The Titanic Secret

by Clive Cussler

  Bell seemed intrigued by Hall’s theory, and asked, “How do the French play into this scenario? We know someone contacted them from the Hvalur Batur.”

  “Not sure,” Hall admitted. “I didn’t know about that. Must be they promised him a job with them and a home for him and Adeline.”

  Bell got up and felt his way over to the truck. He reached in and flipped on the headlamps. Though they appeared dim while driving, they gave off more than enough light to fill the small barn.

  “Why’d you do that?” Vern Hall asked peevishly.

  “Because,” Bell said, “it’s time to put an end to this charade.”

  40

  Bell’s words hung in the air for a long moment.

  Vernon Hall looked from Bell to Brewster and back again. He somehow managed to sound defiant when he asked, “What charade?”

  “What’s going on, Bell?” Brewster asked.

  “I needed Vernon to pass on to Gly the name of the ship we’ve booked passage on and when it sails.”

  Brewster’s eyes went wide and his mouth slack.

  “You haven’t figured it out? Johnny Caldwell wasn’t the saboteur. He was a victim. Your old friend Vern was the one who sold you all down the river. I realized a couple of days ago but needed to keep him around to pass the information on to Gly. I’ve got to hand it to you, Hall, you had me going for a long while. And pretending to be concussed since that night on the train was a brilliant move.”

  Hall made like he was going to get to his feet.

  Bell had his .45 in hand before Hall had moved even an inch. Hall relaxed again, but his eyes glittered and darted like a trapped rodent. “What threw me initially was the squeaky door I heard on the whaling ship. You hid your identity from Arn well enough when you used the radio, but you couldn’t risk his reporting your visit without finding a way of deflecting suspicion onto someone else.

  “When you were finished calling your people on the Lorient, you came down to my cabin, made a noise outside of it loud enough to wake me, and then opened and closed one of the other cabin doors to make me think it was one of the six men sleeping near me who’d just been up. I went to the bridge, where Arn told me about one of the miners in the radio shack. I tested the set and found it was still warm. But I never once thought it was you because your cabin was on a different deck than mine.”

  Bell looked to Brewster. He appeared unable to grasp the level of betrayal. Bell had no choice but to plow on. “I realized after I found you unconscious on the train that the blow to the head—self-inflicted, no doubt—was the only mark on you. The rest of us were banged-up from the fight on the dock, but you didn’t have a scratch. It’s because you didn’t participate. You were hoping the French would beat us there and you’d get whatever reward Gly had offered you.

  “But the two times I checked your eyes, they didn’t react like someone with a head injury. So I was suspicious. When it appeared we might give Gly the slip permanently by switching trucks in Birmingham, you suddenly woke up. You had to get word to Gly.”

  Bell looked again at Brewster. Brewster still stared at Vern as though he’d never seen him before. The detective continued his narration. “Vern couldn’t reach the French from Novaya Zemlya because you’d secretly disabled the radio, forcing him to make the clandestine call from the whaling ship. From that, Gly knew we were headed to Aberdeen and he had an ambush waiting for us. What follows after that—I really have to hand it to Gly, he’s as smart as he is evil. By putting that telephone number and mention of a reward in newspapers, he turned everyone in central England into his personal spy. The innkeeper made the call and the French almost got away with the ore. Next, Gly correctly figured we needed to change vehicles and couldn’t do it through any legitimate means. That led me to the next major city, Birmingham. And Gly had already put out word to the local underworld to be on the lookout for us. I practically handed us to George Devlin on a silver platter.”

  Bell paused for a reflective moment. “Had it not been for Warry O’Deming, we’d all be dead and the ore lost behind an abandoned cotton mill for all eternity.

  “But Gly’s not a mind reader. He could have guessed we’d head to Southampton, but he didn’t know our ship or sailing time. During the initial stage of the fight in the garage, I saw Vern speaking to one of the mechanics. I had gone over the travel arrangements my agent in London made for me again this morning so there would be no confusion when he passed on our itinerary. That’s why I saved the man as we were leaving the garage. I had to make sure Gly had that information.” Bell turned his attention back to Vernon Hall. “Now that that task is completed, I no longer have any use for you.”

