by Tom West
The building was a nondescript concrete monstrosity, huge and cold and resting in a flat windswept landscape many miles from the nearest habitation. The journey from London had taken a little over three hours and Kate had no idea in which direction they had travelled. It was not enough time for the vehicle to reach Dartmoor or the Yorkshire Moors; the landscape here was too flat and bleak for the Welsh borders, so she concluded the detention complex was somewhere in East Anglia, perhaps near King’s Lynn or Lowestoft.
She was searched, asked to walk through a scanner, had her bag thoroughly checked, mobile temporarily requisitioned and her shoes removed. On stockinged feet, Kate was led to a featureless waiting area, a long, narrow room painted gunmetal grey with a stone floor. From there, flanked by silent armed guards, she was shown into a smaller, low-ceilinged space with one wall taken up by a darkened window. The room contained just four things: a table, two chairs, and Adam Fleming.
He was dressed in a bright orange one-piece, his blond curls cut brutally short. He had a cut under his left eye and he was chained to the table by his wrists and his ankles. His right hand was in an aluminium cast. In the two weeks since the bizarre series of events aboard Gladstone, he seemed to have lost some weight and his face had a haunted gauntness about it.
‘Come to gloat have we, Katie? I’m surprised at you.’
She stared back at Fleming across the dull and scratched metal table, her expression neutral. ‘Not at all, Adam.’
‘I’m sure hubby isn’t too delighted you should choose to visit your old pal though.’
She ignored the remark.
‘So why then, if not to rub in that you won?’
‘I just want some answers, Adam. I’m confused about something.’
‘Clever Katie, confused? Goodness me!’ He squinted at her and she could see through his hubris, through the pain he was feeling, to the numbness that had become the key feature of his life.
‘People don’t do what you did without reason, Adam.’
‘Maybe it was simply about money. Thought of that?’
‘Of course, but I’m not so sure you were ever that interested in vast wealth.’
‘And you purport to know me do you, clever Katie?’
There was a long dull silence between them.
‘I imagine a lot has happened during the past two weeks, has it not?’
‘Yes, it has. The head of Eurenergy, Glena Buckingham, has been arrested, as have a dozen of her top people. Buckingham has tried plea-bargaining, sold you down the river.’
‘Naturally.’
‘And we have tied up the loose ends over the questions surrounding Einstein’s work and the Kessler Document.’
‘Oh?’
Kate looked around her. She knew this conversation was being taped, and although she could not see them through the darkened glass, she knew the armed guards were there along with perhaps several senior staff.
‘Obviously I can’t go into details, but suffice it to say, things did not turn out as simply as we had hoped. The cylinder we recovered from the cockpit proved to be a decoy. By sheer fluke, we found a second cylinder that had been secured inside one of the Electra’s engine casings. Except it had not been secured well enough.’ She paused again. ‘Hell, there’s no real secret about it – Lou and I are scheduled to attend a press conference to announce the news tomorrow afternoon.’
Fleming gave her a puzzled look.
‘We are pretty sure the second cylinder became dislodged during the final leg of Amelia Earhart’s fateful flight and that it shorted the electrics of the port engine, causing the plane to crash. We could tell by electrical burn marks along the length of the cylinder.’
Fleming looked startled for a moment. ‘And this second cylinder carried the real message?’
‘Yes. We’re close to cracking the code.’
Fleming shook his head slowly. ‘That is, well, quite surprising. If I were in a better mood I would congratulate you – two mysteries solved simultaneously.’
There was another long silence.
‘So why did you do it, Adam? Why betray your country, your friends . . . and even Eurenergy?’
‘Perhaps for the fun of it, Katie.’ He pursed his lips and looked down at the table.
‘I know about your wife, Celia.’
Fleming did not look up.
‘Did her death . . .?’
‘You know nothing about me,’ Fleming hollered, pushing himself forward as far as he could, the chains clinking under the strain. Kate thought she heard movement from behind the glass.
‘I’m sorry,’ Fleming said and sighed heavily.
‘At Oxford you were a patriot extraordinaire,’ Kate said. ‘Your family history, your upbringing. You were imbued with it all. And then, the army, the intelligence service. Is it any wonder I might think Celia was the catalyst?’
