The Titanic Secret Page 23

  He shuddered because for a split second he almost believed what Brewster had said on the beach, that the men really were already dead.

  23

  Not long after, Arn Bjørnson entered the mess to announce there was enough hot water for each of the men to take a five-minute shower. Brewster had been silently glowering at Bell, and the unexpected intrusion broke the spell. Bell stood and left the room without a backward glance. Any doubt he had concerning Brewster’s sanity had evaporated. He didn’t know what madness had driven him to take on and ultimately succeed at mining the byzanium ore, but the price he’d paid was obvious. He wondered what sort of life the man would enjoy once he’d turned the samples over to the Army. None of the options that came to mind seemed agreeable.

  He retired to his cabin and didn’t bother removing more than his shoes before rolling into bed and falling into a dead sleep.

  Bell woke with a throttled gasp and threw aside his mass of blankets and sheets. He was covered in a sheen of slick sweat. The dream remained vivid for a few more moments before it faded into a vague, unsettled feeling. Something beyond the dream had roused him. He listened for a moment. All seemed as it should be—the ship’s mechanical heart beat down in the engine room, water hissed smoothly along the hull, and at the very stern of the whaling vessel the steel screw whirred like a muted aeroplane propeller.

  Then he heard a metal door squeak closed on its rusty hinges. He quickly lit a match to check the time. It was a quarter of two in the morning. Unless someone was visiting the head, there was no reason for any of the miners or crew to be out. A man walking by his cabin door had awoken him. There was no reason that should have roused him unless it piqued Bell’s subconscious.

  He swung his legs out of bed and toed into his loose-laced boots.

  The dim hallway was deserted. There were six cabins near enough that he would have heard their doors squeal. Most of them had just a single occupant. Brewster and Vern Hall were quartered in another section of the superstructure. Bell ignored them and headed aft to one of the two communal washrooms. It contained a commode and sink, and its walls were a jumble of wires and pipes and conduits. There was no porthole, but there was an electric lamp. Bell left it off and lit a match in the pitch-blackness. The light and sulfur made him squint his eyes. He reached up and touched the glass sconce around the single lightbulb. It was cool to the touch.

  A normal person would have concluded that the light hadn’t been used and therefore neither had the bathroom, but Bell was cautious and thorough. He unthreaded a set screw that held the fragile globe in place and lifted it enough to feel the actual bulb. It too was cool. Now he was satisfied and checked the second lavatory. The light there hadn’t been on there either, and in both rooms the seats were up. Neither had been visited by anyone in the past few minutes.

  Intrigued, Bell went down to the galley. It was deserted, and its electric lamps were also cold to the touch. But possibly someone had spent some time alone in the dark. His answer wasn’t here. He climbed two decks to the bridge.

  Red lamps glowed softly, to preserve the watchstander’s night vision. It gave the space a warm, intimate feeling, while beyond the broad windscreens the ocean’s vastness quickly shattered any illusion of amiability. He recognized the big shape of Arn at the wheel.

  “Good morning. How’s the leg?”

  “Is good. Thank you. You can’t sleep either?”

  “Either?” Bell said. “Someone else up?”

  “One of the miners was just here.”

  “Do you know which one?”

  “No. In this light, everyone looks the same.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “Not really. He said he just wanted to watch the ocean for a while. He sat in the radio room so he would not be in my way.”

  The bridge was big enough for a half dozen men to stand without overcrowding. The fine hairs on the back of Bell’s arms tingled. “How long was he up here?”

  “An hour or so.”

  “Be right back.”

  The radio room was at the very back of the bridge, enclosed and insulated by shelves containing rolled-up charts and reference books on celestial mechanics and navigation. Bell stepped in and closed the door so he could turn on the overhead lights. He rolled up his shirtsleeves and pressed his elbow against the leather swivel seat, it being among the most thermally sensitive parts on a human body besides lips and cheeks, and there was no way he was going to press his mouth to a scabrous chair in a whaling ship’s radio shack.

