The Titanic Enigma (32 page)

Lou got to his feet and looked around.

The cargo hold was about three yards to a side. The air was breathable, but they had no idea how long it would last. As soon as the suits were deactivated they began to feel the temperature
drop. The water outside was close to freezing point.

Some of the sensor and comms systems of the LMC suits were functioning even when the main systems had been powered down. Lou tapped the screen on his arm and scrolled down.

‘Radiation levels are high, but we can survive for a while. Luckily most of the remaining radiation is alpha and beta particles which can’t get through the skin of the cargo hold.
There is some residual gamma ray radiation.’

‘How long, Lou?’

He double-checked. ‘The radiation would get us first . . . forty minutes, maybe forty-five until we get a fatal dose. The cold? I reckon a bit longer. The air? Anyone’s guess. Or
maybe the whole thing will collapse first.’ He looked around at the corroded hold. ‘Take your pick.’

‘Some choice! How long do the suits need to recharge?’

‘No idea. I think we’re in completely uncharted territory now, Kate.’

The air stank of rust and rotting organic matter. Three of the walls were lined with hundreds of lockers and safety deposit boxes. Some of these had corroded; doors hung off rusted hinges
exposing crumbling contents; ragged papers and other detritus lay scattered across the rusted metal floor. The hold creaked, old brackets and joints feeling the strain of a century spent at the
bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

‘God, this place feels so creepy,’ Kate commented as they walked over to the nearest wall of boxes. ‘I never imagined I could feel claustrophobic on the ocean floor!’

They could just make out some numbers attached to the doors of the security boxes:
13BS . . . 28BS.
Kate turned towards the right adjacent wall and scanned along the rows and columns of
boxes until she could make out a number.

‘37AS,’ she called over to Lou and crouched to study some of the lower boxes. Eventually she found another label – 56AS – straightened and surveyed the boxes higher up.
Lou came over and they took an end each.

‘Got it,’ Lou called. Kate joined him. He was pointing at a row about shoulder height. ‘16AS.’ He ran a hand along the box fronts. ‘21AS . . . Too far.’ He
stopped, backtracked. ‘This must be 19AS.’

The hold shook. Kate started to fall and grabbed at Lou. He put his right hand against the wall of boxes to steady himself. A loud grinding sound came from their left.

‘It’s not happy!’ Lou commented.

‘Come on.’ Kate stepped forward and tried the handle of deposit box 19AS. It was stuck fast. ‘Typical!’

Lou rummaged in a pouch on the belt of his suit and lifted out a small plastic cylinder. Depressing a button on the side, a blade shot from one end. He leaned in towards the door of the box and
slipped the blade along the edge.

The hold shuddered again. The knife slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. Kate stumbled, made a grab for the wall of deposit boxes and landed on her front.

Lou ran over.

‘You OK?’

She nodded and tried to stand. ‘Ow! My God!’

‘Here,’ Lou said and helped her up.

Kate tried to put weight on her left leg and screamed in agony.

‘Sit,’ Lou commanded. ‘Stay still.’

Another massive jolt far more violent than the last reverberated around the walls. It went on for several seconds.

Lou froze. ‘Shit! It really isn’t happy!’

A horrible crunching sound came from the corner of the cargo hold. Kate swivelled round and they both saw the wall start to distort, water cascading down one corner of the hold.

‘It’s going!’ Lou screamed and dived to the floor next to Kate. ‘Pull up your helmet!’ He was tugging his on. ‘Reactivate the suit, Kate.’

‘But . . .’

Lou had his helmet on and locked. Kate couldn’t move.

‘KATE!’ Lou grabbed her helmet and pulled it into position, flicked the clasp and stabbed at her wrist control panel. Pulling back, he did the same to his own keypad. The suits made
low hissing sounds; a row of lights on each arm flicked on, blinked orange and then green. The liquid metal carbon expanded rapidly.

Kate tried to stand up again.

‘Stay put, Kate!’ Lou shouted. ‘I can do this.’

The floor started to buckle. Lou lost his balance, tried to grab at the boxes and stumbled into them.

The entire hold began to shake as if it were about to launch from the ocean floor. Kate screamed, the sound coming loud through their comms.

