The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [52]
In the last hours he had heard from Loyal Truex—twice—and from Josiah Wirth, who, at this moment, was on his way to Europe from Texas on an AG Striker corporate jet. Coming, he was sure, for one reason alone, to look over White’s shoulder and direct his every move. Both men had demanded to know where he was and how he was progressing and when, exactly, the problem would be resolved, as if he were a plumber called in to repair a broken toilet while a wedding party waited outside to use it. Both wanted it done yesterday, yet neither understood the complexity of finding the ghost he was chasing. Truex was trouble enough, but at least he and White spoke the same language. Wirth was entirely different, a man too driven, too egotistical, too rich, and too single-minded to view the world from any other perspective but his own. People like that easily became reckless, even foolhardy, especially when they began to lose confidence and feel things were slipping out of their control. As a result they left themselves wide open to their own brand of panic, one that easily led to judgments that could be hugely damaging and sometimes dangerous or even deadly, and not just to themselves but to people around them. And that was the last thing Conor White wanted.
Now or ever.
8:20 P.M.
In the growing twilight he could see the black Mercedes limousine that had brought the captives to the farm house parked under an overhang of trees. Its liveried driver and a similarly dressed local gunman, who had met White and the two SimCo mercenaries he’d brought with him from Bioko to Madrid and driven them there, were standing nearby smoking and chatting. Fourth and fifth hands if a problem arose inside the house. As if it would with the men stationed there: Irish Jack Hanahan, a former member of Sciathán Fianóglach an Airm, the Ranger Wing of the Irish army, with massive thirty-two-inch thighs, lightning reflexes, and fists like hams; and the wiry, almost too handsome French-Canadian with piercing green eyes, Patrice Sennac, at one time the CIA’s top Central American counterinsurgent, a veteran jungle fighter, who had a long scar at the side of his mouth to prove it. Depending on the situation, either man could be absurdly polite or grimly lethal to anyone, friend, enemy, or whoever fell in between. Like those waiting for him to come back inside and begin the questioning once more—the young Spanish doctor and her four medical students. Five people who might very well know what the Equatorial Guinean army interrogators had failed to find out—the location of the photographs. Might very well know because Nicholas Marten would have had every opportunity to tell them: on the road to Malabo from where they had first met on the beach in Bioko South, or in Malabo itself at the hotel over drinks, or, last and most likely of all, on the long overnight plane ride to Paris.
White would have much preferred to have gone after Marten himself and left the doctor and her students to others, but that assignment had gone to Anne, who Truex, Sy Wirth, and Anne herself felt could get closer to Marten than he could. So instead he was given the secondary target, the five now inside the house.
The thing driving it all was urgency. Find the photographs and destroy them before they fell into what could only be referred to as “public hands.” For White the pressure was all the greater because he was a prominent figure in any number of the pictures, and if they were made public everything he’d worked for all his life would be gone.
Everything.
Colin Conor White had been born in London, the only child