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 G.o.ddam business. Contractually we"re in bed with them for years on down the road. We can"t have them wondering what the f.u.c.k"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-f.u.c.king-a.s.s 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 a.s.s 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.
15.
Sy Wirth and Arnold Moss watched the door close behind Truex. When it had, Wirth looked to his general counsel. "I agree with what you said about SimCo. We set up to distance ourselves from it and Conor White as quickly and quietly as possible. At the same time, we have to distance ourselves from Hadrian and Truex. Even if it means opening the door to Joe Ryder and his congressional commission and inviting them in. Even if it means giving back every penny of the nine-hundred-plus million we"ve made in Iraq. It"s nothing compared to what we stand to make in the future."
Wirth crossed to the window and looked out at the garish midday brightness of the city. "We needed a private security contractor for our expanded operations in Equatorial Guinea," he mused out loud. "We felt Hadrian was already stretched too thin in Iraq. Also, there were some questions concerning our partnership there. Still, we trusted Hadrian and asked Loyal Truex to recommend a reliable contractor."
Wirth turned and looked at Moss directly. "SimCo was a small subcontractor to Hadrian in Iraq. Truex liked the company and its honcho, Conor White, who he"d worked with before and who had outstanding credentials. Because of that he introduced us. We liked what we saw in White and hired his company. How could we know SimCo was a front for Hadrian, which was trying to expand its operations into West Africa without the questionable stigma of Iraq? What Hadrian, through SimCo, was attempting to gain in firing up the insurgency in Equatorial Guinea we had no idea whatsoever. As you said, Arnie, AG Striker is an oil field management and exploration company, nothing else.
"Hadrian could try to deny it by saying we have a contract that says we helped create SimCo and why. But if they did, they would have to produce the contract itself, the hard copy of which, as we all know, is locked in a great big Mosler safe in one of the most secure buildings in the world. If they wanted to produce an electronic copy from Washington"s database, they would have to have Washington"s approval, and that is something that would never happen. If Truex were to complain to them privately later, his going there now, and then on to meet with Ryder in Iraq, would only make it look as if he knew there was trouble all along and was trying to get everyone on his side before it blew up.
"If somehow the photographs are made public before we get them, it won"t be AG Striker that"s under Joe Ryder and the Justice Department"s laser beam, it will be Hadrian and SimCo."
Wirth went to the mesquite-topped bar in the corner, poured himself a shot of Johnnie Walker Blue, and drank it in one swallow. Then he locked eyes with Arnold Moss and swore an oath.
"I am not going to lose the Bioko field, Arnie. Not to Hadrian. Not to Conor White or Joe Ryder. Not to Washington. I"m not going to lose it to anyone."
16.
AIR FRANCE FLIGHT 959, MALABO SAINT ISABEL AIRPORT.
TO PARIS, CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT.
STILL THURSDAY, JUNE 3. 10:30 P.M.
The seating in the economy cabin of the Airbus 319 was three and three divided by a center aisle, and the four-man army patrol that had escorted Marten and Marita and her people to the airport had commandeered one complete row for them. Window to aisle on the far side were Marita, Rosa, and Ernesto. Window to aisle on the other were Marten, Luis, and Gilberto. The flight had taken off during a lull in the storm, and the cabin lights had been lowered shortly after that. Save for the occasional pa.s.senger using an overhead light to read or work, most of the pa.s.sengers slept, more out of relief to have escaped a long weather-related delay in Malabo than anything else.
Of them all, probably none was more thankful than Marten. Emotionally drained and enormously relieved to be airborne out of the army"s grasp, he only now realized the depth of his exhaustion. He"d been on Bioko for barely five days, but it seemed a lifetime. Still wired and restless, he tried to sleep, but it was impossible. Across the aisle, he could see the red-haired Ernesto awake, too, listening to something over a headset. A deep exhale and he turned to look out the window in time to see the Airbus break through the lingering cloud deck into a clear, moonlit night.
10:38 P.M.
He lay back and closed his eyes once more. They were still hours from Paris, and he wanted to sleep for as many of them as he could. To escape, for a time at least, everything that had happened in the last days.
