Read The Hadrian Memorandum Online
Authors: Allan Folsom
BERLIN. 8:18 A.M.
Four people stood in the front room of a modest flat on Scharrenstrasse: Hauptkommissar Franck, Komissar Gertrude Prosser, two uniformed policemen, and Karl Betz. A fifth person, Betz’s wife, peeked anxiously through a door that led to the rest of the apartment. Betz was fifty-two, a little overweight, had a mustache and curly eyebrows, and was very nervous. He was also a waiter on the tour boat
Monbijou
.
Franck held up the official photograph of Nicholas Marten. “This is the man you served on the
Monbijou
last night.”
“Not served, exactly, Hauptkommissar.” Betz tried to smile through his uneasiness. “Actually he helped me serve. Along with his wife, that is. Or someone I took for his wife. They passed along a couple of glasses of beer to passengers seated next to them.”
“But it was him, you’re certain?” Franck pressed him impassively.
“He’s the one you’re looking for? The murderer of Theo Haas?”
“Is it the same man or is it not?”
“Yes, Hauptkommissar. It is the same man.”
“And the woman with him was the one described to you by Kommissar Prosser?”
“Yes, Hauptkommissar.”
“You said he was wearing something in particular.”
“A Dallas Cowboys baseball cap.” Betz smiled proudly. “I’ve been to Dallas. Dallas, Texas. I nearly bought a cap like that myself, but we were on a strict budget.”
“Where did they board the
Monbijou
?”
“I’m not exactly sure. Lustgarten dock, I think.”
“Where did they get off?”
“Weidendamm Bridge, the Friedrichstrasse crossing.”
“At what time?”
Betz suddenly looked at the floor.
“At what time, Herr Betz?” Franck pressed him.
The waiter looked back, more nervous than before. “We did nothing illegal. It was a special tour for foreign travel agents. It ran later than usual. We had a special permit; you can look it up. The boat was crowded. I don’t know how they got on, but they did.”
“Herr Betz, I am not the waterway police.” Franck was beginning to lose patience. “What time did they leave the boat?”
“Close to nine forty, Hauptkommissar. I looked at my watch as we docked.”
“Nine forty.”
“Yes, Hauptkommissar.”
“Thank you.”
8:24 A.M.
8:26 A.M.
Marten stood at the edge of the window looking down at the alley. Light rain still fell. The line of umbrella-huddling students inching forward seemed longer than ever.
Once, then twice he’d gone back to the television, turning the sound up, watching. Occasionally there had been repeats of the news story from Spain. If the Spanish police had more information on what had taken place there, they weren’t making it public. The same was true of the news from Berlin. The investigation into the savage murder of Theo Haas was ongoing. The police were asking the cooperation of the public in locating the man “wanted for questioning” in the killing. Again the fuzzy cell phone photograph of Marten had been shown, and with it a call in-number and e-mail address for contacting the police if he were seen. After that came the announcement that a media blackout had been imposed. That part Marten found even more troubling than the continued exposure of his picture. From his experience on the LAPD, a media blackout meant the police were on to a number of leads that were potentially significant and that they weren’t about to disclose. Often that meant an arrest was imminent.
He looked back to the front door.
Where was Anne? What was she doing that was taking so long? What if—his heart caught in his throat at the idea—something had happened and the police had her? She had his passport with her. How long would it be before they forced her to tell them where he was? Maybe that was the reason for the media blackout.
He felt sweat bead up on his forehead. Once again he thought of Spain and the two people still unaccounted for in the car bombing. He had to trust that the Spanish police knew what they were doing and that those missing would soon be found. Then again, maybe not. Who knew how far the limousine had traveled before it blew up? Maybe other police agencies were involved and there was a jurisdiction problem. Politics might figure in as well. Immediately the thought struck that the remaining two were still alive somewhere else in the countryside and at that moment were being tortured in order to get information about the photographs. It was something the police would have no way of knowing. How could they? Christ, he had to alert someone. But how?
Just then the television crackled with more breaking news. He crossed the room quickly to watch it. The report was live from Madrid, where the police were about to make an announcement concerning their investigation of the limousine explosion.
An icy feeling of dread crept through him as he watched a police spokesman approach a bank of microphones, then address the waiting media in Spanish. A studio announcer provided a voice-over English translation. Two bodies, he said, had been found in a shallow grave at an abandoned farm house less than five miles from the car bombing. Another body had been found in a ramshackle barn nearby. All three had been shot in the head. The first two victims were women; the third was a man. Identification of the dead was pending.
