by Allan Folsom
“Mr. Marten.” Stump Logan peered through his thick glasses. “I knew Father Willy very well. I visited him in Bioko more than once. The two treasures of his life were his brother and the people he served in Equatorial Guinea.”
“I saw that for myself. I understand,” Marten said.
“So do I. Theo Haas did not send you here without reason.”
11:25 A.M.
70
HOTEL LARGO. 11:37 A.M.
Wirth was back in his room and had just finished brushing his teeth when his BlackBerry sounded. Immediately he answered.
“Yes.”
“Praia da Rocha. Four-door silver Opel Astra, license number 93-AA-71,” Korostin said tersely. “By the time you reach it my people will have found Marten. By the terms of our agreement, Josiah, I will tell you where.”
“Thank you.” Wirth clicked off.
It was time to move.
He went into the bedroom and picked up the blue-tape Blackberry. Two calls would be made from it. The first would be to Conor White, letting him know where Marten had gone, giving him a description of the car, and telling him he would give him an exact location in Praia da Rocha when he had it. The second would be made once he knew White had reached Praia da Rocha. It would be a text message to an FBI in for mant in Spain arranged by his friend in the FBI’s Houston bureau who had originated the transmission system for the blue-tape BlackBerry. The text would be a simple “OK.” At that point the informant would call Spanish authorities, implicating Conor White in the Madrid farmhouse murders and telling them he was armed and dangerous and thought to be in Praia da Rocha, Portugal.
Wirth glanced out the window at the swarm of pleasure boats plying the Sunday waters of Faro harbor, then lifted the blue-tape BlackBerry and punched in Conor White’s number.
“Yes, Mr. Wirth,” White’s voice came back sharply.
“The city of Praia da Rocha. On the sea near Portimão. I’m on my way now.”
“I need a location.”
“I will have it by the time you get there.”
“Yes, sir.”
11:45 A.M.
THE HOUSE AT 517 AVENIDA JOÃO PAULO II. 11:50 A.M.
They found it, as Stump Logan said, through an old wooden gate and down a gravel drive. Marten opened the gate by hand, drove the Opel through, then closed it behind them and started down the driveway.
They could see the house at the bottom. It was single story, made of stone and white stucco with a red tile roof, and was very nearly on the beach itself, no more than a hundred feet up from the high-water mark. Jagged sea cliffs that rose straight up from the sand surrounded most of it, giving a feel of isolation and extreme privacy. For all the bustle of the town’s nearby beaches, there was nothing here but sea birds and slowly lapping waves.
Marten rolled the Opel to a stop at the end of the driveway, and he and Anne got out. They studied the house for a moment, then looked around. There was no one in sight, either on the beach or up the driveway behind them.
“Let’s do this fast,” Marten said, and they moved toward the house. Sand had blown up in shallow drifts over the front walk, and a loose awning swung from its anchorage over a front window, seemingly torn free by the wind. Stump Logan had been right—whoever Jacob Cádiz was, he wasn’t there and hadn’t been for some time. Nor apparently had anyone else, at least since the wind had started moving the sand and awnings around.
Marten started toward the front door, then decided against it and led Anne around to the side of the house. Most of the windows had blinds that had been drawn against the sun, suggesting this was a vacation retreat of some kind and Cádiz had closed them when he left.
They were turning back for the front door when Marten noticed a small window that did not have a shade. Peering in, they saw a narrow hallway that looked as if it were an extension of the front entryway. Partway down it was a small wooden drop-leaf table stacked high with mail, as if someone had deposited it there for Cádiz upon his return. A neighbor or caretaker perhaps.
Mail.
Suddenly Marten remembered what he’d thought during the flight out of Malabo—that the reason the army hadn’t found the photos on Bioko was that Father Willy might have sent them to a safe haven somewhere off the island, perhaps in something a simple as the everyday mail.
