The Hadrian Memorandum

16

AIR FRANCE FLIGHT 959, MALABO SAINT ISABEL AIRPORT

TO PARIS, CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT.

STILL THURSDAY, JUNE 3. 10:30 P.M.

The seating in the economy cabin of the Airbus 319 was three and three divided by a center aisle, and the four-man army patrol that had escorted Marten and Marita and her people to the airport had commandeered one complete row for them. Window to aisle on the far side were Marita, Rosa, and Ernesto. Window to aisle on the other were Marten, Luis, and Gilberto. The flight had taken off during a lull in the storm, and the cabin lights had been lowered shortly after that. Save for the occasional passenger using an overhead light to read or work, most of the passengers slept, more out of relief to have escaped a long weather-related delay in Malabo than anything else.

Of them all, probably none was more thankful than Marten. Emotionally drained and enormously relieved to be airborne out of the army’s grasp, he only now realized the depth of his exhaustion. He’d been on Bioko for barely five days, but it seemed a lifetime. Still wired and restless, he tried to sleep, but it was impossible. Across the aisle, he could see the red-haired Ernesto awake, too, listening to something over a headset. A deep exhale and he turned to look out the window in time to see the Airbus break through the lingering cloud deck into a clear, moonlit night.

10:38 P.M.

He lay back and closed his eyes once more. They were still hours from Paris, and he wanted to sleep for as many of them as he could. To escape, for a time at least, everything that had happened in the last days.

Two minutes passed. And then four. And then eight. Marten sat up. Sleep wasn’t going to come and he knew it. Again he looked out the window, watching as the plane banked, beginning its turn over the island. The darkness below played against the quiet whine of the engines, and for a moment he thought the combination might lull him to sleep. Then he caught sight of three reddish points of light on the ground. They were probably twenty or more miles apart in what should have been the deep black of heavily forested land. In his mind there was no question what they were. Burning villages. If he was right, either the insurrection was escalating and moving quickly north, or President Tiombe’s army was taking preventive action and destroying suspected rebel townships in a show of force. Maybe it was both. But whatever was happening, hundreds of people were being killed, and the rebellion-justified as it might be against Tiombe and his brutal, corrupt regime-was being made all the worse by Conor White’s supplying of arms to the insurgents because the army’s massive response to it was so barbaric. In Father Willy’s words, “extreme, even savage cruelty.” In Conor White’s, “The army is literally slaughtering suspected insurgents along with their friends and families, the old and women and children included, and afterward burning their villages to the ground.” To Marten it seemed as if the war were being purposely escalated on both sides. The question was, why and why now?

What had President Harris told him in England barely a week earlier? “Father Dorhn has been in Equatorial Guinea for fifty years. If anyone knows what’s going on there he does, and from his letter he seems to know quite a lot.”

Well, Father Willy did know a lot. And he was dead because of it. So were the two young boys with him. How many hundreds, maybe thousands of untold others had been annihilated in the course of things? How many were being killed right now, at this moment, twenty thousand feet beneath him in villages along the way?

Marten turned from the window, pulling down the shade as he did. As if somehow it would shield him from the horror going on below.

At almost the same moment a flight attendant entered from the first class cabin, abruptly pulling the separating curtain closed behind her as she did. For the briefest instant Marten caught a glimpse of the handful of passengers seated there. To his surprise, Anne Tidrow was among them. She was dressed casually in dark slacks and tailored jacket and was in an aisle seat near the rear. Next to her was an older, gray-haired man in a business suit. Whether they were traveling together or were just seatmates he had no way to tell.

10:50 P.M.

Marten was angry and on edge and probably too tired to be trying to sort things out, but he kept at it anyway because he couldn’t help it and because in this situation, his mind had no off switch.

“Tell them what you have seen!” Father Willy yelled just before he was killed.

By that he’d meant the photographs.

To President Harris and to Joe Ryder, especially, their significance would go far beyond showing SimCo mercenaries secretly arming the insurgents. The pictures would give immediate credibility to the theory Theo Haas had put forward to Joe Ryder about the Striker/Hadrian collusion in Iraq having been extended to Equatorial Guinea.

It was, he knew, pure speculation on his part. Still, he had seen what he had seen, and what Father Willy had so forcefully and tragically sent him to report. The trouble was that just telling them would not be enough. He needed hard evidence-the photographs themselves and if possible the camera’s memory card. The same hard evidence the Equatorial Guinean government wanted as proof that an outside force was fueling the rebellion. The same hard evidence, he was certain, that Conor White and Anne Tidrow had been after but for the opposite reason: to keep their actions from being found out.

Clearly both sides believed the photos existed and would do whatever was necessary to retrieve them. But so far neither had apparently succeeded. Even if Marten accepted their belief that the pictures did exist, he had no more way of knowing where they were than the others. The whole thing was, and remained, a mystery that only Father Willy could resolve. And Father Willy was dead.

10:55 P.M.

For no particular reason Marten looked across the center aisle to the passengers in the rows of darkened seats behind him. To his surprise he saw a man in a striped shirt and white trousers sitting under a reading light watching him. At Marten’s glance he looked away, clumsily picking up a magazine he had in his lap. He was heavyset and jowly, and Marten knew he had seen him somewhere before. Where, he didn’t know. A moment later his gaze shifted across the center aisle. Two seats down another man was awake and reading. He was dressed in tan khakis and a light blue golf shirt and was considerably younger than the jowly man. Marten had seen him before, too. In the airport maybe. Perhaps that was where he’d seen the other man as well.

No.

Suddenly he remembered where he’d seen them both. In the bar at the Hotel Malabo. The heavyset, jowly man in white he’d had to step around on his way in. The other had been sitting halfway down the bar when he’d been talking with Anne Tidrow and Conor White. If they were on the flight by chance, then why had the jowly man been watching him? Or had he been watching him?

10:57 P.M.

Marten turned out the light over his seat and again closed his eyes. He was starting to drift off when the thought he’d had earlier came roaring back. Why had the army interrogators suddenly put him on a plane and let him go when they could have as easily killed him and buried his body somewhere in the rain forest?

The reason had to be the photographs. They hadn’t found them on Father Willy’s person or in his church or residence or anywhere among the people in his village, or on Marten’s person or in his belongings at the hotel, or in those of Marita and her students. As a result they might well have concluded he’d managed to send them to a safe haven off the island, maybe to someone on the mainland using something as simple as the regular mail. The last person they had seen him with had been the foreigner Marten. So why not assume the priest, instead of giving him the pictures to smuggle out, had told him where they were? If that were so they had simply used the old police/military tactic some called “intelligence gain-loss”-why destroy a target when you can exploit it? Meaning it would have been foolish to kill him when it was so much better to let him go and follow him. And they had, putting him on the next plane out of the country and then planting someone on the same plane to tail him. Maybe the jowly man or the man in the golf shirt, or both, or maybe someone else entirely. The problem was-and even in his exhausted state Marten had to smile-they were grasping at straws, because Father Willy had told him nothing.

Once again he glanced over his shoulder. The light over the jowly man’s seat was turned out. Not so for the man in the light blue golf shirt, who was still awake and reading. Forget it, Marten thought. Let them do what they want. You know nothing, so just forget it and go to sleep. He pulled the Air France courtesy blanket up around him and closed his eyes.

You know nothing, he repeated.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.