  “That’s nothing but pure fantasy, Bell,” Hall said. “None of it’s true. Johnny cracked me over the head with a shovel and I’ve been unconscious until just this morning.”

  Bell ignored him. “There’s two things I don’t have an answer to. One, I don’t know why you did it. I assume you were offered a tremendous amount of money and you believed—wrongly, I suspect—that Gly would let you live. You’re a loose end to him. He’d just as soon put a knife into your belly as honor his bargain. The second thing I don’t know is, how you planned to pin this on someone else if I ever got suspicious. Blaming a lovelorn Johnny Caldwell and claiming ignorance about the radio equipment and the call from the Batur was good.”

  “I almost believed it myself,” Brewster said in a dead monotone. “I wanted to believe it.”

  “You two have been friends for a long time, so I can’t blame you,” Bell told him. “You see, Hall, Johnny probably did know Jake Hobart’s wife, but it wasn’t her picture he carried. When concocting lies, it’s best to keep them as vague as possible. Naming Adeline Hobart as Johnny’s love was a mistake. I’m not sure of his girl’s name, but it ended in tia, and Johnny couldn’t be with her because there are laws on the books and prejudice in men’s hearts over people of different races being happy together. You took your lie one step too far. I’ve known about your being the mole for a while now, but I needed you to reveal yourself in front of Joshua. Otherwise, he never would have believed me. Right?”

  “That’s why you told us about Johnny and the girl when we were back at the pub.”

  Bell nodded. “Because of how the fight turned out aboard the locomotive, Vern had no choice but to say that Johnny was the saboteur. Tonight, I fed Hall a line about Johnny having a girlfriend he couldn’t be with and he went with it, embellishing the story as he went. He spun a narrative that dovetailed with how Jake Hobart was secretly married and thought he was convincing us with every word.”

  “Only, he was digging himself deeper.”

  “That he was.” Bell shot Vernon Hall a mocking smile. “I can’t tell you how many confessions I’ve gotten over the years because criminals are too stupid to keep their mouths shut.”

  “What happens now?” Hall asked. “Are you going to kill me?”

  Bell said to Joshua Brewster, “There’s some rope behind the seat in the truck. Could you get it for me?”

  “Yeah.” Brewster got to his feet and lurched over to the truck. He was at his breaking point, physically and mentally.

  Returning his attention to Hall, Bell said, “I’m going to leave you tied up here until Wednesday afternoon, when there’s nothing more you can do to interfere in this mission. Afterward, I’m going to turn you over to the Army liaison officer at the American Embassy and see to it you’re shipped back to the States in irons.”

  Brewster came back, walked up to where Hall lay on the straw. He hesitated for just a second. Standing only a few inches above five feet, Joshua Hayes Brewster managed to look like he towered over his old friend. He gave that same disturbed tittering laugh Bell had heard in the pub back in Newcastle.

  “No,” Bell shouted, but it was too late.

  Brewster had fallen upon Vernon Hall with a rusty screwdriver that Bell had overlook
ed when he’d inventoried potential weapons in the dump truck. By the time Bell got to him and pulled him off, Brewster had sunk the tool into Hall’s chest a half dozen times. Brewster didn’t struggle. In fact, he was quite passive, considering the savagery of the attack.

  He looked at Bell, his face streaked with blood. “Sorry about this little outburst. I get these wild ideas sometimes,” he said, repeating what he’d told Bell after the pub incident. “Though this time I know exactly where it came from.”

  A few minutes passed. Brewster said, “It doesn’t matter to me why he did it. Maybe he was crazier than me. I’m going to tell myself that he had no choice. I’m going to believe the French had him in such a jam that he had to do this to us and that he’d been told we’d all be spared. I can’t live thinking it was any other way. That said, it’s still important to me that this stays between us. I’m not going to write about Vern’s betrayal in my notes and I’d be beholden to you if it stayed out of your official report.”

