The Hadrian Memorandum

43

9:48 A.M.

Marten felt the van lean to the right, then accelerate and even out. After that there was the quiet hum of the tires over the roadway and little else. If Anne and Erlanger were talking, he couldn’t hear them.

Who Erlanger was or might be, Marten had no idea. His best guess was that he was one of Anne’s German operatives from her CIA days in Berlin. It made him wonder when that had been. She was forty-two now. So how old would she have been when she left the agency to care for her father? Twenty-nine, thirty, maybe a little more. So for ten or more years at least she had stayed in contact with these people, not just Erlanger, but the woman whose apartment they had stayed in, and the person or persons who had tailed him from the airport and then told her where he was. Of them all it was the woman who’d provided the apartment and now Erlanger who were most on the spot. They were aiding fugitives and if caught risked serious prison time. On the other hand, if they had been operatives, or maybe still were, this was the kind of thing they did all the time, where connections were everything and loyalty and silence ran deep.

By Marten’s estimate they had been traveling for nearly thirty minutes at good speed and without being stopped again, which meant they were probably on a major highway and headed for some town or city that lay outside of Berlin proper and its heavy blanket of police. Suddenly he began to wonder just where Erlanger was taking them and what would happen when they got there. Getting out of Berlin was one thing, getting out of Germany quite another, because there would be intense law enforcement presence at the airports, metro, train, and bus stations. Seemingly the only way out would be for Erlanger to drive them across the border himself. Maybe that was his intention. Maybe Anne had worked that part out, too, but it was unlikely; since she still had no idea where the photographs were, it would be impossible for her to give Erlanger or anyone else a destination. Telling her where they were-“if” they were-was something he’d so far managed to avoid but was a subject he knew would come up as soon they reached their destination.

He’d known from the moment they’d left the Adlon that at some point he’d have to tell her something, especially when he realized that she might actually be able to get him out from under the noses of the police, but just how much to reveal was tricky. Tell her too much and she wouldn’t need him, might even turn him over to Franck just to get him out of the way. Tell her nothing and he would get no farther than wherever Erlanger was taking them now.

The answer, he decided, was to wait and see where that was and what the circumstances were when they got there.

9:57 A.M.