The Hadrian Memorandum

99

THE APARTMENT ON RUA DE SÃO FILIPE NÉRI. 7:17 A.M.

An hour and forty minutes of sleep had been enough. Conor White was up at six forty-five. By seven he’d showered and shaved, and then he woke the others. Barefoot and wearing nothing but a bath towel around his waist he’d plugged a team radio unit, a team radio unit, headset into his right ear, tuned to the 171.925 frequency Branco had given him, and listened to the intermittent chatter of Branco’s men watching the apartment at 17 Rua do Almada. Afterward he’d gone into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. By seven ten he was at the kitchen table making notes on his laptop. Six minutes later he opened a map of Lisbon and pinpointed the U.S. Embassy on Avenida das Forças Armadas, a location that looked to be no more than a five to ten minute drive from where they were.

7:20 A.M.

White lifted his BlackBerry and punched in Carlos Branco’s number.

“Yes,” Branco’s voice came back.

“Where are you?”

“Just leaving the Ritz. Congressman Ryder’s suite is ready for him. We are on our way to the airport to meet his flight.”

“I need a car and one of your men for a driver, a guy who knows his way around the city and knows what’s going on with Marten and the congressman.”

“When and what?”

“A limousine of some kind with UN plates, parked outside the U.S. Embassy. I need it fast. How soon can you have it?”

“Not so simple a request. It will take a few calls.”

“How soon, Branco?”

“Within the hour.”

Conor White glanced at his watch. “We’ll leave here at eight twenty and arrive at the embassy by eight thirty. If there is a problem, let me know before that.”

“There will be no problem.”

“Good.”

With that White clicked off and went into the bedroom Irish Jack and Patrice had shared. The covers on the twin beds were thrown back. Irish Jack was just out of the shower, towel-drying his hair. Patrice walked in from the bathroom doing the same. Both were in undershorts and nothing else. Despite their physical differences, both men were built like stone and carried the tattoos and body scars of the longtime combat veterans they were.

“You look like fucking lovers,” White said impassively.

Irish Jack grinned broadly. “That towel does wonders for you, too, Colonel. Standing here with us pretty boys makes you look like some kind of chap who wants to join the party but hasn’t been invited.”

For a moment a boyish sparkle came into White’s eyes. “My dick’s too big for you pussies, you couldn’t handle it.” Immediately the playfulness vanished and his eyes narrowed. “Business garb today. Suits, shirts, and ties. Ready to move out at oh eight twenty.”

White headed into the other room to get dressed himself. As he did, his BlackBerry signaled a text message. He looked at it and saw it was from Loyal Truex, still in Baghdad, and went into the kitchen to take it.

He read it once, then again.

This arrived five minutes ago from Washington with copies to Arnold Moss in Houston and Jeremy Moyer, COS/Lisbon. I forwarded it to you and to Anne, in the event she can, and would want to, read it. As you know, Washington can be purposely terse and ambiguous, so I’m not sure if it’s a reprimand, a compliment, or if they just want us to know. It reads like a newspaper brief tied to a world geography narrative.

“The 585-mile-long Tagus River rises in the mountains east of Madrid, then flows northwest through the mountains and across central Spain to form part of the Spanish-Portuguese border. Afterward it runs southwest into the Atlantic Ocean at Lisbon. It is here, between the cities of Paço de Arcos and Carcavelos, where the river meets the sea, that the body of Striker Oil chairman Josiah Wirth was discovered by fishermen just after dawn this morning floating in a tangle of debris and seaweed.”

I forward, too, a second message. It was encrypted and sent to me and Moss only. Use your laptop to read it. It’s self-explanatory. You will find it extremely disturbing. Know you will take immediate and appropriate action upon reading. Am returning to Washington within the hour.

White sat down at the table and pulled his laptop around, then booted it up and pressed the pound sign on the keyboard. Immediately a marker popped up asking for his personal code. He typed it in. A second marker called for a password, which he entered as well. The screen registered a number of symbols and, beside them, a time and date code. He moved the cursor to the most recent entry-barely twelve minutes earlier. The message was brief.

XARAK Protocol, file accessed, 4 June, 1717 EDT. Access ceased 1720 EDT. Access code AZ101P-22-0LX5-8.*.8.*.2.

Instantly White signed off and shut down the laptop. The access code belonged to Loyal Truex. The time 1717 through 1720 EDT was 2217 through 2220, Lisbon time. The exact same time Anne Tidrow had been in her room at the Hotel Lisboa Chiado. The file had been accessed only, not copied or downloaded. If an attempt had been made to do either, the program would have shut down immediately, a security breach would have been sounded, and there would be an electronic record of the time and location where the attempt had been made. All things Anne would have known. It meant she had read the document and most likely either hand-copied it or photographed it off the screen.

“Fuck,” he swore under his breath. Anne and the photographs were trouble enough; now they had to deal with this. In the hands of Joe Ryder the first two would be crushing, but this last-the text of the document Truex, Sy Wirth, Arnold Moss, and himself had all referred to as The Hadrian Memorandum-would be hard evidence of Agency involvement in the civil war in Equatorial Guinea on behalf of the Striker Oil company, an operation authorized by the deputy director himself. Having it become public was not something that could be tolerated under any circumstance. Meaning the line in Truex’s text message Know you will take immediate and appropriate action upon reading had not been a directive but an explicit order: Retrieve the outstanding materials and eliminate Marten, Anne, and Congressman Ryder as quickly as possible. Before it had just been Marten and Anne, and Ryder if necessary. Now all three had been given a death sentence. One that was to be executed immediately and in any way most expedient.

Suddenly he wondered what he was doing. His entire adult life had been given to the single purpose of gaining his father’s recognition. In the process, he had become a highly educated national, even international, warrior-hero. But all that had ended with the photographs. Since then he had done everything in his power to recover them for the sole intent of protecting his own image. In doing so he had become a murderer-of young women and men, of a despotic oil executive, and now he was hours, maybe minutes, away from killing three more, among them a United States congressman. Why? So that the man who had never acknowledged him would not be aghast at what he saw if the photos were made public. What kind of a reason was that?

The trouble was, Anne’s interference had snowballed the whole thing into a gargantuan geopolitical complication, with a huge, far-reaching cost if things continued to go wrong. It meant the game was no longer his alone. At stake now was the heart and soul of The Hadrian Memorandum itself, the protection of a vast sea of oil for the West. It was a twist he could never have imagined. In a strange way it eased his mind and raised his spirits because it meant the deadly actions still to come would not be those of a common murderer but of a soldier, a patriot-warrior.

7:48 A.M.