The Hadrian Memorandum (15 page)

37

2:57 A.M.

In two of the first four reports, three eyewitnesses—one at the Platz der Republik and two near the Brandenburg Gate—had made mention of a young, curly-haired man in a black sweater running through the crowd as if he were being chased. That was all, just that. Nothing about what he looked like, his size, or what he was wearing other than the sweater. It all three cases it was just a throwaway observation. Certainly nothing that would tie him in with Marten, Anne Tidrow, or the Haas murder. Nonetheless Franck made a note about it and reached for the fifth report. As he did his phone rang. He glanced at the clock on his desk and then picked up.

“Yes.”

“
Hauptkommissar.
” It was Gertrude Prosser.

“You should be home sleeping. A few hours at least.”

“
You are working
.”

“Yes, but I’m foolish. Go home, Gertrude. You can’t work if you don’t rest.”

“
Hauptkommissar
.” Her voice became urgent. “
I just received answers on two pieces of information you requested a short while ago. I think they should be regarded as confidential
.”

“Go on.”

“
You wanted to know where Nicholas Marten and Anne Tidrow had been before Paris. Answer, they had both come in on the same Air France flight from Malabo, on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea
.”

“Equatorial Guinea?”

“
Yes, sir
.”

“The second piece?”

“
Striker Oil has oil field service and exploration contracts around the world. Lately they have expanded exploration activities on the island of Bioko and have hired a British private military contractor called SimCo to provide protective services there. And then I discovered something else
.” She paused, and he could feel the excitement in her.

“Go on.”

“
A catholic priest, a Father Willy Dorhn, was killed in southern Bioko by members of the national army a day before Marten and Ms. Tidrow left there
.”

“So?”

“
Father Dorhn was the brother of Theo Haas
.”

“What?”

“
That’s all I have so far. There is a major civil war building in Equatorial Guinea. Maybe they are all connected
.”

“Yes, maybe. Good work, and thank you, Kommissar Prosser. Go home and get some sleep.”

Emil Franck hung up. This was a turn he would never have expected. Was it possible Marten and Anne Tidrow, and maybe her oil company, were somehow involved in the civil war in Equatorial Guinea? And had some part of it spilled over into Berlin via Theo Haas and his brother? If so, why? The questions puzzled and troubled him at the same time, and he suddenly wondered if this was something that should be handled by either the BND, the Federal Intelligence Service, or the BKA, the Federal Criminal Police, rather than his office.

But bringing in either agency would change everything. Their presence would be too unwieldy and have too much media coverage. As a result he might lose Marten and Anne Tidrow altogether. No, can’t do it, he thought. For now, at least, he would do as Gertrude Prosser had advised and keep the information confidential.

Again he glanced at the clock on his desk.

3:09 A.M.

Time to lie down on the worn leather couch across from him and get some sleep himself. He closed the reports he’d been studying and was reaching to turn off his desk lamp when his personal cell phone sounded, announcing an incoming call with a musical ringtone a technical assistant had programmed, which he detested.

Who was it? His wife would have long been asleep. His children were out of the country, his twenty-year-old daughter spending a college year in China, his nineteen-year-old son backpacking in New Zealand. Very few others had the number.

The phone went silent, then rang again. He picked up and clicked on.

“Yes.”

“
I thought I’d find you working
,” a throaty female voice came back.

Franck paused, trying to place the voice. Then he did. “It’s been a long time.”

“
We need to talk
.”

“When?”

“
Twenty minutes
.”

“Same place?”

“
Yes
.”

“Okay,” Franck said, then slowly clicked off. He was right, it had been a long time. But putting things together, he knew he should have expected to hear from her.

3:12 A.M.

38

7:15 A.M.

Marten woke with a start. The bed beside him was empty. He looked around. The clothes Anne had taken off the night before to carefully fold and lay atop the chest of drawers were gone.

“Anne?”

There was no reply. He got up fast.

“Anne?”

He went down the hall, glanced at the open bathroom door, then went into the front room, then into the tiny kitchen. She wasn’t there. It was then he smelled the coffee and saw the automatic coffeemaker on the counter near the sink. A freshly brewed pot was nestled inside it. A cup sat alongside. So did a note.

