Read The Titanic Secret Online
Authors: Jack Steel
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Thrillers, #Sea Stories
The Titanic Secret
Titanic
Secret
Jack Steel
worked in a garage, a factory, a mortuary and an operating theatre before joining the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm as a pilot. He served for over twenty years, including active service during the Falklands War. As a senior officer, he became involved in intelligence gathering and dissemination, in covert operations in places like Yemen, and on projects classified above Top Secret. After leaving the service, he ran his own company in his adopted home of Andorra for several years before becoming a professional author. He now divides his time between writing and lecturing, principally on ships of the major cruise firms, including Cunard. Jack Steel is a pseudonym.
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Jack Steel, 2012
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Jack Steel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Dehli
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-85720-862-0
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-85720-863-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-85720-861-3
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
To Sally, for now and for always
Prologue
6 April 1912
Berlin
A shadow moved on the opposite side of the street, a darker shape in the gloom of the alleyway. A match flared, briefly illuminating the man’s face as he bent forward to light a cigarette.
David Curtis glanced through the discoloured glass towards the figure, but even in that brief split second, he knew he’d never seen the man before. That wasn’t surprising. The Prussian secret police, the
Preußische Geheimpolizei
, appeared to have enough agents working the streets of Berlin to ensure he would have no chance of seeing the same man twice. But that didn’t alter Curtis’s certainty about the man’s employer, or what he was doing. Why else would he be loitering at the entrance of an alleyway on Mittelstraße, at midnight, watching the café opposite?
Curtis knew he was under surveillance. He’d been under surveillance ever since he’d arrived in Germany, most probably, and certainly since he’d checked into his hotel in Berlin. Almost subconsciously, he pressed his left arm downwards, feeling the reassuring weight of the Webley Mark II revolver in his leather shoulder holster, a firm and reliable friend in the event of any trouble.
He wondered how much time he had left before they made their move. It would be tonight, he guessed, or tomorrow at the latest. It all depended on how accurate their information was. For the moment, he dismissed the silent watcher from his mind and concentrated on his companion.
The man sitting opposite him was a minor government official, in reality little more than a clerk, but Curtis knew that it wasn’t the man’s job which was important, but where he worked, and what he had seen as a result. And the previous week he had seen something startling, something which Curtis had scarcely been able to comprehend when the German clerk had explained it to him. And now he needed more details – one detail in particular.
‘I need the name, Klaus,’ Curtis said again, his German fluent and colloquial. ‘You have to give me that, or the information’s useless.’
The German picked up his glass of schnapps and held it up to the light which faintly illuminated the corner of the bar where the two men were sitting. Outside, the yellow glow from the gas lamps which lined Mittelstraße picked out the first few flurries of falling snow, adding to the layers already covering the roads and pavements. It was going to be another hard, cold night.
Klaus Trommler nodded in satisfaction as he looked at his glass, then drained the liquid in a single gulp and slammed the base of the tumbler down onto the scarred wooden table. He stared at Curtis and nodded again.
‘I have a name for you, my friend,’ he said, ‘but I’m beginning to wonder if you can afford it. This is important information I have. You know that I’m risking my job just by talking to you.’
Curtis glanced surreptitiously out of the window towards the alleyway where a red pinprick of light marked the position of the watcher and his cigarette. Trommler, he knew, was actually risking far more than just his job. But that wasn’t his problem.
‘We agreed a price, Klaus.’
‘For the information, yes. But the name is different, separate. The name, that will cost you more, a lot more.’
‘How much?’
The German clerk glanced round the corner of the bar, but there was nobody within earshot. He leant forward and unclenched his left fist. A grubby, crumpled piece of paper dropped onto the wooden table between the two men.
