Robert Walker - Titanic 2012

“Surely, your captain has gotten Marconi messages to the effect that death itself is aboard your ship, messages from the Belfast authorities.”

“Messages of death aboard?” asked the officer. “I am Second Officer Charles Lightoller, Constable, and it is unlikely Captain Smith would share such wireless messages with me, but if such were so, rumors most surely would’ve reached me.”

“And surely there must be rumors among the crew? The officers perhaps? The men receiving the messages from my boss to yours? Any whispers of sabotage… anarchists, for instance?”

“Anarchists? Aboard Titanic ?”

“It is a possibility. Surely your wireless operator put our message into Smith’s hands.”

Lightoller, a man with the features of a boy, took off his officer’s cap and ran his fingers gingerly through his thinning hair. “The Marconi Company men are extremely professional, sir, and not given to loose tongues; they value their jobs, after all.”

Lightoller looked to be a bright young officer with a future ahead of him, Ransom thought, if he’d only listen. “Mr. Lightoller, please, just have a look at our evidence you have a killer aboard Titanic , and that before you set sail for New York, you must allow us to bring this to your captain’s attention. Declan! Show him the photographs—the results of this… this fiendish murderer quite possibly lurking about the shadows in the depths of Titanic this moment.”

Declan snatched out the photos they’d brought with them for Charles Lightoller’s perusal. Lightoller gasped at the images of the bodies—before and after dissection—and he hardly knew what he was looking at.

“This killer,” Ransom said in his ear, “works fast and he spreads a horrible disease wherever he goes, Mr. Lightoller—a plague, and if that plague gets underway as Titanic gets underway—Charles, can I call you Charles, son?”

“Yes sir… sounds bloody serious; something… something…”

“Something your captain needs to take seriously, Charles.”

Lightoller swallowed hard. “All right, come on aboard; I’ll see to it you have an audience with Captain Smith.”

“Good… good.” Ransom and his young associates stepped aboard and found comfortable places to sit about the crates. Lightoller hurried the loading and soon all passengers had been welcomed aboard.

The huge floating tender began now making its way toward Titanic , and Ransom and the young interns relaxed; Ransom’s words to Lightoller had gotten the right reaction. He’d couched the danger in the perfect terms to move the man—that and the photographic evidence. Lightoller had stepped off, muttering, “To burn a man to death like that—awful… just awful.”

The images in the photos did look like men who’d been incinerated; there was no way to capture the true appearance of a victim of this thing—certainly not on a grainy, two-dimensional, black and white photograph. Still the photos had had the desired result, to get them aboard Titanic and before the only man capable of stopping the ship where it sat and ordering a quarantine.

They would then set up a proper method of determining how to hunt this thing down, trap it, and destroy it… destroy the carrier. Fear also ran high that at some point—left to flourish, this thing would accomplish its single-minded purpose to reproduce and would replenish its kind.

Declan, Thomas, and Ransom went to the other side of the tender and creeping up before them was the huge open hatchway at sea level where all passengers, trunks, bags and crates were to be loaded onboard. For Thomas and Declan, it recalled the night Pinkerton Agent Tuttle shouted down at them to stay off the ship, that Tuttle didn’t know where Anton Fiore might be. For Alastair it recalled standing before this gaping wall of blackness with Reahall at his back telling him he knew his darkest secrets. The same night those two interns knocked at his door and had dragged him into this crazy, madcap chase after an unknown killer none of them knew enough about—a killer toward which they’d run. Reahall had been smart enough to run in the opposite direction.

Then Ransom had someone, a young woman of obvious breeding and some wealth, carrying an umbrella over her head, speaking in his ear, saying, “I was to’ve traveled on the seventh, you know, on the George Washington for New York, but when I heard of this fantastic wonderful new boat was leaving on the 10 th, three days after Easter Sunday I changed my passage, and why not? I covered the spring fashions at the Easter Sunday races! You know, to learn Titanic will dock in New York the same day as George Washington! What a boon!”

“I see, reporting on the Easter parade of fashions, is it, ma’am?” he replied, unsure what else he might say when he realized the couple she stood with were the well-photographed Astors—Mr. and Mrs. John Jacob Astor. Astor was the richest man on the globe, an American tycoon on his way to New York via Titanic .

“Oh, where are my manners?” the lady traveling with the Astors said, a surprisingly gabby aristocrat indeed, he thought now. “I am Edith… Edith Embler; I write a fashion column syndicated to the newspapers.”

“I see.”

“And you, sir?” She put up an umbrella to secure herself from the sun.

“Oh… just a fellow traveler.” He had to swerve to avoid being struck by her umbrella.

“One with a badge, I see.”

He realized he’d revealed his badge when speaking to Lightoller and had forgotten about it until now. “You are quite observant.”

“Are you the least bit worried, sir, about this platform toppling over? Do you feel that frightful current below our feet?” she asked.

She was right, and more and more people aboard the tender that Declan had said was built for Olympic, were being shoved off their feet, despite a calm, glassine-looking surface. Some were knocked off their feet by the powerful draught that seemed bent on sucking anything too near Titanic into her hull.

Edith Embler grabbed onto Ransom who’d steadied himself via the rail as did John Jacob Astor and his wife. Edith’s umbrella fell from her hand and was claimed by the sea. She shouted, “My word! Well… I mean a boat that can cause such upheaval and calamity from this distance? I mean in a sea so calm as this? Why it’s dangerous. I wish I’d gotten on the George Washington.”

“Oh, please, Edie—we’d have missed you terribly had you left earlier,” replied Mrs. Astor.

As they drew nearer Titanic , the groundswell of this invisible force below the pristine surface and below the platform welled up, shaking the tender violently, causing a collective gasp. Now with everyone aboard the half expecting to go under, holding onto anything stable, the tender reached Titanic and pounded her side with such force that Ransom feared the tender would be split in two. But somehow it all held, and crewmen waiting aboard Titanic at its cargo hold shouted, “Lower your anchors!” even as these men began lowering Titanic ’s gangplank. At the same time, Lightoller rushed to the captain of the tender and pleaded that he drop all of his anchors into the water to steady her—and now.

“Look at that, boys,” Ransom said to Declan and Thomas, pointing. Ten men on either side of the Titanic ’s gangplank stood like sentinels to hold it in place and steady. Even so the gang-plank shook and swayed and eddied and flowed and pulled to one side then the next like an angry dragon being held against its will.

Ransom and his party held back while cargo and passengers unsteadily moved across, and remaining behind with them stood Edith Embler, feet planted. She had waved the Astor’s off sometime before. Astor had taken his wife’s arm in his and with absolute aristocratic bearing, they had marched onto and across the enormous, moving metal floor which doubled as a cargo loading point above the waterline. Mr. and Mrs. Astor set the standard, and so Ransom worked at keeping his sea legs the whole while.