The Titanic Enigma (11 page)

‘I’m not so sure they are the only ones. I am concerned that this information has gone further.’

‘But how? How could it . . .?’

Buckingham waved a hand in front of her face and Newman shut up immediately.

‘I will ensure all parties are eliminated, all copies destroyed.’

‘So, you’re pleased?’ Newman asked, almost childlike in his enthusiasm. ‘I was staggered when I—’

‘No! I can’t say I’m pleased with this turn of events at all, professor. This discovery represents a terrible risk. The radiation leak from the
Titanic
is coming from
some unknown energy source; that much is clear from its profile. The governments of the West will know that, the Chinese will know it from satellite surveillance, so too will the Russians . . . the
whole shooting party will be alerted by now. If that energy source could be harnessed as this information will allow, within five years conventional forms of energy production will be made quite
obsolete. That scenario must be prevented at all costs.’

‘There is something else you need to know,’ Newman said nervously. ‘This material –’ and he nodded towards the screen ‘– is incomplete.’

‘Explain.’

‘It is only about, oh, I’d guess, maybe seventy per cent of the total.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’

‘Whole chunks are missing, random sections. The math jumps; concepts are missing as though its creator has gone through the original completed work and deliberately taken out sections.
It’s like reading a book with thirty per cent of the pages ripped out indiscriminately.’

‘And you cannot fill in the gaps?’

Newman shook his head. ‘It would be like trying to put in several minutes of missing score from the music of a master composer.’

‘Please,’ Buckingham had a hand up. ‘Spare me any more tedious analogies, Professor Newman. So this work really was written by a scientist travelling on the
Titanic?’

‘I am convinced it is the work of Egbert Fortescue.’

‘Rutherford’s assistant?’

‘Yes. He must have been on the ill-fated ship. This work has his personality stamped all over it. It is as unique as . . .’ He stopped himself. ‘He must have deliberately split
the work in case it fell into the wrong hands.’

‘Aboard the
Titanic?’

Newman merely shrugged.

‘So then . . . this missing material could still be somewhere within the wreck, or may have been utterly destroyed.’

Newman stayed silent and Buckingham seemed lost in thought for a few moments before turning her piercing eyes on him. ‘We are grateful to you, Professor Newman. Now you must return to the
naval base before anyone notices you are missing. For our part we have to find the location of that missing thirty per cent – before anyone else does.’

But Professor Newman did not return to the Norfolk Naval Base. That had never been a part of his plans. Instead he walked back to his car where he had parked it the previous
evening. He pulled onto Chesapeake Boulevard, headed south and then turned onto the 64. A very ordinary blue saloon turned onto the highway behind him. The man in the passenger seat spoke into his
cell phone as he gazed out at the trees and buildings flashing past.

‘Mistral here,’ he said. ‘We have the professor in sight. He’s heading south-east on 64.’

‘He must be on his way to the airport,’ Sterling Van Lee replied. ‘I’ll alert them.’

Twenty minutes later Newman’s Ford Taurus pulled into the long-term parking compound of Norfolk International Airport. The blue saloon kept a discreet distance and the two men in the car
followed Newman, who had no other luggage but his briefcase and laptop.

Inside the airport, the professor headed straight for the United Airlines desk. After making a call from his cell phone, Mistral watched with satisfaction as a man in a United Airlines
manager’s suit walked over to the First Class check-in desk just as Newman approached with his passport in hand. The manager whispered a few words to the girl at the desk and she vacated her
seat to let the manager sit in her place.

Newman smiled at the man and offered his passport and credit card.

‘One return ticket for Acapulco,’ the manager said, glancing at his computer screen, his words passing into a miniature contact mic under his suit lapel and along the open line to
Mistral standing fifty yards away.

‘Holiday?’ the man asked cheerfully.

‘Much needed,’ the professor replied.

‘Right, that will be 1,695 dollars,’ the manager intoned, lifting his eyes from the screen.

Newman slid the credit card across the countertop and the man processed the fare. ‘Beautiful this time of year,’ he commented.

‘I think it’s meant to be beautiful at any time.’