‘You didn’t know me that well.’ There was an edge to his voice, a touch of resentment. ‘But, look, OK. I won’t deny it. We are all slaves to what happens to us . . . it’s all very Nietzschean, is it not?’ And he produced a sliver of a smile that vanished as fast as it appeared. ‘It was all so simple and straightforward when we were kids, wasn’t it, Katie? When did it all start to get so goddamn complicated?’
‘Our lives become progressively more complicated the older we get.’
‘Pedestrian of you, but yes, you’re right. Celia’s death was a catalyst. How could it not have been? She died for nothing. Her death changed nothing. She believed in her country, but her country had no interest in her, not in who she really was, the woman she was. To them, she was a statistic, a number, a series of numbers, just as we all are. I carried on, I carried on for years after she died; went on doing what I did, believing still, never really questioning. But then, I don’t know . . . something snapped, I suppose.’
He held Kate’s gaze, his voice calm, as though he were talking about a book he had enjoyed, or an innocuous incident from schooldays. ‘I was in Karachi. It was eighteen months after Celia died. I didn’t really realize it at the time, but I was working flat out; classic displacement of course, and something . . . well, you get the picture, something gave. It really did. I felt it. It was almost a physical thing, I swear I heard it go, heard it snap, some cord, a connection, an empathy. It was a link between the old me and the new me. A link between the person who had been brought up in the Fleming family, with all our long, proud heritage, and the evolved Adam Fleming, if you will.’
He paused for breath and looked around the soulless room. ‘There. Does that satisfy you? Or do you want me to beg forgiveness? Feel remorse?’
‘Do you?’
‘Do I feel remorse, Katie?’
She looked at him and could see nothing in his expression. He was either extremely good at concealing his feelings – or maybe there really was nothing there to conceal.
‘You killed people, Adam.’
‘Yes, I did. I killed people for queen and country, many people. And then I killed for myself. Is there really any difference? I was patted on the back for the former, sent here for the latter.’ He gazed around again, pausing for a moment as he glanced past the darkened window. ‘Moral relativism . . . a strange beast. A unicorn perhaps. Nothing more than a legend, a figment of the imagination.’
Kate suddenly felt tired and part of her no longer wanted to be there, no longer wanted to ask questions, find out things. She had a momentary vision of being curled up on a sofa with Lou, watching their favourite TV show.
‘Did you really come here just to ask me questions?’ Fleming said.
‘I’m not altogether sure now.’
‘I was being disingenuous when I accused you of wanting to gloat. But you did not come here for me, nor to satisfy prosaic curiosity. You have asked me these questions for yourself, Katie.’
She was shaking her head. ‘How do you possibly . . .?’
‘How do I work that out? It’s really not that difficult. You and I, we knew each other, albeit briefl
y at a time in our lives when we were each emerging from childhood. Neither of us stayed the adults we grew up to be initially. When I knew you, you were more mature than me in many ways, but I could never have visualized you then as a married woman, settled, with a career and a domestic future lined up. And me, well, I changed even more, didn’t I?’ He allowed himself another vague smile.
‘But I scared you, didn’t I?’ He tilted his head slightly. ‘Oh, don’t look so surprised. Drop the guard a second, be honest, at least with yourself. You saw how thin the veneer of education, upbringing . . . even morality can be. You saw me, the product of a “good” family and an Oxford education, followed by the army and MI6 discipline. You saw me change . . . change hugely. That frightened you. You wanted some deep, meaningful answers. That’s why you came here today.’
‘If that is true, I will go away empty-handed.’
‘Yes, you will.’
‘Because you can’t, or you won’t, answer?’
Adam Fleming did not reply; just gave her that thin smile one last time.
Tom West is the pseudonym for the internationally bestselling author of ten novels. Private Down Under, which he co-wrote with James Patterson under the name Michael White, is the sixth book in the Private series. The Einstein Code is the second book to feature marine archaeologists Kate Wetherall and Lou Bates, after The Titanic Enigma. Tom West lives in Perth, Australia.
First published 2015 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2015 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-1-4472-4660-2
Copyright © The White Family Trust, 2015
Cover Images © Larry Rostant
The right of Tom West to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Title page
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About the Author
Copyright page
