The Hadrian Memorandum (22 page)

58

SIMCO FALCON, APPROACHING MÁLAGA, SPAIN.

AIRSPEED 355 MPH.

ALTITUDE, 27,700 FEET. 4:49 A.M.

Conor White hunched forward in his seat. Headset on, his laptop open with a street map of Málaga on the screen, he was listening to Málaga air traffic control. Behind him, Patrice and Irish Jack had laid out their choice of weapons: two nine-and-a-half-inch fixed-blade, partially serrated jungle knives and accompanying nylon sheaths; two compact, lightweight, highly modified M-4 Colt Commando submachine guns with sound and flame suppressors and six 45 mm thirty-round magazines for each—firepower 750 rounds per minute; two Beretta 93R burst-firing 9 mm automatic pistols, with six twenty-round magazines for each. And then there were Conor White’s armaments: a similar nine-and-a-half-inch fixed-blade jungle knife; two modified Heckler & Koch 9 mm MP5 submachine guns with sound and flame suppressors and eight thirty-round magazines, firepower 800 rounds per minute; and one short-barrel SIG SAUER 9 mm semiautomatic handgun with four ten-round magazines that he used as a backup “hide gun,” kept under his jacket in a slim polymer holster at the back of his belt. This was the gun he had used to kill the young Spanish doctor in the farmhouse outside Madrid and, soon afterward, the driver of the hired car, whom he’d shot at point-blank range in the dilapidated barn.

4:52 A.M.

They were ninety miles out. Marten’s Cessna, D-VKRD, had already been cleared to enter the Málaga landing pattern. By White’s calculation, that should put the Cessna on the ground in about fifteen minutes, or approximately 5:07 A.M.

He had one man in the control tower and two in the terminal, one at the entrance from the tarmac, the other at the exit onto the street. A fourth and fifth waited in cars just outside, one near the taxi line, the other near the car rental agencies.

Once Marten landed, the plane would taxi to the terminal area, where he and Anne would disembark. Assuming the Berlin police hadn’t put out a Europe-wide APB for Marten, which would have the Spanish police closely watching arrivals at every airport, the two would simply enter the terminal, walk through the green NOTHING TO DECLARE customs door, and go into the terminal proper. There they would either take a taxi, rent a car from an airport agency, or use some other form of transportation yet to be determined. Anne might even have a car waiting. Whatever the case, once they left the terminal they would be followed by one or both of the men outside—and soon thereafter by himself, Patrice, and Irish Jack traveling in a dark green SUV that would be waiting for them at the edge of the tarmac, an SUV courtesy of Spitfire Ltd., a Madrid-based private security contractor that served most of the Iberian Peninsula—Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Gibraltar, and a tiny French territory in the Pyrenees—and was owned by a former SAS major, one of his closest friends.

For no particular reason, White thought of his father, Sir Edward Raines. For everything he had—money, political and military esteem, legitimate family of wife, daughter, two other sons, three grandchildren—the one thing he did not have was the Victoria Cross, which was the honor White treasured most. It was not only hugely prestigious, it put his name ahead of his father’s in British military history. But while queen and country had proudly and publicly saluted him for it, his father had not. He had been invited to the ceremony but had not come. Nor had he phoned, faxed, e-mailed, or written. It had been a golden opportunity for him to recognize his bastard son without ever saying it. The simplest of gestures. A handshake, a look in the eye, a word of congratulations would have been enough. It was the prize he coveted most of all, but it had not happened.

And now, at this moment, and for a reason he was unable to understand, the lack of recognition pained him more than it ever had in his life. It was a hurt that had been assuaged a hundred times over in combat when the face of the enemy had suddenly become that of his father and he’d struck at it with every ounce of fury he had. It was why he had been so successful in battle. Why he had received the Victoria Cross and the sea of Distinguished Service Order medals. It was why he would succeed again in the hours and minutes immediately ahead, because this time the enemy who would wear the face of Sir Edward Raines would be the person who stood between himself and ruin. Nicholas Marten.

“Cessna D-VKRD, you are in the landing pattern. Please change radio frequency to
267.5.” The voice of an air controller suddenly crackled over his headset.

“D-VKRD. Going to new frequency, 267.5,”
he heard the Cessna’s female pilot reply.

“Copy to 267.5, D-VKRD.”

