All Honourable Men (28 page)

She knocked and came quickly into his cabin. “I told the steward we were
both
getting an early night and didn't want to be disturbed. And I listened at Dr Streibl's door and he's moaning louder than the wind, so I think we're safe from him. Good luck.”

Ranklin took the companion-way that led to the outside world rather than go through the saloon. The door onto the deck wasn't locked – presumably in case they had to abandon ship – and he stood outside it for a moment, rain lashing into his face like dust-shot, hoping his eyes would adjust to the darkness. They didn't much; a stormy night at sea is a very dark
place, and a wet, noisy and wallowing one as well. The
Loreley
didn't just roll, she also wanted to put her nose down and whuffle along like a badger. There were long shuddering spells when he guessed the propeller had come clear out of the water.

But when he started moving forward, at least there was a rail along the deck-house wall to grip. He worked along it towards the distant light of the bridge, step by step, hand by hand.

The door of the Captain's
Büro
was unlocked, just as Ranklin had hoped and expected. Locks and bolts were civilian concepts: a senior officer's cabin was
sacred
. He pulled the door shut behind him and kept gripping the knob as a hand-hold against the wandering floor.

It was even darker in here, he'd certainly need the torch. But the cabin had windows onto the main deck and roving half-shaded torch-light would look far more suspicious than drawn curtains, so after one flash to locate himself, he staggered about in the darkness pulling them shut. Then he sat in the desk chair, which was bolted to the floor, and played the torch around.

Apart from being the Captain's office, it must be his sea cabin – where he dossed down for an hour or two between storms – because it had a bunk along one wall and a clothes cupboard next to it. That just about left room for the desk, chair and the safe. It was about twice as big as the one on the train and spattered with old-fashioned brass trimmings, and perhaps a professional safe-cracker would have rubbed his hands with glee –
if
he could have got on board a naval vessel to begin with.

Ranklin seated himself on the floor in front of it, peered at the dial – a normal numerical one – and then dug in his pocket for his diary. It had two months' of fiction about Snaipe's dinner engagements and dentist's appointments, and at the back some figures posing as expenses, bets and train times. He began decoding.

“First crack the owner of the safe,” Mr Peters the locksmith had advised, and Ranklin had come as prepared as he could. So the first number to try was the Kaiser's birthday: 27–01–59. He
spun the knob two full turns anticlockwise, then onto 27. A full turn clockwise and onto 01. Then 59. If that had been right, he should have heard a small bar falling into place along the three notches on the now-aligned discs. He didn't, but there was plenty of noise from the ship and the sea, so he tugged at the handle anyway. Still nothing.

Start again with the Kaiser's accession as King of Prussia: 15–06–88. Nothing.

Then the date the German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles: 18–01–71. More nothing, and he began to doubt the Captain's patriotism.

So try his professionalism:
Grössadmiral
von Tirpitz's birthday, 19–03–49.

He couldn't remember what the remaining numbers were, though probably one was Admiral Prince Heinrich, the Kaiser's brother. And none of them worked. Just for the hell of it he tried 10–20–30 and a few like it, in the faint hope it was still at the combination the makers had set all those years ago, but somebody had gone to that small trouble.

He gave up and flashed the torch around. As Lady Kelso – and Mr Peters before her – had said, people could be stupid enough to scrawl the combination on the wall, even on the safe, but while a navy might have nothing against stupidity, it deplored such untidiness. Or they wrote it inside a desk drawer, so he returned to the chair and tried the drawers. They were locked, probably just to stop them falling out in the storm, yet he wasn't skilled enough to pick even
them
: what chance did he stand with a safe?

Outside, the sea thundered and the wind shrieked in the rigging. Overhead, he heard the clump of booted feet on the bridge and the occasional ting of the engine-room telegraph – reassuring sounds, for as long as they were there, they weren't catching him here. But it didn't advance his cause.

