by Allan Folsom
Wirth glanced at the two BlackBerrys on the table beside him. One was his everyday phone. The other had a little piece of blue tape on the bottom to distinguish it. Calls made from it were rerouted through the Hadrian Worldwide Protective Services Company’s headquarters in Manassas, Virginia, making it appear as if they had originated from there.
It was the device he’d been using to contact Conor White since the meeting with Hadrian’s Loyal Truex and Striker’s chief counsel, Arnold Moss, in Houston when both companies had agreed to distance themselves from SimCo. The same meeting where, after Truex left, he’d told Moss it was time to distance themselves from Hadrian as well. Hence any calls he made to Conor White would be on telephone company records as having come directly from Hadrian. It was a concept he had devised himself, the system and means of execution very quietly put into play by a friend in the Houston office of the FBI.
11:07 P.M.
Wirth looked at his watch, then picked up his main BlackBerry and alerted the pilots of his Striker-owned Gulfstream on standby at Tegel Airport to be ready for takeoff in two hours. Done, he set the alarm on his watch for midnight, then got up, crossed to the bed, lay back, and closed his eyes, determined to get even a few minutes of sleep. It didn’t come quickly. His mind and senses overrode it.
In addition to normal air traffic, by one thirty there would be four more planes in the air, all headed for Málaga: Marten’s piston-engine Cessna and three chartered jets—Conor White’s Falcon 50, another with Dimitri’s people on board, and his own Striker Gulf-stream. A lot of money, a lot of men, a lot of aircraft to recover a single batch of photographs.
53
A LEARJET 55, SOMEWHERE OVER SOUTHERN FRANCE.
FUSELAGE REGISTRATION LX -C88T7.
AIRSPEED 270 MPH. ALTITUDE 39,000 FEET. PILOTS, 2.
MAXIMUM PASSENGERS, 7. ACTUAL PASSENGERS, 2.
SUNDAY, JUNE 6. 1:25 A.M.
Emil Franck could see Kovalenko hunched over a cell phone in the darkened forward cabin, every once in a while nodding and gesturing with his free hand. His first thought had been that he was in conversation with someone in Moscow—his wife or his children, or perhaps a mistress. Yet the idea that it was a domestic call was doubtful because it was almost three thirty in the morning Moscow time. A more credible scenario was that he was engaged with a superior, discussing the mission at hand and the details of what would happen if and when they recovered the materials they were after.
They’d lifted off from Berlin/Schönefeld just after nine thirty and two hours later gone into a holding pattern, a wide circle over the southern city of Toulouse that swung as far out as the Pyrenees on the French/Spanish border, waiting for the slower Cessna carrying Nicholas Marten and Anne Tidrow to catch up so they could follow it into Málaga or wherever else it might touch down. Wherever else because they knew Marten was not foolish enough to file a flight plan that would tell anyone exactly where he was going.
Franck looked to the laptop he’d been monitoring off and on since they’d left Berlin. On it, superimposed over a map of Western Europe, was a tiny green dot that represented the location of Marten’s Cessna, the information relayed by a powerful thumb-sized transmitter hidden inside the aircraft.
The setup was part of a complex operation carried out quickly and efficiently after his meeting with Kovalenko that morning at Neuer Lake when he’d tapped into his vast underground network of informers and several hours later learned of an urgent request to charter a fast plane—a jet or turboprop—to fly two passengers from a private airstrip near Potsdam to Málaga, Spain, early that evening. Quickly, he’d turned the fast-plane request into one for a slower aircraft, the piston-driven Cessna 340, then had the transmitter installed after the plane had been secured and was being serviced.
His current calculation put the Cessna some two hundred and fifty miles behind them, flying southwest at approximately 190 mph, the speed it had been averaging since he first turned the laptop on and picked up the plane’s location. It meant they were still on course for Málaga. Nothing had changed.
1:30 A.M.