The man chuckled. ‘Gotta beat Virginia in the fall. Rain? Enough already!’ He handed Newman his card and a ticket as a boarding pass emerged from a printer under the counter.
‘No luggage, professor?’

‘No. I plan to buy my bathing trunks there,’ he said jauntily.

‘You have a safe journey now,’ the manager said.

Newman headed towards the gate, followed by the two men from the blue saloon. They held back as he presented his boarding pass and passport at the security check. He then put his bag and laptop
onto the conveyor belt, strode under the metal detector arch and disappeared behind a screen.

‘He’s on the 11.50 United flight to Acapulco,’ Mistral said into his cell. ‘Lands 14.55.’

‘Good work,’ said Van Lee.

Passing behind the screen, Newman lowered himself onto a bench and watched the other passengers coming through security control. He waited five minutes, ten minutes. There was no sign of the two
men who had been tailing him.

Standing, he pulled the plane ticket and boarding pass from the inside pocket of his jacket, ripped them into half a dozen pieces and tossed them into a metal bin beside the bench. From the left
pocket of his trousers, he withdrew a different ticket, for American Airlines, and stopped at a large display listing departures. He checked the time of the flight leaving for JFK, which connected
to a Thai Airways flight to Bangkok departing at 15.10 that afternoon.

Kate and Lou met for an early breakfast at their favourite cafe, Donovan’s, close to the beach half a mile along the coast from the institute. They both had fond memories
of the place. It had been their secret rendezvous when they were first romantically involved and wanted to keep their relationship to themselves.

They found a table in the back and watched despondently as the rain came down outside. Their drinks arrived.

‘You’re a constant surprise, Kate Wetherall,’ Lou said suddenly, looking away from the rain, searching her face with his dark-blue eyes.

She gave him a puzzled look and tucked a few strands of blonde hair behind her left ear, a habit Lou had always found endearing. ‘What do you mean?’

Lou shook his head. ‘Oh, nothing.’

‘Lou! That’s not fair!’ And she leaned forward, arms stretched across the table each side of her coffee mug to take his fingers as she gave him her best ‘big-eyed’
look.

‘Well, you’re only the goddaughter of the most famous scientist since Einstein, and you hadn’t told me!’

‘Oh, that . . . It wasn’t my decision, Lou.’ She let go of his fingers and pulled back into her chair. ‘I was only two weeks old when I was christened.’

‘And I suppose your granny is the queen of England.’

‘Well, actually . . .’ Kate laughed. ‘Look, my father was a don – you knew that. He spent two years at Princeton. He and Uncle George became best friends.’

‘Uncle George!’

‘And,’ she went on, ignoring Lou’s sarcasm, ‘although I said it wasn’t my decision, I couldn’t be happier about it. Professor Campion and his wife Joan are
probably the nicest people I’ve ever met.’

‘I’m sure they are. Where do they live?’

‘Only an hour from here, near Franklin.’

‘So we’ll go see them? Talk to Uncle George about the EF docs?’

‘Well, yeah. That’s what I was thinking.’ She was flicking through screens on her iPad. ‘Oh, damn!’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got a conference call at eleven o’clock.’

‘Anything important?’

‘Yeah. It’s the CEO of Avalon. The company in Oregon? Remember back on Bermuda I mentioned there was some interest in putting private money into our
Lavender
project?’

‘I’d totally forgotten. The last few days have been a whirlwind.’

‘You’re telling me!’

‘So OK, let’s call the Campions,’ Lou said. ‘When could we get there by?’

‘Can’t do that.’

‘Why?’

‘They don’t have a phone, no cell, no computer. They’re kinda eccentric . . . in a nice way.’

Lou pulled a face.

‘I’ll be done by twelve. We’ll go straight after the conference call with Avalon.’

*

In the end, they didn’t get away until one o’clock. Lou’s T-Bird was in the garage for new brake linings, which he had no time to install himself, but the
garage had provided him with a little Toyota courtesy car for a couple of days.

Lou went back to the institute to pick up Kate. He was wearing his authentic Second World War USAF flying jacket which Kate had always loved seeing him in.

‘Not quite the right attire for this titchy thing, is it, Lou?’ she said, nodding towards his jacket as they approached the Toyota compact.

‘You should have seen the second choice of car,’ he laughed.

