Allan Folsom - The Hadrian Memorandum

“Come into the house,” she said, then led him past some trees and up a gravel pathway to a two-story house that, from the surroundings, appeared to be in a quiet and leafy residential neighborhood.

Marten used the toilet and then opened the door and started down a hallway toward the front door, the way they’d come in.

“Here.” He heard Erlanger’s voice from a room behind him. He turned back and entered a small, wood-paneled office to see Erlanger alone and just getting up from a desk. Behind him was a window that looked out on a small garden.

“Where is Anne?” Marten asked.

“Upstairs. She’ll be down in a moment. Would you like some coffee?”

“Yes, thank you,” Marten said. Erlanger nodded and left.

Marten looked around. The room, like the little he’d seen of the rest of the house as he came in, was comfortable and worn, filled with a large collection of apparently well read books, knickknacks, and family pictures, as if whoever lived there had done so for years and had no intention of moving. Hardly the hideout of a man fearful of the police.

“Feeling better?” Anne suddenly walked into the room. Gone were the dowdy clothes and blond wig; back were her jeans, tailored jacket, and running shoes, her black hair twisted up in a bun at the back of her head. She looked sexy and impatient and dangerous at same time.

“Yes. You?”

“I’ll be better when we’re moving again. Where do we go from here?”

“Where is here, this house?”

“Potsdam. About a half hour outside of Berlin. It’s Erlanger’s home. He took a big chance bringing us to it. He’ll still help, but we have to set things up as quickly as possible and get out. So, as I said, where do we go from here? Where are the photographs? Neither I nor Erlanger can do anything more until you give me a destination.”

“Does Erlanger know about the pictures?”

“No.”

Marten closed the door. “The whole trip, while I was twisted up in the dark in that little compartment over the wheel well, I was thinking of the cost.”

“Of what?”

“The photographs. How many people are dead because of them. Bioko, Spain, Berlin. Who knows who’ll be next or where it will happen?” He crossed to the window and looked out.

“What are you getting at?”

“That the best thing would be to get in touch with Hauptkommissar Franck and tell him where they are.” He turned to look at her. “Let the German government have them and do what they think is right.”

“That’s not a very good conclusion.”

“Maybe not. But under the circumstances it will do.”

Suddenly Anne flared. “Where are the pictures, Nicholas?”

“I want the war stopped, Anne,” Marten snapped back, his eyes riveted on her. “At the very least slowed to a crawl. The photographs will do that. The world media will pounce. Reporters, camera crews, everything. And not just to Equatorial Guinea but to Houston, where they will be all over Striker management, and to SimCo headquarters in England. There’ll be tough questions about what’s going on. Blogs and talk shows will pick it up. Politicians will get involved because they’ll have to. And the subject won’t disappear the way it always seems to about the Congo or Darfur or other African theaters of horror because an American oil company and its private military contractor are at the center of it.”

“I want the killing stopped as much as you do. I told you that before.”

“You also said you wanted the photos so you could threaten to turn them over to the Ryder Commission if your friends at Striker and Hadrian and SimCo didn’t stop arming the insurgency.”

“Yes.”

“How do I know your real goal isn’t simply to protect Striker? Get the pictures and destroy them.”

“It’s not.”

“How do I know?”

Anne glared at him. “I’ll ask you what I did yesterday. How much do you want for the photos? Name your price, anything you want.”

“Anything?”

“Yes.”

“I want you.”

“Me?”

“Yes,” he said quietly.

Anne was astounded. “For Christ’s sake, Nicholas, after everything this is about sex? You want to fuck me? Is that your price? Jesus God!”

“I don’t want to fuck you ,” he said as quietly as before. “I want you to fuck your company.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Conor White is prominent in a number of the photos.”

“So. You’ve actually seen them.” Anne smiled lightly as if she’d just achieved some sort of cruel victory.

“Some, not all.” Marten stepped closer to her, as if to underscore the gravity of what he was telling her. “The point is Conor White is easily identifiable. Maybe you don’t want to destroy the pictures, but he does because he’s got a helluva lot to lose if they’re made public. Who he kills or how he gets them doesn’t seem to make much difference. One way or another he’s already responsible for the deaths of Father Willy and his brother, to say nothing of my Spanish friends. If you have the photos, Striker board member or not, CIA or not, he’ll kill you as quickly as he will me.”

Anne’s eyes darted over his face. “I still don’t know what you want me to do.”

“If I bring you with me and we get the pictures, we take them to Joe Ryder himself. You tell him who you are and who Conor White is and that you want to do anything you can to stop the flow of weapons to the rebels, hoping that the State Department can then pressure Tiombe into ordering his fighters to stand down.

“Of course, that will lead to his wanting to know more, and you’ll tell him about SimCo as a front company for Hadrian, which in turn will make him go after the Striker/Hadrian enterprise even harder than he already is. If he can prove Hadrian and SimCo are providing arms to the rebels at Striker’s behest, your Mr. Sy Wirth and the other decision makers at Striker, as well as Conor White and the people running Hadrian, will be in for a very ugly time. Prison wouldn’t be out of the question for anyone, you included. You said ‘anything,’ Anne. That’s the price, otherwise-”

Abruptly there was a knock at the door. Erlanger’s voice came through it. “I have coffee. Should I leave it outside?”

“Give us a minute, Hartmann,” Anne said and looked back to Marten. “Otherwise, what?”

“Otherwise I’ll think you want the photos to protect your company and its investments in Equatorial Guinea. I’ll assume they sent you because you’re a very attractive woman and you might use that against me-the way you already have, taking off your robe in the hotel, kissing me in the middle of the street with the police watching, sitting in nothing more than panties and a T-shirt with your nipples showing through as you told me the story of your life. And because you were CIA you would know better than most what the hell you were doing and how to do it. You would have been trained for it.”

For a moment Marten thought he was going to get slapped, but it didn’t happen. Anne just stood there, breathing softly, staring at him in silence.

“That’s the deal,” he said finally. “Understand it?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me you agree.”

“How do you know you can trust me even if I do?”

“Because you just might be telling the truth about doing this for your father-for his memory, for the reputation of the company he built, and because you loved him. And because there’s always Hauptkommissar Franck if you’re not.”

He could feel her nails come up. Her stare cut him in two, but she said nothing. Finally, she nodded almost imperceptibly.

“No, say it,” he pressed her.

“I agree.”

“To everything.”

“To everything.”