The Hadrian Memorandum (6 page)

13

“I believe you are Mr. Marten,” the woman said as she reached him.

Marten looked at them warily. “Yes, why?”

“My name is Anne Tidrow. This is Conor White.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m a member of the board of directors of the AG Striker Oil and Energy Company,” Anne Tidrow said. “Mr. White is head of the security firm we have retained to safeguard our workers in Equatorial Guinea. We understand that you were caught up in the rebellion in the south where a German priest was killed. Since Striker has many employees in various regions of Bioko, we are naturally concerned for their safety. Anything you could tell us about what you saw or experienced might help us be better prepared to protect our people.”

“I went over the details at great length with army interrogators. Why don’t you ask them?”

“Unfortunately the army does not share that kind of information with us, Mr. Marten,” Conor White said, his accent noticeably British. “Might we have a few moments of your time? And in private, if you don’t mind. This room is filled with large ears, and we wouldn’t want to inadvertently create a climate of fear where there is none. Or at least where we hope there is none.”

Marten hesitated. Here was a situation he could hardly have imagined. The oil company’s chief security contractor, a man photographed supplying arms to the rebels, standing in front of him asking him to give him details of what he knew about the rebellion, and the woman with him, a member of Striker’s board of directors, going so far as to mention Father Willy, though not by name. Maybe the army didn’t share information with SimCo, but Conor White undoubtedly knew about the photographs and possibly knew that Marten had spent time alone with the man who took them. It meant that he, like the army, suspected Marten knew where the pictures were and wanted to retrieve them as quickly and quietly as possible. That explained Conor White and why he was here. What about Anne Tidrow?

It was interesting to wonder why she was even in Bioko, let alone here with White. There was little doubt she knew about the photos, too, or White wouldn’t have dared expose his involvement with the rebels by bringing her along. So why would she be trying to protect SimCo when that was the firm her company had hired to safeguard its employees from the insurgency it was helping to fuel? It was the same question he had asked Father Willy.

“I came in here hoping to find a gin and tonic,” Marten said finally. “Then I ran into my friends, and so far a waiter hasn’t been by.”

“Gin and tonic sounds good,” White said. “Why don’t we see about it at the bar?”

Marten nodded. “Why not?”

7:35 P.M.

Conor White led them to a corner of the bar that was away from the crowd and relatively quiet, seemingly safely devoid of the “large ears” he had referred to. An aging Asian barman wearing a dark toupee, who looked like he’d been there since the building was erected, came over, and White ordered drinks. As he did, Marten pulled back a worn rattan barstool for Anne Tidrow.

“Thank you.” she said, smiling.

“How did you know my name and that I was, as you put it, caught up in the rebellion in the south? Who told you?”

“My people,” White answered for her. “We often monitor army radio communications. It helps us keep up on what’s happening inside the country.”

“It does until you get caught.”

White grinned. “We are not in the business of geting caught, Mr. Marten.”

Just then the barman brought the drinks, and White handed them around.

Anne Tidrow picked up her glass and looked at Marten. “Perhaps you could tell us something of your experiences during the fighting. What went on, what you saw.”

“I wasn’t exactly in the middle of it.” Marten picked up his glass and took a solid pull at his drink. “What I remember was seeing two little native boys come running along a very muddy road in the pouring rain yelling for Father Willy Dorhn, the priest you were referring to. A couple of minutes later I heard gunfire from the village. The next thing, a couple of army trucks full of soldiers showed up. The first one stopped beside Father Dorhn and the boys. Soldiers jumped out. One of them hit the father with a rifle butt hard and knocked him down. Maybe you don’t know, but he was an old man. Another soldier did the same to the boys. One right after the other. I found out later all three of them died. The soldiers in the second truck came after me.” Marten paused; then his eyes came up to hers and held there. “What else do you want to know?”

“Did you get to the village beforehand?” Now it was Conor White asking the questions. “By that I mean were you there earlier, before the rebels came?”

“I never said the rebels came. I’d met Father Willy several hours earlier, and he took me into the rain forest to show me some native plants. I’m a landscape architect. That’s why I came to Bioko. To study the local flora for some clients back home. It was afterward, when we came down out of the jungle and were nearing the village, that all the trouble started. The father told me to run, and I did.”

“Were you in his church? His living quarters?”

