The Hadrian Memorandum

76

FARO, HOTEL LARGO. 2:30 P.M.

Sy Wirth and Conor White came in the front entrance and went straight to the front desk, leaving Patrice and Irish Jack to wait outside in the black Toyota SUV. At this point Wirth had wholly abandoned the idea of keeping his distance from White. Too much was at stake, emotionally and physically, if the package Korostin had promised contained the photos and the camera’s memory card as he hoped-as the Russian had indicated when he’d so surprisingly and belatedly reached him as he stood with White at the Santa Catarina fortress in Praia da Rocha.

“You will find the terms of the contract have been fulfilled, Josiah,” he’d said with quiet assurance. “Everything is in a large envelope that is on its way by messenger to your hotel in Faro now. Things didn’t quite work out as planned. I apologize. We’ll do better the next time.” That he’d clicked off with no mention of either Marten or Anne didn’t matter. If the contract had been fully executed, the whole thing would be over anyway. What had happened to the others would be irrelevant. He would immediately destroy the photographs and the memory card, and they could all breathe a monstrous sigh of relief. Afterward White and his men would simply fly back to Malabo, and he would return to Houston.

“I’m Mr. Wirth, room 403. You have a package for me,” he said to a tallish red-haired woman behind the front desk.

“Yes, sir.” She turned and disappeared into a back room.

Wirth glanced at Conor White. Then the woman came back carrying a large padded envelope and handed it to him.

“How was it delivered?” he asked.

“I believe a taxi driver brought it, sir. I was at lunch at the time. I can check on it for you.”

“No matter,” he said and with a nod at White walked off toward the elevators.

Wirth pushed the button, the elevator door slid open, and he and White entered. Immediately he pushed the fourth-floor button and the door started to close. Suddenly it pulled back and a young couple entered. The man held the hand of a little boy. His wife, or at least the woman with him, was noticeably pregnant. Both smiled and nodded politely as they entered. Neither man responded.

They rode up in silence. Second floor. Third. The car stopped at the fourth, and they all got off. Wirth let them walk off down the corridor in front of them; then he and White followed. At room 403, Wirth stopped and slid his keycard through the slot in the door. A green light flashed, and the two men entered.

“Lock it,” Wirth said and went anxiously to a writing desk near the window. The moment he reached it, he tore the envelope open and dumped its contents on the desk. “What the fuck?”

There were a dozen eight-by-ten photographs. Eleven were cheesecake photos of naked women in various pornographic poses. The twelfth was of Sy Wirth himself, the official corporate photograph of Striker’s chairman standing alongside the company logo in the lobby of its Houston headquarters.

Apart from the photographs were two letter-sized envelopes. Enraged, Wirth ripped open the first and took out a small, thin rectangle, the size of a digital camera memory card. The trouble was, it was no memory card but a tourist trinket, a refrigerator magnet. Printed on the front in bright, happy red letters was the phrase FOND MEMORIES OF FARO, PORTUGAL.

“Fucking Russian cocksucker,” Wirth breathed, his face as crimson as the letters on the magnet. Immediately he picked up the second envelope. Angrily he ripped it opened and looked inside. White could see the color drain from his face.

Slowly Wirth turned the envelope upside down and a half-dozen or more torn pieces of paper fell onto the tabletop, landing among the cheesecake photographs, his official Striker portrait, and the Faro refrigerator magnet. White had no idea what it was. Sy Wirth had known instantly. It was what was left of the agreement for the massive Andean gas field, the Magellan/Santa Cruz-Tarija, he had given to Dimitri Korostin at the Dorchester Hotel in London in exchange for finding and returning the photographs and the memory card.

“What is it?” Conor White was staring at him.

Wirth’s eyes came up to meet his. “I thought I was dealing with a friend. I wasn’t.”

“You said something about a Russian. What did you mean?”

Wirth glared at him. “I said nothing about a Russian. Nothing at all.”

“Are the Russians involved?” This time White didn’t hold back anything. “Is that what happened?”

Wirth didn’t reply.

“Do they have the photographs?”

“I don’t know.”

Suddenly Conor White’s vast experience and education-at Eton, Oxford, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, his long career as a frontline British combat officer and then a top-level professional mercenary soldier-came fully into play. Wirth’s blundering had struck an immediate and terrifying chord, the stakes of which, even moments earlier, he could never have imagined.

“Mr. Wirth,” he said emphatically, “I suggest you try to reach Anne and find out where she is. If she’s with Marten, if she’s not. Maybe she’ll answer, maybe she won’t. But if we can find out what happened, we may well learn something about the rest of it. In the meantime one of us needs to call Loyal Truex and tell him what the hell’s going on. God help us if the Russians have the photographs, because if they do they will have all the evidence they need to prove what they may have already guessed about what Striker is doing in Bioko.

“We’re talking about a massive amount of oil, Mr. Wirth. Massive. They will want it, all of it, if for no other reason than to keep it out the hands of the West. Once they start formulating a plan and communicating between themselves, the Chinese will find out. And they will want it, too. Either or both will create some kind of excuse for an armed intervention into the insurrection, basically to get hold of the country for themselves. They do that and it will be seen as a bona fide threat to U.S. national security, and Washington will have no choice but to try and stop them.” White paused as a chilling apocalyptic anger raged through him. “You might have damn well planted the seeds for a major war, Mr. Wirth. Major.”

3:08 P.M.