The Titanic Enigma (22 page)

‘So?’

‘Where is it positioned?’

‘Towards the back of the room, but it covers the whole lab . . . Lou, what is it?’

‘Where does the feed go? From the camera?’

‘There’s a hard drive in one of the lab cupboards. Records in forty-eight-hour cycles and automatically wipes. One of the technicians looks after it. Why?’

Lou was up and out of his chair, heading towards the door.

*

Kate fished out the hard drive from its cradle in a cupboard at one end of a row high up above the counters that lined the back of the lab. It had an HDMI cable dangling from
the back. She handed it to Lou. It took him only a few moments to hook it up to a laptop at his workstation. He pulled in his chair and Derham and Kate stood behind him leaning in towards the
screen.

He tapped at the keyboard and a management screen appeared. He input a security code and the monitor lit up with a view of the lab. In the bottom-right corner of the screen they could see:
‘10.05, 10 October’. The lab was empty, rain beating on the windows.

‘Two mornings ago,’ Lou said and clicked a couple of keys on his laptop. The image fast-forwarded. They could see the lab door open and Lou coming in. He sat at a counter to study
the box of papers they had retrieved from the wreck of the
Titanic
. Kate entered and they talked for a while before setting up the digital copier above the glass chamber. Then Kate placed
Fortescue’s papers carefully under the crosshairs of the scanner copier using the robot arms.

‘It’s too far from the security camera,’ Derham said.

Lou did not answer, just manipulated the image from his laptop. The view expanded, zooming in on the pages of equations inside the glass chamber.

‘You can almost read it!’ Kate exclaimed. ‘Can you get any closer, Lou?’

‘I’ll try.’ He tapped at the keyboard and the image became distorted. ‘Any closer and we lose resolution. Damn!’

‘Hang on,’ Kate said excitedly. ‘We’ve got an image-enhancer. Remember we used it for the German U-Boat wreck last year?’

Lou got up, almost knocking Derham aside, paced over to a counter, opened a cupboard door, closed it again, swore. ‘Kate, any ideas where it was put?’

She was searching through another cupboard the other side of the lab. ‘Yes!’ she said.

Derham helped Kate carry the machine over to Lou’s workstation and sixty seconds later they had the enhancer hooked up to the laptop and the hard drive. Kate checked the cables.
‘Ready.’

Lou opened the file, sped forward to the point where they began to copy Fortescue’s papers two mornings ago. On the screen, they could see Kate poised with the robot arms. The first page
lay under the copier.

Lou lined up the enhancer on the laptop and set it to ‘Resolution 200%’. The image grew and kept its resolution, but the writing was still little more than a series of undecipherable
squiggles.

Lou paused the film and tapped the arrow keys on the laptop. The enhancement level increased . . . ‘250%’ . . . ‘300%’.

‘Come on!’ Lou exclaimed. ‘Trouble is, this has its limits too. Tip over the edge and we’ll lose resolution again.’ He keyed in some parameters. A counter at the
bottom of the screen read: ‘320%’. And as they watched, the image cleared.

Kate gasped.

‘Yes!’ Derham said.

On the monitor they could see the words written by Egbert Fortescue over a century ago – as clear as the day they were penned.

Albert Embankment, London. Present day.

‘A cup of tea, Arthur?’

The man sitting across the desk from Christian Halley – the head of MI6, Arthur Bevington – had either not heard him or had chosen to ignore the question.

‘Ar thur?’

‘Yes?’ The man looked up from his papers a little startled.

‘Tea? Would you like tea?’

‘Er . . . yes, that would be splendid, thank you.’

Halley tapped a button on his phone. Both men could hear the secretary’s call tone from the adjoining room. ‘A pot of tea please, Estelle.’

Christian Halley got up from his chair and turned towards the vast window behind his desk. He had his hands clenched behind his back as he studied the view in silence. To his right lay Lambeth
Bridge and a glimpse of Lambeth Palace. Turning to his left, he could see how the river took a gentle turn north-west. No more than a few dozen yards from the base of the Secret Intelligence
Service building stretched Vauxhall Bridge packed with rush-hour traffic. In the west the last wisps of daylight slipped behind the buildings, lighting up the Thames like a river of fire.