They headed south-west on the freeway, the rain driving hard against the windscreen, the wipers beating. Weekday, early afternoon, and the traffic was light. Kate had her iPad perched on her
knees.

‘We still know almost nothing about this character EF,’ she said, tapping on the screen.

‘We know he was in First Class, cabin C16; probably a scientist, although he could have simply been a courier for the isotope and the documents.’

She pulled up the
Titanic
manifest on Google. Scrolled down. ‘That’s interesting.’

‘What?’

‘There were no First Class passengers with the initials “EF”.’

‘Travelling under an assumed name then. Who was in cabin C16?’

Kate tapped the screen again, ran her finger across the glass. ‘C16. A John Wickins.’

‘John Wickins?’ Lou said and glanced at Kate. She gave him a blank look. ‘While Isaac Newton was at Cambridge, he shared a room with a John Wickins for almost twenty
years.’

‘How did you know that?’

‘History of science unit at UCLA. There was a great book on the reading list –
Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer.
You read it?’

Kate shook her head.

You should – will change any preconceived notions you had about Sir Isaac Newton.’

‘Well, using that pseudonym adds weight to the idea “EF” was a scientist, I guess; but it doesn’t tell us any more about who the man was.’

‘Or why he was on the
Titanic
with a radioactive sample.’

They turned off the freeway at intersection 13B taking the road to Suffolk. The rain had stopped, the trees lining the road left dripping. They passed along Main Street, through an old-fashioned
city centre with low-rise brick buildings, some dating back to the early nineteenth century, and picked up the highway west towards the small town of Franklin.

They pulled off onto a narrow two-lane road. The landscape became more wooded, houses fewer and further apart. The rain started again.

‘So tell me a bit about Professor Campion,’ Lou said, his eyes fixed on the beating wipers and the soaked road.

‘Well, you know the public figure – “science celebrity”, “the cleverest man since Einstein”, all that nonsense. My godfather is a great physicist, but you
know what it’s like – the usual stampede to make some sort of cartoon figure out of any amazing talent. The media did it with Stephen Hawking, then ten years ago they repeated the trick
with Uncle George.’

‘After he proved that the speed of light was not the upper limit for the universe.’

‘Yes; refuting Einstein is one thing, proving him wrong is quite another.’

‘The myth is all true then? Campion couldn’t stand the limelight and retreated to . . .’ Lou lifted a hand from the wheel and swept across the view through the windscreen.

‘That’s pretty much it. He was never one for drawing attention to himself. He hated the constant trivializing of his work, the film crews barging into his rooms in Princeton. And
then to cap it all, he attracted the opprobrium of some of his colleagues.’

‘With his radical ideas.’

‘Now he’s seen as existing on the fringe. It’s almost as though the scientific community have ostracized him for being right and Einstein wrong. They have to accept it, of
course. Science is all about progress – absorbing a concept if it is proven to be right, adapting one’s vision of the way the universe works – but scientists are human too . .
.’ She pointed to a sign indicating a track off to their left: ‘It’s there.’

A hundred yards along the track Lou pulled the car up outside a stone cottage.

‘Wait here a second,’ Kate said, getting out of the passenger seat. ‘I’ll see if anyone’s home.’

She walked quickly through a low arch on to a cobbled path running between two stretches of wet lawn girded by rose beds, the flowerless bushes looking a little bedraggled in the rain.

The white painted door had an old-fashioned bell pull. Kate tugged on it and heard sounds from inside the house. The door opened slowly and an elderly lady with greying auburn hair and a round,
rosy-cheeked face stood at the opening. She was dressed in a flowery dress covered with a flour-stained apron. The smell of baking wafted along the hall.

‘Kate!’ the woman exclaimed, breaking into a rapturous smile. ‘Sweetheart, it’s been so long!’

Before she could reply, Kate saw a figure appear from the shadows at the end of the hallway. The elderly lady stepped forward and hugged Kate as George Campion arrived at the door, a big smile
on his face. He was wearing worn-out corduroys, a brown sleeveless sweater over a shirt and an ineptly knotted tie. He held a pipe in his left hand. Tufts of white hair either side of his bald head
softened his weathered face.