The Machiavelli Covenant

30

• MADRID, HOTEL RITZ, 1:25 A.M.

Jake Lowe took the call in the dark in his private fourth floor suite.

"Yes," he said, moving up on an elbow in bed, then instinctively glancing around, making sure he was alone.

"I have a mosquito that needs swatting," a middle-aged female voice said calmly. "His name is Nicholas Marten. He pretended to be an associate of Representative Baker. How he found us I don't know. He was asking very 'enlightened' questions. He was also with Mrs. Parsons in the last hours before she died."

"Yes, I'm aware of that."

"I would like to find out who he works for, what he knows, and if anyone is working with him before we call in an exterminator."

"Where is he now?" Lowe asked.

"Malta. The Castille Hotel."

"When are you leaving?"

"Shortly."

"I'll be in touch."

There was a click as the caller hung up. Lowe hesitated for a moment, then turned on the bedside lamp and picked up his BlackBerry. The voice had come over a secure phone and had been altered and then digitally scrambled, making it virtually impossible to identify, let alone trace. Only one person had the equipment and the necessary code to use it-Merriman Foxx.

• VALLETTA, MALTA, BRITISH HOTEL, 6:45 A.M

"Come back in five minutes!" Demi Picard barked in answer to a knock on her door. She fastened the last buttons of a blue-striped man-tailored shirt, slipped a woven leather belt through her tan slacks, then, one, two, clipped on a pair of small gold hoop earrings.

The knock came again. She sighed in annoyance, then went to the door.

"I told you to come back in-" she said as she opened it, then stopped in mid-sentence.

Nicholas Marten stood there.

"I was expecting a porter," she snapped in the same infuriated tone she'd used the night before. Immediately she turned and went back into the room to take a blue blazer from the closet. Her all-but-packed suitcase was open on the bed, her camera gear in a hard case next to it.

"You're leaving."

"Like everyone else, thanks to you."

"Me?"

She glared at him. "Yes."

"Who is everyone?"

"Dr. Foxx left early this morning. So did Reverend Beck a short while later. So did Cristina."

"For where?"

"I don't know. I found a note under my door from Reverend Beck saying he had been called away unexpectedly and that our trip to the Balkans had been canceled."

"What about the other two?"

"I called Cristina's room to see what she knew about it and was told she'd already checked out." Abruptly Demi went into the bathroom. A moment later she came back with a small bag of toiletries. "I made the same call to Foxx's apartment. His housekeeper said he'd gone as well." She put the toiletry bag in her suitcase and deliberately zipped it closed.

"And you have no idea where any of them went."

She glared at him again. "No."

"Porter." A man in hotel uniform stood in the open doorway.

"Just the one bag," she said, then pulled on her blazer, threw her purse over her shoulder, and picked up her camera case. "Good-bye, Mr. Marten," she said, and with that brushed past him and walked out.

"Hey!" Marten said and went after her.

Forty seconds later Demi, Marten, and the porter rode the elevator down in silence. Demi stared at the floor. Marten stared at her. A full minute, two elevator stops, and three hotel guests later, the elevator stopped. The door opened and Demi led the group toward the main lobby. Immediately Marten fell into lockstep with her.

"What did you mean last night when you said to stay away before I 'ruined everything'?"

"Don't you think it's a little late for explanations?"

"Okay, let's change the subject and try 'the witches.' "

Demi ignored him and kept walking. They reached the lobby and started across it.

"What witches? What were you talking about?"

Still she ignored him. They went three strides farther then Marten took her arm and pulled her around. "Please, it's important."

"What do you think you're doing?" she bristled.

"For one thing, asking you to be civil."

"Do you want me to call the police? Because there they are." She nodded toward two black-uniformed, black-booted motorcycle police who stood just outside the front door.

Marten slowly let go of her arm. She fixed him with an irate stare, then walked off. He saw her stop at the concierge desk and chat briefly with a mustachioed gentleman behind it. He smiled knowingly, then reached into his desk, took out an envelope, and handed it to her. She thanked him, glanced briefly back at Marten, then followed the porter to a taxi waiting outside. A moment later she was gone.

31

• MADRID, HOTEL RITZ, 7:05 A.M.

"What do you mean he's not there?" Six-foot four-inch National Security Adviser Dr. James Marshall abruptly stood from his working desk, his papers and electronic message boards scattered across the top of it.

"I mean he's not there. He's gone. Vanished." Jake Lowe was white with disbelief. "I went into his suite to get the answer to what we talked about last night and there was no one there. Pillows were rolled up under the bedcovers to make it look like he was still sleeping."

"The president of the United States is gone? He's missing?"

"Yes."

"Does the Secret Service know?"

"They do now. But it wasn't until I started yelling. Then they freaked."

"Good Lord."

"What the hell's going on?" Hap Daniels came hard into the room. "Is this a joke? Is POTUS (the president of the United States) having fun? Are you guys? If this is a game, say so. I'm not kidding!"

"No game here, Hap," Marshall snapped. "The president is your charge! Where the hell is he?"

Hap Daniels stared, openmouthed, stunned. "You're kidding."

"Nobody's kidding."

"Jesus Christ!"

• THE PRESIDENTIAL SUITE, THIRTY SECONDS LATER

Front door closed. Jake Lowe and James Marshall stood in horrified silence waiting while Hap Daniels made a sweep for the second time. Conference room, bedroom, bathroom. Seconds passed and he came out, crossed the room without a word and went into the hallway. A half minute later he came back in with a six-foot one-inch bulldog of a man, Secret Service agent Bill Strait, his deputy special agent in charge.

"Other than Mr. Lowe, only room service has come or gone from the suite since the president entered at 0020 hours," Daniels said.

"At 0035 hours the president called for a sandwich, a glass of beer, and some ice cream," Strait said. "A hotel employee brought it on a pushcart at 0045. The cart had a vase of fresh flowers, the sandwich, beer, and ice cream-vanilla-cloth napkin, and silverware. At 0132 hours, the president said he was going to shower and then go to bed and asked that the cart be taken away. At 0144 hours the same employee entered the sitting room here and took the cart away as asked. By then the president had closed the door to the sleeping area. The employee left and no one has come or gone since. That was until Mr. Lowe arrived to see the president at 0700 hours."

"Well, gentlemen," National Security Adviser James Marshall said icily, "bottom line, 'Crop Duster' has gone missing."

(CROP DUSTER- the Secret Service's code name for President Harris.)

"It's impossible," Agent Strait protested in shock and chagrin. "I was right outside his door all night. There are monitored surveillance cameras in every hallway, elevator, and stairwell. We have a dozen agents on the floor with a dozen more stationed at every ingress and egress, not to mention the Spanish Secret Service on the grounds. A mouse couldn't get in undetected."

"Well somehow Crop Duster got out!" Lowe snapped. "Who did it, how it was done, who has him now, and what the hell we tell the rest of the world I haven't the damnedest idea."

"Fuck!" Hap Daniels said loudly and to no one, after what had been the longest minutes of his life.

32

Within minutes the entire hotel was under lockdown. A suspected breach of security, hotel and hotel security officials were told, as was the Spanish Secret Service, which, as the host country, was providing the majority of the president's protection. Guests were not allowed in or out of their rooms. Every hallway, closet, room, and possible hiding place was searched. Every employee interrogated, including the room-service waiter who had delivered the president's order at a quarter to one the previous morning.

Yes, he had seen the president, he said. Had been graciously thanked and then left.

"What was he wearing?"

"Dark blue pants and a white dress shirt with no tie."

"You're certain?"

"Yes, sir. You don't forget the president of the United States when you meet him in person in the middle of the night."

"Did you see him when you came back to retrieve the food cart?"

"No, sir. His bedroom door was closed."

"Your food cart is covered with material that goes from the top of the cart to just above the floor."

"Yes, sir. In case we have extra china, utensils, chafing dishes, or the like."

"Is there any way a person could have hidden unseen in that space when you took the cart away?"

"Yes, sir. And no, sir."

"Explain."

"Yes, there is room for someone to hide, if they tucked themselves up. But all I delivered was a sandwich, beverage, and ice cream. I would have noticed the extra weight immediately and checked to see why."

The white dress shirt and dark blue trousers the room-service waiter described matched the white shirt and dark blue suit the president had worn the evening before. His explanation of the extra weight if someone had attempted to hide in the food service cart either on the way into the presidential suite or on the way out of it seemed accurate and correct. His security clearance was verified once again. There was no reason to suspect him of doing anything other than what he had done-deliver room service to a hotel guest.

As the minutes ticked by and the search intensified it became increasingly clear POTUS was not in the building. At the end of an hour it was confirmed without doubt. Yet no one outside the highest levels of the Secret Service agents present or the men there who comprised the president's closest inner circle knew it.

At 9:20 A.M. those men gathered in a highly secured suite on the Ritz's fourth floor: Jake Lowe, National Security Adviser Dr. James Marshall, Secretary of Defense Terrence Langdon, Chief of Staff Tom Curran, White House Press Secretary Dick Greene, and the president's SAIC Hap Daniels.

The rest-Vice President Hamilton Rogers, Secretary of State David Chaplin, and United States Air Force General Chester Keaton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-were en route back to Washington by private jet and in live communication with the others by secure speaker phone.

"We have to go on the premise of foul play," Hap Daniels told them.

"Yes, of course," Marshall said, and looked to the others. "This is not only a monumental catastrophe, there's protocol here. Our ambassador in Madrid needs to be informed immediately. So do the CIA, the FBI, and probably a dozen other agencies. All we can hope to God is that we don't get a tape with him in terrorist custody pleading for his life with some hooded sonofabitch threatening to cut off his head.

"Still, until we learn something, until we see what happens next, we can't afford to have this get out. The world can't think the president of the United States is missing. If that happened God only knows what the hell the financial markets would do and what rumors and power plays would begin and who might try to take advantage of it inside their own countries." Marshall leaned toward the speakerphone. "Mr. Vice President, are you there?"

"Yes, Jim." Vice President Rogers's voice came back clearly.

"You understand what position this puts you in. Until POTUS is found and is safely in our custody, you are put on notice that you may be sworn in as president at any moment."

"I know, Jim, and I take that responsibility gravely."

Jake Lowe crossed the room. "There are a billion questions here," he said. "What's going on? Who's responsible? How did they get in and get out without attracting the attention of any of the Secret Service's rings of security? What power or powers were involved? Which countries do we notify and what do we tell them? Do we set up roadblocks, close down airports? And-how do we do it without the media getting wind of it? As Jim said, we can't have the world thinking the president of the United States has gone missing. We need a cover story and fast. I think this is it." He looked to Hap Daniels. "Tell me if there's a flaw here or why it won't work." He looked to White House Press Secretary Dick Greene. "You tell me if you can pull it off with the media, or you can't." He looked again to the secure speaker phone. "You still there, Mr. Vice President?"

"Yes, Jake."

"Can the others hear me too?"

"We can, Jake." It was the voice of Secretary of State David Chaplin.

"Okay, here we go." Lowe looked to the others. "The hotel's already in an uproar. Everyone knows we feared a serious breach of security. What no one knows is we first got word of that breach, a serious terrorist threat, at three o'clock this morning. At that time we woke POTUS and took him down a service elevator to the basement garage and then by unmarked car to an undisclosed location. That's where he is now. Safe and unharmed, while our investigation continues." He looked to Dick Greene. "Can you handle that?"

"I think so. At least for a while."

Now he looked to Hap Daniels. "You?"

"Yes, sir. But that still doesn't answer the most urgent question. Where he is and who's got him?"

National Security Adviser Marshall's eyes swung to Daniels. "He was lost on your watch. This has never happened in history. You find him and you bring him home safely. But you keep the doing awful goddamn quiet. You don't and this gets out, the Secret Service is going to look like Little Bo Peep to the whole damn world."

"We will bring him home, sir. You have my word on it. Safely and quietly."

Marshall glanced at Lowe and then back to Hap Daniels, "You damn well better."

33

• ROME, LEONARDO DA VINCI AIRPORT, 9:40 A.M.

Nicholas Marten's Air Malta flight from Valletta had landed thirty minutes earlier and now he waited to board an Alitalia flight for the hour-and-forty-five-minute trip to Barcelona, which was Demi Picard's destination when she left Malta.

He'd learned where she'd gone the same way he'd found out where she was staying in the Maltese capital-by bribing the maître d' at the Café Tripoli for the destination of the taxi he had called for her, Reverend Beck, and the young woman, Cristina-"The British Hotel, Mr. Marten," he'd said quietly.

Marten had done the same with the mustachioed concierge at the British Hotel, approaching him moments after Demi left, telling him Ms. Picard was his fiancée and that they had gotten into a quarrel and she had run off.

"Her mother was supposed to meet us here in Valletta tomorrow. I don't know what I should tell her now; Demi is her only child," he'd lied despondently, playing the kind of game he hadn't played since he'd been a homicide detective in Los Angeles, taking almost any role necessary to get the information he was after. "Do you have any idea where she went?"

"I'm afraid I can't say, sir."

Marten became even more sincere. "She was quite upset, wasn't she?"

