The Hadrian Memorandum (39 page)

108

HOSPITAL DA UNIVERSIDADE. 10:52 A.M.

Marten reached the rear entrance and hesitated. He had no idea what to expect when he went in. A Lisbon police car had come down the alley from the opposite direction just as he’d started toward the entrance, and he’d had to draw back and wait. It had stopped at the door, and a uniformed officer had gone inside. It was a full ten minutes before he came out again and drove away past Marten. Why the police had stopped there, what had happened inside that had taken so long, he had no way of knowing. Conor White and the others aside, he’d had to remember that he was still wanted for the murder of Theo Haas. And, as the president had told him, both he and Anne were the prime suspects in the murder of Hauptkommissar Franck. The Portuguese police knew they had been in the Algarve the day before and might well suspect they were in Lisbon now. For all he knew the police visit to the hospital was one of many, giving the staff their description and instructions on what to do in the event either of them showed up. Still, he had little choice but to go ahead as planned, hoping that he was wrong about the police and that Anne was safely there and that Ryder and his RSO detail were either with her or on their way for the eleven o’clock encounter. With great trepidation he took a deep breath, then pulled open the door and went inside.

What he saw was a relatively small city hospital with corridors leading this way and that and people coming and going in any number of directions. A sign guided him toward the front of the building and to a waiting area where about a dozen people occupied its twenty-odd chairs. On the far side was a walk-up booth with two people behind it. One was a balding man, who fit Raisa’s description of Mário Gama, the hospital’s director of security. He was maybe fifty, wore a white shirt and a tie, gray slacks, and a dark green blazer, and was working at a computer terminal. Marten approached him.

“Excuse me, I’m looking for a Mário Gama.”

The man looked up. “You found him, sir.”

“My name is Marten. Has a Ms.Tidrow or a Mr. Ferguson arrived? I’m from the American Insurance Company. We are to meet with Catarina Silva, the accounts receivable director.”

“Ms. Tidrow is here, sir. Mr. Ferguson has not yet arrived. Please come with me.”

“Thank you,” Marten said gratefully and followed him across the room and down a side hallway.

10:54 A.M.

Gama opened the door to a small examination room and ushered Marten in. Anne stood there, alone and waiting. He was surprised at the way her face lit up when he came in, as if she had been more than a little worried about him.

“Please excuse me,” Mário said and then left.

“What happened?” Anne asked as the door closed behind him.

“There was an accident. The motorcycle rider chased after you and Tomás in the truck. He was going very fast when he suddenly swerved to avoid something in the street.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t?”

“No.”

“But he’s dead.”

“I didn’t hang around long enough to find out.” Marten changed the subject. “No sign of Ryder.”

“Not yet.” Anne looked at him uncertainly, as if she wanted to tell him something but didn’t quite know how.

“What is it?”

“I—”

“Go on.”

“Earlier, I got a text message from Loyal Truex at Hadrian. I didn’t tell you because we were on the run and there was no reason. But you should know. Sy Wirth is dead. They found his body floating in the Tagus River, downstream, where it meets the Atlantic.”

“So he was here.”

“Apparently.”

“And with Conor White.”

“Probably.”

“White kill him?”

“I don’t think he slipped and fell. Put the pieces together. Sy made a stupid deal with the CIA to protect the Bioko field. Then he and Loyal brought in White and created SimCo. Things were fine until the pictures showed up. Then everything started to come apart. At some point Sy probably pushed too hard like he always did and stepped all over Conor in the process.”

“And that jeopardized the whole operation, and White, maybe at the Agency’s request, got rid of him.”

“I don’t know. I doubt if we’ll ever know. What’s clear is that they—Conor, Loyal, Sy, and the Agency—wanted to recover the pictures from the beginning. Now, they want more.”

“What does that mean?”

“I knew when I hacked in and found the memorandum that at some point they would learn about it. Not who did it, or from where, but that the site had been accessed and on what day and at what time. They know that on that day and at that time I was at the Hotel Lisboa Chiado, where the rooms have Internet access. They may not know I made a copy but will assume I’d tell you and Ryder what I found.

