The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [157]
“Fuck,” he swore under his breath. Anne and the photographs were trouble enough; now they had to deal with this. In the hands of Joe Ryder the first two would be crushing, but this last—the text of the document Truex, Sy Wirth, Arnold Moss, and himself had all referred to as The Hadrian Memorandum—would be hard evidence of Agency involvement in the civil war in Equatorial Guinea on behalf of the Striker Oil company, an operation authorized by the deputy director himself. Having it become public was not something that could be tolerated under any circumstance. Meaning the line in Truex’s text message Know you will take immediate and appropriate action upon reading had not been a directive but an explicit order: Retrieve the outstanding materials and eliminate Marten, Anne, and Congressman Ryder as quickly as possible. Before it had just been Marten and Anne, and Ryder if necessary. Now all three had been given a death sentence. One that was to be executed immediately and in any way most expedient.
Suddenly he wondered what he was doing. His entire adult life had been given to the single purpose of gaining his father’s recognition. In the process, he had become a highly educated national, even international, warrior-hero. But all that had ended with the photographs. Since then he had done everything in his power to recover them for the sole intent of protecting his own image. In doing so he had become a murderer—of young women and men, of a despotic oil executive, and now he was hours, maybe minutes, away from killing three more, among them a United States congressman. Why? So that the man who had never acknowledged him would not be aghast at what he saw if the photos were made public. What kind of a reason was that?
The trouble was, Anne’s interference had snowballed the whole thing into a gargantuan geopolitical complication, with a huge, far-reaching cost if things continued to go wrong. It meant the game was no longer his alone. At stake now was the heart and soul of The Hadrian Memorandum itself, the protection of a vast sea of oil for the West. It was a twist he could never have imagined. In a strange way it eased his mind and raised his spirits because it meant the deadly actions still to come would not be those of a common murderer but of a soldier, a patriot-warrior.
7:48 A.M.
100
PORTELA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. 8:42 A.M.
Carlos Branco waited at the bottom of the steps as Congressman Joe Ryder and his personal RSO detail, agents Chuck Birns and Tim Grant, came down the steps of their Gulfstream 200 and stepped onto Lisbon soil. Grant and Birns, Branco knew, had been assigned to Ryder for the past fifteen months as his sworn protectors when he traveled outside of the United States, and he trusted them completely. That meant they had a long-standing, interlocking loyalty and made them people he might well have trouble wresting away from the congressman when the time came and he tried to pull the entire RSO detail back in order to give Conor White and his gunmen singular access to their targets.
“RSO Special Agent Anibal Da Costa, Congressman,” Branco said smartly as he introduced himself. “Welcome to Lisbon, sir. This way, gentlemen, please.”
Immediately he turned and led them toward a black Chevy Suburban SUV parked on the tarmac twenty feet away where two more RSO agents waited, the rest of the Lisbon embassy detail.
Moments later they were driving past security gates and heading into the city, taking the same route Branco had used barely twelve hours earlier when he’d brought Conor White and his men in from the same airport.