“Why?”

“Mr. White is just trying to get some sense of what was going on before the rebels attacked.” Anne Tidrow took a sip of her drink and set the glass on the bar.

“You people keep telling me the rebels attacked. I never saw a rebel. Only soldiers.”

“But you were in his church and his living quarters,” Conor White pressed him.

“I met him in the village square, if that’s what you want to call it.” Marten deliberately locked eyes with White. “First it was the rebels. Now you’ve asked me twice if I was in the priest’s church or his living quarters. Just what is it you’re trying to find out?”

“If he was encouraging the rebellion. If you saw anything that might indicate that.”

“No. I didn’t.”

“It might interest you to know the savagery has escalated greatly in the last weeks. The army is literally slaughtering suspected insurgents as well as their families, the elderly and women and children included, and afterward burning their villages to the ground. In response the people are butchering soldiers and bystanders alike. It is becoming very dangerous to have our people here, both mine and the employees of Striker Oil.”

“Why don’t you get them out?”

“Because if we did we might well not get back in again for a very long time. Striker has a major investment here. So, at the moment, that option is not realistic.”

“Well, that’s your business, not mine.” Marten’s eyes left White and went to Anne Tidrow. “If you don’t mind, I’ve had a long couple of days. I want to join my friends at the table so that we’re all together when the soldiers come to escort us to the airport. Maybe you haven’t heard, but the army kicked us out of the country. We’re leaving on the ten-o’clock flight to Paris, assuming it gets off. One way or another we’ve still got a lot of night ahead of us.”

Suddenly the thunderous beat of a bass drum rocked the room. Instantly everything went silent. Even the storm seemed to quiet down. Anne looked to Conor White.

“Here we go again.”

In the next second an honor guard made up of a dozen black African soldiers in gold-and-blue dress uniforms and wearing white gloves appeared in the main doorway. Each carried a gold-plated AK-47.

Again came the thundering boom of the drum. Immediately eight more soldiers in the same uniforms marched smartly into the room and stopped in unison. One had a large bass drum harnessed in front of him. The others carried gold-plated trumpets. In unison they raised them to their lips and blasted out what sounded like some kind of fanfare.

“President Tiombe is coming,” Conor White said quietly. “He does this at whim, whenever it is his pleasure.”

Marten looked toward the doorway as the drummer and trumpet soldiers stepped to the side and a lone black African in an elegantly tailored full-dress military uniform entered. He was tall and wide at the same time and visibly soft, giving more the appearance of a buffoon than of the warrior-king of a merciless army. For an instant he surveyed the room, then without further hesitation started forward, accompanied left and right by the gold-plated-AK-47-carrying guards.

“What’s going on?” Marten asked.

“He’s making himself known to the foreign guests,” White said. “He wants to be recognized as Equatorial Guinea’s great host and benefactor.”

Marten watched as president/dictator Francisco Ngozi Tiombe worked the room like a politician, choosing this person and that at random, shaking hands, chatting briefly, and sometimes touching them warmly on the shoulder as he moved on to the next. Thirty seconds and a dozen handshakes later he stopped in front of them.

“Good evening, Ms. Tidrow, Mr. White,” he said in a low rumbling voice and in impeccable English. “I trust you are enjoying your stay.”

“Yes, of course, Excellency, thank you,” Conor White said, bowing slightly at the waist as he did. President Tiombe smiled, and then his eyes shifted to Marten.

“This is Mr. Marten, Excellency,” White offered. “Unfortunately circumstances are such that he has to leave your most hospitable country this evening.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Marten.” Tiombe smiled. “Please say good things about my nation and my people when you reach your home. I look forward to welcoming you personally the next time you visit Malabo.”

“That is most generous, Mr. President.” Marten nodded but did not bow. “Thank you.”

Tiombe fixed Marten with a stare that could only be called chilling and then abruptly moved on.

“Now you can say you’ve met the president of Equatorial Guinea,” Conor White said with a smile.

“All the more reason to be leaving.” Marten finished his drink and set the glass on the bar. “I hope I’ve been some help to you.”

“It was kind of you to take the time to talk with us,” Anne Tidrow smiled.

“The pleasure was mine,” Marten said and, with a nod to Conor White, walked off.

White waited until Marten was out of earshot, then turned to Anne. “What do you think?”

