tray. He put it on a low table in the middle of the room
a few yards behind Newman.

The professor spun round. ‘I really don’t know what you people want from me,’ he said.

The guy shrugged.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Jimmy.’

‘Jimmy . . . I only just got this document today.’ Newman picked up the slim file.

He shrugged again. ‘Ain’t nothing to do with me. I’d eat your soup, man. Reckon you’re in for a long night!’

Newman watched the door close, ignored the soup and quickly turned back to the laptop. He had to get his message out fast if he was to evade Van Lee. The machine had found the satellite and was
online. He tapped at the keyboard. The word ‘Crosshair’ appeared. It was his password of the day.

Nothing happened for twenty seconds. Then a brief message appeared – ‘Betty Grable.’

The exchange was enough to trigger an encoder program using an algorithm that changed every twenty hours. It meant Newman could write his message in English. It would then be scrambled and
transported via satellite to its destination: a nuclear submarine in the mid-Atlantic. There, it would be decrypted and translated into Chinese and forwarded to Beijing.

He wrote: ‘Crucial discovery concerning NATO designation REZ375. Have copies of documents taken from wreck of
Titanic
that describe alternative nuclear energy process. May hold
many other valuable secrets. Other parties very interested. Please make your bid.’

He stared at the screen for a few minutes listening to the waves breaking on the sand. A gull landed on the window ledge, its head swivelling to get a good look inside the room. It pecked at the
brickwork and flew off.

A message appeared on the screen: ‘Authorized to offer $2 million. $250,000 now, the rest upon delivery of interpretation of document and satisfaction with its value.’

Newman ran a hand through his hair. ‘I assume you are attempting a joke,’ he typed in reply. ‘$10 million. Fifty per cent in my Swiss account by –’ he glanced at
his watch‘– 9 p.m. EST today. The remainder on acceptance of interpretation.’

There was a much longer silence. Newman pulled himself up from the desk, picked up the bowl from the table in the middle of the room and started to eat the soup as he gazed out at the ocean
swelling and shifting in the darkness.

A low bleep came from the laptop. A new message. He walked over and read the response, feeling a stab of disappointment before turning towards the Mac and Fortescue’s calculations. He
would let the Chinese stew for a while before giving his final offer to them.

He scanned in the pages and created a password-protected file on the Mac, opened the first page and started to study the equations. There was another bleep from the laptop. The same message
resent. Newman smiled to himself. ‘Getting antsy, are we, guys?’ he said aloud, and with remarkable self-control, he turned back to the Mac.

He gave it ten minutes, during which he was able to delve head-first into Fortescue’s handwritten equations from over a century ago. Then he broke away and tapped a new message into the
laptop: ‘$5 million – same terms as my previous offer. This is my last.’

He had barely returned to the desktop Mac when a reply came through. A single word: ‘Agreed.’

Max Newman had always had a natural empathy with mathematics. A prodigy who had entered Yale at the age of fifteen, he obtained his degree in a year and a PhD by the age of
eighteen – just as most kids were starting undergraduate courses. It was both a gift and a curse – he had always known that. He had lived and breathed mathematics to the exclusion of
all else. He had no friends, no lovers, he could barely hold a conversation with his parents. Aged nineteen, he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s; no one who knew him was in the slightest
bit surprised.

He had gravitated towards the US Navy because he had become interested in nuclear physics and it offered him the best opportunity to research at his own pace. And Professor Newman was ambitious.
Not in any normal sense. He wanted money, but not to spend on Lamborghinis and loose women. He wanted to establish his own research facility, to explore his more cutting-edge ideas without some
admiral breathing down his neck.

Which was why he had agreed to spy for the Chinese and why, when he saw the documents that had been recovered from the famous wreck of the
Titanic
and flown straight to Norfolk Naval
Base, he knew he had hit pay dirt. But he also knew the Chinese were not the only people interested in this find and he had already established nefarious links with others along the way.

