The Hadrian Memorandum

30

MONTE DE EL PARDO, SPAIN. SAME TIME.

The soil under the ancient olive trees was soft from a recent, unseasonable rain and made the grave easy to dig. A few minutes with a shovel and the job was done. Conor White lifted the corpse himself. It was small and delicate in his large hands. For a moment he studied it-the two tiny feet at the end of spindly legs, the unruly fluff of feathers at its neck, the proud twist of its beak, its gray wings, looking as if they could still take flight, neatly tucked back against its body. What kind of bird it was, or had been, he didn’t know.

“I hope you had a good life, my little friend,” he said reverently. Then, turning the creature over so that it would be on its side in the earth, he placed it gently in the grave and covered it over with soil. “Farewell and safe journey,” he said with the same reverence. Then, shovel in hand, he walked off through the olive grove toward the farm house.

To his right he could see the A6, the main highway to Madrid, and the evening traffic on it leading to and from the city. A thick forest of conifers surrounded the house from behind and to the side, obscuring it from the roadway, while fallow, unplowed fields stretched out in front and to the right in an expansive fifty-acre semicircle. The farm was for sale and had been since its elderly owner had passed away more than two years earlier. So far there had been no offers to buy and no funds allotted for upkeep. As a result the olive trees had gone unattended. So had the mile-long dirt and gravel drive leading into the property, an ingress/egress that had been washed away in any number of places by winter rains and was mottled with rocks and overgrown with weeds. Yet, troublesome as it was, it had not deterred vandals from breaking into the house and taking anything and everything of value, leaving only the stove and toilets and a few pieces of unwanted furniture. The only other structure on the property was a dilapidated barn in a state of such disrepair that the only reasonable thing to do would be to knock it down and rebuild it from the ground up. Altogether, the location made an ideal setting for the interrogation that had been going on since he and his colleagues had arrived from Madrid via private jet from Malabo and then been driven here in a hired car some six hours earlier.

Six hours of questioning was a long time and had left the people being talked to both terrified and exhausted. Which was, perhaps, the reason he still had no answer to his queries, and why he’d walked out, to give them a rest and let them consider the gravity of their situation and to get some fresh air himself. It was then he’d found the dead bird in the shadows just outside the door.

8:18 P.M.

He was closer to the house now. Inside he could see the dull glow of a portable lantern one of his men had brought correctly assuming the property no longer had working electricity. He looked up at a sky filled with red streaks and wisps of clouds as the sun set in the west. If he were the smoking man he once had been, this would have been the time he would have brought out a cigarette. But not now. Smoking was in his past, so he had nothing to use as a crutch except his own thoughts and emotions, which at the moment were deeply troubling.

This was hardly the situation he’d imagined when he took the job creating SimCo for Striker and Hadrian more than a year before, resigning from his own company to take a position that would be a major step forward in the highly lucrative world of private security companies. Not just a step but a leap, one that had begun with a ten-year contract with Striker Oil to protect their workers in Equatorial Guinea and that was renewable every five years afterward for the next fifty years. It was a situation that had instantly put him on a level with major private security firms worldwide, and that included Hadrian. But in that heady rush of expectation, neither he nor anyone else had foreseen the bizarre, even obscene, minefield that he and SimCo were in now. How graphically simple and stupid the whole thing with the photographs was. Almost as graphically simple and stupid as the Watergate break-in that brought down the Nixon administration almost a half century earlier. Yet it was as real for him as it must have been for Richard Nixon. But he wasn’t a paranoid president locked up in the golden hell of the White House; he was a highly educated, seasoned warrior whose charge it was to bring the nightmare of the photographs to a fast and silent resolution before everything disintegrated because of it.

In the last hours he had heard from Loyal Truex-twice-and from Josiah Wirth, who, at this moment, was on his way to Europe from Texas on an AG Striker corporate jet. Coming, he was sure, for one reason alone, to look over White’s shoulder and direct his every move. Both men had demanded to know where he was and how he was progressing and when, exactly, the problem would be resolved, as if he were a plumber called in to repair a broken toilet while a wedding party waited outside to use it. Both wanted it done yesterday, yet neither understood the complexity of finding the ghost he was chasing. Truex was trouble enough, but at least he and White spoke the same language. Wirth was entirely different, a man too driven, too egotistical, too rich, and too single-minded to view the world from any other perspective but his own. People like that easily became reckless, even foolhardy, especially when they began to lose confidence and feel things were slipping out of their control. As a result they left themselves wide open to their own brand of panic, one that easily led to judgments that could be hugely damaging and sometimes dangerous or even deadly, and not just to themselves but to people around them. And that was the last thing Conor White wanted.