Nor did the photograph of, presumably, the Captain's wife on the wall. Ranklin caculated that if the combination were
her
birthday and he could guesss her age within five years, he'd have about 1800 combinations to try (even assuming the
Captain remembered his wife's birthday). He began a desultory search of the desk baskets and found plenty of figures, but all temporary ones: distances steamed, kilos of coal and other stores embarked, dates on letters and forms . . .

There was also a faded photograph of the
Loreley
itself when she had been launched in 1885 as the
Mohican
. There were a few figures in the caption, so he tried combinations of the gross and net tonnage – 53–63–64 and 36–45–36 and was left with the builders' number 90061.

Putting a zero on the front meant dialling 00, which was impossible, so he added it at the end: 90–06𔂿10. Click.

He didn't believe it and the pull on the door was pure habit, but it opened and the torch shone on – paperwork. A mass of paperwork, and he couldn't believe that, either. As in a trance, he pulled a heavy book free and saw it was the current German Navy code. A bulky sealed envelope turned out to be instructions in case of war. Increasingly desperate, he shuffled envelopes and pamphlets all stamped
GEHEIM
– secret. He stared numbly as the torchlight played over a spy's treasure trove which he was totally unprepared to deal with. And not a single, solitary centime of gold in sight.

Automatically he shut the door and spun the dial to lock it, then sat back. Oh, he could see what had happened, all right. The noble military mind at work: the real treasure was codes and sealed orders, sorry, no room for mere gold, shove it in my socks drawer.

Well,
had
the bloody man shoved it in his socks drawer? Crawling as the safest way to move around, it took him under half a minute to find the four boxes in the bottom of the clothes cupboard under a collection of sea-boots.

The boxes were solidly built – they had to hold nearly a hundred pounds weight each without falling apart – but crude and unsealed apart from the nails. By now furious at the time and apprehension he'd wasted, he used his penknife to wrench one of the lids free. And there were ten bags of coin, each printed “Imperial Ottoman Bank”, each drawstring sealed with red wax, but hastily and variably. Some were barely sealed at
all, and he lifted each bag in turn into the torchlight to pick those out. He got two, then took a second look at the others rather than open another box.

And that bag felt odd. He squeezed it again, feeling the tiny circles of coin, but those at the bottom seemed stuck together in a lump. Gold coins sticking together? That seemed unlikely. Holding it over the box, where fragments of sealing-wax might be expected, he picked the drawstring loose, opened the bag and felt down past the loose coins on top and brought up the lump. They were certainly glued together, but holding the lump closer to the torch he saw they were blank discs daubed with gold paint. Where the paint had scratched, dull grey metal showed through.

He sat back to think – but the first thought was that this was neither time nor place for thinking. He struck a match and re-sealed the wax, reloaded the box, finding other bags with lumps at the bottom – and then realised he had nothing to hammer the lid shut with except rubber boots. He took a big metal ashtray from the desk and used it to force the nails back by silent pressure.

Then he opened the curtains, took a last think around the dark cabin, and cautiously stepped out into the storm. Before he started working his way aft, he pitched his bag of shot into the sea.

“Nobody tried to come in,” Lady Kelso reported. She sounded a little disappointed. “How did you get on?” Then she realised how wet he was. “No, you go ahead and change, I'll turn my back.”

Modesty wasn't Ranklin's main worry: it was the steward finding his damp clothes in the morning, since nothing would dry in that cabin overnight. Well, he'd think of something. He changed his trousers, dried his feet, and lit a cigarette.

Lady Kelso turned back. “Well?”

“I found it. It wasn't even in the safe.” He frowned, trying to think one step ahead of what he was saying. But she had to know most of it: suppose she was with Miskal when the ransom
was delivered and he got furious at all treacherous Europeans? She wasn't planned to be there then, but this of all plans wasn't going to go to . . . well, to plan.

“And?” she prompted.

“Somebody's salted the sugar already: some of the bags have got discs of lead in at the bottom, stuck together so they won't spill out if you just checked the coins at the top. So I left them as they were.”

“Dahlmann?”

“No. It would be cutting his own throat. Most of the coins are real, so he'd still be paying a good ransom for guaranteed nothing . . . Unless he's working to some ‘fiendish plan', and he doesn't seem a man to believe in fiendish plans.”

