The Titanic Enigma (20 page)

‘Your uncle and aunt are hoping for a fresh new start in America.’

Billy nodded. ‘Uncle Bert’s a strong man. Been working on the roads in East London. He reckons there’ll be a lot of road building going on in New York and
there’ll be jobs for the both of us.’

‘Well, you shall not be joining him, Billy.’

The boy gave Fortescue a puzzled look.

‘You have a talent so prodigious, it would be a scandal to squander it and I shall do everything I can to make sure that does not happen. No, Billy, when we reach New York, I
shall have a word with your uncle and aunt and we’ll see what we can do about getting you a decent education.’

Billy looked at Fortescue and the man could see that there was not the merest hint of hope in the boy’s eyes.

Billy did not return to Third Class; he still had plenty of zest for what he liked to call ‘exploring’. Fortescue saw him out onto the deck, and from
there he snuck into a ‘crew only’ corridor. He was an expert at dodging out of sight. It was a skill he had acquired in Belfast where he had spent the first ten years of his life before
moving to Hackney. Where he came from such skills kept you alive. He had known nothing but thievery and grubbing for food, so stealth and ‘exploring’ came naturally.

He slunk into the kitchen. It was a large room crammed with brand-new ovens and steel counters. Pipes ran across the ceiling; the floor was spotless and buffed to a high polish. From
his vantage point behind a cupboard Billy could see the staff rushing around, each dedicated to their own particular task, cogs in a well-oiled machine that produced hundreds of meals each day for
the First Class passengers.

Billy watched a young lad, perhaps no more than a couple of years older than him, cutting thin slices of meat from a heavy pink ham on a thick oak chopping board. A row of delicate
porcelain plates lay on the counter to the young cook’s right. As a sliver of meat slipped from the ham onto the chopping board he lifted it and placed it decorously on the closest
plate.

A gruff voice from across the kitchen called out. The boy looked up and dashed over to one of the senior chefs. Checking it was safe, Billy slipped from behind the cupboard, crouched
low and shuffled over to the counter where the boy had stood. In one swift movement he peeked over the edge of the counter, grabbed a fistful of meat and swung back round. He was back behind the
cupboard, stuffing his face with the luscious lean ham before the young man had even reached the senior chef.

Two minutes later Billy had slipped from the kitchen unobserved and was creeping along a little-used corridor leading from a set of storerooms to the boat deck. He heard voices
– two people – a man and a woman. It sounded as though they were approaching from just beyond a bend a few yards ahead.

He felt a tingle of excitement. He could not keep going, nor could he turn and head back. Whoever was coming along the corridor would realize immediately that he was an intruder in
First Class; one glance at his filthy shirt and torn clothes would give him away.

There was nowhere to hide in the corridor. He spun on his heel, then changed his mind. The excitement turned to panic just as he glimpsed a door standing ajar a short way along the
passage in the direction of the two people approaching the bend. He dashed through the doorway.

It was a small, grey room; dark, the only light coming from a single porthole half blocked by one of several crates that took up most of the floor space. It smelled of damp rope,
grease and rubber. Billy guessed it was a storeroom for spare parts.

He expected the two people to pass the door and for their voices to fade away, but he ducked behind one of the crates just in case.

The couple stopped outside the storeroom door. Billy held his breath, listening intently.

‘Let’s pull in here,’ the man said.

‘Good God!’ the woman replied.

‘The cleaners will be in our rooms now. Can you suggest anywhere more salubrious?’

Billy heard the woman huff as they entered the room. The door squeaked as it was pulled inwards and clunked closed.

‘I still can’t get anything,’ the man said. He had a refined English voice.

‘But you had at least three hours last night and then all the time he was with the boy on deck,’ the woman replied. She had a distinctive foreign accent that Billy
couldn’t quite identify. He thought it was probably German.

‘After my last attempt he had the lock changed so I couldn’t get in. He obviously suspected something. It took me almost two hours to get a new key, by which time he was
back in the room.’

The woman huffed again. ‘You said you left no traces.’

‘I didn’t. The man must have a sixth sense. Did you gather anything from him? You were together long enough.’ There was a raw edge to the man’s
voice.

‘We were busy with other things. But you have seen photographs of Fortescue, the same as I have. Wickins is definitely the same man.’

‘And his cover story is pure fabrication?’

‘Of course . . . it’s just as we were told in Berlin, Charles. You did well to gather the information on the man and his mission. The surveillance of the scientists in
Manchester was worth you suffering the cold for.’

‘That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t have to put up with it!’

‘Oh, do stop moaning,’ the woman snapped. ‘You turn a compliment into a chance to whinge. I thought English public schools were meant to harden you chaps, make men
of you.’ She laughed mirthlessly.

‘I need another try in his cabin. I’m certain he has the material in the safe. We need a second diversion, get him out of therefor a while.’

The woman sighed. ‘And then what? If you get the stuff, we still have almost three days before we reach New York.’

‘Well, obviously Mr Wickins has to be dealt with, doesn’t he? It’s a big ocean to lose a body in.’

Behind the crate Billy was itching to see the faces of the two people, but he could not tell precisely where they were standing, and for all he knew one of them could be looking his
way. He slowly shuffled along the ground, inching his way towards a narrow gap between two crates. He slid along the cold metal floor, eased upright a little and pulled close to the crack between
the boxes. With one eye to the opening, he could see the two grown-ups in profile. They stood just a few feet away.

The gasp was completely involuntary. It just seemed to escape from Billy’s throat.

The couple instantly stopped talking and he saw the dark outline of a person’s face peering over the top of the crate beside him. The boy yanked himself up and sprang away into
the room, charging straight into the woman. She produced a low growl as they collided and fell back against a bulkhead behind her.