  It was still warm. Body heat had transferred down to the metal frame and was now slowly radiating back out. Bell felt the metal box containing the ship’s crystal wireless radio. It was cool. The keypad for the Morse encoder was cool as well, but that wasn’t a surprise.

  He thought through the scenario. One of the miners woke in a cabin without windows and was feeling a little queasy. The seas weren’t bad, but some men have no stomach for any kind of ocean roll. He dresses and comes up to the bridge. There’s no place to sit except the captain’s chair, and he knows enough not to use it. There’s a stool in the radio room. The porthole is small and requires a wrench to open, but he can see the horizon and the faint sun clinging to it through some clouds. An hour later, he’s feeling better, and so he heads back to his cabin, passing Bell’s to reach his own and awakening Bell by merely walking past.

  It all made sense, and Bell had no reason to suspect otherwise, and yet he found himself opening drawers in the desk under the radio set, until he located a toolkit rolled up in a piece of cloth. He unfurled the bundle of equipment and found an appropriate screwdriver. The wireless transceiver wasn’t particularly powerful, but an antenna only needed to be close or exceptionally large to receive a signal. There was no reason for him to investigate this any further—nothing, that is, except a lifetime of trusting hunches that oftentimes never made sense at first.

  There were a dozen screws holding the outer cover to an inner frame surrounding the radio’s internal parts. Bell carefully lifted the shell and placed it on the floor. He touched the exposed crystal. Heat dissipates from the outside inward. The radio’s case was cool, and so was the framework protecting the device’s innards, but at the very heart of the crystal, which vibrated at frequencies powerful enough to traverse the ether, a tiny amount of warmth remained.

  The other scenario that Bell had considered when Arn had told him a miner had sat in the radio shack for an hour was far less plausible but no less true. He’d come in here to transmit a message—coded, no doubt, to be short and to the point—and he’d waited for the set to cool down on the off chance Arn or another crewman came in to check. The traitor had waited until the outer case was as cold as the desk and the shelves and the metal walls themselves and then slunk to his cabin, his dark deed done.

  The fact he was trying to sneak back to his bunk and was not walking normally like someone returning from the head is what had penetrated Bell’s sleep and woke him with a start.

  Bell narrowed his choices to the six miners bunked near his own cabin. Made sense that it wasn’t Brewster or Vernon Hall, who Brewster had been friends with for years according to reports he’d heard back in Central City. Who the message had been sent to was also pretty easy to deduce. There was only one other group of people interested in the byzanium.

  * * *

  —

  As he set the last screw in place and twisted it home, he considered the will it took to work so closely with these men, day in and day out, laboring under truly hellish conditions, sharing untold deprivation and hardship, and knowing all along you were going to sell them out. For as insane as this job had driven Joshua Hayes Brewster, the miner who was going to betray them all had been a psychopath long before he ever set foot on Novaya Zemlya.

  Bell said good night to Arn and headed to the forward part of the ship, where Brewster was quartered in a cabin reserved for tw
o harpooners who’d been lucky enough to return to Iceland when the Hvalur was impounded. He didn’t knock and he turned on the light as soon as he entered. Brewster was on his back under a blanket, only his face showing, and for a moment Bell thought he was dead. He was deathly pale, and it looked like he wasn’t breathing at all, but then his eyes reacted to the light filtering through his lids and they fluttered open, confused and teary.

  “What’s going on? Where am I?” He spotted Bell standing at the cabin door. “Who are you?”

  “It’s me, Brewster, Isaac Bell. You’re aboard a whaling ship. We picked you up yesterday from the island.”

  “Isaac who?”

  “Colonel Patmore sent me. You and I met in Paris just before the French shipped you and your men to the Arctic to mine the byzanium for them.”

  Brewster struggled up into a sitting position and began a coughing fit that only ended when he spit a glob of blood into a trash can. “I’m sorry. My mind wanders now. I have a hard time concentrating.”

  Bell asked, “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “We’d closed up the mine. Yeah. That’s it. We’d done it and we closed it up and headed for the cove to wait for . . . you. That’s right. You promised to get us off that rock on April first.”

