The Hadrian Memorandum

55

1:53 A.M.

“We have clearance for takeoff?” Marten was looking at Brigitte as he climbed into the Cessna. She was sitting at the controls studying navigational charts under a high-intensity cockpit light. Behind her, he could see Anne watching from the darkened cabin.

“Yes, sir,” Brigitte said.

“Then let’s go.”

“Yes, sir,” she said again.

Marten slid past her on his way to his seat. As he did he saw the two women exchange glances.

“What was that for?” he said as he buckled in.

Anne raised an eyebrow. “How long does it take to pee?”

Marten grinned. “Sometimes it works right away and sometimes it takes a little coaxing.”

Brigitte turned out the cockpit light and the lights of the instrument panel in front of her came to life. There was a sharp whine as she touched the ignition. A second later the port engine caught, then the starboard, and with a roar of propellers the Cessna moved off.

Marten waited a moment, then looked to Anne and lowered his voice, the lightheartedness of seconds earlier gone. “I specifically requested a faster plane. We didn’t get it. Whose idea was that, yours or Erlanger’s? Or was it someone else?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I asked you before about what Erlanger said in Potsdam before we took off. You didn’t want to discuss it. With all your connections in Berlin, he, or whoever arranged for the plane, could have found the kind of aircraft I wanted. It didn’t happen. And for one reason. They gave us a two-hundred-mile-an-hour Cessna so they could use a five-hundred-mile-an-hour jet to track us. That way we couldn’t outfly them in the event we changed course. They know the kind of aircraft we’re in, its registration number, who our pilot is, our flight plan, everything. Not to mention this.”

Marten took a small black box from his jacket and held it out to her. “Looks like a Hide-A-Key, doesn’t it?” He slid it open and took out a thin, flat object about four inches long and an inch wide. A tiny red light blinked off and on in the center of it. “I found it under the copilot’s seat. Just clipped in like whoever did it didn’t have much time.”

She looked at it and then at Marten. “It’s a bug, a transmitter.”

“I don’t suppose you knew about it.”

“No.”

“I didn’t think you would,” he smiled cynically. “I’m sure whoever put it there did it just to make sure we didn’t get lost.” Abruptly his demeanor hardened. “What does the CIA have to do with this? And don’t say you don’t know. I could see it in the way you looked at Erlanger when he spoke to you. He was warning you about something, and it upset you a great deal. What was it?”

Brigitte swung the Cessna sharply right and onto the runway, then accelerated for takeoff, the roar of its twin engines earsplitting as the plane gained speed. Ten seconds, then twenty and thirty, then they were up, the lights of Bordeaux-Mérignac Airport disappearing beneath them.

Anne glanced at Brigitte, then looked to Marten and lowered her voice. “I’m not sure how much Erlanger already knew or what he had just learned. But I put it together with something that happened that last night at the hotel in Malabo. As I was leaving for the airport I saw Conor White meet with a man in combat fatigues. He was armed and unshaven and looked as if he’d been in the rain forest for several days if not more. They talked briefly and then left together. I assumed he was working for SimCo, but I’d never seen him there before.”

“What do you mean ‘there’? Malabo?”

“No. Not anywhere SimCo people were. Malabo or anywhere else on Bioko. Not on the mainland, Rio Muni, either.”

“But you had seen him somewhere before.”

“Not just seen him, I knew him, when I was active CIA in El Salvador. His name is Patrice Sennac. He’s French-Canadian and was then a top contract agent. He’s a first-rate jungle fighter whose specialty is insurgency and counterinsurgency. He’d fight for one side in the morning and the other in the afternoon, working one against the other. Neither side knew.”

“Jungle fighter?”

“Yes, why?”

“He’s tall and very thin. Wiry.”

“How did you know?”

“He was in several of the photographs.”

Anne said nothing, just looked at him in that fearful way she had when Erlanger spoke to her at the airstrip.

“You think White brought him in specifically to help arm Abba’s rebels but kept him out of sight until you left because he knew you would recognize him and ask what he was doing there?”

Still she said nothing.

“Is that what you think happened?”

“Yes,” she said finally.

“Meaning you’re not sure if he’s a SimCo employee or if he still works for the CIA. And if he does, then Conor White might work for them, too, another contract agent with a top security clearance, comfortably inside in the Striker/Hadrian household with neither of them knowing, like the two sides in El Salvador.”

Anne nodded.

“I don’t understand. Striker/Hadrian is a State Department issue, not national security or intelligence. If it was, the CIA or FBI would be doing the investigating, not the Ryder Commission. You were in the Agency. Why would it be involved at all, let alone to that degree?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. But if it’s true and somehow Erlanger found out, maybe through his own poking around, which is his nature… You understand? He did what he was told and brought in the Cessna instead of a jet-then tried to warn me away. I doubt if he knew about the bug.”

Marten stared at her. “I think you do know.”

There was the briefest moment when Anne did nothing at all. Finally she glanced at Brigitte, then looked back to Marten, her eyes cutting into him, her voice low and fiery. “I said I don’t know and I meant it. I’ve told you everything. There is nothing else. Understand?”

Marten didn’t react. She could get as mad as she wanted, he wasn’t about to let go. “Let’s assume that what you’ve said is true and get back to the photographs. You and your friends at Striker want them. Maybe for different reasons, but you both still want them. No doubt the Hadrian people do, too. So do the Equatorial Guinean army, Conor White and his pals at SimCo, and now the CIA. It’s starting to play like some kind of comedy where all kinds of crazy people are chasing after the same thing. Or a darker, more murderous one, if they’re just as insane but don’t laugh much. It should be entertaining, but it’s not. A civil war is going on. People are being butchered by the hour. What I saw myself was bad enough. The CIA video pushed it over the top.”

Again Anne glanced toward the cockpit-if Brigitte had heard over the engine noise, she didn’t acknowledge it. Anne looked back to Marten and softened. “Those things we saw on the video are as raw in my mind as they are in yours and won’t go away. Your ragging on me as if I’m hiding something does nothing but get me mad and doesn’t help anybody. I’ve told you the truth all along, and if you don’t believe it we can stop right here. When we land I get out and walk away. Then the whole thing is in your lap. You deal with it.”

Marten said nothing, just searched her eyes. He didn’t know what to believe except that as much as he might have delighted in the idea of her walking away before, he didn’t now. Whatever the Erlanger thing was, it was too important to abandon.

“What if I told you I did believe you. And probably have all along.”

“Then I’d say I’m not so sure I believe you.”

“Then that puts us in the same fix. Neither of us knows what to believe.” Marten looked at her a second longer, then at the bug in his hand and the blinking red light in the center of it. “You know how to disable this thing?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He said with a smile. “I’ll tell you when.”

2:37 A.M.