Abruptly White’s radio went to static as the Cessna pilot changed radio frequency. He took off the headphones and looked over his shoulder to Patrice and Irish Jack in the seats behind him.

“They’re on approach, gentlemen. Workday’s about to begin,” he said sharply. “Saddle up.”

4:55 A.M.

59

CESSNA, D-VKRD, ON APPROACH TO

MÁLAGA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. 5:02 A.M.

Marten looked at his watch, counting down the time. Anne was awake now, watching him in the dimly lit cabin.

“Where do we go from here?” she asked quietly.

“That will depend on Brigitte.” Abruptly he undid his seat belt and climbed into the copilot’s seat next to her, just as he had an hour before. Below he could just make out the cloud deck in the beam of the plane’s landing lights. It was steel gray and forbidding, stretching out like some enormous glacier.

“How long before we’re in it?”

“About eight seconds.”

Marten glanced over his shoulder at Anne, then back out the windshield. He held his breath and counted down. Five, four, three, two—Then they were in it. The clouds swirled around them. He turned to Brigitte.

“This is what I want you to do.”

5:05 A.M.

SIMCO FALCON, 3C-B797K, 5:12 A.M.

Conor White felt the main landing gear hit; then the plane’s nose angled over, and the front gear touched the runway. He saw the lighted terminal flash past, then heard the scream of the three Garrett turbofan engines as the pilot put them into reverse thrust. The plane slowed quickly. Another few seconds and they were at the end of the runway and coming back around. Instantly he was out of his seat and at the window looking for the Cessna as they taxied for the terminal. Patrice and Irish Jack were up, too, their weapons packed away in a pair of dark green and yellow sports-equipment bags, peering out, ready to go. All they saw was darkness and parked aircraft.

“Where the fuck is he?” Irish Jack was on edge. “Where the hell did he go?”

White was already on his cell phone talking to his man in the tower. “Where’s the Cessna that just landed?”

“The landing was aborted at the last second.”

“What?”

“The pilot reported radio trouble. Said she would refile a landing request.”

“Where did she go?”

“Don’t know. Her radio is still out.”

White glanced at Patrice and Irish Jack. “Son of a bitch used the cloud deck to dance out of here. He knows he’s being followed.” He turned back to the phone. “Refile us for immediate takeoff, then get me a reading of the Cessna’s transponder code. I want a location of that aircraft.”

“It may take a little time to find, sir. There is a lot of traffic in the area. Cessna’s not the only airplane up there.”

“My friend.” Conor White’s voice was filled with rage, “I can’t follow a plane when I don’t know where the hell it went! Find it. Find it fast! Find it now!” Conor White clicked off and looked to Patrice and Irish Jack. “Shit!” he said.

5:24 A.M.

LEARJET 55, FORTY MILES OUT FROM MÁLAGA.

AIRSPEED 310 MPH. ALTITUDE 14,200 FEET. SAME TIME.

Emil Franck turned his laptop off and then back on and waited for it to reboot, just as he had done moments earlier. The green dot giving the Cessna’s position had suddenly disappeared from the screen, and he held his breath, hoping the problem was with the laptop’s software. Up front, he could see Kovalenko talking excitedly to the pilots and knew the software had nothing to do with it. They’d had the Cessna on their screen, too, and called for Kovalenko seconds after it had vanished from Franck’s. Clearly something major had occurred. Abruptly Kovalenko left the pilots and came toward.

“Marten’s aware that he’s being tracked,” he said. “The Cessna was on approach, then suddenly veered off in a cloud deck and reported radio trouble. There is something of a disorder in the Málaga tower as a result.”

“The transmitter was new. It was functioning perfectly.”

“And then it went dead. Almost at the exact same moment the pilot aborted her landing. Either it was found and disabled or simply stopped working at a con ve nient moment. But whatever happened makes no difference. The Cessna is gone. Málaga tower is attempting to locate it by its transponder reading, but it will take time. Maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours. Who knows?”

Kovalenko suddenly leaned in close, his face inches from the German detective’s, his eyes seeming to pull back into his skull in a way that was wholly unnerving. “Hauptkommissar, that little tracking device, no bigger than your pinky finger—its condition and where it was placed on the aircraft were your responsibility.”

“I neither selected it nor placed it. I simply ordered it done and it was.”

“It was your responsibility, Hauptkommissar. The Cessna is gone. So is Marten.”

“Then I will find him.”

