The Hadrian Memorandum by Allan Folsom Page B

of central casting. The SimCo people were your classic badass tough guys, hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, black-T-shirt-and-camouflage-pants-wearing, shaved-headed combat veterans from probably a dozen different countries and as many wars. The Striker crew looked like field people—drillers, riggers, technicians, and the like. Most of them still wore their grease-and sweat-stained work clothes, lightweight jumpsuits with a big AG STRIKER company logo stenciled on the back, and unlike the SimCo people, not all were men.
    Four women who looked like office staffers, folded umbrellas still wet from the rain hung over the backs of their chairs, sat at a nearby table drinking and talking among themselves, and once in a while looking off toward a hunky mercenary or oil driller. Here and there were unkempt-looking women. They wore low-cut, slit-to-the-thigh dresses like uniforms and took up space at the long mahogany bar or sat at cheap rattan cocktail tables working any man who would pay for their attention.
    Then there were the rest. Mostly they were men, ranging in age from middle twenties to late sixties. The majority of them wore tropical suits with dress shirts open at the neck. Some of the younger ones wore jeans or khakis with golf shirts under wrinkled, lightweight sport coats. Judging from their languages they seemed to be European or South African. Within a circle of twenty feet Marten heard smatterings of English, German, Afrikaans, Spanish, and Italian. His experience in his not-so-many-years-removed life as a homicide detective on the Los Angeles Police Department told him most were quick-buck artists—gamblers, manipulators, and hangers-on, whores of all trades—drawn to anywhere there was fast money to be made. And his sense of things during the few days he had been there told him there was plenty to be made in Equatorial Guinea. The dealings would be in drugs, guns, human beings, information—by the bundle or in snippets—anything at all they could sell for profit.
    Marten pushed around a large man in a sweat-stained white suit and was trying to find the most direct way to the bar when he saw Marita and her medical students squeezed around a small corner table. She smiled and waved when she saw him. He grinned and nodded in return. He hadn’t seen any of them since they had been separated and the soldiers had taken him off for interrogation, and he was happy to see they had been released and were safe. He stepped around two arguing AG Striker oil workers and went to their table.
    “We were concerned about you, Mr. Marten,” Marita said as he reached the table. “Please sit down.”
    “I’m alright, thanks.” They made room, and he sat down gingerly. “What about you? Everybody okay?”
    “We’re fine,” Marita said, then looked at her young companions. “¿Sí?”
    “Sí,” they nodded in agreement.
    The four were people he knew only by their first names: the slim, ever-smiling Luis; baby-faced Rosa, a little overweight and looking like a wannabe executive secretary in oversized glasses and olive-colored sack dress; the quiet, chubby, seemingly overly serious Gilberto; and Ernesto, tall and gangly with an unruly mop of bright red hair and red Converse sneakers to match. Here, in this crowded, boisterous, smoke-filled room, surrounded by a crowd of hardscrabble players from a wholly different world, they looked a lot less like people who would soon be doctors than kids who should still be living at home and going to high school.
    “They collected our things from the hostel where we were staying,” Marita added, “and then brought us here, saying they would pick us up at nine and take us to the airport. We were told to leave the island tonight. From what they said we will be on the same flight you are taking.”
    “To Paris.”
    “Yes.”
    Marten smiled. “It’s a pleasant coincidence.” Some coincidence, he thought. From what he’d learned at the front desk, it was the only flight out for the