'It's said that insanity breeds genius. Perhaps in Brewster's case it was so, or perhaps he was simply misguided by his delusions. He assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that he could never make it safely aboard the ship with the byzanium by himself. So, he buried it in Vernon Hall's grave and substituted worthless rock in the original ore boxes. Then he probably left his journal with the church vicar with instructions to turn it over to the American consulate in Southampton. I imagine his cryptic prose grew from the madness that had brought him to the point where he trusted no one-not even an old country vicar. He probably figured that some perceptive soul in the Army Department would decipher the true meaning of his wandering prose in the event of his murder.'
'But he made it on board the Titanic safely,' Donner said. 'The French didn't stop him.'
'My guess is that things were getting too warm for the French agents. The British police must have followed the trail of bodies, just as I did, and were breathing down the pursuers' back.'
'So the French, afraid of an international scandal of gigantic proportions, backed off at the last moment,' Koplin injected.
'That's one theory,' Pitt replied.
Sandecker looked thoughtful. 'The Titanic . . . the Titanic sank and queered everything.'
'True,' Pitt answered automatically. 'Now a thousand ifs enter the picture. If Captain Smith had heeded the ice warnings and reduced speed; if the ice packs hadn't floated unusually far south that year, if the Titanic had missed the iceberg and docked in New York as scheduled; and, if Brewster had lived to tell his story to the Army, the byzanium would have simply been dug up and recovered at a later date. On the other hand, even if Brewster had been killed before he boarded the ship, the Army Department would have no doubt figured the double meaning at the end of his journal and acted accordingly. Unfortunately, the wheels of chance played a dirty trick the Titanic sank, taking Brewster along with it, and the veiled words of his journal threw everybody, including ourselves, completely off the track for seventy-six years.'
'Then why did Brewster lock himself in the Titanic's vault?' Donner asked in puzzlement. 'Knowing that the ship was doomed, knowing that any suicidal act was a meaningless gesture, why didn't he try and save himself?'
'Guilt is a powerful motive for suicide,' Pitt said. 'Brewster was insane. That much we know. When he realized that his scheme to steal the byzanium had caused a score of people, eight of whom were close friends, to die needlessly, he blamed himself. Many men, and women, too, have taken their own lives for much less-'
'Hold on a moment!' Koplin cut in. He was kneeling over an open case of mineral-analysis gear. 'I'm getting a radioactive reading from the fill over the coffin.'
The diggers climbed out of the hole. The rest clustered around Koplin and peered curiously as he went through his ritual. Sandecker pulled a cigar from his breast pocket and stuck it between his lips without lighting it. The air was cold, but Donner's shirt was wet right through his coat. No one spoke. Their breaths came in small wisps of vapor that quickly dissipated in the subdued gray light.
Koplin studied the rocky soil. It didn't match the composition of the moist brown earth that surrounded the grave's excavation. At last, he rose unsteadily to his feet. He held several small rocks up in his hand. 'Byzanium!'
'Is . . . is it here?' Donner asked in a hushed whisper. 'Is it really all here?'
'Ultra high grade,' Koplin announced. His face broke into a wide smile. 'More than enough to complete the Sicilian Project.'
'Thank God!' Donner gasped. He staggered over to an above-ground crypt and unceremoniously collapsed on it, oblivious to the shocked stares of the local farmers.
Koplin looked back down into the grave. 'Insanity does breed genius,' he murmured. 'Brewster filled the grave with the ore. Anyone except a professional mineralogist would have simply dug through it and finding nothing in the coffin but bones, would have walked off and left it.'
'An ideal way to conceal it,' Donner agreed. 'Practically right out in the open.'
Sandecker stepped over and took Pitt's hand and shook it. 'Thank you,' he said simply.
Pitt could only nod in reply. He felt tired and numb. He wanted to find himself a place where he could crawl away from the world and forget it for a while. He wished the Titanic had never been, had never slid down the ways of the Belfast shipyard to the silent sea, to the merciless sea that had transformed that beautiful ship into a grotesque, rusted old hulk.
Sandecker seemed to read Pitt's eyes. 'You look like you need a rest,' he said. 'Don't let me see your ugly face around my office for at least two weeks.'
'I was hoping you'd say that.' Pitt smiled wearily.
'Mind telling me where you plan to hide out?' Sandecker asked slyly. 'Only in the event an emergency arises at NUMA, of course, and I have to get in touch with you.'
'Of course,' Pitt came back dryly. He paused a moment. 'There's a little airline stewardess who lives with her great grandfather in Teignmouth. You might try me there.'
Sandecker nodded in silent understanding.
Koplin came over and grasped Pitt by both shoulders. 'I hope we meet again sometime.'
'My sentiments, too.'
Donner looked at him without rising and said with emotional hoarseness, 'It's finally over.'
'Yes,' Pitt said. 'It's over and done with. Everything.'
He felt a sudden chill, a feeling of cold familiarity, as though his words had echoed hauntingly from the past. Then he turned and walked from the Southby graveyard.
They all stood and watched him grow smaller in the distance, until he entered a shroud of mist and disappeared.
'He came from the mists and he returned to the mists,' Koplin said, his mind drifting back to his first meeting with Pitt on the slopes of Bednaya Mountain.
Donner gazed at him oddly. 'What was that you said?'
'Just thinking out loud.' Koplin shrugged. 'That's all.'
August 1988
RECKONING
'Stop engines.'
The telegraph rang in reply to the captain's command, and the vibrations coming from the engine room of the British cruiser H.M.S. Troy died away. The foam around the bow melted into the blackness of the sea as the ship slowly lost her momentum, silent except for the hum of her generators.
It was a warm night for the North Atlantic. The sea was glassy-calm and the stars blazed in a sparkling carpet across the sky from horizon to horizon. The Union Jack hung limp and lifeless in its halyards, untouched by even a hint of breeze.
The crew, over two hundred of them, was assembled on the foredeck as a lifeless body sewn in the traditional sailcloth of a bygone era and shrouded by the national flag, was carried out and poised at the ship's railing. Then the captain, his voice resonant and unemotional, read the sailor's burial service. As soon as he uttered the final words, He nodded. The slat was tilted, and the body slid into the waiting arms of the eternal sea. The bugle notes were clear and pure as they drifted into the quiet night; then the men were dismissed and they turned silently away.
A few minutes later, when the Troy was under way again, the captain sat dowry and made the following entry in the ship's log:
H.M.S Troy. Time 0220, 10 August 1988.
Pos. Lat. 41°46'N., Long. 50°14'W
At the exact time in the morning of the White Star steamer R.M.S Titanic's foundering, and in accordance with his dying wish that he spend eternity with his former shipmates, the remains of Commodore Sir John Bigalow, K.B.E., R.D.,. R.N.R. (Retired) were committed to the deep.
The captain's hand trembled as he signed his name. He was closing out the last chapter of a tragic drama that had stunned the world . . . a world the likes of which would never be seen again.
At almost the same moment, on the other side of the earth somewhere in the vast desolate wastes of the Pacific Ocean, a huge cigar-shaped submarine crept silently far below the languorous waves. Startled fish scattered into the depths at the monster's approach, while within its smooth black skin, men prepared to launch a quad of ballistic missiles at a series of divergent targets six thousand miles to the east.
