The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [51]
The soil under the ancient olive trees was soft from a recent, unseasonable rain and made the grave easy to dig. A few minutes with a shovel and the job was done. Conor White lifted the corpse himself. It was small and delicate in his large hands. For a moment he studied it—the two tiny feet at the end of spindly legs, the unruly fluff of feathers at its neck, the proud twist of its beak, its gray wings, looking as if they could still take flight, neatly tucked back against its body. What kind of bird it was, or had been, he didn’t know.
“I hope you had a good life, my little friend,” he said reverently. Then, turning the creature over so that it would be on its side in the earth, he placed it gently in the grave and covered it over with soil. “Farewell and safe journey,” he said with the same reverence. Then, shovel in hand, he walked off through the olive grove toward the farm house.
To his right he could see the A6, the main highway to Madrid, and the evening traffic on it leading to and from the city. A thick forest of conifers surrounded the house from behind and to the side, obscuring it from the roadway, while fallow, unplowed fields stretched out in front and to the right in an expansive fifty-acre semicircle. The farm was for sale and had been since its elderly owner had passed away more than two years earlier. So far there had been no offers to buy and no funds allotted for upkeep. As a result the olive trees had gone unattended. So had the mile-long dirt and gravel drive leading into the property, an ingress/egress that had been washed away in any number of places by winter rains and was mottled with rocks and overgrown with weeds. Yet, troublesome as it was, it had not deterred vandals from breaking into the house and taking anything and everything of value, leaving only the stove and toilets and a few pieces of unwanted furniture. The only other structure on the property was a dilapidated barn in a state of such disrepair that the only reasonable thing to do would be to knock it down and rebuild it from the ground up. Altogether, the location made an ideal setting for the interrogation that had been going on since he and his colleagues had arrived from Madrid via private jet from Malabo and then been driven here in a hired car some six hours earlier.
Six hours of questioning was a long time and had left the people being talked to both terrified and exhausted. Which was, perhaps, the reason he still had no answer to his queries, and why he’d walked out, to give them a rest and let them consider the gravity of their situation and to get some fresh air himself. It was then he’d found the dead bird in the shadows just outside the door.
8:18 P.M.
He was closer to the house now. Inside he could see the dull glow of a portable lantern one of his men had brought correctly assuming the property no longer had working electricity. He looked up at a sky filled with red streaks and wisps of clouds as the sun set in the west. If he were the smoking man he once had been, this would have been the time he would have brought out a cigarette. But not now. Smoking was in his past, so he had nothing to use as a crutch except his own thoughts and emotions, which at the moment were deeply troubling.
This was hardly the situation he’d imagined when he took the job creating SimCo for Striker and Hadrian more than a year before, resigning from his own company to take a position that would be a major step forward in the highly lucrative world of private security companies. Not just a step but a leap, one that had begun with a ten-year contract with Striker Oil to protect their workers in Equatorial Guinea and that was renewable every five years afterward for the next fifty years. It was a situation that had instantly put him on a level with major private security firms worldwide, and that included Hadrian. But in that heady rush of expectation, neither he nor anyone else had foreseen the bizarre, even obscene, minefield that he and SimCo were in now. How graphically simple and stupid the whole thing with the photographs