The Hadrian Memorandum Read Free Page B

Shortly afterward he formed the Bristol, England–based SimCo LLC, a smaller, far more agile military security company where the emphasis was narrowed to “providing protective security services to major companies doing business in underdeveloped regions of the globe.” Less than a month later, SimCo signed a long-term contract with Striker to provide those same services for the AG Striker Company in Equatorial Guinea. Ten days after that, White signed a separate contract for SimCo to provide operational support to Hadrian in Iraq, where it had long been Striker’s chief private defense contractor under an agreement between Striker and the U.S. Department of Defense.
    It was to Hadrian’s Loyal Truex that Conor White waited to send his urgent and necessarily secure postmidnight e-mail. Another man might have been nervous about what he had to report; he wasn’t. As far as he was concerned he was in the middle of a war, and war was not only deadly but often troublesome and, these days especially, highly unpredictable. Moreover, he had been and still was a highly trained professional soldier. He acted accordingly.
    12:25 A.M.
    He pressed the pound sign on the keyboard. Immediately a message flashed on the screen in front of him: YOUR LXT DIGITAL IS ACTIVATED. PLEASE ENTER YOUR PERSONAL CODE.
    White’s fingers reached out, and he entered the code. Instantly the words LOCK FUNCTION appeared on his screen. It meant the transmission line from Conor White, SimCo/Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, to LoyalTruex, Hadrian/Manassas, Virginia, was secure.
    Immediately he typed in the following: We’ve got a potential bad one. There are photographs of our guys unloading arms to the rebels.
    Two seconds passed, then Truex replied.
    Photographs?
     
    CONOR WHITE: Yeah. Clear as day. No doubt about who our guys are if somebody wanted to examine it. I’m included with the other ops. I’ve seen several of the pics myself, computer-printed hard copies. They were taken last week. All have date codes.
    LOYAL TRUEX: Have the photos been distributed?
    CW: Not that we know. The copies I saw were brought to our guys in the field by a local native who wanted to sell them.
    LT: Who took them?
    CW: Old German priest in Bioko. The army got him, he’s in a coma. His place was searched. His printer found and destroyed. Digital camera found, too. Only camera he had. No photographs, no extra prints discovered. The memory card was new. The old one with the photos is missing.
    LT: What if he e-mailed the pictures somewhere?
    CW: There is no Internet connection in Bioko South, where he lived. To send them he would have had to use an E.G. government, Striker, or SimCo facility in Malabo, only places that have IT connections. He didn’t.
    LT: Camera cell phone transmission?
    CW: His only cell phone was old. Had no camera technology. Cell transmission from Bioko South is unreliable anyway.
    LT: He could have faxed the printer copies.
    CW: Fax machine was found in his office, broken. Two more in the village. Both checked for recent communication. None in six months for one, three months for the other. Both destroyed. Owners now deceased. Ongoing check for more machines in surrounding villages. More—local telephone company records accessed. So far no fax or cell-photo transmissions to anywhere other than E.G. in last six weeks. Locals under us checking number by number now. Sense nothing sent, area still too primitive.
    LT: What about regular mail service? He could have mailed them.
    CW: Mail service from the south is erratic at best. Pickups would have gone to central post office in Malabo. Only possible tracking was if he sent them via registered mail. There is no record that he did. If he did send them via regular mail, they would be impossible to trace.
    LT: CRITICAL — retrieve and destroy photographic evidence of any kind. Paper, electronic, etc. MOST IMPORTANT — locate, retrieve, and destroy the camera’s ORIGINAL MEMORY CARD. Locate and destroy any