Free The Hadrian Memorandum by Allan Folsom Page A

pockets of overstuffed cowhide furniture arranged here and there in tidy groups for simultaneous separate conversations. A long side table held bottles of water, a stack of cheap Styrofoam cups, and a large thermos of coffee; a well-worn mesquite-topped bar stood in a far corner. In front of the window was the room’s centerpiece, Wirth’s enormous desk, ten feet long by four feet wide, its glass top an inch thick. On it were his essentials: an open laptop computer, a hand-tooled leather cigar box, a twelve-inch-high cigar lighter in the form of an oil derrick, the Texas-shaped ashtray, a slate gray telephone console, two lined yellow legal pads, an electric pencil sharpener, and four freshly sharpened number 2 Ticonderoga 1388 pencils lined up perpendicular to each other exactly two inches apart. Other than his executive desk chair and a mesquite credenza behind the desk itself, there was very little else. No photographs of wife and children. No bound volumes of corporate handbooks lining ornate bookshelves. No portraits of company founders on the walls, which, except for a large AG STRIKER company logo stenciled in raised gold leaf across from his polished-steel office door, were wholly bare.
    A buzzer sounded on Wirth’s console.
    “Yes.”
    “Mr. Truex,” a female voice responded.
    “Send him in.” Wirth said, then looked at Moss, “He’s here.”
    “So I gather,” Moss said as the door opened and Loyal Truex, founder and chief executive of the private security contractor Hadrian Protective Services, entered.
    “Finally, the man himself,” Wirth snapped. “Where the fuck have you been?”
    “Traffic accident. Luckily not mine,” Truex said in a quiet kind of southern drawl.
    “Ever think to pick up the phone and call? Or don’t you think this meeting’s important enough?”
    “You sound like my mother, Sy.” Truex smiled easily, then plunked down on the arm of an overstuffed chair and made himself at home.
    Loyal Truex was forty-three and just over six feet tall. With close-cropped black hair and the muscular build of the former U.S. Army Ranger he was, everything about him—calm, boyish humor, self-made wealth—reflected confidence. His clothes mirrored it: close-fitting, hand-tailored navy suit, open white shirt, plain-toed Italian dress shoes, diamond-studded gold bracelet on one wrist, Rolex watch on the other. That he had spent most of the morning circumventing bad weather while piloting his own Gulfstream jet from Virginia to Texas and after that inching through traffic for nearly an hour seemed to have had no more effect on him than Wirth’s urgent summoning of him to Houston from his Manassas office at six that morning. Still, he was there as promised and ready to go to work.
    Wirth got to it quickly. “The Bioko photographs.”
    “You want to know where we stand with them.” Truex glanced at Arnold Moss, then looked back to Wirth. “It’s the reason I’m here.”
    “I know where the fuck we stand with them. We don’t have them! The reason you’re here is because I want to know what Washington knows. How much you’ve told them or they’ve found out. How closely they’ve been monitoring this.”
    “As far as I know, Sy, it’s still all in-house, yours and mine,” Truex said quietly. “Communication with Bioko, with Conor White, is the same as it’s been with you—all done over our own secure lines. The SimCo people in Malabo have been instructed to say nothing to anyone, and they won’t. They’re exceptionally loyal to White and closed-mouth anyway. On the other hand, if Washington has been monitoring the situation in a way we don’t know—which I doubt, for the simple reason that this is a very recent, low-key development that would take time to filter down—I would have heard about it, slick, fast, and hard. As for the photographs themselves, White’s best operators went after them and came up with nothing, so he brought in General Mariano’s army