He swung back to the room as the tea arrived. Estelle poured, retreated and closed the door softly behind her.

‘You sounded pretty excited on the phone, Arthur,’ Christian Halley said, taking a sip of his tea. ‘So let’s have it.’

Bevington was a tall spindly man with thinning white hair and bushy eyebrows. He had been in the service for thirty-five years and was now number three. He would go no higher; indeed, he planned
to retire within two years. He was seen as the reliable Old Man of the service, a bit of an anachronism for sure, but almost universally liked.

‘Well, to be honest, it
is
exciting. We’ve intercepted an encoded message sent from the east coast of the United States that was en route to Beijing.’

‘Not that unusual, Arthur.’

‘No. But it is unusual to stumble upon it when we’re not actively looking for it. This message was only picked up by chance by one of the juniors at GCHQ.’

‘How?’

‘It leaked from a Chinese satellite and one of ours, RANOS-132 to be precise, was within range and detected it.’

‘I see. And what was the message about?’

‘One of my teams has been working on it for the past sixteen hours. They finally cracked it – it’s a set of mathematical expressions. A lot of it doesn’t seem to make
sense . . . at least that’s what the chaps on the third floor tell me.’

Halley took another sip of his tea and eyed Bevington over the rim of his bone-china cup.

‘The really startling thing is the non-mathematical parts of the message. Whoever sent it is somehow involved with REZ375.’

‘The Exclusion Zone in the Atlantic?’

‘They seem to be selling something to the Chinese, something linked to the wreck of the
Titanic.’

Halley caught his breath, lowered his cup and interlinked his fingers in an arch in front of his face. ‘We learned only this morning that something has been brought up from the wreck. We
have an aircraft carrier in the Exclusion Zone, HMS
Ipswich,
but the Yanks insisted that they use their own gear to get down there. Turned down our help. It’s sent alarm bells
ringing at the MOD.’

‘Not ruddy surprised!’ Bevington said.

‘So, what’s this all about?’ Halley was almost talking to himself, then turned to the older man.

‘The transmission to the Chinese satellite originated about ten miles from Norfolk Naval Base,’ Bevington explained. ‘It seems pretty clear that the Americans have a spy in
their midst who has somehow gained access to whatever it was the United States Navy brought up from the wreck of the
Titanic.’

‘But mathematical expressions?’

Bevington shrugged. ‘The radiation levels in the Exclusion Zone have been dropping fast since they went down there. Clearly they brought to the surface whatever was causing it, as well as
this maths stuff.’

‘And you think these equations are some sort of analysis of the retrieved source passed on to the Chinese by someone from the US Navy?’

‘That is one possibility.’

‘Have your boys made any headway working out what the maths describes?’

‘No,’ Bevington said. Then he seemed to notice his tea for the first time and drank the whole lot in one go. Replacing the cup on the saucer, he held Halley’s intense stare.
‘But I do think we ought to get a Special Forces unit into the Exclusion Zone right away. We’ve been far too relaxed about all this. The Americans have retrieved something important and
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they make several more trips down to the wreck. They’re not willing to share intel on this, and they have refused any joint missions to the ocean
floor.’

Halley looked at Bevington in silence, his mind running through the ramifications. Then he leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘We don’t want to upset anyone,’ he
said cautiously.

‘There is actually a further complication.’

‘Oh?’

‘Glena Buckingham.’

Halley blanched. ‘Don’t tell me that cow is involved already?’

Bevington simply nodded. ‘It would make sense, Christian. Energy is her game – her bread and butter, if you will.’

‘Yes,’ Halley responded. ‘Anything concrete on her?’

‘Well, you know as much as I do – she is under constant surveillance. There’s a file a mile thick on the woman. Her home, her office, her cars – they’re all bugged
using the latest microdot microphones. Her people have never succeeded in deactivating them even if they know the equipment is there.’

‘But have you recorded her saying anything that is specifically linked to REZ375?’

‘Yes . . . we think she has a copy of the mathematical material that was sent to the Chinese.’

