The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [151]
The lamp was still on, and he could see her on the far side of the bed, under the covers with her back to him. He glanced at the clock: 3:32 A.M.
Immediately he went to the closet, punched in the combination to the safe, waited as the electronic locks slid back, then opened the door and put the envelope inside next to the photographs and the camera’s memory card. For the briefest moment he studied them all, then closed the door, listening as the electronic locks engaged. Seconds later, he set the Glock on the bedside table and turned off the light, then took off his robe and slid into bed next to her. Ever so gently he leaned over, kissed her lightly, then pulled the covers up around her and lay back in the dark, wholly drained by one of the longest days of his life. All he wanted was sleep.
Instead thoughts crept in, one overlapping another as he tried to understand what had happened. Anne’s sudden fragility, her tears and runaway emotion, reminded him of the tragic breakdown of his sister, Rebecca, years earlier when, as a child, she had seen their adoptive parents shot to death by intruders in their California home. By the time neighbors and the police found her she was on the edge of complete hysteria. Shortly afterward she had gone into deep shock, retreating into a heartbreaking world of silence where she could neither speak nor hear. Institutionalized, she had remained that way for years until another monstrously traumatic incident brought her out of it.
The stark memories of her ordeal made him recall what Anne had told him in Berlin. “My mother got very sick when I was three. She was in the hospital for a month. She didn’t recognize me or my father. Nobody knew what was wrong. Finally she came out of it. The experience scared the hell out of me. It did the same to my father. I was very young, but I could see it. I wanted so much to help him, but I couldn’t.”
Then: “My mother died when I was thirteen. It was brain cancer. She didn’t live long, but it was awful for her and my dad. Like the first time, he tried to protect me from it while he was falling apart himself. How he kept everything together—me, himself, the company—I don’t know.”
Marten’s experience with Rebecca had brought him into close contact with any number of mental health professionals. Transposing what he had learned then to Anne’s behavior tonight made him think that the seeds of it might well have been planted when she was a child. With no siblings to comfort her, her only escape would have been to hide her own emotions and focus on concern for her father. The same thing played out years later when he lay dying after a series of strokes. Again she would have put her own feelings aside in favor of his. By then it would have become a way of life; the outwardly strong, confident woman, routinely dealing with profoundly troubling issues by not dealing with them at all and instead burying them deep inside her. Shift that behavior to the present, where she faced a colossal runaway train: the Bioko field, the Striker/Hadrian corruption situation in Iraq, the Ryder Commission’s probe into it, Conor White and the creation of SimCo—involving both of her ex-husbands, no less; the photographs; the CIA video; Erlanger’s warning; the growing suspicion that the CIA was involved with Striker and Hadrian in fueling the civil war; all but confirming it, the arrival of Franck and Kovalenko in Praia da Rocha in search of the pictures and the realization that Franck was a CIA operative.
She’d been a professional, so suspicion alone wasn’t enough. She left him and went to the hotel and did what she’d been trained to do, obtain proof. Once she’d hacked into the Agency files and discovered the memorandum, she would have suddenly realized she was standing on a moral precipice. Either turn away and forget she