Koplin looked back down into the grave. "Insanity does breed genius," he murmured. "Brewster filled the grave with the ore. Anyone except a professional mineralogist would have simply dug through it and finding nothing in the coffin but bones, would have walked off and left it."
"An ideal way to conceal it," Donner agreed. "Practically right out in the open."
Sandecker stepped over and took Pitt's hand and shook it. "Thank you," he said simply.
Pitt could only nod in reply. He felt tired and numb. He wanted to find himself a place where he could crawl away from the world and forget it for a while. He wished the Titanic had never been, had never slid down the ways of the Belfast shipyard to the silent sea, to the merciless sea that had transformed that beautiful ship into a grotesque, rusted old hulk.
Sandecker seemed to read Pitt's eyes. "You look like you need a rest," he said. "Don't let me see your ugly face around my office for at least two weeks."
"I was hoping you'd say that." Pitt smiled wearily.
"Mind telling me where you plan to hide out?" Sandecker asked slyly. "Only in the event an emergency arises at NUMA, of course, and I have to get in touch with you."
"Of course," Pitt came back dryly. He paused a moment. "There's a little airline stewardess who lives with her great grandfather in Teignmouth. You might try me there."
Sandecker nodded in silent understanding.
Koplin came over and grasped Pitt by both shoulders. "I hope we meet again sometime."
"My sentiments, too."
Donner looked at him without rising and said with emotional hoarseness, "It's finally over."
"Yes," Pitt said. "It's over and done with. Everything."
He felt a sudden chill, a feeling of cold familiarity, as though his words had echoed hauntingly from the past. Then he turned and walked from the Southby graveyard.
They all stood and watched him grow smaller in the distance, until he entered a shroud of mist and disappeared.
"He came from the mists and he returned to the mists," Koplin said, his mind drifting back to his first meeting with Pitt on the slopes of Bednaya Mountain.
Donner gazed at him oddly. "What was that you said?"
"Just thinking out loud." Koplin shrugged. "That's all."
August 1988
RECKONING
"Stop engines."
The telegraph rang in reply to the captain's command, and the vibrations coming from the engine room of the British cruiser H.M.S. Troy died away. The foam around the bow melted into the blackness of the sea as the ship slowly lost her momentum, silent except for the hum of her generators.
It was a warm night for the North Atlantic. The sea was glassy-calm and the stars blazed in a sparkling carpet across the sky from horizon to horizon. The Union Jack hung limp and lifeless in its halyards, untouched by even a hint of breeze.
The crew, over two hundred of them, was assembled on the foredeck as a lifeless body sewn in the traditional sailcloth of a bygone era and shrouded by the national flag, was carried out and poised at the ship's railing. Then the captain, his voice resonant and unemotional, read the sailor's burial service. As soon
as he uttered the final words, He nodded. The slat was tilted, and the body slid into the waiting arms of the eternal sea. The bugle notes were clear and pure as they drifted into the quiet night; then the men were dismissed and they turned silently away.
A few minutes later, when the Troy was under way again, the captain sat dowry and made the following entry in the ship's log:
H.M.S Troy. Time 0220, 10 August 1988.
Pos. Lat. 41°46'N., Long. 50°14'W
At the exact time in the morning of the White Star steamer R.M.S Titanic's foundering, and in accordance with his dying wish that he spend eternity with his former shipmates, the remains of Commodore Sir John Bigalow, K.B.E., R.D.,. R.N.R. (Retired) were committed to the deep.
The captain's hand trembled as he signed his name. He was closing out the last chapter of a tragic drama that had stunned the world . . . a world the likes of which would never be seen again.