The Hadrian Memorandum (20 page)

52

BERLIN. THE APARTMENT AT 11 GIESEBRECHTSTRASSE.

10:47 P.M.

“We’re leaving now, Mr. Wirth. I’ll confirm when we’re airborne.” Conor White clicked off his BlackBerry, then clicked back on and punched in a number.

Across from him, Patrice and Irish Jack were already on their feet, putting away the cards they’d been playing, packing up, getting ready to leave.

“This is White.” He spoke into his BlackBerry. “File a flight plan for Málaga, Spain, and get clearance for takeoff. Wheels up in forty minutes.”

“Málaga?” Sennac said, his eyebrows raised, his Quebecois accent pronounced as always.

“Oui,”
Conor White nodded as he clicked off.

Irish Jack grinned. “Good pubs, good babes, good beaches. Merrily we roll along.”

“Jack,” White cautioned, “we’re not on holiday.”

“Aw, don’t spoil the fucker for us, Colonel.” He winked at Patrice. “What we got to do won’t take but a short few minutes. Will it now?”

“It shouldn’t,” White said deliberately and with none of the Irishman’s humor. “And won’t.”

“You’re right, Col o nel, it won’t.” Patrice glanced at Irish Jack, a warning to back off the levity. They’d known White’s obsession with recovering the photographs from the beginning. If they needed a reminder they needed only to remember what happened in the farm house outside Madrid. The grilling of the young Spanish doctor and her medical students had gone on to the point where White had had enough. Removing his balaclava and telling them to remove theirs had been a signal that they would give them one last chance to cooperate and that would be it. Killing one captive in front of others was an age-old means of attempting to terrify those left into divulging information when they had so far refused to provide. It hadn’t worked, and White ended it on the spot. Afterward he’d sincerely apologized to the three horrified students who remained, saying he had taken up too much of their time, and told the limo driver to take them back to their homes and parents in Madrid, knowing full well Patrice had rigged the limousine to explode twelve minutes after the engine was started. Seconds after they’d gone, White went into the barn where the Spanish gunman who’d brought him there waited with the car, and shot him where he stood.

For a professional soldier like Conor White to be fixated on accomplishing a mission was one thing. The depth of his passion was something else entirely. He’d told his men soon after the interrogation of the Spanish doctor and her students had begun that they had no idea where the pictures were and or even what their captors were talking about. But he’d gone on with the questioning anyway. Then personally managed their deaths.

Over the years both he and Irish Jack had lived and fought alongside extremely cruel and often fanatical men, but nothing matched what Conor White had done in Spain. He was clearly mad, and in a way neither of them had ever seen before, not even on the battlefield. Still, they would follow him into hell simply because they knew something larger was going on, the substance of which they, as foot soldiers, wouldn’t know about or be told. Whatever it was, it was clearly important enough for White to be giving everything within him to successfully execute. You took orders from men like that, fought alongside them and didn’t ask questions. It was what he and Irish Jack had signed on for and the kind of professionals they were.

RITZ-CARLTON BERLIN, SUITE 1422. 10:55 P.M.

“
Málaga
.” Dimitri Korostin’s call had come ten minutes earlier. His message had been to the point and exceedingly brief.
“They will probably arrive sometime after four in the morning, maybe later. The plane is a piston-engine Cessna 340. Its fuselage registration is D-VKRD. If there’s a change I will inform you. Sweet dreams. Get your own blow job and don’t worry so much.”
With that he’d hung up.

Sy Wirth was still at the writing table, his chin resting in his hands, his yellow legal pads piled up beside him, the remains of his club sandwich on a side table.

“Cessna 340. Fuselage registration D-VKRD. Flight plan filed Berlin to Málaga, Spain. ETA sometime after four in the morning.”

It was the information he’d passed on to Conor White, secure in the fact that if the Cessna changed course Dimitri would report to him within minutes, and in turn he would alert White. But until then White was to keep a safe distance behind and follow Marten’s Cessna directly to Málaga. Something he would do without question because that was the directive Wirth had purposely given him.

