The Titanic Secret (31 page)

‘Who is it?

The voice was slightly muffled, but still audible.

‘Voss,’ he said. ‘Open up.’

He heard the click as a lock was undone, and then a dark eye surveyed him through the crack where the door opened. As soon as the man recognized him, he opened the door fully and Voss strode inside.

The stateroom was substantially smaller than the suite Voss occupied, but the furniture and fittings were still elegant and of very high quality. The woman they’d snatched was sitting on a chair against one wall, her wrists handcuffed behind her back and a makeshift gag covering her mouth. She glared at Voss as he walked in.

‘Any problems, Leonard?’ he asked.

‘No,’ the man said, ‘but I need to go to the lavatory and I’d like to get some breakfast, if there’s time. I’ve had nothing to eat since dinner last night, and I’ve been awake for most of the last twelve hours.’

Voss glanced at his watch and nodded. ‘Take your time,’ he replied, and smiled at Maria. ‘We’ve got all day,’ he added, ‘so we can do this nice and slowly.’

Once the bodyguard had left the stateroom, Voss took a seat in another easy chair facing Maria and looked across at her dispassionately.

‘I think I need to explain the reality of your situation,’ he began. ‘Maitland – your friend, or employer, or fellow agent, or whatever he was – is dead. There will be no last-minute rescue or reprieve, so today is the last day of your life. At the end of it, I will tell Vincent to kill you, just as I did with Maitland, and you have a very similar choice to make. If you are prepared to answer my questions, to tell me whatever you know, then I will instruct him to make your death as painless as possible. A single bullet to the back of your head, and you’ll be dead before your body even hits the deck. You’ll feel nothing at all, that I can promise you.

‘And,’ he continued, ‘if you cooperate with us, we can probably have quite a pleasant day, all things considered. I’ll order a decent lunch and some wine, that kind of thing. On the other hand, if you decide that cooperation isn’t in your nature, and you’d rather fight us, then I can promise you that the next twelve hours or so are going to be desperately unpleasant for you. I abhor physical violence, but fortunately I’ve always been able to employ men who not only are very good at inflicting pain but who enjoy it. Vincent, in particular, can do things with a knife and a rope that are unbelievably painful, and I would far rather spare you the agony. But, of course, the choice is entirely up to you.’

Voss smiled at her again, and nodded encouragingly. ‘I suggest you think about that while Leonard enjoys his breakfast. Then, when he comes back, we can get started, one way or the other.’

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Maria stared across the small stateroom at Voss, impotent fury blazing in her eyes. She had no doubt that if she refused to cooperate, he would do exactly what he threatened, and she had already decided that she would go along with whatever Voss suggested. But she didn’t have to like it.

The only possible way she could see of leaving the ship alive was if she could somehow kill Voss and escape from the clutches of his bodyguards, and that would only be possible if she was uninjured, and able to use some of her close-combat tactics. If she let Vincent or the other bodyguard go to work on her, she had no idea what damage they would do, but obviously her chances of turning the tables on them would be seriously reduced.

She still didn’t believe Voss’s promise to have her killed quickly and painlessly, and guessed that once he had obtained all the information that she had to give him, he would turn her over to the bodyguards for their entertainment until the time came to throw her over the side of the ship. And she knew precisely what kind of entertainment the bodyguards would have in mind. But that actually gave her some hope, because to enjoy her properly, they would need to unshackle her wrists; and her fists, elbows and knees could, in the right circumstances, become lethal weapons. But whatever happened at that stage, there was no way she would give in without a fight.

About half an hour later, there was a knock at the door, and when Voss opened it the bodyguard reappeared.

‘Excellent,’ Voss said, and gestured for the man to go and stand beside Maria. ‘Now,’ he went on, ‘I’m going to ask Leonard to remove your gag. But before I do that, I want you to give me your word that you won’t scream or yell when he takes it off. If you do Leonard will hit you very hard in the stomach and then will replace the gag. Do you understand?’

Maria nodded once.