“The pictures were bad enough because they implicate Striker in the war. The memorandum implicates, even criminalizes, the CIA. And not just the Agency but the deputy director personally. Conor White has enough to lose as it is. Now he has this. If he is Agency, or even if he’s not, he’s got to protect it. He can’t go down as the soldier who was supposed to guard something as massive as the Bioko field but lost it and at the same time disgraced the CIA.

“If he was fired up before, it’s double that now. He’ll come after us with everything he has, and there are few better than he is. He knows what he’s doing and how to do it, and he has his people with him. There may well be others, too, like those doing surveillance outside Raisa’s building. High or low, Conor pays people well. But bottom line, he’s the one running things. And if he is CIA, they’re letting him do whatever he wants because it benefits them most of all. What he wants is us dead and every piece of evidence we have recovered and destroyed. He can, and probably will, be very, very violent and won’t shy away from any means necessary to achieve his ends. That’s his training and the reason for all those medals. If he learns where we are he’ll kill everyone in this hospital if has to just to get to us. I—”

Suddenly there was a noise at the door. Immediately Marten’s hand went to the Glock in his waistband. Then the door opened and a man in a tan business suit and carrying a briefcase entered.

“Please don’t, Mr. Marten.” He turned the briefcase toward him. “It’s not necessary. I’m Special Agent Birns, Congressman Ryder’s RSO detail, half of it anyway.” He glanced at Anne and then around the room, then stepped back. “It’s alright, Congressman.”

A half second later Joe Ryder walked into the room; his look-alike, Tim Grant, followed him.

11:00 A.M.

109

AVENIDA DAS FORÇAS ARMADAS. SAME TIME.

Jeremy Moyer had spent the moments since he’d given Carlos Branco the green light to back up Conor White at the hospital taking a roundabout return drive to the embassy, trying to think of the best way to respond to the disaster that was only moments from making world headlines. At the same time, he had to find a reasonable excuse for pulling the remaining RSO detail out of the Ritz so that their ongoing presence wouldn’t raise questions later, especially in the follow-up investigation by the FBI or the State Department of Congressman Ryder’s killing. He mulled over a number of possibilities, then settled on the simplest: call Debra Wynn, chief of RSO/Lisbon, and tell her that a member of Congressman Ryder’s personal RSO detail—Special Agent Birns, he distinctly remembered the name from State Department paperwork alerting him to Ryder’s visit—had phoned him a short time ago to say the congressman had abruptly changed his plans and was on his way to the airport, preparing to leave Lisbon immediately. That had been the entire message. Whether Ryder had informed the ambassador or not, he didn’t know. Nor did he know why Birns had called him instead of her. At any rate, would she please pull her people out of the Ritz and reassign them.

Which was precisely what he did, calling her as he approached the embassy, explaining it all and closing with “If there was a sudden security threat, he didn’t mention it. My office has received nothing to raise the alert level any higher than it already was for his visit. Maybe it’s political. Maybe it has to do with Ryder’s commission. Maybe he’s going back to Iraq. I don’t know. It’s one of those things. Maybe one day we’ll find out.”

With that he clicked off, took a deep breath, and tried not to think of what was about to happen.

HOSPITAL DA UNIVERSIDADE. 11:08 A.M.

Special agents Grant and Birns stood guard in the hallway outside the examination room while Joe Ryder, Marten, and Anne went over Father Willy Dorhn’s Bioko photographs one by one. Ryder had already been told about the CIA briefing video and seen the 35 mm negatives of the memorandum. Since the document pages were too small to read without magnification, he could only listen to Anne’s detailed explanation of what was on them and accept her assurance that once full-sized prints were made everything would quite legible. In his mind there was no doubt of the veracity of what she was saying. Her tone of voice, her facial expression, the way she held herself, the involuntary clenching and unclenching of her hands told him, as much as the document itself, the personal hurt she was going through in revealing it. Not to mention the legal jeopardy she was putting herself in; she had, after all, stolen a top secret government document, and she sat on the board of directors of what very likely would become a federally indicted company, with its leaders quite possibly brought before an international court charged with crimes against humanity.

The photographs were self-explanatory, as was Marten’s description of other photos on the camera’s memory card that had been lost to the Russian agent Kovalenko. Those showing Conor White with the Chilean war criminal Mariano had been of particular interest, especially when tied to the CIA briefing video that he knew could be subpoenaed. That Kovalenko had killed the German policeman, Franck, and taken the memory card posed another concern because it raised the specter of Russian political interference in Equatorial Guinea, even high-stakes blackmail if Moscow threatened to make the photographs public.

