The Titanic Secret (27 page)

Evans nodded. ‘Dummy warheads, I presume?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Hutchinson said. ‘Live warheads. Tell them to take their time, and make sure they get everything right, but both weapons must be ready and loaded in the tubes no later than fifteen hundred hours tomorrow. Any questions or any problems, let me know immediately.’

Evans nodded again, but looked somewhat quizzically at Hutchinson as he left the cabin and walked back into the control room to issue the appropriate orders.

Hutchinson shrugged. He had no option but to deceive Evans, the same way he was deceiving the rest of the crew. His orders were absolutely specific, and came from a level in the command structure which made it impossible to disobey, or even to question them. The reality was that he still had no idea what he was supposed to be doing steaming around the Atlantic Ocean in a submarine carrying live weapons.

Perhaps the next classified and encrypted signal the boat would receive would provide him with an explanation. But somehow, he doubted it.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

‘It’s time,’ Tremayne murmured, glancing again at his watch. It was just after four thirty in the morning, and both he and Maria were still fully dressed. They’d slept for a short while, until just after three, and then spent the last hour and a half trying to decide not what they should do – they already knew that, because of the unequivocal final message Tremayne had received from Mansfield Cumming – but exactly how they should do it.

And, in the end, there seemed to be only one possible way they could achieve their goal: they would have to tackle each of the three conspirators in their staterooms, one by one, when they were alone and, hopefully, asleep, and make sure they were all dead by the morning.

It wasn’t much of a plan, realistically, and it largely depended on Tremayne’s ability to pick the door locks quickly – and above all silently – and on the corridors of the giant ship being deserted while they moved from one stateroom to another. And, obviously, on their intended victims not being wide awake and sitting waiting for them, armed with loaded pistols.

‘Have you got everything?’ Maria asked, getting up from the bed where she’d been lying down.

Tremayne nodded, and pointed at the occasional table where he’d laid out the tools he was going to need. His leather case of lock picks was next to his pistol, the suppressor still attached to the end of the barrel, and beside that lay the cosh and garrotte. The last item was a small steel tin which Maria hadn’t seen before.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

Tremayne clicked open the lid to show her. Inside was a syringe, two needles and four small glass bottles containing a straw-coloured liquid.

‘What you’re looking at are four cases of instant heart attack. Just load up the syringe, stick the needle in someone’s arm and press the plunger, and thirty seconds later they’re dead. It’s quick and allegedly painless.’

Maria looked at the steel case with interest. ‘That might be the best option, if you can use it,’ she said. ‘Somebody dying of a heart attack on board the ship is sad, but hopefully no-one would suspect foul play, and we wouldn’t have to lug the body up to the outside decks and throw it over the side. Mind you, three cases of heart attack might be a bit more difficult to explain. Does that stuff leave any traces in the body?’

Tremayne shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he replied. ‘The instructions, if you could call them that, didn’t mention it. But even if it does, there should be nothing to link us with the simultaneous deaths of three other first-class passengers. Obviously, once we’ve done the job, all the evidence that we were involved goes over the side of the ship. In fact, if you think about it, a ship is an ideal place to commit a murder; the ocean will swallow both the body and the evidence.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

Maria still sounded unhappy about what they were about to do, and in truth, Tremayne didn’t feel comfortable with it either, but they had absolutely no choice in the matter, and both of them knew it.

He slipped the pistol into the right-hand pocket of his trousers, and distributed the remaining tools, for want of a better word, into his other pockets. He had the sheath for the stiletto strapped to his left arm, under his jacket, the knife already in it. Maria would be carrying nothing apart from her handbag which contained her Browning with the suppressor attached. She would be the eyes and the ears at the back of Tremayne’s head.

She opened the door of their stateroom as quietly as she could, and peered out into the corridor, glancing in both directions. Lights were burning, but there was no sign of life, no indication that anybody on that deck of the ship was awake. And that suited them fine.