"Yes, sir. Especially when she called just after six this morning and asked, or rather demanded, that I do everything in my power to make a hotel reservation for her."

"And did you?"

"Yes, sir."

It was then Marten slipped the concierge a sizable tip and said, "For mother."

The concierge hesitated then leaned forward and quickly scribbled Hotel Regente Majestic, Barcelona on a piece of stationery. Folding it, he handed it to Marten. "For mother," he said genuinely. "I understand completely."

Why Demi was going to Barcelona and in such a hurry after everyone in Malta had seemingly abandoned her, or at least left the island, was anyone's guess. No matter what had happened between her and Reverend Beck, she was clearly connected to him, as, it seemed, was Merriman Foxx. Once again he thought how curious it was for an African-American minister to be a long-time friend of an apartheid-era officer in the South African army who had headed a medical unit attempting to develop secret biological weapons designed to wipe out the black African population.

There was also something else. Something Marten hadn't really thought much about until he'd come upon Beck at Merriman Foxx's table at the Café Tripoli-that it had been the reverend who called Dr. Stephenson for medical assistance when Caroline had broken down after the funerals of her son and husband, and that it had been Stephenson who administered whatever it had been that had started Caroline's rapid spiral into death. Beck to Stephenson to Foxx, the doctor/white-haired man, with his long, hideous, fingers and that horrid thumb with its tiny balled cross. Those things taken together made Reverend Beck nearly as interesting as Dr. Foxx himself, and Marten hoped that by following Ms. Picard to Barcelona he would find either or both.

Marten heard his Alitalia flight called for boarding. Carry-on bag with his electronic notebook inside over his shoulder, he started for the gate. As he did, he noticed a slightly built young man in line several passengers behind him. He looked to be in his early twenties and was wearing jeans and a baggy jacket over some kind of campy T-shirt. A student maybe, or a young artist or musician, who knew? The trouble was he had seen him before. In the lobby of the Castille Hotel in Valletta as he checked out, and then again on his flight from Valletta to Rome. And now here he was boarding the same flight to Barcelona. There was no reason to suspect that it was anything more than coincidence. Except that he did, and it made him uneasy. It was almost as if the young man had the name Merriman Foxx written on his forehead.

34

• MADRID, 11:00 A.M.

It was now four hours since Jake Lowe discovered the president was missing. In the United States every top-security federal agency was clandestinely in overdrive, among them the Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and every branch of military intelligence. Vice President Hamilton Rogers had personally informed the prime minister of Spain and the U.S. ambassador to Spain. It was thought at first he should also inform the U.S. ambassadors worldwide and in turn, the presidents of Russia, China, Japan, France, and Italy, the chancellor of Germany, and the prime minister of Great Britain, but that idea was stopped in its tracks by Jake Lowe.

This was and had to remain an absolute "need-to-know" circumstance, Lowe said. What had happened had taken place only a short while earlier, meaning there was every chance the president was still somewhere close by and could be found quickly and brought to safety in secret. The more people who knew what had happened, the greater the risk of a security breach. If that happened it would only be a heartbeat before the world knew the president was missing. What would follow-he elaborated on Dr. Marshall's earlier worries-would be a sudden perceived imbalance of global power, followed in turn by sharply escalated national security fears, America's as much or more than any other. In rapid succession those fears would morph into raised military tensions and a massive upheaval in the international stock markets, and after that God only knew what else. The possibilities were endless. Such was the power of the office of the president of the United States and accordingly, the person who occupied it, which made it imperative to keep "the need to know" to as few people as possible.

In Madrid and under the order of the Spanish prime minister, the CNI, Centro Nacional de Inteligencia, the Spanish secret intelligence service, was coordinating a top-secret manhunt that included all points of exit from Madrid-airports, railway and bus stations, and major highways, as well as heightened electronic surveillance of communications between known radical political and terrorist organizations operating in Spain, including the Basque separatist group, ETA.

At the Hotel Ritz, Hap Daniels and Secret Service video experts huddled in the Secret Service mobile command post in the building's underground garage examining digital video recordings taken by the scores of surveillance cameras mounted in and around the hotel: the fourth floor presidential suite, the hallways, elevators and staircases nearby, those in the hotel's underground garage, its entryway and public rooms, and those mounted on the roof that gave a 360-degree view of the building's grounds.

On the hotel's fourth floor, Secret Service technical experts were going over the presidential suite itself, treating it as what they believed it was, a crime scene.

On the fourth floor too, and inside the same secure room they had gathered in earlier, National Security Adviser Dr. James Marshall, faced a somber foursome of Jake Lowe, Secretary of Defense Terrence Langdon, White House Chief of Staff Tom Curran, and the president's close friend, Madrid resident Evan Byrd. What Marshall had to say was something that at one point or other had crossed all of their minds.

"What if the president is not a victim of foul play? What if he's not been kidnapped at all but somehow found a way to beat security and get out on his own? What if that was his answer to our demand that he authorize the assassinations of the president of France and the chancellor of Germany?"

"How could he beat the Secret Service's impossibly complex circles of security?" Tom Curran dismissed the idea, at least out loud, as if somehow the idea of one man doing it alone were impossible. "And even if he did, how could he defeat Spanish security outside?"

"Tom, assume to hell he did." Marshall was angry. "Assume it was his idea and he got out. How doesn't make any difference except to show that he's smart as hell. What we've got here is a potential disaster. He knows what we requested of him. He knows who was there. The question is what is he going to do with that information? Until we bring him down, we're hanging in the wind, all of us."

"I think, Jim-" Jake Lowe crossed to the window, then turned around to face them. "There's nothing he can do."

"What the hell does that mean?" Marshall snapped. "He's the president of the United States, he can damn near do anything he wants."

"Except tell the truth about this," Lowe looked from Marshall to the others. "What's he going to do, burst into a TV station and say, 'Put me on the air I've got an important announcement to make? Every one of my top advisers, including the vice president, the secretary of defense, the national security adviser, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs has demanded I authorize the assassination of the leaders of France and Germany'?

"The first thing they'd do is put him in a room and call a doctor, followed by the Spanish police and the U.S. embassy. They'd think he'd gone off his rocker. Hap Daniels would have him back here in no time. And the more he protested the crazier he would seem.

"More than that, if he has done this on his own, it means he doesn't think he can trust anyone. He's in office because we put him there. Everyone he knows, we know, and then some. He'll be very aware of that. Furthermore, he wouldn't have run if it wasn't a last resort, if he wasn't afraid that if he didn't do what we asked we'd kill him and Vice President Rogers would become president. A president whose first act would be to authorize the assassinations. And he'd be right about that. We would kill him. And we will kill him now as soon as he's brought back to us.

"He may be a conservative, gentlemen, but he's far too independent for us. It's our fault we didn't see it from the beginning. But we didn't and now he's out there, a time bomb if he can find a way to expose us. On the other hand there's not a lot he can do. He can't use electronic communications, because he'll know that all cell-phone, BlackBerry, and 'hardline' traffic, voice or text, is being monitored for electronic intercept by every security agency in our arsenal and Spain's. He tries to call anywhere, his location will be pinpointed before he gets ten seconds into his conversation. That communication will immediately be shut down in the event he's being made to do it against his will, and Spanish intel or our guys will pick him up in minutes if not seconds.

"So with no electronic communication, that means he's on the streets looking for a place to hide until he can figure out what to do. Next to maybe a couple of rock or movie stars, his is the most recognizable face on the planet. Where the hell does he think he can go that someone won't recognize him and shout about it one way or another? When that happens, the police and Spanish intelligence will show up in a heartbeat. They'll get him out of sight fast and call us. Then Hap and Jim and I will go to collect him. No matter what he says, within the hour he'll be back here, with everyone believing the death of his wife, the pressure of the campaign, of the office, of the whole thing here, finally just got to him and he lost it. He'll be examined by the medical staff who will recommend a little R & R, a breather in the countryside before Monday's NATO meeting in Warsaw. That's where he will be taken, and then taken care of. A heart attack or something. A sad and tragic ending to a proud and extremely promising presidency."

"All well and good," President Harris's close friend Evan Byrd said. "But what if this is not his own doing? What if he is a victim of some terrible foul play?"

"Then we hope and pray for the very best, don't we?" Lowe said evenly. "But don't count on it, Evan. If you'd seen him on Air Force One when he turned us down, you'd know what I meant. No, this is his show and he's going to try to crush us. How, I don't know, but he's going to try. We just have to tighten the screws and make sure we get him first."

35

• THE WESTIN PALACE HOTEL, APRIL 7, 11:40 A.M.

"Good morning, Victor."

"I was wondering when you were going to call, Richard."

Victor paced up and down in his underwear, his cell phone to his ear, his room curtains drawn against the brightness of midday. What was left of his room-service breakfast, coffee, cereal, ham and eggs and toast rested on a tray near the door. The TV was on in silence, tuned to a cartoon channel.

"You don't worry about that, do you? I always call when I say I will. Maybe sometimes a little bit later than you'd like, but I always do call, don't I, Victor?"

"Yes, Richard, you do."

"Did you go to the Hotel Ritz last night as I asked?"

"Yes, of course. I ordered a drink in the lounge just as you said and then took the elevator to the second floor with some other guests. Afterward I went up to the third floor, alone. You asked me to try and get to the fourth floor, where the president was staying. The elevator was blocked from going past the third floor, and the stairs to the fourth were controlled by what seemed to be security people. When they asked what I was doing I said I was just walking around while I was waiting for a friend to meet me for a drink. They said I couldn't go upstairs and so I thanked them politely and left. Then I went down and finished my drink as you instructed and went back to my hotel. That's where I am now."

"The security people did see you."

"Oh yes. But there was no trouble about it."

"Good, Victor. Very good." Richard paused. "I have another assignment for you."

"What is it, Richard?"

"I want you to go to France, to a race track outside of Paris."

"Alright."

"Pack now and go down to the desk and check out. When you do an envelope will be waiting. Inside will be an airline ticket to Paris and instructions on what to do when you get there."

"Is the ticket first-class?"

"Of course, Victor."

"And you want me to go now?"

"Yes, Victor. As soon as we hang up."

"Alright, Richard."

"Thank you, Victor."

"No, Richard, thank you."

• 11:45 A.M.

A tall, slim, balding man wearing glasses and dressed in a black sweater, blue jeans, and running shoes sat at a back table in a small café in the center of Madrid's old city, a mile or more from the Hotel Ritz. He sipped strong coffee and watched people begin to filter in for lunch. That he spoke Spanish fluently helped because it made him seem more at ease and less foreign than he was. So far, as had been the case throughout the morning as he had walked the streets trying to get his bearings, not one person had given him as much as a second glance. Hopefully it would remain that way and no one would realize that the lone man sitting among them was John Henry Harris, the president of the United States.

Growing up, Johnny Harris had heard his late father's double-barreled admonition often enough. The first part was, "Always think on your feet and never be afraid to act if the need arises." Part two followed immediately: "And just because things seem comfortable don't think things can't change in a hurry because they not only can, they usually will."

If that constant, often grating homily had helped prepare him to take action against the cruel and sudden turn of events here in Madrid, two other pieces of his education had helped almost as well. First, as a young man he had worked on farms and ranches in his hometown of Salinas, California, where he learned to speak Spanish to the point where he shifted easily and comfortably between it and English and where he had a hand in almost everything, including the flying of crop dusters, hence his Secret Service code name. Second, as an adjunct to farming, he had been a carpenter and later a building contractor, working primarily in the renovation of older commercial buildings in Salinas and then farther north in San Jose. In result, he was familiar with the nuts and bolts of construction: structural and mechanical requirements; electrical, plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning; and the use of space as it applied to function and design. Older buildings took special care, especially when it came to incorporating central heating and air-conditioning systems into the original architecture and fitting them into spaces not initially designed for them. The Ritz Madrid had opened in 1910. Since then it had been renovated any number of times. When the current heating and air-conditioning system had been added he didn't know. What he did know was that the Ritz was a large hotel, which meant the ducting for central heating and air-conditioning would be substantial-the main ducts themselves might well be four to six feet square, with side ducts probably in the neighborhood of two by three feet. The side ducts would be concealed in drop ceilings in the hallways and in certain individual areas of the guest rooms. The main shafts would, or should, have built-in ladders to access the interior of the system from basement to roof.

He knew the Secret Service advance team would have checked those shafts and made certain they were secure long before the presidential party arrived. It meant they would be locked at the specific points of entry: the access panels on the roof and in the basement. What they would have had no reason to consider was that at both roof and basement those same access panels would have internal safety latches to prevent anyone from becoming trapped inside. Meaning the panels could be opened from the inside and would lock again automatically once someone had come out. Considering any commercial building's need for usable space-and the Ritz, as an old renovated building, would be no different-it was more than probable that the bottom of the air ducts would be incorporated into already existent areas of the basement, a storage area or furnace room, perhaps even the laundry.

It was this knowledge and this assumption that Johnny Harris had counted on to make his escape. It had taken nearly two hours and been considerably more difficult than he had expected. The side ducts had been smaller than he'd anticipated and he'd made a number of turns that led to dead ends that had to be retraced backwards in the dark. He'd used up several books of matches lighting his way and was beginning to think he might be trapped in there forever until he finally found a main duct and started down.