Sitting in this room, for all its pretty vistas and comfy furniture, he was beginning to regret this last decision, and in particular choosing Glena Buckingham’s multi-trillion-dollar
colossus Eurenergy as a second paymaster a few months ago. This was his first job for them. He had called them as soon as he heard of the radiation leak – even before Fortescue’s notes
had been retrieved. His contact at Eurenergy had got it immediately and was super-keen. So keen in fact it had landed him here, holed up against his will. Glena Buckingham, the CEO of Eurenergy,
one of the two largest energy resource conglomerates on the planet, was clearly anxious to get hold of the information from the
Titanic.
Three years ago she had appeared on the cover of
Time,
and only a few months earlier she had been listed as the second most powerful woman in the world. Newman knew a little of her past. She was British by birth, a scientist by training,
a former Cambridge fellow. She had started out as a biochemist before setting up a biotech firm that had made her extremely rich when it was floated. Four years ago she had assumed the helm of
Eurenergy. Famed for her ruthlessness, she was nevertheless respected for her intelligence and vision.

Clearly, Eurenergy did not trust him; which was, he had to admit, understandable. He did have every intention of giving them the information, just not on an exclusive basis.

He studied the mathematical symbols and lines of figures on the screen. To anyone other than a specialist in the field of particle physics, the equations would have been totally meaningless
– sets of squiggles as indecipherable as Egyptian hieroglyphics. But to Newman, the screenful of information was as easy to interpret as a musical score in the hands of Mozart.

‘But my God!’ he thought, ‘Fortescue’s thinking had been weird, so utterly radical!’ He could only wonder at the sheer genius of the man who, over a century ago,
had created an atomic theory three decades ahead of its time and via an entirely different and beautifully simple route. It was staggering.

He ran through the basic history in his head. Just as the Second World War broke out in Europe scientists across the world were beginning to realize the power held within the atom. A couple of
years later, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch laid out the theory for fission – a nuclear process for creating vast amounts of energy from splitting uranium with neutrons.

But, twenty years earlier, unknown to anyone, Fortescue had envisioned a nuclear process that released even greater amounts of energy from a quite different procedure. He and Rutherford had then
apparently developed experiments to test it.

It was all here in this file, all here in the twenty-odd pages of notes Fortescue had with him on the
Titanic.
And it had almost reached the States, almost initiated a nuclear weapons
development programme before the First World War.

But why, Newman wondered, hadn’t Rutherford continued the research after the
Titanic
went down? Why wasn’t the programme reinitiated? Was Fortescue carrying the only
available sample of the enriched ibnium? Perhaps Rutherford could have refined more, but the British government had lost heart. Yeah . . . that was one possibility. Another was that without
Fortescue the bomb could not be made. He was, after all, a formidable physicist, a far greater scientist than Rutherford.
That must be it,
Newman concluded.
Fortescue was the real
brains behind this, and when he died the bomb died with him, only to be resurrected in a different form a generation later.

He gazed at the screen, transfixed by the equations. A cold chill ran down his spine. ‘No,’ he said aloud. ‘No, No . . . that can’t be right!’ He tapped the mouse,
froze the equations and retraced his reasoning, finger to the screen.

‘What the . . .?’

He pushed back his chair and started to pace, his head filled with mathematical figures, symbols, numbers. ‘Fortescue had discovered cold fusion!’ Cold fusion – a way to
harness nuclear power at room temperature using only everyday chemicals to make it work. Even today it was the ‘Holy Grail of modern physics’. He was talking to himself again, his voice
quiet, incredulous. He stared around him in a daze. ‘How is that possible?’

He strode back to the computer, sat, scrolled down the scanned-in pages and stopped abruptly. ‘Jesus Christ!’ He closed his eyes and kept them closed. A crazy part of him thought
that when he opened his eyes again, the Mac would tell him something different.

He opened them, read through the clustered figures and slammed his fist down on the desk so hard it sent a tremor of pain along his arm to his shoulder. ‘It’s not all here! For
Christ’s sake! It’s not all here!’

