Allan Folsom - The Hadrian Memorandum

White headed into the other room to get dressed himself. As he did, his BlackBerry signaled a text message. He looked at it and saw it was from Loyal Truex, still in Baghdad, and went into the kitchen to take it.

He read it once, then again.

This arrived five minutes ago from Washington with copies to Arnold Moss in Houston and Jeremy Moyer, COS/Lisbon. I forwarded it to you and to Anne, in the event she can, and would want to, read it. As you know, Washington can be purposely terse and ambiguous, so I’m not sure if it’s a reprimand, a compliment, or if they just want us to know. It reads like a newspaper brief tied to a world geography narrative.

“The 585-mile-long Tagus River rises in the mountains east of Madrid, then flows northwest through the mountains and across central Spain to form part of the Spanish-Portuguese border. Afterward it runs southwest into the Atlantic Ocean at Lisbon. It is here, between the cities of Paço de Arcos and Carcavelos, where the river meets the sea, that the body of Striker Oil chairman Josiah Wirth was discovered by fishermen just after dawn this morning floating in a tangle of debris and seaweed.”

I forward, too, a second message. It was encrypted and sent to me and Moss only. Use your laptop to read it. It’s self-explanatory. You will find it extremely disturbing. Know you will take immediate and appropriate action upon reading. Am returning to Washington within the hour.

White sat down at the table and pulled his laptop around, then booted it up and pressed the pound sign on the keyboard. Immediately a marker popped up asking for his personal code. He typed it in. A second marker called for a password, which he entered as well. The screen registered a number of symbols and, beside them, a time and date code. He moved the cursor to the most recent entry-barely twelve minutes earlier. The message was brief.

XARAK Protocol, file accessed, 4 June, 1717 EDT. Access ceased 1720 EDT. Access code AZ101P-22-0LX5-8.*.8.*.2.

Instantly White signed off and shut down the laptop. The access code belonged to Loyal Truex. The time 1717 through 1720 EDT was 2217 through 2220, Lisbon time. The exact same time Anne Tidrow had been in her room at the Hotel Lisboa Chiado. The file had been accessed only, not copied or downloaded. If an attempt had been made to do either, the program would have shut down immediately, a security breach would have been sounded, and there would be an electronic record of the time and location where the attempt had been made. All things Anne would have known. It meant she had read the document and most likely either hand-copied it or photographed it off the screen.

“Fuck,” he swore under his breath. Anne and the photographs were trouble enough; now they had to deal with this. In the hands of Joe Ryder the first two would be crushing, but this last-the text of the document Truex, Sy Wirth, Arnold Moss, and himself had all referred to as The Hadrian Memorandum -would be hard evidence of Agency involvement in the civil war in Equatorial Guinea on behalf of the Striker Oil company, an operation authorized by the deputy director himself. Having it become public was not something that could be tolerated under any circumstance. Meaning the line in Truex’s text message Know you will take immediate and appropriate action upon reading had not been a directive but an explicit order: Retrieve the outstanding materials and eliminate Marten, Anne, and Congressman Ryder as quickly as possible. Before it had just been Marten and Anne, and Ryder if necessary. Now all three had been given a death sentence. One that was to be executed immediately and in any way most expedient.

Suddenly he wondered what he was doing. His entire adult life had been given to the single purpose of gaining his father’s recognition. In the process, he had become a highly educated national, even international, warrior-hero. But all that had ended with the photographs. Since then he had done everything in his power to recover them for the sole intent of protecting his own image. In doing so he had become a murderer-of young women and men, of a despotic oil executive, and now he was hours, maybe minutes, away from killing three more, among them a United States congressman. Why? So that the man who had never acknowledged him would not be aghast at what he saw if the photos were made public. What kind of a reason was that?

The trouble was, Anne’s interference had snowballed the whole thing into a gargantuan geopolitical complication, with a huge, far-reaching cost if things continued to go wrong. It meant the game was no longer his alone. At stake now was the heart and soul of The Hadrian Memorandum itself, the protection of a vast sea of oil for the West. It was a twist he could never have imagined. In a strange way it eased his mind and raised his spirits because it meant the deadly actions still to come would not be those of a common murderer but of a soldier, a patriot-warrior.

7:48 A.M.

PORTELA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. 8:42 A.M.

Carlos Branco waited at the bottom of the steps as Congressman Joe Ryder and his personal RSO detail, agents Chuck Birns and Tim Grant, came down the steps of their Gulfstream 200 and stepped onto Lisbon soil. Grant and Birns, Branco knew, had been assigned to Ryder for the past fifteen months as his sworn protectors when he traveled outside of the United States, and he trusted them completely. That meant they had a long-standing, interlocking loyalty and made them people he might well have trouble wresting away from the congressman when the time came and he tried to pull the entire RSO detail back in order to give Conor White and his gunmen singular access to their targets.

“RSO Special Agent Anibal Da Costa, Congressman,” Branco said smartly as he introduced himself. “Welcome to Lisbon, sir. This way, gentlemen, please.”

Immediately he turned and led them toward a black Chevy Suburban SUV parked on the tarmac twenty feet away where two more RSO agents waited, the rest of the Lisbon embassy detail.

Moments later they were driving past security gates and heading into the city, taking the same route Branco had used barely twelve hours earlier when he’d brought Conor White and his men in from the same airport.

He’d been right when he told White that Marten would not recognize him the next time they met. The clean-shaven, dark-haired man in the Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans he’d seen last night in the Hotel Lisboa Chiado now wore a tailored black suit, white shirt, and tie, and had gray hair and a neatly trimmed full beard of the same color. Moreover, his natural hazel-green eyes were now covered by deep blue contact lenses, a further safeguard in the event Marten had been paying that much attention; which he might well have been, considering what he had done to the men in the blue Jaguar.

That thought, coupled with the presence of Congressman Ryder sitting in the seat behind him now, reminded him of the real-politik of the situation, the cold truth of why he had been brought aboard as a “painter” to set things up for White. Anne Tidrow, Ryder, and Marten, each in his or her own way, and for reasons unknown to him and possibly even COS Moyer, had become exceedingly dangerous to the CIA and had to be treated as such. Ryder’s personal RSO detail had to be looked at that way, too. It was why he had recruited the people he had: five former members of the Portuguese army Batalhão de Comandos, counterguerrilla special forces commandos who would shadow Anne and Marten the moment they left the building on Rua do Almada to wherever he and his RSO detail brought Ryder to meet them. Meaning they would have both parties covered from start to finish with neither aware of it and giving them little or no chance for escape. And if, at the crucial moment, Birns and Grant, Ryder’s RSO people, attempted to interfere with his pullback of the entire RSO detail, his commandos would cut them to pieces-dedicated State Department employees regrettably caught in a crossfire between his own RSO detail and assailants unknown-in the process leaving Anne and Marten and Joe Ryder to the mercy of Conor White and the men he had brought with him.