‘I have no idea.’
‘The second fact?’ Buckingham said.
Toit paused again before answering. His eyes turned to the buildings close to the London Eye: the Houses of Parliament across the river, the Admiralty, Westminster Abbey. ‘I heard through
the grapevine that you spotted something quite extraordinary using the new satellite network controlled out of Flotta.’
‘You are well-informed.’
‘It’s my job.’
‘Go on.’
‘According to my information, the experiment in 1937 had some close connection with a very famous woman of the time.’ He pursed his lips, glanced at his shoes and then turned his
gaze straight into Glena Buckingham’s eyes. ‘Amelia Earhart.’
Ignoring each other as though they had not exchanged a word on the thirty-minute journey, as the capsule of the London Eye completed one full revolution and skimmed slowly
along the egress–ingress platform, Herman Toit had parted company with his employers. He had then turned left while Secker and Buckingham hung a right.
The Eurenergy executives were met by a chauffeur-driven BMW that slipped onto Belvedere Road en route to the company’s Hammersmith headquarters. Toit walked north beside the grey-brown
Thames towards grimy concrete steps that led up to Waterloo Bridge.
It had clouded over, the temperature dropping a few degrees. Toit walked at a brisk pace towards the Strand. He turned as a black cab slowed and drew to a stop at the kerb. The driver’s
window wound down, and a thin man with black hair and dark shades leaned over.
‘I have a message for you, Mr Toit.’
Toit, all senses alert, looked back along the bridge towards the Bullring and the Imax cinema. ‘I’m all ears.’
‘Could we drive a short while, sir?’
Toit glanced into the interior of the cab to see it was empty, then pulled on the handle and slipped inside. The cab drove away before he was seated. Beside him on the leather seat lay an iPad.
Toit picked it up and instantly the screen flickered to life.
A heavily pixelated face filled the screen and a man’s distorted voice spilled from the tiny speaker.
‘You come highly recommended, Mr Toit.’
Toit stared impassively at the screen and noticed the driver concentrating on the road as they approached the Strand.
‘We would be interested in employing you.’
‘I am already spoken for.’
‘But paid insufficiently I would imagine.’
Toit pursed his lips and looked out at the traffic and the stone buildings. ‘Go on.’
‘We would like to secure your exclusive services for a particular task.’
‘I’ve never been keen on the word “exclusive”.’
‘I believe, Mr Toit, that in this case, when you hear our terms, you will be.’
‘ “Our”? I like to know who I’m being propositioned by.’
A short laugh from the speaker. ‘That is quite fair. My operational name is Ming Lo. I am a representative of Ling Chi, Minister of State Security in Beijing.’
‘I see.’
‘We have recently learned that a rather dangerous artefact has been discovered in the Pacific.’
Toit could not hide his surprise completely.
‘You should not expect our intelligence people to be any less efficient than your present employers, nor indeed the agencies of the West.’
‘I don’t,’ Toit responded. ‘I’m just unclear as to how you have concluded this find is at all dangerous. Is it not an academic matter?’
‘If it were of purely scholarly interest why would you meet your employers in such a clandestine manner? And why would Glena Buckingham be so interested in the aforementioned
artefact?’
‘So, what do you require of me, if your people are so efficient?’
The small laugh again. ‘Personally, I like your attitude, Mr Toit, but you would not do well working within the official agencies in my country.’
‘Then, Mr Ming, it is fortunate that working in Beijing is not on my bucket list.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’ve a busy evening ahead of me, so if you could please come
to the point.’
The line was silent for a moment. ‘We believe the relic discovered by the pair of researchers from the Institute of Marine Studies is more than a trophy for a billionaire fan of Amelia
Earhart. I would ask you to study the attached document.’
Toit tapped the screen and Ming’s face was replaced with a file. He opened it and sat in silence for a few minutes, reading. He then touched the link once more and the blurred face
reappeared.
‘Exclusivity is expensive.’
He could see the man’s expression change through the digital camouflage. ‘We are not poor.’
Toit rubbed his fingers across his chin. ‘OK. You have my attention.’
Ten minutes after their meeting with Toit, Glena Buckingham and Hans Secker were seated in the back of the black BMW760Li and in spite of the fact that the car had recently
been purchased for a little over £100,000, it was stuck in traffic like a jalopy.