Back soon. Stay here.

I have your passport
.

His passport? Maybe he had threatened to leave and take his chances with the police, but in truth, for the moment, at least, he was better off staying right where he was and letting her try to find a way to get them out of Berlin. Trouble was, by now she would be vulnerable to capture, too, and would know it, so where the hell did she go? Immediately came another thought. What if someone knocked on the door? Or had a key and just came in? Anne would have been able to handle things because she set it all up. He didn’t even know whose apartment this was.

As if in answer to his concern, he suddenly heard voices in the alley outside. Immediately he went into the front room, stood by the window, and carefully looked out. A light rain was falling, and a number of people were entering the alley from the street under umbrellas. Most looked like they were college age or close to it. It made him think there might be some kind of school farther down the alley that had Saturday classes. If so, passport or not, it might be a place for him to hide, to blend in among the students, in the event the police began a house-to-house search.

7:19 A.M.

A small television sat on a bookshelf across the room. He went to it and turned it on, hoping for news of Hauptkommissar Franck’s investigation. Quickly he ran through the channels. There was nothing but Saturday-morning television, cartoons and sports and travel shows. Finally he found an English-language news channel where someone was giving the weather forecast for Europe. He looked at his watch and then at the door, wondering what time Anne had gone out. The weathercast segued to an Audi commercial. He went back to the window and looked out. There were more young people huddling under umbrellas. By now a line had begun to form. What was going on, especially this early on a Saturday morning? Then commercials ended and the news resumed, and he went back to the TV to watch it.

The story being covered was about a car that had exploded on a country highway. All he saw was police investigators and the burned-out wreckage of the car, and he assumed the location was somewhere in Germany. It wasn’t. It was Spain. The car had been a limousine; its driver was among the dead. A bomb was suspected. The other victims were thought to be three of five people missing since they’d arrived in Madrid the morning before on a flight from Paris, Spanish medical personnel just returned to Europe from Equatorial Guinea. Their names were being withheld pending formal identification of the bodies.

“Please, God, no!” Marten froze in horror. In the next instant he realized prayers and denial were useless. He knew exactly who the victims were—Marita and her students. The coincidence was far too great for it to have been anyone else. Shocked and sickened, he watched for a moment longer, then turned off the sound and walked away. His senses numb, he went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee, then just stood there staring at nothing. Finally he set the cup down and found his way into the bathroom.

He looked in the mirror. His complexion was ghostly white. There were paper cups by the sink. He filled one with tap water and drank it, then crumpled the cup and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. He went back into the front room to stare at the TV still playing in silence. He saw one commercial and then another. Next came a business news brief. Then a replay of the story about the limousine explosion.

The initial account had reported the victims missing since they’d arrived in Madrid yesterday. Suddenly it occurred to him that if the police had the bodies of the limo driver and three of the five missing people, where were the other two? And who were they? Marita and one of the kids? Or two of the kids, with Marita among the dead in the exploded car?

Marten felt rage begin to heave through him. Unless there had been some terrible fluke of coincidence, whatever had happened had to have involved the photographs. This was the doing of AG Striker and SimCo. There was no point in even thinking it might have been operatives from President Tiombe’s cutthroat army. They might have had the will but not the kind of connections or swift response that a world-class mercenary like Conor White would have at his fingertips.

Meaning that what Anne had said about not trusting White and wanting to recover the photos herself in order to help slow the war and save the reputation of her father’s company would have been nothing more than a excuse to get him to trust her. Meaning, too, that she most certainly would have known about White’s activity in Spain. Maybe even helped orchestrate it. All of them making the assumption that, afraid something would happen to him, he had confided in Marita and the others and told them what the pictures were and where to find them. If that were so, it meant she didn’t give a damn about anything but protecting the company.

Marten left the TV and stood near the window watching the line of people with umbrellas in the alley below. Immediately his gaze shifted to the end of it where it met Ziegelstrasse. It was the way Anne would come when she returned.

Where the hell was she?

7:33 A.M.