Marten stared at the screen, numb and transfixed. Slowly he looked off to the window and the gray sky and drizzle and vague buildings beyond it. His memory was vivid. He saw the faces of Marita and Ernesto, Rosa, Luis, and Gilberto as they sat at the table with him at the Hotel Malabo during the howling storm; slept across from and beside him on the night plane from Malabo to Paris; remembered clearly his exchange with Marita when they all said farewell at the airport in Paris and she pressed a page torn from a notebook into his hand and smiled her impish smile.
“
My address and telephone number if you get to Spain. My e-mail if you don’t. Please call me if you have time. I want to know what happens to you
.”
“
Nothing’s going to happen to me. I’m going home and back to work and grow old, nothing else
.”
“
You’re not a ‘nothing else’ person, Mr. Marten. I think you’re one of those people trouble follows around. We have to go. Please call me
.”
As if from far away he heard the sound of the television. A commercial for skin cream. Suddenly his head felt light. A wave of dizziness swept over him, and the room began to spin. In the next second he felt his heart start to race. Almost immediately he struggled to get his breath. Sweat seemed to engulf him. He felt hot and cold at the same time. He didn’t know what was happening. He put a hand out against the wall to steady himself, gasping for air as he did. He felt trapped, as if the walls were closing in. He wanted to get out of there. Be outdoors in the open. Then the sound of his own voice rose above that of the television and the deep rasp of his labored breathing. It came from far inside and was powerful and intense and filled with rage and chanting a litany of names over and over like some demonic mantra.
Striker, Hadrian, Conor White, Anne Tidrow
.
Striker, Hadrian, Conor White, Anne Tidrow
.
Striker, Hadrian, Conor
—
Suddenly there was another sound. That of a key being put into the front door. He pushed back against the wall and froze. A half second later the door opened.
“Nicholas?” a familiar voice called out. “Nicholas?”
Anne Tidrow.
He remembered seeing her close the door and lock it, then turn toward him. She had her purse and a garment bag over one arm and was pulling a cheap plastic rain cover from her hair. The rest he had little recollection of. All he knew now was that she was sitting in a chair by the television staring at him, her hair disheveled, the garment bag and her purse on the floor. And that he was leaning against the wall breathing deeply, his arms across his chest, trying not to look at her.
“Tell me what happened,” she said quietly.
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I—”
“Tell me.”
Slowly his eyes went to hers. “I grabbed you by the throat and shoved you against the wall. Hard. And held you there.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say. I asked.”
“Asked what?”
“Why them?”
“And what did I say?”
“Who are you talking about?” Marten could feel his jaw tighten in anger. “You knew exactly who I was talking about.”
“No. I didn’t. I still don’t.”
“Fuck you.”
“Tell me.”
“You want me to spell it out?”
“Yes.”
“The Spanish doctor and her medical students. I’ll name them for you. Marita, Ernesto, Rosa, Luis, Gilberto. Marita wasn’t even thirty. None of the students were more than twenty-three. They’re all dead! Murdered! Somewhere outside Madrid. God only knows what happened before they were killed.”
“Nicholas, I didn’t know. Believe me. How could I?”
“I said—fuck you.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Jesus God.” Marten walked over to the window and stood beside it staring out. He felt like putting his foot through it and yelling at the people below that there was a real live murderer in here and they should call the police.
“You might have killed me,” she said.
Marten’s head came around like a bullet, his eyes filled with hatred. “I should have killed you.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I should have.”
“What did you do?”
“I took my hands away and let you go.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No.”
“You cried.”
For a long moment Marten said nothing, just glared at her. “Yeah, well, fuck it,” he said finally. “One way or another Conor White and your damned AG Striker Company killed them. Whether you helped him plan what to do and how to do it, I don’t know. You do, but I don’t.”
“Nicholas,” she said quietly, “I’m terribly sorry about your friends, I really am, but I don’t know why you would think that I or Striker or Conor White had anything to do with it.”
“Why? I’ll tell you why. You thought I told them where the photographs were. You came after me, White went after them.”
“That’s not true.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Where is he now?”
“As far as I know, still in Malabo.”
“You have his cell number?”
Anne nodded.
Deliberately Marten walked over and picked up her purse, then fished out her BlackBerry and dropped it in her lap. “Call him. Ask him where he is.”
“Alright.” Anne picked up the BlackBerry and punched in a number. She waited a few seconds; then they both heard a male voice on the other end. It was sharp and curt, the British accent unmistakable.
“
Yes
.”