Let him go first. Give him time to get there, Wirth thought. It has to look as if he’s doing this on his own, that he’s out to protect himself, SimCo, and Hadrian at all costs and that Striker has no knowledge of it whatsoever.

Wirth glanced at the two BlackBerrys on the table beside him. One was his everyday phone. The other had a little piece of blue tape on the bottom to distinguish it. Calls made from it were rerouted through the Hadrian Worldwide Protective Services Company’s headquarters in Manassas, Virginia, making it appear as if they had originated from there.

It was the device he’d been using to contact Conor White since the meeting with Hadrian’s Loyal Truex and Striker’s chief counsel, Arnold Moss, in Houston when both companies had agreed to distance themselves from SimCo. The same meeting where, after Truex left, he’d told Moss it was time to distance themselves from Hadrian as well. Hence any calls he made to Conor White would be on telephone company records as having come directly from Hadrian. It was a concept he had devised himself, the system and means of execution very quietly put into play by a friend in the Houston office of the FBI.

11:07 P.M.

Wirth looked at his watch, then picked up his main BlackBerry and alerted the pilots of his Striker-owned Gulfstream on standby at Tegel Airport to be ready for takeoff in two hours. Done, he set the alarm on his watch for midnight, then got up, crossed to the bed, lay back, and closed his eyes, determined to get even a few minutes of sleep. It didn’t come quickly. His mind and senses overrode it.

In addition to normal air traffic, by one thirty there would be four more planes in the air, all headed for Málaga: Marten’s piston-engine Cessna and three chartered jets—Conor White’s Falcon 50, another with Dimitri’s people on board, and his own Striker Gulf-stream. A lot of money, a lot of men, a lot of aircraft to recover a single batch of photographs.

53

A LEARJET 55, SOMEWHERE OVER SOUTHERN FRANCE.

FUSELAGE REGISTRATION LX -C88T7.

AIRSPEED 270 MPH. ALTITUDE 39,000 FEET. PILOTS, 2.

MAXIMUM PASSENGERS, 7. ACTUAL PASSENGERS, 2.

SUNDAY, JUNE 6. 1:25 A.M.

Emil Franck could see Kovalenko hunched over a cell phone in the darkened forward cabin, every once in a while nodding and gesturing with his free hand. His first thought had been that he was in conversation with someone in Moscow—his wife or his children, or perhaps a mistress. Yet the idea that it was a domestic call was doubtful because it was almost three thirty in the morning Moscow time. A more credible scenario was that he was engaged with a superior, discussing the mission at hand and the details of what would happen if and when they recovered the materials they were after.

They’d lifted off from Berlin/Schönefeld just after nine thirty and two hours later gone into a holding pattern, a wide circle over the southern city of Toulouse that swung as far out as the Pyrenees on the French/Spanish border, waiting for the slower Cessna carrying Nicholas Marten and Anne Tidrow to catch up so they could follow it into Málaga or wherever else it might touch down. Wherever else because they knew Marten was not foolish enough to file a flight plan that would tell anyone exactly where he was going.

Franck looked to the laptop he’d been monitoring off and on since they’d left Berlin. On it, superimposed over a map of Western Europe, was a tiny green dot that represented the location of Marten’s Cessna, the information relayed by a powerful thumb-sized transmitter hidden inside the aircraft.

The setup was part of a complex operation carried out quickly and efficiently after his meeting with Kovalenko that morning at Neuer Lake when he’d tapped into his vast underground network of informers and several hours later learned of an urgent request to charter a fast plane—a jet or turboprop—to fly two passengers from a private airstrip near Potsdam to Málaga, Spain, early that evening. Quickly, he’d turned the fast-plane request into one for a slower aircraft, the piston-driven Cessna 340, then had the transmitter installed after the plane had been secured and was being serviced.

His current calculation put the Cessna some two hundred and fifty miles behind them, flying southwest at approximately 190 mph, the speed it had been averaging since he first turned the laptop on and picked up the plane’s location. It meant they were still on course for Málaga. Nothing had changed.

1:30 A.M.