‘Good God! Now you tell me! It seems everyone has something from the bloody
Titanic
except us.’ Halley jumped up, his large face pink. ‘First the bloody Yanks, then
the Chinese and now you tell me that arch-bitch Glena Fucking Buckingham has a lead on Her Majesty’s Government. How long has this—?’

‘Christian, take a deep breath, old boy.’ Bevington stayed remarkably calm. ‘It’s all very new. We are on top of things, you know . . .’

Halley walked back to his desk, lowered himself slowly into the plush leather upholstery of his chair. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. Apologies, it’s been a long
day.’

Then he lifted the receiver of his phone.

‘Estelle,’ he said to his secretary. ‘Get me the PM, please . . . immediately.’

Ministry of State Security of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing. Present day.

Ling Chi, Minister of State Security, stood at the window of his modest fourth-floor office looking out at the view. He had his hands clasped behind his ramrod-straight
back and turned his head slowly left then right watching the world beyond the glass. At the foot of the monstrously oversized Ministry building beyond the patrolled security cordon lay a ribbon of
neon-splashed tarmac crammed with cars. Across from this ten-lane highway stretched mile upon mile of concrete buildings lit up in the night and intercut with more tarmac.

Ling turned to face his visitor, Zhu Lo, Minister for Scientific and Technological Information, a grossly fat man in a tight suit, tie digging into the ample flesh around his neck. He had small
black eyes and seemed never to blink. Ling had worked with him for seven years and he knew that Zhu had hated him for at least three of those . . . dating from the day he had snatched the job of
Minister of State Security from under the fat man’s nose.

‘You can definitely rely on your source, minister?’ Ling asked softly and pulled himself into his chair, his back to the view. He rested his hands on the old wooden desk.

‘He comes highly recommended,’ Zhu replied.

‘And you have approved –’ Ling glanced at his iPad ‘– five million dollars?’

Zhu stared at the minister, his face totally without expression. He said nothing, forcing Ling to speak.

‘It seems rather a lot.’

‘It is not excessive if one considers what we have obtained,’ Zhu said.

Ling studied his interlinked fingers. ‘Let us assume then that this material is genuine . . .’

‘It is genuine, minister.’

‘Let us assume this is the case,’ Ling repeated. ‘Your people have managed to decode it and they claim it is a description of some –’ he glanced at his iPad again
‘– alternative source of atomic energy.’

‘There is more to it than that.’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘The technicalities are complex,’ Zhu commented.

‘I’m sure they are, Zhu. I’ll try to keep up.’

‘The implication is that it points the way to cold fusion.’

Ling did well to hide his surprise. ‘But that has been discredited time and time again. The British, the French, the Japanese, they have spent billions on the concept and got precisely
nowhere. I’ve seen the reports from the field.’

‘It seems, minister, that this work offers an entirely different approach.’

‘And this breakthrough, as your man calls it, comes from the wreck of the
Titanic?’
Ling looked incredulously at the minister. ‘You’ll have to forgive me, but
this all seems rather fanciful.’

‘I understand,’ Zhu replied. ‘I will confess that my team and I have had the same doubts, but the lineage of the find is incontrovertible.’

Ling nodded and waved his iPad a few inches above his desk. ‘I know the Americans have developed the technology to walk on the ocean floor and have been down to the wreck.’

‘Yes, it is indeed hard to imagine how the radiation source and any documents detailing such advanced theoretical physics could have ended up in a century-old shipwreck, but it is . . . it
was there. That much is not open to conjecture. We have looked into the possible author of the work. My contact Professor Newman in Virginia is a physicist. He recognized the mathematical reasoning
as being that of Ernest Rutherford’s assistant, one Egbert Fortescue, who, we have learned, was travelling on the
Titanic
under the assumed name of John Wickins. And, as you would
know, minister, the material from the wreck was taken to Norfolk Naval Base in Virginia. It included a radiation source . . .’

‘The source that started the whole affair, yes. I have a report that says the radiation levels have dropped off markedly since whatever was down there was retrieved.’ He looked at
Zhu. ‘I have to admit, I am extremely displeased that we were not quicker off the mark. The boss is fuming.’ He spun his chair round and returned his gaze to the world of light and dark
beyond the glass.