Several knuckles and a part of his shin had been scraped raw, and every bit of him was strained and sore from the sheer physical effort, but nonetheless his main sense of it had been right and it had worked-the principal air shaft opened through an access panel into a large supply room in the building's cellar. Once out, the panel had automatically locked closed behind him, and he'd walked down a short, dimly lit hallway to an area near the loading ramp, where he'd hidden behind a large walk-in freezer until a produce truck arrived at a little after three in the morning. He'd watched carefully, biding his time as two men unloaded it. Then, when they went to the truck's cab to sign the delivery manifest, he slipped into the back and hid behind a stack of lettuce crates until the driver got in and drove off, passing both his own Secret Service agents and Spanish security posted outside. The next delivery stop was another hotel several blocks away. Here he waited until the driver went inside, then simply jumped down and walked off in the darkness.

Now, with the time closing on noon, he sat, still unrecognized, sipping coffee in the small old-town café, his wallet in his back pocket-a wallet that held his California driver's license, personal credit cards, and nearly a thousand euros in cash, and minus the toupee no one except his personal barber had any idea he wore-fully aware of the chaos that would have exploded once it had been discovered he was missing and trying to decide how best to get from where he was to where he was going without someone recognizing him and sounding the alarm.

36

• HOTEL RITZ, 11:50 A.M.

The entire fourth floor was a screaming beehive as Hap Daniels had known it would be. White House Press Secretary Dick Greene was about to make a special statement to the crush of world media who had swarmed the building, adding chaos to the throng of reporters in the White House press pool already following the president on his European tour. Word had been leaked that the president was no longer in Madrid, that he had secretly been taken to an undisclosed location in the middle of the night after a credible terrorist threat was intercepted by Spanish intelligence. As the Secret Service senior official supervising the investigation, Daniels had already been in contact with George Kellner, CIA chief of station Madrid, and Emilio Vasquez, the head of Spanish intelligence, setting up a joint task force that would coordinate their own bureaus with Spanish law enforcement authorities in an all-out, fullblown search for the president; one that would be designated a national security operation, meaning TOP SECRET on every level. Immediately afterward Daniels had been on a secure phone to the special agent in charge of the Secret Service field office at the U.S. embassy in Paris, asking that the Paris office go on full standby alert in the event additional bodies were needed in Madrid. Soon to be added to the chaotic stew was Ted Langway, an assistant director of the Secret Service at USSS headquarters in Washington, who was already en route to Madrid to liaise with Daniels and then to set up a twenty-four-hour communication with the director of the Secret Service in Washington who would in turn advise the secretary of U.S. Department of Homeland Security, under which the Secret Service now operated.

And then there was the rest, the trail that led Hap to the air-conditioning access panel in the drop ceiling of the presidential suite's bathroom.

A painstaking review of digital videos made by the roof-mounted security cameras showed a produce truck arriving at the hotel at 0302 hours. It had been stopped and searched by Secret Service agents and then cleared to enter the hotel. Security cameras in the hotel's underground parking area showed the same truck coming down a ramp and stopping at a loading dock at 0308 hours (eight minutes past three that morning).

A hotel worker and the truck driver unloaded several cartons of produce and then went to the front of the truck, where the hotel worker signed the delivery manifest. In that moment a vague shadowlike movement was seen near the rear of the truck. It began near the top of the screen, coming from the area of a walk-in freezer, then approached the rear of the truck and went out of view. A moment later the hotel worker stepped away from the truck, and the driver got in and drove away. Security cameras outside the building caught the vehicle as it left the building, turned onto a side street, and disappeared from view.

"Somebody got into the truck while the hotel worker went to talk to the driver. Whoever it was was still in the truck when it left," Hap Daniels had barked in response to what he saw. The vehicle's driver had since been taken into custody by the CNI and had given them the location of his delivery stops immediately after he had left the Ritz.

Meantime, the Secret Service and hotel officials had traced the phantom's progress backward from the truck across to a large walk-in freezer, then to the dimly lit hallway behind it, searching every room and corridor that led from it. Within minutes they'd found a large closed storage area and inside it a main heating and air-conditioning shaft that led to the roof, with side ducting leading to every room on every floor of the building. That the access door to the shaft was locked and had been checked and verified secure by the advance Secret Service team and then checked and verified once again just before the president arrived seemed to rule out the possibility that anyone had gone in that way-using the shafts to get to the presidential suite and kidnap the president and take him back out the same way-especially when the video cameras had caught a lone shadow entering the truck.

In one moment everyone realized the same thing: their entire approach had been designed to prevent someone from getting into the hotel without being seen, not someone trying to get out of it: especially someone who had full knowledge of the concentric blankets of security the Secret Service used-someone like the president himself. Moreover, it appeared he had done it with forethought and purpose. An inventory of the clothes the president's valet packed when they left Washington revealed what was missing-a pair of underwear, athletic socks, running shoes, a black sweater and blue jeans. The clothes the president liked to relax in when his official day was over. His wallet was gone as well. Exactly how much money he might have had in it no one seemed to know for certain, but his personal secretary confirmed she had given him a thousand euros before he left the White House for the European trip. Carrying a fair amount of cash wherever he went was a habit that dated back to President Harris's farm days, when he paid cash for almost everything.

As for his use of the hotel's ventilation ducts to avoid Secret Service surveillance, hotel maintenance people had demonstrated how the access panels to the main ducting system could be opened from the inside, and that those same panels would automatically relock once whoever had been inside came out and the panel had been closed behind them. Moreover there were built-in footholds that ran from roof to basement in the main shafts, and the side ducts leading to the guest and public rooms were wide enough for a man to squeeze through.

As skeptical as Hap Daniels might have been at the start that the president had acted alone and used the ducting system as a means to make his escape from the hotel, the clincher came when the remains of several recently burned wooden matches were found at the bottom of the shaft that opened into the storage area. The president's friend, Evan Byrd, was a pipe smoker and had little collections of small decorative boxes of wooden matches near ashtrays throughout his home. Daniels had seen President Harris pick up several of those boxes as they left Byrd's residence the night before and put them in his pocket. The president didn't smoke and as far as Daniels knew, never had, so what he'd wanted the matches for had been anyone's guess. Now he understood. They had been to light his way through the hotel's ducting system without having to turn on the system's interior lights and thereby take the chance he might trip some kind of alarm.

"Hap?" Jake Lowe's voice came at him from the other room.

"In here."

A moment later Lowe and National Security Adviser Marshall entered the presidential suite's bathroom, where Daniels and two other Secret Service agents were examining an open access panel in the bathroom's drop ceiling.

"This is where he went out," Hap was looking up into the duct area where a third Secret Service agent could be heard moving around in the duct work.

"Anything?" Daniels called up.

"Yeah," the agent's head suddenly appeared in the open rectangle. "For one thing, the maintenance guys were right. You get up here and slide the panel closed behind you. A simple turn of a bolt will relock it. Nobody would know anyone ever used it."

"How did he get it open from down here? It takes a special key."

"You want it, you got it. Catch." The agent dropped a twisted piece of steel into Daniels's hand. "It's a spoon. Bent to operate like a key. Crude, but it works. I tried it."

Lowe stared at the spoon and then looked to Jim Marshall. "Room service. A sandwich. A beer. Ice cream. You need a spoon to eat ice cream. He knew what he was going to do all along." Abruptly he turned to Daniels. "Let's go talk."

37

• 12:00 P.M.

Sixty seconds later Lowe, Jim Marshall, and Hap Daniels entered the secure room they had used earlier. Lowe closed the door behind them.

"I think by now we can presume the president did this on his own," Lowe looked at Daniels. "You agree?"

"Yes, sir, I agree. The question is why?"

Lowe and Marshall exchanged the briefest glance, then Lowe walked across the room. "Obviously none of us has that answer," he said. "But my sense is that too much has happened too quickly for him. To the point he was pushed to sheer psychological exhaustion. I'm no psychologist, but this trip, the way it's been going, France and Germany in particular, and coming so soon on the heels of a long and enormously draining election campaign, followed almost point-blank by the inauguration, fine-tuning the cabinet and what's going on in the Middle East, has been, strong as he is, exceedingly trying, as it would be for anybody. I know because we've had private conversations about it. He even asked me once if I thought he was really suited for the job. Add the thing he doesn't talk about but that I know still haunts him, the death of his wife-think of him winning the election and then spending his first Christmas in thirty-three years without her and alone in the White House to boot. On top of that we all know how close he was to Mike and Caroline Parsons and their son.

"Maybe if he was the kind of guy to complain or get testy or even get drunk once in a while it would be different, but he isn't. Put it all together and you've got a man who's kept it all inside and is emotionally spent. All of sudden it catches up with him and he does something crazy, just to keep from suffocating.

"The story Dick Greene is telling the media downstairs-that the Secret Service hustled him away in the middle of the night to an undisclosed location following a credible terrorist threat we can't talk about-is the one we'll continue to use even when we get him back. That way he gets enough time for a full medical exam and then, assuming he's alright, to rest and recover before he goes to the NATO meeting in Warsaw." Lowe came back across the room. Before, he had been talking to them both; now he was looking directly at Hap Daniels.

"We know what he was wearing when he went out and the places where the delivery truck stopped after it left the hotel. He's on his own, maybe even disoriented. It's not like he can walk around like a tourist without being recognized. With your people, the CIA, Spanish intelligence, and Madrid law enforcement working together, my guess is he's not going to stay missing for very long."

Daniels said nothing. He just hoped to hell Lowe was right.

"Chief of staff is arranging for a place to take him once we have him. It's up to us-Jim, myself, chief of staff, Press Secretary Greene here in Madrid and the vice president and secretary of state in Washington-to dance with other governments and the media until we can bring him public again. It's up to you to find him and get him the hell out of here fast and unseen to the marker location. You guys got President Bush secretly to Iraq twice, the first time nobody even knew he was gone until he was back home in Texas." Lowe paused and his eyes narrowed, "Hap, we need, we have to have, that same efficiency here. The situation is infinitely more critical."

"I understand, sir. This happened on our watch. We'll take care of it."

"I know you will, Hap," Lowe looked at Marshall, then walked Daniels to the door and opened it. "Good luck to us all," he said, and Special Agent Hap Daniels left. Lowe closed the door and came back into the room. "He buy it?"

"That the president went off the deep end?"

"Yes."

"I don't think he had any choice. His feathers are really ruffled. The president is gone, it happened while he was in charge and he feels personally responsible. He's not just protecting the man, he's protecting the office. He wants exactly what we want, the president back as quickly and with as little noise as possible. As if he'd never left."

Lowe walked to a mahogany sideboard, turned over two glasses and picked up a bottle of whiskey. He poured a double shot into each glass and handed one to Marshall.

"It seems we have a president who has decided he wants to be his own man and who has very definite ideas of how he wants the country run," Lowe took a stiff tug at his drink. "In all the years I've known him I never had the slightest clue he wasn't a team player all the way. Until now."

Marshall took a drink then set his glass on a table next to him. "It's a humbling lesson, Jake. One that's going to cost the president his life. Let's just hope to hell it doesn't get that expensive for us."

38

• 12:25 P.M.

Nicholas Marten heard the grind of hydraulics as the aircraft's landing gear came down. Ten minutes later he was on the ground at Barcelona's El Prat Airport and heading into the terminal. Twenty minutes after that he had collected his luggage and was in line to board the Aerobus for the twenty-five-minute trip into the city. His thoughts-only moments earlier on Merriman Foxx and Demi Picard and the brief phone conversation he'd had with Peter Fadden while waiting to board his flight in Malta-had now shifted to a man three passengers in line behind him. He was about five-foot ten, Caucasian, and maybe forty, with salt and pepper hair. He wore sunglasses and a light yellow polo shirt tucked into blue jeans; a small red traveling bag was thrown indifferently over his left shoulder. He looked like a tourist, one accustomed to traveling casually and lightly. There was nothing about him to attract attention, and Marten probably wouldn't have noticed him at all if he had not seen him nod in passing at the young man in jeans and baggy jacket who had been in the lobby of his hotel in Valletta and then on the flights from Valletta to Rome and Rome to Barcelona. And now that young man was no longer there but this other man was, waiting in line behind him to board the blue Aerobus into Barcelona. If the first man had indeed followed him from Valletta, then there was every possibility this second man was now tailing him. In essence, one had handed him off to the other.

• 12:30 P.M.

That second man was now two seats in front of him and on the other side of the bus looking out the window as they turned out of the airport for the drive into the city. Marten watched him for a long moment and then sat back and tried to relax.

Today was Friday, April 7. The day before yesterday the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police had escorted him from Caroline's memorial service and put him on a plane to London, where he'd arrived the next day, yesterday, and soon afterward boarded another flight to Malta. Then this morning, following last evening's encounter with Merriman Foxx, he'd hurriedly left the island following Demi Picard to Barcelona. He was jet-lagged, had had very little sleep, and was running on little more than adrenaline. He knew he had to be aware of his own state of mind. In situations like this it was easy to make monsters out of what in reality were only furry little animals. Meaning there was every chance he was wrong about the salt and pepper-haired man in the dark glasses and yellow polo shirt, and that the nod that had taken place between him the baggy-jacketed young man might well have been nothing at all, and in truth that neither man had any design on him whatsoever. So he let it go and thought back to the telephone conversation he'd had earlier with Peter Fadden, reaching him in London shortly after the Washington Post reporter arrived on a stopover on the way to cover the upcoming NATO summit in Warsaw.

