The Titanic Enigma (21 page)

Secker brightened. ‘I thought I would give you the bad news first.’ He risked the faintest of smiles. ‘Copies in the hands of the navy and the two marine archaeologists Kate
Wetherall and Lou Bates have been retrieved or destroyed and we have the originals.’

‘And you got them cleanly?’

He paused. ‘Successfully, Glena.’

She glared at him. ‘Explain.’

‘Van Lee’s men stole the originals from the lab at the Institute of Marine Studies and they destroyed the hard drive that had been used to store the copies Wetherall and Bates made.
Van Lee lost three men in the effort. He had ordered them to stay behind at the institute so they could check that the marine archaeologists didn’t have a copy.’

Buckingham frowned. ‘I don’t follow.’

‘Yesterday morning, the two archaeologists went to the house of George Campion. Apparently the woman, Dr Wetherall, is a family friend. Van Lee assumed they had left a copy at the
scientist’s house. They searched the place but came up empty.’

‘Hold on,’ Buckingham snapped. ‘He raided the home of Professor George Campion?’

‘Yes. But . . .’

‘But what, Hans?’ she asked menacingly.

‘Van Lee’s men were a little heavy-handed.’

‘Jesus!’ Buckingham exploded and pushed herself up from the table. ‘How fucking heavy-handed? Don’t tell me they . . .’

‘They murdered Professor Campion and his wife.’

‘What! You . . . That man was one of the few human beings I ever respected. Dammit!’ She returned to the table leaning forward, palms flat on the precious wood. Secker could hear her
breathing. ‘Well . . . what’s done . . .’ she said, fixing her assistant with a truly terrifying stare. ‘Go on.’

‘A pair of Van Lee’s men followed Wetherall and Bates and drove their car off the road. They survived, but the car was . . .’ He flicked his fingers in the air to signify the
vehicle going up in smoke. Van Lee’s men then cornered them when they returned to the Marine Institute late last night. They got nothing from them and were themselves ambushed by a navy team
led by Captain Jerry Derham.’

‘Sounds like an utter shambles.’

‘Not at all. We have all the copies or they have been destroyed.’

‘How do you know the copy in the car was not retrieved by the navy?’

‘Van Lee informs me that would not have been possible. Glena, we have effectively stopped NATO in its tracks. I would suspect that we shall see the ships returning to port and the
Exclusion Zone—’

‘Don’t be a bloody fool, Secker!’ Buckingham’s eyes were ablaze. ‘Even if we have the original documents and all the copies have been destroyed, you’re
forgetting Newman.’

‘But he’s—’

‘He’s out there with a copy of the document from the
Titanic
and the scientific knowledge to know what it means. As you pointed out, he is a clever man. He was certainly not
foolish enough to trust us, now, was he?’

‘No, but—’

‘And he must have known Van Lee’s men were tailing him from the house in Plymouth. He owes us no favours, does he?’

‘No,’ Hans Secker agreed again, sighed and looked at the table.

‘You may – I repeat, may – have snatched the Egbert Fortescue materials from NATO, but there are other forces railed against us now. I want Professor Max Newman, preferably
alive, here in this building so that I may pick his very ample brain. But if that isn’t possible, I want that brain . . . deactivated.’

Norfolk, Virginia. Present day.

The morning after the lab was wrecked, Kate was stuck in early morning traffic on Interstate 264 just outside Norfolk when her cell phone trilled. A pain shot through her
side and she winced as she leaned forward to punch the ‘receive’ button.

‘Jerry. What’s happened?’

‘Hi, Kate. Looks like Newman’s completely vanished. Can we meet up this morning for a briefing?’

‘Sure. I’m on my way to the institute. Lou’s already there. You want to hook up at the cafeteria?’ She glanced at the dash, then the traffic. ‘Half an
hour?’

*

There were a few people at the tables closest to the counter. Kate ordered and spotted Lou at a table near the back wall. Derham appeared as she walked over. A few minutes later
he joined them with a large cappuccino in his hand.

‘Better bring us up to speed,’ Lou said, taking a sip of coffee.

‘We’ve searched Newman’s place in Plymouth. Someone had already gone over it.’

‘No clue as to where he’s gone?’

‘We’ve checked. He’s left the States; been skipping through airlines and continents. We lost him after he flew out of Bangkok.’

‘To where?’