“He knows more than he’s telling.”

“I agree.” White picked up his drink. “The question is what to do about it.”

7:52 P.M.

14

HEADQUARTERS, AG STRIKER OIL & ENERGY COMPANY,

HOUSTON, TEXAS. STILL THURSDAY, JUNE 3. NOON.

A deeply troubled forty-seven-year-old Josiah “Sy” Wirth, chairman of AG Striker, stared out at the glare of the city from the window of his sixty-fourth-floor office. Tall and lanky, his face creased by time, the Texas sun, and the lifelong strain of intense ambition, he wore faded jeans, a weathered, pearl-studded western shirt, and ostrich-skin boots. He looked more like a cowboy just in from the range than like the top executive of a booming oil company.

“By all accounts, Mr. Loyal Truex landed his Gulfstream an hour ago,” he said coldly. “Theoretically, he’s on his way here now.” Abruptly he turned from the window to look at Striker’s general counsel, Arnold Moss, a sixty-two-year-old widower and long-ago-transplanted New Yorker, sitting in a chair across from him. “It doesn’t take that long to get from Ellington Field to here. So where the hell is he? Lost? Or did he stop to get laid along the way?” Wirth sat down at his desk and picked up a large unlit cigar from a red, white, and blue ashtray shaped like the state of Texas.

Like his personality, like Texas itself, Wirth’s office was huge, if coldly austere, all chrome and glass with pockets of overstuffed cowhide furniture arranged here and there in tidy groups for simultaneous separate conversations. A long side table held bottles of water, a stack of cheap Styrofoam cups, and a large thermos of coffee; a well-worn mesquite-topped bar stood in a far corner. In front of the window was the room’s centerpiece, Wirth’s enormous desk, ten feet long by four feet wide, its glass top an inch thick. On it were his essentials: an open laptop computer, a hand-tooled leather cigar box, a twelve-inch-high cigar lighter in the form of an oil derrick, the Texas-shaped ashtray, a slate gray telephone console, two lined yellow legal pads, an electric pencil sharpener, and four freshly sharpened number 2 Ticonderoga 1388 pencils lined up perpendicular to each other exactly two inches apart. Other than his executive desk chair and a mesquite credenza behind the desk itself, there was very little else. No photographs of wife and children. No bound volumes of corporate handbooks lining ornate bookshelves. No portraits of company founders on the walls, which, except for a large AG STRIKER company logo stenciled in raised gold leaf across from his polished-steel office door, were wholly bare.

A buzzer sounded on Wirth’s console.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Truex,” a female voice responded.

“Send him in.” Wirth said, then looked at Moss, “He’s here.”

“So I gather,” Moss said as the door opened and Loyal Truex, founder and chief executive of the private security contractor Hadrian Protective Services, entered.

“Finally, the man himself,” Wirth snapped. “Where the fuck have you been?”

“Traffic accident. Luckily not mine,” Truex said in a quiet kind of southern drawl.

“Ever think to pick up the phone and call? Or don’t you think this meeting’s important enough?”

“You sound like my mother, Sy.” Truex smiled easily, then plunked down on the arm of an overstuffed chair and made himself at home.

Loyal Truex was forty-three and just over six feet tall. With close-cropped black hair and the muscular build of the former U.S. Army Ranger he was, everything about him—calm, boyish humor, self-made wealth—reflected confidence. His clothes mirrored it: close-fitting, hand-tailored navy suit, open white shirt, plain-toed Italian dress shoes, diamond-studded gold bracelet on one wrist, Rolex watch on the other. That he had spent most of the morning circumventing bad weather while piloting his own Gulfstream jet from Virginia to Texas and after that inching through traffic for nearly an hour seemed to have had no more effect on him than Wirth’s urgent summoning of him to Houston from his Manassas office at six that morning. Still, he was there as promised and ready to go to work.

Wirth got to it quickly. “The Bioko photographs.”

“You want to know where we stand with them.” Truex glanced at Arnold Moss, then looked back to Wirth. “It’s the reason I’m here.”

“I know where the fuck we stand with them. We don’t have them! The reason you’re here is because I want to know what Washington knows. How much you’ve told them or they’ve found out. How closely they’ve been monitoring this.”

