The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [10]
“Quickly!” Marita shouted. “Quickly! Quickly!”
The group rushed forward.
Nicholas Marten was in and out of a dream. He thought he saw the face of a beautiful young woman staring down at him. Then she was replaced by a young man with a canteen trying to hold him up and give him water. Then he saw two sturdy black men dressed in uniforms trying to help him to his feet. After that everything faded and he was in England, arriving midday and by rental car at some grand country manor—the Fifield estate near the city of Oxford. The blue sky was mottled with white puffy clouds, the surrounding trees and rolling lawns of Fifield, a bright early-summer green.
Soon he was past a phalanx of men in dark suits and sunglasses, and quickly afterward smiling, shaking hands, and then bear-hugging a tall, elegant, silver-haired man he affectionately called “Cousin Jack”; the same man who, with like affection, called him “Cousin Harold.” The same man who knew what few others anywhere in the world did, that at one time not many years earlier he had been a Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective named John Barron, a member of an elite squad that had disintegrated in a complex circumstance of murder and horror. Faced with the threat of lethal reprisals from dark forces inside the LAPD, he had changed his name to Nicholas Marten and fled with his sister to a new life in Europe: his sister as governess to a wealthy family in Switzerland; he at first as a student of landscape architecture at the University of Manchester in northern England, and then as a professional landscape architect and full-time employee of the respected firm of Fitzsimmons and Justice in that same city.
In short order Marten and “Cousin Jack” were seated alone in the manor’s orangerie and being served lunch: Scottish salmon, Irish potatoes, French beans, Italian white wine, and Spanish mineral water, thereby spreading culinary goodwill over a number of countries.
Even in his dream Marten smiled. “Cousin Jack” was no ordinary cousin, nor was he a relative at all. He was a man he’d been as close to as one human could be to another; a man who had saved his life and whose life he had saved during a near-weeklong hellish journey in Spain some sixteen months before. He was also a man he’d never really expected to see again. “Cousin Jack” was John Henry Harris, the president of the United States.
Earlier that same morning Marten had left his home in Manchester and taken a flight to London, then driven a rental car into the countryside. President Harris was in England to meet with the British prime minister but had set aside time to meet privately with his old friend. The encounter, as Marten well knew, was not without purpose. Their Spanish adventure, in Barcelona and then at the monastery at Montserrat, had been perilous at best, and so his summons to meet “Cousin Jack” alone at Fifield, a beautiful but isolated estate, gave him good cause for unease.
“You want to know what this is about?” the president asked when the pleasantries and reminiscences were over.
“Yes.” Marten smiled carefully. “I want to know what this is about.”
“You’ve heard of the German novelist Theo Haas.”
“The Nobel Prize winner? Of course. I’ve read him and read about him. He’s a brilliant, cantankerous, eighty-year-old troublemaker.”
“Yes,” the president said, smiling, “he is. That aside, he was in Washington three days ago and met with one of his most ardent fans, Representative Joe Ryder of New York. Ryder is the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is the main investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
“I know.” Marten smiled as well. “The Internet works in Manchester the same as most everywhere else. I keep an eye on the national news. I haven’t forgotten where I was brought up.”
“Then you would also know that Ryder is focused on the billions of dollars we are spending in Iraq. He’s particularly interested in the cost overruns by a Texas-based oil field management and exploration company called AG Striker