“It’s Anne. Where are you?” She paused as he said something, then, “I just wanted to know where you were if I needed you.” Another pause, then, “I’m still in Berlin. But don’t come here. I’m alright. Never mind what you see in the media.” There was a long pause as White said something more, then, “Yes, I think so. What?” Another pause, then, “No, I don’t think, Conor, I know,” she said testily, then finished. “I’ll be in touch.”
Marten watched her click off, then get up and put the Black-Berry away. “Where is he?” he said.
Anne hesitated.
“Where?”
“Madrid, Barajas Airport.”
“Madrid?”
“Yes.”
Marten leaned in so that his face was inches from hers. “The next time you talk to him, tell him from me that it was all for nothing. The people he killed didn’t know a damn thing about the photographs. I never said a word.”
Anne looked at him genuinely, even vulnerably. “Think whatever you want. But I didn’t know. Whatever Conor White did, he did on his own, or maybe, as I said before, at the urging of Sy Wirth or the people at Hadrian.”
Marten glared at her hatefully, then took a breath and crossed the room to again stare out the window. “When the hell are we getting out of here?”
“A van is picking us up”—she looked at her watch—“in five minutes.”
“Where?”
“Outside, on Ziegelstrasse.”
“A van is coming here?”
“Yes.”
“To do what, run us right past the noses of the five thousand cops looking for us?”
“Hopefully.”
“Hopefully?”
“The Hauptkommissar is getting closer. He must have interviewed people on the tour boat. Police are starting to put up roadblocks near the dock where we got off. If what I’ve put together doesn’t work, we can both look forward to spending the next thirty years in a German prison.”
Marten’s eyes fixed on hers. “God damn you. Your company. Hadrian. Conor White. All of you.”
“I’m sorry.”
8:50 A.M.
9:12 A.M.
The van had been there right on time, parked at the curb at the end of the alley where it met Ziegelstrasse. It was white and reasonably new. A man introduced by Anne as Hartmann Erlanger was at the wheel. He was probably in his late fifties and slim with thinning gray hair. He wore frameless glasses and a light brown cardigan over dark brown slacks, all of which gave him the appearance of a retired professor or antiques dealer, the role he seemed to be playing. Or at least that was what Marten remembered before he was ushered into the vehicle’s rear compartment and past a collection of a dozen or so straight-backed antique chairs. Immediately Erlanger removed an interior panel to reveal a tiny, cramped space over the left rear wheel.
“Get in, please,” he said in heavily accented English. “The police are stopping traffic at intersections, checking identification. I was lucky to get through. If we are stopped, please do not move, make no sound at all. Hold your breath if you can.”
Marten climbed in and twisted around, trying to make his six-foot-tall body somehow conform to the microscopic area. Then Erlanger put the panel back in place. Marten heard him lock it, and like that he was alone in the pitch black.
He remembered hearing Erlanger speak to Anne in English seconds later. “How is your German? There is every chance we will be stopped on the way out.”
He heard Anne begin to say something in German, and then the driver’s door slammed closed and Erlanger started the engine. Seconds later the van moved off.
Whatever else Anne had done, or hadn’t, or was involved with, there was no question that she had balls. Apparently she was going to sit up front with Erlanger as they attempted to pass through Franck’s roadblocks. Probably play Erlanger’s wife or sister or niece. There was every chance she’d get away with it, too. Not just because of her attitude and determination and her ability to speak German but because of the way she looked—the reason she’d gone out early and the reason for the garment bag she carried when she came back. In the minutes before they went out to meet Erlanger she’d put her dark hair up under a blond shoulder-length wig and replaced her jeans outfit and running shoes with a dowdy beige pantsuit and ugly orthopedic sandals. Her old clothes she stuffed back into the garment bag and brought with them.
Marten moved gingerly, trying to find some sort of comfort in his cramped, traveling prison. For a time he thought he had managed it and relaxed as best he could. Then the van hit a pothole in the roadway and he shot straight up, banging his head against the top of the enclosure. Seconds later they slowed and came to a stop. He heard a mix of voices and then that of a sharp-edged, authoritative male speaking German. Erlanger’s voice came next. They were at a police checkpoint.
Now what?
Suddenly he heard the van’s rear doors open. Then someone climbed inside. He held his breath as Erlanger had asked. There was the scrape of the antique chairs as they were moved aside. Immediately there was a thump on the van’s far wall, as if someone had hit it with a fist. Then came more. The vehicle’s interior paneling was being checked. Seconds later there was a bang on the outside of the panel just above his head. In the next instant he heard Anne say something in German, her voice calm and accommodating. Several seconds passed, and then he heard footsteps retreating and the sound of the rear doors closing. There was another exchange between Erlanger and the authoritative male. A silence followed, and then the van moved off.