*

Newman had no conscious awareness of time passing. He existed now in a bubble of his own cerebral creation, an ocean of mathematics roiling like the real one beyond the window.
Once he had spotted the enormous leap forward Fortescue had made, he could not rest. He saw that some of the work was missing, but this would not stop him. He had to at least try to fill in the
gaps . . . to make it all fit together.

By the time he had fully reasoned through what was there in the short collection of papers, dawn was breaking, autumnal sun slithering over the oceanic horizon, revealing clusters of yachts in
the swell.

Rubbing his eyes, he leaned back in his chair straining to hear any sounds of movement from the rooms below. Then he booted up his laptop and dialled the connection he had made the night before.
As the computer found the uplink to the satellite, he checked his account. The promised deposit had been made. Excellent.

The laptop produced a series of clicks and bleeps, then a message flashed across the screen: ‘Connection Green: Signal Strength 84%’.
Not great, but good enough,
Newman
thought and started to type again. He wrote: ‘As promised. Here is the interpretation of the work found at REZ375. It has exceeded my expectations and I’m sure it will yours. Please
have your scientists confirm interpretations and authorize second payment within twenty-four hours.’

A few minutes passed and a response came. ‘Receipt acknowledged. Will update you in due course.’

Newman yawned, feeling incredibly tired. A strange sound came from the desktop Mac. It took him a few moments to realize that it was an in-coming Skype call. He brought up the management screen,
found the Skype icon, clicked it, then scanned the name of the caller. It simply said: ‘EURENERGY’. He hovered the cursor over the green ‘connect’ symbol and a woman’s
face appeared.

Even though they had never met, Newman recognized her immediately. It was Glena Buckingham herself.

‘My people picked up your encrypted call to us last night concerning the find at REZ375,’ she said. ‘I then had a call from Van Lee. He impressed upon me the fact that you were
very excited and that you had complied with our wishes to interpret the find.’

Newman took a deep breath before replying. He felt incredibly nervous. This woman exuded an indefinable power, and it terrified him. ‘Your, er . . . colleague was very insistent,’ he
said.

‘I told him to be, professor; and he is indeed a very persuasive man.’

A sound came from behind Newman. He half turned to see Jimmy coming in through the door, another tray in his hands. Van Lee walked two paces behind him. Jimmy put the fresh tray on the table,
lifted the old one and walked out, closing the door behind him. Van Lee stood close to the coffee table, arms folded across his chest. He’d changed into a tracksuit and trainers and he
smelled of sweat.

Newman swung back to the screen. ‘Well, you’ll be pleased to hear I didn’t sleep last night and I have something very, very interesting for you.’

Buckingham raised an expensively groomed eyebrow.

‘I take it this line is secure?’

‘Couldn’t be more so.’

‘Could I have some of that coffee?’ Newman turned to Van Lee.

The man tilted his head and was about to make a flip response but changed his mind.

A few seconds later Newman had a mug in his hand and had taken a gulp. Then he explained what he had discovered.

Buckingham said nothing, just let him speak. When he had finished she remained silent for ten seconds, fixing Newman’s eyes. ‘Cold fusion. You have proof?’ she said finally.
‘You’re able to show me your working? Clear notes explaining everything in detail?’

‘I can send it all to you now.’ He lifted the document from a file on the management screen and dumped it into the Skype ‘send’ box.

It arrived almost instantly. Newman could see Glena Buckingham open it and start to read. It was identical to the one he had sent to the Chinese submarine.

Van Lee had poured himself a coffee and was seated in a sofa on the far side of the room from the desk, his eyes fixed on the back of the professor’s head.

Newman understood that he should say nothing, nothing at all. Let the work speak for itself. There was no need for him to add anything. But as the minutes passed, his anxiety mounted. Buckingham
was studying the information, her face bone hard.

She stopped, looked up, met Newman’s gaze. ‘This is quite extraordinary,’ she said. ‘Who else has the raw data?’

‘Just the pair at the Marine Institute, Lou Bates and Kate Wetherall . . . and, of course, Captain Derham, the section commander.’