by Allan Folsom
CW: Wilco. As stated, retrieval process already under way.
LT: Keep me posted.
With that Loyal Truex signed off, leaving Conor White alone to breathe and reflect in the darkened cabin of his SimCo motor home.
“Right,” he said finally, his accent clearly upper-class British boarding school.
He’d known Loyal Truex since the First Gulf War when British SAS and U.S. Army Ranger advance teams went deep behind enemy lines to gather intelligence on Soviet Scud mobile missile launchers. They’d spent three nights and four days crammed into a tiny cave within a camel’s breath of a large contingent of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, where the slightest mistake or lack of discipline by either of them would have cost them their lives. Since Hadrian’s foray into Iraq just after the beginning of the Second Gulf War he’d worked both with Truex and for him, and more than once in the field. As a result he not only respected Truex’s leadership abilities and the logic behind his thinking, he wholly understood the orders he had just been given: Find and challenge anyone who might have seen the photos. Do what needs to be done. Pay whatever it costs. Leave no trail. Translated it meant: Locate all possible recipients of the photographs; confront them with a show of force; break down any resistance; retrieve the photographs; afterward, kill if necessary.
Conor White shut off the computer. The job was big and ugly and complex. But it was doable. “Right,” he said again, then stood up and made his way toward his sleeping quarters in the rear.
5
Daybreak.
Nicholas Marten stirred from a deep sleep as something small scurried across his face. In reflex action, he reached up and brushed away whatever it was. He started to doze off again when he felt a similar scurrying across the top of his head. He brushed it off, then suddenly was fully awake. He looked down. Hundreds of small red and gray crabs were crawling over him. His arms, his legs, his torso, everywhere. He cried out and jumped up, slapping at anything on his body that moved. Quickly he backed away, watching the crabs scurry in every direction. As he did he touched a wall of some kind. He whirled around. All he saw was strong wooden staves, running from the dark, sandy mud at his feet to crown a foot or more above his head. For an instant he thought it was a crude jail, its bars made of wood. Then he felt water rush in against his feet and a moment later pull back. Instantly he looked around, expecting to see the grinning faces of his captors. Instead he saw more wooden bars and then more outside of where he was. Then he understood. The bars were tree roots. He was in a sandy marsh infested with mangrove trees. The water pushing in and then out at his feet was the incoming tide. The crabs had simply been looking for higher ground to escape the rising water, and he had been their most available avenue.
Where he was now was as much a mystery as where the river had deposited him in the middle of the night. How he had found his way from the river to this thicket of mangroves in the dark—walked, crawled, swam—he had no idea. What he did know was that the river had been fresh water, and the water here was salt. It meant, with the wash of incoming tide, he was somewhere close to the sea.
He moved out from his jail-like habitat to find more of the same. Mangrove trees, he knew, grew where few, if any, other trees would survive, in areas inundated by saltwater. It was the high roots themselves that extruded the salt, which later would be secreted through cells on their leaves. But while it was the roots that protected the plant from the salt, right here and now those same roots were the problem because Marten was surrounded by them in every direction. Whichever way he chose to go, if it was wrong, he would go deeper into the swamp and maybe never find his way out. On the other hand, the tide was coming in and he could see high-water marks where the roots crowned above him, meaning that soon he would have no place to go but up into the trees themselves. He and thousands of crabs and snakes or anything else trying to escape rising water.
Again he watched the flow of the incoming tide, the way it carried in from the left across his feet and then washed back out. The tide was coming in from the sea and washing out to the sea. If he were to reach it, that was the direction he should go. Just how far it was or how long it would take to get there, he had no way of knowing.
Abruptly he turned and followed the tide. Crouching, ducking, twisting, sometimes crawling, he fought his way through mud and crabs and mangroves for ten minutes and then fifteen and then fifteen more. In that time the water rose from ankle level to just below his knees. In the early light he saw nothing but mangroves and the crabs that had climbed their roots.
Then something hard bumped into him. And he turned to see a large piece of floating driftwood, part of a dead tree. Like everything else it was covered with crabs. He started to push it away, then suddenly froze in horror. Entrapped in its branches were the bodies of a native woman and three young children, the oldest five at the most. All four had had their throats cut, and the crabs were hungrily scuttling in and out of the wounds carrying off what pieces of human loot they could.
A surge of tide pushed the log against Marten once more. Quickly he shoved it aside and moved on. The woman was dead, the children were dead, there was nothing he could do except say a prayer for them and wonder if they had been from Father Willy’s village and if he had known them. God, he thought, what are these people doing to each other? And are the SimCo mercenaries making it worse?
Little by little the sky grew brighter, making the canopy of mangroves seem even thicker than before. It was already hot, and the air was a shroud of humidity. Mosquitoes began to swarm, and Marten swatted at them as he went. He was thirsty and hungry and increasingly apprehensive. For all he knew he might have only begun to cross the swamp. It could stretch on for miles before it reached the sea. He began to wonder if he was a fool to try to cross it. How long would it be before his legs gave out or he lost his bearings and turned back the way he had just come? Or stumbled into quicksand, which he knew could be anywhere?