Buckingham looked out at the crowds of commuters either side of Pall Mall, the grand grey facade of the Reform Club and the throng of besuited workers crossing the entrances to St James’s
Square.
‘It would be faster to walk,’ Buckingham declared. A beep came from a flat screen on the back of the driver’s seat. She touched the screen and a man’s face appeared. He
looked flushed, a bead of sweat nestled in his philtrum.
‘Joyce,’ Buckingham said to her Deputy Chief of Operations (Southern Region). ‘You look positively glowing.’
Joyce took a deep breath. ‘Some interesting news, ma’am.’ He swallowed and straightened in his seat. ‘Just picked up a transmission from close to the new Chinese island,
Dalton.’
‘Stop before you say anything else. I take it this is a scrambled line?’
‘Of course.’
‘Go on.’
Secker was leaning to his right to better see the screen. Buckingham could smell his breath.
‘My team is aware of your memo, ma’am – about the plane spotted using the equipment on Flotta. They will keep their eyes peeled and ears to the ground for anything linked with
it. We only caught fragments of this recent transmission, but we’ve pinpointed it, and Flotta IDed the caller. It came from a chartered ship,
Inca
, moored off Howland close to
Dalton.’
Buckingham raised an eyebrow. ‘What was the gist of the transmission?’
‘The caller mentioned finding Amelia Earhart’s plane.’ He glanced at some papers in front of him. ‘A Lockheed Electra 10E?’
‘Oh my goodness!’ Buckingham brought a hand to her mouth. Neither Joyce nor Secker had seen their boss demonstrate such emotion before.
Buckingham nodded as though she were processing the information, then she glanced out at the milling office workers. ‘That is . . . excellent news, Joyce.’
‘I have some of the message. We caught the tail end of it.’ He tapped a key on his laptop. A second of quiet hiss spilled from the speaker of the headrest screen and then a
man’s laughter could be heard.
‘No . . . really?’
Then a woman’s voice, a trace of a French accent.
‘Where is it? What shape is it in?’
A pause, then a different woman.
‘We’re going to head home, we have some materials that need to be studied.’
The first woman spoke again.
‘What kind of materials?’
‘Rather not say over the radio, Cherie. We’re catching a seaplane to Tarawa. Gustav and Connor will stay here for a bit, tidy up loose ends. It’ll still take us a couple of
days to get back though.’
The transmission ended abruptly.
‘This ship?’ Buckingham asked. ‘Anything?’
‘Chartered in the Gilbert Islands five days ago. Booking in the name of the Institute of Marine Studies, Hampton, Virginia. The lead names are . . .’ He glanced down again.
‘Doctors Wetherall and Bates,’ Buckingham interjected.
Joyce looked up, puzzled.
‘I’m familiar with the names.’ Buckingham turned and gave Hans Secker a frosty look.
‘How long ago was this call made?’ he asked.
‘Two seventeen a.m., our time, sir. I was only informed at noon. I then checked it through Flotta.’
‘You did well, Joyce,’ Buckingham said distracted. ‘Anything else?’
‘No, ma’am.’
Buckingham spun on Secker and narrowed her eyes. ‘Sounds like we have a little time, Hans.’ She checked her Patek Philippe. ‘They may still be in the Gilbert Islands even if
they left the ship soon after the transmission. I want them found and followed. They must have retrieved something of value from the remains of the aircraft. They hinted at it. Whatever it is, I
want it.’
Off Howland Island, Pacific Ocean. Present day.
Lou held his hand up to shield his eyes as he stared out over the endless horizon.
‘There it is,’ he said and turned to Kate.
She saw a flash of light as the evening sun reflected off the approaching seaplane, a Canadair CL-215. They could see its canary yellow fuselage as it came closer and banked round, reaching the
surface of the ocean about a hundred feet to
Inca
’s starboard.
Their assistant Gustav was waiting for them in the launch with their luggage and equipment. Kate gave their other junior, Connor, a hug and Lou shook his hand.
‘See you back home,’ Lou said. ‘No sunbathing, we want a full analysis of that wreck before you leave here.’
Connor gave him a mock salute and Lou and Kate descended the ladder to the launch.
*
The flat, pristine blue of the Pacific dropped away beneath them as the seaplane took off towards the setting sun. It was a three-hour flight to Tarawa, the main island in the
Gilberts. For most of the journey, Lou and Kate spoke little, Lou absorbed in his book and Kate with her headphones on listening to music.
