lose the Bioko field. I haven’t changed my mind.”
“Arnie, listen to me.” Wirth was emphatic. “We’re going to execute what you and I discussed in Houston. Joe Ryder’s due here in the morning. I’m staying at the same hotel he is and am going to request a meeting with him. Just the two of us. He’ll see me if for no other reason than the Iraq situation. I plan to tell him exactly what he’s going to find when he gets the photos, then turn it right back on Truex. Tell Ryder it was all his game, his and Conor White’s, one we knew nothing about. We had no idea that they were helping to arm the revolution until we heard about the photographs.
“Their plan all along seems to have been to covertly expand their influence in West Africa by using us as cover while they backed Abba and his people, giving them whatever they needed to overthrow Tiombe. Something they were certain Abba could do if he had the weapons. Then suddenly the photos came into play and a whole new enterprise presented itself, one worth hundreds of millions if not billions.”
Again Wirth crossed the room. “All they had to do was get hold of the pictures and exploit them. Play Striker as the bad guy who ordered it done. Make it look as if we had backed the overthrow of the country for our own benefit. If they did it right, the exposure would kill Striker publicly and politically, and we’d have to pull out, forfeiting our leases.” He walked across the room once more and then again.
“In the chaos afterward, Truex would convince Abba that he had no experience finding and extracting oil. With Abba’s blessing, he would resurrect the leases in Hadrian’s name with the promise that he’d find someone who did have that experience, first and foremost the Russians, who’d been hovering there the whole time. Then he’d sell the leases to them for an enormous fee and leave, staying lily-white in the process.
“The trouble was, they didn’t have the photos but they knew who did, and they came to Lisbon to get them at any cost whatsoever. They hired a freelancer named Carlos Branco to take care of Anne and Marten and recover them when they went to meet with Ryder, kill Ryder, too, if necessary. I found out what was going on and confronted White and tried to stop him. He refused and threatened to kill me if I said anything or got in the way. That was when I knew I had to go to Ryder myself. He doesn’t have to know anything about Black or the Agency. They’d deny it anyway if it came up.”
“Arnie.” Wirth kept pacing, not even aware of it. In his mind he was in Houston and face-to-face with his general counsel, a man he saw now as little more than an employee. “I run Striker Oil, not you. I’m the one who brought the company to where it is. I’m the one who decided to take the chance and explore Equatorial Guinea and then negotiated the long-term leases with Tiombe’s people. I’m also the same fucking guy who told you from the start he was not going to lose the Bioko field. Not to the Agency, the Russians, or anybody else. Newhan Black doesn’t want to talk to me, then fuck him. You call him and tell him just what I’ve told you and what I’m going to tell Joe Ryder.
“You’re right when you say Black’s not stupid and the find is far too strategic for him to risk. Still, he can’t chance having the photos get out, so he’ll let Branco, White, and his men get rid of Anne and Marten, then take the pictures and fade into the woodwork. Not long afterward, somebody they all know and trust will show up and they’ll disappear. Just like that. White, his gunmen, Branco, and the photos. That same day or maybe the next, Truex will go down, an accident of some kind, and the Bioko field will remain the legal property of the AG Striker Company. Much easier for the Agency that way. After all, we’re the oil company with the long- term leases. The others were just hired gunmen. Hired gunmen are dispensable. Long-term leases for an ocean of oil are not.”
“I am the fire, Arnie. I’ll call you after I meet with Joe Ryder.”
9:46 P.M.
86
9:52 P.M.
The rain was everything. Off-and-on showers had been forecast for the next few days and were expected to begin after midnight. But just after dark a storm front moved in and a steady rain began to fall. To Marten it was serendipitous, and he used it as an excuse to go out after Anne.
He’d found an umbrella stand in a cubbyhole near the apartment’s front door with three large umbrellas tucked into it. Several hats and caps had been in a nearby closet. As with almost everything else, and in a most thorough way, Raisa Amaro had provided her guests with solid protection against nature. Now, with the Glock automatic in his waistband and using the night and weather to help veil his movements, he ventured out.
Umbrella held overhead, jacket collar turned up, a bucket hat borrowed from the closet pulled over his ears and several-day growth of beard adding to his prayer that neither a passing police patrol nor White’s people, however many of them there might be, would recognize him, at least initially, he let Raisa’s front door close behind him, then crossed Rua do Almada and went into the now deserted park.
Six minutes later he crossed Rua da Flores, leaving the Bairro Alto district and entering the Chiado section, backtracking the way he and Anne had come. It was the only thing he could do considering that neither of them had been in Lisbon before today. His guess was that she had to have seen something in passing that caught her eye, a place she felt she could retreat to later. For what purpose he had no idea whatsoever.
Her fear of the CIA seemed to be at the core of everything. But what she thought she could do about it somewhere out here on a rainy Sunday night in a city she barely knew mystified him. Yet whatever she was so intent on doing was, as he’d told her, beside the point if she ended up in the custody of the police or dead at the hands of Conor White. Still, concerned about her as he was and as angry with her as he’d been, at another time and place he might have let it ride, have let her take her chances and get whatever it was out of her system while he stayed in the apartment riding herd on the photographs and keeping out of sight himself. But he no longer had that luxury. Not now, not after President Harris had so compellingly stirred the pot.
Twenty minutes earlier, and still in the apartment, he’d used his dark blue throwaway cell phone to call Harris-at Camp David or the White House or wherever he was-on his own throwaway cell. There had been no answer. He’d tried again to no avail. Then, seconds later, the apartment’s phone had rung. It startled him and he hesitated. Finally he picked up, sure it was either Anne or Joe Ryder.
“Who is me?” he said warily.
Marten relaxed. “You wanted me to let you know when we got here. I was waiting for Ryder’s call. I thought maybe this was it.” He made no mention of Anne, just let the president assume