Marten had quickly briefed him on his encounter with Merriman Foxx at the Café Tripoli the night before, telling him how he had played himself off as an aide to Subcommittee Chairwoman Baker and how Foxx's initial congeniality had quickly become heated over Marten's questions about the testing of experimental toxins on humans after South Africa's biological weapons had been officially destroyed. He'd become even more heated when Marten told him the made-up story about a memo Congressman Mike Parsons left shortly before his death in a plane crash suggesting that Foxx had consulted in secret with Dr. Lorraine Stephenson, over the course of the committee hearings. Adding separately, that Parsons had questioned the truthfulness of Foxx's testimony. Foxx's reaction, Marten said, had been to fiercely defend his testimony and to deny knowing Dr. Stephenson, after which he'd abruptly ended the conversation and walked off.

Finally he told Fadden about Caroline's fearful description of the "white-haired man with the long hideous fingers and that horrid thumb with its tiny balled cross" who had examined her at the clinic where she had been taken following her breakdown after the funerals of her husband and son.

"Peter," Marten had said emphatically, "Foxx not only has white hair, he has extraordinarily long fingers and that same tattoo on his thumb. I can tell you he was involved both with Dr. Stephenson and with Caroline's death. One more thing-when I met him he was having dinner with congressional chaplain Rufus Beck."

"Beck?" Fadden had been wholly surprised.

"They weren't trying to hide it either. At least not tucked away the way they were in a café in Malta and thinking Foxx was meeting with a representative of Congresswoman Baker."

"I don't get it," Fadden said.

"I don't either. Reverend Beck and Dr. Foxx should be like oil and water."

"Yet they're both comfortable enough to be around someone they think works for the chairwoman of the subcommittee Foxx was testifying in front of."

"Not just testifying, Peter. Testifying in a classified investigation."

Marten finished with the rest: that the French photo-journalist Demi Picard had been with Foxx and Reverend Beck at the Café Tripoli and had privately warned Marten to "stay away" before he "ruined everything"; and that early this morning Foxx and Reverend Beck had left Malta for places unknown and that Demi had left soon afterward, going to Barcelona with a reservation at the Hotel Regente Majestic, which was where Marten was headed now.

"Peter," he'd said emphatically as his flight was called for boarding, "try to find the name of the clinic where Caroline Parsons was taken after Dr. Stephenson gave her the injection and before she was transferred to George Washington University Hospital. She had to have been there for several days. There has to be some record of it and of who treated her and for what."

Marten felt the Aerobus slow and he looked up. The man with the dark glasses and light yellow polo shirt was watching him. Caught, he smiled casually, then turned away to look out the window. Several minutes later the bus made its first stop at Plaça d'Espanya. Four passengers got off, three got on, and the bus moved off. Then they stopped at Gran Via/Comte d'Urgell, and again at Plaça de la Universitat where three more passengers collected their luggage and got off. Marten watched carefully, hoping his man in the yellow shirt and salt-and-pepper hair would stand and get off with them. He didn't and the bus continued on.

The next stop, Plaça Catalunya, within walking distance of the Hotel Regente Majestic, was his. The bus pulled to the curb and Marten stood with a half dozen others. Gathering his traveling bag, he moved toward the front of the bus, glancing at his man as he did. The man stayed where he was, sitting back, his hands in his lap, waiting for the bus to go on. Marten was the last off. He stepped around several people waiting to get on and walked off looking for the street called Rambla de Catalunya and the Hotel Regente Majestic. A moment later the Aerobus passed him, moving away in traffic. He walked on a moment longer, then something made him turn and look back. The man with salt-and-pepper hair and the yellow polo shirt was standing at the bus stop staring after him.

39

• MADRID, ATOCHA STATION, 1:05 P.M.

A folded copy of the Spanish language newspaper El País under his arm, President of the United States John Henry Harris walked down a platform in a group of passengers toward the Altaria train number 1138 that would take him on a five-hour trip northeast to Barcelona. There he would transfer to the Catalunya Express for the hour-plus ride to the one-time Moorish stronghold city of Gerona.

Everything had been thought through the night before on the ride back to the hotel from Evan Byrd's home following his surprise meeting with "his friends," as he called them. Right off, there had been no doubt that if he refused their demands, they would kill him. It meant he had no choice but to run. And he had. Freeing himself from his Secret Service protection and escaping the hotel had been difficult enough. Carrying out the next piece of action was something else entirely.

Included in his European agenda had been time set aside to address the annual conference of the New World Institute, a think tank of celebrated international business, academic, and former political leaders who met annually for the express purpose of exploring the future of the world community.

An institution for more than two hundred years, the NWI had met in various exotic locations around the globe for most of the last century, but for the last twenty-two years it had made its home the exclusive resort of Aragon in the mountains outside of Barcelona. As the newly elected president of the United States he had been invited to be this year's "surprise guest speaker" and give the main address at its Sunday sunrise service. It was something he had agreed to when prevailed upon by the host clergyman, Rabbi David Aznar, a cousin of his late wife and a highly respected leader in the Spanish city of Gerona's large Jewish community.

That his wife had been Jewish was thought at first to be a political liability to him, but it had proven otherwise. She had been a funny, brilliant, outspoken, and extraordinary life's companion whom the public had adored. That she had been unable to bear children was a sadness they both accepted, but as he climbed the political ladder, they found themselves embraced as if the entire electorate were their family. There were nonstop invitations to spend holidays or other special occasions at the homes of private citizens across a broad economic, racial, and religious range, and often they accepted. The media loved it, the people loved it, his political machinery loved it, and he and his wife loved it.

It was through her the president had come to know Rabbi David, and the two had become close when the rabbi had traveled several times from Spain to Washington to be with them during his wife's illness and rapid decline. He had been there when she died and had officiated at her funeral; had been there to embrace him on election night; had been a personal guest at his inauguration; and then had invited him to be the surprise speaker at the convention at Aragon. It was to Rabbi David's home in Gerona he was going now, the only person within physical reach he dared trust and confide in, and the only place he knew, for the moment anyway, he could hide.

Head down, he reached the train and boarded a second-class car in a crowd of other passengers in the same unassuming way he had conducted himself inside the station, when he'd waited patiently in line to pay cash for his ticket. The same way he had all along. On the streets of Madrid and in the café where he'd taken refuge before coming to the station-trying to blend in, not attract attention. So far his luck had held; no one had paid him the slightest notice.

So far.

He knew that by now Hap Daniels would have Spanish intelligence, the FBI and CIA, and probably a half-dozen other security agencies working frantically to bring him back under Secret Service control. He was equally certain that the NSA would be using satellites to electronically monitor communications across the whole of Spain. It was the reason he'd left his communications equipment behind-his cell phone, his BlackBerry-because he knew any contact he tried to initiate would be intercepted in seconds, and they'd be on him before he could go a half block.

Scant hours earlier he'd been the most powerful, protected man on the planet, with every agency and state-of-the-art piece of technology at his fingertips. Now he was a man alone, stripped to nothing but his guile and wits, and charged with the task of stopping the first genuine attempted coup d'état that he knew of in the history of the United States.

Not just stopping it but crushing it. Whatever it was. Assassinating the leaders of France and Germany and replacing them with leaders they could trust to do their bidding in the United Nations was only the beginning. Part two was putting the Middle East under their control and in the process crushing the Muslim states that comprised it. How they would do that was the real horror: the unknown plan for what had to be a campaign of mass destruction, which he was certain had been devised and developed by the former South African army scientist Merriman Foxx. It was a nightmare beyond anything imaginable.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Henry IV, Part 2

• 1:22 P.M.

There was a lurch and the train moved slowly out of Atocha Station. The car he had chosen was nearly full when he'd boarded and he'd taken the first available seat on the aisle, next to a man about his age in a leather jacket wearing a beret and reading a magazine. In a show of normalcy he unfolded his newspaper and began to read it. At the same time he tried to stay aware of what was going on around him, alert for anyone-young, old, man, woman-who could be a member of the security forces trying to find him.

The one thing he had known from the start was that when the Secret Service realized he was gone not only would a massive and very clandestine manhunt have begun in the search for him, but they would also have gone over every inch of the presidential suite trying to put together what had happened. Among those they would call in would be his valet, who would have done an immediate inventory of his clothing and determined that he had worn a black sweater, blue jeans, and running shoes when he left. Those clothes were now in a trash can in a back alley of Madrid's old town and had been replaced by a pair of khaki pants, a blue sport shirt, an inexpensive brown jacket, and brown walking shoes. All paid for with cash and purchased at an El Corte d'Inglés department store. Added to that was the pair of cheap reading glasses bought at a shop near the railway station, and the thing he was certain was helping most of all-he had removed his hairpiece. Hap Daniels and everyone else would be looking for POTUS as they knew him, not the balding, eyeglass-wearing, Spanish-speaking public school administrator or minor civil servant he appeared to be, one carrying a Spanish language newspaper and riding tourist class on the train to Barcelona.

40

• BARCELONA, HOTEL REGENTE MAJESTIC, 2:25 P.M.

Do you know if Ms. Picard has arrived?" Nicholas Marten smiled at the attractive female clerk at the front desk. "My name is Marten. I'm with The Washington Post. We were told to check in here for room assignments."

"I'm sorry," she smiled. "I don't understand."

"We're in Barcelona for the Newspaper Writers and Photographers conference. Her name is Picard. P-I-C-A-R-D. First name, Demi."

"One moment," the woman's fingers danced on her computer keyboard. "Yes, Ms. Picard checked in about noon," she said without looking up. "You said your name was-"

"Marten. With an 'e.' Nicholas Marten."

"I don't seem to have a reservation for you, Mr. Marten. Is there any other name it might be under?"

"I-" Marten hesitated; she'd given him an opening he would be foolish not to use. "I was to have been registered with the small group that included Ms. Picard and Reverend Rufus Beck from Washington, D.C. Reverend Beck has checked in too hasn't he?"

Again the woman's fingers worked the keyboard. "Reverend Beck has a reservation but has not yet arrived."

Marten was right. Demi had followed Beck here. "And you say you have no reservation for me?" he asked with all sincerity.

"No, sir."

"I was afraid something like this would happen. Never trust a new secretary to do your own work." Marten looked off, as if trying to decide what to do next, then looked back. "Do you have a room? Anything will do," he smiled, "Please, it's been a very long day already."

She looked at him sympathetically. "Let me see what I can find."

Room 3117 was small but with a view of the street below and Marten stood at the edge of the window looking down at it. He hadn't liked using his own name to check in, but he had hardly come prepared with an alias or false documents, so he'd had no choice.

Still, he was reasonably certain he'd lost his salt-and-pepper-haired, yellow-polo-shirted tail-and he was sure the man had been tailing him. He'd followed him at a distance the first five blocks Marten had walked after leaving the Aerobus stop at Plaça Catalunya. Then Marten had deliberately entered a tapas bar on Pelai Street, where he'd had a light lunch and lingered for nearly an hour. Then, playing the tourist and taking his time, he left and walked toward the Plaça de la Universitat, stopping to browse in a bookstore, then a shoe store, and then spending a solid thirty minutes exploring a huge Zara department store before going out a side exit and making his way to the hotel on Rambla de Catalunya. In none of those places had he seen Salt and Pepper.

Who he was or who the baggy-jacketed man who had followed him from Valletta was, he had no idea, except that it had begun in Malta, where the main attraction had been Merriman Foxx. Assuming Foxx had finally done his homework and found Marten had no connection whatsoever to Congresswoman Baker then his displeasure would be greater now than it had been at the Café Tripoli the night before. He would want to know who Marten was and what else he knew and why he was doing what he was, and if he reported to someone. And once he learned enough to satisfy him, Marten could almost certainly be assured the South African would find a way to permanently put an end to his curiosity.

Marten watched a moment longer then turned from the window and started back across the room. As he did, his cell phone rang. Immediately he clicked on, hoping it was Peter Fadden with information about the Washington, D.C., clinic where Caroline had been taken. Instead he heard the familiar voice of Ian Graff, his supervisor at Fitzsimmons and Justice. Marten loved his work and his employers and he liked Graff a great deal. But he needed none of it now.

"Ian," he said, surprised, trying to be pleasant. "Hello."

"Marten, where the hell are you?"

The rotund, widely read, highly educated Graff, normally pleasant and easygoing, became difficult and quick-tempered under pressure. And Marten knew all too well the ever-increasing pressure to finalize the plans for the large and costly Banfield country estate project they were working on.

"I'm in-" there was no point in lying, "Barcelona."

"Barcelona? We tried your hotel in Washington. They said you'd checked out. We assumed you were on your way back here."

"I'm sorry, I should have called."

"Yes, you should have. You should also be at your desk right now."

"I apologize, but this is something very important."

