Kate stood up. She was five-ten in trainers, just an inch shorter than Lou; her lab coat swished around her slender, toned body as she turned. She had a runner’s physique and maintained a regime of at least forty miles a week, usually before 6 a.m. each day. If she missed exercise for more than a day, she could be very hard to talk to.
Lou watched her and could not stop a memory. A summer night in Virginia, his apartment. Kate nestled into his shoulder, a sheet barely covering their naked entwined legs. Nowadays he could no longer say it aloud, but he missed her.
‘Say what you like about this,’ and Kate tapped the screen, ‘I think there’s something very odd going on.’
‘Yes, and you’re not the only one. All the crazies have come out of the woodwork over this, Kate. You’re in very good company!’
She sighed and gave up. ‘So, do you want to know what I’ve just discovered?’
‘Of course!’ Lou pulled a stool up to her monitor.
During the three months the pair had been on Bermuda they had been trying, day by day, to unravel the mystery of why a ship, the Lavender, carrying ninety-six pilgrims from Plymouth had run aground on a calm evening in July 1615 a few hundred yards from where they now stood. Kate and Lou had been down to the wreck some two dozen times. They had retrieved an array of artefacts, photographed and filmed the wreck from every conceivable angle and catalogued everything. In their island lab they had studied tiny fragments of porcelain and metal under the microscope, conducted infrared spectroscopic analyses and run a multitude of chemical tests on items ranging from metal casks to the remnants of four-hundred-year-old Bibles partially protected inside rusty chests. But they were still no nearer to knowing the cause of the accident. Now they had begun to consider the idea that the voyage had been doomed because of a clash of personalities aboard the Lavender.
Kate tapped her keyboard and the image of a fragment of paper appeared on the screen. It contained some text, but it was almost completely illegible. At the top, above the edge of the piece of ancient paper, a label read: Sample # BZ081.
‘This is the best of the Bible fragments we found in the captain’s chest.’
‘Yes, I recognize it.’
‘I ran it through an enhancement program.’ She moved the mouse and clicked an icon. ‘At maximum resolution, I got this.’ The new image was a much clearer copy of the original fragment.
‘You can almost read it,’ Lou said.
‘You can read it — a few words anyway.’
‘Yes, I see… there… what does it say?’
‘A snatch of Latin: Magna. Then a gap: vitas… praevalet.’
‘Magna est veritas et praevalet,’ Lou muttered and glanced at Kate.
‘How on earth did you…?’
‘Kate, baby…’ He held his hands out wide apart, palms up.
She laughed. ‘So you get the relevance of it?’
‘Er… No.’
‘Hah! Well, smart ass, in English Magna est Veritas et praevalet means—’
‘I know what it means! “Great is truth and mighty above all things”.’
‘But more importantly,’ Kate said, ‘it’s from I. Estras, a book of the Apocrypha from the Old Testament. The pilgrims aboard the Lavender would have only read the King James Bible, and that definitely does not contain the Apocrypha. They would have abhorred such a thing.’
‘So you reckon the captain was a Catholic? Oops!’
Kate was about to reply when they both heard a strange sound from outside. They looked at each other and headed towards the doors leading to the corridor and outside. A dark-blue Harrier was settling onto the tarmac of the car park.
By the time Kate and Lou reached the plane, its engines had begun to quieten. The passenger canopy rose and a tall, well-built man in naval uniform and clutching an aluminum attaché case began to clamber down a fuselage ladder. Reaching the ground, he made his way over. In his mid-thirties, the man had cropped hair, a hint of grey at the temples, black eyes and a strong jaw.
‘Lou Bates and Kate Wetherall?’ he said. His voice was deep with just a trace of a southern drawl to it.
‘Guilty,’ Kate said.
He took a step towards them. ‘Captain Jerry Derham, United States Navy.’
Lou snapped his heels and did a mock salute.
Kate gave him a dirty look.
Jerry smiled and stuck out his hand. ‘I’m sorry to turn up unannounced. I hope I haven’t interrupted your work. Can you spare me ten minutes of your time?’
Lou made them coffee using what he and Kate referred to as the ‘sacred coffee machine’ — a Miele espresso maker that had been shipped over from Virginia and was their lifeline on slow days.
Captain Derham removed his cap and took a sip. ‘Good coffee,’ he said appreciatively. ‘I guess you’re wondering why I’m here?’ He took another sip. ‘I’m Section Commander at the Norfolk Naval Base, Virginia. It’s about ten miles from your facility at the Marine Research Institute.’ He nodded westward. ‘We’re heading up the investigation into Marine Phenomenon REZ375.’
‘I’ve just been watching the film of the trawler,’ Kate replied. ‘It’s quite something.’
‘It is.’
‘Although,’ Kate went on, ‘my colleague —’ and she nodded towards Lou ‘— thinks it’s the navy’s fault.’
‘I didn’t say that exactly…’ Lou began.
‘Believe what you like,’ Derham replied. ‘I’m not the Inquisition. But I have something I’d like to show you.’ He plucked an iPad from his case, switched it on and handed it to them.
‘That,’ he said as the film started, ‘was taken by a deep-sea probe we sent down to the Titanic two days ago. You’ve probably seen similar footage from the remote submersibles that visited the wreck back in the mid-1980s. But note the digital display in the corner.’
‘Yeah, I was wondering what that was,’ Lou said.
‘It’s a readout from a Geiger counter.’
‘It’s reading… what? Two times ten to the power of twenty curies? That’s ridiculous!’
‘Almost off the scale.’
‘So Greenpeace and the others have been reporting the truth — there is a radiation source down there,’ Kate said without taking her eyes from the screen. The digital display kept climbing. ‘What happened to the crew of the trawler?’
‘Radiation sickness, but they’ll all survive — they got out of the area pretty damn quick.’
‘What sort of radiation are we talking about here?’ Lou asked.
‘Alpha and beta particles, gamma rays — pretty conventional, but our probes show that the combination of the three types of radiation is unusual. It’s possible we’re dealing with a type of source we’ve not seen before. There’s certainly nothing in nature that produces this radiation profile, even if we ignore the intensity.’
‘But if it isn’t a natural source, it has to be military hardware, surely?’
‘It’s not ours,’ Derham said.
Lou looked sceptical.
‘As far as we know, it isn’t,’ the captain added.
‘Russian, Chinese?’ Kate offered.
‘We simply don’t know.’
‘So, what now?’ Lou said, handing back the iPad.
‘We’ve isolated the source to somewhere in the bow section of the wreck. But we have no precise coordinates yet. It’s a big ship. We’re working on it, though, and hope to have it down to a few square yards in a day or two.’
‘Then?’
‘Well, that’s why I’m here. We need your expert help. The story has broken across the Internet and the world is watching. You two come highly recommended; experienced marine archaeologists — a rare commodity.’