Curtis reached forward, smoothed it out and read the figure that was written on it. As he did so, he tried not to show his relief. Before he’d headed out for the rendezvous, his third meeting with his new source in the German government, he had discussed this very matter with his superior at the embassy. They already knew Trommler was greedy – he was a mercenary spy, no more, no less – and Curtis had guessed that the German would make a further demand for money before he revealed the last, vital piece of the puzzle. Luckily, they had overestimated the man’s avarice, and Curtis carried enough cash in his pocket to pay the sum he was demanding twice over.
‘That’s an awful lot of money,’ he said now.
‘It’s a fair price for what you’re getting,’ Trommler insisted. ‘And it is not negotiable.’
Curtis nodded, reached into one of his pockets and extracted an envelope, one of two, each containing an identical sum. He knew exactly how much money was inside it, but he lowered it beneath the table, and made a show of checking the contents. Then he placed it in the centre of the table in front of him.
Trommler grabbed for it, but Curtis immediately placed his left hand over it. ‘Not so fast, Klaus. This is a trade. You give me the name, and then you can take the envelope.’
‘How do I know that it isn’t just full of cut-up pieces of newspaper?’
‘I’ve paid you what you asked each time we’ve met. Why should this time be any different?’
But Trommler shook his head. ‘This time
is
different because this will be our last meeting. I have the information that you need, and this is the end of it. It’s getting too risky, far too risky, for me to carry on. So unless I’m sure that you’re being straight with me, I’m just going to get up and walk out of here, right now.’
Curtis stared at the German for a few moments, then almost imperceptibly inclined his head. ‘Very well,’ he said, rotated the envelope so that the open side faced his companion, and riffled the edges of the banknotes inside it, so that Trommler could clearly see what they were.
‘Good.’ Trommler leant forward and, in a voice that was so quiet Curtis had to mirror his actions, uttered just two words.
‘You’re sure of that?’ Curtis asked.
‘I saw it. That’s the name on the document. There are two others as well, but I don’t know their names, they weren’t typed on the pages that I saw. But he’s the important one, the leader. Everything, the whole plan, it’s all his idea.’
Curtis slid the envelope across the table and nodded his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said simply. ‘You’ve done us a fine service. Good luck.’
Right at the back of the bar, in gloomy shadows that the dim electric lighting didn’t seem able to penetrate, two men sat at a table, half-drunk glasses of beer in front of them. But their attention was not directed at their drinks, or even at each other. Instead, both men were looking directly at the table where Curtis and Trommler were sitting.
A whispered secret in exchange for an envelope of hard cash. That’s what it had looked like, and the evidence – the envelope that was now in the clerk’s pocket – would be all they’d need to prove their case.
One of the men murmured something to his companion, and then they both stood up, their beers forgotten, and walked swiftly through the bar, weaving around the other drinkers.
As he prepared to leave, Curtis knew that Klaus Trommler was going to need all the luck he could find, because if the
Preußische Geheimpolizei
were following him, they almost certainly had people mounting surveillance on everyone he met. He guessed that Trommler would probably be studying the four walls of a prison cell before the week was out. But, as he’d thought before, that wasn’t his problem.
Curtis saw movement in his peripheral vision and glanced to his left. Two hard-faced men wearing long black leather coats were heading purposefully towards him, and he didn’t think they wanted to join him for a drink.
Curtis stood up, grabbed the back of his chair and swung it as hard and accurately as he could directly towards the two men. Then he ran for the door, ignoring the shouts from behind.
The flying chair cartwheeled through the air. Both the approaching men ducked sideways, in opposite directions, but one of them wasn’t quite quick enough and a wooden chair leg caught him squarely on the cheek. The blow knocked him backwards, and he tumbled to the ground, shouting in pain.
His colleague pulled open his coat, drew out a semiautomatic pistol and aimed it at Curtis, at the same time shouting out an order in German for him to stop.
Curtis reached the door, grabbed the handle and yanked it open. As he did so, the man behind him fired. The bullet smashed through the glass in the door, just inches in front of Curtis’s face, showering him with needle-sharp splinters that stung his cheek and forehead, opening up tiny cuts that immediately started to bleed.