The Einstein Code (11 page)

‘It’s all a bit cryptic, but we’ve been contacted by someone claiming they know where it is.’

‘Well, well.’

‘Not sure we can trust it, of course.’

‘Understood. But I assume you are doing the checks?’

‘As best we can, Adam.’

Fleming sighed wearily.

‘The Yanks treating you well?’

‘You received my communiqué? The marine archaeologists are safe and well and the artefact is secure.’

‘The whole thing almost went arse up at the airport though, I heard.’

‘Almost. So, who’s behind this lead?’

‘No names, just initial contact, someone reaching out to us; calls himself “Zero”.’ Wilberforce exhaled dismissively through his nostrils. ‘Could be a dead end, of
course. I’ve got Serge and MacCabe on it as we speak.’

Fleming was unable to stifle a yawn, tiredness suddenly descending.

‘Get some sleep, old chap,’ Wilberforce was saying. ‘With a bit of luck I’ll have something concrete for you when you wake up.’

By the time Kate, Lou and the British agent Adam Fleming had left his office, Jerry Derham was on to his fourth strong coffee since midnight and he felt wired. Through his
window the lights of the base threw a massicot glow across the horizon dotted with the grey hulks of warships; the stars and a luminous low-slung moon shone in the sky.

Jerry twirled a pen around his fingers absent-mindedly. There was little he could do at this hour. He got up from his desk and walked out into the corridor. It was quiet, just the whirl of air
conditioning and the occasional beep of a computer as an email arrived in someone’s office. A security guard passed the end of the passage, glanced at Derham and saluted.

In the kitchen, Jerry poured himself a glass of chilled water and retraced his steps back to his office. He placed the drink on a side-table, dimmed the lights and stretched out on the sofa
along the wall opposite the window. The last thing he remembered before sleep swept over him was the twinkling of Venus close to the top of the window frame.

He roused himself with a start, caught a glimpse of the wall clock telling him it was 7.34. Rubbing his eyes, he leaned over, took a gulp of the now tepid water on the side-table, stood up and
walked around his desk.

‘It might be too early,’ he muttered, ‘but worth a try.’

He tapped the numbers into his desk phone and leaned back as the line connected and rang. He was just about to hang up when a voice came down the line.

‘Marsha Edwards, Langley.’

‘You’re at work very early on a Sunday.’

‘Jerry! So are you!’ The woman gave a short peal of laughter. ‘To what do I owe this honour . . . Captain?’

Jerry loved Marsha’s laugh. It reminded him of college days. They had been an item for a while, but now they were happy just being great friends. Not that they saw much of each other since
she had been promoted to the rank of senior supervisor at CIA headquarters, Langley. These days it seemed she was at work 24/7.

‘Just need some info, Mar.’

‘What sort of info?’

‘Background check on an MI6 operative.’

‘Shouldn’t you be calling London for that, Jerry?’

Derham laughed. ‘I think that might be stretching the Special Relationship a little too far.’

‘I guess. OK. It’ll take a few minutes. Lucky you caught me early. Got twenty-six newbies to initiate at eight-thirty.’

‘Oh, lucky you!’

It took close to fifteen minutes before Jerry’s email sounded and he opened it to find a file of almost two megabytes Marsha Edwards had sent. One point nine meg of it was a security code
which Jerry decrypted with a secure key he was directed to within another encoded website. Twenty minutes after calling his friend, Jerry had a detailed file on Adam Fleming and had begun
reading:

Derham paused in his reading to survey a collection of images of Fleming at Oxford, on exercises at Sandringham, his first ID photograph at MI6, attending a formal dinner
dressed in white tie, his blond hair oiled back rakishly.

‘Quite the golden boy,’ he muttered to himself. ‘And the girl to go with it,’ he added, noticing Fleming’s arm was draped around the bare shoulders of a stunning
woman with high cheekbones and large black eyes. He read on:

Jerry stopped again to study more closely the picture of Fleming with the woman.

‘Wow!’ Derham said to himself as he tapped his keyboard and scrolled down to the end of the report. ‘Just as it says on the packet!’

There was a gentle tap at the door. Derham looked up and saw in the doorway the man he had just been reading about, his fingers on the handle.

‘You free?’ Fleming asked. ‘I have some news.’

Institute of Marine Studies, Hampton, Virginia. Present day.

‘I don’t know how you have so much energy,’ Lou moaned, sipping at his second cup of strong coffee.

‘It’s early Sunday morning – the best time of the week. And don’t forget I went for a run at six,’ Kate replied.

Lou rolled his eyes. ‘Obviously you are Superwoman.’ He turned back to his monitor.

On the screen was an image of the inside of the cylinder they had found in the cockpit of Amelia Earhart’s plane a few days earlier. The piece of paper could be seen clearly, the three
words: ‘REMEMBER JOAN’S PLACE?’ Kate wheeled over her chair directly behind Lou so she could see the screen.

‘Handwritten,’ she commented.

‘This can’t be the extent of the cipher Einstein talked about on the film we saw. If it was as simple as that why go through the whole rigmarole of putting the message in this metal
container?’

Kate flicked a glance at the rusted metal tube lying on the laboratory bench close by. ‘Why not just have somebody commit it to memory and pass it on, or come to that, why didn’t
this Professor Kessler simply say that over the phone?’

