The Titanic Secret (6 page)

‘I have a few questions for you, Eberhard,’ Williams began, removing the gag, ‘but just remember what I said earlier. Oh, if you do want to shout, be my guest. There’s nobody around who can hear you.’

That was actually untrue, but the Englishman was certain that Neumann would have no idea where he was, and would probably assume from his surroundings that he was somewhere deep in the German countryside.

‘First of all,’ Williams said, ‘I’d like you to tell me a little bit about a man named Gunther Voss, and everything you know about what he’s been doing here in Germany for the last couple of weeks.’

Neumann shook his head in refusal, and Williams sighed.

‘Now don’t be like that, Eberhard, or I’m going to have to hurt you. Hurt you badly, in fact.’

A couple of minutes later the driver, leaning on the side of the taxi smoking a Grathwohl cigarette – the brand was advertised as having
Unerreichte Qualitäten
, unsurpassed quality, which he, personally, didn’t agree was the case – winced as he heard the first screams.

Then he shrugged, drew a powerful hit of nicotine deep into his lungs, and exhaled slowly. He decided he actually didn’t care what Williams did to Neumann.

After all, they owed him for what his men had done to David Curtis.

9 April 1912
London

Early that afternoon, after a short and unsatisfactory lunch at his club, Mansfield Cumming stomped heavily along the Victoria Embankment, barely even glancing at the water traffic on the Thames, deep in thought. In fact, deeply worried was probably a more accurate description. Almost without conscious thought about where he was and where he was going, he walked past a succession of elegant four- and five-storey buildings, following his familiar route up Horse Guards Avenue and into Whitehall Court. Outside this building he paused, as he always did, and looked up at the massive structure, a huge contiguous building that consisted of two separate constructions designed by two different architects who had somehow managed to mesh their work into a coherent whole. Built during the mid-1880s, it had always been occupied by a large number of private residents and several commercial and administrative organizations, a veritable rabbit warren of rooms and corridors and suites and staircases.

Three years earlier, in 1909, a small suite of irregular shaped and sized rooms, accessed by a private lift and located right at the top of number 2 Whitehall Court, had been requisitioned by the War Office, and the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau, in the person of George Mansfield Smith-Cumming himself, had moved in. In fact, this organization was a lot less impressive than it sounded. The SSB was a joint initiative working under the auspices of the War Office and the Admiralty, and was primarily intended to conduct intelligence operations overseas, with a particular emphasis on the activities of the Imperial German Government. The problem was that the Bureau had almost no staff and a miniscule budget, neither of which Mansfield Cumming, the eccentric director of the organization, could do a great deal about, though he certainly tried.

Extracting funds from the British government had never been easy, right from the earliest days of the Bureau’s existence. But occasionally, when Mansfield Cumming – he didn’t normally bother with either the ‘George’ or the ‘Smith’ – was able to demonstrate that a particular threat existed, the Treasury’s hold on the purse strings could be temporarily loosened.

Some weeks earlier, rumours which had surfaced on both sides of the Atlantic had prompted Cumming to approach his masters in government, with the result that certain funding had somewhat unexpectedly been made available to him. He was keeping most of the money in reserve, but he had invested in one piece of new and unusual technology for his office, a device which he still regarded with a certain amount of suspicion, but which was undeniably already beginning to prove extremely useful: a telephone.

Almost all of the messages that Mansfield Cumming received were written: signals sent by wireless using Morse code and then transcribed, printed telegrams and the like. Telephone communications, even from people who knew that he now had such an instrument, were far less frequent.

But only a few minutes after he got back into his office that afternoon, he did receive a telephone call. An international call in fact, which originated in the British Embassy in Berlin.

‘I expected to hear from you sooner than this,’ Cumming began, raising his voice. He knew he was talking to a man in Germany, and thought the extra volume would probably help. ‘What happened?’

‘We had to wait for him to leave the building yesterday evening,’ Williams replied, his voice somewhat crackly and difficult to hear over the pops and whistles of the international line. ‘I had another chap standing by with a taxi, and we picked him up in that. But he was a tougher nut to crack than I’d expected, and I had to collate and analyze what he’d told me.’

