The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [1]
Finally he spoke. “I don’t know you at all, Mr. Marten,” he said without looking at him. Spanish was the official language of Equatorial Guinea, but he used English when talking to Marten. “Soon I will have to decide if I can trust you. I hope you understand.”
“I understand,” Marten said, and they hiked on. Minutes passed, and then he heard a low, rumbling sound he couldn’t place. Little by little it intensified, drowning out the sounds of the birds and becoming very nearly a roar. Then he knew. Waterfalls! In the next seconds they rounded a bend in the trail and stopped before a cascade of falls that thundered past them in a rising mist to disappear into the jungle a thousand feet below. Willy stared at the spectacle for a long moment, then slowly turned to Marten.
“My brother told me you were coming, to expect you,” he said over the roar of the water. “Yet he has never met you. Never talked with you. So whether you are the man he told me about or someone else who has taken his place, I have no way to know.”
“All I can tell you,” Marten said, “is that I was asked to come to see you. To listen to what you have to say and then to go home. I know very little more than that, except that you think there is trouble here.”
The priest studied Marten carefully, still unsure of him. “Where is this ‘home’?”
“A city in the north of England.”
“You are American.”
“Was. I’m an expat. I carry a British passport.”
“You are a reporter.”
“A landscape architect.”
“Then why you?”
“A friend who indirectly knows your brother asked me to come.”
“What friend?”
“Another American.”
“He is a reporter.”
“No, a politician.”
Willy’s eyes found Marten’s and held there. “Whoever you are, I will have to trust you, because I fear my time is increasingly short. Besides, there is no one else.”
“You can trust me,” Marten said, and then looked around. They seemed wholly alone, yet he had the sense they were being watched.
“They have gone,” Willy said quietly. “Fang tribesmen. Good friends. They followed us for a time until I assured them I was alright. They will make certain no one else comes.” Abruptly he reached inside his priest’s frock and took out a letter-sized envelope. He flicked it open, slid out several folded pages and held them unopened in his hand. “What do you know of Equatorial Guinea?”
“Not much. Just what I read on the plane. It’s a small, very poor country run by a dictator-president named Francisco Tiombe. In the last decade oil was discovered and—”
“Francisco Tiombe,” Willy cut him off angrily, “is the head of a brutal, ruthless family who consider themselves royal but are not. Tiombe killed the former president, his own cousin, in order to gain power and reap the riches from oil leases. And rich he is, enormously rich. He recently bought a mansion in California for forty million U.S. dollars, and that is only one of a half dozen he has around the world. The trouble is he has chosen not to share that wealth with the masses who remain poorer than poor.” Willy’s passion grew deeper.
“They have nothing, Mr. Marten. The few jobs, when they can find them, are pennies-a-day labor and selling what little food they can grow or fish they can catch. Safe drinking water is like gold and is sold as if it were. Electricity, in the villages that have it, goes on, then off. Mostly it is off. Medical facilities are laughable. Schools barely exist. For any kind of decent life at all, there is no hope.” Willy’s eyes bore into Marten. “People