  “I never lie in my personal journals, but I’ll make sure this stays out of my write-up for Colonel Patmore.”

  “Thanks. So what now?”

  Bell studied the corpse for a moment. “We make the best of this tragedy and bury one last Coloradan on British soil. The town of Southby has to have a church and cemetery. We need to also find a stonecutter for a special headstone. Vernon Hall is going to take a secret to his grave.”

  41

  The SS Bohemia was roughly three hundred feet long, black-hulled, with a single smokestack as tall and as straight as a chimney. She had two forward holds, with a mast derrick between them, and a third hold aft that also had its own crane for slinging aboard cargo. Bell estimated she was at least a decade old, and while someone had taken care of her in the early years, she seemed to have hit a rough spell of late. Her paint was peeling in places, and there was a massive dent in her bow where she’d slammed into a pier or possibly another ship. A placard on her pilothouse just aft of the bridge wing said she was owned by Bougainville Shippers Ltd. It was one of the smaller of the twenty-three steamship lines that used the port.

  He had wanted to keep the ship under observation since her arrival in the bustling Port of Southampton, but making arrangements in Southby had taken a great deal longer than he’d anticipated. They’d barely arrived in time for the scheduled sailing.

  The afternoon was fair, with the sun dancing around the clouds overhead. The temperature was nearing sixty degrees, which made it the warmest Bell had experienced since long before this case had begun back in Denver all those months ago. He was a man of dogged persistence, and there was no question he’d see this through to a satisfactory conclusion, yet it had taken a heavy toll.

  He had watched the Bohemia on and off since before noon, but with all the commotion around Berth 44, it had been difficult. There had been thousands of passengers and well-wishers, as well as dozens of trucks carrying luggage, and more trucks with the last of the perishables, and barges loading coal that the recent strike had made so expensive, many ships had been left idle in port. While he hadn’t spotted Foster Gly, by the time he began a serious stakeout from the roof of a nearby warehouse with a ridiculously easy lock to pick, Bell had counted no less than six men moving about on the ship who didn’t act like sailors and another four loitering in the area that weren’t stevedores.

  “What do you think?” he asked softly.

  “I think if your plan doesn’t work, we didn’t bring enough guys.”

  Joel Wallace looked almost as travel-worn as Bell, but he was back from a useless jaunt to Aberdeen, and Miss Bryer had done her job and told her boss to gather some troops. Sadly, he’d only managed to get four additional men, English lads eager for a few extra quid and good with their fists. They were waiting in a car out of sight behind the warehouse.

  Bell checked the time. “We’d better get down there. The taxi should be here any minute. Don’t do anything until I give the signal.”

  “Which is?”

  “If I shoot my pistol or Gly’s thugs swarm me on deck, get up there and save me.”

  “Got it. Gunshot or swarm.”

  Bell and Wallace descended to the dock. Wallace went to get his boys, and they took up position hidden behind pallets of machine tools. Bell hung back too, checking his watch. Finally, a taxi appeared. He stepped into the open and it was as if he’d upended a beehive. The four heavies on the pier rushed toward him, fists clenched, intimidating scowls in place. On the freighter, several more of Gly’s men moved to the head of the gangplank, while another vanished into the superstructure. Even before Bell had made it ten paces, Gly appeared on the ship’s deck with a slovenly dressed man with a peaked hat. It had to be the captain, René Bougainville.

  The taxi eased to a stop at the foot of the gangway. Bell was ready to watch the reaction when she exited the vehicle. This was going to be one for the ages, he thought.

  The rear door opened, and a slender Asian girl with a rope of black hair dangling down her back jumped out. Bell was expecting someone else and was startled. She regarded him languidly. She was pretty but had too much self-possession for one so young. She had a cynic’s eyes in a schoolgirl’s face.

  “Min,” the captain yelled. “Get up here and go to the cabin.”

  Two men grabbed Bell from behind. His plan had gone sideways before it had even launched. What were the odds of a second taxi arriving at the allotted time of the one he was expecting?