‘Is he dead?’

‘Bread? What do you mean?’

‘No. Is. He. Dead.’

This time Williams heard him clearly. ‘Very. We left his body in the Tiergarten. But I’ve got a piece of bad news for you. When Voss left the
Preußische Geheimpolizei
headquarters two days ago, I told Paul Harrington to follow him, just in case he was going anywhere else that afternoon.’

‘So?’

‘So Harrington hasn’t been seen since. We’ve no idea what happened to him, but if I had to make a guess, I’d say that either Voss or more likely his bodyguards spotted that they were being tailed, and decided to get rid of him.’

Mansfield Cumming was silent for a few moments. First Curtis, then Harrington. The casualties were beginning to mount up. But the stakes were too high not to carry on.

‘If Harrington turns up, or if his body is found, make sure that I’m the first to know about it,’ Cumming instructed. ‘But what about the information we needed? Did Neumann tell you what we wanted to know?’

‘More or less. It took a while, and it was quite messy, especially towards the end, when there weren’t many places left where I could stick a knife in—’

Mansfield Cumming shuddered slightly. During his career in the Royal Navy he’d always been able to live like a gentleman, but since his secondment to the Secret Service Bureau, he had increasingly been forced to confront – or at the very least, be aware of – the brutal tactics which were the norm in the dirty business of espionage. And, as in this case, he sometimes had to issue orders which he knew could lead to the death or torture of an agent of either Britain or a foreign power. But he didn’t have to like it.

‘Spare me the gory details, Williams. Just get to the point, will you?’

‘He told me everything he knew, but actually that wasn’t everything we wanted to know. But you were right. Voss is the architect of this scheme. The trouble is, we still don’t know exactly what the scheme is, because Neumann clearly didn’t know all the details. But what he did tell me was bad enough.’

Mansfield Cumming listened to the familiar voice of his agent in Berlin for the next few minutes, occasionally requesting Williams to say something again when the static made his voice inaudible. And twice he had to ask for a sentence to be repeated because he simply didn’t believe what he was hearing, the suggestion was so monstrous.

When Williams had finished, Cumming muttered just two words: ‘Dear God.’

For a few moments the only sound on the line was a faint humming interspersed with crackles, then Mansfield Cumming spoke again.

‘What else did he tell you?’ he asked.

‘It’s not just Voss by himself. He’s got two people working with him, and they’re the money men. Voss’s field of expertise is mining. That’s what he does, and that’s what he’s good at. But these other two have the financial resources to make things happen, and one thing in particular.’

Again Cumming listened as Williams unfolded details of the plot which had been hatched.

‘Can he do that?’ Cumming asked, when his agent had finished his explanation.

‘Voss can’t, no, not by himself. He’s a very wealthy man, but not even his financial reserves would allow him to do that. But the two other men involved in the plot with him are bankers, and they do have the resources to achieve this. If they manage it, Mansfield, we really are in trouble. Serious trouble.’

‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ Cumming replied. ‘You have got the identities of these two men, I hope? And where they might be found?’

‘Yes. You won’t be surprised to learn that, like Voss, they’re both American citizens, but they were born in Germany, and that’s obviously where their sympathies lie. Their names are Jonas Bauer and Lenz Kortig, but where they are I have no idea. They might even be back in the United States by now. But there is one place you might start looking for them.’

‘Where?’

‘According to Neumann, Voss told him he was joining a ship at Cherbourg tomorrow, so maybe the other two men are with him.’

Williams spelled the names of the two men and Mansfield Cumming wrote them down on a piece of paper.

‘Now we have their names,’ Cumming said, ‘we can try and find them, even if they are in Washington or New York or even somewhere over here in Europe, but obviously I’ll try and find out if they’re booked on a ship first. Did Neumann know if these two people were an integral part of the plot, or just recruited by Voss because of their positions? And what are they getting out of it if the plan goes ahead?’

