Newman found himself in a comfortable room on the top floor of one of the waterfront houses. It had a large window with an expansive view over the wintery waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and it was warm and quiet. In spite of the fact that Newman seriously resented being kept a prisoner here, he realized he could do little but to acquiesce.
They had taken a short drive to the house and were met at the door by one of Van Lee’s buddies, a short, flabby man with a shaved head and wearing a black suit and black tie. He had come to the door with a gun in his right hand.
‘So what do you expect from me?’ Newman asked the men after he had been led to the room at the top of the house.
‘You’re a physicist, right? Top nerd at the base? We expect you to translate this gibberish into something even my friend here could understand,’ Van Lee said, flicking his colleague a humourless smile. The two men made an odd couple. Van Lee was almost the complete physical opposite of his associate: tall, very fit, square-jawed and tanned.
‘Just made some soup,’ the flabby guy said. ‘You want some?’
Newman sighed. ‘I guess.’
Van Lee pointed to the professor’s briefcase. ‘May I?’ he said, his hand extended. It was, of course, a rhetorical question.
‘Just my laptop, work papers.’
Van Lee plucked Newman’s cell phone from the bag, pocketed it and handed back the briefcase.
After that they left him to his own devices. There was a Mac on a desk; next to that a scanner/printer. Professor Newman placed his bag beside the computer and pulled out his laptop, opening the lid. He then placed the blue plastic folder of photocopied notes from EF’s box on the other side of the Mac.
It was no ordinary laptop. It was fitted with a modem, scrambler and long-range transmitter coded into a satellite link. Newman tapped a couple of keys and watched as the screen changed.
There was a rap at the door. Newman closed the laptop and turned to the Mac keyboard as the door opened and the flabby guy came in with a tray. He put it on a low table in the middle of the room a few yards behind Newman.
The professor spun round. ‘I really don’t know what you people want from me,’ he said.
The guy shrugged.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Jimmy.’
‘Jimmy… I only just got this document today.’ Newman picked up the slim file.
He shrugged again. ‘Ain’t nothing to do with me. I’d eat your soup, man. Reckon you’re in for a long night!’
Newman watched the door close, ignored the soup and quickly turned back to the laptop. He had to get his message out fast if he was to evade Van Lee. The machine had found the satellite and was online. He tapped at the keyboard. The word ‘Crosshair’ appeared. It was his password of the day.
Nothing happened for twenty seconds. Then a brief message appeared — ‘Betty Grable.’
The exchange was enough to trigger an encoder program using an algorithm that changed every twenty hours. It meant Newman could write his message in English. It would then be scrambled and transported via satellite to its destination: a nuclear submarine in the mid-Atlantic. There, it would be decrypted and translated into Chinese and forwarded to Beijing.
He wrote: ‘Crucial discovery concerning NATO designation REZ375. Have copies of documents taken from wreck of Titanic that describe alternative nuclear energy process. May hold many other valuable secrets. Other parties very interested. Please make your bid.’
He stared at the screen for a few minutes listening to the waves breaking on the sand. A gull landed on the window ledge, its head swivelling to get a good look inside the room. It pecked at the brickwork and flew off.
A message appeared on the screen: ‘Authorized to offer $2 million. $250,000 now, the rest upon delivery of interpretation of document and satisfaction with its value.’
Newman ran a hand through his hair. ‘I assume you are attempting a joke,’ he typed in reply. ‘$10 million. Fifty per cent in my Swiss account by —’ he glanced at his watch‘— 9 p.m. EST today. The remainder on acceptance of interpretation.’
There was a much longer silence. Newman pulled himself up from the desk, picked up the bowl from the table in the middle of the room and started to eat the soup as he gazed out at the ocean swelling and shifting in the darkness.
A low bleep came from the laptop. A new message. He walked over and read the response, feeling a stab of disappointment before turning towards the Mac and Fortescue’s calculations. He would let the Chinese stew for a while before giving his final offer to them.
He scanned in the pages and created a password-protected file on the Mac, opened the first page and started to study the equations. There was another bleep from the laptop. The same message resent. Newman smiled to himself. ‘Getting antsy, are we, guys?’ he said aloud, and with remarkable self-control, he turned back to the Mac.
He gave it ten minutes, during which he was able to delve head-first into Fortescue’s handwritten equations from over a century ago. Then he broke away and tapped a new message into the laptop: ‘$5 million — same terms as my previous offer. This is my last.’
He had barely returned to the desktop Mac when a reply came through. A single word: ‘Agreed.’
13
Max Newman had always had a natural empathy with mathematics. A prodigy who had entered Yale at the age of fifteen, he obtained his degree in a year and a PhD by the age of eighteen — just as most kids were starting undergraduate courses. It was both a gift and a curse — he had always known that. He had lived and breathed mathematics to the exclusion of all else. He had no friends, no lovers, he could barely hold a conversation with his parents. Aged nineteen, he had been diagnosed with Asperger’s; no one who knew him was in the slightest bit surprised.
He had gravitated towards the US Navy because he had become interested in nuclear physics and it offered him the best opportunity to research at his own pace. And Professor Newman was ambitious. Not in any normal sense. He wanted money, but not to spend on Lamborghinis and loose women. He wanted to establish his own research facility, to explore his more cutting-edge ideas without some admiral breathing down his neck.
Which was why he had agreed to spy for the Chinese and why, when he saw the documents that had been recovered from the famous wreck of the Titanic and flown straight to Norfolk Naval Base, he knew he had hit pay dirt. But he also knew the Chinese were not the only people interested in this find and he had already established nefarious links with others along the way.
Sitting in this room, for all its pretty vistas and comfy furniture, he was beginning to regret this last decision, and in particular choosing Glena Buckingham’s multi-trillion-dollar colossus Eurenergy as a second paymaster a few months ago. This was his first job for them. He had called them as soon as he heard of the radiation leak — even before Fortescue’s notes had been retrieved. His contact at Eurenergy had got it immediately and was super-keen. So keen in fact it had landed him here, holed up against his will. Glena Buckingham, the CEO of Eurenergy, one of the two largest energy resource conglomerates on the planet, was clearly anxious to get hold of the information from the Titanic. Three years ago she had appeared on the cover of Time, and only a few months earlier she had been listed as the second most powerful woman in the world. Newman knew a little of her past. She was British by birth, a scientist by training, a former Cambridge fellow. She had started out as a biochemist before setting up a biotech firm that had made her extremely rich when it was floated. Four years ago she had assumed the helm of Eurenergy. Famed for her ruthlessness, she was nevertheless respected for her intelligence and vision.