"So is the Banfield project, if you understand what I'm saying."

"I understand, Ian. I do. Completely."

"Just how long is this 'very important' whatever it is going to keep you occupied?"

"I don't know," Marten crossed to the window and looked out. Still no Salt and Pepper, at least that he could see. Just traffic and pedestrians. "What do you need that I can walk you through from here? Is the problem with the plant selection, the grading permits, the ordering, what?"

"The problem is Mr. Banfield and his wife. They have decided the rhododendron woods should be on the south hill not the north and that the north hill should be planted instead with eighty to a hundred ginkgo trees."

"Ginkgo trees?"

"Yes."

Marten turned from the window. "They'll grow too high and too thick and will block their view of the river."

"Exactly what we told them. But that's nothing compared to what they want to do with the forsythia, azalea, and hydrangea placements."

"They approved all those ten days ago."

"Well they disapproved all those this morning. They've agreed to pay for the changes. They just won't have the schedule interrupted. If I were you I would hustle my bum back here on the next plane out."

"I can't do that, Ian. Not right now."

"Are you employed by us or not?"

"Please try to understand what I'm doing here is difficult and very personal. If-" A sudden loud knock on Marten's door stopped him in mid sentence. A second knock followed immediately.

"Ian, hang on a moment, please."

Marten went into the short hallway that separated the room from the front door. He was almost to the door when the thought suddenly hit-what if he hadn't lost Salt and Pepper after all? What if he was right outside in the corridor and Merriman Foxx had decided he wasn't going to play who-what-and-why but was simply going to have him eliminated right then?

The knock came again.

"Christ," Marten breathed. Immediately he brought the phone to his ear. "Ian," he said in a voice just above a whisper, "I need to take care of something. E-mail the changes and I'll get back to you as soon as I can."

He clicked off and the knock came once more, louder and harder. Whoever it was wasn't giving up. He looked around for a weapon of some kind. All he saw was a room telephone on the wall next to him. Immediately he picked it up and rang room service.

A voice answered in Spanish.

"Do you speak English?" he said into the phone.

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Hold on please."

Phone in hand, a lifeline to the room service operator if he needed it, Marten took a breath, then turned the lock and opened the door.

Demi Picard stood in the hallway, hands on her hips, glaring at him. "What Newspaper Writers and Photographers conference?" she spat angrily in her French accent. "How did you find me? What the damn hell are you doing here?"

If she'd been any hotter she'd have burst into flame.

41

• 3:00 P.M.

It took a very long walk before Marten could get Demi to calm down enough to even talk to him. It took even longer to convince her to join him for lunch. And after that, nearly half a bottle of a good local cava-champagne-to become at least halfway civil.

Now they sat at a table in the back room of Els Quatre Gats-The Four Cats-a café on a narrow street in the city's Barri Gòtic section, eating suquet de peix, a hot fish and potato mixture, and drinking still more cava. Slowly she was coming around.

Demi still wore the navy blazer over the striped man-tailored shirt and tan slacks she had worn that morning in Valletta. Professional photojournalist or not she was clearly used to traveling quickly and light. Which was probably the reason for her short hair too, not a lot to do with it except wash and fluff. She was smart and determined and, as he knew, fiery. But as true as those things were, she also seemed strangely unconnected, as if everything she was about, even her profession, had to do with something else. What that was he couldn't begin to guess, but it gave her a strange air of vulnerability that made her hard to figure out. Her big, deep brown eyes didn't help either because they drew your attention and threw you off, especially when she was looking directly at you, the way she was at Marten now.

"You want me to trust you," she said, "yes?"

"It would help."

"But you don't think you can trust me."

Marten smiled, "I asked you in Malta if you knew where Dr. Foxx or Reverend Beck or the girl Cristina had gone and you said no. Yet you knew all along Beck was coming to Barcelona and to what hotel and-"

Demi cut him off. "The concierge called me shortly before you arrived at my hotel room. He said the reverend had asked him to apologize for his leaving so abruptly. He told me where he had gone and said an airline ticket had been left for me if I wished to follow. That was what was in the envelope I picked up from the concierge as I left."

"The details of how you got here or why don't interest me. What does is the fact that you flat out lied. Tell me where 'trust' fits in there."

"Let's just say your showing up in Malta and the way you handled things with Dr. Foxx put me in a very awkward position."

"That's why you told me I could ruin everything."

"What do you want with me?"

The way Demi avoided the question and the way she looked at him when she did told Marten that for now, at least, that was as far in that direction as she was going to go.

"Look," he said directly, "I'm here for the same reason I was in Washington and in Malta, to find out the truth about what happened to Caroline Parsons. Whatever you want to talk about or don't is your business but from where I sit it's clear you came to Barcelona because of Reverend Beck, and that's why I'm here. Beck and Foxx were together in Malta for a reason. They both left suddenly and separately. That tells me they just might get back together as quickly, especially since Beck is still hanging around this part of the world. Beck is a curiosity but it's Foxx who's my real interest and I'm betting the good reverend will lead me to him, and sooner rather than later."

"And you think Dr. Foxx has an answer for you about Mrs. Parsons."

"Yes," Marten's eyes were suddenly intense. "He started to talk to me about it last night, then he realized he was going too far and got upset. I want him to finish what he had to say."

Just then their waiter, a pleasant, delicate-faced man with dark hair, stopped at their table. "May I get you something else?" he asked in English.

"Not now, thanks," Marten said.

"Of course," the man nodded and left.

Demi took a sip of the cava and looked at Marten over the top of the glass, "You seem to have cared about Mrs. Parsons a great deal."

"I loved her," he said without embarrassment or apology.

"She was married."

Marten didn't reply.

Demi half smiled. "Then you are here because of love."

Marten leaned forward. "Talk to me about 'the witches.'"

"I-" Demi hesitated and looked down at her wine glass, as if she was uncertain what to say, if anything. Finally she looked up, "Do you know what a strega is, Mr. Marten?"

"No."

"It's the Italian word for female witch. I have a younger sister who came to Malta two years ago and disappeared. I found out later that she was a practicing strega involved with a very secretive coven of Italian witches. Whether that had anything to do with her disappearance or not I don't know. What I do know is that Malta is old and filled with ancient places and secretive things. My sister was there for three days and that was the last anyone saw of her. The authorities searched but found nothing. They said she was a young woman and might have done anything.

"For me, that was no answer, so I kept looking on my own. That was how I heard about Dr. Foxx. He has many connections on Malta and knows people and things that others would not, not even the police. But they are things he would never reveal to a stranger. I didn't know what to do, and besides, I had to get back to work. My job put me on a photo assignment in Washington covering the social lives of U.S. congresspeople. It was there I learned about Reverend Beck and discovered he knew Foxx well. This was a huge opportunity to find out what happened to my sister, so through a French publisher I arranged to do a photo-essay book on clerics who minister to politicians. I made Beck a primary subject so that I could become his friend and gain his confidence. Because of that I was able to go to Malta and meet Dr. Foxx personally. But I didn't get to speak with him the way I needed to because-" for an instant her eyes flashed with anger, then she seemed to get over it, "-you suddenly arrived and it all fell apart. I followed Reverend Beck to Barcelona because, as you guessed, he is to meet with Dr. Foxx again soon. Maybe even tomorrow."

"You know that for certain?"

"No, not for certain. But Cristina, the woman who was with us at dinner in Malta, told me that the reverend and Dr. Foxx had talked about it just before Foxx left the restaurant. 'Until Saturday,' Foxx said. Since that took place Thursday night, I would assume he meant this coming Saturday, which is tomorrow. That's why I came here, to continue work on the book with Reverend Beck and because of it, hopefully to get to see Dr. Foxx when he meets with him." Suddenly her eyes came up to his and the anger returned, "Maybe I can do that if you stay away."

Marten ignored her outburst. "There's one thing you're leaving out: why you asked me if Caroline Parsons said anything about 'the witches' before she died. What makes you think she would know anything about them?"

"Because-" She looked up. Again their waiter was at the table and topping off their glasses with cava as he had twice before. Now the bottle was empty.

"May I bring you another? Or perhaps something else from the bar?" he asked.

"No, thanks," Marten said for the second time. The man looked at Demi and smiled, then turned and walked off. Marten waited until he was out of earshot, then looked back to Demi, "Because-what?"

"Of her doctor."

"Stephenson?"

"Yes," Demi reached into her purse and took out a pen. "Let me show you." She pulled a paper napkin toward her, then carefully drew a simple diagram on it and pushed it across the table to Marten.

He exhaled loudly when he saw what it was. The same balled cross he had seen tattooed on Merriman Foxx's thumb, the same balled cross Caroline had described in her fearful description of the white-haired man.

"It is the sign of Aldebaran, the pale red star that forms the left eye in the constellation Taurus. In the early history of astrology it was considered to emanate a powerful and fortunate influence. It is also called 'Eye of God.'"

"What does it have to do with Dr. Stephenson?"

"She had it tattooed on her left thumb. It was small, you could barely see it."

Marten was incredulous. "Foxx has the same thing."

"I know. So does the woman, Cristina."

"What does the tattoo have to do with 'the witches'?"

"It's the sign of the coven to which my sister belonged."

"Foxx and Stephenson are witches?"

"I'm not sure. But my sister had the same tattoo. Why else would people so dissimilar have the sign of Aldebaran tattooed on their thumb, specifically the left thumb?"

"What led you to think Caroline was involved with them? I held her hands for a long time, I never saw that mark or any other."

"She was dying. Dr. Foxx had been nearby and Stephenson had been her doctor for some time. I don't know their rituals but I hoped she might have had some knowledge of it. If she was frightened she might have wanted to share it with someone she completely trusted, and quite frankly that seemed to be you. I had to find out."

"She never said a thing."

"Then I was wrong. Either that or it was a secret she took into eternity."

"Does Reverend Beck have the mark?"

"Have you ever looked at his hands?"

"He has a pigmentary skin disorder, vitiligo. The skin on his hands is blotched," Marten said, then he understood. "You mean that even if he had the mark it would be very difficult to see."

"Yes."

"So you don't know if he's a member of the coven."

"I think he's involved, but whether he's a member or not I don't know."

"Tell me about the coven itself. Is it some kind of cult? Satan worshipers? Religious extremists? Or with Foxx's background some sort of military group?"

"Does the name Nicolo Machiavelli mean anything to you?"

"You mean Machiavelli, the man."

"Yes."

"As I recall he was a sixteenth-century Florentine writer famous for a book called The Prince about the ways to gain and keep raw political power, where authority is everything and expediency is placed above any kind of morality. A sort of how-to book for becoming a dictator."

"Yes," Demi nodded appreciatively.

"What does Machiavelli have to do with the coven?"

"There is a story that on his deathbed he wrote an addendum to The Prince, a kind of secondary blueprint for gaining power. It was based on what he called a 'necessary prerequisite,' the creation of a secret society to be governed by the rule of complicity; a brotherhood of blood where members would participate in an act of ritual murder. It was to be an elaborate, carefully orchestrated human sacrifice held once a year at a remote and secured spot, a church preferably, or a temple, that would give the ceremony religious impact. The rules required every member to sign a heavily guarded, dated journal that included his name, place and date of birth; name and manner of death of the victim; and a print of his thumb dipped in his own blood and pressed in the journal alongside his signature. This was done to confirm his presence there, his allegiance to the society and his willing involvement in the killing. The journal was the key to the society's power because public exposure of it would mean ruin, even death, for them all. Once the murder was done, and the participants' presence recorded, the society could set forth its agenda for the year with the knowledge that what they did was wholly protected from treachery within, thereby freeing it to execute whatever plan was agreed upon.

"Those familiar with the story believe the addendum, if it existed, never reached its intended audience-Florentines oppressed by the ruling Medici family that Machiavelli hoped he could unite in blood to overthrow-and instead was smuggled to Rome where it fell into the hands of an already powerful and influential group who used it, and have continued to use it over the centuries, as an ideology to further their own ends. For those who follow such things, the addendum has come to be known as the Machiavelli Covenant."

"And you think that's what the Aldebaran coven is about, a present-day edition of the Covenant?"

"That, Mr. Marten, is what I have been trying to find out for a long time."

Abruptly something caught Marten's eye. He picked up his glass and sat back, casually scanning the room.

"What is it?"

"Get up as if you're mad at me, pick up your purse and walk out of the restaurant," Marten said quietly. "Go up the street, turn the corner, and wait."

"Why? What's going on?"

"Just do it. Now."

"Alright," deliberately Demi pushed back from the table, glared at Marten, then picked up her purse and left. He stared after her for a moment then signaled the waiter for the check. Purposely he took another sip of cava, then put the glass down and sat back. A moment later the waiter brought the check. Marten paid cash, then got up and walked out, passing without a glance the fortyish-looking tourist who had taken a table near them and was looking at a menu. A tourist with salt-and-pepper hair who now wore a dark-colored sport coat over his yellow polo shirt. If there was any doubt he had been handed off at the Barcelona airport, it was gone now.

42

• 3:40 P.M.