“Front door,” Marten said quickly. They went to it, and he rang the doorbell. No answer. He tried it again. Still nothing. Once more. Same result. He looked to Anne. “CIA give you training in breaking and entering?”
“Yes, but most of it I learned it on my own.” Anne bent down and picked up a fist-sized rock. Quickly they went back to the window.
She looked at him. “Just hope to hell there’s no alarm system.”
“Darling, break the damn window.”
Three sharp hits with the rock and the glass cracked. They stopped and listened. No alarm. Marten nodded at Anne, and she hit the glass again. Once more and there was a hole big enough for Marten to reach through and take out the remaining shards. Seconds later they climbed inside.
“Anyone here?” Marten’s voice echoed through the room. There was no reply, and they moved toward the front hallway. To the left was a small study lined with bookshelves. It had a round desk with an ergonomic chair in the center. A desktop computer and printer sat to one side. Beyond that was a kitchen and eating room that faced the sea.
“Anyone here?” Marten called out again, and they went into the front hallway, stopping at the wooden table and the stack of mail overflowing it they’d seen from outside.
Most of it was bills, newspapers, magazines, and advertising circulars. By the postmarks the pieces seemed to have been deposited there off and on over the last four to five weeks.
Marten swore under his breath as he went through it quickly. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
He sifted through the rest, increasingly concerned that no matter what Stump Logan had said about Theo Haas having sent him to Cádiz for a reason, Haas had been playing him for a fool and their trip had been for nothing.
“Wait,” Anne said abruptly. Several more pieces were on the floor, hidden by a leaf of the table. They were bigger, three boxes and four large envelopes. She sorted through them quickly. The bottom-most piece was a thick padded envelope addressed to Jacob Cádiz and postmarked from Riaba, Equatorial Guinea, sometime in late May. The exact date was hard to read.
“This, maybe!” she said with a rush and handed it to him.
Marten looked at the postmark. “Christ,” he breathed and anxiously tore it open.
“Yes. Yes!” he all but shouted as he slid out a plastic-wrapped bundle of Father Willy’s photographic prints, color computer copies like those the priest had shown him in the rain forest. There were twenty-six in all, and all of them the damning Bioko/SimCo stuff.
The first few were duplicates of pictures he had seen before: the helicopter set down in the jungle clearing with men in the doorway unloading crates of weapons to natives who in turn were loading them on an open-bed truck. Among the faces was a very familiar Caucasian in tight black T-shirt and camouflage fatigues.
“Recognize your friend Conor White?” Marten asked, then went to the next photo that showed two more Caucasians. They had buzz-cut hair, were wearing the same black T-shirts and camouflage gear, and were standing in the helicopter doorway.
“Patrice,” Anne said, pointing to the man on the left. “The other’s Jack Hanahan, a onetime Ranger in the Irish Army. Conor keeps him with him almost all the time. Calls him Irish Jack.”
Marten stared at the picture, fixing the men’s faces in his mind. “You knew who these people were, but you had no idea any of this was going on,” he said quietly but with an edge that was clearly accusatory.
Anne reacted. Fiercely. “Of course I knew what was going on. The whole thing was my idea. I love to watch thousands of people kill each other. It beats the hell out of Texas football. You want to get more into it? Fine. We can fight about it later. Right now let�
�s take this stuff and get the hell out of here.”
Marten stared at her, waiting for her to give him some small clue that she had known what was going on, or at least to soften. She did neither.
“Alright,” he said finally, “sorry.”
“You better be.”
“I am.” Immediately he picked up the photographs and started to slide them back into the plastic wrapping. As he did, a white letter-sized envelope slid out. It had been folded over several times and sealed tight with an elastic band. He slipped off the band and unfolded it, then turned it upside-down. A small, thin rectangle dropped into his hand.
Anne and Marten looked at each other.
The camera’s memory card.
“As I said, let’s take this stuff and get the hell out of here.” Anne started for the door.
