The Einstein Code

by Tom West

  ‘No!’ Freeman exclaimed into the phone as the lift shifted through the floors. ‘What do you mean, you aren’t ready?’

  Buckingham looked daggers at the man and snatched the phone. ‘MacBride. You can’t be serious! How long for God’s sake?’

  The two men could hear the muffled sound of a reply.

  ‘WHAT!’ Buckingham exploded, stabbed at the phone and tossed it back to Freeman. ‘Other choppers? There must be others fuelled and ready.’

  Freeman called a number nervously, avoiding direct eye contact with the head of Eurenergy. He talked quietly and gave nothing away before terminating the call. ‘Thirty minutes,’ he said.

  Buckingham was terrifyingly silent. Secker and Freeman heard her take deep breaths as the lift doors swished open.

  ‘Give me the phone back,’ Glena Buckingham said, striding quickly out of the lift along a corridor heading towards the departure/arrivals room close to the helipad. ‘MacBride. We just need enough fuel to get to the mainland. We can radio ahead. Yes . . . yes . . . I know. For God’s sake, listen, man. I’m giving you ten minutes, not twenty. Do it, or you will be signing on come Monday.’

  They reached the white-walled waiting area and could see the helipad through the glass. A fuel truck had just reached the chopper and MacBride was out of the aircraft hurrying along the technicians and ground crew.

  Buckingham started to pace, Freeman kept out of the way the best he could. Freeman’s phone tinged. He read the screen, his face incredibly pale in the harsh whiteness of the room.

  ‘What is it?’ Buckingham hissed.

  ‘Erm, not sure you want to—’

  ‘WHAT IS IT?’

  ‘Newsfeed. Police have raided central office, and . . . erm . . . your home, Ms Buckingham.’

  The head of Eurenergy simply stared into Freeman’s face, her eyes as black as the Grim Reaper’s.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ Freeman spluttered.

  They all turned to the glass as a sound broke through the glazing. For a vain moment, they each hoped it was the chopper engine sparking to life, but it was not. It was the sound of F35s screaming low over Flotta.

  69

  Norfolk Naval Base, Virginia. Ten days later.

  Kevin Grant pushed the hair out of his eyes and stared at the words he had written on a piece of paper: ‘REMEMBER JOAN’S PLACE?’ They were the three words presumably written by Johannes Kessler and placed in the cylinder found aboard Amelia Earhart’s plane.

  On the monitor in front of him the single continuous line of symbols and notation Kate and Lou had discovered on the inside of the same cylinder ran across horizontally in three neat rows. For two weeks now, since Grant had been given this material, he had tried, in vain, to match the prosaic three-word sentence with the confusion of text in front of him.

  ‘“Remember Joan’s Place?”’ he muttered for perhaps the hundredth time. ‘What the fuck does it mean?’

  Clearly it was a ‘key to the key’; those three words meant something that would unlock the meaning of the lines of symbols found inside the cylinder.

  He had spent the first ten days searching for some mathematical relationship, employing every technique he had acquired during his eight years as an encryption analyst, everything he had learned as a mathematics PhD at MIT. Nothing worked, nothing. But he would not be beaten. He had cracked every code he had been called upon to solve. He would not be defeated by this, even if it had been contrived by two of the cleverest scientists in history.

  As he worked, Kate and Lou had tried to find out anything they could about the Kessler Document they had retrieved from Phoenix, but without the key anything they could do was peripheral – just as Grenyov’s work had been. A week after returning from the North Sea they had flown to the Pacific to supervise the retrieval of the remains of Amelia Earhart’s plane.

  On day eleven, Grant reached breaking point and went fishing.

  It was perhaps an unlikely hobby for the encryption genius who wore Grateful Dead T-shirts and spent far too much time in front of a computer screen, but fishing relaxed him, gave him a sense of purpose far removed from mathematical abstractions. But this time the exercise had failed and Grant had returned to the naval base still seeking a breakthrough.

