Read Online The Hadrian Memorandum by Allan Folsom - Free Book Online

next two days, and the army clearly wanted them all off the island as quickly as possible. He looked around the table. None of them seemed to have been ill treated. Still, they had been questioned, and he wanted to know what they had told whoever had done it. He wondered if the subject of the photographs had come up, or if they even knew about them. He turned to Marita. “What did they ask you?”
    “They searched us and then wanted information. Mostly about you. How we came to be traveling together. What we knew about you. The things you said to us.”
    “What did you tell them?”
    “The truth, of course. That we saw you walking on the beach and you collapsed and we went to help you. After that all the things you told us,” Marita smiled conspiratorially, the impishness in her rising up, then she repeated almost verbatim what he had told them on the beach and what they had gone over in the Land Cruiser on the drive to Malabo. “Afterward they asked what we were doing in Bioko, but we had already documented our purpose with the proper authorities when we first arrived. So we were okay.”
    “That’s all they wanted, nothing else?”
    “No.”
    “Nothing about a priest?”
    “No. Why?”
    Marten shook his head. “Nothing.” Apparently the matter of the photographs had not come up. Perhaps because the authorities were satisfied with what he had told them and believed that the distance between Father Willy’s village and the beach where he had been found was too great to have involved a conspiracy to smuggle the pictures out. If that were the case, then the pictures would not have been mentioned. No reason to alert others to their existence if there was no need; that could only serve to complicate things later if some unforeseen problem arose, say, with the media and inquisitive reporters.
    Suddenly Ernesto ran a hand through his pasture of red hair. “There was one other thing,” he said in English. “When we collected our luggage we realized everything had been gone through, even our medical supplies. But nothing was missing. Why they did it none of us knows.”
    Marten half-smiled. “Don’t feel bad, they went through mine, too. Looking for what, I don’t know any more than you do.” So they had been looking for the pictures. They weren’t that incompetent. “I guess they have a revolution on their hands and aren’t taking any chances.”
    At that moment a sudden gust of wind sent an avalanche of rain across a large window behind them. Seconds later a stronger gust rattled the entire building. Again the lights flickered, almost went out, then came back on.
    “We’ll be lucky if we get out tonight at all,” Marita said with not well hidden apprehension. She didn’t like being stuck here any more than Marten did. Too many things could still go wrong.
    “That’s what I was thinking,” Marten said.
    Immediately something off to one side caught Marita’s eye, and she turned to look. Marten followed her gaze to see a tall, attractive woman coming toward them through the crowd. She was probably in her late thirties or early forties, had stylishly cut, shoulder-length dark hair, and wore expensive white linen slacks with a matching short-sleeve top. She also had the intense, almost severe air of someone used to being in charge and had something immediate and definitive on her mind.
    With her was a handsome man in a tan suit with a light blue shirt open at the collar. He looked to be a little older than she, was well over six feet tall, had dark, close-cropped hair, and appeared to be more than physically fit. He, too, held the aura of authority. It was in the cut of his clothes and the way he carried himself: shoulders back, chest out; his movements smooth and fluid; his presence bordering on the aristocratic. It was a characteristic Marten had seen in some of his clients in Manchester, a studied military bearing born in the career officer ranks of the armed forces. There was something else, too, and