The Hadrian Memorandum

11

THE HOTEL MALABO. 6:30 P.M.

Nicholas Marten stood in a tiny shower stall that was crammed, like the toilet, into a corner of his room. Head back, his eyes closed, he let the water run over him, relieved beyond imagination to be free of his army interrogators and on his way out of Bioko. At the same time, he thought of the cold bravado with which the hawk-faced soldier had told him of the village massacre.

How many had lived in that village? Sixty? Eighty? Maybe more. He wondered what was so extraordinarily valuable to the army about those photographs that they would expend so much effort and take that many lives trying to retrieve them.

The only answer that made sense was that they wanted them as proof to the world that an outside force was fueling the rebellion and that their deliberate actions in repressing it-highly criticized by human rights groups, the United Nations, and any number of countries-were justified. Still, if they were so eager to uncover the pictures and had not yet found them, why had they suddenly stopped their interrogation and let him go?

Part of the puzzle might have been the condition of his hotel room when he returned. The place had been thoroughly ransacked. Every piece of his personal belongings gone through, his bed stripped, the furniture turned over. They hadn’t found the photos there, and they hadn’t found them on his person, but that didn’t answer the question of why they had let him go when they could have as easily killed him and buried his body somewhere in the rain forest where a missing man, no matter who he was, would never be found. A missed communication between them? Maybe. Goodwill? Not from men like that, particularly when they knew he’d seen firsthand what the army did to old priests and young boys and boasted about their slaughter of the villagers. So their freeing him had to have been for some other reason altogether. What that was he couldn’t imagine.

7:10 P.M.

Freshly shaven and dressed in a clean shirt, jeans, and sport coat, Marten left his bags at the front desk and headed for the bar. He walked gingerly, his balls still swollen and achingly tender from the field-goal-like kick presented to him by the major’s “specialist.” What he wanted most was to have a gin and tonic, or two or three to kill the pain, and then get the hell out of there on the ten-o’clock flight to Paris. Yet suddenly there was doubt even about that. In the last half hour a tropical storm had whirled in from nowhere. Wind and rain pelted in never-ending sheets. The lights flickered and went off, then came back on. He’d been warned at the desk that the airport might close down.

“For how long?” he’d asked of the white, middle-aged desk clerk.

“For however long the storm lasts, señor. An hour. A day. A week.”

“A week?”

“Sometimes, yes,” the man grinned.

“The airport closes, you make sure I have a room. I don’t want to sleep here in the lobby for a night, much less a week.”

“I don’t know if that is possible, señor.”

“You don’t?”

“No, señor.”

Marten reached into his jacket, took out a small roll of bills, and handed him a ten-thousand-CFA-franc note, the currency of Equatorial Guinea, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty U.S. dollars. “Now you do.”

“Of course, señor. If the airport closes you will have a room.”

“Good.”

Marten walked off and shuddered as he did. The last thing he wanted was to spend another hour, let alone a night or a week, here.