  Back in the bare-walled office he stared at the blank face of his iPad resting on his paper-strewn desk.

  He picked it up and opened his library. He had purchased two dozen titles, each relating to Albert Einstein. There were no surviving letters between Einstein and his colleague, Kessler, but their relationship was mentioned in most of the books. Sadly, none of these references had led to any sort of clue.

  Glancing at the screen, he saw a notification from an e-book seller, Truman and Co., a company that, a week earlier, had located one of the less well-known biographies of Einstein from the 1970s. It was a short message informing Grant that they had managed to track down a copy of another, even more obscure, book called Chatting with Einstein, a collection of conversations from 1951 between the scientist and a respected journalist of the day, Winslow Mortimer.

  Grant shrugged and tapped the link, approved payment of a dollar ninety-nine, and a few minutes later he had the e-book on the screen.

  He flicked through abstractedly, pausing at a few of the exchanges before moving on. His finger stopped on the glass and he felt a pulse of excitement shoot through him as he read.

  ‘Professor, you spent some time in Oxford before you arrived in the States in 1933. Was that rewarding?’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed. I was there with my wife, and my dear friend Johannes Kessler was visiting for a semester. He had a wonderful time too. I remember many stimulating conversations with Johannes. Also, there was a woman we knew, Joan Sinclair. She was a widow, her husband James had died in 1930. She was a Professor of Botany at New College and hosted lovely gatherings of like-minded people at her home.’

  ‘And you and Kessler often met there?’

  ‘Indeed we did; our wives too. Joan was a very versatile individual and an excellent scientist, a keen painter and a very accomplished pianist. I remember she lived on Iffley Road, number 1001; that was often a source of merriment for Johannes and me.’

  Kevin Grant did not notice how much his hands were shaking. ‘My God!’ he announced to his empty office. ‘Oh . . . My . . . God. I’m a genius, a fucking genius!’ He plucked up his phone and called Jerry Derham.

  70

  ‘You really think you’ve cracked it, Kev?’ Derham said, sitting at Grant’s desk five minutes later. He could not disguise completely the edge of scepticism in his voice.

  ‘Do I hear doubt, Captain?’

  ‘No,’ Derham said earnestly.

  ‘OK, so this is how it works. “Remember Joan’s Place?” wasn’t some silly message or a red herring. I had a strong feeling about that from the start. I had a sense it was actually integral to solving the puzzle. But I was getting nowhere with it until ten minutes ago.’ He nudged his iPad across his desk and twisted it so Jerry could see the highlighted passage from the e-book Chatting with Einstein.

  ‘And?’ Derham said after he had finished reading it.

  ‘1001 Iffley Road.’

  ‘Yeah. What caused Einstein and Kessler a chuckle over that, Kev?’

  ‘It’s binary. 1001 is 9. An in-joke. The number 9 must be the key to the text from the inside of the cylinder and that will then unlock the Kessler Document. I wanted you to be the first to see it happen.’

  Derham was shaking his head. ‘That is, well . . . unexpected.’

  ‘Yep. Now watch.’ Grant shunted his laptop so that they could both see the screen and flicked the mouse to drag the computer from hibernation. They both studied the lines of symbols, numbers and letters as they ran across the screen.

  ‘The simplest thing would be to extract every ninth figure, taking the first letter – “M” – as number 1. Yeah?’

  Grant’s fingers stuttered across the keyboard and a succession of symbols were lifted from the lines
and placed in a fresh section of the screen. There were three hundred and fourteen figures in all. This produced a fresh line containing thirty-four letters, numbers and symbols.

  With the last number in place, Grant sat back and considered the screen. It made absolutely no sense.

  ‘OK, we’ll try something else,’ he said. ‘Let’s extract every ninth figure, starting from the end and working backwards.’

  He tapped at the keyboard again and a fresh line of thirty-four appeared.

  They both considered the screen.

  ‘Sorry, Kev, that makes no sense either.’