“If he’s not already on the ground somewhere and vanished. Then where will we be, Hauptkommissar, you and I? Most particularly to Moscow.”

Franck’s black eyes flashed angrily at Kovalenko’s attempt to shift the blame to him, but he said nothing. Instead he stood up and slid a cell phone from his jacket, then punched in a number.

“At this point they won’t have much fuel remaining,” he said quietly, then turned to the phone as a male voice answered. “This is Franck. I want an immediate Europe-wide aeronautical APB on a Cessna 340, fuselage registration D-VKRD, last seen approaching AGP, Málaga Airport, Spain. Contact me with the coordinates the moment the aircraft’s transponder signal is located or when the pilot requests permission to land, whichever is first. I want information only. No contact is to be made with the aircraft itself. All agencies are requested to stand by for further instructions. No action is to be taken without my permission. Confirm.”

“Roger, copy. Confirmed, sir.”

Franck clicked off without another word, then looked to the Russian. “If, as you suggest, Nicholas Marten manages to land somewhere without our knowledge, then recovers the photographs and disappears into the mist, we would be dealing with the concept of fate we discussed earlier. Yours and mine especially, as far as Moscow is concerned. To paraphrase you, Kovalenko—we go about the business at hand until our true fate catches up and then—that’s that. Put more directly, unless something happens within a very short time, we will both soon be dead.”

5:31 A.M.

60

CESSNA, D-VKRD. AIRSPEED 190 MILES PER HOUR.

ALTITUDE JUST OVER 11,200 FEET. 5:57 A.M.

“Where are we?” Marten was talking to Brigitte without looking at her, his eyes on the sparkling lights of a city below.

“Passing over Gibraltar. Following the coastline west, as you asked.”

“Good.”

“It would be helpful if you told me where you want to land.”

“I’ll tell you when we get there. The same as I’ve I said all along.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was still nearly an hour to sunrise. Faro, Marten had to remember, was in Portugal, not Spain, and the time zone there was an hour earlier, meaning it was now approaching five in the morning Portuguese time. From what he remembered of the Google map he’d studied earlier, Gibraltar was probably a hundred and fifty miles from Faro in a direct line. By following the coast they could easily add another forty or fifty miles to the trip. Meaning it would be sometime after six when they reached Faro, and that was important. If they arrived too early, the airport terminal would be relatively quiet, making it difficult for two people arriving by private plane to walk in off the tarmac unnoticed. Faro was the hub airport for the popular Algarve region of southern Portugal, and the later they got there, the better the opportunity they would have to mix in with the tourists and business people arriving or departing on early-morning flights. The trouble was, by taking a longer route, fuel became a problem, and they were low on it as it was.

Marten glanced at the gauge on the instrument panel. It read close to empty.

The last thing he wanted was to put down somewhere between where they were and Faro, because the minute he gave the order to land, Brigitte would have to contact the tower, and once they were down they would be vulnerable. Never mind that the people in two planes he suspected had followed them to Málaga might still be on their tail; if Brigitte was a CIA plant arranged through Erlanger in Berlin, she might well silently alert someone on the ground and an operation to tail them would be in force when they arrived. That kind of chance he was prepared to take in Faro because he knew exactly where they were going afterward; he’d just have to hope they could find a way to leave the airport quickly and unnoticed. But landing at an unknown airport along the way was no good. He looked to Brigitte.

“How soon before we need fuel?”

“An hour. A little more if we throttle back and slow down.”

“Then slow us down,” he said without hesitation. If they made it to Faro they would be landing on fumes, but it was a chance he was willing to take.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.” Anne’s voice rang out from behind him.

He turned to look at her. She was sitting back, her arms folded over her chest. “I’m not exactly in the mood to end up in the Atlantic.” She smiled demurely.

“If it makes you feel any better, neither am I.”

“How comforting.” She smiled again.

“Isn’t it?”

6:00 A.M.

61

STRIKER OIL GULFSTREAM G550. SOMEWHERE OVER

NORTHERN SPAIN. AIRSPEED 510 MILES PER HOUR.

ALTITUDE 31,300 FEET. 6:14 A.M.

“I understand, Conor, there was nothing you could do,” Sy Wirth said with uncharacteristic calm, his ear to his Conor White–only, blue-tape BlackBerry. “I assume you’re still on the ground at Málaga?”

