The Titanic Secret (34 page)

For a moment, Voss wondered if his best option might be to lie in wait in his suite. After all, Tremayne had told him that he would be returning, and Voss guessed that he would simply be able to shoot him down as he walked in through the door. But then he shook his head. Leonard, he now knew, was the only one of his four bodyguards who had survived their encounters with Tremayne, and he had a pretty good idea what his man had intended to do to the woman. There was a good chance, he thought, that if he got down to E-Deck as quickly as he could, he might well find that Tremayne was still in the stateroom there, exacting a messy revenge on Leonard for what he’d done to the American woman.

If he could burst in and surprise him, Voss knew that he could shoot down Tremayne, recover the original documents, and walk back up to his suite before any ship’s officers or crew could turn up there to investigate the sound of gunfire. And that would also mean that all the blood would be down there as well, not spread all over the carpeted floor of his own stateroom.

He opened the door of his suite, checked up and down the corridor, then closed the door behind him and followed the same route Tremayne had taken, down to E-Deck.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Tremayne unlocked the door of their stateroom and then stood aside to let Maria enter first.

‘We did it,’ Maria said, with a hint of a surprise in her voice. ‘For a while there, I wasn’t sure that we’d be able to complete the operation.’

‘There’s still Voss,’ Tremayne reminded her.

‘I know, but you’ve got the documents and all the copies. Without them, there’s nothing Voss can do, even if you don’t kill him. The job’s as good as finished. Let’s get that signal sent off to Mansfield Cumming. There’s less than three hours left before the deadline.’

Tremayne nodded, pulled out the notebook in which he’d written the decoded versions of the signals Mansfield Cumming had sent them, and opened it to start looking for the appropriate page.

‘Do we need a special signal form or anything?’ he asked, as he drew up a chair and sat down at the occasional table.

‘Yes,’ Maria replied. ‘Just hang on there and I’ll go along to the Purser’s Office and get one. It’s on this deck by the grand staircase.’

She was back in under five minutes, a printed form clutched in her hand.

‘You have to use this,’ she said, passing him the piece of paper. ‘That’s a form for a Marconigram, and according to the man I asked, it’s the fastest way of getting a message back to London.’

Tremayne completed the administrative sections and in the large section at the bottom of the form, where the word ‘To’ was printed, he carefully wrote the address he’d been given, the address which he knew would ensure the message was sent straight to Mansfield Cumming as soon as it arrived in London. Then, below that, in the grid for the communication itself, he printed the prearranged message in block capitals, and added one piece of additional information:

There was no section on the form for a precedence indicator, so against ‘Service Instructions’, he simply wrote ‘MOST URGENT’ and underlined it twice, and then added ‘RELAYING PERMITTED’.

Tremayne showed Maria what he’d written, but she frowned at him. ‘He will get it in time, won’t he?’ she asked.

He looked at his watch. ‘It’s not even eight o’clock yet,’ he said, ‘and the deadline Cumming gave us was twenty-two hundred hours tonight, which is still over two hours away. I’ve marked the message “most urgent”, so with any luck he’ll get it within a few minutes. I certainly don’t think there’ll be any problem with it arriving within the next two hours. And this is the only way we can contact Mansfield. He told me on no account were we to let any of the ship’s officers know what was happening, or what we were doing.’

Tremayne left the stateroom and walked quickly to the Purser’s Office, where he handed in the form. The attendant behind the desk glanced at it, then carried it into the adjacent Enquiry Office, Tremayne following, where he inserted it in a canister which he put in a pneumatic tube system.

‘That message is very urgent,’ he said. ‘I mean really, genuinely life or death important.’

‘Don’t worry, sir, it’s a very efficient system,’ he said. ‘From here, it goes straight to the Marconi Office to be sent. They’ll see the “Most Urgent” markings and get it sent as soon as possible.’

Tremayne thanked the man, paid for the message and then walked across the lobby but turned right instead of left. Once he’d finished off Voss, he could finally relax.