  “I kept my word,” Bell told him. “Do you remember now? We came aboard, and I took you down to the mess. You ate some chowder, and we talked about how the food was poisoning you.”

  “Right,” Brewster said absently, scratching at what little remained of his beard. “The food.”

  “What happened to Jake Hobart, Joshua? How did he die?”

  “I told ya, didn’t I?” Brewster said, suddenly angry now. And suspicious. “I had to have. You need to understand, Bell. You have to know what could happen.”

  He could sense that Brewster was on the verge of a full mental collapse. He needed to calm him down or he’d have a stroke or his heart would simply stop. “Easy, Joshua. You told me already,” Bell lied smoothly. “It’s okay. I just want you to tell me again. All right?”

  “What? Yes. Okay. Um.” He coughed again, and foamy blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. “I’ve, ah, kept the secret so long I guess it’s gotten to me.”

  “You told me he got lost in a storm and died of exposure. Is that what happened?”

  “No. That’s what we were supposed to believe, and I didn’t let on that I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Jake was murdered, Mr. Bell. Not sure which one of ’em done it, but someone rammed a steel rod into his ear and killed him dead.”

  24

  Bell was in motion even as Brewster’s words still hung in the cabin’s cold air. The passenger he first considered to be merely a traitor to his fellow miners he now saw as a murderous fiend willing to kill to protect his secret and escape with whatever reward the Société des Mines had promised him. For three months he’d toiled side by side with Jake Hobart and then had rammed a shiv in his ear and ended the man’s life on the most inhospitable spot on earth so that his body would forever remain frozen in time and place and go unmourned.

  He rushed to the aft section of the superstructure, where there was another hallway of cabins. More were located one deck down, inside the hull, but they were empty, since the Hvalur Batur was running with a skeleton crew. He entered his own cabin, noting for the first time that his door also squealed on its hinges as it came open. His .45 was under his pillow. He cleared the chamber and checked the magazine before quietly reracking a round into the firing position. He vowed to remain armed at all times until this affair was settled.

  He tucked the pistol behind his waist so the icy metal was against his lower spine, kept in place by his belt. Back in the dim corridor, he reached for the handle of the cabin door closest to his. It was locked, so he wrapped on it with his knuckles until he heard a mechanical snick and the door creaked open.

  Upon hearing the grating squeal, Bell went for the pistol at his back but stopped himself before drawing the weapon clear. Barely able to keep himself from swaying, the miner named Alvin Coulter regarded Bell with wide owl eyes under a furrowed brow and a completely bald pate. His complexion was a sallow yellow, made more sulfurous by the hallway’s muted lighting.

  “What?” he asked, knuckling sleep from his eyes.

  From inside the cabin came a weak voice from the middle berth of a three-bed bunk. “You okay, Al? Ya ain’t gonna be sick again?”

  “Rest easy, Johnny. It’s the man that came to fetch us off the island.”

  “Have either of you left your cabin in the last twenty minutes?” Bell asked.

  “Aye, Al did just a minute ago,” John Caldwell wheezed from his bunk. “Poor sod’s been heaving up his dinner.”

  Al Coulter stepped from his cabin and closed the door partway so his bunkmate couldn’t hear. “I was sick just after we left the mess. Hours ago. Mr. Bell, Johnny’s in a bad way. Delirious with fever, and he can’t keep down more than a few sips of water. That’s why I agreed to sleep two to a cabin, so’s I can keep an eye on ’im. We’re all in a bad way, but Johnny’s the worst of us.”

  “What was his specific job back in the mine?”

  “Assistant blaster to Jake Hobart. When Jake died, Johnny took over as head driller and chief blaster even though he’s so young. Jake had taken the boy under his wing a while back, you see.”

  “And you?”

  “I usually run ore trains in the mines, but here I do tool repair and sharpening and general labor.”

  Bell nodded. “Sorry to have woken you.”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “I heard someone moaning as if in pain,” Bell lied. “Thought it was coming from here. I’m going to check on the others.”