Marten exhaled.
One checkpoint down. How many more to go?
9:32 A.M.
9:40 A.M.
Hauptkommissar Franck sat alone in a dark gray Audi parked along Lichtensteinallee in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s sprawling urban park. He stared blankly out at the drizzle and listened to the crackle of radio transmissions from his people in the field, most particularly the force he’d sent out in the last hour following his conversation with the
Monbijou’s
waiter. His description of the man and woman who had gotten off the tour boat at the Lustgarten dock, coupled with the reference he’d made to the Dallas Cowboys baseball cap the man had been wearing, all but matched the account the shamed motorcycle officers had given him in their report.
As a result he’d made a computerized grid of the surrounding area, then set up roadblocks at intersections and sent two hundred plainclothes and uniformed officers into it in a block-by-block search. Afterward he’d climbed into his car and driven here, then parked and waited.
Now he lifted a small container of orange juice, took a sip, and put it back in the car’s cup holder. The gray sky, the drizzle. He should be home sleeping, especially after the long night. Under other circumstances the suspects would already be in custody. Meaning he could get up late, have a cup of coffee with his wife, then go to the gym before meeting with the media. But these weren’t other circumstances.
“
We need to talk
.” He still heard the throaty female voice he’d heard when he’d answered his cell phone in the early-morning hours.
“When?”
“
Twenty minutes
.”
“Same place?”
“Yes.”
The place had been a darkened café just off Taubenstrasse near Gendarmenmarkt Square. The time, 3:30 A.M. It had been just the two of them, half seen in a chiaroscuro of near black-and-white created by the spill from a streetlamp outside. Elsa was older, as he was, but still exhilaratingly handsome, intellectually and sexually. The sexual activity between them had stopped years before, and he knew better than to try to relight it. Especially now and under the circumstances.
“This Nicholas Marten,” she’d said as she had walked behind the bar to pour them each a small cognac and then come around it to sit on a stool next to him.
“What about him?”
“Allegedly there are a number of photographs pertaining to the rebellion in Equatorial Guinea. They are why Marten came to Berlin, to collect them.”
“What are they of?”
“All we’ve been told is that they are strategically important. Read into it what you will.”
“By ‘allegedly’ you mean ‘if they exist.’”
“We are assuming they do.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Follow Marten. Find the pictures—the camera’s digital memory card may be with them. If it is, retrieve both. Afterward eliminate Marten and anyone with him.”
“To follow him, Elsa, I have to find him without his knowing. Something quite difficult in itself but complicated even more by the elevated profile of the case and the number of police personnel involved.”
“It can be done, Emil. We succeeded before in the old days and under far more difficult circumstances.”
“We didn’t have the media curse we have now.”
She hadn’t replied, just stared at him in silence. He’d been given an order. Excuses didn’t exist. Like the old days.
He remembered picking up his glass and taking a sip of the cognac, then looking at her directly. “Who is he?”
“Marten?”
“Yes.”
“You mean other than a landscape architect?”
He’d nodded.
“As yet, we don’t know.”
“Before he came to Berlin”—there was no point in keeping it a secret from her; she might have known anyway—“he had been in Equatorial Guinea. So had Anne Tidrow, the woman we think is with him.”
“Board member,” she’d said. “Striker Oil Company. Houston, Texas. They have a large oil operation in Equatorial Guinea.”
“So you do know.”
“Tell me the rest, Emil.”
“While they were there a priest was murdered. He was the brother of Theo Haas.”
“Did either of them have contact with the priest?”
“I don’t know. Any more than I know why Marten—”
“Murdered Theo Haas?”
“Yes.”
“Did he murder him?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Still, it is reason enough for you to kill him after you recover the photographs.”
“Yes, if your information is correct and he knows where they are.”
She’d looked at him with a steely silence, a gesture of condescension she’d employed for as long as he’d known her. Then she’d picked up her glass, drained it.
“I will give you further instructions as I have them,” she’d said, then set the glass on the bar and looked at him once more—either remembering the old days or trying to judge whether or not she could still trust him, he didn’t know which. “Please lock the door when you leave,” she’d said finally, then stood up and walked out.
Her instructions had come two hours later, waking him shortly after he’d fallen asleep on his office couch. He was to meet a man in the Tiergarten on the southern edge of Neuer Lake at ten o’clock that same morning. He would be a Russian in his midforties, bearded and a little overweight. His name was Kovalenko.