  The girl scampered up the ramp and disappeared, the captain giving her a disquieting look. Bell was frog-marched up after her. Gly sported a Navy peacoat that looked like it had been fitted by tentmakers. His shoulders and arms strained at the wool cloth. He had a cigar going in the corner of his mouth, and his eyes were slitted against the smoke.

  “Where’s the ore?” he asked, and stepped forward and rammed a fist so deeply into Bell’s gut it felt like Gly had punched the inside of his spine.

  Bell would have collapsed had the two men not been holding him up. Gly backed away, pacing like a caged animal awaiting its meal, while Bell tried to reinflate his lungs by taking agonizing sips of air.

  “Gone,” he finally wheezed.

  “What do you mean gone?”

  “What it sounds like, you ape.” Bell straightened as best he could. “Gone. I was onto Vern Hall from the beginning. I fed him false information so he’d pass it on to you. See that dark cloud way down the Channel? That’s the ship carrying the ore, Gly. It left dock at noon as scheduled and should arrive in New York to much fanfare on the seventeenth.”

  A terrible blackness descended over Gly’s eyes as the realization struck home.

  Captain Bougainville sensed it and stepped forward. “No killing on my ship, Gly.” His accent was an odd mash-up of French and something else. “You want to tear each other apart, do it on the dock.”

  The huge Scot ignored him and ran at Bell with a full-throated roar of hatred. Bell kicked both legs up since his arms were being supported by Gly’s henchmen and struck outward just as Gly came into range. The dynamics of the strike saw Gly stagger back and the men holding Bell stagger back and lose their grip. In the confusion of the sudden reversal, Bell lifted the .45 from its holster and shot the closest man.

  He swung right to line up on Gly, but the guard on his other side barreled into Bell at the last second and he was thrown against a tall, tuba-like air intake scoop. He leveraged an elbow free and slammed it into the man’s nose, breaking it.

  Joel Wallace must have been watching much closer than Bell gave him credit for. He and his guys came up the gangway like a flying squad even as the echo of the single gunshot was fading to nothing.

  Boots and fists flew in a mad scrum. Bell just saw flashes of it, like some stroboscopic effect. Faces leered at him and he struck out at them, punching with abandon, kicking where he could. For each time he was shoved, he pushed back twice as hard. All the whil
e he was looking for Gly amid the tangle of bodies. He had one round left in the Colt and he didn’t want to waste it.

  But then he was taken from behind, arms with the strength of boa constrictors pinning his arms to his sides and beginning to crush his chest. Gly lifted him from the deck so that Bell’s feet wheeled uselessly. He tried to ram his head back into Gly’s face, but the Scotsman absorbed the blow as though it were a tap.

  The crushing force seemed to double. A little air escaped Bell’s mouth, and Gly was there to make sure he couldn’t replace it with fresh oxygen. Men bumped into them, fighting around them, and yet the two stood still in the melee, Bell’s life slowly ebbing from his body as the pressure on his ribs doubled again.

  He had just enough of an angle to shoot the two smallest toes off Gly’s right foot.

  Gly released him out of surprise more than pain. Bell fell to the deck but didn’t remain still. He pulled his boot knife free and was rising fast to jam it up under Gly’s ribs when there was a shout of such command that he stopped. They all did.

  “Arrêtez-vous immédiatement!”

  A woman stood at the head of the gangway flanked by two men in overcoats carrying revolvers. She was stern-faced, with a nest of dark hair, and dressed severely in all black. Even had she not been one of the most famous women in the world, her presence would nevertheless command a room.

  “What is the meaning of this?” demanded Madame Marie Curie. “Gly, what is going on here?”

  The natural-born killer actually looked like a contrite schoolboy for a moment. Bell moved away from him as the two groups of fighting men also separated themselves. Most of the faces were bloodied and deeply bruised, though Joel Wallace’s boys seemed to have enjoyed themselves, judging by their newly gap-toothed grins.