  “Could be any of us.”

  Coulter slid back to his cabin and locked the door.

  Bell checked the next cabin’s door. It was unlocked, and like his and the previous it came open with a noise not unlike nails clawed down a chalkboard. The amber light cast by the hallway lamps shone across the bearded face of Walter Schmidt as he slept on his bunk. He was a large man, and his feet in their threadbare socks showed at the foot of his bed. The white sheet near his head and pillowcase were speckled with a dark fluid. Bell didn’t need to see any clearer to know was blood.

  He closed the door without rousing the sleeping miner and checked a third cabin. He opened the door only a crack before closing it again. Like his door and the other two, it creaked as if the hinge points hadn’t seen oil since the Hvalur Batur took to the seas.

  While not destined for the stage, Bell considered he had a pretty good ear and could hold his own in any front parlor singalong around a friend’s piano, but he was damned if he could discern the difference between various door creaks. He was sure that someone out there possessed such perfect hearing and pitch that they could tell one squeal from another and pinpoint the door used by the clandestine radio caller, but he was not that person.

  For a moment, he bemoaned his particular lack of ability but then chided himself for being utterly foolish. Dupin and Holmes were conjured up in the minds of fiction writers and thus could be infallible, while he had to contend with a real human’s foibles and failures and could not be.

  He allowed himself a small chuckle. It was one thing to accuse someone of a crime because of a squeaky door hinge, but such evidence would be laughed out of court. He needed something far more solid, and for the time being he’d have to make do without help. Bell knew better than to rely on Brewster. The man was so far gone mentally and physically that adding one more burden to the weight already pressing down on him might be the proverbial final straw.

  In truth, Bell didn’t know how much more any of the men could stand. The coughing, the bleeding, the vomiting, the lethargy—these were all symptoms of a great many illnesses, and food poisoning couldn’t be ruled ou
t. But Bell felt a darker presence, something more insidious than merely contaminated meals. He surely was no doctor, but, looking at the eight remaining Coloradans, he couldn’t help thinking back to Brewster’s description when they met on the beach. His exact words were “We’re all walking dead men.”

  Bell hurried to Captain Fyrie’s cabin, located just under the pilothouse and next to the stair that led to the bridge. His fingers had no sooner made contact with the cold steel door than the whaler’s voice called out, muffled but clear, “Come.”

  Given the readiness of the summons, Bell expected the man to be seated at his desk, going over a report or making notations in the ship’s log, but the cabin was dark, and Ragnar Fyrie was just swinging his legs free from under a thick polar bear pelt he used as a blanket. A lifetime at sea had taught him to come fully awake at the slightest disturbance.

  “Sorry to bother—”

  With a strong belief that if it’s important enough to wake him for, it’s urgent enough to skip the pleasantries, Fyrie snapped, “What is it?”

  Bell wasn’t put out by the gruff tone. “One of the miners used the radio and tried to cover his tracks. I suspect he contacted whatever French ship they left lying in wait in these waters.”

  “Skit.” He pulled a pair of breeches off the floor and legged into them before ramming his earlier-stockinged feet into calf-high rubber boots. “Don’t suppose you know which one?”

  “I lack the ear of a good acoustician.”

  “Huh?” Fyrie shinnied into a bulky roll-neck sweater the color of old whale bones.

  “Your doors all squeal the same, so, no, I don’t know which. Only that it’s not Brewster or Vernon Hall, and likely not Alvin Coulter or John Caldwell.”

  Thirty seconds after Bell’s initial knock, he was trailing Captain Fyrie up to the wheelhouse. The big harpooner, Arn, still had the con and nodded a taciturn greeting to his captain and guest. The seas were as black as slag heaps and capped with jagged white lines of foam that wriggled and twisted like living creatures or fanned across the surface like pale bolts of electricity. The sun was a distant smear against the horizon behind them, not yet powerful enough to inject any color into the sky except for a blue just one shade lighter than the deepest obsidian. They were traveling south and west toward the north coast of Norway and making sixteen knots, as they had passed below the ice limit.