“As far as I know, Sy, it’s still all in-house, yours and mine,” Truex said quietly. “Communication with Bioko, with Conor White, is the same as it’s been with you—all done over our own secure lines. The SimCo people in Malabo have been instructed to say nothing to anyone, and they won’t. They’re exceptionally loyal to White and closed-mouth anyway. On the other hand, if Washington has been monitoring the situation in a way we don’t know—which I doubt, for the simple reason that this is a very recent, low-key development that would take time to filter down—I would have heard about it, slick, fast, and hard. As for the photographs themselves, White’s best operators went after them and came up with nothing, so he brought in General Mariano’s army unit.”

“Mariano?” Wirth erupted. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“Easy, Sy.” Truex put up a calming hand. “White’s people were getting nowhere, so he asked Mariano for help. Only his sector knows about them, no one else. His men were told they were looking for unauthorized photographs taken by a village priest and anything found was to be brought directly to Mariano himself. As far as I know, only White and a few villagers have actually seen them. Which is how White got them in the first place, through one of the villagers. The result of it all was that White’s operators and Mariano’s turned over every stone and tree root in the area looking for them, taking down a lot of people in the process. A hundred killed at least. So if the pictures were there they would have been found. But they weren’t. What that means is there’s a very good chance the priest destroyed them himself to avoid being killed.” Truex smiled. “Which is probably why nobody’s found them. Because they no longer exist.”

“And maybe they do exist and are in some fucking place nobody knows about,” Wirth spat, anger, impatience, and displeasure crawling all over him. The next came out of the blue. “Who the hell is this landscape guy, Nicholas Marten?”

“Apparently no more than he appears. An American expat visiting Bioko from England doing plant research for clients. He met the priest by happenstance. That’s all we know.”

“That’s all you know?”

“Sy, we’re working on it.”

“I asked you to come here with hard information. You give me ‘as far as I knows’ and ‘maybes.’ And now you add the ‘incidental information’ that the army knows about them, too. Do I have to go over there and take care of this myself? What the fuck do I need you and White for? Shit!”

Abruptly Wirth pushed out of his chair and walked off, trying to digest the reality of what was going on. The information about the existence of the photos had come to them barely twelve hours earlier in Conor White’s urgent e-mail to Truex. That White had known about them earlier and not reported it, and that he had enlisted a special section of the Equatorial Guinea army to help search for them, made things worse because now too many people knew about it. Worse yet, none of it had done any good. The photos were still missing.

Wirth reached the far side of his office, where the AG Striker logo was, then stopped and turned back. “If those photographs become public the whole Bioko field project is dead, and so is this company. If the media doesn’t make certain of it, Washington will.” He pointed his unlit cigar at Moss. “What the fuck do we do, Arnie?”

The New Yorker in him aside, Arnold Moss’s thirty-odd years in the oil business had given him a shrewd appreciation for the complexities of life and a habit of taking the time to think things through. For a long moment he sat there in silence, doing just that.

“When this whole thing came together,” he said finally, “in exchange for protecting our investment and interests in Equatorial Guinea, we agreed to give Mr. Truex and his Hadrian company seven percent of our gross profit from all crude oil pumped from the Bioko field until the year 2050. By our projections and his, that figure is staggering. That means Mr. Truex has considerable interest in making sure the photographs, if indeed they do exist, are not made public. Because if they are, as you correctly implied, Sy, Washington will simply void the contract, make certain our leases are terminated, and put together a new deal elsewhere. And we, along with Mr. Truex, will end up with nothing.” Moss got up and went to the side table to pick up a Styrofoam cup and fill it from the thermos. Holding it, he looked back.

“That said, we have to assume the photographs do exist and will be publicly exposed. We have to act accordingly. Starting immediately the AG Striker and Hadrian companies have to distance themselves from SimCo and Conor White. Build a legal and public relations defense against them and be prepared to sever our relations with White and SimCo the instant the photos show up. How they’re delivered, whether by this Nicholas Marten or by someone else or if they somehow just show up on the Internet, doesn’t matter. Whatever is in them, whatever they reveal about White’s people delivering arms to the rebels, it has to look as if it were SimCo’s doing alone, that it was their agenda entirely and one we knew nothing about.” Moss walked back to his chair and sat down.

