The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [26]
A buzzer sounded on Wirth’s console.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Truex,” a female voice responded.
“Send him in.” Wirth said, then looked at Moss, “He’s here.”
“So I gather,” Moss said as the door opened and Loyal Truex, founder and chief executive of the private security contractor Hadrian Protective Services, entered.
“Finally, the man himself,” Wirth snapped. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Traffic accident. Luckily not mine,” Truex said in a quiet kind of southern drawl.
“Ever think to pick up the phone and call? Or don’t you think this meeting’s important enough?”
“You sound like my mother, Sy.” Truex smiled easily, then plunked down on the arm of an overstuffed chair and made himself at home.
Loyal Truex was forty-three and just over six feet tall. With close-cropped black hair and the muscular build of the former U.S. Army Ranger he was, everything about him—calm, boyish humor, self-made wealth—reflected confidence. His clothes mirrored it: close-fitting, hand-tailored navy suit, open white shirt, plain-toed Italian dress shoes, diamond-studded gold bracelet on one wrist, Rolex watch on the other. That he had spent most of the morning circumventing bad weather while piloting his own Gulfstream jet from Virginia to Texas and after that inching through traffic for nearly an hour seemed to have had no more effect on him than Wirth’s urgent summoning of him to Houston from his Manassas office at six that morning. Still, he was there as promised and ready to go to work.
Wirth got to it quickly. “The Bioko photographs.”
“You want to know where we stand with them.” Truex glanced at Arnold Moss, then looked back to Wirth. “It’s the reason I’m here.”
“I know where the fuck we stand with them. We don’t have them! The reason you’re here is because I want to know what Washington knows. How much you’ve told them or they’ve found out. How closely they’ve been monitoring this.”
“As far as I know, Sy, it’s still all in-house, yours and mine,” Truex said quietly. “Communication with Bioko, with Conor White, is the same as it’s been with you—all done over our own secure lines. The SimCo people in Malabo have been instructed to say nothing to anyone, and they won’t. They’re exceptionally loyal to White and closed-mouth anyway. On the other hand, if Washington has been monitoring the situation in a way we don’t know—which I doubt, for the simple reason that this is a very recent, low-key development that would take time to filter down—I would have heard about it, slick, fast, and hard. As for the photographs themselves, White’s best operators went after them and came up with nothing, so he brought in General Mariano’s army unit.”
“Mariano?” Wirth erupted. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Easy, Sy.” Truex put up a calming hand. “White’s people were getting nowhere, so he asked Mariano for help. Only his sector knows about them, no one else. His men were told they were looking for unauthorized photographs taken by a village priest and anything found was to be brought directly to Mariano himself. As far as I know, only White and a few villagers have actually seen them. Which is how White got them in the first place, through one of the villagers. The result of it all was that White’s operators and Mariano’s turned over every stone and tree root in the area looking for them, taking down a lot of people in the process. A hundred killed at least. So if the pictures were there they would have been found. But they weren’t. What that means is there’s a very good chance the priest destroyed them himself to avoid being killed.” Truex smiled. “Which is probably why nobody’s found them. Because they no longer exist.”
“And maybe they do exist and are in some fucking place nobody knows about,” Wirth spat, anger, impatience, and displeasure crawling all over him. The next came out of the blue. “Who the hell is this landscape