Billy was at the door, tugging on the handle. He felt a hand grab his oily jacket, pulled on the door and heard the fabric rip. He slipped into the corridor, head down, and sped
along the hard floor. Looking up, he saw a steward in a white uniform, silver tray aloft. Billy crashed into him; the man staggered backwards, and the tray flew several feet along the passage,
smashing into the wall. Remnants of a late breakfast scattered, milk splashed up the wall and a silver pot of tea fell to the floor clanging across the metal, its contents slopping all
around.

Billy didn’t pause for breath. He heard the steward yell but he was at the end of the corridor and out along another passageway headed for the deck.

A maintenance man repairing an electric light on the wall close to the Grand Staircase saw the boy rushing towards him. He quickly downed his screwdriver and made to block
Billy’s path. The boy swung to his left, then to his right like a footballer taking on a defender, slipped under the man’s outstretched arm and straight into a gentleman who had at that
moment emerged from a corridor diagonally opposite.

Billy protested loudly and tried to wriggle free – then he looked up into the eyes of Egbert Fortescue.

GCHQ, Cheltenham, England. Present day.

Colin Edwards had only been in the job for a month and he was filled with excitement and pride that he had made it to Satellite Interpretational and Correlation Directive
Assistant (a SICDA). He had emailed his parents about his promotion as soon as he heard back in September, but he was a professional and had remembered to be absolutely circumspect when it came to
how much information he could pass on to them, which was actually very little. Even so, unknown to Colin, his email had been intercepted and given a light censorial dusting by a colleague called
Martin Fillmore, an Internet Interpretational and Correlation Directive Assistant (an IICDA) who Colin had chatted to in the canteen once or twice.

Colin was monitoring signals originating in the northeast of the United States and passing through NATO satellites with UKUSAJMA, or British-American Joint Military Assets designations, when he
noticed a tiny abnormality in the signal. It was something trivial – a one per cent difference between the bandwidth of the input and output signals from a single satellite, RANOS-132,
currently in geosynchronous orbit over the mid-Atlantic.

Anyone less keen than Colin, or with fewer hours at the monitoring console, would almost certainly have failed to notice the discrepancy. But Colin did notice it and he acted upon it. Isolating
the part of the output signal that was different to the inputted one for satellite RANOS-132, he ‘snipped it’ – that is, he cut the digital impulses from the rest of the signal
and isolated it in a file on his computer.

This stage, Colin knew, was almost always the easiest. He’d done it before in training when he had isolated and snipped a rogue emission from a fictitious orbiter in a simulator. It was
one thing to capture information, quite another to read it and far more difficult to interpret it.

He tried to open the snatched file, but it resisted his efforts. He then ran a program to decipher regular satellite emission files, but that also came up empty. At this point Colin decided to
call upon the help of his supervisor, Gordon Manners, who worked at a slightly larger console to his left.

Gordon surveyed Colin’s screen. ‘That’s not one of ours,’ he said matter-of-factly.

‘But how could that happen? It’s from a NATO satellite.’

‘Show me the positions and telemetries of all the orbiters within a hundred miles of RANOS-132.’

Colin ran his fingers over the keyboard of his console. A series of dots appeared on his screen. Each had a serial number attached that appeared as a red alphanumeric immediately beneath it.

‘There,’ Gordon said, his finger indicating a point on the screen. ‘A Chinese satellite within ten miles of RANOS. Must have leaked a signal. Ranos picked it up and it became
embedded in the output signal from the NATO orbiter.’

‘Shit!’

‘Pass it on to Decryption. Could be useful.’

‘Hang on, sir, I think I can get it out,’ Colin said, filled with enthusiasm.

Gordon Manners sighed quietly. He didn’t really like this kid, thought he was a little too full of himself, but he had been taught that good managers give their staff enough oxygen to
breathe. He stood beside Colin Edwards’s terminal, arms folded, as the young operator tapped away, shuffled the mouse, thought for a few moments, wrote in something fresh, had it knocked
back, waited, typed again and pushed himself back in his chair.

‘Gotcha,’ Colin Edwards declared.

On the screen a set of equations appeared. The Satellite Interpretational and Correlation Directive Assistant scrolled down and whistled.

Gordon Manners leaned in to study the screen. ‘What in God’s name is that?’

Five miles outside Lyon, France. Present day.

Hans Secker only ever appeared contrite in the presence of one person. He dined regularly with presidents and argued with prime ministers, none of whom fazed him; but now,
with the onerous task of breaking bad news to his boss, Glena Buckingham, contrition slithered across his face automatically.

They were seated on opposite sides of a Louis XVI table that the Sultan of Brunei had given Buckingham for her fortieth birthday. Secker had a MacBook in front of him.

‘If your face is anything to go by, I don’t think I’m going to like what you have to tell me, Hans,’ Buckingham said and studied her fingernails.

‘We still have no idea where Newman is.’

Buckingham looked at the table for a few seconds and when she raised her eyes to meet Secker’s her expression was surprisingly neutral. ‘I find it hard to believe that Professor
Newman could have evaded Van Lee and two of his best men at JFK after you were tipped off that he was switching planes there.’

‘He is a clever man, Glena.’

She slammed the table with the palm of her right hand, making Secker jolt. ‘We are cleverer,’ she hissed. ‘Well, at least you and Van Lee had better be.’ She took a deep
breath. ‘Alert every foreign agent. I want that man found. He cannot be allowed to disappear, not with the precious cargo he carries. Now, what of the other copies of the EF
material?’