‘What they’ll get is a lot of money,’ Williams replied. ‘I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics of the way it works, but making money is probably their prime motivation. Neumann claimed he’d never met these two men, but according to Voss they’re just as deeply involved in the plot as he is. I got the impression that even if you could somehow eliminate two of them, whichever one was left could – and probably would – continue what they’ve started. And make it happen.’

‘So we have to find all three of them?’

‘Exactly. We have to track them all down, find out the details of this plot they’ve constructed, and then kill them. As far as I can see, Mansfield, there’s no other solution if we want Britain and her Empire to survive.’

‘God help us,’ Cumming said, his voice barely more than a whisper. ‘God help us all.’

9 April 1912
London

There was an air of ruthless and impatient competence about the tall, fair-haired young man who walked into Whitehall Court later that afternoon. The secretary who guarded the entrance to Mansfield Cumming’s inner sanctum glanced from the smart tweed suit he was wearing to the expression on his face, and simply nodded to him to go up. Alex Tremayne had an appointment – perhaps a summons would have been a better description – and he was already late.

Getting inside was the easy part. Actually reaching the office was rather more complicated, because Mansfield Cumming had just installed a false staircase, entry to which was controlled from the director’s office using a complicated system of levers and pulleys, which only occasionally worked properly.

It took three attempts before Tremayne was finally able to knock on the director’s door and then step inside.

‘Come in, Tremayne,’ Mansfield Cumming boomed. ‘You’re late,’ he added.

Tremayne sat down in front of the wide desk. ‘I wouldn’t have been quite so late if you didn’t always have to fiddle about with that ridiculous staircase. Why can’t you just have an office in a corridor, like anybody else?’

‘Don’t be impertinent, Tremayne,’ Cumming replied, picking up a gold-rimmed monocle from the desk and screwing it firmly in his right eye. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, the first letter “S” of this unit’s designation stands for “Secret”. That means nobody is supposed to know who we are, or where we are. And that staircase would work perfectly well if the people who built it for me had been competent. After all, I designed it myself.’

Tremayne didn’t reply. The last sentence seemed to him to provide an entirely adequate explanation for any failings in the operation of the equipment in the building. Mansfield Cumming was a former naval officer who had been retired from the Royal Navy because of persistent seasickness, but who had shown a considerable talent for intelligence work. As far as Tremayne knew, he had no abilities whatsoever in carpentry or mechanical engineering.

‘We have a problem,’ Cumming began, and Tremayne knew better than to interrupt. The two men enjoyed an easy and familiar relationship, for a variety of reasons, but Cumming was still Tremayne’s boss, and the summons he had received had made it clear that something serious was going on.

‘We have a problem,’ Cumming repeated, ‘and it’s all the bloody Kaiser’s fault.’

That didn’t come as a surprise to Tremayne. The military and economic development of Germany had been startling. In the forty years between 1870 and 1910, the population of the country had rocketed from 24 million to 65 million, and some 40 per cent of its total workforce was now employed in industry. Its industrial development was the fastest in the world. Germany had increased coal production by 400 per cent since 1870; steel, engineering, chemicals and armaments had grown rapidly, and its international trade had quadrupled. The country had the most efficient army in the world, with some half a million men under arms, and the second largest navy, though not as yet even beginning to approach the strength of the Royal Navy.

Any impartial observer would have come to the obvious conclusion that Germany was preparing for war. And Britain, with its vast Empire and almost limitless resources, was the major obstacle to the Kaiser’s global ambitions, and clearly the country’s most likely potential enemy.

‘What’s happened?’ Tremayne asked, his piercing blue eyes narrowing as he stared at Cumming.

‘You knew David Curtis?’ Cumming asked.

The past tense wasn’t lost on Tremayne. ‘Yes, I did. What’s happened to him?’ he asked.

‘He’s dead, shot on the street three nights ago in Berlin.’ Cumming never believed in sugar-coating the truth, no matter how unpalatable. ‘He had a meeting with a low-level informer, but something obviously tipped off the German secret police. He was chased through the streets and then shot dead right outside the British Embassy. The events leading up to his killing were somewhat confused, as you’d expect, but we’ve received reports that the man he’d been talking to in a bar a few minutes earlier was arrested, so we presume they got the informer as well.’