Marten stepped through the door and pulled on dark glasses against the glare of the sun, then walked quickly up the street. At the corner he glanced back toward the entrance to Els Quatre Gats. If Salt and Pepper was coming after him he hadn't done it yet. Another step and he was around the corner looking for Demi. The sidewalk was crowded and he didn't see her. For a moment he was afraid she might have gone off on her own, that she still didn't trust him and that he would have to find her and fight the same battle all over again. Then he saw her waiting beneath the overhang of a storefront.

"What is it?" she said as he reached her.

"A man with salt-and-pepper hair and a yellow polo shirt. I've been followed, and all the way from Valletta. It's got to be Foxx's doing but I can't be sure."

"You were followed."

"Yes."

"That means we've been seen together."

Marten could see the fire in her start to roar back. "You can dodge the whole thing by telling Beck straight off that I tracked you to Barcelona and insisted you talk to me. In the restaurant I asked you a bunch of crazy questions you knew nothing about and when I kept pushing you got mad and left."

"You're right, I did get mad and I am leaving," she said angrily and abruptly turned and started off into the crowd.

Marten caught up with her. She ignored him.

"Whether you like it or not we're in this together. You want to know what happened to your sister and I want to know what happened to Caroline Parsons." He glanced around and then lowered his voice, "Dr. Foxx seems to be key in both situations."

Still she ignored him, just kept walking.

Marten stayed in stride. "If Foxx is here and Reverend Beck is meeting him-where and when, that's all I want to know. Other than that I'll stay out of your hair, I promise."

She didn't reply. They reached the end of the block and stopped in a crowd waiting to cross a main boulevard. Marten stepped close to her. "You're alone in all this, aren't you?"

Demi said nothing. The light changed and she stepped off with the others. Again Marten caught up with her. "These are not terribly nice people, Foxx especially. At some point you're going to wish you had a friend."

They reached the far curb and she suddenly turned and confronted him.

"You won't go away, will you?"

"No."

She stared at him a second longer, "All you want to know is when and where," she said finally and in resignation.

"Yes."

"I'll do what I can."

"Thank you," he said, then quickly looked up and stepped off the curb to hail a passing taxi. The driver crossed two lanes of traffic and pulled up beside them.

Marten opened the rear door. "Go back to the hotel. Hopefully by now Beck will have checked in. See how comfortable he is with you, if you think the situation has calmed enough for him to actually talk about Foxx and his meeting with him." Demi slid in and he handed her a slip of paper, "The number of my cell phone. I don't hear from you by five o'clock, I'll call you." Abruptly he closed the door, the taxi moved off and Marten started quickly back the way they had come.

43

Marten and Salt and Pepper saw each other the moment Marten rounded the corner heading back to Els Quatre Gats.

At that instant Salt and Pepper realized what was happening and bolted. He ran across the narrow street, then darted down another, turning at the end of the block onto the heavily congested Via Laietana. Marten came after him on the dead run. As he ran, Marten's foremost thought was how the man had tracked him to the restaurant when he was certain he had lost him earlier. All he could think of was their attentive waiter, maybe not so obviously pushing drinks to build the bill as he'd first thought but making sure he and Demi stayed where they were until Salt and Pepper was informed and could get there. If that was the case what was going on had far more reach than he had imagined. Some kind of cult embracing medieval witchcraft that controlled, or least paid, a network of street informers who probably had no idea where their money was coming from. People like Salt and Pepper and the young man who had followed him from Valletta.

Running, dodging around people on a sidewalk jammed with shoppers, Marten tried to keep his eye on his man. But there were too many people and he lost sight of him. He slowed and was about to give up when he saw him suddenly dart out of a crowd a half block ahead and then cut left onto a side street. Marten jostled around a pair of arguing shopkeepers, nearly knocked over a woman carrying a baby, then turned the corner just in time to see Salt and Pepper glance back, then cut left again, running onto a broader street filled with heavy traffic.

This was all old neighborhood, part of the Gothic Quarter, Barri Gòtic, with its thirteenth- to fifteenth-century buildings, outdoor cafés, street-level shops with apartments above. Lungs on fire, heart pounding, Marten ran on. Pulling up sharply to avoid a fast-moving motorcycle, he took the same turn Salt and Pepper had and ran on, his eyes searching the crowds on either side of the street. He was in full stride when he heard the sharp blare of a horn. A split second later a cry of horror went up from the people on the block in front of him. Then the horn stopped and the entire area went silent.

Marten rushed forward, moving through people seemingly frozen in place and looking toward something in front of them. Then he saw a large delivery truck stopped in the middle of the street, its front grillwork badly dented, the body of Salt and Pepper on the ground in front of it.

People stood around silent, staring. Marten moved in slowly and went up to Salt and Pepper. Kneeling down, he put a hand to his carotid artery trying to find a pulse. The truck driver, a male, thirty at most, stood by the open door to his cab. Half in shock, motionless.

Marten suddenly looked to the crowd around him. "Call an ambulance. Ambulance! Ambulance!" he said loudly, then twisted back, opened Salt and Pepper's sport coat and put a hand on his heart. Again he touched the carotid artery, held his hand there a few seconds, then slowly reached over, closed Salt and Pepper's sport coat, and stood up.

"Ambulance!" he said again, then moved away and off through the crowd. Around him he could see people on cell phones calling for help. Behind him the truck driver stood where he had been, frozen in place beside his truck.

Marten kept walking. All he needed was for the police to arrive and question him about the man hit by the truck. They would want to know his name. Ask if he was a doctor. And finding he wasn't, want to know why he'd gone to help as he had. Want to know what he had seen. What details he could fill in. He had no knowledge of Spanish law and how it applied to accidents but the last thing he wanted was to be interviewed by the police or the press or have his picture taken by the paparazzi or be a video snippet on local television news.

What he did want was no connection to Salt and Pepper at all.

44

• ALTARIA TRAIN #01138, MADRID TO BARCELONA, 4:35 P.M.

President of the United States John Henry Harris nodded a thanks to the counterman in the cafeteria car, then took his purchase, a sandwich and bottle of mineral water, to a small side table to eat. Other than the counterman there were six other people in the car, four men and two women, one older than the other. Of the men, two sat by a window drinking beer; another stood, paper coffee cup in hand, staring out at the passing countryside. The last sat at a table sharing a platter of small sandwiches with the two women. These three seemed harmless, a brother and sister and maybe an aunt, or husband and wife and his or her older sibling. It was the other three he wasn't so sure about.

Minutes before, they had left the city of Lleida after a stop in Zaragoza and were moving northeast with a stop at Valls before they were to arrive at the Barcelona-Sants station at a little past six in the evening. For the most part the trip had been uneventful with no one giving him as much as a second look, but at Lleida several armed men in uniform had boarded and shortly afterward four more had come on, dressed in civilian clothes but with the certain style and body movement that suggested they were some kind of plainclothes agents. It made him wonder if one or perhaps all of the other three men, the two sipping beer and the man standing, weren't some kind of agents as well, Spanish or American. All three had come into the car after he had and were close enough to the far door to prevent him going out of it if they chose. The uniformed men or other plainclothes agents who had come on in Lleida could easily come in and block the door behind him. If he was right and they did, the game was over.

Harris quickly finished his sandwich and took another sip of water. Then, dutifully putting the paper plate the sandwich had come on in a trash receptacle, he walked past the man and women and left.

He walked the length of the next car and entered the one behind it, taking his seat in the second-class car next to the man in the leather jacket and black beret who had been his seating companion since Madrid. By now the man had turned toward the window, his beret pulled down covering most of his head, and was apparently sleeping. Harris took a deep breath and relaxed, then picked his folded copy of El País newspaper from the seatback in front of him and opened it.

It was now 4:44. The next stop was Valls at 5:03 and Harris wasn't sure what to do when he got there. He knew Hap Daniels would be more than determined to bring him home. He would be feverish. Not only had he become the first Secret Service agent in charge of a presidential detail ever to lose a POTUS, he would also be embarrassed beyond measure and would take enormous flak from above to the point where there was every chance he would be fired. Personally he would feel he had monstrously let down a friend.

The Secret Service's first presumption would be that he had been a victim of foul play and would have acted accordingly. By now the CIA, FBI and NSA would be wholly involved. Madrid would have been scoured by Spanish intelligence and the Madrid state police. A larger search would have been expanded to include all of Europe and North Africa, with another team working out of the Rome field office covering the Middle East and into Russia and other former Soviet bloc countries. All of it done under blackout orders, or as they would call it, "under the cover of night." Yet by now they would have enough information to be reasonably certain of what had really happened, that he had gone out on his own. In result an angered Jake Lowe and National Security Adviser Jim Marshall would have made a convincing case that he had done it because something was gravely wrong, that he had suffered a mental breakdown of some kind. It was the only story they could make work, but it was a good one because, for the people responsible for protecting him, the whole thing would rise above the horror of the president being kidnapped to what Lowe and company would play as an achingly human story of the most powerful man in the world come apart.

Consequently everyone, from the group that had been in Evan Byrd's Madrid home the night before to the secretary of Homeland Security to the director of the Secret Service and on down would do everything in their power to make sure he was found and brought home and out of harm's way as quickly as possible, with only a few very select people having any knowledge at all of what was really going on.

"Home and out of harm's way" meant he would be delivered to Jake Lowe and company, who would already have arranged for him to be placed in their care. Once that happened he knew the rest. He would immediately be spirited to a place remote enough and safe enough to isolate him and then kill him-a massive stroke or heart attack or something equally convincing.

The sound of the door opening at the far end of the car made Harris look up. Two of the armed, uniformed men who had boarded the train at Lleida entered and stood there surveying the passengers as the door closed behind them. Harris could see they were members of the CNP or Cuerpo Nacional de Policía, the Spanish federal police. Automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, they stood silently for a moment longer and then slowly started forward, the first CNP studying the passengers on the right side of the car; the second, the travelers to the left. Halfway down, the first CNP stopped and looked at a male passenger wearing a broad-brimmed hat, then asked to see his identification. The other CNP came over and watched as the man complied. The first CNP studied the man's ID, then handed it back, and the two continued on down the aisle.

Harris watched them come, then looked to his newspaper. There was little doubt they were looking for him, checking anyone who had even a remote resemblance to him or, in the case of the man with the hat, that they couldn't clearly identify.

They drew closer and he could feel his heart rate pick up, feel sweat bead up on his upper lip. He kept his head down, reading, hoping they would pass on by and go into the next car. Suddenly he saw a polished boot stop next to him.

"You," the CNP said in Spanish. "What is your name? Where do you live?"

His heart in his mouth, Harris looked up. The CNP was not looking at him but at the man in the beret dozing next to him. Slowly the man raised the beret and looked up. By now the second CNP had joined the first. Harris felt like a lamb in the presence of two starving lions. All they had to do was turn their attention to him.

"What is your name? Where do you live?" the first CNP snapped again.

"Fernando Alejandro Ponce. I live at number sixty-two Carrer del Bruc in Barcelona," the beret said in Spanish. "I am an artist!" Suddenly he was getting indignant. "A painter! What do you know of art? What do you want with me anyway?"

"Identification," the first CNP said firmly. By now everyone in the car was looking their way.

The second CNP unslung his automatic rifle and slowly, angrily, Fernando Alejandro Ponce reached into his leather jacket and slid out some kind of identification card. He handed it to the first CNP.

Abruptly he looked to Harris. "Why don't you ask this man his name? And where he lives? Demand his identification? It's only fair! Go ahead, ask him!"

Jesus, God, Harris thought and held his breath, waiting for the CNP to take up the man's challenge and do as he demanded. The CNP looked at Fernando Alejandro's ID card, then handed it back.

"Well, are you going to ask him?" Angrily Fernando Alejandro waved his ID card at Harris.

"Go back to sleep, painter," the CNP said. Then, with a glance at Harris, he turned, and with his companion, continued on down the car. A moment later they went out the door at the far end.

Alejandro's eyes followed them all the way, then shot back to Harris. "¡Cabrones! ¿En todo Caso, ¿a quiéndiablos están buscando?" he snarled. Bastards! Who the hell are they looking for anyway?

"No tengo idea." No idea. Harris shrugged. "No tengo idea en absoluto." No idea at all.

45

• BARCELONA, 5:00 P.M.

Twenty minutes after the accident in the Gothic Quarter Nicholas Marten quietly checked out of the Hotel Regente Majestic, apologizing to the sympathetic desk clerk still on duty and saying his newspaper had abruptly changed his assignment. Graciously she canceled his credit card deposit and tore up the receipt. Five minutes afterward he was clear of the hotel and back on the street carrying his small traveling bag, never letting Demi know what he had done. Clearly there was no way to know if Salt and Pepper had been called to the restaurant by the waiter or if he had tracked Marten to the Regente or if someone from the hotel had alerted him and he'd tailed him from there, but by checking out as he had he'd left no clear trail for anyone to follow.

Nonetheless they knew he was in Barcelona, and with Salt and Pepper dead it was only a matter of time before they sent someone else to take his place. Someone who would be able to recognize him but whom he would not know. A stranger. The only advantage he had, if it was an advantage at all, was that now he knew who Salt and Pepper had been: Klaus Melzer, 455 Ludwigstrasse, Munich, Germany, a civil engineer.