‘And do you promise that you won’t scream or try and make a noise?’

Again she nodded.

‘Good.’

Voss nodded to the bodyguard, who leaned over Maria and untied the gag from the back of her head. She licked her parched lips and looked over at Voss.

‘Could I please have a drink of water?’ she asked.

Voss nodded. ‘Yes, of course,’ he replied, and watched as Leonard poured water into a glass and held it to Maria’s lips.

‘So what have you decided?’ he asked, when she finished the drink. ‘Will you cooperate with us?’

‘I’m not stupid, Voss,’ she said. ‘The choice you’ve given me is no choice at all. You think I’ve got information that you want and either I tell you of my own free will or you beat it out of me. Either way, the end result is the same, so of course I’ll cooperate with you. I don’t want to be hurt.’

Voss almost purred. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I thought you would end up being sensible about this. Now, I think the best thing to do is start at the beginning, with who you are – and who Maitland was – and who you were both working for.’

Maria nodded, and began speaking in a low voice. ‘Very well. My name is Maria Weston, and I’m American, obviously. I work for the Bureau of Investigation, in Washington, so I’m a government employee. My boss assigned me to this operation, to follow you, and he knows exactly where I am and what I’m doing, and if you do kill me, you can expect more than a little trouble from him. The man your thug killed, the man you knew as Alex Maitland, was actually named Alex Tremayne. He was employed as an undercover agent – not an assassin, as you seemed to be suggesting earlier, Voss – by the British Secret Service Bureau, based at Whitehall Court in London.’

‘He may not have been employed as an assassin, Miss Weston, but the equipment I took off your partner last night clearly shows that killing people was one of his jobs. A silenced pistol, a garrotte and some kind of poison are not the sort of things most gentlemen would carry about their persons.’

Maria shrugged. ‘Extreme circumstances call for extreme measures,’ she said. ‘When our two organizations discovered what you and your co-conspirators had planned, we realized that the only way we could stop you was to kill you. And, yes, that’s why Alex and I were sent on board this ship. In fact, Alex was ordered to carry out the executions, not me.’

She was choosing her words carefully, subtly trying to convince the two men that she had been little more than an assistant for Tremayne, just a bag carrier and a lookout, so that when the time finally came, they would not be anticipating that she could be physically dangerous. And as she started thinking ahead, towards the next things she would tell them, she suddenly realized that Voss had just said something very significant. Or, to be absolutely exact, it was something that he hadn’t said, an omission, which was important.

But that was the least of her concerns right then. She knew that the mission she and Alex had embarked on had failed. Voss was clearly alive, and sitting right in front of her, and the deadline for the signal to be sent back to Mansfield Cumming was fast approaching, with nothing she could do about it. But at least, she reflected silently, she knew that the plan hatched by Voss, Bauer and Kortig was doomed to fail, not because of Alex Tremayne’s ability as an assassin, but because Mansfield Cumming had prepared a contingency plan that was entirely independent of the ship itself. She smiled slightly at the thought that her captors would be joining her in the Atlantic Ocean within a matter of hours.

‘Something funny?’ Voss asked.

Maria shook her head. ‘No, not really,’ she replied. ‘I was just thinking how quickly you managed to turn the tables on us, how easily an advantage can be lost.’

Voss stared at her narrowly, as if wondering if he was missing something, then shook his head and resumed his questioning.

‘So this Secret Service Bureau that Tremayne worked for,’ he said. ‘How did that organization find out what we were planning to do?’

‘It all started in Germany, in Berlin,’ Maria began, ‘with a man named Klaus Trommler.’

14 April 1912
London

Mansfield Cumming stared at the clock on his desk, then came to a decision. He had heard nothing from Alex Tremayne, despite the urgency of his last message to the
Titanic
, and had no idea what progress the two agents had made. On the other hand, a progress report wasn’t really what he wanted.

