Bell grabbed a passing busboy, a lad who looked like he’d just seen a ghost.
“What the devil is happening?” he demanded.
“It’s news just come from America, sir. The Titanic. She struck an iceberg last night.”
“Was anyone hurt?” Bell would forever remember asking such a stupid question on that historic morning.
“She sank, sir. They’re saying half the passengers and crew drowned.” The boy pulled free and vanished into the kitchens.
Bell and Marion exchanged a look, a look that only married couples could understand. In that single glance, they apologized for arguing, reaffirmed their love and commitment, and thanked the Fates that they hadn’t been aboard. Neither would have left the other or taken a seat in a lifeboat that could have gone to a stranger.
Bell sat heavily, his chin sunk to his chest. Marion came to his side and rested a protective hand on his shoulder. He knew Brewster wouldn’t leave the crates. He’d have gone down with the Titanic as surely as her captain must have. The last of the Coloradans was dead.
Bell had spent that previous few days tidying up some details of the case. He’d anonymously paid for the funeral of one of the victims of the Devlin Garage fire. Warry O’Deming now rested in the Catholic section of Birmingham’s Handsworth Cemetery. He’d also reworked Joshua Hayes Brewster’s journal, expunging any mention of Ragnar Fyrie and substituting a piece of fiction about an American gunboat under the command of one Lieutenant Pratt. Bell got that name from a childhood friend back in Boston who’d died of diphtheria. He made sure his own report contained the fictions he’d agreed to with Brewster concerning his closest friend. Vernon Hall might have died as a tra
itor, but history would record him as a hero.
One detail he couldn’t sew up was the derringer pistol he’d taken from the garage. He’d planned on tossing it into the waters off Southampton following his meeting with Marie Curie only to discover he no longer had it. He assumed Brewster had taken it with him on the Titanic and could only hope he hadn’t done anything foolish during the pandemonium of the great liner’s sinking.
Bell never once considered it would all end like this. Thinking about the sacrifice and the hardship, the deprivation and ultimately the madness, he wanted to rage against the injustice of their deaths but knew there was no solace to be had in that. It had gone wrong from the very first, and no matter how hard he tried to make it right, the outcome seemed inevitable. He supposed all that remained was to submit his report to Colonel Patmore at the War Department and hope they did the right thing.
Nine good men went into the Russian wilderness to pull off the impossible and not one survived to tell the tale. It was all a senseless waste, he thought, and said under his breath, “Thank God for Southby.”
EPILOGUE
Dirk Pitt reached the bottom of the staircase and strode down the platform. To his right was an empty set of tracks. At his left sat the gleaming silver body of an Amtrak Acela high-speed train.
He smiled at the porter as he stepped aboard the first-class car and found his seat. He stowed his bags in the overhead but kept the copy of Isaac Bell’s journal. Despite his best efforts the previous night, he’d been unable to finish it before being overtaken by exhaustion.
He accepted a bottled water from the porter and read the last pages of Bell’s saga while there was a delay pulling from the fluorescent-lit tunnels below New York’s Penn Station for the run down to Washington. Ten minutes later, he turned the last page. He rested his head against the railcar’s window.
Pitt was a man of few regrets, but one he was beginning to feel was that he’d never get the opportunity to meet Isaac Bell. What an extraordinary man, he thought.
Straightening the pages of the journal and slipping them back into the envelope, he saw that a piece of paper was stuck to the back of the last page of text, something he hadn’t noticed earlier as he’d perused the journal.
It had been torn from a notebook. Dated October 15, 1953, and signed by Isaac Bell, it read
Writing out this story brought back many memories and one burning question—what did the government do with the information I provided? Following my return to New York with Marion and presenting my notes to Colonel Patmore, I never once followed up on the affair, thinking that it would remain classified. I made some calls this week and learned that Patmore and his immediate superior were killed in a training exercise days after my meeting with them. To the best of my knowledge, the government dropped all interest in byzanium following their deaths. In light of what Madame Curie told me, and what I saw firsthand in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I believe it is for the best.
Pitt knew from speaking firsthand with one of the last Titanic survivors, John L. Bigelow, that Joshua Hayes Brewster had insisted on being led to the vault that ill-fated night. He wanted to be taken to where the crates were stored and then asked to be locked inside. He’d even pulled a pistol, the one Bell had lost track of, on the junior officer to compel his assistance. Brewster’s last words, according to Bigelow, mirrored the final handwritten line of Bell’s tale. At the bottom of the notebook page were scrawled the words Thank God for Southby.
POSTSCRIPT
Under a light mist that fell over the nation’s capital, Pitt walked between the rows of headstones and family mausoleums until he came to a red granite stone with the name Bell across its face that simply said
BELL
ISAAC MARION
1880–1968 1886–1968
Together Forever
Pitt’s fondest wish was to approach this man he admired. To express his admiration for a man lost in the mist of the ages. He stood silently as his mind traveled into the past, recalling their parallel dangers, with death a constant threat. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small stone, one of several he had picked up when he had visited the graveyard in Southby a few years earlier, and laid it at the foot of the granite marker.
The mist was dissipating when Pitt walked away after paying his respects to a man separated by time.