Malcolm Rausing rarely stepped foot on dry land. He preferred the freedom of the open sea, with its murky and arcane laws. Rausing Oceanic’s ships were built by the lowest bidder, paid for by the highest bidder, flagged in Panama or Liberia, operated by Pakistanis and Filipinos and largely immune from oversight or prosecution. The high seas were the last frontier, the Wild West, and that was just the way Rausing liked it.

When he decided it was time to shutter the company’s de facto headquarters once and for all, Malcolm Rausing sailed into Aberdeen aboard his latest ship, the DSV Depth Charge, to pay a final visit. The office, in a harbor-front building that once looked out on the company’s fleet, sat neglected, its view now blocked by shiny condominiums. It was staffed by an underpaid skeleton crew of secretaries and cleaning crew who rarely showed up to work. Rausing ordered all of the company’s legacy documentation be digitized and then destroyed. This was all to be done secretly by employees promised a lucrative pension. Only his personal office, once Angus Rausing’s, was to be left untouched. He would look to that.

His father’s old desk was a massive oak affair, built from leftover timber from Rausing Oceanic’s first ship in the 1950s. Its surface was scarred and covered with a film of dust and heaped with unopened mail. A scrimshaw letter opener lay in a tray beneath a green shaded lamp and an assortment of nautical paraphernalia lined the corners, booty salvaged by Angus during his time as a diver. Malcolm Rausing hated this place. It was drafty and dark and smelled of the past, a past he never knew, yet disdained. His father’s portrait glowered from the reception area. Burn it with the rest, Rausing thought.

In a locked lower drawer of the desk was his father’s dive logbook. Malcolm had never bothered to look at it. He’d heard enough of his father’s war stories of diving in far flung places, refloating sunken ships, de-mining harbors, and retrieving bodies. But before tossing it on to the growing pile of papers to be destroyed, something compelled him to open it. He flipped its wrinkled, stained pages, mostly scratched with depths, bottom times and locations, until he reached the final entry, scrawled in a shaky hand that he recognized as that of his crippled father:

Ceylon. 15 April, 1942. Vampire salvage, 59 fathoms.

It had been his last dive — killed his partner, too. Angus Rausing had told Malcolm little about it, and he’d only pieced together sketchy details. He read the last line in the dive log’s final entry:

Weapon. Aft bomb room. Atomic?