Allan Folsom - The Hadrian Memorandum

White would have much preferred to have gone after Marten himself and left the doctor and her students to others, but that assignment had gone to Anne, who Truex, Sy Wirth, and Anne herself felt could get closer to Marten than he could. So instead he was given the secondary target, the five now inside the house.

The thing driving it all was urgency. Find the photographs and destroy them before they fell into what could only be referred to as “public hands.” For White the pressure was all the greater because he was a prominent figure in any number of the pictures, and if they were made public everything he’d worked for all his life would be gone.

Everything.

Colin Conor White had been born in London, the only child of a young barmaid and George Winston White, a London railway worker who died of a heart attack several weeks after his son was born. Soon afterward Conor’s mother, in grief and despair, left the city and went to live near her sister in a small two-room flat in Birmingham in west central England, where he grew up street-tough and all but impoverished. When he was eleven, and quite by accident, he discovered a farewell note tucked away in a cabinet above the kitchen sink in a long-forgotten box of memorabilia. In it, he learned that his father had not been a railway worker at all but instead a very married man. His name, what he did, and even the truth of the note were things his mother refused to discuss during an anger-filled confrontation, telling him in no uncertain terms that the idea was preposterous and that she had no idea who had written the note or where it had come from and warning him not to bring up the subject again.

Her heated denial only sent him digging for more. A careful examination of the London Transport Executive records, the railway authority at the time, determined that no worker named George Winston White had been employed there within two years of his birth. Eighteen months later and after considerable snooping, he discovered the man to be Sir Edward Raines, a handsome, silver-haired, longtime member of Parliament and former decorated officer in the British army who had lost an arm in the Battle of Crater during the Aden Emergency on the Arabian Peninsula in 1963. Raines, it seemed, was not only his father but was paying his mother a yearly stipend to keep silent about it.

Challenged again, his mother, quite irritably, kept to her original story, refusing to acknowledge any such person or arrangement. Moreover, the confrontation caused her to sink deeper into her own increasingly apparent mood of base self-pity. How dare he think a “somebody” such as Sir Edward Raines would even consider paying attention to a woman who barely had a grade school education and no breeding whatsoever? He could still hear the shrill, anger-filled ring of her voice:

“You should get it permanently through your head, Mr. Conor White, that neither me nor you will ever have that kind of social status and that you had best prepare yourself for a working man’s life and not be making up silly fantasies about who you might prefer your father to have been. They will get you no further than the two-room flat we live in, if you’re that lucky.”

Maybe so. But fantasies or not, he had other ideas and had gone directly to Sir Edward himself demanding a confirmation of his paternity. Or rather he’d tried to. Each time he’d been rebuffed by an intermediary, Sir Edward refusing to even see him.

Powerfully built, sullen and angry, and little more than a street tough, Conor White’s salvation had come through a determination to be as celebrated and socially acceptable as his father. Through a love of reading and the physical escape of rugby, which he’d played with a ferocity aimed directly at Sir Edward, he won a full scholarship to Eton College, where he excelled in English and was captain of the rugby team. Success there provided him entry and a scholarship to Oxford; upon graduation, he joined the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst determined to become an officer in the British Army. Not long afterward he managed an invitation to join the elite special forces unit known as the SAS. It was an invitation he jumped at because it promised the opportunity to become a frontline soldier in highly dangerous combat situations and, not so coincidentally, offered a playing field where, with luck and extreme courage he could become a military hero. The same as his father had been.

And for most of the last quarter century he had followed that path, building a stellar reputation as a top line operator in extremely high-risk situations across the globe. His SAS career alone, with an extraordinary run of decorations, was proof enough. Distinguished Service Order, or DSO, presented for meritorious service, valor in the face of the enemy, Iraq, 1991. DSO, Iraq, 1998. DSO, Bosnia, 2000. DSO, Sierra Leone, 2002. Victoria Cross, the United Kingdom’s highest award for bravery, presented by the queen for duty in Af ghan i stan, 2003. DSO, Iraq, 2004. Then he’d moved into the private sector, where, even now, he remained a poster-boy hero with plans to one day run for parliamentary office. So to have it all come to a thundering end-his face smeared across the Internet and worldwide television, to be seen staring out from the covers of newspapers and tabloids everywhere as a lackey for an oil company intent on overthrowing the government of a third world country for its own gain, no matter how tyrannical the regime-was a humiliation he could and would not suffer.

8:22 P.M.

He reached the house and set the shovel alongside the front door, giving it a second glance as he did, wondering if more graves would have to be dug that night. A deep breath of resolve and he took a black balaclava from his jacket pocket, pulled it on, then opened the door and went inside.

The five “guests” were as he had left them, sitting in the glow of lantern light on a rustic wooden bench in the room that was once part kitchen, part dining area. By now he knew them by name-Marita, Gilberto, Rosa with the big glasses, Luis, the red-haired Ernesto. All were as pale, terrified, and silent as they’d been when he’d gone out. Except for Marita, they all stared at the floor. Her eyes had been on him the moment he stepped through the door. They were filled with defiance and hatred.

Irish Jack stood at the end of the bench, his arms crossed over his chest. Patrice was in front of them, feet apart, his arms behind him. Both wore the jeans and pullover sweaters he did. Both had automatic pistols in Kevlar holsters strapped to their thighs. Both wore the same kind of black balaclava he did.

“Who is ready to talk about the photographs?” White said in his crisp British accent.

“For the hundredth time, we cannot tell you what we don’t know,” Marita spat angrily.

Conor White looked at the frightened, sullen faces and scratched his head. “Maybe we’re making this too hard,” he said evenly and with that reached up and pulled off his balaclava. This was the first time he had been without it, and he could see their surprise as they recognized him from the bar in the Hotel Malabo. “Gentlemen”-he looked to Patrice and Irish Jack and nodded-“a little politeness, please. No reason to alarm these people any further.”

Immediately both men removed their balaclavas and tucked them into their belts.

White moved a little closer. “You now see we are forthright and mean you no harm. All this has come about because of the civil war in Bioko. The photographs are very important to the oil company that employs us. Our job is to recover them, and right away. Once we do you will be free to go.”

Suddenly Rosa looked up and boldly repeated Marita’s words. “We cannot tell you what we don’t know.”

“No, I don’t suppose you can.” White hesitated for a moment, then looked to Patrice. “We need to speed this up.”