It had been made very clear to him by his masters in the British Government that the only acceptable solution, from their point of view, to the problem posed by Gunther Voss and his two co-conspirators was either confirmation of their deaths on board the ship or, if that failed, the destruction of the vessel itself. Whatever happened, the three men could not be permitted to reach America.

Cumming believed that he had given his two agents both adequate time to complete their assignments, and suitable tools to do the job. And they should now be in no doubt about the potential consequences for them personally, and for the rest of the innocent people sailing on board the ship, if they failed.

He shook his head. Alex Tremayne was undeniably the best agent that he had ever employed, and Maria Weston had arrived from Washington highly recommended. He hated the thought that they would not be coming back from this mission. But he also knew where his duty lay, and the lives of two people – of any two people – and even of the more than two thousand souls on board the
Titanic
, were expendable and irrelevant when you considered the bigger picture.

With a heavy heart, Cumming took a fresh sheet of paper and began composing the ‘prepare’ signal to be transmitted by the Admiralty to the captain of the submarine. That would ensure that the boat was ready in all respects to complete the assignment, if it came to that, and included the final rendezvous position and time, based upon the very latest information from the White Star Line.

Cumming still hoped, desperately, that Tremayne would somehow complete his mission and that he would never have to send the final signal, the message to ‘execute’, a military term that was, in the circumstances, horribly appropriate.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

At that moment, in his stateroom on the
Titanic
some two thousand miles away, Alex Tremayne tossed and turned in fitful sleep, tormented by kaleidoscopic images that tumbled and coursed through his brain. Jonas Bauer taking his last breath; his fight with the two bodyguards on the Promenade Deck; Lenz Kortig’s skull blowing apart as the pistol bullet ploughed through it and, above all, his last sight of Maria, standing in the cross passage in the grip of one of Voss’s thugs with the barrel of a pistol pressed against the side of her head.

Tremayne woke up with a gasp, clammy and damp with sweat, and immediately reached for his watch to check the time. Just gone five. He stood up, took a towel and dried his body as best he could – the stab wound in his side meant that he couldn’t take a bath, even if he’d had the time, and got dressed again, picking a clean white shirt and a black suit he’d not worn before on the ship.

He picked up the Colt automatic pistol, took out the magazine which he had fired two rounds from, and replaced it with one of the fully charged magazines he had taken off Vincent. The problem, as before, was the suppressor, a black canister which effectively doubled the length of the pistol and prevented it from fitting inside any of his pockets. But he had to have the suppressor attached to the weapon before he dared fire it. The only solution was to unscrew it and tuck it away separately, and hope that he would have enough time to reattach the suppressor before he found himself in a situation where he had to pull the trigger.

Tremayne checked that the stiletto, which he’d cleaned properly to remove all traces of Vincent’s blood, was secure in the sheath strapped to his left forearm, and that he had the two other magazines for the pistol in his pocket. When he’d finished, he looked at himself in the full-length mirror, and although a couple of his pockets bulged noticeably, nobody could possibly tell what he had in them.

Then all he could do was watch and wait until Voss returned to his stateroom.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

It was late afternoon when Voss finally finished questioning Maria Weston. He was amazed at how much information that treacherous German clerk, Klaus Trommler, had managed to pass to the British, and how near they had come to wrecking his carefully planned operation.

But at least he now knew that the danger was past. Thanks to Vincent, he had discovered the plot to kill him and his friends on board the
Titanic
, and had then managed to outwit the two agents sent by the governments of Britain and the United States, and kill them. Or at least, his men had killed one of them, and the body of that interfering American woman would go over the side that very night.

All in all, it was a satisfactory result, and just a shame that Jonas hadn’t lived long enough to see their plan come to fruition. As far as Voss was concerned, nothing could stop them now.

And that just left the woman to be disposed of. He looked at her across the small stateroom. She was still sitting in the same chair, her wrists manacled behind her back, returning his gaze. He stared at her eyes for a few moments, unable to shake the irrational belief that somehow she had won. In those grey eyes he seemed to see a kind of knowledge, a calm serenity that spoke of enormous self-belief.