He stopped and looked back. Retracing his steps could be as treacherous as moving on. Even if he made it back to the river he would only have to find another way out. That was if he didn’t run into soldiers first. No, it was best to trust his instincts and keep on the way he was, following the incoming tide.
Ten minutes more and the first sun of the day cut a swath across the trees above him. Another ten and it hit him squarely in the face. In that moment he knew he was looking due east. It meant he was headed toward Bioko’s eastern shore. A half hour later he stopped and shaded his eyes. When he did, the breath went out of him. Through the trees he could see the ocean, its low breakers rolling in beneath a cloudless sky.
“Yes! Yes!” He let out an explosive cry of joy and relief.
Wet, bone weary, hungry, battered, torn, and thirsty, whatever he had done, however he had done it, however far he had come, he had crossed the never-ending prison of mangroves and made it out of the swamp. At that moment nothing in his life had ever seemed more wondrous than the sight of the sandy beach and the rolling sea before him.
For a while he simply sat and rested. Finally he stood and looked left, toward the north. A half mile or so up he could see the rusting hull of what once must have been a coastal freighter buried in the sand. All that was left now was the stern and a piece of bow, connected by what remained of its midsection. Beyond it stretched miles of beach. Nowhere did he see a sign of humanity. No village, no fishermen, no boats at anchor. No person or thing that might provide water and food or help him get to Malabo at the northernmost tip of Bioko. All that had happened, it seemed, was that he had traded the endless maze of the mangroves for miles of uninhabited, desolate beach. It made his fate nearly the same as before. Put one foot in front of the other and move on.
He looked at his watch.
7:48 A.M.
A glance at the cloudless sky, a deep breath, and he stepped off.
6
11:27 A.M.
“Look!” Twenty-four year-old Luis Santiago cried out in Spanish. He was staring off throu
gh the high grass and toward the ocean. Immediately his companions, Gilberto, Rosa, and Ernesto, rushed to join him.
“Marita!” Rosa called over her shoulder to the group’s leader, a young Spanish doctor hunched over the hood of one of two aging, mud-splattered Toyota Land Cruisers looking over a map with two uniformed native guides.
“What is it?” she called back in Spanish.
“A man on the beach!”
Marita turned to look.
“There.” Luis pointed toward the sand.
Marita Lozano shaded her eyes. At first she didn’t see him, and then she did: a lone man in the distance staggering along the beach near the water’s edge. They were at the side of a mud-rutted dirt road a good fifty yards from the shoreline and probably not visible through the tall grass from where the man walked. He was moving slowly and more than once stopped to look around as if he were trying to get his bearings. Then he moved on, his gait unsure, his balance unsteady. Finally he stumbled and fell and then lay still.
“Quickly!” Marita shouted. “Quickly! Quickly!”
The group rushed forward.
Nicholas Marten was in and out of a dream. He thought he saw the face of a beautiful young woman staring down at him. Then she was replaced by a young man with a canteen trying to hold him up and give him water. Then he saw two sturdy black men dressed in uniforms trying to help him to his feet. After that everything faded and he was in England, arriving midday and by rental car at some grand country manor—the Fifield estate near the city of Oxford. The blue sky was mottled with white puffy clouds, the surrounding trees and rolling lawns of Fifield, a bright early-summer green.
Soon he was past a phalanx of men in dark suits and sunglasses, and quickly afterward smiling, shaking hands, and then bear-hugging a tall, elegant, silver-haired man he affectionately called “Cousin Jack”; the same man who, with like affection, called him “Cousin Harold.” The same man who knew what few others anywhere in the world did, that at one time not many years earlier he had been a Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective named John Barron, a member of an elite squad that had disintegrated in a complex circumstance of murder and horror. Faced with the threat of lethal reprisals from dark forces inside the LAPD, he had changed his name to Nicholas Marten and fled with his sister to a new life in Europe: his sister as governess to a wealthy family in Switzerland; he at first as a student of landscape architecture at the University of Manchester in northern England, and then as a professional landscape architect and full-time employee of the respected firm of Fitzsimmons and Justice in that same city.
In short order Marten and “Cousin Jack” were seated alone in the manor’s orangerie and being served lunch: Scottish salmon, Irish potatoes, French beans, Italian white wine, and Spanish mineral water, thereby spreading culinary goodwill over a number of countries.
Even in his dream Marten smiled. “Cousin Jack” was no ordinary cousin, nor was he a relative at all. He was a man he’d been as close to as one human could be to another; a man who had saved his life and whose life he had saved during a near-weeklong hellish journey in Spain some sixteen months before. He was also a man he’d never really expected to see again. “Cousin Jack” was John Henry Harris, the president of the United States.
Earlier that same morning Marten had left his home in Manchester and taken a flight to London, then driven a rental car into the countryside. President Harris was in England to meet with the British prime minister but had set aside time to meet privately with his old friend. The encounter, as Marten well knew, was not without purpose. Their Spanish adventure, in Barcelona and then at the monastery at Montserrat, had been perilous at best, and so his summons to meet “Cousin Jack” alone at Fifield, a beautiful but isolated estate, gave him good cause for unease.
