Allan Folsom - The Hadrian Memorandum

“Go!” White commanded, and they started for the platform area. Somewhere a woman screamed. Commuters watched in horror and puzzlement as the three well-dressed men raced past them.

“Here they come!” Grant yelled and shoved Ryder ahead of him toward a Metro car just entering the station. “Everybody back, please!” he yelled at the crowd of commuters. “Everybody back!”

Marten caught a glimpse of Conor White, then saw Patrice rush forward, an M-4 in his hands, shoving people aside. “Look out!” he yelled and raised the Glock to fire. An elderly couple were right in his sights and he had to step away. By then Patrice was gone in the swell of people on the platform-people who were beginning to panic. They’d heard the woman’s scream and there were men rushing through them with guns.

The train stopped and the doors opened. Travelers started to get off. Grant shoved Ryder through them, the backpack tight under his arm, his finger on the MP5K’s trigger.

Now Marten caught sight of Patrice: He was rushing forward toward Grant and Ryder. Then he saw Irish Jack shoving in from the side. He pushed Anne forward after Grant and Ryder, then swung the Glock at Irish Jack. The mercenary saw him and ducked into the crowd. At the same time, Patrice pulled up, raising the M-4. People shrieked. Grant whirled and lifted the backpack. The MP5K’s red laser dot fell on Patrice’s chest a split second too late. There was a burst of silenced M-4 fire and Grant’s head blew apart, his body twisting around wildly to collapse among horrified passengers.

People ran screaming in every direction, some using cell phones trying to call for help. Marten grabbed Anne and rushed her toward the train, stopping only to pick up Grant’s backpack and press it into her arms. “There’s a machine pistol in there. Stay with Ryder. Get him to the plane.”

“No!” she yelled, her eyes locked on his. Love. Fear. Horror. Everything. Before, in the hospital, it had been a parting with hope and without an end. They both knew that if Marten stayed behind now there was every chance he would be dead within seconds.

“Fuck it, Anne! You know what to do! Get Ryder the hell out of here! Now!”

Their eyes locked for the briefest instant; then she bolted into the car, trying to find Ryder. She saw him in the crush just as the doors closed and the train began to pull out. Through the window she glimpsed Irish Jack rushing toward them through the crowd. Then she saw Marten twenty feet away, the Glock up ready to fire. People shrieked, racing to get out of the way. Then Irish Jack disappeared in the melee and Marten was shoving through people trying to find him.

The train picked up speed. Suddenly Patrice stepped out of nowhere only feet from it, his finger closing on the M-4’s trigger.

“Get down!” Anne yelled and shoved Ryder to the floor as a burst of silent automatic-weapon fire raked the windows, obliterating them. She grabbed the backpack and got up. Patrice was gone. A half-dozen or more people were on the floor. Some were dead, others moving. Ryder was trying to help a blood-splattered woman on the floor next to him. They were nearly to the tunnel. Outside she saw Marten looking for Patrice. He didn’t see Irish Jack move in just feet behind him, his M-4 up, readying to fire. In one motion she turned the backpack and squeezed the MP5K’s trigger. The 9 mm slugs ran across the Irishman’s formidable chest; his body danced in a semicircle, then toppled onto the platform to the screams of the terrified people around him. She turned to look for Marten and saw him. Their eyes met. Then the train was in the tunnel and the station disappeared from view.

Marten saw the train’s lights vanish as it gained speed inside the tunnel. Glock in hand, he looked back. Faces stared out from every possible hiding place. Under benches, behind decorative sculptures, inside the lone newspaper kiosk. Most of them frozen in some kind of unbearable silence. Every expression raw and filled with fear and unimaginable horror. Each person questioning how much longer he or she had to live. Suddenly two young women rose up and bolted across the platform, dropping down onto the tracks and running into the tunnel after the train.

“Don’t!” Marten yelled. They ignored him. Never mind the trains, there was a live electric third rail there. God only knew how many volts. Touch it with one foot on the ground and you were fried. He looked back. Where the hell was Patrice? Where was Conor White?

In the next second the lights went out.

A universal cry of alarm went up, then everything went deathly silent. Here and there were the sounds of crying or mumbled prayers, but that was all. The only illumination came from battery-powered emergency lights. They lit the stairways, dimly washed the station walls, touched the newspaper kiosk and the entrances to the tunnels at either end of the station.

“THIS IS THE POLICE!” an amplified male voice echoed through the chamber, first in Portuguese, then in English. “EVERYONE FACE DOWN ON THE FLOOR, HANDS SPREAD OUT IN FRONT OF YOU. ANYONE WHO TRIES TO STAND UP WILL BE SHOT!”

Marten could just make out the SWAT team as they fanned out from the stairs to form a line in front of it, a black-armor-suited, helmeted, visor-wearing assault force of about twenty to thirty men. Six of their own had been surprised and cut down only moments before. Whoever had done it was somewhere here, among the terrified commuters. There was no chance they were going to walk out alive.

He had still seen no sign of either Conor White or Patrice since the train had left the station. Things had happened with lightning speed, and there were probably forty or fifty people crowded on the platform, so they could easily be among them.

SWAT would have no idea how many gunmen had been involved in taking down their men. Marten was wanted for murder. If they found him with the Glock, they might very well shoot him on the spot. On the other hand, he wasn’t about to get rid of the pistol and then have Conor White and Patrice find him before the police did. Third rail or not, orders to lie facedown or not, he crept to the edge of the platform in the semidarkness and eased over the side and onto the tracks.

Conor White was just inside the mouth of the tunnel with Patrice directly across. What should have been an easy takedown of the principals and recovery of the photographs and other evidence-most importantly whatever sort of copy of The Memorandum Anne had made in those few minutes when she was alone in the hotel room-had been anything but. In reality it should have been they who were on the train that left the station, not Anne and Ryder. He thought of the dark shadow in the car. Everything that could have gone wrong had. It was Murphy’s Law personified. He had never been superstitious in his life, but he was now, and Marten was at the core of it, the bearer of some kind of demon curse meant to destroy him. In that same moment he realized something else-that no matter how much he had convinced himself that his mission to protect the massive Bioko oil field for the West was singularly patriotic, in truth it was the same as it had been from the beginning, to recover the photographs and preserve his dignified place in British history. And by doing so keep alive the soul-wrenching hope that one day Sir Edward Raines, the father who had refused to recognize him for so long, that he so hated and so desperately loved at the same time, might yet step forth and acknowledge him.

White looked back into the dark of the station, a cavernous space lit here and there by the beam and wash of the emergency lights as if it were the set of an abstract play. The police were there in mass, hidden among the terrified, trapped commuters waiting for them to make their move. Marten was somewhere there, too. Destroy him and the shadow would disappear and the curse would be lifted. Afterward he and Patrice would retreat into the Metro tunnels to maneuver and hide and wait for as long as it took-an hour, a day, a month-until the police finally left and they walked out free and alive. They had done it before.