The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [31]
Clearly both sides believed the photos existed and would do whatever was necessary to retrieve them. But so far neither had apparently succeeded. Even if Marten accepted their belief that the pictures did exist, he had no more way of knowing where they were than the others. The whole thing was, and remained, a mystery that only Father Willy could resolve. And Father Willy was dead.
10:55 P.M.
For no particular reason Marten looked across the center aisle to the passengers in the rows of darkened seats behind him. To his surprise he saw a man in a striped shirt and white trousers sitting under a reading light watching him. At Marten’s glance he looked away, clumsily picking up a magazine he had in his lap. He was heavyset and jowly, and Marten knew he had seen him somewhere before. Where, he didn’t know. A moment later his gaze shifted across the center aisle. Two seats down another man was awake and reading. He was dressed in tan khakis and a light blue golf shirt and was considerably younger than the jowly man. Marten had seen him before, too. In the airport maybe. Perhaps that was where he’d seen the other man as well.
No.
Suddenly he remembered where he’d seen them both. In the bar at the Hotel Malabo. The heavyset, jowly man in white he’d had to step around on his way in. The other had been sitting halfway down the bar when he’d been talking with Anne Tidrow and Conor White. If they were on the flight by chance, then why had the jowly man been watching him? Or had he been watching him?
10:57 P.M.
Marten turned out the light over his seat and again closed his eyes. He was starting to drift off when the thought he’d had earlier came roaring back. Why had the army interrogators suddenly put him on a plane and let him go when they could have as easily killed him and buried his body somewhere in the rain forest?
The reason had to be the photographs. They hadn’t found them on Father Willy’s person or in his church or residence or anywhere among the people in his village, or on Marten’s person or in his belongings at the hotel, or in those of Marita and her students. As a result they might well have concluded he’d managed to send them to a safe haven off the island, maybe to someone on the mainland using something as simple as the regular mail. The last person they had seen him with had been the foreigner Marten. So why not assume the priest, instead of giving him the pictures to smuggle out, had told him where they were? If that were so they had simply used the old police/military tactic some called “intelligence gain-loss”—why destroy a target when you can exploit it? Meaning it would have been foolish to kill him when it was so much better to let him go and follow him. And they had, putting him on the next plane out of the country and then planting someone on the same plane to tail him. Maybe the jowly man or the man in the golf shirt, or both, or maybe someone else entirely. The problem was—and even in his exhausted state Marten had to smile—they were grasping at straws, because Father Willy had told him nothing.
Once again he glanced over his shoulder. The light over the jowly man’s seat was turned out. Not so for the man in the light blue golf shirt, who was still awake and reading. Forget it, Marten thought. Let them do what they want. You know nothing, so just forget it and go to sleep. He pulled the Air France courtesy blanket up around him and closed his eyes.
You know nothing, he repeated.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
17
PARIS, CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT.
FRIDAY, JUNE 4. 7:11 A.M.
Marten waited at the luggage carousel with the other passengers from Air France Flight 959. Nearby, he saw Marita standing with her chattering medical students sorting through boarding passes