The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [98]
When all was said and done—when Dimitri’s people had delivered the photographs and gone, and from Dimitri’s reputation and actions so far there was little reason to think they wouldn’t succeed, with Marten and Anne dead in the process—the person left twisting in the air would be Conor White. And there would be nothing he could say without incriminating himself further. Even if he pointed the finger at Wirth, claiming he was the mastermind of all this—of arming the rebels and then of directing the search for the damning photographs, which included the interrogations in the farmhouse outside Madrid—his case would fall apart because there would be no photographs and any claim of direct communication between the two of them would end only in a trace back to the general number at Hadrian headquarters in Virginia. An allegation of a clandestine meeting between the two of them at the former bordello in Berlin would be indefensible as well. The apartment had been rented by phone and charged to a SimCo account in England under the name Conor White. On the morning of the day in question Josiah Wirth had been in a meeting with the Russian oil oligarch Dimitri Korostin at the Dorchester Hotel in London. It was true he had gone to Berlin later and taken a suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, but that had been to meet with an associate of Korostin’s who had had to cancel at the last minute. He hadn’t even been aware that White was in the city. Sometime after one the next morning he’d left the German capital in the company Gulfstream for a series of business meetings in Barcelona.
It was on the way there that he would hear about the tragedy in whatever town or city where Dimitri’s people caught up with Anne and Marten, and where White and his gunmen would be found by the local authorities and accused of their murders. Authorities who would have gone there on a tip from the Spanish police, who would have been anonymously alerted to White’s probable complicity in the Madrid farmhouse murders and have been warned that he was on his way to wherever this place was to settle some grievous personal account with Striker board member Anne Tidrow.
Depending on the timing, Wirth would either go to the location directly from Barcelona or divert his flight en route, shocked and outraged at White’s involvement with what had happened there and at the Madrid farmhouse and mourning the death of a dear colleague who was the daughter of Striker’s late and much loved found er.
Wirth took another sip of coffee and looked out the window to see the first streaks of day beginning to brighten the eastern sky. Suddenly he felt exhausted, as if all of the anxiety, intensity, and travel of the past days had caught up with him. He’d slept little and knew he would need all the clearheaded energy he could muster when things began to happen. If he could sleep now, even for twenty minutes, it would be a godsend. He put the cup down and lay back, closing his eyes. Just relax, he told himself. Don’t think about anything. Don’t think about anything at all.
6:28 A.M. SPANISH TIME
62
CESSNA, D-VKRD. AIRSPEED 130 MILES PER HOUR.
ALTITUDE 4,500 FEET. 6:15 A.M. PORTUGUESE TIME.
Marten glanced at Brigitte and then looked back at Anne. She was watching him without expression, as if she were fed up with his maneuverings and seriously wondering if he really did know what the hell he was doing. He turned back, saying nothing. This was no time to get into it again. Not when they had come this far and were so close to their objective. Or at least what he hoped what their objective would