“You want to know what this is about?” the president asked when the pleasantries and reminiscences were over.
“Yes.” Marten smiled carefully. “I want to know what this is about.”
“You’ve heard of the German novelist Theo Haas.”
“The Nobel Prize winner? Of course. I’ve read him and read about him. He’s a brilliant, cantankerous, eighty-year-old troublemaker.”
“Yes,” the president said, smiling, “he is. That aside, he was in Washington three days ago and met with one of his most ardent fans, Representative Joe Ryder of New York. Ryder is the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is the main investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
“I know.” Marten smiled as well. “The Internet works in Manchester the same as most everywhere else. I keep an eye on the national news. I haven’t forgotten where I was brought up.”
“Then you would also know that Ryder is focused on the billions of dollars we are spending in Iraq. He’s particularly interested in the cost overruns by a Texas-based oil field management and exploration company called AG Striker and a chief Striker subcontractor, a private military security firm called Hadrian. Both are working under long-term State Department contracts and have been paid hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars for their services, a lot of it in vague, unsubstantiated cross-billings. Ryder’s job to is clarify those expenditures, but he can’t because the agreements are ‘classified.’ ”
“Not to you.”
“No, not if I press it.” The president put down his fork and took a sip of mineral water. “The public expects its president to be informed, but I have to be careful not to stir up a hornet’s nest if it’s not warranted.”
Marten stared at him. “What are you getting at?”
“In his meeting with Congressman Ryder, Theo Haas suggested that something might be going on between AG Striker and Hadrian that is apart from the situation in Iraq. He was referring to a Striker oil operation in Equatorial Guinea.” President Harris reached into his jacket and took out a folded piece of paper.
“Joe Ryder gave me this.” He handed it to Marten. “It’s a copy of a letter Haas received from his brother, Father Willy Dorhn, a German priest who lives on the island of Bioko, which is part of Equatorial Guinea. In the letter Father Willy describes the changes he has seen in the country over the past few months. His main reference is to a rapidly escalating and violent civil unrest on the mainland, the brutal reaction to it by the regime in power, and the fear that it will soon spread to Bioko. At the same time, more and more people from Striker Oil are arriving there, and a private British military security contractor called SimCo has been brought in to protect them.” The president stopped. “Read it yourself.”
Marten studied him, then took a sip of water and looked at the letter. He read it and handed it back.
“What does this have to do with me?”
President Harris looked at him directly. “After Haas received his brother’s letter, he did some homework and learned that SimCo has been in existence for just over a year. In that time it signed two long-term contracts, one to provide Striker with security services in Equatorial Guinea and another to do the same as a subcontractor to Hadrian in Iraq.”
“You’re suggesting there’s some kind of arrangement between Striker and Hadrian that involves SimCo in both Iraq and Equatorial Guinea.”
The president nodded. “That’s what Hass thought. He apologized to Ryder for having the mind-set of a novelist and then told him he was fully aware of Ryder’s interest in the Striker/Hadrian situation in Iraq. ‘Is it not possible, my friend,’ he told him, ‘that United States taxpayers may be secretly footing the bill for what is happening in Equatorial Guinea as well?’ ”
“You mean SimCo is a front for Hadrian in Equatorial Guinea.”
“Perhaps.”
“It’s not illegal.”
“Unless it’s being done, as Haas suggests, to have the U.S. taxpayers unknowingly fund it, the money coming from the Striker/Hadrian/State Department contracts in Iraq.”
“Striker’s a very successful oil company with apparently enough trouble in Iraq. Why would they do somet
hing like that and expose themselves even more?”
“Don’t know that they did. But I’d like to find out,” the president took a bite of the salmon, washed it down with mineral water, and then looked back to Marten. “There may be nothing to it at all. Everything might be wholly legal. On the other hand, things in Equatorial Guinea are happening quickly and with a lot of bloodshed, and if Striker and Hadrian are somehow trying to make a profit from it with taxpayer money we need to know. At this stage there’s not enough to alert the CIA or anyone else. Moreover, if we did, we would risk tipping our hand to Striker and Hadrian, because they have very good friends in both the Agency and in the Pentagon. On top of that, an intelligence inquiry, even a quiet one, might very well be leaked to the media, and then we would have to deal with that.”
Marten stared at the president. “I hope you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
“Joe Ryder suggested we send an ‘independent contractor’ of our own down there to quietly look around and see what’s going on. Somebody who knows what he’s doing and can have some straight talk with Father Dorhn, then report back with what he thinks is happening, if anything.”
Marten put up his hands in protest. “Mr. President, I’m honored at the suggestion, but I’ve got five very demanding accounts breathing down my neck.”
“Father Dorhn has been in Equatorial Guinea for fifty years.” The president ignored his objection and speared a neatly sliced piece of Irish potato. “If anyone knows what’s going on there he does, and from his letter he seems to know quite a lot.”
“Either that,” Marten pushed back, “or Theo Haas is just worried about him and wants someone to do something about it. Or maybe, as he said, he just has the mind-set of a novelist and is trying to create a story where there is none. He doesn’t have his rascally reputation for no reason.”