39

LONDON, THE DORCHESTER HOTEL.

STILL SATURDAY, JUNE 5. 8:50 A.M.

(LONDON IS ONE HOUR EARLIER THAN BERLIN.)

Sy Wirth’s corporate Gulfstream G550 had had landed at Stansted Airport just after midnight. Immediately afterward a limousine had taken him into the city and to a private apartment in Mayfair. At 1:30 in the morning London time, he’d gone to bed. Four and a half hours later he was working out in the apartment’s gym. At 7:07 he showered, then dressed in dark blue suit and tie, his accent and ostrich skin boots the only outward remnants of his Texas persona. At 7:30 he left the Mayfair apartment and was driven to the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. At 7:45 he was seated in a private dining room awaiting the arrival of his guest. Three minutes later that person arrived with fanfare—the brash, designer-dressed, forty-eight-year-old Russian oil oligarch Dimitri Korostin with a gaggle of bodyguards in tow. Within seconds the bodyguards were gone, and the two greeted each other as the old friends and business adversaries they were. They ordered breakfast and began to make the ritual small talk.

“How are your children, Dimitri?”

“They are well, already in college, if you can believe it. Oxford, Yale, and the Sorbonne.” Korostin grinned, his Russian accent heavy. “Covering as many bases as possible given we only have the three. And how are you, Sy? Or are you again calling yourself Josiah, giving yourself some biblical dignity when you come to this side of the pond?”

“I’m in the oil business, Dimitri. I have no dignity, biblical or otherwise. Neither do you.”

“So we stop talking about children and other bullshit and get to the reason you are here. What do you want to sell?”

“Trade.”

“What for what?”

“I”—Wirth hesitated—“need your help.”

“That can be expensive.”

“Andean gas field lease, thirty-five years.”

“Which one?”

“The Magellan, in Santa Cruz–Tarija.”

“That is potentially a very big field.” Korostin smiled. “Your trouble must be personal.”

“Someone has a number of photographs and most probably the digital memory card from the camera used to take them. I want both recovered and returned to me with whatever package or packing they are in unopened.”

“You’re being blackmailed.”

Wirth nodded.

“A woman. A man, perhaps.”

Wirth nodded. Dimitri’s inference was as good a cover as any. “Sex can be a nasty business.”

“Surely you have your own people for these things.”

“I’m not convinced my people are going to get it done. For all its success the West is provincial. We have a tradition of trying to do things more or less the right way, even if it isn’t always legal. It’s a mind-set that doesn’t necessarily work, especially if the situation is urgent. You, on the other hand, take the shortest route to the problem and more often than not have a satisfactory outcome. I need only mention the former KGB agent poisoned with polonium right here in London.”

“The result is not always neat.”

“But it works just the same.” Wirth took a folded sheet of paper from his jacket and handed it to Korostin. “The Magellan/Santa Cruz–Tarija contract.”

Korostin slipped on reading glasses and opened it.

The document was on simple everyday stationery. There was no letterhead, nothing to identify where it had come from. The words covered barely two-thirds of a page, the deal spelled out in the simplest terms, the particulars, everything. Josiah Wirth’s signature was at the bottom of it.

“Everything’s there,” Wirth said. “The name of the principal person involved, Nicholas Marten. What I want done and how. When I have the items in my possession the Magellan/Santa Cruz–Tarija is yours.”

Korostin read it. Then read it again and looked up. “You want to be kept informed of our movements.”

“Each step of the way. I want to know where your people are and where Marten is. No action is to be taken on him until I am there, so that when the photographs and camera memory card are recovered they can be handed directly to me.”

“That might be awkward.”

“You are a gifted man, Dimitri, you’ll find a way to make it work.”

Korostin smiled. “If the items are as damning as your offer suggests, how do you know I will keep my part of the bargain and not turn them against you?”

“Small as we are compared to the giants, Striker Oil has any number of long-term oil and gas field leases around the world. Something you well know. You might want to do business with us again. As I said, you are a gifted man. You wouldn’t jeopardize that opportunity.”

Korostin folded the paper and slipped it into his jacket. “When do you want the work completed?”

“Yesterday.”