Lou scrambled to his feet, but for a moment he couldn’t get his bearings. He pulled himself along the wall using the gaping doorless holes and found 26AS. Grabbing his way a few feet
further, he reached Fortescue’s deposit box.

They both heard the sound at the same moment, turned and saw the inner door of the lock start to open inwards. A figure appeared at the opening.

‘Thank God!’ came a voice through their comms.

‘Jerry!’ Lou exclaimed.

The captain rushed over to them. ‘Where’s Jane Milford?’

‘Her suit . . .’ Lou started to say.

Derham sighed and looked down. ‘OK, Kate?’

‘I think I’ve broken my—’

The hold rocked and the sound of snapping metal came from directly overhead. A crack appeared one end of the roof and stuttered across the length of the cube, zig-zagging like a fissure on a
frozen lake. The walls shook. A torrent of water poured in. Lou grabbed the nearest locker to steady himself and saw Derham struggling to keep upright.

‘Come on!’ the captain screamed above the noise.

‘But the box. I can get it,’ Lou cried. He looked down searching for his knife. He couldn’t see it – it was now under a foot of swirling dark water.

Derham was easing Kate to her feet.

Lou hammered on the door of the security box. ‘Damn you!’

‘Lou . . . Gotta go, man!’ Derham hollered. He turned and with his spare hand tried to pull Lou round, but Lou shrugged him off and slammed his fist into the front of the box
again.

‘Shit! . . . You . . .’

The water was now up to their knees.

‘Lou! . . . Please!’ Kate screamed. But he seemed oblivious.

A metal panel broke away from the roof and swung down, screeching as it buckled and contorted.

Derham pulled Kate to him and headed for the door.

‘No!’ she screamed. ‘Jerry . . . NO! LOU . . .!’

Tears of frustration ran down Lou’s cheeks, blurring his vision. He took a gasp of air from the tanks of his suit and hit the door of 19AS one last time. It held, stuck fast.

He felt Derham’s hand grab his arm and this time he did not resist. Spinning on his heel, he stepped forward, grasped Kate’s arm and the three of them hurtled to the airlock door as
the cube began to fold in on itself.

Five miles outside Lyon, France. Following day.

Five minutes before leaving for a state banquet in Paris, Glena Buckingham was dressed in a pale-blue sequinned cocktail dress her stylist really should have advised her
against. She had never possessed much in the way of sartorial sense or style. If she were three billion euros poorer, she would have been viewed as the same nerd she had been at school and at
Cambridge University. Jewels, Versace and professionally applied make-up helped, but they did not do a thorough enough job.

She sat with Hans Secker on the balcony adjoining the drawing room. Between them stood a table with a pair of partly consumed gin and tonics. Before them stretched a magnificent view of the
Rhône Valley. Glena Buckingham was smoking.

‘So,’ she said, lifting her glass, blue smoke rising from the end of the Cuban cigar in her other hand. ‘We can chalk up a victory, I suppose.’

‘Why the reserve?’ Secker replied. ‘I actually think we should be very pleased with ourselves. A substantial chunk of the Fortescue material has been lost for ever; the rest is
at least partially in the public domain and incomplete enough to stop any clever clogs from developing cold fusion within a decade, minimum.’

Buckingham nodded sagely. ‘More through luck than skill,’ she said, turning dark eyes upon her executive assistant and drawing on the cigar. ‘Our best man, Sterling Van Lee,
singularly failed in his operation. If the Gods had not been on our side, those two pain-in-the-ass scientists, Wetherall and Bates, would have retrieved the rest of the Fortescue documents and the
game would be up. Someone would have developed cold fusion within two to three years, and you and I would be out of a job.’

‘But that did not happen, did it, Glena?’

‘There’s always the danger that given enough inducement, Van Lee or one of his men will blab,’ Buckingham responded icily.

‘Measures are in place to prevent that from happening. Van Lee and his two surviving buddies will not see the sunrise tomorrow.’

‘And Newman?’

Secker took a sip of his drink to cover his unease. ‘We will find him.’

Buckingham exhaled quickly through her nose, drank some more of her gin and tonic, resting its base in her palm. With the cigar clenched between her teeth, she said: ‘I have always been a
glass half-full type, Hans.’ She pulled away the cigar and produced a faint smile. ‘And so I accept that we have won this fight. It was a close shave, but we did win.’

