“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 something 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
