bottom-most piece was a thick padded envelope addressed to Jacob Cadiz 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
“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 Cadiz’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 Cadiz 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.
“Cadiz,” 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 Cadiz 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.”
