The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [172]
A half second later Joe Ryder walked into the room; his look-alike, Tim Grant, followed him.
11:00 A.M.
109
AVENIDA DAS FORÇAS ARMADAS. SAME TIME.
Jeremy Moyer had spent the moments since he’d given Carlos Branco the green light to back up Conor White at the hospital taking a roundabout return drive to the embassy, trying to think of the best way to respond to the disaster that was only moments from making world headlines. At the same time, he had to find a reasonable excuse for pulling the remaining RSO detail out of the Ritz so that their ongoing presence wouldn’t raise questions later, especially in the follow-up investigation by the FBI or the State Department of Congressman Ryder’s killing. He mulled over a number of possibilities, then settled on the simplest: call Debra Wynn, chief of RSO/Lisbon, and tell her that a member of Congressman Ryder’s personal RSO detail—Special Agent Birns, he distinctly remembered the name from State Department paperwork alerting him to Ryder’s visit—had phoned him a short time ago to say the congressman had abruptly changed his plans and was on his way to the airport, preparing to leave Lisbon immediately. That had been the entire message. Whether Ryder had informed the ambassador or not, he didn’t know. Nor did he know why Birns had called him instead of her. At any rate, would she please pull her people out of the Ritz and reassign them.
Which was precisely what he did, calling her as he approached the embassy, explaining it all and closing with “If there was a sudden security threat, he didn’t mention it. My office has received nothing to raise the alert level any higher than it already was for his visit. Maybe it’s political. Maybe it has to do with Ryder’s commission. Maybe he’s going back to Iraq. I don’t know. It’s one of those things. Maybe one day we’ll find out.”
With that he clicked off, took a deep breath, and tried not to think of what was about to happen.
HOSPITAL DA UNIVERSIDADE. 11:08 A.M.
Special agents Grant and Birns stood guard in the hallway outside the examination room while Joe Ryder, Marten, and Anne went over Father Willy Dorhn’s Bioko photographs one by one. Ryder had already been told about the CIA briefing video and seen the 35 mm negatives of the memorandum. Since the document pages were too small to read without magnification, he could only listen to Anne’s detailed explanation of what was on them and accept her assurance that once full-sized prints were made everything would quite legible. In his mind there was no doubt of the veracity of what she was saying. Her tone of voice, her facial expression, the way she held herself, the involuntary clenching and unclenching of her hands told him, as much as the document itself, the personal hurt she was going through in revealing it. Not to mention the legal jeopardy she was putting herself in; she had, after all, stolen a top secret government document, and she sat on the board of directors of what very likely would become a federally indicted company, with its leaders quite possibly brought before an international court charged with crimes against humanity.
The photographs were self-explanatory, as was Marten’s description of other photos on the camera’s memory card that had been lost to the Russian agent Kovalenko. Those showing Conor White with the Chilean war criminal Mariano had been of particular interest, especially when tied to the CIA briefing video that he knew could be subpoenaed. That Kovalenko had killed the German policeman, Franck, and taken the memory card posed another concern because it raised the specter of Russian political interference in Equatorial Guinea, even high-stakes blackmail if Moscow threatened to make the photographs public.
Marten had still not told anyone but President Harris that the real memory card was in his possession and that the one he’d given to Kovalenko was harmless. They were far from being out of the woods yet, and he