The Titanic Secret (20 page)

Bauer nodded, leant forward and began to talk.

12 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Tremayne stepped into the smoking room and took a seat at a vacant table on the opposite side of the room. The three men were already there, and appeared to be deep in conversation.

Other people came and went from the smoking room, and Tremayne simply registered their movements without taking any particular notice of who they were or what they were doing. But when a thick-set man in a dark suit walked past his table and continued striding over to where Voss was sitting, he immediately registered the fact. He wondered if he was one of the bodyguards he’d been told Voss was travelling with.

As the man approached the table, Voss stood up, and for a few moments they talked quietly together. Then the man nodded, turned and walked out of the smoking room through the other door, and Voss resumed his seat.

‘I wonder what that was about?’ Tremayne murmured to himself, looking down at his book again.

On the other side of the room, Voss sat silently for a few seconds. Vincent had returned to the smoking room to tell his employer the unwelcome news that he’d not seen the intruder anywhere, and to ask if he should start checking out the second- and third-class passengers as well, when he’d walked straight past the table where the man he was looking for was sitting. He must have walked up one staircase to the Promenade Deck as he, Vincent, had been walking down the other.

When Voss had stood up to greet him, Vincent had needed to explain very little.

‘He’s here in this room,’ had been his opening words. ‘At the table right behind me, on the opposite side of the fireplace. The guy’s by himself, fair hair, blue eyes. He’s wearing a dark-grey suit, black shoes, and reading a book.’

Voss hadn’t reacted, just in case the man was watching him, except to nod once.

‘Thank you, Vincent,’ he’d replied briefly. ‘I’ll let you know what I want you to do later.’

Now, he leant forward across the table, and spoke to his two companions in low, urgent tones.

‘Don’t turn round or react in any way,’ he said, ‘but the man who broke into my stateroom is sitting in this room, about thirty feet away, wearing a grey suit and reading a book. Over the next few minutes, take a glance in his direction, and try to memorize his face.’

Bauer nodded, then leant back in his chair and stretched both his arms above his head, as if to relieve cramped shoulder muscles. As he did so, he snatched a glance across the smoking room towards the table Voss had indicated.

‘I’ve seen him before,’ he said, turning to Voss. ‘I believe he’s been in here every day since we sailed from Cherbourg. You think he’s been watching us?’

‘Unless you can think of another good reason why a non-smoker – I’ve not seen him with so much as a cigarette between his lips – would want to spend his days in a room full of tobacco smoke.’ Voss paused, and glanced across the room. ‘I’ve noticed him before as well,’ he added. ‘I assumed he was just a rich upper-class idiot, spending some of his inherited wealth on an expensive transatlantic crossing. It looks like I was wrong.’

‘So you think he’s an agent? British or American, I mean?’

Voss nodded. ‘No other reasonable conclusion.’

‘So what do we do about him?’

‘
We
don’t do anything,’ Voss said. ‘It’s important that we behave absolutely normally, and remain very visible, at least for the moment, so that when that man turns up dead, or simply vanishes over the side, nobody will have any reason to suspect that we were involved.’

12 April 1912
London

The telephone rang in Mansfield Cumming’s office, and he reached out his hand to the instrument somewhat hesitantly: he still didn’t entirely trust the new technology.

‘Yes?’ he barked.

‘I have a call for you from Berlin,’ Mrs McTavish announced. ‘It’s that man Williams again.’

Moments later, Cumming was connected.

‘Yes?’ he said again. ‘Is that you, Williams?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Michael Williams replied. ‘I have a little more information, but I don’t know how much use it’s likely to be. You remember that you asked me to check all of Voss’s activities in the city, not just his contacts with government officials? Well, the commercial attaché has been working with me and looking at all of his movements, and two of them look interesting.’

Cumming seized a pencil and a sheet of paper while he listened intently.