Franck put the laptop aside and leaned back, hoping to get an hour or so of sleep, a prospect he knew was unlikely. Sleep in situations like these was not part of the drill. He glanced at the overnight bag on the seat across from him. In it was a fresh shirt, socks, underwear, a toothbrush, and a razor all tucked neatly alongside a Heckler & Koch MP5K compact submachine gun, which, along with the Glock 9 mm automatic Kovalenko carried in a holster clipped to his waistband, had been locked inside a storage compartment on the aircraft when they boarded.
Who the hell was Kovalenko anyway? A man with FSB credentials—the Federal Security Service Ministry of Internal Affairs—who had arrived on-scene in Berlin quicker than magic, literally within hours of his early-morning meeting with Elsa in the darkened café near Gendarmenmarkt Square, as if he’d already been in the city looking for Marten. And maybe he had. Franck might be a top cop in Berlin, a Hauptkommissar of Hauptkommissars, but he certainly didn’t know everyone or everything, and besides, he hadn’t heard from Elsa in ages. So there was no telling who or what she had been involved with since. She might well have been working with Kovalenko for years. That the Russian had known Marten from before, when he’d been a homicide investigator in Los Angeles, was a curiosity in itself. Stranger still was how they should both end up here circling over France at the orders of Moscow waiting for him to retrieve what were thought to be extremely important pictures. How had Elsa put it when reminding him Marten was wanted for the murder of Theo Haas?
“. . . it is reason enough for you to kill him after you recover the photographs.”
Which, other than his official role as the primary German investigator charged with apprehending Marten for Haas’s murder and his connections to the international law enforcement community that might be of help in the event Marten eluded them on the ground, was the reason he was there. Retrieving the photos for Moscow was only part of it. Once done—if done—Kovalenko and the pictures would disappear, and he would be left to clean up. Eliminate Marten and whoever was with him—in particular the Texas oil woman, Anne Tidrow, and/or anyone else who got in the way. That way there could be no trace back to Moscow, no hint that Russia was in any way involved.
1:37 A.M.
Franck glanced at the laptop’s screen. The Cessna was no longer moving. Instead its dot was frozen on the screen inland from the sea near the French city of Bordeaux. He sat up fast. As he did, he saw Kovalenko coming toward him.
“The Cessna has stopped,” he said quickly. “Did the transmitter crash? Did the plane?”
Kovalenko grinned. “Neither, Hauptkommissar. They’ve put down at Bordeaux-Mérignac Airport, most likely for fuel. An understandable delay. Nothing has changed.”
“What is our own fuel situation?” Franck said calmly, unhappy with his show of alarm and Kovalenko’s patronizing response.
“For now, more than adequate, Hauptkommissar.”
Franck squinted in the dim cabin light trying to see the Russian more clearly. Deliberately he changed the subject. “You told me you knew Nicholas Marten from before, that he had been a homicide investigator in Los Angeles.”
“I was there investigating a case involving the murder of Russian nationals. We had some dealings together. He had a different name then.”
“Why did he change it and move to another country and take up another profession? Corruption?”
“He’s not a policeman at heart, Hauptkommissar. I think he wanted to wholly extricate himself from that world. He preferred to see the beauty in life instead of bearing such close witness to the horror of what the human race does to itself every day.”
“Yet now he’s going to become part of that same horror.”
“It is his fate, Hauptkommissar.” Kovalanko pointed a finger skyward. “Written long ago in the stars. At least he will have had a few years of peace and, hopefully, joy.”
“You believe in fate, Kovalenko?�
��
Kovalenko smiled. “If I didn’t, I, too, would be out planting flowers. Who the hell wouldn’t? If it weren’t for fate, everyone in the world would be out planting flowers. It would seem a very reasonable thing to do. Few, like Marten, recognize what’s happening and do something about it. The rest of us merely accept it and simply go about the business at hand.” The humor left Kovalenko’s eyes. “Until, as Marten is about to discover, our true fate catches up.”
“And then?”
“And then—that’s that.”
1:45 A.M.
54
FRANCE, BORDEAUX-MÉRIGNAC AIRPORT. 1:50 A.M.