  Grant was staring, unblinking. Derham could see the man’s jaw muscles working. What was that? he wondered. Frustration? Anger? A nervous twitch?

  ‘Ah!’ Grant exclaimed and pulled in close to the desk, gripped the ends of the keyboard and brought it a few inches nearer to himself before stabbing at the keys. ‘First, take out all the symbols and numbers from this sequence of thirty-four figures.’

  Half of them disappeared to leave seventeen letters that read: ‘NICE TRY BUT NO CIGAR’.

  71

  Pacific Ocean. 2 July 1937.

  Amelia and Fred had barely exchanged a word. They had acted on impulse, moving mechanically, speechless, thinking about nothing beyond the moment, the next move, the next requirement.

  Back in Lae, Papua New Guinea, they had opened the doors of the hangar, each barely able to look back at the two dead men on the floor. From twenty feet away, the Germans looked as though they were relaxing on red mats, glossy red mats that caught the electric ceiling lights shining down from above the Electra.

  There would be some serious questions to answer, Amelia knew that. Why had they run? Why had they not gone to the local police? They would be accused of murder. But then that had to be better than being dead . . . or worse. How could they know for sure that there were no other German spies ready to torture them for information?

  But then again: what evidence could be used against them? Amelia realized they had every right to fly when they wanted to. Who was to say with any certainty that the two men were killed by them? Where was the proof to say the aviators were not a hundred miles away in the skies over the water by the time these men died? Who was to say the two had not killed each other?

  But Fred was angry, Amelia knew that. And that was perfectly understandable. What had she got him involved in? That’s what he would be thinking, and that’s what she was thinking also.

  Neither of them had sensible answers. She could say nothing more about the things she knew, even now, even after Noonan had saved her and killed for her.

  They flew on in silence. Flew on for twelve hours, well over halfway to Hawaii. From there, Amelia mused, they would begin the final leg. The news of the deaths in the hangar would not travel as fast as them. The government of Papua New Guinea was a flimsy fragmentary thing, any form of police force almost non-existent. No, they would leave Hawaii, and after that they would soon be home. There they might be asked questions, but by then they would have formulated answers. Everything would be deflected by the fact that they had achieved something truly amazing. No one would care about some strange, unsubstantiated event on an obscure Pacific island. Everything would be all right.

  *

  Six hours later and they were both utterly exhausted. The ocean, almost totally featureless, had become a boring nothing. They could almost imagine it was not there at all, and as night crept in, and the hours slipped away, it felt as though they were flying through a vacuum. The only sound came from the engines and from the air rushing over the wings, the same beat, the same tempo.

  Amelia checked the chronometer. It was 20.13. She yawned. Eighteen hours in the air, and they were still flying through an eternal void, or so it seemed. They had been warned of a storm along the designated flight path, taken a detour south, and now they were back on the original course.

  ‘How we doing, Fred?’

  ‘Running good, Amy. Plan?’

  She knew exactly what he meant. For how many hours could they just keep on flying without rest? Neither of them could tell for sure. But she stayed silent for a long time and Fred surveyed the dials in front of him, and without registering it, he heard the air over the wings.

  ‘You got our position, Fred?’

  He gave her the numbers. She flicked on the radio and cleared her throat. ‘We are on the Line of Position 157–337. Will repeat this message on 6210 KCS.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Wait listening on 6210 KCS . . . We are running north and south . . .’

  There was no response. She expected none. She took a breath and was about to say something to Noonan. They both heard the sound; it came like the crack of a whip.

  The plane seemed totally unaffected.

  ‘What was that?’ Fred Noonan asked.

  ‘Hell if I—’

  A much louder crack.

  Fred looked down out the window and saw a piece of metal tear free from the port wing. ‘Holy fuck!’ he screamed.

  A third crack and a section of the port-side engine cover broke away and shot over their heads. A sheet of flame thrust into the night, lighting up the hidden ocean. The fire swept towards the cockpit before being extinguished in the rush of air over the wings. Amelia screamed and was thrown back in her seat as the engines shrieked and a series of bolts shot out from the control panel. One of them passed through the flesh of her arm.