‘Damascus. Syrians wouldn’t help us.’

‘So obviously Newman has been working for someone,’ Kate said.

‘And he either fell out with them or he’s double-dealing,’ Lou added.

Kate shuddered. ‘This is all getting a bit . . .’

‘Out of hand?’ Derham offered.

‘I was thinking “crazy” actually. A few days ago we were in Bermuda working on a pilgrim shipwreck. It’s all a bit much to take, to be honest.’

‘I hear you. But that’s just the way it is. And, although I hate to upset you even more, you have to accept that you two are in the greatest danger.’

‘And I guess we’re no closer to retrieving a copy of the Fortescue document?’ Lou said, placing his mug on the table.

‘No. My tech guys will be working today on the smashed-up scanner from your lab. They may be able to recover something useful.’

The scientists did not look encouraged. ‘We’re pretty much left with nothing,’ Kate said without meeting Derham’s eyes. ‘We had Egbert Fortescue’s papers and
lost them. We’ve learned that Newman is a spy and he has a copy of the material. And, even if we were to retrieve the equations, my godfather was convinced not all the calculations were there
and that Fortescue must have developed the work on the
Titanic
before it went down, so that’s all gone too!’

They were quiet for a moment, the sounds of the espresso machine and the chat of the other customers a backdrop to their thoughts. Lou started to fiddle with a packet of sugar in his bandaged
hand, tossed it down and took a sip from his coffee.

‘Newman realized straight away that there was more to the Fortescue document than a bunch of jumbled equations,’ Kate remarked.

‘George Campion did say the man was a fine scientist.’

‘But it even took George a while to see the cold fusion material. Newman wouldn’t have seen that immediately.’

‘I think that’s not really the point,’ Derham said. ‘That document is inflammatory enough without the work that Fortescue was doing immediately before his death. It
includes an alternative way to create atomic energy that could be cheaper, cleaner, safer, easier to produce than the methods we use today. The cold fusion stuff is the icing on the
cake.’

‘Some icing!’ Lou exclaimed.

‘But we don’t know that it is at all practicable,’ Kate said.

‘Sure,’ Derham replied. ‘But if we put cold fusion aside, the basic work Rutherford and Fortescue were doing could itself lead to some really significant advances in energy
production. There are agencies out there that cannot be too careful. They are always on the lookout for anything that could threaten the conventional energy supply lines they control.’

‘What?’

‘Well, think about it, guys,’ Derham said. ‘The mere suggestion of an efficient powerful new form of harness-able energy would make some people very unhappy. On the one hand
you have governments spending vast fortunes building conventional power stations, while on the other, private corporations earn hundreds of billions from oil, petrol, gas.’

‘And Newman has had the EF document for what . . . thirty-six hours? He would have got to the cold fusion stuff,’ Lou said.

‘Which is incomplete,’ Kate reminded them.

‘Yes, but it could be enough. It could be reverse-engineered, couldn’t it?’ Jerry Derham asked.

‘Search me. I’m just a marine archaeologist!’ Kate spat. ‘A very pissed-off one.’

‘All right.’ Derham put his hands up. ‘Let’s calm down.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ Kate persisted. ‘This is the sort of thing you’re used to. You’re military. I’m not . . . we’re not.’

‘Understood.’

‘I just want to get on with my work.’ She flicked her hair behind her ear.

‘But there’s nothing to work on here now, is there, Kate?’ Lou interjected wearily.

Kate looked round at him seriously. ‘No, you’re right. There isn’t.’

It took Lou and Kate two hours to clear up the lab. They went through the motions mostly in miserable silence, exchanging the odd word despondently. It seemed as though every
single item in the room had been moved, every piece of paper displaced, every piece of glassware smashed.

Kate slapped a soaked cleaning cloth onto a workbench, let out a small cry and slumped into a chair. ‘Hell, I’ve had it with this!’

Lou came over, pulled a chair up close to hers and took her hand.

‘It’s almost done,’ he said softly.

‘It’s not that!’ Kate snapped. ‘Oh, God! I’m sorry, Lou.’ She squeezed his hand and gave him a weak smile. ‘It’s this whole bloody thing.
I’ve lost my godparents . . . You saw the horror . . .’ She burst into tears.

Lou held her tight and let her cry on his shoulder. After a moment she pulled back and forced herself to calm down, wiped away the tears, her stoicism kicking in.

