Kate slapped a soaked cleaning cloth onto a workbench, let out a small cry and slumped into a chair. ‘Hell, I’ve had it with this!’
Lou came over, pulled a chair up close to hers and took her hand.
‘It’s almost done,’ he said softly.
‘It’s not that!’ Kate snapped. ‘Oh, God! I’m sorry, Lou.’ She squeezed his hand and gave him a weak smile. ‘It’s this whole bloody thing. I’ve lost my godparents… You saw the horror…’ She burst into tears.
Lou held her tight and let her cry on his shoulder. After a moment she pulled back and forced herself to calm down, wiped away the tears, her stoicism kicking in.
‘I feel like walking out that door and getting on a plane back to Bermuda,’ she declared. ‘In fact, why shouldn’t I? I’m not a bloody conscript!’
‘There’s nothing to stop you, Kate. Except…’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Except what?’
‘I think that you want to get to the bottom of all this just as much as I do.’
‘There are limits!’
The phone rang. It took Lou a moment to find it under a pile of files.
‘I’ve got some news.’ It was Jerry Derham.
‘Good news, I hope.’
‘Bit of each actually.’
‘OK.’
‘Can you and Kate come over?’
Lou covered the receiver. ‘Jerry. Has some news. Wants us to go see him. You still fighting or flying back to the sunshine?’
Kate rolled her eyes and wiped her nose. ‘What do you think, wise guy?’
‘We’ll be there in an hour.’
A uniformed officer had been posted outside their lab. He drove them to the naval base, escorted them through security, on to Captain Derham’s office, and then waited outside. Lou and Kate walked in to see Kevin Grant in a chair facing the captain’s desk.
‘You remember Kevin?’ Derham said and indicated that Kate and Lou should sit. The young guy nodded and lifted from his lap a metal box about the size of a paperback book. ‘The hard drive,’ he said. ‘Damaged beyond repair, I’m afraid. Couldn’t get a thing from it.’
‘Fantastic!’ Lou said and turned to Kate. She had a glazed expression on her face. ‘Jerry, you said you had good and bad news. Not seeing much good so far!’
‘Ah, well, Kevin here can enlighten you on that too. He’s decoded the message that Fortescue had with the documents.’
‘You’re kidding!’ Lou said. ‘You said it would be really difficult to crack because it was so short.’
Grant beamed. ‘It did take a long time… by my standards!’
‘For God’s sake!’ Kate exclaimed. ‘What did it say?’
‘Security Box 19AS. Cargo hold 4.’
Lou whistled. ‘He must have hidden the other part of his work there. But why?’
‘Who knows?’ Derham answered. ‘But my suspicion would be that he believed someone, an enemy agent, for example, was also travelling on the Titanic. Why else would he be so careful?’
‘But what are the chances of the security box still being in one piece, or traceable among the wreckage?’ Kate asked.
‘Quite good actually,’ Derham replied. He turned his computer screen to face them and walked round the desk. ‘As soon as Kevin decoded the message I had my people scour all the footage of the wreck taken recently by Commander Milford and her team aboard the Armstrong. They’ve developed a program that matches up the entire wreck with the original schematic of the ship used by the men who built it at the Harland & Wolff yards in Belfast. They’ve found cargo hold 4, just there.’ He tapped the screen then reached for the mouse and shuffled it. The image on the screen expanded and closed in on a section of wreckage about twenty yards by ten.
‘That’s amazing!’ Kate exclaimed. ‘And it’s intact?’
Derham returned to his seat, rotated the screen back into place and picked up a sheet of glossy photo paper. He handed it to Kate. Lou looked over her shoulder.
‘A computer-enhanced image from the lab guys,’ Derham said.
The picture showed a close-up of the chunk of shipwreck. The ends were ragged, but a long section in the middle had remained relatively unscathed. They could see two doors. There was a figure painted on each. The one on the right was illegible; on the left-hand door, the writing had been worn away and was faded in patches but it was just about discernible. A big number ‘4’.
‘That’s cool,’ Lou said. ‘But we don’t have the first document, so whatever Fortescue put in this hold is not going to be much use to us, is it?’
Derham sighed. ‘I can’t argue with that.’
‘I’d love to get my hands on the bastards who trashed the lab,’ Kate said. There was real venom in her voice.
‘I think you may have met some of them,’ Derham replied.
‘In the car park.’
Derham nodded. ‘The three dead men were clean, no ID, nothing. We still don’t know who they are or who they were working for.’
‘Professionals,’ Kate said. ‘They knew the layout of our lab, the function of the digital copier, and they disabled the security cameras along the corridor as well as the one in our lab.’
Kate looked to Lou and saw he was deep in thought, staring into space.
‘Say that again,’ he said, turning to Kate.
‘What? The men were pros — they knew the layout.’
‘No, after that.’
‘The digital copier…’
‘No… no.’ Lou paused. ‘The security camera in our lab. I forgot we even had one.’
‘So?’
‘Where is it positioned?’
‘Towards the back of the room, but it covers the whole lab… Lou, what is it?’
‘Where does the feed go? From the camera?’
‘There’s a hard drive in one of the lab cupboards. Records in forty-eight-hour cycles and automatically wipes. One of the technicians looks after it. Why?’
Lou was up and out of his chair, heading towards the door.
Kate fished out the hard drive from its cradle in a cupboard at one end of a row high up above the counters that lined the back of the lab. It had an HDMI cable dangling from the back. She handed it to Lou. It took him only a few moments to hook it up to a laptop at his workstation. He pulled in his chair and Derham and Kate stood behind him leaning in towards the screen.
He tapped at the keyboard and a management screen appeared. He input a security code and the monitor lit up with a view of the lab. In the bottom-right corner of the screen they could see: ‘10.05, 10 October’. The lab was empty, rain beating on the windows.
‘Two mornings ago,’ Lou said and clicked a couple of keys on his laptop. The image fast-forwarded. They could see the lab door open and Lou coming in. He sat at a counter to study the box of papers they had retrieved from the wreck of the Titanic. Kate entered and they talked for a while before setting up the digital copier above the glass chamber. Then Kate placed Fortescue’s papers carefully under the crosshairs of the scanner copier using the robot arms.
‘It’s too far from the security camera,’ Derham said.
Lou did not answer, just manipulated the image from his laptop. The view expanded, zooming in on the pages of equations inside the glass chamber.
‘You can almost read it!’ Kate exclaimed. ‘Can you get any closer, Lou?’
‘I’ll try.’ He tapped at the keyboard and the image became distorted. ‘Any closer and we lose resolution. Damn!’
‘Hang on,’ Kate said excitedly. ‘We’ve got an image-enhancer. Remember we used it for the German U-Boat wreck last year?’
Lou got up, almost knocking Derham aside, paced over to a counter, opened a cupboard door, closed it again, swore. ‘Kate, any ideas where it was put?’
She was searching through another cupboard the other side of the lab. ‘Yes!’ she said.