Two minutes pa.s.sed. And then four. And then eight. Marten sat up. Sleep wasn"t going to come and he knew it. Again he looked out the window, watching as the plane banked, beginning its turn over the island. The darkness below played against the quiet whine of the engines, and for a moment he thought the combination might lull him to sleep. Then he caught sight of three reddish points of light on the ground. They were probably twenty or more miles apart in what should have been the deep black of heavily forested land. In his mind there was no question what they were. Burning villages. If he was right, either the insurrection was escalating and moving quickly north, or President Tiombe"s army was taking preventive action and destroying suspected rebel townships in a show of force. Maybe it was both. But whatever was happening, hundreds of people were being killed, and the rebellion-justified as it might be against Tiombe and his brutal, corrupt regime-was being made all the worse by Conor White"s supplying of arms to the insurgents because the army"s ma.s.sive response to it was so barbaric. In Father w.i.l.l.y"s words, "extreme, even savage cruelty." In Conor White"s, "The army is literally slaughtering suspected insurgents along with their friends and families, the old and women and children included, and afterward burning their villages to the ground." To Marten it seemed as if the war were being purposely escalated on both sides. The question was, why and why now?
What had President Harris told him in England barely a week earlier? "Father Dorhn has been in Equatorial Guinea for fifty years. If anyone knows what"s going on there he does, and from his letter he seems to know quite a lot."
Well, Father w.i.l.l.y did know a lot. And he was dead because of it. So were the two young boys with him. How many hundreds, maybe thousands of untold others had been annihilated in the course of things? How many were being killed right now, at this moment, twenty thousand feet beneath him in villages along the way?
Marten turned from the window, pulling down the shade as he did. As if somehow it would shield him from the horror going on below.
At almost the same moment a flight attendant entered from the first cla.s.s cabin, abruptly pulling the separating curtain closed behind her as she did. For the briefest instant Marten caught a glimpse of the handful of pa.s.sengers seated there. To his surprise, Anne Tidrow was among them. She was dressed casually in dark slacks and tailored jacket and was in an aisle seat near the rear. Next to her was an older, gray-haired man in a business suit. Whether they were traveling together or were just seatmates he had no way to tell.
10:50 P.M.
Marten was angry and on edge and probably too tired to be trying to sort things out, but he kept at it anyway because he couldn"t help it and because in this situation, his mind had no off switch.
"Tell them what you have seen!" Father w.i.l.l.y yelled just before he was killed.
By that he"d meant the photographs.
To President Harris and to Joe Ryder, especially, their significance would go far beyond showing SimCo mercenaries secretly arming the insurgents. The pictures would give immediate credibility to the theory Theo Haas had put forward to Joe Ryder about the Striker/Hadrian collusion in Iraq having been extended to Equatorial Guinea.
It was, he knew, pure speculation on his part. Still, he had seen what he had seen, and what Father w.i.l.l.y had so forcefully and tragically sent him to report. The trouble was that just telling them would not be enough. He needed hard evidence-the photographs themselves and if possible the camera"s memory card. The same hard evidence the Equatorial Guinean government wanted as proof that an outside force was fueling the rebellion. The same hard evidence, he was certain, that Conor White and Anne Tidrow had been after but for the opposite reason: to keep their actions from being found out.
Clearly both sides believed the photos existed and would do whatever was necessary to retrieve them. But so far neither had apparently succeeded. Even if Marten accepted their belief that the pictures did exist, he had no more way of knowing where they were than the others. The whole thing was, and remained, a mystery that only Father w.i.l.l.y could resolve. And Father w.i.l.l.y was dead.
10:55 P.M.
For no particular reason Marten looked across the center aisle to the pa.s.sengers in the rows of darkened seats behind him. To his surprise he saw a man in a striped shirt and white trousers sitting under a reading light watching him. At Marten"s glance he looked away, clumsily picking up a magazine he had in his lap. He was heavyset and jowly, and Marten knew he had seen him somewhere before. Where, he didn"t know. A moment later his gaze shifted across the center aisle. Two seats down another man was awake and reading. He was dressed in tan khakis and a light blue golf shirt and was considerably younger than the jowly man. Marten had seen him before, too. In the airport maybe. Perhaps that was where he"d seen the other man as well.