They walked down the short corridor to the lobby beside the staircase and climbed quietly up to the deck above, where they knew that Bauer and Kortig had their staterooms. As they stepped into that staircase lobby they separated, Tremayne walking to one side of the ship to check the corridors in both directions, and Maria to do the same on the other side. Just as on the deck below, all the passageways appeared to be deserted, which is what they’d hoped.

‘This way,’ Tremayne whispered, and led the way down the corridor towards Jonas Bauer’s stateroom. As with most of the first-class accommodation, not every stateroom had en suite facilities, and there were a number of cross passages running between the main port and starboard corridors, in which bathrooms and lavatories were located. The first of these passages was almost opposite one of the two doors that gave access to Bauer’s suite, which would allow Maria to keep out of sight, while still being able to check for people approaching down the corridors.

‘Which door?’ she mouthed.

Tremayne pointed first at one door, and then at the other one, and whispered: ‘Lounge, and bedroom.’

He gestured silently to her, and she slipped into the cross passage and waited there. He glanced in both directions, but neither heard nor saw anybody. He took the leather case out of his pocket, selected two of the tools from inside it, again checked that he was unobserved, then crouched down and began working on the lock of the door leading to the bedroom of the suite.

It didn’t take long. In less than a minute there was a faint click, and Tremayne was able to turn the handle and ease the door open the barest fraction of an inch. Then he stopped, replaced the case in his pocket, took out his cosh and motioned for Maria to follow him. Jonas Bauer was a big man, and subduing him might be easier with the two of them.

The one thing Tremayne had not brought with him on board the ship, was an electric torch, and as he peered through the crack between the door and the frame into the darkness of the stateroom, he regretted the omission. The other obvious problem was that the corridor lamps were burning brightly and would throw a sudden flood of light into the room as soon as he opened the door fully, and that might well be enough to wake the sleeping occupant. But that was a chance he was simply going to have to take.

Tremayne glanced behind him, to make sure that Maria was there, nodded to her, then pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The light from the corridor revealed a bedchamber that looked just as opulent as the one Voss had taken. As he glanced round, Tremayne saw the same kind of luxurious furnishings – elegant chairs, tables and decorations – with the bed positioned over to his right. He took all that in, and immediately stepped forward.

The moment he did that, he noticed that although the covers on the bed showed that it had obviously been slept in, there was nobody lying there.

And as his steps faltered with the realization that his target was not where he expected him to be, a pair of hands seized him around the neck and began to efficiently choke the life out of him.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Tremayne gasped with shock, and then reacted. He reached up, grabbed the wrists of the man standing behind him, and started to bend forward, to try to throw his attacker completely over his body and break the man’s grip. But before he could complete the move, there was a dull thud from behind, and the grip on his neck was immediately released.

Tremayne whirled round, his right hand lifting up his cosh, but then relaxed again. In the light spilling into the stateroom from the corridor, he could see Maria standing about four feet away, the Browning pistol held firmly in her right hand, but reversed so that she was grasping it by the slide and suppressor, effectively turning the weapon into a very efficient club. At her feet lay the crumpled figure of Jonas Bauer, blood oozing from a wound on his right temple.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked Tremayne, who was massaging the sides of his neck where the banker had grabbed him.

‘Yes. And thank you for your intervention.’

‘You didn’t need me,’ Maria said with a slight smile. ‘I saw what you were going to do, but I just thought it might be better to knock him out before you started throwing him all around the stateroom and breaking the beautiful furniture. I hope,’ she added, looking critically at her pistol, ‘that I didn’t bend the barrel or anything on his thick skull.’

‘The Browning’s a good pistol,’ Tremayne said, looking around the stateroom. ‘It’ll take a lot more than that to do it any serious damage.’

He walked behind Maria to the open door, peered out, checking in both directions, then stepped back inside, closed and locked the door and switched on the electric light. He looked down at the unconscious man and nodded.