“No,” Marten said abruptly. “Father Willy didn’t print every picture. I want to see what else there is.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a computer in the other room and because there may not be a chance later. And because when we call Joe Ryder, I want one of us to be able to tell him what’s on it.”
“What do you mean—one of us?”
“In the event your Mr. White and his friends show up and one of us gets killed.”
12:16 P.M.
71
12:17 P.M.
Marten sat down at the round desk in Cádiz’s study and booted up the computer, then looked for a port to slip the card into.
“It’s here,” Anne said and slid an external card port from behind several books near the CPU and set it on top of the tower.
Marten was about to load the memory card into it but found one already there. He started to slide it out. Anne stopped him.
“Let’s see what’s on it. There may be more. Something Father Willy sent earlier.”
She moved in behind him. Marten clicked the photo icon, and images on the card came to life. On it was a series of everyday snapshots. The beach in front of the house, sea birds, the house itself, inside and out, and, as they moved on, a heady number of nude or nearly nude twenty-something women sunbathing on a beach, seemingly taken with a hidden camera.
“Jacob Cádiz has quite an eye.” Marten grinned.
“Stop drooling, darling. There’s a little bit of urgency here. Take that card out. Put the other one in.”
Marten popped out the card, slid the other out of the white envelope, and loaded it into the port. In seconds they knew it was the card Father Willy’s photos had been printed from. They hunched closer to the screen as Marten started to click through them. It was then they heard a car pull up on the gravel outside.
“Cádiz,” Anne said.
“Or maybe a friend or house keeper. Or—”
“Conor White wouldn’t come up that way. Neither would the others.”
Abruptly Marten shut down the computer, then put the memory card back in the envelope with the photographs. “Use the front door. Say we were looking for Cádiz and found it open and the window broken.”
12:23 P.M.
The glare from the midday sun was blinding as they came out, and both squinted against it. The vehicle that had driven in was stopped behind theirs, a dark gray Peugeot sedan. Two people were visible in the front seat. Then the driver’s door opened and a tall man stepped out, a Heckler & Koch compact submachine gun in his hand.
Hauptkommissar Emil Franck.
“Jesus God,” Marten said and looked around expecting to see more police. He saw none. Then the passenger door opened and Marten let out a sharp breath as a slightly overweight, bearded, and very familiar figure stepped into the Portuguese sunshine.
“Good afternoon, tovarich. It’s been a long time.”
“Yes, it has,” Marten said in astonishment.
“Who is he?” Anne asked quickly.
Marten kept his eyes on both men. “Yuri Kovalenko. An old friend from Moscow.” What the hell was going on? What did Kovalenko have to do with this? “Why are you here?” he said. “What do you want?”
“I think you should ask the Hauptkommissar.”
Emil Franck answered before Marten had the chance. “The photographs.”
“What photographs?”
“Those, in the package under your arm. The postmaster confirmed that he personally delivered mail to the house on a regular basis. Among the pieces was a large envelope sent from Equatorial Guinea, which he remembered because of the stamps.” Franck smiled forcefully. “He often did personal favors for Jacob Cádiz. He liked him.”
If Marten was wary before, he was more so now. “Why are there no other police?”
“They know I prefer to work alone. It makes less noise.”
“Then why him?” Marten indicated Kovalenko, then looked back to Franck. “Who else does the Hauptkommissar work for? Mother Rus sia? Hadrian? SimCo? Or is it Striker Oil?”
“The photographs, please.” Franck lifted the Heckler & Koch and started toward them.
“The Hauptkommissar and I met in Berlin.” Kovalenko started forward as well. “Later we had a dialogue with an old friend of Ms. Tidrow. You seem to have found our transmitter. By shutting it down you succeeded in helping to throw off the others following you. There are others, you know. They may well be on their way here now.” Kovalenko’s eyes went to Franck and then back to Marten. He kept moving, slowly, carefully, keeping pace with the German.