Franck put the laptop aside and leaned back, hoping to get an hour or so of sleep, a prospect he knew was unlikely. Sleep in situations like these was not part of the drill. He glanced at the overnight bag on the seat across from him. In it was a fresh shirt, socks, underwear, a toothbrush, and a razor all tucked neatly alongside a Heckler & Koch MP5K compact submachine gun, which, along with the Glock 9 mm automatic Kovalenko carried in a holster clipped to his waistband, had been locked inside a storage compartment on the aircraft when they boarded.

Who the hell was Kovalenko anyway? A man with FSB credentials—the Federal Security Service Ministry of Internal Affairs—who had arrived on-scene in Berlin quicker than magic, literally within hours of his early-morning meeting with Elsa in the darkened café near Gendarmenmarkt Square, as if he’d already been in the city looking for Marten. And maybe he had. Franck might be a top cop in Berlin, a Hauptkommissar of Hauptkommissars, but he certainly didn’t know everyone or everything, and besides, he hadn’t heard from Elsa in ages. So there was no telling who or what she had been involved with since. She might well have been working with Kovalenko for years. That the Russian had known Marten from before, when he’d been a homicide investigator in Los Angeles, was a curiosity in itself. Stranger still was how they should both end up here circling over France at the orders of Moscow waiting for him to retrieve what were thought to be extremely important pictures. How had Elsa put it when reminding him Marten was wanted for the murder of Theo Haas?

“. . . it is reason enough for you to kill him after you recover the photographs.”

Which, other than his official role as the primary German investigator charged with apprehending Marten for Haas’s murder and his connections to the international law enforcement community that might be of help in the event Marten eluded them on the ground, was the reason he was there. Retrieving the photos for Moscow was only part of it. Once done—
if
done—Kovalenko and the pictures would disappear, and he would be left to clean up. Eliminate Marten and whoever was with him—in particular the Texas oil woman, Anne Tidrow, and/or anyone else who got in the way. That way there could be no trace back to Moscow, no hint that Russia was in any way involved.

1:37 A.M.

Franck glanced at the laptop’s screen. The Cessna was no longer moving. Instead its dot was frozen on the screen inland from the sea near the French city of Bordeaux. He sat up fast. As he did, he saw Kovalenko coming toward him.

“The Cessna has stopped,” he said quickly. “Did the transmitter crash? Did the plane?”

Kovalenko grinned. “Neither, Hauptkommissar. They’ve put down at Bordeaux-Mérignac Airport, most likely for fuel. An understandable delay. Nothing has changed.”

“What is our own fuel situation?” Franck said calmly, unhappy with his show of alarm and Kovalenko’s patronizing response.

“For now, more than adequate, Hauptkommissar.”

Franck squinted in the dim cabin light trying to see the Russian more clearly. Deliberately he changed the subject. “You told me you knew Nicholas Marten from before, that he had been a homicide investigator in Los Angeles.”

“I was there investigating a case involving the murder of Russian nationals. We had some dealings together. He had a different name then.”

“Why did he change it and move to another country and take up another profession? Corruption?”

“He’s not a policeman at heart, Hauptkommissar. I think he wanted to wholly extricate himself from that world. He preferred to see the beauty in life instead of bearing such close witness to the horror of what the human race does to itself every day.”

“Yet now he’s going to become part of that same horror.”

“It is his fate, Hauptkommissar.” Kovalanko pointed a finger skyward. “Written long ago in the stars. At least he will have had a few years of peace and, hopefully, joy.”

“You believe in fate, Kovalenko?”

Kovalenko smiled. “If I didn’t, I, too, would be out planting flowers. Who the hell wouldn’t? If it weren’t for fate, everyone in the world would be out planting flowers. It would seem a very reasonable thing to do. Few, like Marten, recognize what’s happening and do something about it. The rest of us merely accept it and simply go about the business at hand.” The humor left Kovalenko’s eyes. “Until, as Marten is about to discover, our true fate catches up.”

“And then?”

“And then—that’s that.”

1:45 A.M.