Marten had known he was dead the minute he saw the savage dent in the truck's grillwork and the way his body was sprawled on the pavement in front of the vehicle. Feeling his carotid artery for a pulse had confirmed it. The rest, the pleading to the crowd to call an ambulance, the opening of his jacket to feel for a heartbeat, then the closing of his jacket and the second plea for an ambulance had all been show. He'd seen the slight bulge in the man's sport coat when he'd first bent over him. That was what he had wanted and what he had taken as he left, Salt and Pepper's wallet. Inside he'd found his German driver's license, credit cards and several business cards with his name and his firm's name: Karlsruhe & Lahr, Bauingenieure, Brunnstrasse 24, Munich.

• 5:44 P.M.

Marten checked into the Rivoli Jardín Hotel. He was still in the Gothic Quarter but several long blocks south of the Regente Majestic. Again, and with no other choice, he used his own name and identification to register. Ten minutes later he was unpacked and on his cell phone trying to get through to Peter Fadden in London. Instead of reaching the Washington Post writer he got his voice mail saying he was not available and to please leave word. Marten did, asking Fadden to call him as soon as he could. Then he clicked off and dialed the Hotel Regente Majestic asking for Demi's room. The phone rang through but there was no answer. He clicked off without leaving a message and with the gnawing feeling that maybe it had been a mistake to let her go. She'd tried to get rid of him before and was angry all over again after the episode at the Four Cats, and what had he done but put her in a cab and send her off? It made no difference what she'd promised, all she had to do was check out of the hotel and there was every chance he'd never see her again. On top of that there was still that something about her, her manner, the sense he'd had before that she was strangely unconnected and that everything she was about had to do with something else. Whether that had to do with her missing sister, or whether the whole thing about her was made up and it was something else entirely, was impossible to tell. Whatever it was added to the discomfort he felt about her now.

Marten put down the phone and picked up Klaus Melzer's-Salt and Pepper's-driver's license. He turned it over in his hand, then looked again at his business card. Never mind that Marten had been handed off to him at the airport. Why would a forty-something German civil engineer be tailing him? It made no sense.

Unless-

Marten clicked on his phone and dialed the Munich number for Karlsruhe & Lahr listed on Melzer's business card. Maybe his identification-driver's license, credit cards, business cards-was false, maybe there was no Klaus Melzer or Karlsruhe & Lahr at all. Ten seconds later the second half of his conjecture fell apart:

"Karlsruhe und Lahr, guter nachmittag." Karlsruhe and Lahr, good afternoon, a cheery female voice said.

Five seconds after that the first part went out the window too.

"Klaus Melzer, please," Marten said.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Melzer is out of the office until next week," the voice said in accented English. "Would you like to leave a message?"

"Do you know where he can be reached?"

"He's traveling, sir. May I have him return your call?"

"No, thank you. I'll get back to him."

Marten clicked off.

So there was a Klaus Melzer and there was a Karlsruhe & Lahr. That confirmation brought him back to his original thought-why had a middle-aged German civil engineer seemingly with a good job been following him? Why had the handoff from the young man to Melzer at the airport seemed so professional? Why had he run away when Marten was about to confront him? All he'd had to do was deny whatever Marten accused him of and that would have been that. There was nothing Marten could have done. But he hadn't and now Melzer was dead.

"Dammit," Marten said in frustration then clicked on his phone and tried Demi once more.

He let the phone ring until the hotel operator came on.

"I'm sorry, Ms. Picard is not answering."

"Thanks," Marten said and was about to hang up when he had one more thought. "Has Reverend Beck checked in yet? He was coming in from Malta."

"Let me check, sir." There was a brief pause then the operator came back on. "No, sir. Not yet."

"Thank you."

Marten clicked off then took a determined breath and crossed the room to plug in his cell phone to recharge it. If Demi wasn't answering and Beck hadn't checked in, then where was she? Again he had the disturbing thought that she had already left, maybe to meet Beck, or even Merriman Foxx. If she had, maybe she was not in Barcelona at all but somewhere else. If so, this time she would have covered her tracks well, making sure there would be no trail he could follow.

46

• 5:58 P.M.

President John Henry Harris watched the countryside turn to suburb and then to city as Altaria train #01138 neared Barcelona. In the distance he could see the sunlight glint off the Mediterranean Sea. In five minutes they were due to arrive at Barcelona-Sants Station. His plan was to transfer to the 6:25 Catalunya Express, which, barring difficulty, would get him into Gerona at 7:39. Once there, there would be no calling Rabbi David Aznar's house for directions because he knew his phones would be monitored by some piece of Hap Daniels's intelligence machinery and that meant he would have to find Rabbi David's house on his own. But he had come this far without being discovered, and he had to trust his luck would hold and he could go the rest of the way without incident.

• 6:08 P.M.

The Altaria pulled into Barcelona-Sants Station five minutes late. John Henry Harris stood with the other passengers as they collected their things.

He nodded to Fernando Alejandro Ponce, his leather-jacketed, beret-wearing artist seat-mate, then followed the others from the train. When he did his heart came up in his throat. Armed, uniformed police had blocked the exits and were checking the identification of everyone leaving the terminal. The lines felt like they were miles long. Harris's only thought was that Hap Daniels- under the directive of the director of the Secret Service in Washington, under orders from the secretary of Homeland Security, under orders from Vice President Hamilton Rogers and the rest of Jake Lowe's "pals"-had put his foot to the accelerator. It meant this sort of thing would be going on all over Spain, if not all of Europe.

• 6:12 P.M.

President Harris stood in the ticket line for the Catalunya Express which was scheduled to depart for Gerona in thirteen minutes. He had purposely not bought a transfer ticket to Gerona in Madrid when he'd paid his fare for Barcelona, simply because he didn't want to alert anyone who might have recognized him, or who might later be questioned, his ticket seller in particular, as to his true destination. He now wished he had. The line to the ticket counter was twenty deep, and the police were walking up and down looking carefully at the people in line. And not just here, but at every ticket window.

• 6:19 P.M.

The line inched forward. People around him mumbled about what was going on. There was fear among them too, with memories of the horror that had gone on at Atocha Station on March 11, 2004, still achingly clear in their memories. Without doubt they were wary about the armed force around them. Many were half expecting a bomb to go off at any second.

• 6:22 P.M.

The line moved closer and Harris could see the ticket sellers in their cages checking the identification of every person buying a ticket, and CNP agents inside the ticket cages with them overseeing the process.

Slowly, easily, he stepped away from the line and walked toward the men's restroom. What he had to do was get out of the building and find some other way to Gerona. What that would be he didn't know, because he was certain every bus and train terminal would be under the same heavy surveillance.

Harris passed a news kiosk. Prominently displayed was ADN, apparently a major Barcelona newspaper. The front page had a photograph of himself leaving the presidential limousine, taken at some point the day before. The headline in Spanish read:

¡HARRIS HUYE DE AMENAZA TERRORISTA EN MADRID!

– HARRIS FLEES TERRORIST THREAT IN MADRID!

Head down he kept on, passing shops, restaurants, and an ungodly number of uniformed police. Finally he reached the men's restroom and went inside, passing a policeman stationed just inside the door. Half a dozen men stood at urinals. Harris went immediately into a stall and closed the door. What to do next? This was a nightmare beyond nightmares. He wished to hell he could wake up from it and find it had all been just that, a gruesome dream. But it wasn't and he knew it. He had to find a way out of the building, even though he knew nothing of Barcelona, let alone how to find some safe transportation to Gerona.

He sat down on the toilet and tried to think. For the moment, at least here, with the stall door closed, he was safe. But that would last only until someone else tried to use it or the policeman stationed at the door became suspicious and came to check on him. His first thought was to take a chance and call Rabbi David in Gerona and ask him to get in his car and drive here, then arrange for a place to meet and hide somewhere nearby until he arrived. But he knew from what was going on in the station that that was out of the question. If he had worried before that the rabbi's phones would be fully monitored there was no doubt of it now. Seemingly every inch of everything everywhere was covered. His pursuers, even if they didn't realize it, were literally steps away from him.

It meant he had to slow things down and take them a step at a time, just as he had at the Ritz. The first move was to find a way out of the station. Once on the streets he could decide the next course of action. To do that he had to do what he had done in Madrid, use his knowledge of how public buildings were constructed and use the station's mechanical interior-the hidden corridors that contained the heating, air-conditioning, plumbing, and electrical systems-as a way out. The way a mouse or rat would find his way to freedom.

Harris stood up and flushed the toilet and was about to open the door when he saw a folded copy of La Van-guardia with his photograph on the cover lying on the floor near his feet. Immediately he saw it as a prop, something he could use to casually shield his face on the way through the station until he found an entrance to the maintenance corridors he was looking for. Additionally, he might learn something of the smoke-screen story the White House press corps had put out and see how "his friends," most especially the master manipulator Jake Lowe, had managed to sound the general alarm without telling the truth or upsetting the public any more than had already been done.

Quickly Harris picked up the paper, tucked it under his arm, then flushed the toilet once more, opened the stall door, and went out.

47

• HOTEL REGENTE MAJESTIC, 7:15 P.M.

Nicholas Marten sat alone in the hotel lounge waiting for a cell phone call back from Peter Fadden who was now in Madrid, gone there to cover the story surrounding the abrupt evacuation of the president from the Hotel Ritz the night before. Fadden had been on with him momentarily, then had to click off to take another call, promising to call back right away.

His hair slicked back and dressed in fresh khakis, crew-neck sweater, and light sport coat, Marten looked appreciably different from the man who had checked into this same hotel and then checked out only a short while later. His situation was helped too by the fact that none of the hotel staff who had been on earlier was on duty now.

Demi, he'd learned to his great relief, had not checked out as he'd feared. Moreover Reverend Beck had finally arrived and registered, though neither was in their rooms at present, or at least they weren't answering their phones if they were. Marten had checked the bar, coffee shop, and restaurant just to make certain they weren't there. Therefore he felt it safe to assume that unless they were in another guest room somewhere, they were not in the building.

His seat in the lounge gave him a view of the front door, the registration desk, and the elevators past it. Meaning that Demi or Beck or both would have to pass by him when they returned. He didn't like sitting there exposed as he was, but in his days as an LAPD detective he'd done enough surveillance to know the mechanics of it. Come and go once in a while, pretend you're waiting for someone who has yet to arrive. Ultimately, of course, he would have to leave, but not at the moment. And at the moment what he was doing was buying time waiting for Demi to return and for Peter Fadden to call. Time, on the other hand, was itself problematic. By now Foxx or whoever had set Karl Melzer on his trail would know Melzer was dead and would have scurried to get someone to take his place. After that there would be calls to every hotel in Barcelona looking for someone who had registered as Nicholas Marten-"I'm trying to find a friend" or "my cousin, his name is"-or something like that, Melzer's replacement would say. And even with as many hotels as there were in the city, it would probably take less than half an hour to find him. Then they would know where he was and the entire thing would begin again.

Marten was turning to get a better view of the front door when his cell phone chirped and he clicked on.

"This is Marten."

"It's Peter," Fadden's voice was as clear as if he were sitting beside him. "Sorry it took so long. The Secret Service took the president out of the hotel in the middle of the night to an undisclosed location. They're saying it was a credible terrorist kidnap threat and that the suspects are still loose and trying to get out of the country. They've got just about every Spaniard who can fit into a uniform trying to find them never mind what's going on with the Secret Service, CIA, and the FBI."

"I know, Peter, I saw the news."

"Whatever's going on I'm pretty much here alone. The White House press secretary shut down everything and sent the whole press corps back to Washington. Why, I don't know, except that's where all the official news will come from once something breaks. Of course they'll all turn right around and bring everybody back for the NATO meeting Monday in Warsaw. But that's not what you want to talk about. It's the Caroline Parsons thing. The clinic, that stuff."

"Yes."

"The clinic is legitimate. She was taken from her home to the Silver Spring Rehabilitation Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. She was there for six days until she was transferred to University Hospital. Dr. Stephenson was a consulting physician there and approved her admittance and then the transfer. No one on staff ever heard of or saw anyone who looked like Foxx."

Marten took a breath, then glanced around the room. Maybe a dozen people at most were gathered at surrounding tables. None was paying him the slightest attention. He turned back to the phone.

"Peter, I've got something else. Stephenson and Foxx belonged to a cult, a coven of witches-"

"Witches?"

"Yes."

"Oh for chrissake!"

"Peter, stop and listen," Marten demanded sotto voce.

"I told you before how Foxx had a tiny balled cross tattooed on his thumb. Stephenson had one too. And maybe Beck as well."

Marten looked up as a young couple sat down at a small table next to him. He got up and walked toward the hotel's lobby, cell phone to his ear.

"That balled cross is the sign of Aldebaran," Marten said as he went, "the pale red star that forms the left eye in the constellation Taurus. It is also called the 'Eye of God.'"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Some kind of cult, Peter."

"And you think this 'cult' had something to do with Caroline Parsons's death and those of her husband and son?"