She was looking calm but curious. “Then who d'you think it was?”

“I think it all happened at the Imperial Ottoman Bank. Not by them, but there. I saw Dahlmann check the coins – dammit, I
signed
that I'd witnessed that. . . Then we watched the coins being bagged and sealed and nailed into boxes . . . Then I went off to change some sovereigns.” And he'd rejoined the party as they were waiting for the last box to be brought up from the vaults – so Dahlmann couldn't have been watching all four boxes all the time. “They switched a whole box. At least one.”

“Yes, but
who?”

Hardly D'Erlon, it was his – one of his – banks' reputation. So who had muddied the waters by asking a British diplomatist and an American bankeress along to sign that the whole thing had been above-board? – and been careful not to be there himself? “Did you meet a chap they call Beirut Bertie at the Embassy dinner?”

“D'you think it was him? Yes, I met him. We had a long chat about the Bedouin, he knows the tribes very well. He seems to be very much on their side.”

“That's what everybody says. So perhaps nobody thinks he might be working at his real job on the French side.”

“Could he have arranged it?”

“If you've been around these parts as long as he has – it must
be thirty years –
and
worked for the Imp Ott at one time, I fancy you could arrange anything.” Provided, of course, that you knew well in advance what the money was wanted for.

“But aren't the French supposed to be our allies nowadays?”

“Yes, but are we acting like
their
allies? On the face of it, we're helping the Germans get the Railway restarted, aren't we?”

“I suppose so,” she said in a small voice.

Ranklin shook his head wearily. “Everybody's cooking to their own recipe on this one: Germans, French, ourselves, Zurga's faction of the Turkish Government. God knows what it's all going to taste like.” He roused himself: “Look: this may give you an extra card. If we get into Miskal's stronghold and you're still there when the ransom looks like arriving, you can warn him in advance that he's being cheated. Just so he doesn't get angry with you.”

“Thank you.” She cocked her head on one side; if she'd had her fan she would have waved it slowly. “When I first met you, I thought you were a bit of a fool. Now . . .”

Ranklin groaned to himself; he'd let the Snaipe mask slip. He rammed it back in place. “Oh, well, you know . . . I mean—”

“Yes, saying things like that.”

“It doesn't do in the Diplomatic to seem too bright.”

“It doesn't do to
be
too bright. Remember, I was married to one once. Good night, Mr Snaipe.”

Although he slept deeply, Ranklin must unconsciously have noticed the storm passing because he woke unsurprised that the yacht was leaning but steady. It must have sails set again, and was just pitching slowly in a long swell. Cheerful with the sense of evil safely accomplished, which was turning out to be almost as good as a clear conscience, he went to order breakfast and then up to stroll the windward deck until it was ready. The sun was bright but not yet hot; in the Mediterranean, another month would make all the difference.

When he returned to the dining-saloon, Streibl was at the table, pale and full of apologies for his weakness of last evening.

Ranklin waved them aside. “Not your fault, old boy. Why, I had an aunt who used to get sick on trains. Carriages, too. In fact, come to think of it, she got sick whenever she felt she wasn't the centre of attention. So not really relevant. Forget I spoke.”

But Streibl was already quite good at forgetting Snaipe had spoken, or even still was. “The steward said we will not be at Mersina until tomorrow night. I will ask if the wireless operator can . . .”

It sounded complicated, reaching a wireless station in Constantinople or, with luck, a ship in Mersina harbour, then telegraph via the Railway HQ or sub-HQ . . . In a few years' time the world might be gossiping as between adjacent chairs in a club – that was the sort of bright future O'Gilroy believed in, anyway. Ranklin had his doubts; if it happened at all, did he really want to listen to club bores on a global scale?

* * *

Some two hundred nautical miles behind and catching up, the
Vanadis
was bouncing along through what O'Gilroy thought was a tempest and Corinna a bright, if chilly, sunny day. He spent much of the time in his cabin – being sick, Corinna suspected – but it took more than that to overcome his Army and Irish habit of taking every meal offered.