The Hadrian Memorandum

7

BIOKO. 12:20 P.M.

Marten felt harsh sunlight cross his face. A second later there was a jarring bump, and his body flew upward only to be caught in a restraint of some kind and forced back down. Abruptly he awoke and through the fog of a deep, exhausted sleep saw that the cuts and scrapes on his right leg and left arm had been bandaged. Immediately there was another jolt, and his head cleared enough to realize that he was in a moving vehicle. Startled, he looked up and found staring at him perhaps the most captivatingly beautiful woman he had ever seen. With medium-length dark hair tucked behind her ears, a little turned-up nose, and dazzling green eyes, she was petite, sexy, and impish in a way that was wholly natural.

“This road is filled with potholes,” she said in accented English. “You have been sleeping. You were quite tired.”

Marten tried to shake off the lingering stupor and looked around. They were in the backseat of a battered, mud-splattered Toyota Land Cruiser that was traveling rapidly over a rutted dirt road. Two young, uniformed black men rode in front, one driving, the other sitting next to him. Marten looked over his shoulder. A second Land Cruiser was following close behind. It was dirty and plastered with mud as well. To the right, he could see open swampland dappled with splotches of bright sun that cut through an overcast sky. To the left, steep hills rose up sharply to disappear in a thick blanket of low-hanging mist.

“My name is Marita Lozano.” The young woman smiled. “I am a physician. My companions in the car behind are medical students. We have come to Bioko from Madrid to give AIDS education to the people in the southern part of the island. As you probably know, a civil war has broken out here. The army ordered to us to return to Malabo immediately.”

“The army?” Marten was suddenly alarmed.

“They stopped our cars a short time ago and told us to follow them.”

Marten looked past the uniformed men in front and through the dirty, mud-streaked windshield to see an Equatorial Guinea army Humvee of sorts kicking up mud and gravel some thirty yards ahead of them. Uniformed soldiers were seated inside, while another, standing, manned a roof-mounted machine gun.

Marten looked back to Marita. “Did they see me?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “They seemed to think you were one of us, and I let them. I simply said you were tired and were sleeping.”

“They didn’t ask for identification?”

“Only mine. Our guides told them who we were and what we were doing here.” She smiled gently and with it came the perky impishness he’d seen before. “I knew you had been caught up in the fighting in the south and that you escaped the soldiers, so naturally I assumed you didn’t want to be questioned by them.”

“How do you know all that?” Marten was incredulous. Instinctively he glanced at the guides and then looked back to Marita.

“You told us. Myself and my colleagues; the guides, too. We saw you walking on the beach. You stumbled and fell and didn’t get up. When we got to you, you were quite exhausted and exceedingly dehydrated. A little disoriented and frightened, too, when you saw the guides in their uniforms. Of course you had no way to know who we were.”

Marten studied her carefully. “What, exactly, did I tell you?”

“That your name is Nicholas Marten and you are an English landscape architect in Bioko to study native plant life. You said you met a priest who took you up into the rain forest and showed you some of the flora you were looking for. You were returning to his village when fighting erupted there, the army trucks came, and the priest told you to run and you did.”

Marten stared at her in disbelief.

“You have no memory of telling us, do you?” she said gently.

“No.”

“Whether it’s the truth is not my business.” This time there was nothing gentle in her manner, nor any hint of impishness.

“It is the truth. Just the way I said it.”

“Good, because you will want to repeat it when we get to Malabo.”

“What do you mean, repeat it?”

“The army is going to question us when we arrive. They said so. It’s why they ordered us to follow them.”

“By us, you mean me, too?”

“Yes.”

Questioning by army interrogators was the last thing Marten wanted. It was impossible to know how much they knew of his connection to Father Willy or if they had known about the photographs all along and had been trying to trap him and anyone he might have shown the photos to or told about them. Brutal as they were, they were fighting a war and would do anything to get as much information as they could about what was going on and who was involved with arming the rebellion. Father Willy had been with the natives a long time and that made him a prime suspect in anything that might appear to be supporting the insurgency. The soldiers had seen Marten with him, and Marten had turned and run when they came after him. That in itself would make any question-and-answer session with them long and probably ugly, maybe even fatal.

Abruptly he looked to Marita. “There’s no need for me to make things difficult for you. Why don’t you tell your driver to just pull over when we go around a bend in the road and let me off. They won’t see it happen, and that way I’m out of your hair and you won’t have to answer questions about me when they find out I wasn’t part of your group to begin with.”

“They know how many of us there are, Mr. Marten. If there were to be one less we would have to explain it and they would want to know why and then there would be more trouble all around. Even if we did stop and you got out, where would you go? Into the rain forest? How long would you be prepared to stay there? This is an island, Mr. Marten, and not terribly hospitable, as you already know. Whatever your private circumstances are, I would think it best that you settle them sooner rather than later.”

“You do,” Marten said flatly.

“Yes, I do.”

Marten looked off. He knew she was right and that the best thing he could do would be to face whoever interrogated him and hope he could bluff it through. The idea of calling the president, using the direct-dial twenty-four-hour-a-day number Harris had given him, or calling anyone else for that matter, was not an option. This was not the United States, not Britain, not Europe. Demands to make a phone call would, he knew, be met with laughter and more likely with physical punishment. Maybe worse. He turned back to her. “Alright. I’ll follow your suggestion.”

“That being the case”-Marita grinned a little, and the impishness returned-“please tell me your story again, and precisely as you did before. That way we will all have everything comfortably in mind before you and we and the soldiers meet.”

Marten smiled at her pluck. Here was a beautiful young doctor on some kind of mission of mercy or education or both in the middle of a poor-as-dirt jungle region who understood something of the underbelly of the world around her and could smile about it even as she determined how to deal with it. People like that didn’t come along very often.

12:42 P.M.