“AG Striker is an oil field management and exploration company,” he said, “nothing else. Hadrian is a contractor for us in Iraq only. Should it ever be proven that we and Hadrian were, in any way, involved with SimCo to exploit the revolution in Equatorial Guinea for our own gain, everything we’ve been blessed with and worked so long and hard to protect is over. Not only that, there is every chance the Department of Justice will look into it, with Congressman Joe Ryder hanging over their shoulder. Which means not only very bad publicity and an enormous legal expense to defend us but the stark reality that some or all of us will go to prison. You, Sy, and Mr. Truex included. Should we look to Washington for help, they won’t be anywhere in sight. To them, our agreement will have never existed. That’s the way it is.”

Josiah Wirth stared at his chief counsel in silence, then looked to Loyal Truex. “We send Conor White over, then what? Who protects us in E.G.?”

“We do.”

“You?”

Truex nodded. “If it’s done right, and Washington is convinced SimCo will take the fall cleanly, they’ll approve it. They won’t like it, but they’ll approve it because of the sheer scope of the thing and because they won’t dare risk losing what’s there to the maneuverings of a foreign power. Once they do, we’ll bring in a new contractor, one squeaky clean. Maybe Belgian or Dutch. I’ll find out exactly who.”

“That means telling them what’s going on.”

“Yes, it does.”

Wirth stared at Truex, then again looked to Arnold Moss. “Tell him he’s fucking crazy.”

Moss shook his head. “He’s not crazy, Sy, he’s right. They should know what’s happened and what we’re doing to correct it. Despite what Mr. Truex has said, they may already know and wonder why we haven’t told them. If they don’t and find out later, they’ll be understandably upset. Enough so that they might just cancel the contract anyway and make a deal with another oil company even if we’re lucky enough to retrieve the photographs before something happens. Besides, if we include them now, they may be able to help.”

“Arnie.” Wirth’s anger was building. “That’s the same as telling them we can’t control our own goddam business. Contractually we’re in bed with them for years on down the road. We can’t have them wondering what the fuck’s next or they’ll chop us off at the knees. Once that happens, forget ever having them go to bat for us again. And I mean ever! And it won’t make a longhorn’s-fucking-ass difference what party or administration’s in power.”

Moss smiled delicately. “Sy, you pay me for advice. This time I suggest you take it. Washington is not a group we can ignore and then apologize to later. We’re not buying land or oil rigs here, we’re helping facilitate a revolution. They need to know what’s going on and understand that we would very much appreciate their help in resolving the situation. There are times in life when honesty really is the best policy. This is one of them.”

Wirth stared at him. He hated all this. Hated that it had happened. Hated to have anything go this far out of his control. Especially when it revolved around something as simple and stupid as a few photographs snapped by a nosy priest. On the other hand, he knew he had to consider the counsel of Arnie Moss, a man he had known for years and to whom he had entrusted Striker’s legal wrangling ever since he had become chairman of the company.

Finally he looked to Truex. “Get in your Gulfstream and go back to Washington. Call them from the plane, tell them you’re coming and that it’s important they wait for you. You should be in their offices by seven, maybe eight their time. When you get there, tell them what’s happened and make me the bad guy, say that I wanted to go after the photographs on my own. That I hoped we’d retrieve them before anything came of it. But you disagreed and came here to talk me out of it because you felt it was important they know what has happened, not just because we’re all partners in this but because you value who they are and what they believe in and want their muscle and help. You convinced me you were right and went back to meet with them. That will explain the time delay if they already know what’s going on.” Wirth turned to Arnold Moss. “You okay with that?”

“Yes.” Moss nodded.

Wirth looked to Truex. “You?”

“Yes.”

“Call me when it’s done.”

“You bet.” Truex looked from one man to the other, then started for the door.

“Loyal,” Wirth said, and Truex turned back. “Dracula Joe Ryder in is Iraq with a group of other congressmen looking for any dirty crumb he can lay to us.”

“I know.”

“After you’re through with Washington, go there. Find Ryder and hold his hand. Be as gracious as you can be. Kiss his ass without looking like it. Show him anything he wants. Make him feel we have absolutely nothing to hide.”

Truex grinned. “There is no dirt, Sy. No cakes or crumbs, either. Never has been. We all know that, don’t we?” With a glance and a nod at Arnold Moss, he pulled open the door and went out.