Marten crossed the lighted tarmac in the area dedicated to civil aviation. A dozen planes were parked equidistant from each other. All dark. Locked for the night. The thirteenth, the Cessna D-VKRD, was farthest out, its interior lights on. By now it would have been fueled and ready for takeoff. Anne and their pilot, Brigitte Marie Reier, having used the terminal’s toilet facilities and had something to eat, would be in the plane waiting for him.
Before, he’d purposely stayed back, remaining with the aircraft, letting the women go inside first. There’d been no real reason, other than to be polite and wanting to stretch his legs, and to be alone and think. And for a brief time he had, reflecting back on his conversation with Anne.
Memories of his late, beloved Caroline had moved him deeply, as had the horrors of Equatorial Guinea. The deaths that occurred there screamed out, leaving nothing but unfathomable anger and damning hatred for the carnival of perpetrators. All of it complicated by his own mental and physical exhaustion.
The truth was he was coming apart. He’d thought he’d left the savagery of violent death behind when he’d begun his new life in England. Then, from nowhere, he’d been thrust headlong into a world far darker and more monstrous than anything he’d seen on the streets of L.A. Suddenly he was afraid he was no longer capable of operating in it, that the self-protective, steel-edged coping mechanism every homicide cop develops to deal with murder on a daily basis had left him. If he was to continue, he would need that attitude and those skills. Without them, he might very well be killed himself and take Anne along with him. Especially if he had to go up against Conor White and whatever mercenaries he was sure to have accompanying him.
Instinct told him to walk away now. Say to hell with Anne, the photographs, Joe Ryder, even the president. Leave the Cessna where it was without a word or a note or anything. Just find his way back to Manchester and the quiet beauty and emotional safety of his life there. Make believe none of this had ever happened.
He might have done it, too, or at least tried, if he hadn’t suddenly been jolted by the thundering roar of a corporate jet taking off less than two hundred yards from where he stood. He’d watched it disappear into the night sky, its exterior navigational lights quickly fading to nothing. In that moment he heard Erlanger’s words again.
“Stay away from the old contacts. You got away with it this once. For your sake, don’t try it again.”
Maybe they’d gotten away with it and maybe they hadn’t.
Immediately he thought of the jet aircraft he’d requested and then of the slow ’54 Chevy of a Cessna they’d been given. Had it been all that was available or was there some other reason?
In the next second he’d gone to the plane and walked around it, looking at the engines and under the wings, then examined the fuselage and tail assembly as best he could in the faint light. Afterward he climbed inside and poked around in the same way, looking under the instrument panel, the seats, the small luggage area, anywhere some kind of electronic transmitting device might have been planted. Then he’d heard the women coming back and quickly finished, stepping out just as they arrived.
A few insignificant words passed between them, and then it was his turn to go into the terminal. He’d used the restroom, then found a cafeteria area with Wi-Fi hookups and given the lone young man he found working at a laptop twenty euros to borrow it for a few moments—“to check my e-mail and stuff.” In those minutes he’d done what he’d not had the chance to do since Theo Haas had been murdered, clicked on Google Maps and pinpointed the location of the town Haas had pointed him toward, Praia da Rocha, in the Algarve region of Portugal’s south coast. He’d found it nestled among the myriad of small beach communities near the city of Portimão. The nearest major airport was in Faro, which was close to the Spanish border and probably not two hundred miles from Málaga. Importantly, there were rental car facilities at the airport, most of which opened at six in the morning.
Faro was close enough to Málaga for Brigitte to radio a last-minute amended flight plan to Málaga air traffic control saying her passengers had requested she give them a tour of the coastline and would return to her original flight plan when they had finished. Not an unusual request for civil aviation traffic. So, if he chose to bypass Málaga, Faro would be the clear option. Anne could rent a car, and they could take what on the Google map appeared to be no more than a thirty-minute drive to Praia da Rocha. So he had a workable alternative, but he would wait until they were approaching Málaga before he made a final decision.
55
1:53 A.M.
“We have clearance for takeoff?” Marten was looking at Brigitte as he climbed into the Cessna. She was sitting at the controls studying navigational charts under a high-intensity cockpit light. Behind her, he could see Anne watching from the darkened cabin.