Marten had still not told anyone but President Harris that the real memory card was in his possession and that the one he’d given to Kovalenko was harmless. They were far from being out of the woods yet, and he wasn’t about to give up the last piece of evidence when it was neither safe nor necessary. To that end he would keep custody of it until they were out of the country and the other evidence was secure and protected. Even then there was only one person he would give it to, the president himself.

11:10 A.M.

There was a knock on the door, it opened, and Birns stepped into the room. Mário Gama was with him.

“There is a man wearing the white jacket of Raisa Amaro’s laundry in the reception room,” Mário said. “He told the receptionist he was to ask for Ms. Tidrow or Mr. Marten and tell them he has a truck waiting. She referred him to me.”

“He asked for us by name?” Marten said flatly.

“Yes, sir.”

“He was to have waited until we came out. I’m not sure he even knew our names.”

“Maybe he did know and simply forgot his instructions. He came in to make sure nothing went wrong.”

“Maybe.” Marten looked at his watch. “He’s early. He was to have been here at eleven fifteen.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Ryder said. “Put the photographs back together. Let’s get out of here.”

Anne felt her danger antenna come up. She looked at Marten.

He was already moving, nodding to Agent Grant in the hallway and closing the door. Now he looked to Gama. “Do you know the laundry’s telephone number?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you please call and ask for Raisa. When you get her, hand the phone to me.”

Mário’s eyes darted cautiously around the room. Then he lifted a BlackBerry from his pocket and punched in a number. They could hear it ring through; then someone picked up and a male voice answered in Portuguese.

“Yes.”

“Raisa Amaro, please.”

There was a pause and then,
“Who’s calling, please?”

Gama looked to Marten and covered the mouthpiece. “He wants to know who’s calling.”

“Tell him a personal friend.”

Gama nodded and did as Marten asked.

“Just a minute.”

Twenty seconds passed, then thirty. Gama looked to the others and shrugged. “He must have gone to get her.”

Marten and Anne exchanged glances. Marten looked back to Gama. “Where is the laundry truck parked? Which door did the man come in through?”

“The front door. His truck is parked in front.”

Marten felt the hairs stand up on his neck. Immediately he turned to Gama. “Click off.”

He did, and Marten asked him another question. “Can you find out if an ambulance was called to the laundry in the last half hour?”

Concern spread over Gama’s face. “Yes, sir.”

“Please do it.”

“Yes, sir.” The security director said, with a nod, then turned away, punched a number into his BlackBerry, and waited.

Marten looked to the others. “Ten to one it was the police who answered the phone. If so, they were tracing the call. That was the reason for the delay. It also means that White found out about Raisa, learned where she worked, and went there. The driver out front is one of his men.”

“Thank you,” Gama said in Portuguese and then clicked off the phone, his expression grim. “Emergency medical vehicles were called there by the police. Four people were found shot to death. Three men and a woman.”

“Raisa,” Anne mouthed.

Marten looked at her and nodded faintly, then turned back to Gama. “What did you tell the driver when he asked about us?”

“That I didn’t know anything and would see what I could find out. For some reason he didn’t look like a laundry worker.”

Immediately Marten’s eyes went to Ryder. “I presume your men brought friends along.”

“They’re armed, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Again Marten looked at Gama. “There are security cameras covering the front and rear entries. I saw them when I came in. Are there more?”

“Yes.”

“Where are the monitors?”

“In the Security Center. Down the hall the way we came in, just before you reach the lobby.”

“Please take me there.”

Gama hesitated, unsure of what was going on and more than a little concerned that the dead woman at the laundry was Raisa. Marten read his unease.

“I don’t know how much Raisa told you, but the man you know as Mr. Ferguson”—he nodded at Ryder—“is United States Congressman Joseph Ryder, in Lisbon on a highly classified operation. The men with him are United States government security officers. There are people trying to find us and do us harm. It’s why Raisa called you to help. She knew you could be trusted. Please, take me to your office right away. The guy out front starts to wonder where you are, he’s going to come looking, and he won’t be alone.”

11:14 A.M.