He glanced both ways down the corridor before he drew out his weapon, opened the door and stepped inside.

Then he stopped short. Voss was no longer lying tied up on the floor. Tremayne closed the door behind him, his eyes darting around the room, looking for hiding places, but there was nowhere a man could be concealed, at least not in that sitting room. He stepped forward to the door leading into the bedroom and took a swift, cautious glance in there as well, but again the only possible hiding place was under the bed, and one look was enough to tell him that Voss wasn’t there either.

He walked back into the sitting room and picked up one end of the cord that was lying on the floor. It had clearly been cut, and Tremayne cursed himself for not having searched Voss before he left the room. But he’d been so concerned for Maria’s safety that he’d got out as quickly as he could. That had obviously been a bad mistake, understandable though it was.

So where had Voss gone? Not to the officers on the ship, Tremayne was almost sure about that. Voss wouldn’t want any official involvement any more than Tremayne would: it would hamper his movements far too much.

He tried to put himself in Voss’s position. And then the answer seemed obvious. Voss would want to recover the original documents as quickly as possible.

From Tremayne being the hunter, it looked as if the tables might have been turned, and that now Voss would be pursuing him.

And hunting Maria. Tremayne turned on his heel and ran down the corridor back to his stateroom.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

The Marconi Office was actually a number of interconnecting rooms located on the Boat Deck, staffed by Marconi employees. The transmitting equipment was rated at five kilowatts, making it one of the most powerful transmitters afloat, and had a normal range of only 250 nautical miles, but that was during daylight. At night, transmission ranges of up to 2,000 nautical miles were possible, and especially to receiving stations located either directly ahead or directly astern of the ship, because of the radiation characteristics of the T-shaped aerial.

At that time, the ship was just within range of a receiving station in southern Ireland, and from there the message could be swiftly relayed through the normal landline system to London. The range, in this case, was not the problem. Tremayne’s message was delayed simply because of the workload.

The passengers on board the
Titanic
had been delighted to find that, for a comparatively modest cost, they could send telegrams to people they knew on other ships, to friends back in England, or people over in the United States of America, and they took full advantage of this facility. The Marconi operators were literally working day and night to handle the backlog of messages, and were not helped in this endeavour by the fact that the radio transmitter had broken down for several hours the previous day, and had also stopped working a couple of times on the fourteenth.

The messages from passengers had, of course, continued to arrive, and all were treated in the same way: no matter what the message contents, they were handled strictly in the order in which they arrived at the office.

As Tremayne’s Marconigram arrived, the operator picked it up, glanced at the text and smiled at the ‘Most Urgent’ note at the bottom. Then he tossed it onto a pile with all the others, picked up the next message and began transmitting the contents.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Voss walked slowly along the starboard side passageway through the first-class accommodation on E-Deck, his right hand inside his jacket and resting on the butt of one of his Lugers, which he’d moved to the front waistband of his trousers. He passed a couple of people as he made his way down towards the small stateroom occupied by his surviving bodyguard, but the area was still largely deserted.

Outside the room, he checked that nobody was in sight, then pressed his ear to the door and for several seconds just listened. He heard nothing to alarm him, certainly no sound of a beating. In fact, all he could hear was a faint moaning sound, and that could almost have been caused by some part of the ship’s machinery. He checked around him again, took out the Luger and turned the door handle.

It was locked, and there was no response to his knocking. But Voss held the duplicate keys to the staterooms his men occupied – he was the one paying for their passage, after all – and he inserted the key and turned it in the lock. With the pistol held out in front of him, his finger on the trigger ready to fire the moment he saw Tremayne or any danger, he opened the door and stepped inside.

The stateroom was obviously empty apart from the man lying on the bed, who Voss immediately realized had been the source of the sound he had detected. Leonard was still curled up, his hands and handcuffed wrists clutched between his legs, and clearly in great pain.

Voss locked the door behind him, then stepped across to the bed on the other side of the stateroom. He grabbed Leonard by the shoulder and shook him.