Now or ever.

8:20 P.M.

In the growing twilight he could see the black Mercedes limousine that had brought the captives to the farm house parked under an overhang of trees. Its liveried driver and a similarly dressed local gunman, who had met White and the two SimCo mercenaries he’d brought with him from Bioko to Madrid and driven them there, were standing nearby smoking and chatting. Fourth and fifth hands if a problem arose inside the house. As if it would with the men stationed there: Irish Jack Hanahan, a former member of Sciathán Fianóglach an Airm, the Ranger Wing of the Irish army, with massive thirty-two-inch thighs, lightning reflexes, and fists like hams; and the wiry, almost too handsome French-Canadian with piercing green eyes, Patrice Sennac, at one time the CIA’s top Central American counterinsurgent, a veteran jungle fighter, who had a long scar at the side of his mouth to prove it. Depending on the situation, either man could be absurdly polite or grimly lethal to anyone, friend, enemy, or whoever fell in between. Like those waiting for him to come back inside and begin the questioning once more-the young Spanish doctor and her four medical students. Five people who might very well know what the Equatorial Guinean army interrogators had failed to find out-the location of the photographs. Might very well know because Nicholas Marten would have had every opportunity to tell them: on the road to Malabo from where they had first met on the beach in Bioko South, or in Malabo itself at the hotel over drinks, or, last and most likely of all, on the long overnight plane ride to Paris.

White would have much preferred to have gone after Marten himself and left the doctor and her students to others, but that assignment had gone to Anne, who Truex, Sy Wirth, and Anne herself felt could get closer to Marten than he could. So instead he was given the secondary target, the five now inside the house.

The thing driving it all was urgency. Find the photographs and destroy them before they fell into what could only be referred to as “public hands.” For White the pressure was all the greater because he was a prominent figure in any number of the pictures, and if they were made public everything he’d worked for all his life would be gone.

Everything.

Colin Conor White had been born in London, the only child of a young barmaid and George Winston White, a London railway worker who died of a heart attack several weeks after his son was born. Soon afterward Conor’s mother, in grief and despair, left the city and went to live near her sister in a small two-room flat in Birmingham in west central England, where he grew up street-tough and all but impoverished. When he was eleven, and quite by accident, he discovered a farewell note tucked away in a cabinet above the kitchen sink in a long-forgotten box of memorabilia. In it, he learned that his father had not been a railway worker at all but instead a very married man. His name, what he did, and even the truth of the note were things his mother refused to discuss during an anger-filled confrontation, telling him in no uncertain terms that the idea was preposterous and that she had no idea who had written the note or where it had come from and warning him not to bring up the subject again.

Her heated denial only sent him digging for more. A careful examination of the London Transport Executive records, the railway authority at the time, determined that no worker named George Winston White had been employed there within two years of his birth. Eighteen months later and after considerable snooping, he discovered the man to be Sir Edward Raines, a handsome, silver-haired, longtime member of Parliament and former decorated officer in the British army who had lost an arm in the Battle of Crater during the Aden Emergency on the Arabian Peninsula in 1963. Raines, it seemed, was not only his father but was paying his mother a yearly stipend to keep silent about it.

Challenged again, his mother, quite irritably, kept to her original story, refusing to acknowledge any such person or arrangement. Moreover, the confrontation caused her to sink deeper into her own increasingly apparent mood of base self-pity. How dare he think a “somebody” such as Sir Edward Raines would even consider paying attention to a woman who barely had a grade school education and no breeding whatsoever? He could still hear the shrill, anger-filled ring of her voice:

“You should get it permanently through your head, Mr. Conor White, that neither me nor you will ever have that kind of social status and that you had best prepare yourself for a working man’s life and not be making up silly fantasies about who you might prefer your father to have been. They will get you no further than the two-room flat we live in, if you’re that lucky.”

Maybe so. But fantasies or not, he had other ideas and had gone directly to Sir Edward himself demanding a confirmation of his paternity. Or rather he’d tried to. Each time he’d been rebuffed by an intermediary, Sir Edward refusing to even see him.

Powerfully built, sullen and angry, and little more than a street tough, Conor White’s salvation had come through a determination to be as celebrated and socially acceptable as his father. Through a love of reading and the physical escape of rugby, which he’d played with a ferocity aimed directly at Sir Edward, he won a full scholarship to Eton College, where he excelled in English and was captain of the rugby team. Success there provided him entry and a scholarship to Oxford; upon graduation, he joined the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst determined to become an officer in the British Army. Not long afterward he managed an invitation to join the elite special forces unit known as the SAS. It was an invitation he jumped at because it promised the opportunity to become a frontline soldier in highly dangerous combat situations and, not so coincidentally, offered a playing field where, with luck and extreme courage he could become a military hero. The same as his father had been.

