Hollow Mountain (8 page)

In front of the largest screen sat a dark-haired youth, face pitted with unhealed acne scars. His hands were plunged into black, elbow-length rubber gloves, with which he appeared to be controlling the movements of a metal pincer moving through a murky green space. Spike assumed this was some kind of video-game simulation until a school of sea bream flashed past the screen. ‘Watch your tail, Johnnie,’ Clohessy snapped, pointing at the umbilical cord that connected the robot to the boat. Johnnie waved his arms to one side and the pincer pressed on into the algae-clouded gloom.

‘Johnnie’s flying our ROV for the morning,’ Clohessy said to Spike. ‘You met our senior pilot earlier.’

‘Did I?’

‘Johnnie’s brother. He picked you up in the RIB.’

‘He wasn’t one for introductions.’

‘That’d be Dougie,’ Johnnie murmured in a Scottish accent as he steered the robot past a pile of silt-covered girders.

Clohessy sat down, inviting Spike to do the same. His photochromic glasses had grown clearer the further they’d descended into the ship, revealing a pair of shrewd shark’s eyes set close together beside the sharp nose. ‘You’ve done your fair share of treasure work, I imagine,’ he said.

Just call the boat ‘she’ and you’ll be fine
, had been Galliano’s advice on shipping cases. ‘Not really,’ Spike said, sensing a few heads turn.

‘But you’re familiar with the nature of modern salvage?’

‘I have a working knowledge of admiralty law.’

Clohessy’s irritation was clear, yet his voice remained controlled. ‘Let’s start with the basics, then,’ he said. ‘As I was telling you earlier, the era of scuba divers and oxygen tanks is over. Anders over there spends the winter months on our scout ship, the
Triton
, shooting sonar over potential wreck sites that Jamie’ – the man with the weak goatee raised a hand – ‘finds by checking the Hydrographic Database against old copies of
Lloyd’s List
.’

‘Amongst other sources,’ Jamie called out in an English public-school voice.

Clohessy threw him an impatient look. ‘If Anders picks up a man-made anomaly, we wait until summer, then call in the
Trident
and send down the ROV. If there are traces of a shipwreck, we’ll check first for diagnostic artefacts – a cannon, say, or an anchor. Failing that, we can carbon-date timber or ballast to get a sense of when she sank. Once we’ve confirmed the identity of the ship, we try and find her cargo. Then and only then do we make our legal application to salvage.’

‘Which you did last month to the Receiver of Wreck.’

‘Correct.’

‘Felix Canessa has been receiver in Gibraltar for over ten years. Captain of the Port for fifteen. I don’t see why he needs a judge to decide the matter.’

‘Johnnie?’ Clohessy said, a first tremor of excitement entering his voice.

The pilot parted his gloved hands and the image on the screen broadened out.

‘The older the wreck, the more scattered the cargo. For the
Gloucester
. . .’

‘The
Gloucester
?’

Clohessy’s tone took on a brittle edge. ‘You didn’t read the file?’

‘It’s referred to as “The Wreck” throughout the documentation,’ Spike replied crisply.

Clohessy gave an ungracious nod as Jamie hit a button on his keyboard to reveal a close-up of a seaweed-encrusted ship’s hull. Faintly visible on the metal were four letters, ‘GLOU’.

‘That’s handy,’ Spike said.

Smiling again, Clohessy reached for a plastic bag lying on the white work surface. He unsealed it and took out a rusty fork, its handle knobbled with tiny barnacles. ‘Ivory,’ he said proudly, holding up the implement by a string tag. ‘Carbon-datable to within a single year of when the elephant was shot. Mid-nineteenth century, bang on the money for the
Gloucester
.’ He dropped the fork back into its bag like a court exhibit.

‘So what’s the receiver worried about?’