Then she lifted her drink again. ‘To victory,’ she said and drained the glass.

Kota Kinabalu, Indonesia. Next morning.

Professor Max Newman was seated at a table in the Coconut Bar close to the edge of the beach watching the gentle turquoise waves roll across the white sand.

It was early and quiet in the bar. An old TV stood on a shelf in a corner near the bar, the sound barely audible.

Newman twirled the contents of his cocktail glass and took a sip. He had arrived only the previous night, reaching the hotel on the beach in a rickety cab just as a tropical storm broke. And
even though he had been helped from the car by a pair of porters with umbrellas, by the time he had reached the reception desk, he was soaked through. Sleeping late, he had enjoyed a full
breakfast, armed himself with sunscreen and a straw hat and wandered down to the beach.

The desperate escape from the United States had taken him to Bangkok, Damascus and Tripoli before he backtracked east to Jakarta and then the short hop to Kota Kinabalu. He knew he could never
rest and relax, not completely. Not only had he stolen from his own government and passed on sensitive material to a rival state, he had taken large sums of money from the Chinese, and they would
not be happy with him now they knew they had paid a fortune for material that had gone public within a matter of days. He could admit to betraying America, he told himself. But he could not be
blamed for upsetting the Chinese. It wasn’t his fault that forces beyond his control had accessed the same material and handed it over to the public. Not his fault at all.

He was draining the cocktail glass when he noticed something new appear on the TV: a rather unflattering photograph of Sterling Van Lee.

He got up from the table and walked closer to where the set was perched so he could hear it properly.

‘Another, sir?’ the barman asked.

Newman shushed him and flapped his left hand irritably.

‘. . . was the leader of the team who stowed away on the
Armstrong
, killing most of her crew,’ a reporter was saying as the image changed to show the faces of Van
Lee’s accomplices. ‘But now, the three who survived the SAS assault on the vessel, Steve Heynerman, Al Brillstein and Van Lee himself, are dead. They were being held in three separate
cells at a military detention facility outside Washington. Each of the three men was poisoned. A thorough investigation has begun . . .’

Newman stood transfixed, feeling his heart race. He suddenly felt a desperate urge to urinate and for a horrible moment he thought he was about to wet himself.

‘Bathroom?’ he asked the barman. The man pointed to a door just beyond an overhanging shade at the front of the bar.

Newman walked quickly over to the washroom, pushed on the door and rushed to the urinal. He heard the door swing open again behind him but was too engrossed in relieving himself to take any
notice.

Jing Bojing, Secret Police designation Chai454, moved silently across the floor to stand two feet behind the man he had followed from Kota Kinabalu airport the previous night. He lifted the
garrotte and slipped it around Newman’s neck.

Newman struggled, his brain trying, through the pain and terror, to understand what exactly was happening. He caught a glimpse of his assailant in a faded and fractured mirror above the urinal
and seeing the man’s features, he knew which of his enemies had caught up with him first. The last of the air in his lungs left him, the wire of the garrotte caught his jugular and for a few
seconds he saw blood spray from his neck before the light darkened to nothing.

Norfolk, Virginia. Twenty hours later.

Kate was wearing a loose-fitting top and baggy running shorts, her hair tied back as she sat up in bed in her apartment, late afternoon sun streaming through the drawn
curtains. Her leg in an aluminum cast was held in a support at a forty-five degree angle.

Jerry Derham had done everything he could to make her comfortable. When she had insisted on being allowed home, the navy had provided her with a private nurse.

Even so, she felt physically and emotionally drained. Her body needed to recuperate, but the real pain came from her sense of loss, the terrible things that had happened to her godparents, the
horrible death of Jane Milford. She knew that she needed to get back to work to help eradicate the pain.

She touched the screen of her iPad and her BBC World News app appeared. A reporter was standing aboard a naval vessel, the ocean wind ruffling his hair.

‘The story has been a hundred years in the making,’ he said, ‘but only during the past few days has the astonishing truth emerged.’ The picture changed to a faded sepia
photograph of a stiff-looking Egbert Fortescue in a round-collared shirt, tie and raffish bowler.