And for most of the last quarter century he had followed that path, building a stellar reputation as a top line operator in extremely high-risk situations across the globe. His SAS career alone, with an extraordinary run of decorations, was proof enough. Distinguished Service Order, or DSO, presented for meritorious service, valor in the face of the enemy, Iraq, 1991. DSO, Iraq, 1998. DSO, Bosnia, 2000. DSO, Sierra Leone, 2002. Victoria Cross, the United Kingdom’s highest award for bravery, presented by the queen for duty in Af ghan i stan, 2003. DSO, Iraq, 2004. Then he’d moved into the private sector, where, even now, he remained a poster-boy hero with plans to one day run for parliamentary office. So to have it all come to a thundering end-his face smeared across the Internet and worldwide television, to be seen staring out from the covers of newspapers and tabloids everywhere as a lackey for an oil company intent on overthrowing the government of a third world country for its own gain, no matter how tyrannical the regime-was a humiliation he could and would not suffer.

8:22 P.M.

He reached the house and set the shovel alongside the front door, giving it a second glance as he did, wondering if more graves would have to be dug that night. A deep breath of resolve and he took a black balaclava from his jacket pocket, pulled it on, then opened the door and went inside.

The five “guests” were as he had left them, sitting in the glow of lantern light on a rustic wooden bench in the room that was once part kitchen, part dining area. By now he knew them by name-Marita, Gilberto, Rosa with the big glasses, Luis, the red-haired Ernesto. All were as pale, terrified, and silent as they’d been when he’d gone out. Except for Marita, they all stared at the floor. Her eyes had been on him the moment he stepped through the door. They were filled with defiance and hatred.

Irish Jack stood at the end of the bench, his arms crossed over his chest. Patrice was in front of them, feet apart, his arms behind him. Both wore the jeans and pullover sweaters he did. Both had automatic pistols in Kevlar holsters strapped to their thighs. Both wore the same kind of black balaclava he did.

“Who is ready to talk about the photographs?” White said in his crisp British accent.

“For the hundredth time, we cannot tell you what we don’t know,” Marita spat angrily.

Conor White looked at the frightened, sullen faces and scratched his head. “Maybe we’re making this too hard,” he said evenly and with that reached up and pulled off his balaclava. This was the first time he had been without it, and he could see their surprise as they recognized him from the bar in the Hotel Malabo. “Gentlemen”-he looked to Patrice and Irish Jack and nodded-“a little politeness, please. No reason to alarm these people any further.”

Immediately both men removed their balaclavas and tucked them into their belts.

White moved a little closer. “You now see we are forthright and mean you no harm. All this has come about because of the civil war in Bioko. The photographs are very important to the oil company that employs us. Our job is to recover them, and right away. Once we do you will be free to go.”

Suddenly Rosa looked up and boldly repeated Marita’s words. “We cannot tell you what we don’t know.”

“No, I don’t suppose you can.” White hesitated for a moment, then looked to Patrice. “We need to speed this up.”

“Yes, sir.”

Patrice took a half step to stand right in front of them. He looked from one to the other to the other, turned toward Marita, then abruptly reversed his move and stepped in front of Rosa. A gasp went up from the others as a second later Irish Jack moved behind her to take hold of her shoulders in an iron grip White himself couldn’t escape from.

“Marita!” Rosa cried out.

In the next instant Patrice slid the automatic from his holster and slid it up under her nose.

White’s eyes went to Marita. “Where are the photographs?”

Marita’s eyes went to Rosa in horror, then came back to him. “For God’s sake, we don’t know! We’ve told you that over and over!”

“That’s too bad.”

Conor White nodded at Patrice. Irish Jack stepped to the side and Patrice pulled the trigger. There was an ear-shattering roar and Rosa’s head exploded, her oversized glasses disappearing behind her, her body collapsing like a rag doll across the bench.

White gave them no chance to recover, just walked over to Marita. “The photographs. Where are they?”

Numbed, horrified, Marita simply shook her head.

“You’re still telling me you don’t know?”

“Yes. No. God! We don’t know! Please! My God, please! Please!”

White looked at Gilberto and then Luis and then Ernesto. In the next instant he reached into a holster at the back of his belt and pulled a short-barrel SIG SAUER 9 mm semiautomatic from it. In one fluid motion, he turned and shot Marita point-blank in the head.

8:27 P.M.