‘Agreed. Must be more to it. On the recording Einstein said the code was something he and Kessler had developed when they were younger and working in Oxford together for a brief time
before the war. We should have it checked over by a forensic document examiner – confirm it’s Kessler’s . . . or not. This “Joan’s Place” must be something to do
with that time, don’t you think?’

Kate was nodding, lost in thought. ‘More than likely, maybe it was somewhere they hung out, or maybe Joan was a friend, a girlfriend of Kessler’s? Einstein was married by 1933,
wasn’t he?’

‘To his second wife, Elsa . . . years before, I think. It could be anybody though, couldn’t it? Or
anywhere
come to that.’

‘I feel like we’re missing something, something obvious. It’s really annoying.’

‘Look, we’ve got a lab full of equipment here. I suggest we get started.’

Lou pulled on a pair of latex gloves, picked up the cylinder and held it under a powerful halogen light close to the workbench. Kate joined him, pulling up a stool to the bench.

‘We did everything we could with the equipment we had on the boat – we have the basics down: dimensions, weight, description of any markings, condition of the relic.’

‘And Gustav ran a full spectrometric analysis as well, didn’t he?’

‘I suggest the next thing we do is a UV spectroscopic scan, and if needs be, run an NMR on it. I’m pretty sure the paper inside is in good condition. I don’t think the object
was vacuum-sealed, so there shouldn’t be any problems taking it out into an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere.’

Kate picked up the cylinder and walked over to a plain-looking steel box standing close to the end of the bench. The UV spectrometer was the size and shape of a toaster. She opened the front,
placed the cylinder inside the cavity, closed the door and punched a few buttons on the top of the device. A moment later, the image of the cylinder appeared as a brightly coloured graphic on a
monitor close to the machine. Kate pulled up close to the bench and began tapping at the keyboard, altering parameters and settings on the device.

On the screen, the image of the cylinder rotated and different coloured lines began to appear on its surface. These denoted fault lines in its metallic structure.

‘This isn’t telling us anything new,’ Kate commented. She retrieved the cylinder from the machine and settled at the bench close to where Lou was sitting.

‘Better open it then, I guess.’

Kate gripped the end of the cylinder and attempted to unscrew the metal cap. It wouldn’t budge.

‘Let me see.’

Kate handed the object to Lou. He tried to loosen the cap but had no more luck than her. Rummaging in a drawer under the bench, he found a pipe wrench. A further search offered up a length of
rubber tubing. He cut two short pieces from one end and taped these to the claws of the pipe wrench so the cylinder would not be scratched. Clamping the end of the tube, he gripped tightly and
twisted. The cap produced a squeaking sound and began to give.

Small flakes of rust fell onto the surface of the bench, but after three turns on the cap it came loose and Lou placed both the cylinder and the end piece on a pad of cotton wool. Slipping two
fingers inside the open end, he pulled out the single sheet of paper.

He handed it to Kate, who rolled it open and placed it on a cotton pad, smoothing it down very gently.

It was a piece of expensive stationery. At the top of the paper was printed:
Regent Berlin Charlottenstr. 49, Berlin, BE 10117, Germany.

‘Ah, hotel stationery. The Regent Berlin, I’ve heard of that. Quite a classy place – well, it is now. We didn’t pick up the header with the scanner on the
boat.’

‘Kessler must have been staying at the hotel when he wrote this message.’

Lou picked up the cap of the cylinder and rolled it in his palm before studying it closely under the lamp. ‘No markings, nothing on here.’ He put it aside and moved the cylinder
under a magnifying glass on a stand and peered through it. Kate glanced over as Lou turned the cylinder over, end to end.

‘Wait,’ Kate said. Lou looked at her, surprised.

‘Tip it back again.’ She took the cylinder from Lou’s hands and nudged him aside. ‘Yes! I didn’t think I’d imagined it.’

‘Imagined what?’

‘Look.’ She tilted the cylinder, catching the inside close to the opening in a pool of light from the lamp.

‘Wow! Well spotted. Tilt it back a little bit, can you?’

‘Can you make out what it says?’

‘Not really. Just a couple of letters. Is it a P? An N?’

‘I thought it was a B and then an N,’ Kate said.

‘You’re right.’ Lou rotated the cylinder along its axis, and squinted through the magnifying glass.

Kate was an inch away from his face staring at the same magnified image. ‘Anything?’

‘Nothing.’

‘We’ll have to use a fibre-optic probe. There may well be some other letters further into the tube.’

It took them over half an hour to set up the equipment. The probe was incredibly slender and pliable. At the end of the fibre-optic strand was a tiny 3D camera able to collect visual data in a
360-degree field and in very low light. It had been specifically designed for use by archaeologists investigating burial chambers and inaccessible parts of ruins. A miniature version had then been
adapted to study the insides of delicate, often oddly shaped objects that resisted conventional analysis.

Kate inserted the fibre-optic slowly into the cylinder, taped the end to the opening to keep it fixed in place and pulled up a chair beside Lou at a computer console linked to the probe. Lou
tapped at the keyboard, and activated the fibre-optic. For a few minutes nothing changed on the screen as the probe collected data and collated the information to create a detailed coloured image
of the entire inner surface of the cylinder. The cursor blinked, a line of computer code slithered across the screen, then a hi-res, full-colour image flicked up on the monitor.

It took a few seconds for the scientists to understand what they were seeing. Then Lou emitted a low whistle, shaking his head in disbelief.

‘I didn’t expect that!’ Kate said.