The Hadrian Memorandum

52

BERLIN. THE APARTMENT AT 11 GIESEBRECHTSTRASSE.

10:47 P.M.

“We’re leaving now, Mr. Wirth. I’ll confirm when we’re airborne.” Conor White clicked off his BlackBerry, then clicked back on and punched in a number.

Across from him, Patrice and Irish Jack were already on their feet, putting away the cards they’d been playing, packing up, getting ready to leave.

“This is White.” He spoke into his BlackBerry. “File a flight plan for Málaga, Spain, and get clearance for takeoff. Wheels up in forty minutes.”

“Málaga?” Sennac said, his eyebrows raised, his Quebecois accent pronounced as always.

“Oui,” Conor White nodded as he clicked off.

Irish Jack grinned. “Good pubs, good babes, good beaches. Merrily we roll along.”

“Jack,” White cautioned, “we’re not on holiday.”

“Aw, don’t spoil the fucker for us, Colonel.” He winked at Patrice. “What we got to do won’t take but a short few minutes. Will it now?”

“It shouldn’t,” White said deliberately and with none of the Irishman’s humor. “And won’t.”

“You’re right, Col o nel, it won’t.” Patrice glanced at Irish Jack, a warning to back off the levity. They’d known White’s obsession with recovering the photographs from the beginning. If they needed a reminder they needed only to remember what happened in the farm house outside Madrid. The grilling of the young Spanish doctor and her medical students had gone on to the point where White had had enough. Removing his balaclava and telling them to remove theirs had been a signal that they would give them one last chance to cooperate and that would be it. Killing one captive in front of others was an age-old means of attempting to terrify those left into divulging information when they had so far refused to provide. It hadn’t worked, and White ended it on the spot. Afterward he’d sincerely apologized to the three horrified students who remained, saying he had taken up too much of their time, and told the limo driver to take them back to their homes and parents in Madrid, knowing full well Patrice had rigged the limousine to explode twelve minutes after the engine was started. Seconds after they’d gone, White went into the barn where the Spanish gunman who’d brought him there waited with the car, and shot him where he stood.

For a professional soldier like Conor White to be fixated on accomplishing a mission was one thing. The depth of his passion was something else entirely. He’d told his men soon after the interrogation of the Spanish doctor and her students had begun that they had no idea where the pictures were and or even what their captors were talking about. But he’d gone on with the questioning anyway. Then personally managed their deaths.

Over the years both he and Irish Jack had lived and fought alongside extremely cruel and often fanatical men, but nothing matched what Conor White had done in Spain. He was clearly mad, and in a way neither of them had ever seen before, not even on the battlefield. Still, they would follow him into hell simply because they knew something larger was going on, the substance of which they, as foot soldiers, wouldn’t know about or be told. Whatever it was, it was clearly important enough for White to be giving everything within him to successfully execute. You took orders from men like that, fought alongside them and didn’t ask questions. It was what he and Irish Jack had signed on for and the kind of professionals they were.

RITZ-CARLTON BERLIN, SUITE 1422. 10:55 P.M.

“Málaga.” Dimitri Korostin’s call had come ten minutes earlier. His message had been to the point and exceedingly brief. “They will probably arrive sometime after four in the morning, maybe later. The plane is a piston-engine Cessna 340. Its fuselage registration is D-VKRD. If there’s a change I will inform you. Sweet dreams. Get your own blow job and don’t worry so much.” With that he’d hung up.

Sy Wirth was still at the writing table, his chin resting in his hands, his yellow legal pads piled up beside him, the remains of his club sandwich on a side table.

“Cessna 340. Fuselage registration D-VKRD. Flight plan filed Berlin to Málaga, Spain. ETA sometime after four in the morning.”

It was the information he’d passed on to Conor White, secure in the fact that if the Cessna changed course Dimitri would report to him within minutes, and in turn he would alert White. But until then White was to keep a safe distance behind and follow Marten’s Cessna directly to Málaga. Something he would do without question because that was the directive Wirth had purposely given him.

Let him go first. Give him time to get there, Wirth thought. It has to look as if he’s doing this on his own, that he’s out to protect himself, SimCo, and Hadrian at all costs and that Striker has no knowledge of it whatsoever.

Wirth glanced at the two BlackBerrys on the table beside him. One was his everyday phone. The other had a little piece of blue tape on the bottom to distinguish it. Calls made from it were rerouted through the Hadrian Worldwide Protective Services Company’s headquarters in Manassas, Virginia, making it appear as if they had originated from there.

It was the device he’d been using to contact Conor White since the meeting with Hadrian’s Loyal Truex and Striker’s chief counsel, Arnold Moss, in Houston when both companies had agreed to distance themselves from SimCo. The same meeting where, after Truex left, he’d told Moss it was time to distance themselves from Hadrian as well. Hence any calls he made to Conor White would be on telephone company records as having come directly from Hadrian. It was a concept he had devised himself, the system and means of execution very quietly put into play by a friend in the Houston office of the FBI.

11:07 P.M.

Wirth looked at his watch, then picked up his main BlackBerry and alerted the pilots of his Striker-owned Gulfstream on standby at Tegel Airport to be ready for takeoff in two hours. Done, he set the alarm on his watch for midnight, then got up, crossed to the bed, lay back, and closed his eyes, determined to get even a few minutes of sleep. It didn’t come quickly. His mind and senses overrode it.

In addition to normal air traffic, by one thirty there would be four more planes in the air, all headed for Málaga: Marten’s piston-engine Cessna and three chartered jets-Conor White’s Falcon 50, another with Dimitri’s people on board, and his own Striker Gulf-stream. A lot of money, a lot of men, a lot of aircraft to recover a single batch of photographs.