‘What happened?’ he snapped. ‘Was it Tremayne? What did he do to you?’

Leonard shook his head. ‘No,’ he groaned. ‘It was the woman. She kicked me.’

Voss stared down at his incapacitated bodyguard for several seconds, digesting that information. He’d known that Tremayne and the woman formed a team, that she wasn’t just along to act as his assistant or in a purely supporting role. Leonard was over six feet tall, heavily built, and extremely fit, but he’d been rendered helpless by a single kick from a woman about half his size. Now Voss knew he was facing not one but two trained assassins. He would definitely need Leonard’s help to take them out.

‘Can you stand up?’ he asked, as he unlocked the handcuffs.

‘Just about. God, that hurts.’

Leonard rolled over slowly and painfully to the edge of the bed, and lowered his feet gingerly to the floor. He stood up, resting one hand against the wall of the stateroom for support, his legs spread unusually wide.

‘Try walking,’ Voss instructed.

The bodyguard staggered a few steps across the room, then turned and walked back, his face white with strain and perspiration springing from his brow. He was mobile, just about, but Voss knew that as a fighting force he was useless.

‘Where’s your pistol?’ Voss asked.

‘The woman took it.’

‘Did you see Tremayne?’

Leonard nodded. ‘Yes. He came along after she’d attacked me, and then they left together.’

‘Here,’ Voss said, taking the second Luger from the waistband of his trousers and handing it to Leonard. ‘You’ll have to stay here for a while, until you can walk again. If Tremayne or the woman come back, don’t mess about: just shoot them.’

The bodyguard took it and laid it on the bed beside him. ‘Is there a spare magazine?’ he asked.

Voss shook his head and smiled slightly as he headed for the door of the stateroom. ‘With those two,’ he said, ‘if you don’t take them out with what’s in the magazine now, you’d be dead long before you could reload the pistol.’

14 April 1912
London

Mansfield Cumming had been at his desk the entire day, waiting for the message from Alex Tremayne on board the
Titanic
which would signal the successful termination of the operation. But he had heard absolutely nothing. He had reset the clock on his desk to American Eastern Standard Time, so that he would know the current time on board both the ship and the submarine which was now, he hoped, lurking in the path of the great liner.

The deadline he had given Tremayne was twenty-two hundred hours, ten o’clock in the evening, after which – assuming that no message had been received – he would have no option but to authorize the immediate transmission of the ‘execute’ signal which he had already prepared and which was lying on the desk in front of him.

By twenty hundred hours EST, Mansfield Cumming had given up any pretence of work and was sitting hunched over his desk, his eyes focused for most of the time on the hands of his desk clock, his thoughts racing as he pondered the reason for the delay. An hour later, at twenty-one hundred, there had still been no message, and he was fearing the worst, that Alex Tremayne, far and away his best agent, had failed in his mission. At twenty-one forty-five, fifteen minutes before the deadline expired, he instructed Mrs McTavish to contact the Admiralty by telephone, where several senior Naval officers were awaiting results.

‘I thought you said, Cumming,’ one of them remarked, ‘that your man was competent, that he would do the job.’

‘He’s very competent,’ Cumming replied, ‘so I can only assume that something went badly wrong on board the ship. We did know that Voss was travelling with four bodyguards so perhaps we should have sent more men to deal with him.’

‘With hindsight, anything is possible,’ the officer said. ‘But that still leaves us facing this current problem. I really do not wish to issue this order. Your man does know the deadline, and what will happen if he does not complete his assignment?’

‘Yes. I made that absolutely clear in my last message to him. He’s fully aware of what’s at stake here.’

‘Then for all our sakes, Cumming, I hope the message arrives within the next five minutes.’

‘Can I recommend a delay of thirty minutes?’

‘No, Cumming, you cannot. The window of opportunity for the submarine is extremely narrow. We have to give the order in a timely fashion, otherwise it will be impossible for the engagement to take place at all.’