The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [122]
“Lock it,” Wirth said and went anxiously to a writing desk near the window. The moment he reached it, he tore the envelope open and dumped its contents on the desk. “What the fuck?”
There were a dozen eight-by-ten photographs. Eleven were cheesecake photos of naked women in various pornographic poses. The twelfth was of Sy Wirth himself, the official corporate photograph of Striker’s chairman standing alongside the company logo in the lobby of its Houston headquarters.
Apart from the photographs were two letter-sized envelopes. Enraged, Wirth ripped open the first and took out a small, thin rectangle, the size of a digital camera memory card. The trouble was, it was no memory card but a tourist trinket, a refrigerator magnet. Printed on the front in bright, happy red letters was the phrase FOND MEMORIES OF FARO, PORTUGAL.
“Fucking Russian cocksucker,” Wirth breathed, his face as crimson as the letters on the magnet. Immediately he picked up the second envelope. Angrily he ripped it opened and looked inside. White could see the color drain from his face.
Slowly Wirth turned the envelope upside down and a half-dozen or more torn pieces of paper fell onto the tabletop, landing among the cheesecake photographs, his official Striker portrait, and the Faro refrigerator magnet. White had no idea what it was. Sy Wirth had known instantly. It was what was left of the agreement for the massive Andean gas field, the Magellan/Santa Cruz–Tarija, he had given to Dimitri Korostin at the Dorchester Hotel in London in exchange for finding and returning the photographs and the memory card.
“What is it?” Conor White was staring at him.
Wirth’s eyes came up to meet his. “I thought I was dealing with a friend. I wasn’t.”
“You said something about a Russian. What did you mean?”
Wirth glared at him. “I said nothing about a Russian. Nothing at all.”
“Are the Russians involved?” This time White didn’t hold back anything. “Is that what happened?”
Wirth didn’t reply.
“Do they have the photographs?”
“I don’t know.”
Suddenly Conor White’s vast experience and education—at Eton, Oxford, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, his long career as a frontline British combat officer and then a top-level professional mercenary soldier—came fully into play. Wirth’s blundering had struck an immediate and terrifying chord, the stakes of which, even moments earlier, he could never have imagined.
“Mr. Wirth,” he said emphatically, “I suggest you try to reach Anne and find out where she is. If she’s with Marten, if she’s not. Maybe she’ll answer, maybe she won’t. But if we can find out what happened, we may well learn something about the rest of it. In the meantime one of us needs to call Loyal Truex and tell him what the hell’s going on. God help us if the Russians have the photographs, because if they do they will have all the evidence they need to prove what they may have already guessed about what Striker is doing in Bioko.
“We’re talking about a massive amount of oil, Mr. Wirth. Massive. They will want it, all of it, if for no other reason than to keep it out the hands of the West. Once they start formulating a plan and communicating between themselves, the Chinese will find out. And they will want it, too. Either or both will create some kind of excuse for an armed intervention into the insurrection, basically to get hold of the country for themselves. They do that and it will be seen as a bona fide threat to U.S. national security, and Washington will have no choice but to try and stop them.” White paused as a chilling apocalyptic anger raged through him. “You might have damn well planted the seeds for a major war, Mr. Wirth. Major.”
3:08 P.M.
77
3:34 P.M.
Stump Logan turned the battered green-and-white 1978 Volkswagen bus onto the A2, the Auto-estrada do Sul, and headed toward Lisbon, by now less than a hundred miles to the north. Logan had reasoned that it was best they get out of not only Praia da Rocha but the whole Algarve region before