— I’ll give it to you.” Although looking a little put out Vince asked, “So what about this report you had back from London of the images you sent. I liked that. What did the message really say?”
I took the folded piece of paper from my inside jacket pocket and handed it to him.
I watched his expression as he unfolded the white A4 sheet.
“It’s blank! You crafty bastard,” he said.
Jason Stewart pulled up in a cloud of dust at the end of the narrow street. I helped Vince carry his luggage to the car. He squeezed his seventeen stone frame into the front seat of the small saloon. Winding the window down he said, “I’d love to see the face of that Hassan.”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid,” I said. “I’ll see you when we get back to England.”
In the café, I opened the leather rucksack that Vince had left for me. Fiona and I looked at the small digital transmitter that could recall the underwater lobster pot. I made a mental note to look up as much information on the Illuminati, when I returned to London
Chapter 41
The long flexible blades of the Sea-king helicopter cut the air above our heads. I tapped the pilot on the arm. “Just one more sweep,” I said, “then we’ll return to base and try again tomorrow.” He nodded.
We dropped towards the heavy sea and I watched the wave-tops, flattened by the downward draught of air from the rotor blades.
“OK, Chief,” I shouted over my shoulder. Chief Petty Officer Redfern of the Air-Sea Rescue watch at Portland in Dorset leaned through the door and watched the ocean top.
“Keep her steady, back a bit.” Redfern spoke to the pilot through the microphone in his helmet. The pilot obediently brought the helicopter along a reciprocal course.
“Just a floating piece of wood,” Redfern’s voice came over the intercom.
We moved on to the next square of the search area. Three miles away on the starboard side I could see the English coast around Kimmeridge and Dancing Ledge. Through the grey sea ran black veins as the light fell across the contours of the water. “Too dark now,” I said, and Vince switched off the transmitter. The interior of the cabin glowed with the green light of the instrument panel.
It was two long days before our effort was rewarded. We had hours of ‘forward a bit’ over foamlashed pieces of flotsam and sliding over for a closer look, only to find a shoal of fish, their scales shimmering in the sunlight just below the surface of the water.
When we made contact, the radio transmitter set on Vince’s knees — the one we had stolen from Flackyard’s safe in Marrakech — gave a high pitched ‘pulse’ of response. The pilot held us steady. The wave-crests were inches under us. ‘Beep beep’: it was emitting a signal to us. Vince was talking over the intercom and I grabbed the diver’s rubber-clad arm and tried to go through his instructions all over again in thirty seconds flat.
Redfern tapped my arm and said, “It’ll be OK,” then like a pantomime genie he disappeared. Hands crossed, face lowered, he hit the water with a splash. Only now did I see the target that he had dived towards.
The specially adapted lobster pot was floating amid the waves, green vegetation from the seabed covering most of it. C.P.O. Redfern had the cable lashed around the large brown cage within a minute. The winch operator began to haul it up and brought it splashing and dripping into the cabin of the helicopter. A number of small crabs and seaweed spilled out onto the floor as it rolled around the cramped cabin.
LJ had done his stuff with the top brass. When the helicopter got back to base everything was ready and waiting — even a ration of rum for the still wet C.P.O. Redfern. Vince and I were housed in one of the Air-Sea Rescue workshops with the inner cylinder laid out on the bench when the Station Commander came in to ask if there was anything more we required.
Four bolts had to be cut off, but that was only to be expected after being submerged for prolonged periods of time in salt water. The light alloy panel came free to reveal a large compartment and gave access to two small ballast tanks the propulsion motors and the remote control circuitry.
Vince took a closer look around the compartment using a fibre optic camera linked up to his laptop so as to make sure that the cylinder wasn’t booby-trapped.
“Very interesting,” he said. “Bloody clever, this,” he added.
“What is it?” I asked impatiently.
“It looks like whoever designed this cylinder decided to build in a nasty little explosive device, I’d say just enough to blow the front of your face and hands off, but not enough to kill you. Obviously anyone tampering with it, and who didn’t know the correct procedure for dismantling the thing. Would I’m afraid get a very nasty surprise.”
“Can you deactivate it?” I asked.
“Give me two minutes, after which I’ll either be lying in a pool of blood on the floor or wiping the sweat off of my brow and supping a large glass of that rum over there,” said Vince with a thin smile.
He rendered it safe within minutes.
“Well, that was easier than I’d expected.” Vince held up the flat piece of plastic.
“What we have here, mate, looks like a common or garden processor chip.”
“For your laymen’s mind, that means that it has been programmed with a number of prearranged instructions. Nothing unusual about that, I hear you say, but then this little chap here,” he pointed to a part of the microprocessor.
“I’ve only seen this once before, and that was onboard a Russian nuclear missile.” He saw the look on my face. “Oh don’t worry, it’s nothing sinister — well, not now anyway, all it does is allow it to think for itself once activated.”
“But what the hell is it doing in a lobster pot? Anyway, what they’ve done by the looks of it, is configure it so that every twenty-four hours it would relay a simple message to the motors and ballast tanks to take it to the surface.”
“Then once on the top it would transmit a signal, now the signal is unique to this processor only. When it’s sent its message it simply refills its ballast tanks and then sinks to the bottom again.” He continued to prod around inside the compartment for another ten minutes before proclaiming it absolutely safe.
“So every twenty four hours this metal cylinder had surfaced inside the lobster pot and its unique signal had told Flackyard that it was still “alive and well” as well as giving its exact position, before returning to the bottom,” I said.
“Spot on, old son.”
So George Ferdinand had tried to ‘home in’ on the signal, but failed to spot it before it descended to the seabed again.
Harry Caplin knew that his boat had travelled ten miles on each of Flackyard’s trips.
“Down the coast” he had said.
I reached inside to where a small circular cover was; I could only just get a finger hold to twist the quarter turn required to release it. Once open I found the compact mini-disc stored in an aluminium case, along with two envelopes inside one of those seal-top document bags. Before we opened the CD, we sent for a large jug of coffee and anything that could be rummaged up to eat.
Vince held up the compact mini-disc in one hand and his well earned tumbler of rum in the other, “Based on the trouble we’ve had finding it, I think this is going to be a tough one to get into!”
I agreed. The man, who had successfully concealed Constantine’s List for many years, had not wanted anyone except himself to view its contents.
This was going to take a long time.
Chapter 42
Perhaps I was expecting the typical type of letters inside the cylinder. I spread both of them out on the tabletop. One was type written on official Whitehall headed paper. The other was hand written on a heavy embossed woven paper. But, why were they in the cylinder together?