The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [30]
10:38 P.M.
He lay back and closed his eyes once more. They were still hours from Paris, and he wanted to sleep for as many of them as he could. To escape, for a time at least, everything that had happened in the last days.
Two minutes passed. And then four. And then eight. Marten sat up. Sleep wasn’t going to come and he knew it. Again he looked out the window, watching as the plane banked, beginning its turn over the island. The darkness below played against the quiet whine of the engines, and for a moment he thought the combination might lull him to sleep. Then he caught sight of three reddish points of light on the ground. They were probably twenty or more miles apart in what should have been the deep black of heavily forested land. In his mind there was no question what they were. Burning villages. If he was right, either the insurrection was escalating and moving quickly north, or President Tiombe’s army was taking preventive action and destroying suspected rebel townships in a show of force. Maybe it was both. But whatever was happening, hundreds of people were being killed, and the rebellion—justified as it might be against Tiombe and his brutal, corrupt regime—was being made all the worse by Conor White’s supplying of arms to the insurgents because the army’s massive response to it was so barbaric. In Father Willy’s words, “extreme, even savage cruelty.” In Conor White’s, “The army is literally slaughtering suspected insurgents along with their friends and families, the old and women and children included, and afterward burning their villages to the ground.” To Marten it seemed as if the war were being purposely escalated on both sides. The question was, why and why now?
What had President Harris told him in England barely a week earlier? “Father Dorhn has been in Equatorial Guinea for fifty years. If anyone knows what’s going on there he does, and from his letter he seems to know quite a lot.”
Well, Father Willy did know a lot. And he was dead because of it. So were the two young boys with him. How many hundreds, maybe thousands of untold others had been annihilated in the course of things? How many were being killed right now, at this moment, twenty thousand feet beneath him in villages along the way?
Marten turned from the window, pulling down the shade as he did. As if somehow it would shield him from the horror going on below.
At almost the same moment a flight attendant entered from the first class cabin, abruptly pulling the separating curtain closed behind her as she did. For the briefest instant Marten caught a glimpse of the handful of passengers seated there. To his surprise, Anne Tidrow was among them. She was dressed casually in dark slacks and tailored jacket and was in an aisle seat near the rear. Next to her was an older, gray-haired man in a business suit. Whether they were traveling together or were just seatmates he had no way to tell.
10:50 P.M.
Marten was angry and on edge and probably too tired to be trying to sort things out, but he kept at it anyway because he couldn’t help it and because in this situation, his mind had no off switch.
“Tell them what you have seen!” Father Willy yelled just before he was killed.
By that he’d meant the photographs.
To President Harris and to Joe Ryder, especially, their significance would go far beyond showing SimCo mercenaries secretly arming the insurgents. The pictures would give immediate credibility to the theory Theo Haas had put forward to Joe Ryder about the Striker/Hadrian collusion in Iraq having been extended to Equatorial Guinea.
It was, he knew, pure speculation on his part. Still, he had seen what he had seen, and what Father Willy had so forcefully and tragically sent him to report. The trouble was that just telling them would not be enough. He needed hard evidence—the photographs