Lou put his book down on his lap and tapped Kate on the arm. She pulled off the headphones, the music spilling out. Lou nodded to her MP3 player and she switched it off.
‘I can’t figure out why Amelia Earhart had the cylinder in the cockpit,’ he said. ‘She must have been involved in something.’
‘I imagine she was. There have long been rumours she was a spy and that her plane crash was no accident.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘Well, she was a very experienced pilot and the attempt to circumnavigate the globe had been planned meticulously. They were flying in clear weather, early in the morning, and aiming to
land at Howland.’
‘Where were they headed?’
‘You don’t really know anything about her, do you, Lou?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘I was more into baseball players.’
‘OK. Well you know she was probably the most famous woman in the world at the time she died?’
‘Err . . .’ Lou shook his head.
‘She lived at a time when women didn’t do things like fly planes. About two years before her death she had started to plan the most audacious flight anyone could imagine – a
circumnavigation of the globe. She had a navigator with her, a man called Fred Noonan. They set off from Miami, flying to South America, across the Atlantic to Africa, then on to South East Asia,
Australia and Papua New Guinea. Eventually they flew across the Pacific to Honolulu, planning to fly over to the mainland of America and back down to Miami. Needless to say, they didn’t make
it to Honolulu.’
‘And there’s no evidence of her being involved in any strange conspiracies? There has to be a reason for the cylinder and the cryptic message inside.’
‘I agree.’ Kate gazed out of her window to the vast expanse of water, the sun low over the waves. ‘There have always been loads of stories linked to her disappearance,
obviously. If one of the world’s most famous women disappears on a trans-Pacific flight at a time when war was brewing, it’s bound to spark all sorts of rumours.’
She pulled out her phone, checked for a signal, was pleasantly surprised to see she had a couple of bars and called up Google. A moment later they were looking at a website called:
Amelia
Earhart: 10 Conspiracy Theories.
She scrolled down and they both read the screen.
‘Yep, all there,’ Lou commented. ‘Alien abduction, suicide, murder, captured by the Japanese.’
‘And a theory she was a spy for the US government.’
‘That’s not in the same league as alien abduction.’
‘No, it’s not!’ Kate laughed. ‘The US military helped to fund her trip. That’s a documented fact. The intelligence service would have wanted something in return,
you can be sure of that.’
‘All right, well it’s all food for thought,’ Lou concluded. They felt the plane begin to descend. A voice came over the cabin PA. ‘Doctors Bates and Wetherall,
we’re about to begin our descent into Kiribati. Please buckle up. We should be landing at Bonriki International Airport in about ten minutes.’
*
It was probably the smallest and shabbiest ‘international’ airport in the world. Consisting of two large huts joined by a glass-covered walkway, it boasted
hand-painted signs to ‘Customs’ and ‘Quarantine’ and a handful of very laidback staff. From Kiribati, Kate and Lou had to first travel in the opposite direction to their
final destination. A 727 took them west to Brisbane, and from there they flew east on a direct flight to Los Angeles.
*
Landing at LAX, Lou opened a fresh text from Jerry Derham, a reply to his answer-phone message asking what the exciting news was about.
‘Don’t call him again,’ Kate said to Lou as they headed towards the departure lounge for the connecting flight to Norfolk. ‘We’ll be there in a few hours. You never
know who’s listening in to mobiles.’
‘A little paranoid, isn’t it?’
‘Maybe, but the paranoid are usually the last to die.’
Lou texted back: ‘Can’t explain now. About to board flight home. Stopover in Des Moines. ETA Norfolk, 6.05 p.m. Will call then.’
*
They managed to snatch a few hours of fitful sleep. The in-flight food was almost inedible, they had seen all the movies before and they hit severe turbulence half an hour
before reaching Norfolk, leaving them unsettled and anxious. By the time they arrived at Norfolk International Airport, night was drawing in. They felt wrung out and jet-lagged.
Passing through passport control in a daze, they collected their cases and loaded a pair of trolleys with their personal luggage and a large metal box containing their equipment and samples.
Before leaving
Inca
they had wrapped the canister from Amelia Earhart’s plane in bubble wrap and enclosed it in a padded envelope. Lou had put this into his briefcase, never letting
it out of his sight.