‘I know it’s not exactly the way we planned it,’ he said, fishing in his pocket and producing the metal container supplied by Mansfield Cumming, ‘but now we can actually make this a believable scenario.’

He took out the syringe, attached a needle and then removed the top of one of the small bottles and drew the liquid inside it into the instrument. Bauer was wearing a pair of garish striped pyjamas, and Tremayne was able to easily roll up one sleeve to expose his upper arm. He located a vein in the crook of the man’s elbow, slid the needle into it and depressed the plunger on the syringe.

Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then Bauer gave a sudden shudder, twitched and then fell still, all movement in his body ceasing.

Tremayne felt for a pulse in the man’s neck, and then in his wrist, but could detect nothing.

‘That’s it,’ he murmured, carefully removing the needle and packing it and the syringe back into the metal case.

‘Whatever that stuff is,’ Maria said, ‘it’s certainly very effective.’

A tiny drop of blood had appeared where Tremayne had inserted in the needle, and he wiped it off with a towel he found in the en suite bathroom.

‘If anyone even notices that,’ he said, indicating the towel, ‘they’ll just assume that he cut himself shaving.’

He looked around the bedroom, then back down at Bauer.

‘He was severely overweight, and I don’t suppose a heart attack at his age and in his condition would surprise anyone too much. It’ll look as if he felt unwell, got out of bed, perhaps to try to summon help, then he fell to the floor, smashing his head as he did so. Probably on this,’ he added, wiping the bloodied towel on one corner of the seat of a nearby chair.

Tremayne put the towel back in the bathroom and then walked into the bedroom to stand beside the body. He and Maria stared down at the corpse, their backs to the door. Neither of them saw the handle of the door turn slowly and silently as somebody tried to get in from the corridor outside. But Tremayne had locked it, and the door didn’t budge. After a few seconds, the handle turned back the other way.

‘We’ll take a quick look round while we’re here,’ he said, ‘just in case Bauer has been obliging enough to leave out anything incriminating.’

He and Maria checked in all the obvious places – the drawers and cupboards and a small and clearly expensive leather case on one of the chairs – but found nothing of any interest until Tremayne felt under the still-warm pillow on the bed. Then his fingers closed around an oblong packet. He pulled it out and examined it carefully.

‘This looks like a waterproof pouch,’ he said, opening it at one end and extracting a sealed envelope. ‘Whatever’s in this is important.’

He ripped open the envelope and looked at the contents, half a dozen copies of what looked like financial documents of some kind.

‘What are they?’ Maria asked.

Tremayne looked at each in turn, an unreadable expression on his face. Then he handed them all to Maria.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘these don’t make any sense to me.’

Maria stared at the pages one after the other, and then nodded. ‘They do to me,’ she said, after a moment. ‘I did some training as an accountant – not the most exciting few months of my life. These are copies of documents, of contracts and other agreements for financial transactions, and the only common factor is the signature at the bottom. The signature of the President of the United States of America. I don’t know exactly what these documents refer to, but from the looks of them they provide evidence of a colossal misuse of power, of corruption at the highest possible level. And the sums of money listed in these transactions are eye-watering.’

‘Would they be enough to compel the president to do what Voss wants?’

‘I don’t know, but because of what’s been going on, I assume they must be,’ she replied, handing back the copies to Tremayne, who replaced them in the envelope.

‘I think that explains the lever Voss has then, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘But by themselves, these copies probably aren’t enough, because they could be faked. What we have to do is find the original documents, and my guess is that Voss will have those.’

‘You don’t suppose he might have them stored in a bank vault somewhere?’

‘I doubt it. I don’t think Voss would trust these to a bank. These documents are his ace in the hole and he would want them with him at all times. These copies are just confirmation of their possession of the originals. I assume that Kortig will have a set as well. We need to recover all of them, and especially we need the originals, because if these fall into the wrong hands – I mean, Voss having them is bad enough – the consequences could be catastrophic. We need to find them, and destroy them.’