Clohessy unzipped his mackintosh; no polo shirt for him, just a T-shirt marked
Whistler
, one half of a maple leaf etched above. Canada . . . of course, not American at all. ‘The
Gloucester
was a British freighter,’ he said, tugging out his T-shirt to cool his washboard chest. ‘Her manifest records that she was transporting armaments to British troops during the Crimean War. On 24th August 1853 she set sail back to Southampton carrying a cargo of Ukrainian lead ingots. On her way into Gib for bunkering, she got snagged on the Europa Reef, which is starboard of where we are now – the size of another Rock of Gibraltar, Anders tells us, hidden just below the surface.’ The Swede nodded his white-blond head like an obedient labrador. ‘We’ve found over three tons of the lead already, which is pretty good going. Johnnie?’ Clohessy called out, and Spike saw the Scotsman tense his scarred jaw, perhaps keen to make the most of his opportunity to shine while his elder brother was away. The screen switched to what Spike had assumed were girders. On closer inspection, he saw that the rods were made of smaller individual bars encrusted together.

Clohessy snapped his fingers. ‘More to the left,’ he said as a larger heap of barnacled metal appeared. An octopus retreated into a gap; Johnnie extended the ROV’s pincer into its lair and it pulsed away, squirting a sac of ink. He glanced again at Clohessy, hoping in vain for a nod of approval.

‘Four million pounds for some scrap metal?’ Spike said.

‘A conservative estimation.’

‘Why so much?’

‘The lead is low-alpha,’ Clohessy replied matter-of-factly as he waved the ROV further to the left.

‘That means nothing to me.’

Clohessy’s sinewy neck whipped round. There was something raptorial in his face, Spike thought, as though at any moment he might lean forward and take your eyes. ‘Did you hear that?’ he called to the rest of the crew. ‘Intellectual honesty. You can all learn from that.’ He stared down at Spike, arms folded across his T-shirt. ‘I run a no-bullshit operation here,’ he said, and now Spike could see the ruthlessness that had helped him make his first fortune – something complicated in tech, according to Google. ‘No booze and no bullshit. Those are my rules aboard this ship.’ Clohessy turned back to the screen, brow unwrinkling like a sandbank smoothed by the tide. ‘From the moment lead is mined, its molecular makeup alters. Lead that’s over a hundred and fifty years old will degrade to a point where its alpha particles diminish. That makes it ideal for use in the semiconductor industry.’ He reached into his holster and drew out his BlackBerry; flipping off the rubber back, he pointed at a skinless electronic carcass. ‘The chip in this device runs on low-alpha lead. Regular lead gives off low-level radiation that interferes with the electronics. The low-alpha type is silent – which is why it retails at up to a thousand dollars a pound. From shipwreck to Smartphone,’ he concluded with a grin that suggested a fondness for the phrase. ‘So that’s our salvage. A decent, medium-sized commodities hit for Neptune.’ He paused and gave a wink. ‘But not enough to drag
me
all the way from Vancouver.’ All faces in the ship’s office were now fixed on Clohessy’s. ‘More to the right,’ he said to Johnnie. ‘Stop there.’

What looked like a discarded steel washing machine lay at an angle on the seabed. It was hard to get a sense of scale, until a conger eel writhed obligingly past. A square of metal had been sliced from the box; with admirable agility, the ROV pincer nosed its way in through the gap. The screen switched to infrared as the interior of the box became visible.

‘More lead ingots?’ Spike said.

Clohessy’s eyes were bright. ‘Not exactly,’ he replied, sliding open a drawer in the workstation. ‘We brought this up last week.’ He handed Spike a glinting bar of metal, no bigger than a Mars Bar. The shine and weight suggested solid silver.

‘Ah,’ Spike said.

‘Ah indeed.’

It was tempting to put the bar to his mouth, test it with his teeth as they did in the movies. Instead Spike laid it gently back down on the desk and stared at it. ‘This complicates matters.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Was the silver listed on the outward manifest?’

Clohessy shook his head. ‘The safe was in the captain’s cabin. Our best guess is that he was moving it in secret to avoid excise duty.’

‘Smuggled silver bullion . . .’ Spike said. ‘The
Gloucester
was part of the British merchant navy, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘So if she sank during wartime, and was commandeered to supply troops, that makes her a sovereign vessel.’

Clohessy shrugged.

‘In which case the MoD will own the cargo.’

‘The
listed
cargo.’

Spike paused, thinking. ‘Or customs might have a claim.’

‘Might?’

‘Or it could be a case of “finders keepers”.’

‘That’s about where we’d got to with Paul.’

‘Paul?’

‘Your partner?’