“Yes, sir,” Brigitte said.
“Then let’s go.”
“Yes, sir,” she said again.
Marten slid past her on his way to his seat. As he did he saw the two women exchange glances.
“What was that for?” he said as he buckled in.
Anne raised an eyebrow. “How long does it take to pee?”
Marten grinned. “Sometimes it works right away and sometimes it takes a little coaxing.”
Brigitte turned out the cockpit light and the lights of the instrument panel in front of her came to life. There was a sharp whine as she touched the ignition. A second later the port engine caught, then the starboard, and with a roar of propellers the Cessna moved off.
Marten waited a moment, then looked to Anne and lowered his voice, the lightheartedness of seconds earlier gone. “I specifically requested a faster plane. We didn’t get it. Whose idea was that, yours or Erlanger’s? Or was it someone else?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I asked you before about what Erlanger said in Potsdam before we took off. You didn’t want to discuss it. With all your connections in Berlin, he, or whoever arranged for the plane, could have found the kind of aircraft I wanted. It didn’t happen. And for one reason. They gave us a two-hundred-mile-an-hour Cessna so they could use a five-hundred-mile-an-hour jet to track us. That way we couldn’t outfly them in the event we changed course. They know the kind of aircraft we’re in, its registration number, who our pilot is, our flight plan, everything. Not to mention this.”
Marten took a small black box from his jacket and held it out to her. “Looks like a Hide-A-Key, doesn’t it?” He slid it open and took out a thin, flat object about four inches long and an inch wide. A tiny red light blinked off and on in the center of it. “I found it under the copilot’s seat. Just clipped in like whoever did it didn’t have much time.”
She looked at it and then at Marten. “It’s a bug, a transmitter.”
“I don’t suppose you knew about it.”
“No.”
“I didn’t think you would,” he smiled cynically. “I’m sure whoever put it there did it just to make sure we didn’t get lost.” Abruptly his demeanor hardened. “What does the CIA have to do with this? And don’t say you don’t know. I could see it in the way you looked at Erlanger when he spoke to you. He was warning you about something, and it upset you a great deal. What was it?”
Brigitte swung the Cessna sharply right and onto the runway, then accelerated for takeoff, the roar of its twin engines earsplitting as
the plane gained speed. Ten seconds, then twenty and thirty, then they were up, the lights of Bordeaux-Mérignac Airport disappearing beneath them.
Anne glanced at Brigitte, then looked to Marten and lowered her voice. “I’m not sure how much Erlanger already knew or what he had just learned. But I put it together with something that happened that last night at the hotel in Malabo. As I was leaving for the airport I saw Conor White meet with a man in combat fatigues. He was armed and unshaven and looked as if he’d been in the rain forest for several days if not more. They talked briefly and then left together. I assumed he was working for SimCo, but I’d never seen him there before.”
“What do you mean ‘there’? Malabo?”
“No. Not anywhere SimCo people were. Malabo or anywhere else on Bioko. Not on the mainland, Rio Muni, either.”
“But you had seen him somewhere before.”
“Not just seen him, I knew him, when I was active CIA in El Salvador. His name is Patrice Sennac. He’s French-Canadian and was then a top contract agent. He’s a first-rate jungle fighter whose specialty is insurgency and counterinsurgency. He’d fight for one side in the morning and the other in the afternoon, working one against the other. Neither side knew.”
“Jungle fighter?”
“Yes, why?”
“He’s tall and very thin. Wiry.”
“How did you know?”
“He was in several of the photographs.”
Anne said nothing, just looked at him in that fearful way she had when Erlanger spoke to her at the airstrip.
“You think White brought him in specifically to help arm Abba’s rebels but kept him out of sight until you left because he knew you would recognize him and ask what he was doing there?”
Still she said nothing.
“Is that what you think happened?”
“Yes,” she said finally.
“Meaning you’re not sure if he’s a SimCo employee or if he still works for the CIA. And if he does, then Conor White might work for them, too, another contract agent with a top security clearance, comfortably inside in the Striker/Hadrian household with neither of them knowing, like the two sides in El Salvador.”