‘He made two visits to a warehouse on the outskirts of Berlin, and on the second one he took delivery of two large packing cases. When he left the city by train for Cherbourg, both cases went with him, and he had one of his men stationed in the guard’s van of the train with the cases.’

‘So what was in them?’ Cumming asked.

‘That’s where the commercial attaché proved his worth. He managed – and I don’t know how – to work out which company in Berlin had delivered the cases. It turned out to be a specialist paper manufacturer, so presumably that was what he’d bought. I can tell you the name of the company, if you wish, so that you can run checks from London, but I doubt if you’ll get much information from them if I’m right about what they were doing.’

‘Paper? Why the hell would he be buying paper in Germany?’

‘I think the point, sir, is that it wasn’t just ordinary paper.’

‘You’d better explain that.’

For about a minute Cumming listened intently as Williams expounded his theory. Then he asked another question.

‘If you’re right, that’s only half of what he’d need.’

‘I know, and that’s why the other visit he made to a commercial enterprise in Berlin is significant.’

‘Does that company have the capability to produce what Voss would need?’

‘Definitely. They specialize in precisely this kind of work. I’ve still got one of my men trying to find out more, but I’m not hopeful.’

Cumming glanced over his notes once more, then thanked Williams, and ended the call. He sat in thought for a few moments, then took a fresh sheet of paper and quickly composed a telegraph message for Alex Tremayne. The new information added a vital new dimension to the problem, and to the plot, though at that moment he couldn’t see what Tremayne or Maria could do about it. It looked as if this aspect of the matter would have to be attended to by other means.

12 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

As Tremayne had expected, the three men he was watching stood up about forty minutes before lunch would be served in the main dining saloon, and walked out of the smoking room together. They made their way down the first-class staircase and then separated, with Voss continuing to the deck below.

When the other two men entered the port-side passageway on B-Deck, Tremayne was only a few yards behind them, and watched as Bauer unlocked the door of the first stateroom on the left-hand side of the passageway and stood talking to Kortig for a few seconds before stepping inside. The other man strode down the cross passage to the opposite side of the ship and entered his own suite, the twin of Bauer’s, but on the starboard side of the
Titanic
.

As before, as soon as he’d noted their stateroom numbers, Tremayne returned to the Promenade Deck to rejoin Maria in the lounge.

‘I know their stateroom numbers,’ he said briefly. ‘I followed them down to B-Deck, and I watched them when they opened their stateroom doors and walked inside.’

Maria nodded slowly. ‘So that’s it, then,’ she said. ‘A positive identification of all three now, and we know precisely where to find them.’

‘Exactly. Now we know who the targets are.’

A few minutes later, a pageboy appeared with an envelope addressed to ‘Alex Maitland’, which Tremayne signed for and then opened. He read the contents quickly, then passed the message across to Maria, who read it in her turn.

‘If Mansfield’s right,’ Tremayne remarked, ‘that does add a new dimension to the plot. What I’m not sure about is what he expects us to do about it. Those packing cases will be locked away in one of the holds, and there’s no way we can get in to check them. And even if we could, what the hell could we do?’

‘What about the engravings?’ Maria asked. ‘You didn’t see anything like that in Voss’s stateroom, I suppose?’

Tremayne shook his head. ‘No, and I searched the place pretty thoroughly. If they’d been there, I’d have found them. My guess is that he’s got those locked away in the hold as well.’

‘Is it worth trying to get inside the hold and checking the cases?’ Maria asked. ‘You could pick the lock easily enough, I guess.’

‘I doubt it. I could probably get inside the hold, but I used to work on ships, and unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, and whereabouts in the hold it’s located, finding the cases would be almost impossible. There are always hundreds of boxes, all stacked in neat piles, and even if by some miracle I could identify the two cases Voss had loaded on board, unless they’re on the floor of the hold with nothing on top of them, which is really unlikely, I couldn’t get them open anyway.’

Maria held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘you’ve convinced me. And really, if Mansfield’s information is correct, we already know what’s inside them.’

