The Hadrian Memorandum

70

HOTEL LARGO. 11:37 A.M.

Wirth was back in his room and had just finished brushing his teeth when his BlackBerry sounded. Immediately he answered.

“Yes.”

“Praia da Rocha. Four-door silver Opel Astra, license number 93-AA-71,” Korostin said tersely. “By the time you reach it my people will have found Marten. By the terms of our agreement, Josiah, I will tell you where.”

“Thank you.” Wirth clicked off.

It was time to move.

He went into the bedroom and picked up the blue-tape Blackberry. Two calls would be made from it. The first would be to Conor White, letting him know where Marten had gone, giving him a description of the car, and telling him he would give him an exact location in Praia da Rocha when he had it. The second would be made once he knew White had reached Praia da Rocha. It would be a text message to an FBI in for mant in Spain arranged by his friend in the FBI’s Houston bureau who had originated the transmission system for the blue-tape BlackBerry. The text would be a simple “OK.” At that point the informant would call Spanish authorities, implicating Conor White in the Madrid farmhouse murders and telling them he was armed and dangerous and thought to be in Praia da Rocha, Portugal.

Wirth glanced out the window at the swarm of pleasure boats plying the Sunday waters of Faro harbor, then lifted the blue-tape BlackBerry and punched in Conor White’s number.

“Yes, Mr. Wirth,” White’s voice came back sharply.

“The city of Praia da Rocha. On the sea near Portimão. I’m on my way now.”

“I need a location.”

“I will have it by the time you get there.”

“Yes, sir.”

11:45 A.M.

THE HOUSE AT 517 AVENIDA JOÃO PAULO II. 11:50 A.M.

They found it, as Stump Logan said, through an old wooden gate and down a gravel drive. Marten opened the gate by hand, drove the Opel through, then closed it behind them and started down the driveway.

They could see the house at the bottom. It was single story, made of stone and white stucco with a red tile roof, and was very nearly on the beach itself, no more than a hundred feet up from the high-water mark. Jagged sea cliffs that rose straight up from the sand surrounded most of it, giving a feel of isolation and extreme privacy. For all the bustle of the town’s nearby beaches, there was nothing here but sea birds and slowly lapping waves.

Marten rolled the Opel to a stop at the end of the driveway, and he and Anne got out. They studied the house for a moment, then looked around. There was no one in sight, either on the beach or up the driveway behind them.

“Let’s do this fast,” Marten said, and they moved toward the house. Sand had blown up in shallow drifts over the front walk, and a loose awning swung from its anchorage over a front window, seemingly torn free by the wind. Stump Logan had been right-whoever Jacob Cádiz was, he wasn’t there and hadn’t been for some time. Nor apparently had anyone else, at least since the wind had started moving the sand and awnings around.

Marten started toward the front door, then decided against it and led Anne around to the side of the house. Most of the windows had blinds that had been drawn against the sun, suggesting this was a vacation retreat of some kind and Cádiz had closed them when he left.

They were turning back for the front door when Marten noticed a small window that did not have a shade. Peering in, they saw a narrow hallway that looked as if it were an extension of the front entryway. Partway down it was a small wooden drop-leaf table stacked high with mail, as if someone had deposited it there for Cádiz upon his return. A neighbor or caretaker perhaps.

Mail.

Suddenly Marten remembered what he’d thought during the flight out of Malabo-that the reason the army hadn’t found the photos on Bioko was that Father Willy might have sent them to a safe haven somewhere off the island, perhaps in something a simple as the everyday mail.

“Front door,” Marten said quickly. They went to it, and he rang the doorbell. No answer. He tried it again. Still nothing. Once more. Same result. He looked to Anne. “CIA give you training in breaking and entering?”

“Yes, but most of it I learned it on my own.” Anne bent down and picked up a fist-sized rock. Quickly they went back to the window.

She looked at him. “Just hope to hell there’s no alarm system.”

