The Hadrian Memorandum

23

BERLIN, HOTEL MOZART SUPERIOR,

94 FRIEDRICHSTRASSE, ROOM 413. 1:35 P.M.

Freshly showered and shaved, Nicholas Marten stood in the window looking down at the street below. He was barefoot and bare chested, wearing jeans and nothing else. The dark blue cell phone was in his hand. He hesitated for the briefest moment and then, for the third time since he’d checked into the hotel ninety minutes earlier, he called the number President Harris had given him for Theo Haas.

Again it rang through. After the fourth ring he again got the husky-male-voice recording. Again he clicked off.

“Damn it,” he swore angrily. Where the hell was Haas? What was he doing? When would he be home?

Suddenly it occurred to him that the Nobel laureate might be traveling and not in the city at all. Then what? Try to have the president or Joe Ryder track him down? That could take days, even longer. In the meantime, where were the photographs, assuming Father Willy had indeed sent them to his brother? Where? Sitting in a branch of the Berlin post office? In Haas’s home, just lying around, opened or unopened? Or did Haas have them with him? Was he at this moment preparing to reveal them as only an irascible world-famous writer could, and most likely would?

As quickly Marten thought of something else: that maybe Conor White’s people or operatives from the Equatorial Guinea military hadn’t been as slow to put Father Willy and Theo Haas together as brothers as he’d first thought. Maybe one group or the other had already reached him. If so he could be in grave danger or even dead. In what could only be described as an urgent, near-involuntary reaction, he lifted the phone and punched in Theo Haas’s number again.

Once more the call rang through. Once more he listened as it rang four times. He was expecting the recording to click on once again when instead a male voice answered.

“Yes?” came a grumble in German.

“My name is Marten, Nicholas Marten. I’m trying to reach-”

“You’ve got him,” Theo Haas said sharply in English.

“I would like to meet with you. Could I come to your apartment?”

“Across from the Tiergarten. Platz der Republik. The grassy park in front of the Reichstag. Five o’clock. I’m an old man in a green cap and carrying a walking stick. I’ll be sitting on a park bench near Scheidemannstrasse. If you’re not there by ten minutes past I will leave.”

There was an abrupt click as he hung up and the phone went dead.

“Well,” Marten said out loud and with relief. At least no one else had gotten to him. Not yet anyway.

PLATZ DER REPUBLIK. 4:45 P.M.

Marten came into the park early, determined not to miss Haas through some happenstance beyond his control. In front of him the Platz der Republik sprawled for nearly a quarter of a mile and was filled with seemingly hundreds of people taking advantage of a warm early-summer afternoon. To his right was the massive edifice that was the historic Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building. He vaguely remembered that it had been burned down, purportedly by the Nazis in 1933, and was then rebuilt and reoccupied by the parliament in 1999 as a symbol of German unity following the Cold War. The words carved above its main facade in 1916 had been restored as well-DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE (“To the German people”). Maybe the historical significance of it was something Haas was trying to impress on Marten and the reason he chose to meet in its shadow. Or maybe it had no meaning at all. What was curious was why he had chosen to meet outdoors in public rather than in the privacy of his home, especially when he knew that what Marten had to tell him concerned his brother. He was known for being a “character,” and so maybe it was a whim, or maybe he simply didn’t want strangers in his home.

4:50 P.M.

Marten reached the far end of the park and turned back, staying close to the pathway that ran near Scheidemannstrasse. He looked carefully at every bench he passed, most of which were occupied, and then beyond them to the crowd in the park and what suddenly seemed like the impossible chore of sorting through them to find an old man in a green cap with a walking stick.

4:55 P.M.

He arrived at the Reichstag building and turned back, retracing his steps. Still no green cap, no old man with a walking stick.

4:57 P.M.

He stopped at the far end of the park and once again turned back. What if Haas didn’t show up? All he could do was call him and hope to hell he answered and that someone else hadn’t gotten to him in the meantime. It made him think of the ten-minute timetable Haas had given him. Why had he done that? Once again he wondered why the old man had insisted they meet in a place as public and crowded as this. Maybe it was simply that he felt safer meeting a stranger that way, especially in view of what had happened to his brother in Bioko. Still, a quiet restaurant or café would have accomplished the same thing.

Again Marten looked around. Still nothing. Then from the corner of his eye he saw a taxi suddenly turn out of traffic on Scheidemannstrasse and pull to the curb. A moment passed, and the rear passenger door opened and an old man in a green cap carrying a walking stick got out. He closed the door with a ferocious bang and started into the park and toward a nearby bench. It was exactly five o’clock. Theo Haas had arrived.