The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [110]
“Yes, but most of it I learned it on my own.” Anne bent down and picked up a fist-sized rock. Quickly they went back to the window.
She looked at him. “Just hope to hell there’s no alarm system.”
“Darling, break the damn window.”
Three sharp hits with the rock and the glass cracked. They stopped and listened. No alarm. Marten nodded at Anne, and she hit the glass again. Once more and there was a hole big enough for Marten to reach through and take out the remaining shards. Seconds later they climbed inside.
“Anyone here?” Marten’s voice echoed through the room. There was no reply, and they moved toward the front hallway. To the left was a small study lined with bookshelves. It had a round desk with an ergonomic chair in the center. A desktop computer and printer sat to one side. Beyond that was a kitchen and eating room that faced the sea.
“Anyone here?” Marten called out again, and they went into the front hallway, stopping at the wooden table and the stack of mail overflowing it they’d seen from outside.
Most of it was bills, newspapers, magazines, and advertising circulars. By the postmarks the pieces seemed to have been deposited there off and on over the last four to five weeks.
Marten swore under his breath as he went through it quickly. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
He sifted through the rest, increasingly concerned that no matter what Stump Logan had said about Theo Haas having sent him to Cádiz for a reason, Haas had been playing him for a fool and their trip had been for nothing.
“Wait,” Anne said abruptly. Several more pieces were on the floor, hidden by a leaf of the table. They were bigger, three boxes and four large envelopes. She sorted through them quickly. The bottom-most piece was a thick padded envelope addressed to Jacob Cádiz and postmarked from Riaba, Equatorial Guinea, sometime in late May. The exact date was hard to read.
“This, maybe!” she said with a rush and handed it to him.
Marten looked at the postmark. “Christ,” he breathed and anxiously tore it open.
“Yes. Yes!” he all but shouted as he slid out a plastic-wrapped bundle of Father Willy’s photographic prints, color computer copies like those the priest had shown him in the rain forest. There were twenty-six in all, and all of them the damning Bioko/SimCo stuff.
The first few were duplicates of pictures he had seen before: the helicopter set down in the jungle clearing with men in the doorway unloading crates of weapons to natives who in turn were loading them on an open-bed truck. Among the faces was a very familiar Caucasian in tight black T-shirt and camouflage fatigues.
“Recognize your friend Conor White?” Marten asked, then went to the next photo that showed two more Caucasians. They had buzz-cut hair, were wearing the same black T-shirts and camouflage gear, and were standing in the helicopter doorway.
“Patrice,” Anne said, pointing to the man on the left. “The other’s Jack Hanahan, a onetime Ranger in the Irish Army. Conor keeps him with him almost all the time. Calls him Irish Jack.”
Marten stared at the picture, fixing the men’s faces in his mind. “You knew who these people were, but you had no idea any of this was going on,” he said quietly but with an edge that was clearly accusatory.
Anne reacted. Fiercely. “Of course I knew what was going on. The whole thing was my idea. I love to watch thousands of people kill each other. It beats the hell out of Texas football. You want to get more into it? Fine. We can fight about it later. Right now let’s take this stuff and get the hell out of here.”
Marten stared at her, waiting for her to give him some small clue that she had known what was going on, or at least to soften. She did neither.
“Alright,” he said finally, “sorry.”
“You better be.”
“I am.” Immediately he picked up the photographs and started to slide them back into the plastic wrapping. As he did, a white letter-sized envelope slid out. It had been folded over several times and sealed tight with an elastic band. He slipped