The Hadrian Memorandum

59

CESSNA, D-VKRD, ON APPROACH TO

MÁLAGA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. 5:02 A.M.

Marten looked at his watch, counting down the time. Anne was awake now, watching him in the dimly lit cabin.

“Where do we go from here?” she asked quietly.

“That will depend on Brigitte.” Abruptly he undid his seat belt and climbed into the copilot’s seat next to her, just as he had an hour before. Below he could just make out the cloud deck in the beam of the plane’s landing lights. It was steel gray and forbidding, stretching out like some enormous glacier.

“How long before we’re in it?”

“About eight seconds.”

Marten glanced over his shoulder at Anne, then back out the windshield. He held his breath and counted down. Five, four, three, two-Then they were in it. The clouds swirled around them. He turned to Brigitte.

“This is what I want you to do.”

5:05 A.M.

SIMCO FALCON, 3C-B797K, 5:12 A.M.

Conor White felt the main landing gear hit; then the plane’s nose angled over, and the front gear touched the runway. He saw the lighted terminal flash past, then heard the scream of the three Garrett turbofan engines as the pilot put them into reverse thrust. The plane slowed quickly. Another few seconds and they were at the end of the runway and coming back around. Instantly he was out of his seat and at the window looking for the Cessna as they taxied for the terminal. Patrice and Irish Jack were up, too, their weapons packed away in a pair of dark green and yellow sports-equipment bags, peering out, ready to go. All they saw was darkness and parked aircraft.

“Where the fuck is he?” Irish Jack was on edge. “Where the hell did he go?”

White was already on his cell phone talking to his man in the tower. “Where’s the Cessna that just landed?”

“The landing was aborted at the last second.”

“What?”

“The pilot reported radio trouble. Said she would refile a landing request.”

“Where did she go?”

“Don’t know. Her radio is still out.”

White glanced at Patrice and Irish Jack. “Son of a bitch used the cloud deck to dance out of here. He knows he’s being followed.” He turned back to the phone. “Refile us for immediate takeoff, then get me a reading of the Cessna’s transponder code. I want a location of that aircraft.”

“It may take a little time to find, sir. There is a lot of traffic in the area. Cessna’s not the only airplane up there.”

“My friend.” Conor White’s voice was filled with rage, “I can’t follow a plane when I don’t know where the hell it went! Find it. Find it fast! Find it now!” Conor White clicked off and looked to Patrice and Irish Jack. “Shit!” he said.

5:24 A.M.

LEARJET 55, FORTY MILES OUT FROM MÁLAGA.

AIRSPEED 310 MPH. ALTITUDE 14,200 FEET. SAME TIME.

Emil Franck turned his laptop off and then back on and waited for it to reboot, just as he had done moments earlier. The green dot giving the Cessna’s position had suddenly disappeared from the screen, and he held his breath, hoping the problem was with the laptop’s software. Up front, he could see Kovalenko talking excitedly to the pilots and knew the software had nothing to do with it. They’d had the Cessna on their screen, too, and called for Kovalenko seconds after it had vanished from Franck’s. Clearly something major had occurred. Abruptly Kovalenko left the pilots and came toward.

“Marten’s aware that he’s being tracked,” he said. “The Cessna was on approach, then suddenly veered off in a cloud deck and reported radio trouble. There is something of a disorder in the Málaga tower as a result.”

“The transmitter was new. It was functioning perfectly.”

“And then it went dead. Almost at the exact same moment the pilot aborted her landing. Either it was found and disabled or simply stopped working at a con ve nient moment. But whatever happened makes no difference. The Cessna is gone. Málaga tower is attempting to locate it by its transponder reading, but it will take time. Maybe a few minutes, maybe a few hours. Who knows?”

Kovalenko suddenly leaned in close, his face inches from the German detective’s, his eyes seeming to pull back into his skull in a way that was wholly unnerving. “Hauptkommissar, that little tracking device, no bigger than your pinky finger-its condition and where it was placed on the aircraft were your responsibility.”

“I neither selected it nor placed it. I simply ordered it done and it was.”

“It was your responsibility, Hauptkommissar. The Cessna is gone. So is Marten.”

“Then I will find him.”

“If he’s not already on the ground somewhere and vanished. Then where will we be, Hauptkommissar, you and I? Most particularly to Moscow.”

Franck’s black eyes flashed angrily at Kovalenko’s attempt to shift the blame to him, but he said nothing. Instead he stood up and slid a cell phone from his jacket, then punched in a number.

“At this point they won’t have much fuel remaining,” he said quietly, then turned to the phone as a male voice answered. “This is Franck. I want an immediate Europe-wide aeronautical APB on a Cessna 340, fuselage registration D-VKRD, last seen approaching AGP, Málaga Airport, Spain. Contact me with the coordinates the moment the aircraft’s transponder signal is located or when the pilot requests permission to land, whichever is first. I want information only. No contact is to be made with the aircraft itself. All agencies are requested to stand by for further instructions. No action is to be taken without my permission. Confirm.”

“Roger, copy. Confirmed, sir.”

Franck clicked off without another word, then looked to the Russian. “If, as you suggest, Nicholas Marten manages to land somewhere without our knowledge, then recovers the photographs and disappears into the mist, we would be dealing with the concept of fate we discussed earlier. Yours and mine especially, as far as Moscow is concerned. To paraphrase you, Kovalenko-we go about the business at hand until our true fate catches up and then-that’s that. Put more directly, unless something happens within a very short time, we will both soon be dead.”

5:31 A.M.