The Hadrian Memorandum

38

7:15 A.M.

Marten woke with a start. The bed beside him was empty. He looked around. The clothes Anne had taken off the night before to carefully fold and lay atop the chest of drawers were gone.

“Anne?”

There was no reply. He got up fast.

“Anne?”

He went down the hall, glanced at the open bathroom door, then went into the front room, then into the tiny kitchen. She wasn’t there. It was then he smelled the coffee and saw the automatic coffeemaker on the counter near the sink. A freshly brewed pot was nestled inside it. A cup sat alongside. So did a note.

Back soon. Stay here.

I have your passport .

His passport? Maybe he had threatened to leave and take his chances with the police, but in truth, for the moment, at least, he was better off staying right where he was and letting her try to find a way to get them out of Berlin. Trouble was, by now she would be vulnerable to capture, too, and would know it, so where the hell did she go? Immediately came another thought. What if someone knocked on the door? Or had a key and just came in? Anne would have been able to handle things because she set it all up. He didn’t even know whose apartment this was.

As if in answer to his concern, he suddenly heard voices in the alley outside. Immediately he went into the front room, stood by the window, and carefully looked out. A light rain was falling, and a number of people were entering the alley from the street under umbrellas. Most looked like they were college age or close to it. It made him think there might be some kind of school farther down the alley that had Saturday classes. If so, passport or not, it might be a place for him to hide, to blend in among the students, in the event the police began a house-to-house search.

7:19 A.M.

A small television sat on a bookshelf across the room. He went to it and turned it on, hoping for news of Hauptkommissar Franck’s investigation. Quickly he ran through the channels. There was nothing but Saturday-morning television, cartoons and sports and travel shows. Finally he found an English-language news channel where someone was giving the weather forecast for Europe. He looked at his watch and then at the door, wondering what time Anne had gone out. The weathercast segued to an Audi commercial. He went back to the window and looked out. There were more young people huddling under umbrellas. By now a line had begun to form. What was going on, especially this early on a Saturday morning? Then commercials ended and the news resumed, and he went back to the TV to watch it.

The story being covered was about a car that had exploded on a country highway. All he saw was police investigators and the burned-out wreckage of the car, and he assumed the location was somewhere in Germany. It wasn’t. It was Spain. The car had been a limousine; its driver was among the dead. A bomb was suspected. The other victims were thought to be three of five people missing since they’d arrived in Madrid the morning before on a flight from Paris, Spanish medical personnel just returned to Europe from Equatorial Guinea. Their names were being withheld pending formal identification of the bodies.

“Please, God, no!” Marten froze in horror. In the next instant he realized prayers and denial were useless. He knew exactly who the victims were-Marita and her students. The coincidence was far too great for it to have been anyone else. Shocked and sickened, he watched for a moment longer, then turned off the sound and walked away. His senses numb, he went into the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee, then just stood there staring at nothing. Finally he set the cup down and found his way into the bathroom.

He looked in the mirror. His complexion was ghostly white. There were paper cups by the sink. He filled one with tap water and drank it, then crumpled the cup and dropped it into the wastepaper basket. He went back into the front room to stare at the TV still playing in silence. He saw one commercial and then another. Next came a business news brief. Then a replay of the story about the limousine explosion.

The initial account had reported the victims missing since they’d arrived in Madrid yesterday. Suddenly it occurred to him that if the police had the bodies of the limo driver and three of the five missing people, where were the other two? And who were they? Marita and one of the kids? Or two of the kids, with Marita among the dead in the exploded car?

Marten felt rage begin to heave through him. Unless there had been some terrible fluke of coincidence, whatever had happened had to have involved the photographs. This was the doing of AG Striker and SimCo. There was no point in even thinking it might have been operatives from President Tiombe’s cutthroat army. They might have had the will but not the kind of connections or swift response that a world-class mercenary like Conor White would have at his fingertips.

Meaning that what Anne had said about not trusting White and wanting to recover the photos herself in order to help slow the war and save the reputation of her father’s company would have been nothing more than a excuse to get him to trust her. Meaning, too, that she most certainly would have known about White’s activity in Spain. Maybe even helped orchestrate it. All of them making the assumption that, afraid something would happen to him, he had confided in Marita and the others and told them what the pictures were and where to find them. If that were so, it meant she didn’t give a damn about anything but protecting the company.

Marten left the TV and stood near the window watching the line of people with umbrellas in the alley below. Immediately his gaze shifted to the end of it where it met Ziegelstrasse. It was the way Anne would come when she returned.

Where the hell was she?

7:33 A.M.