No.
Suddenly he remembered where he"d seen them both. In the bar at the Hotel Malabo. The heavyset, jowly man in white he"d had to step around on his way in. The other had been sitting halfway down the bar when he"d been talking with Anne Tidrow and Conor White. If they were on the flight by chance, then why had the jowly man been watching him? Or had he been watching him?
10:57 P.M.
Marten turned out the light over his seat and again closed his eyes. He was starting to drift off when the thought he"d had earlier came roaring back. Why had the army interrogators suddenly put him on a plane and let him go when they could have as easily killed him and buried his body somewhere in the rain forest?
The reason had to be the photographs. They hadn"t found them on Father w.i.l.l.y"s person or in his church or residence or anywhere among the people in his village, or on Marten"s person or in his belongings at the hotel, or in those of Marita and her students. As a result they might well have concluded he"d managed to send them to a safe haven off the island, maybe to someone on the mainland using something as simple as the regular mail. The last person they had seen him with had been the foreigner Marten. So why not a.s.sume the priest, instead of giving him the pictures to smuggle out, had told him where they were? If that were so they had simply used the old police/military tactic some called "intelligence gain-loss"-why destroy a target when you can exploit it? Meaning it would have been foolish to kill him when it was so much better to let him go and follow him. And they had, putting him on the next plane out of the country and then planting someone on the same plane to tail him. Maybe the jowly man or the man in the golf shirt, or both, or maybe someone else entirely. The problem was-and even in his exhausted state Marten had to smile-they were grasping at straws, because Father w.i.l.l.y had told him nothing.
Once again he glanced over his shoulder. The light over the jowly man"s seat was turned out. Not so for the man in the light blue golf shirt, who was still awake and reading. Forget it, Marten thought. Let them do what they want. You know nothing, so just forget it and go to sleep. He pulled the Air France courtesy blanket up around him and closed his eyes.
You know nothing, he repeated.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
17.
PARIS, CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT.
FRIDAY, JUNE 4. 7:11 A.M.
Marten waited at the luggage carousel with the other pa.s.sengers from Air France Flight 959. Nearby, he saw Marita standing with her chattering medical students sorting through boarding pa.s.ses and ticket wallets for luggage receipts. Directly across was the jowly man in the white suit and striped shirt, waiting, like everyone else, for the conveyor to begin. To his right, maybe a dozen pa.s.sengers down, was the man in tan khakis and blue golf shirt. Both men seemed to be traveling alone. Now he saw Anne Tidrow move toward the carousel. The gray-haired man in the business suit who had been seated next to her in the first cla.s.s section was with her. Suddenly he wondered if she had deduced the same thing as the army interrogators, that he knew where the photographs were, and was tagging along a.s.suming he would lead her to them. If that were the case, he had not one group but two watching him. And both for no reason at all.
There was a whirring sound, and then the belt on the carousel started up. Seconds later luggage began appearing. Marten turned to look for his bag and found Marita and her students coming toward him. They had already collected theirs and were on their way out.
"Hi and bye." Marita grinned as she reached him. "We"re on the next flight to Madrid. It leaves in thirty minutes. We barely have time to check our luggage."
"Then you"d better hurry," he said, then looked to all of them. "Thank you again for everything you did to help me. Maybe one day we can all-"
"Here," Marita pressed a page torn from a notebook into his hand. "My address and telephone number if you get to Spain. My e-mail if you don"t." Her words tailed off shyly, but there was nothing shy about her impish smile. "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." Their eyes met, and the impishness vanished. "I think you"re one of those people trouble follows around." Once again she smiled. "We have to go. Please call me."
"I will," he said and nodded at the others.
Then they were gone, making their way through the rush of early-morning pa.s.sengers and finally disappearing from sight.