‘And that adds another confirmation to the reality of the plot. I don’t know about you, but it really looks to me as if Mansfield is right about what Voss is planning.’ He picked up the message form again and pointed to a couple of the names listed on it. ‘This is hard evidence. There’s no legitimate reason that I can think of for Voss making these purchases. But set against what he’s plotting, they make perfect sense, and it’s quite obvious what he intends to do when he gets back to America.’

‘I agree. I think the evidence is now overwhelming. If we let those three men – Voss, Bauer and Kortig – reach New York and implement their plan, the world could be plunged into a bloody war within months, possibly even within weeks.’

‘And the only thing that could stop that happening is if we follow Cumming’s orders and assassinate the three of them.’ Tremayne nodded, then looked resignedly at Maria. ‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘We’ll do the first one tonight.’

12 April 1912
London

Mansfield Cumming had a number of operations running simultaneously. Because the budget of the Secret Service Bureau was so limited, he had been forced to rely upon serving and retired officers of the Armed Forces, people of similar status in the merchant marine, and even some businessmen, to act as his eyes and ears in foreign countries. He had been largely successful in appealing to the innate patriotism of such people, and these unofficial agents had generated substantial amounts of important intelligence information for Britain.

At that moment, he had three groups of volunteer spies operating in Germany, keeping an eye on the ports of Kiel, Hamburg and Bremerhaven. Another small group was based in France, in Paris, trying to make sure that all was quiet in the capital of Britain’s oldest and most traditional enemy, and there were others in Italy, Austria, Poland and Hungary. In addition, he had a number of lone watchers scattered throughout Europe, operating without specific briefs, and simply observing whatever military activity there was in their vicinity.

But ever since he’d first received confirmation of the plot to align Germany with America, that had dominated his thoughts and driven his actions, and he’d spent almost no time doing anything else.

That evening, he was again studying the north Atlantic chart. He’d been given the noon position of the
Titanic
, which he’d plotted carefully. That gave him the liner’s course and average speed, which worked out at a little over twenty knots. The other track marked on the chart was the much slower course being followed by the submarine HMS
D4
, and was significantly more accurate than that of the
Titanic
, simply because a senior officer at the Admiralty was passing him an updated position of the boat every four hours.

Projecting the two courses seemed to suggest that he was going to have to change the rendezvous position slightly. He’d originally planned for it to occur at noon on the fifteenth, but it now looked as if it was going to have to take place twelve hours earlier. He would, he knew, have to keep monitoring the situation very closely.

His thoughts turned then to the
Titanic
, ploughing westwards across the cold north Atlantic waters, and he began to wonder what Tremayne and Maria Weston were doing. By now they should have identified the three Prussian traitors, and come up with a plan to eliminate them.

And as that thought crossed his mind, Cumming realized that there was one specific order, one vital piece of information, which he hadn’t passed to Tremayne. Surely the man would already have guessed what he wanted to happen – they had talked about it, albeit briefly – but Cumming decided he couldn’t take the chance. And there was one further piece of information Williams had gleaned in Berlin. It was only a confirmation of what they already knew, but it was worth passing on to Tremayne.

Quickly, he seized a sheet of paper, composed a short but clear message, and encrypted it. He took the time to check both the original and the enciphered version to ensure there were no mistakes, then walked out of the office and gave it to Mrs McTavish to send immediately.

He just hoped he wasn’t too late.

12 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

‘How will you do it?’ Maria asked.

They were in their stateroom, and were dressed for the evening. As before, they’d taken their meal in the à la carte restaurant, which meant they could eat a smaller meal in a much shorter time than if they’d gone to the main first-class dining saloon.

Tremayne shook his head, and then unlocked his portmanteau. ‘Right now, I don’t know. What is certain is that I have to find one of the three men alone. There can’t be any witnesses, so I’m going to have to pick my moment carefully and use whatever weapon seems to be the most appropriate at the time.’