“Yes, sir,”
White’s voice came back.
“There’s a lot of traffic. The tower is having difficulty picking up the transponder signal from the Cessna. It’s a complicated procedure that’s out of my hands. Even my man in air traffic can’t force it. I’ve pushed him as hard as I can. We’re cleared for takeoff the moment we isolate the signal.”

“I’ll call you back.” Abruptly Wirth clicked off, set the blue-tape BlackBerry on the worktable in front of him, and picked up his other BlackBerry. Immediately he punched in a number and waited for it to connect through.

“I know, Josiah, they’ve lost the signal. My people are on it.”
Despite the hour Dimitri Korostin was right there, clearly expecting his call.
“It’s much too early to have to deal with your problems. You’re making me begin to think an Andean gas field is hardly worth it.”

“A field the size of the Santa Cruz–Tarija is worth as many problems as you have to solve. That is, if you still intend to deliver as promised. So fuck you, and find out where the hell Marten’s plane is.”

“Fuck you, too. I’ll let you know when I have something.”
With that the Russian clicked off.

Sy Wirth set the BlackBerry down and poured himself a cup of coffee from the thermos the flight attendant had provided. When he had it, he sat back and tried to relax. He could worry, but it wouldn’t help. Dimitri’s people were in the air and on Marten’s tail. So far, and despite Marten’s clever maneuverings, they’d tracked him every step of the way, so there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t pick him up again soon. There was little doubt Conor White and his team would find him in due course, too, but Dimitri’s people would find him faster and with a lot less noise.

Unfortunate as losing the Cessna’s signal was, it was strangely working in his favor and was why he hadn’t raised his voice to White. Why upset someone who’s helping you without knowing it? By pressing his man in Málaga air traffic control, he was unconsciously leaving a big fat footprint for the authorities to follow once the business with Marten was done. The same hefty footprint he’d left in Madrid when he hired the limousine and driver to pick up the Spanish doctor and her medical students at the airport and take them to the isolated farmhouse, and then later when he used the Falcon charter to take him from Madrid to Berlin and now back to Spain.

When all was said and done—when Dimitri’s people had delivered the photographs and gone, and from Dimitri’s reputation and actions so far there was little reason to think they wouldn’t succeed, with Marten and Anne dead in the process—the person left twisting in the air would be Conor White. And there would be nothing he could say without incriminating himself further. Even if he pointed the finger at Wirth, claiming he was the mastermind of all this—of arming the rebels and then of directing the search for the damning photographs, which included the interrogations in the farmhouse outside Madrid—his case would fall apart because there would be no photographs and any claim of direct communication between the two of them would end only in a trace back to the general number at Hadrian headquarters in Virginia. An allegation of a clandestine meeting between the two of them at the former bordello in Berlin would be indefensible as well. The apartment had been rented by phone and charged to a SimCo account in England under the name Conor White. On the morning of the day in question Josiah Wirth had been in a meeting with the Russian oil oligarch Dimitri Korostin at the Dorchester Hotel in London. It was true he had gone to Berlin later and taken a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, but that had been to meet with an associate of Korostin’s who had had to cancel at the last minute. He hadn’t even been aware that White was in the city. Sometime after one the next morning he’d left the German capital in the company Gulfstream for a series of business meetings in Barcelona.

It was on the way there that he would hear about the tragedy in whatever town or city where Dimitri’s people caught up with Anne and Marten, and where White and his gunmen would be found by the local authorities and accused of their murders. Authorities who would have gone there on a tip from the Spanish police, who would have been anonymously alerted to White’s probable complicity in the Madrid farmhouse murders and have been warned that he was on his way to wherever this place was to settle some grievous personal account with Striker board member Anne Tidrow.

Depending on the timing, Wirth would either go to the location directly from Barcelona or divert his flight en route, shocked and outraged at White’s involvement with what had happened there and at the Madrid farmhouse and mourning the death of a dear colleague who was the daughter of Striker’s late and much loved found er.

Wirth took another sip of coffee and looked out the window to see the first streaks of day beginning to brighten the eastern sky. Suddenly he felt exhausted, as if all of the anxiety, intensity, and travel of the past days had caught up with him. He’d slept little and knew he would need all the clearheaded energy he could muster when things began to happen. If he could sleep now, even for twenty minutes, it would be a godsend. He put the cup down and lay back, closing his eyes. Just relax, he told himself. Don’t think about anything. Don’t think about anything at all.

6:28 A.M. SPANISH TIME