Moments later Marten collected his bag and walked off, pulling the wheeled suitcase behind him. As he did he saw Anne Tidrow and her gray-haired, business-suited companion, their bags on a luggage trolley, moving toward the exit. Never once did she look his way. It made him think that he was wrong about her following him, that she had been on the same flight by coincidence and had no further interest in him whatsoever.
7:30 A.M.
Marten entered Musikfone, a small audio and electronics kiosk, that was up an escalator and down a window-paneled corridor from baggage claim. Outside, he had seen a bright morning sky filled with puffy clouds and the promise of a gathering weather front, but it was what was inside the store that was of far more interest-a display of iPods, Mp3 players, and other electronic gadgets, plus what looked like a thousand headsets, battery chargers, connectors, and attachments. What he wanted was right in front of him-a shelf of inexpensive, throwaway cell phones and, next to them, prepaid phone cards.
His plan was simple: buy a throwaway cell phone, call President Harris on the private number he"d given him, and tell him about the photographs and what he"d witnessed in Bioko, then get rid of the phone, take the next plane to Manchester, and go back to work. If anyone was following him, good luck to them; their life would suddenly become very tedious and wholly uneventful. That is, unless they wanted to learn about flowers and shrubs.
Marten chose a dark blue cell phone and a prepaid phone card and headed toward the cashier. As he did, two things happened at once. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the jowly man in the white suit step into the store, glance around at the merchandise as if he were looking for something, and then leave. The second thing was infinitely more profound and hit like a lightning bolt.
"f.u.c.k!" he spat out loud at the realization just as he reached the cashier, a pert young woman who looked no more than twenty.
"What did you say, sir?" she asked in accented English.
"Nothing. I"m sorry," he said and set the packaged cell phone on the counter. "Just the phone and the card, please."
7:38 A.M.
Marten walked down the corridor, throwaway phone and phone card in a plastic Musikfone bag tucked into his wheeled suitcase, barely aware of where he was or the people around him. How could he have been so blind, so naive?
Father w.i.l.l.y had told him everything as they were descending from the rain forest in the seconds before they heard gunfire and the two boys came running and yelling.
"I trusted you, Mr. Marten, because I had to," he"d said. "I could not give you the photographs because there is no way to know who you might run into when we part. Hopefully, you have clear memories of what you have seen and what I have told you. Take that information with you and leave Bioko as quickly as you can. My brother is in Berlin. He is a very capable man. I hope that by the time you reach him neither he nor your American politician friend will have need for you to tell them any of this. Tell them anyway."
Have need for him to TELL THEM?
Of course not-when his brother would have the photographs right in front of him right in front of him!
Somehow Father w.i.l.l.y had managed to get them to him, maybe via the regular mail as he"d thought earlier or maybe some other, even simpler, way. If he was right, and he was certain he was, that was where they would be-with Theo Haas in Berlin.
The trouble was, if he could figure it out, how long would it be before Conor White and/or the major and the hawk-faced soldier put things together? How long would it be before they looked into Father w.i.l.l.y"s background and found that despite different last names and lives worlds apart, he and the famed novelist Theo Haas were brothers?
Once they did, the race would be on to get to Haas first. When that happened and the photos were retrieved, then everything Father w.i.l.l.y and his villagers had done and died for would either become a very public justification for the army to continue its barbarous rampage or vanish into thin air at Conor White"s bidding.
To Marten, neither was acceptable. Theo Haas had to be reached and warned, told he was in grave danger and instructed to take the photographs to the police. On second thought, that could lead to unintended consequences if they fell into the hands of someone who recognized their importance and sold them to the tabloids or simply posted them on the Internet. If that occurred, the government of Equatorial Guinea would have achieved exactly what it wanted without having lifted a finger. No, he had to handle the whole thing delicately and with caution, while at the same time remembering that the life of Theo Haas might soon be in severe jeopardy. What Marten had, or hoped he had, was a small window of opportunity before the others realized who Haas was and what his brother, in all probability, had done.
He was in already in Paris. Berlin was a short plane ride away. He had to get there as quickly as he could and without attracting attention.
7:42 A.M.
18.
7:45 A.M.