The Hadrian Memorandum

48

AIR FORCE ONE. STILL SATURDAY, JUNE 5. 8:15 A.M.

President John Henry Harris sat in shirtsleeves listening to Lincoln Bright, his chief of staff, run through the day’s abbreviated appointment schedule: three White House meetings, one of them with the secretary of state just back from meetings in India and China, then helicopter to Camp David and talks with his chief financial advisers about the on going crises in the economy.

The briefing over, Bright left, and the president leaned back to stare out the window, watching as they passed over Lake Ontario and entered American airspace. He’d had an early breakfast with Canadian prime minister Campbell and Mexican president Mayora at the Harrington Lake compound, then immediately departed. In four hours he would be at Camp David to spend the rest of the weekend enmeshed in critical budget details and preparing for a Monday morning meeting with the governors of a dozen states who would each come looking-begging was a better word-for additional funding beyond what they already had been given.

Still, and for all the importance of the secretary of state’s report and the crises with the economy, other things weighed heavily. A phone call from Joe Ryder in Iraq had come before breakfast with Ryder telling him his fact-finding team had met with an unexpected twist when Hadrian’s Loyal Truex had arrived unannounced, boldly and generously offering to throw the Striker/Hadrian doors and books wide open and inviting Ryder and his colleagues to look over anything they liked. Acting as if, in Ryder’s words, “he had come at the last minute to hide everything in plain sight.” Which apparently he had, because so far they’d found nothing more than they already knew.

Then there had been his morning security briefing, where he’d asked about the situation in Equatorial Guinea and was told that President Tiombe’s army was heavily engaged with the insurgent forces while at the same time committing terrible atrocities against the civilian population under the guise of hunting down rebel leaders. The army’s brutal tactics aside, analysts expected Tiombe’s government to fall within days, and by then Tiombe and his family and staff would have fled the country.

“To go where?” he’d asked.

Reports had been inconclusive, but Tiombe was known to have residences in several parts of the world, Beverly Hills among them. The president’s reaction to that had been simple and drawn a laugh. “I hope to hell he doesn’t do that.” But there was nothing funny about any of it. Immediately he called in Lincoln Bright and instructed his chief of staff to get in touch with Kim Ho, secretary-general of the United Nations, and ask what he could do to press the UN to intervene in the situation in Equatorial Guinea, and then to call Pierre Kellen, president of the International Red Cross, and ask what the United States could do to help on a humanitarian level.

The thing was, no matter how concerned he was about the plight of the Equatorial Guinean people, he knew he dared not show too much personal interest in the war itself because to do so would risk pricking up ears in the national and international intelligence and diplomatic communities. They would be more than curious to know why he had singled out that one area when so many other parts of the African continent were suffering under similar circumstances, and they might well send people to look into it. That was something he couldn’t afford. The last thing he needed was to have covert interests poking deeper into what was going on and risk having one of them come up with the photographs before they were safely in his or Joe Ryder’s hands.

Having such far-reaching power and for so many reasons not being able to draw on it was one of the hells of his office and made the trouble with Marten all the worse. Six weeks earlier he would have sent Hap Daniels, his Secret Service special agent in charge, a man he trusted completely and who knew Marten well, to Berlin to sift through the goings-on. Daniels was canny enough and experienced enough to find a way to let Marten know he was there and where to find him without the police or anyone else learning about it, no matter how deeply Marten was hidden. Once contact was made, Daniels could get him the hell out of there, and then both could go after the photos. But in the those six weeks Daniels had undergone heart bypass surgery, and he was at home on medical leave and in no shape to be working that kind of assignment. David Watson, his replacement, was a likable, able man but one Harris didn’t know well enough to send on a mission that would be delicate at best. Moreover, Marten didn’t know him at all and so would have no reason to come out of hiding even if Watson made himself known. That left no one at all the president could turn to for help.

“Dammit,” Harris swore out loud then glanced at his suit coat thrown over the seat across from him. He’d put it there himself, making sure it was in reach. Tucked into an inside pocket was the thing he’d carried everywhere since he’d left Washington: the cheap slate gray cell phone that was his direct and only connection to Nicholas Marten. That was, if Marten called, because he had no way to contact the throwaway cell phone or phones Marten would be using.

He’d hoped all the while Marten would get in touch with him, but he hadn’t. Probably because of the police, or because he was hurt, or even-he hated to think-dead. Or maybe he was just in a situation where phoning anyone was not possible. Or maybe because he had nothing to tell him. What was the thing he’d said when they’d last spoken? “I’ll call you when I have something to report.”

Whatever the reason, the gray phone remained silent, and the stillness was gut-wrenching. It was more than the urgency to find the photographs, or the gnawing reminder that it was he who had sent Marten to Equatorial Guinea in the first place. The thing was he cared about Nicholas Marten enormously. What they had been through together, barely a year earlier in Spain and the close friendship that had come out of it, made them almost like brothers. More than anything he wanted him out of harm’s way. It made him think what it must be like for a parent of a missing child, imagining the worst and waiting and hoping and praying that the phone at your elbow would suddenly come to life and that your daughter or son would be on the other end with a “Hi, Mom” or “Hi, Dad,” all perky and safe and sounding as if nothing at all had happened.

“Damn it to hell,” John Henry Harris spat out loud to the smooth, indifferent walls of Air Force One’s presidential cabin. Then he stoically reached for a breakdown of the federal budget and went to work.