“Darling, break the damn window.”

Three sharp hits with the rock and the glass cracked. They stopped and listened. No alarm. Marten nodded at Anne, and she hit the glass again. Once more and there was a hole big enough for Marten to reach through and take out the remaining shards. Seconds later they climbed inside.

“Anyone here?” Marten’s voice echoed through the room. There was no reply, and they moved toward the front hallway. To the left was a small study lined with bookshelves. It had a round desk with an ergonomic chair in the center. A desktop computer and printer sat to one side. Beyond that was a kitchen and eating room that faced the sea.

“Anyone here?” Marten called out again, and they went into the front hallway, stopping at the wooden table and the stack of mail overflowing it they’d seen from outside.

Most of it was bills, newspapers, magazines, and advertising circulars. By the postmarks the pieces seemed to have been deposited there off and on over the last four to five weeks.

Marten swore under his breath as he went through it quickly. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

He sifted through the rest, increasingly concerned that no matter what Stump Logan had said about Theo Haas having sent him to Cádiz for a reason, Haas had been playing him for a fool and their trip had been for nothing.

“Wait,” Anne said abruptly. Several more pieces were on the floor, hidden by a leaf of the table. They were bigger, three boxes and four large envelopes. She sorted through them quickly. The bottom-most piece was a thick padded envelope addressed to Jacob Cádiz and postmarked from Riaba, Equatorial Guinea, sometime in late May. The exact date was hard to read.

“This, maybe!” she said with a rush and handed it to him.

Marten looked at the postmark. “Christ,” he breathed and anxiously tore it open.

“Yes. Yes!” he all but shouted as he slid out a plastic-wrapped bundle of Father Willy’s photographic prints, color computer copies like those the priest had shown him in the rain forest. There were twenty-six in all, and all of them the damning Bioko/SimCo stuff.

The first few were duplicates of pictures he had seen before: the helicopter set down in the jungle clearing with men in the doorway unloading crates of weapons to natives who in turn were loading them on an open-bed truck. Among the faces was a very familiar Caucasian in tight black T-shirt and camouflage fatigues.

“Recognize your friend Conor White?” Marten asked, then went to the next photo that showed two more Caucasians. They had buzz-cut hair, were wearing the same black T-shirts and camouflage gear, and were standing in the helicopter doorway.

“Patrice,” Anne said, pointing to the man on the left. “The other’s Jack Hanahan, a onetime Ranger in the Irish Army. Conor keeps him with him almost all the time. Calls him Irish Jack.”

Marten stared at the picture, fixing the men’s faces in his mind. “You knew who these people were, but you had no idea any of this was going on,” he said quietly but with an edge that was clearly accusatory.

Anne reacted. Fiercely. “Of course I knew what was going on. The whole thing was my idea. I love to watch thousands of people kill each other. It beats the hell out of Texas football. You want to get more into it? Fine. We can fight about it later. Right now let’s take this stuff and get the hell out of here.”

Marten stared at her, waiting for her to give him some small clue that she had known what was going on, or at least to soften. She did neither.

“Alright,” he said finally, “sorry.”

“You better be.”

“I am.” Immediately he picked up the photographs and started to slide them back into the plastic wrapping. As he did, a white letter-sized envelope slid out. It had been folded over several times and sealed tight with an elastic band. He slipped off the band and unfolded it, then turned it upside-down. A small, thin rectangle dropped into his hand.

Anne and Marten looked at each other.

The camera’s memory card.

“As I said, let’s take this stuff and get the hell out of here.” Anne started for the door.

“No,” Marten said abruptly. “Father Willy didn’t print every picture. I want to see what else there is.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s a computer in the other room and because there may not be a chance later. And because when we call Joe Ryder, I want one of us to be able to tell him what’s on it.”

“What do you mean-one of us?”

“In the event your Mr. White and his friends show up and one of us gets killed.”

12:16 P.M.