‘I feel like walking out that door and getting on a plane back to Bermuda,’ she declared. ‘In fact, why shouldn’t I? I’m not a bloody conscript!’

‘There’s nothing to stop you, Kate. Except . . .’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Except what?’

‘I think that you want to get to the bottom of all this just as much as I do.’

‘There are limits!’

The phone rang. It took Lou a moment to find it under a pile of files.

‘I’ve got some news.’ It was Jerry Derham.

‘Good news, I hope.’

‘Bit of each actually.’

‘OK.’

‘Can you and Kate come over?’

Lou covered the receiver. ‘Jerry. Has some news. Wants us to go see him. You still fighting or flying back to the sunshine?’

Kate rolled her eyes and wiped her nose. ‘What do you think, wise guy?’

‘We’ll be there in an hour.’

*

A uniformed officer had been posted outside their lab. He drove them to the naval base, escorted them through security, on to Captain Derham’s office, and then waited
outside. Lou and Kate walked in to see Kevin Grant in a chair facing the captain’s desk.

‘You remember Kevin?’ Derham said and indicated that Kate and Lou should sit. The young guy nodded and lifted from his lap a metal box about the size of a paperback book. ‘The
hard drive,’ he said. ‘Damaged beyond repair, I’m afraid. Couldn’t get a thing from it.’

‘Fantastic!’ Lou said and turned to Kate. She had a glazed expression on her face. ‘Jerry, you said you had good and bad news. Not seeing much good so far!’

‘Ah, well, Kevin here can enlighten you on that too. He’s decoded the message that Fortescue had with the documents.’

‘You’re kidding!’ Lou said. ‘You said it would be really difficult to crack because it was so short.’

Grant beamed. ‘It did take a long time . . . by my standards!’

‘For God’s sake!’ Kate exclaimed. ‘What did it say?’

‘Security Box 19AS. Cargo hold 4.’

Lou whistled. ‘He must have hidden the other part of his work there. But why?’

‘Who knows?’ Derham answered. ‘But my suspicion would be that he believed someone, an enemy agent, for example, was also travelling on the
Titanic.
Why else would he
be so careful?’

‘But what are the chances of the security box still being in one piece, or traceable among the wreckage?’ Kate asked.

‘Quite good actually,’ Derham replied. He turned his computer screen to face them and walked round the desk. ‘As soon as Kevin decoded the message I had my people scour all the
footage of the wreck taken recently by Commander Milford and her team aboard the
Armstrong.
They’ve developed a program that matches up the entire wreck with the original schematic
of the ship used by the men who built it at the Harland & Wolff yards in Belfast. They’ve found cargo hold 4, just there.’ He tapped the screen then reached for the mouse and
shuffled it. The image on the screen expanded and closed in on a section of wreckage about twenty yards by ten.

‘That’s amazing!’ Kate exclaimed. ‘And it’s intact?’

Derham returned to his seat, rotated the screen back into place and picked up a sheet of glossy photo paper. He handed it to Kate. Lou looked over her shoulder.

‘A computer-enhanced image from the lab guys,’ Derham said.

The picture showed a close-up of the chunk of shipwreck. The ends were ragged, but a long section in the middle had remained relatively unscathed. They could see two doors. There was a figure
painted on each. The one on the right was illegible; on the left-hand door, the writing had been worn away and was faded in patches but it was just about discernible. A big number
‘4’.

‘That’s cool,’ Lou said. ‘But we don’t have the first document, so whatever Fortescue put in this hold is not going to be much use to us, is it?’

Derham sighed. ‘I can’t argue with that.’

‘I’d love to get my hands on the bastards who trashed the lab,’ Kate said. There was real venom in her voice.

‘I think you may have met some of them,’ Derham replied.

‘In the car park.’

Derham nodded. ‘The three dead men were clean, no ID, nothing. We still don’t know who they are or who they were working for.’

‘Professionals,’ Kate said. ‘They knew the layout of our lab, the function of the digital copier, and they disabled the security cameras along the corridor as well as the one
in our lab.’

Kate looked to Lou and saw he was deep in thought, staring into space.

‘Say that again,’ he said, turning to Kate.

‘What? The men were pros – they knew the layout.’

‘No, after that.’

‘The digital copier . . .’

‘No . . . no.’ Lou paused. ‘The security camera in our lab. I forgot we even had one.’