The Hadrian Memorandum

53

A LEARJET 55, SOMEWHERE OVER SOUTHERN FRANCE.

FUSELAGE REGISTRATION LX -C88T7.

AIRSPEED 270 MPH. ALTITUDE 39,000 FEET. PILOTS, 2.

MAXIMUM PASSENGERS, 7. ACTUAL PASSENGERS, 2.

SUNDAY, JUNE 6. 1:25 A.M.

Emil Franck could see Kovalenko hunched over a cell phone in the darkened forward cabin, every once in a while nodding and gesturing with his free hand. His first thought had been that he was in conversation with someone in Moscow-his wife or his children, or perhaps a mistress. Yet the idea that it was a domestic call was doubtful because it was almost three thirty in the morning Moscow time. A more credible scenario was that he was engaged with a superior, discussing the mission at hand and the details of what would happen if and when they recovered the materials they were after.

They’d lifted off from Berlin/Schönefeld just after nine thirty and two hours later gone into a holding pattern, a wide circle over the southern city of Toulouse that swung as far out as the Pyrenees on the French/Spanish border, waiting for the slower Cessna carrying Nicholas Marten and Anne Tidrow to catch up so they could follow it into Málaga or wherever else it might touch down. Wherever else because they knew Marten was not foolish enough to file a flight plan that would tell anyone exactly where he was going.

Franck looked to the laptop he’d been monitoring off and on since they’d left Berlin. On it, superimposed over a map of Western Europe, was a tiny green dot that represented the location of Marten’s Cessna, the information relayed by a powerful thumb-sized transmitter hidden inside the aircraft.

The setup was part of a complex operation carried out quickly and efficiently after his meeting with Kovalenko that morning at Neuer Lake when he’d tapped into his vast underground network of informers and several hours later learned of an urgent request to charter a fast plane-a jet or turboprop-to fly two passengers from a private airstrip near Potsdam to Málaga, Spain, early that evening. Quickly, he’d turned the fast-plane request into one for a slower aircraft, the piston-driven Cessna 340, then had the transmitter installed after the plane had been secured and was being serviced.

His current calculation put the Cessna some two hundred and fifty miles behind them, flying southwest at approximately 190 mph, the speed it had been averaging since he first turned the laptop on and picked up the plane’s location. It meant they were still on course for Málaga. Nothing had changed.

1:30 A.M.

Franck put the laptop aside and leaned back, hoping to get an hour or so of sleep, a prospect he knew was unlikely. Sleep in situations like these was not part of the drill. He glanced at the overnight bag on the seat across from him. In it was a fresh shirt, socks, underwear, a toothbrush, and a razor all tucked neatly alongside a Heckler & Koch MP5K compact submachine gun, which, along with the Glock 9 mm automatic Kovalenko carried in a holster clipped to his waistband, had been locked inside a storage compartment on the aircraft when they boarded.

Who the hell was Kovalenko anyway? A man with FSB credentials-the Federal Security Service Ministry of Internal Affairs-who had arrived on-scene in Berlin quicker than magic, literally within hours of his early-morning meeting with Elsa in the darkened café near Gendarmenmarkt Square, as if he’d already been in the city looking for Marten. And maybe he had. Franck might be a top cop in Berlin, a Hauptkommissar of Hauptkommissars, but he certainly didn’t know everyone or everything, and besides, he hadn’t heard from Elsa in ages. So there was no telling who or what she had been involved with since. She might well have been working with Kovalenko for years. That the Russian had known Marten from before, when he’d been a homicide investigator in Los Angeles, was a curiosity in itself. Stranger still was how they should both end up here circling over France at the orders of Moscow waiting for him to retrieve what were thought to be extremely important pictures. How had Elsa put it when reminding him Marten was wanted for the murder of Theo Haas?

“… it is reason enough for you to kill him after you recover the photographs.”

Which, other than his official role as the primary German investigator charged with apprehending Marten for Haas’s murder and his connections to the international law enforcement community that might be of help in the event Marten eluded them on the ground, was the reason he was there. Retrieving the photos for Moscow was only part of it. Once done-if done-Kovalenko and the pictures would disappear, and he would be left to clean up. Eliminate Marten and whoever was with him-in particular the Texas oil woman, Anne Tidrow, and/or anyone else who got in the way. That way there could be no trace back to Moscow, no hint that Russia was in any way involved.

1:37 A.M.

Franck glanced at the laptop’s screen. The Cessna was no longer moving. Instead its dot was frozen on the screen inland from the sea near the French city of Bordeaux. He sat up fast. As he did, he saw Kovalenko coming toward him.

“The Cessna has stopped,” he said quickly. “Did the transmitter crash? Did the plane?”

Kovalenko grinned. “Neither, Hauptkommissar. They’ve put down at Bordeaux-Mérignac Airport, most likely for fuel. An understandable delay. Nothing has changed.”

“What is our own fuel situation?” Franck said calmly, unhappy with his show of alarm and Kovalenko’s patronizing response.

“For now, more than adequate, Hauptkommissar.”

Franck squinted in the dim cabin light trying to see the Russian more clearly. Deliberately he changed the subject. “You told me you knew Nicholas Marten from before, that he had been a homicide investigator in Los Angeles.”

“I was there investigating a case involving the murder of Russian nationals. We had some dealings together. He had a different name then.”

“Why did he change it and move to another country and take up another profession? Corruption?”

“He’s not a policeman at heart, Hauptkommissar. I think he wanted to wholly extricate himself from that world. He preferred to see the beauty in life instead of bearing such close witness to the horror of what the human race does to itself every day.”

“Yet now he’s going to become part of that same horror.”

“It is his fate, Hauptkommissar.” Kovalanko pointed a finger skyward. “Written long ago in the stars. At least he will have had a few years of peace and, hopefully, joy.”

“You believe in fate, Kovalenko?”

Kovalenko smiled. “If I didn’t, I, too, would be out planting flowers. Who the hell wouldn’t? If it weren’t for fate, everyone in the world would be out planting flowers. It would seem a very reasonable thing to do. Few, like Marten, recognize what’s happening and do something about it. The rest of us merely accept it and simply go about the business at hand.” The humor left Kovalenko’s eyes. “Until, as Marten is about to discover, our true fate catches up.”

“And then?”

“And then-that’s that.”

1:45 A.M.