  The plane slipped to starboard, the wing dipping, the engines whining, disengaging like a car that had slipped out of gear. Amelia, unaware of her injury, pulled on the controls, but nothing responded. She saw the rip in her jacket and her blood staining the bulging lining red; but she felt no pain.

  The plane flipped over and the sea and the sky merged, indistinguishable. Sound and light became one.

  The Electra 10E scythed the water, the ocean consuming Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan; taking them in as most welcome guests.

  72

  Off Howland Island, Pacific Ocean. Present day.

  The sun was so dazzling even Lou’s expensive sunglasses did little to diminish the glare. He shaded his eyes with a hand and gazed up to the winch suspending the remains of Amelia Earhart’s plane as it swung round slowly to bring it onto the deck. Only twenty minutes earlier he and Kate had returned from the wreck after triple-checking the pulleys, cables and restraints that would enable the salvage crew to retrieve the remains of the plane without it suffering any further damage.

  It touched down gently on a large sheet of air-filled plastic, taking up most of the open space of the deck to the rear of the bridge. Lou and Kate stood close by with their three assistants, Gustav, Connor and Cherie.

  Kate was the first to reach the wreckage and she started the process of carefully unlatching the clasps and braces that had caged the fuselage, the inner parts of the wings and the engines as they had been raised from the ocean floor.

  In the cold light of day the plane looked far smaller than it had seemed when they first spotted it two weeks earlier. It was covered with slime, some of the paintwork stripped back to the metal. One side of the fuselage was ripped open to reveal rusted cables and springs. The tailplane had gone and the stubs of the wings left behind a tangle of wires, and strips of metal.

  Kate ran latexed fingers along the degraded surface of the Electra 10E.

  ‘Pretty sad,’ Lou said standing a few feet to Kate’s right.

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘It’ll take a long time to get all the pieces to the surface,’ Kate added and walked to the front of the plane. The cockpit glass was shattered, the cockpit itself filled with water, seaweed and a few crustaceans; everything distorted, corroded, warped.

  Gustav and Connor were inspecting the rear of the plane while Cherie filmed and photographed the wreckage from every angle. Kate walked slowly around the remains of the aircraft, now not much more than a collection of truncated pieces of metal.

  Lou stopped close to the port engine. The cover was contorted and bu
ckled. Very gently, he prised it up. It creaked and groaned. A chunk of corroded metal about a foot square fell away to the cushioned floor.

  Inside, the engine was a mess. The central block was coated in algae and rust. Exhaust pipes looked like tree roots where they had snapped, partially dissolved over time and tangled together.

  Kate came round and stared into the engine cavity. Lou stepped close, put his head under the propped-open cover and started to poke around, trying to get a clearer understanding of what almost eighty years of ocean life had done to the plane.

  That was when he saw it.

  He moved aside a bunch of wires and thrust both hands into the mess.

  ‘What is it?’ Kate asked. She had worked with him long enough to know when he had spotted something interesting.

  He ignored her and stretched the fingers of his right hand, just managing to reach the cylindrical object. Leaning in as far as he could, he clasped the metal, his fingers closing on it and weaving it upwards, negotiating a muddle of wires and cables. He made a twist left, down and then right and his arm was free. Holding up the cylinder, he squinted at it. It was almost identical to the one they had found two weeks earlier in the plane’s cockpit. The only differences were the streaks of oil and the electrical burn marks running from one flat end to the other.

  73

  Somewhere in England. Two weeks later.

  There was a long list of conditions placed upon Kate’s visit to her old friend from Oxford days, Adam Fleming. She was not allowed to record the meeting, she had to sign a non-disclosure agreement which covered every aspect of who he was and what he had done, and she was not permitted to know where the man was being held. To facilitate this last requirement Kate had agreed to be transported to the site in a windowless vehicle driven by an anonymous chauffeur.