‘Peter,’ Spike said sharply, and Clohessy made an attempt at a respectful nod.

‘Have you told the MoD about this?’ Spike asked.

As if on cue, voices murmured outside. The hatchway opened and Dougie, the RIB driver, reappeared, fists strung with plastic shopping bags. Stooped behind him was a tall, rigid figure Spike vaguely recognised. ‘Thought this was meant to be state of the art,’ the man said disparagingly, before taking in the flashing lights of the control room and adjusting his assessment. ‘Hugh Jardine,’ he declared as he walked towards Spike. ‘MoD. Military Liaison Officer.’ He stopped and gave a practised grin. ‘Haven’t we met before?’

Chapter Seventeen

A table appeared at the rear of the central cabin, swiftly and noiselessly assembled by Stevo, as Dougie laid out the unimaginative buffet he’d brought from Morrisons – pap white bread, a wheel of Dairylea, a few unappealing tubs of hummus and slabs of pâté. Spike thought ruefully of what was available on the Rock to those in the know – sweet pastrami from Idan’s, crisp falafel from Samir’s . . .

Mike, the American, remained faithfully at his station, battling the currents of the Straits to keep the
Trident
in place while everyone else sat down around the table, with Spike positioned – inevitably, he felt – between Clohessy and Jardine.

The Neptune workers ate efficiently and said little, preferring to listen to Jardine being brought up to speed on the latest developments of the salvage. ‘Now that’s what I call a silver lining,’ Jardine said eventually. Spike gave a stiff smile at the weak joke, then began: ‘The key matter to address is that of apportionment.’

‘No legalese,’ Jardine groaned, ‘I beg of you.’

Spike shot the soldier a sideways glance. He’d seen him around the Rock over the years, but had assumed he must have retired by now. He wore blue chinos and a pink shirt redolent of old cologne and cigarette smoke. His lips were cracked and his cleft chin had run to fat, but it was the eyes Spike recognised, narrowed and knowing, as though enjoying some private longstanding joke.

Feeling the weight of Spike’s stare, Jardine turned. A strand of his mousy hair had worked itself from its bed of pomade and hung dankly over his forehead. Too long for a military man, Spike decided, pegging him as a smooth talker with a Sandhurst education and flat feet. ‘I understand Neptune has contracted with the Ministry of Defence to split the salved fund sixty-forty.’

‘In Neptune’s favour,’ Clohessy retorted at once.

‘Can you confirm that the MoD is happy to retain these terms given the additional potential value of the silver, Mr Jardine?’

‘Captain Jardine’ – the grey eyes twinkled in their narrow shells – ‘will endeavour to find out.’

‘In which case we can return to the main issue. I feel there’s a good chance that the judge will rule that the silver was illegally imported. If that happens, he may confiscate it in favour of the Crown.’

‘You
feel
there’s a chance?’ Jardine echoed, seeking Clohessy’s eye. ‘Doesn’t sound too convincing, does it?’

Spike ignored him. ‘What we have to do is persuade the judge to see the salvage as a case of “finders keepers”. The danger then is of an heir to the original owner of the silver emerging, which, judging by that unmarked bar’ – Clohessy had already shown Jardine his discovery – ‘is unlikely.’

Clohessy nodded. ‘Initial tests suggest the silver came from a mine in southern Ukraine. The captain probably acquired it on the sly, so we don’t believe there will be any trace documents.’

‘That remains to be seen. The point is that the more favourably the judge looks upon Neptune Marine and its operations, the more likely he will be to award you the silver. He needs to believe that you merit this windfall. Everything must be done by the book.’ Spike turned again to Jardine. ‘Hence why you need to talk to your superiors at the MoD as a matter of urgency.’

Jardine sank a corner of bread into a beige tub of hummus and pushed it between his purple lips. Clohessy watched him with barely concealed disgust, then shoved his own plate away untouched. Catching sight of the raised veins on his arms, Spike wondered if he was ill, or had a complicated relationship with food. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ Clohessy said. ‘I have to make a call.’ As soon as he was gone, Jardine reached for the glass bottle on the table, but was disappointed to find it contained only water. A film of moisture covered his face, like cheddar left out of the fridge overnight. ‘When do you need an answer?’ he said.