54

FRANCE, BORDEAUX-MÉRIGNAC AIRPORT. 1:50 A.M.

Marten crossed the lighted tarmac in the area dedicated to civil aviation. A dozen planes were parked equidistant from each other. All dark. Locked for the night. The thirteenth, the Cessna D-VKRD, was farthest out, its interior lights on. By now it would have been fueled and ready for takeoff. Anne and their pilot, Brigitte Marie Reier, having used the terminal’s toilet facilities and had something to eat, would be in the plane waiting for him.

Before, he’d purposely stayed back, remaining with the aircraft, letting the women go inside first. There’d been no real reason, other than to be polite and wanting to stretch his legs, and to be alone and think. And for a brief time he had, reflecting back on his conversation with Anne.

Memories of his late, beloved Caroline had moved him deeply, as had the horrors of Equatorial Guinea. The deaths that occurred there screamed out, leaving nothing but unfathomable anger and damning hatred for the carnival of perpetrators. All of it complicated by his own mental and physical exhaustion.

The truth was he was coming apart. He’d thought he’d left the savagery of violent death behind when he’d begun his new life in England. Then, from nowhere, he’d been thrust headlong into a world far darker and more monstrous than anything he’d seen on the streets of L.A. Suddenly he was afraid he was no longer capable of operating in it, that the self-protective, steel-edged coping mechanism every homicide cop develops to deal with murder on a daily basis had left him. If he was to continue, he would need that attitude and those skills. Without them, he might very well be killed himself and take Anne along with him. Especially if he had to go up against Conor White and whatever mercenaries he was sure to have accompanying him.

Instinct told him to walk away now. Say to hell with Anne, the photographs, Joe Ryder, even the president. Leave the Cessna where it was without a word or a note or anything. Just find his way back to Manchester and the quiet beauty and emotional safety of his life there. Make believe none of this had ever happened.

He might have done it, too, or at least tried, if he hadn’t suddenly been jolted by the thundering roar of a corporate jet taking off less than two hundred yards from where he stood. He’d watched it disappear into the night sky, its exterior navigational lights quickly fading to nothing. In that moment he heard Erlanger’s words again.

“Stay away from the old contacts. You got away with it this once. For your sake, don’t try it again.”

Maybe they’d gotten away with it and maybe they hadn’t.

Immediately he thought of the jet aircraft he’d requested and then of the slow ’54 Chevy of a Cessna they’d been given. Had it been all that was available or was there some other reason?

In the next second he’d gone to the plane and walked around it, looking at the engines and under the wings, then examined the fuselage and tail assembly as best he could in the faint light. Afterward he climbed inside and poked around in the same way, looking under the instrument panel, the seats, the small luggage area, anywhere some kind of electronic transmitting device might have been planted. Then he’d heard the women coming back and quickly finished, stepping out just as they arrived.

A few insignificant words passed between them, and then it was his turn to go into the terminal. He’d used the restroom, then found a cafeteria area with Wi-Fi hookups and given the lone young man he found working at a laptop twenty euros to borrow it for a few moments—“to check my e-mail and stuff.” In those minutes he’d done what he’d not had the chance to do since Theo Haas had been murdered, clicked on Google Maps and pinpointed the location of the town Haas had pointed him toward, Praia da Rocha, in the Algarve region of Portugal’s south coast. He’d found it nestled among the myriad of small beach communities near the city of Portimão. The nearest major airport was in Faro, which was close to the Spanish border and probably not two hundred miles from Málaga. Importantly, there were rental car facilities at the airport, most of which opened at six in the morning.

Faro was close enough to Málaga for Brigitte to radio a last-minute amended flight plan to Málaga air traffic control saying her passengers had requested she give them a tour of the coastline and would return to her original flight plan when they had finished. Not an unusual request for civil aviation traffic. So, if he chose to bypass Málaga, Faro would be the clear option. Anne could rent a car, and they could take what on the Google map appeared to be no more than a thirty-minute drive to Praia da Rocha. So he had a workable alternative, but he would wait until they were approaching Málaga before he made a final decision.