“Your photographs seem to be quite a popular attraction. The reason why we are here so soon and the others are not is that the Hauptkommissar is highly respected inside the European Union, especially where the police are concerned. We knew you were on approach to Faro quite some time before you landed. We knew you had rented a car in the city. What make, what color, its registration number.” Again Kovalenko looked to Franck, then back to Marten. “You shouldn’t have driven so many times along Avenida Tomás Cabreira or parked your car where you did. The local police are very good at following up on things. They told us where you went. The postmaster helped with the rest.”
Suddenly Anne understood why there were no police. “Nicholas,” she said, “the Hauptkommissar is CIA.”
Kovalenko half-smiled. “Is that true, Emil? You have another employer?”
“Only those you know.” Abruptly Franck twisted the submachine gun toward Anne. “Please step away from Mr. Marten.”
Marten started to move between Anne and the German.
“Don’t, tovarich,” Kovalenko warned. Suddenly he was sliding a Glock automatic from his waistband.
Marten froze where he was.
“The photographs, please.” Franck was right in front of him, the machine gun leveled at his chest. “You are wanted for the murder of Theo Haas. You were found here and refused to surrender. No one will be surprised that you were shot because of it.”
“Give him the pictures, tovarich,” Kovalenko said quietly. “Do it.”
Franck saw the Russian suddenly step behind him. In a millisecond everything that had happened since they’d met in Berlin flashed across his mind in a hellish collage. Kovalenko’s every move, every gesture, even his attitude had been choreographed to perfection: the arrogance, the measured antagonism, the egotism and competitiveness that seemingly came with the job; the constant references to, and deferral to, Moscow; the fear of reprisal, his personal conceit. All were in character and were expected and put him off guard. They knew he was a double agent and probably had for decades, even before the Berlin Wall came down.
A split second later the Glock in Kovalenko’s hand came to a rest behind his ear. The steel felt cold. He wanted to do something, but it was too late. Until our true fate catches up and then—that’s that. He thought of his wife and children. Prayed they would be alright without him. Then he heard a pop and there was a flash of searing white light.
The body of Hauptkommissar Franck dropped to the ground as if some terrible force of gravity had overwhelmed it. Marten an
d Anne jumped at the suddenness of it.
“Ms. Tidrow was quite correct, tovarich, the Hauptkommissar was CIA.” Kovalenko kept the Glock in his hand. He was calm, wholly matter-of-fact, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. His tone and his manner were the same as they had been years before when he’d done very nearly the same thing from point-blank range and in front of Marten in St. Petersburg, Rus sia.
Immediately he retrieved Franck’s machine gun, loosened its strap, and threw it over his shoulder. Done, he looked to Marten.
“If you would help me please, tovarich.” He twisted the Glock toward Franck’s body. “I’m afraid you will have to carry him yourself.”
Marten stared at him, then handed Anne the photographs, picked up Franck’s body, and carried it toward the Peugeot.
Kovalenko opened the trunk, and Marten laid Franck inside. He looked at him just as Kovalenko closed the lid. The once fearsome über-cop with the shaved head, leather jacket, and immense reputation was now stone dead with half of his skull blown away. A mutilated corpse, nothing else. Murdered where he had stood. How many times had he seen that as a homicide investigator in L.A.? Someone who had been alive one minute was lifeless the next. Yet this was different. Franck had not been killed at random, or because he was a gang member, or for money or drugs or over a woman, but for something much larger. The same something Father Willy and Marita and her students and God only knew how many hundreds or thousands of Equatorial Guineans had been killed for. Maybe Theo Haas, too, but he still wasn’t sure about that. The trouble was, he had no idea what that something was.
Oil?
Maybe.
At the moment it was the god of everyone on the planet. But something didn’t fit. SimCo was arming the rebels, not trying to protect Striker’s workers from them.
“The photographs, tovarich.” Kovalenko turned the Glock automatic toward Anne and the envelope in her hands. “Any number of interested parties thought he might have mailed them. They were right. Let’s get out of this sun and see what they are.”