"Possibly. I don't know. But Foxx was increasingly upset when I questioned him. I told you he denied knowing Stephenson at all. Maybe your people found no record of him being at the clinic when Caroline was there but she not only described what he looked like and what his hands looked like but the tattoo as well. Peter, he was at the clinic, believe me. Beck was with him in Malta. And now Beck is here in Barcelona and is expected to meet with him again soon. I'm trying to find out where and when. If I do maybe I'll find out why."

Marten had reached the lobby and was crossing it. A bellman pushing a luggage cart was coming toward him. He stopped and turned away.

"Peter, there's something else. Foxx, or someone, had me followed from Valletta to Barcelona. It was a professional job-one guy handed me off to another at Barcelona airport. I thought I lost him, but he showed up at a restaurant where I was having lunch. I found later he was German, a civil engineer working for a company in Munich."

"Why would a civil engineer be-?"

"That's what I said. But it's legitimate, I called his office and checked up on him."

"Where is he now?"

"Dead."

"What?"

The bellman passed and Marten turned back. As he did the elevator doors across the lobby opened. To his surprise he saw Demi walk out. With her was Reverend Beck and an older woman, Spanish or Italian maybe, and dressed in black.

"Peter, I've got to go. I'll check in with you when I can."

Instantly Marten clicked off then watched the threesome cross the lobby toward the front door. He held back as they went out, watching as Beck spoke with the doorman. A moment later a taxi pulled up, the three got in, and the taxi drove off.

Marten pushed through the door and went out. "Do you speak English?" he asked the doorman.

"Yes, sir."

"The three people who just left. I'm part of a group traveling with the reverend. I was supposed to meet them somewhere but I lost my itinerary. Do you happen to know where they went?"

"To church, señor."

"Church?"

"The cathedral of Barcelona."

Marten smiled, "Of course, the cathedral. Thank you."

"You want to go there?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Well, you are in luck, as your friends were."

Marten was puzzled, "How do you mean?"

"Usually the cathedral is only open until seven. But this month until ten. It is a celebration. It was closed for a long time for restoration but has now just reopened." The doorman smiled, "So you want to go still?"

"Yes."

The doorman motioned for a taxi. A moment later it arrived. Marten gave him a ten-euro tip, then got in, and the cab pulled away.

48

• 7:40 P.M.

John Henry Harris stood in the doorway of a convenience store watching the woman work her section of the street. She was blond, with pale white skin that was almost porcelain. Twenty at most, she looked Scandinavian or German, maybe even Russian. Her nationality didn't matter; her profession did. With a revealing halter top and short, tight skirt, the way she walked up and down between cars every time traffic stopped, there was little doubt she was out there for hire and for the right price would probably do almost anything he or anyone else asked. And that was what John Harris needed now, someone to do what he asked-with no questions whatsoever.

He had no idea where he was except that it was a dozen or more blocks from the train station. A place he'd escaped from not as planned by using inner service corridors, because the few he found had either been locked or strongly guarded. What he had done instead was take an enormous chance and set fire to the rear of a newspaper kiosk that was close to an exit door; a diversion, as the military or police would call it. And it had worked. The attention of Spanish security forces checking IDs at the nearest door had briefly been drawn to the flames and the near-panic from an already nervous public. Harris had calculated his timing and watched the guards rush from the door, and within seconds he was out on the street and gone.

"Señorita," he said as the light changed and traffic moved forward and his girl sashayed from the street and onto the curb. She looked at him and smiled, then came closer.

"¿Habla español?" Do you speak Spanish? he asked, hoping to hell she did. Not wanting to use English unless it was absolutely necessary.

"Sí," she came a little closer.

He peered over the rims of his glasses. "Necesito hablar con Ud. un momento." I would like a little of your time.

"Sí. seguro." Sure. She grinned seductively and adjusted her halter top so that he could see more of her breasts.

"No es lo que usted piensa." It's not what you think, he said quietly.

"Da igual. Si significa dinero, lo haré." Whatever it is, if it pays money, I will do it.

"Bueno," he said. "Bueno."

• 7:55 P.M.

Marten's taxi turned down one street and then another in slow traffic, moving back into the Gothic Quarter, where he had been earlier in the day. He was still up in the air about Demi, still wary of what she was doing, still unsure if he could trust her. That she hadn't answered her phone the several times he'd tried to reach her and after he'd specifically told her he'd call didn't help. Nor did the fact that whatever Beck's mood had been in Malta he'd managed to calm down enough to ask her to follow him to Barcelona, and that now they seemed all buddy-buddy. It made him think that no matter what she'd confided to him about the witches and the sign of Aldebaran at the restaurant, she had done it simply to placate him, hoping it would be enough to make him go away and let her concentrate on staying in Beck's good graces so she wouldn't be left behind when he went to meet Merriman Foxx. It was a thought that made him wonder if that's where the three were going now, to meet Foxx at the cathedral. It also raised the question of who the woman in black was.

• 8:07 P.M.

Marten felt a presence and looked up. The taxi driver was watching him in the mirror. He'd glanced at him more than once before and now he was openly staring at him. Suddenly Marten had the feeling he'd stumbled into some kind of trap, that either the cab driver was Salt and Pepper's replacement or was a stringer like the Four Cats waiter, someone hired to look for him.

"What are you looking at?" he said.

"No hablo English good," the man smiled.

"Me," Marten pointed to his face, "you recognize me? I am familiar to you?" If this man was trouble and taking him somewhere other than to the cathedral he wanted it to come out now, so he could do something about it.

"Sí," the man said, suddenly understanding, "Sí." Immediately his hand slid to the seat beside him and he picked up a copy of an evening newspaper. It was folded back and open to an interior page.

"You Samaritan. You Samaritan."

"What? What are you talking about?" Marten was thrown off.

The man pushed the paper over the seat. Marten took it and looked at it. What he saw was a large photo of himself bent over the sprawled body of his Salt and Pepper man, Klaus Melzer, with the truck that had hit him in the background.

"Buen Samaritano sin sentido-el hombre de la calle ya estaba muerto," the caption read. Marten didn't understand the Spanish but he got the gist of it-he was a good Samaritan for no reason, the man in the street was already dead.

"Sí, Samaritano," Marten handed the paper back, swearing to himself as he did. Obviously someone in the crowd had taken a picture and sold it to the newspaper. They didn't have his name and there wasn't a story, so at least it wasn't about his having pilfered the dead man's wallet. Still, he didn't like it. It was bad enough he'd had to register at his hotel under his own name, but with his picture spread over the city like that it would make him all that much easier to find.

Abruptly the taxi sped up, traveled a half block, then turned down another street, moving deeper into the Gothic Quarter, which he now realized was not just a tourist area, but a sprawling ancient neighborhood where narrow streets emptied into other narrow streets and then into squares. It was a maze one could easily become lost in, something that might have happened to Klaus Melzer, a German, unfamiliar with the city, doing nothing more than trying to get away from a man pursuing him and running directly into the path of an oncoming truck. It was something that again made him wonder why Foxx, or whoever had hired the salt-and-pepper civil engineer, had picked him over a local and why Melzer had agreed to do it.

Just then the taxi slowed and stopped, its driver pointing toward a large square. Hotels and shops lined one side, while on the other stood a massive, ornate stone edifice with a complex series of lighted spires and bell towers that reached high into the evening sky.

"The cathedral, señor," the cab driver said. "Catedral de Barcelona."

49

• 8:20 P.M.

Marten crossed the square to join a group of English tourists as they walked up a series of stone steps and entered the cathedral.

The atmosphere inside the fifteenth-century building's vast and ornate interior was hushed, its muted lighting broken by the flickering of hundreds of votive candles resting on tables on either side of the nave.

Marten lingered as the group moved forward, his eyes scanning the room for Demi or Beck or the woman in black. Here and there people sat in silent prayer. Others walked respectfully around, gazing up at the architecture. At the far end of the nave was a high, elaborate altar. Above it towered Gothic arches that rose toward a ceiling he guessed was eighty feet high.

A raspy, echoing cough from someone near his sleeve brought him back to the purpose at hand and he moved forward, carefully, slowly. If Demi and her companions were there, he didn't see them. He kept walking. Still nothing. Suddenly, he wondered if Beck or Demi had said something to the hotel doorman as they left, and the man had purposely sent him on a wild goose chase and in reality they had gone somewhere else and not come here at all. It was enough to trigger a sense that he should go back to the hotel now and-suddenly he stopped. There they were, the three of them, standing on the far side of the nave, talking with a priest.

Marten crossed it cautiously, using tourists as screens, moving closer to where they were, praying they wouldn't suddenly turn and see him.

He was almost within hearing distance when the priest gestured off, and together the four moved in that direction. Marten followed.

A moment later he was in an inner hallway that ran alongside a large interior garden. Ahead he saw the priest lead the three around a corner and down still another hallway. Again, Marten followed.

Thirty paces and he was there, cautiously entering a chapel of some kind. As he did he saw the priest usher Demi, Beck and the woman in black through an ornate door near the rear. Seconds later the door closed behind them. Immediately Marten went to it and tried its wrought-iron handle. It didn't move. The door was locked.

Now what? Marten turned. An elderly priest stood not ten feet away looking at him.

"I was hoping to find a restroom," Marten said innocently.

"That door leads to the vestry," the priest replied in heavily accented English.

"The vestry?"

"Yes, señor."

"Is it always locked?"

"Except in the hour before and after services."

"I see."

"You will find a restroom that way," the old man gestured toward a hallway behind them.

"Thank you," Marten said, and with no choice, left.

• 8:45 P.M.

Five minutes later he'd walked through as much of the main church as he could, trying to see where they might have gone. Other doors were either locked or opened onto corridors that led to still more corridors, but none seemed to take him in the direction of the chapel where they had been.

He retraced his steps and went out through the main entrance, then walked around the cathedral to the far side where he guessed the chapel was, looking for a doorway Demi and her friends might have come out of. There was none. A hike around the rest of the massive building's exterior revealed only entrances that were darkened and closed and locked. That left only the main entrance, where he'd only moments before come out. That was where he went, blending in among the tourists and passersby on the square in front of the cathedral, to take a table at an outdoor café across from it where he had a clear view of the entryway. He ordered a bottle of mineral water and later a cup of coffee. An hour passed and they still hadn't come out. At ten the doors closed for the night. Frustrated, angry with himself for losing them, Marten got up and left.

50

• RIVOLI JARDÍN HOTEL, 10:20 P.M.

Marten came off the noisy street jammed with pedestrians and bumper-to-bumper traffic and into the relative quiet of the hotel lobby. Immediately he crossed to the front desk to ask for calls or messages.

"Neither, señor," the clerk said politely.

"Did anyone come in asking for me?"

"No, señor."

"Thank you," Marten nodded then crossed to the elevator that would take him to his room on the fourth floor. A push of a button, the door opened, and he stepped into the empty car. Another push of a button, the door closed, and the elevator started up.

That he had no calls or messages and that no one had come looking for him was a distinct relief. It meant whoever had sent Salt and Pepper had yet to find a replacement who might have tracked him to the Rivoli Jardín. Demi, Peter Fadden, and Ian Graff at Fitzsimmons and Justice in Manchester had his cell phone number and would have gotten in touch with him that way. So for the moment, at least, he had a chance to breathe. No one knew where he was.

Demi.

His thoughts were suddenly on her and what she was doing or not doing. Obviously she was back in Beck's good graces or she wouldn't have gone off with him as she did. Where either of them was now and who the woman in black was, was anyone's guess. The fact was Demi remained a conundrum. It was true she had provided him with considerable information, especially as it related to the witches, the thumb tattoos, and the sign of Aldebaran, and that she had come to Barcelona hoping once again to meet with Merriman Foxx. On the other hand, and even though they were more or less after the same thing, she clearly wanted nothing to do with him. It made him think again of his impression of her when they had had lunch at the Four Cats; that as focused as she seemed, everything she was about seemed to have to do with something other than what was at hand. Whether that something was her missing sister, or if that story was even true, he had no way to know. What he did know was that a whole lot about her troubled him. It was as simple as that.

The elevator stopped at the fourth floor, the door opened and Marten stepped out into a deserted corridor. Twenty seconds later he reached the door to his room and swiped the coded electronic key through the lock. The tiny light turned from red to green and the lock clicked open. Bone weary, wanting only to shower and go to bed, he went in, turned on the hallway light, then closed the door behind him and locked it. To his left was the bathroom. Beyond it was the room itself. Dark with only the ambient glow from the street giving it any illumination at all. He walked just past the bathroom door and started to reach for the light switch to the room.

"Please don't turn the light on, Mr. Marten," a male voice sprang from the darkness of the room.

"Christ!" Marten felt ice run down his spine. Instantly he looked behind him. It would be impossible to get to the door, unlock it, then open it and get out before whoever was in the room had him. His heart pounding, he turned back, peering into the darkened room in front of him.

"Who the hell are you? What do you want?"

"I know you are alone. I watched you cross the street to the hotel from the window." The voice was calm, even quiet. This wasn't someone like the baggy-jacketed kid who had tailed him from Valletta to Barcelona or the German civil servant who had fled the instant he was challenged and then panicked and ran into the path of a truck.

"I said who the hell are you? What do you want?" Marten had no way to know if the man was alone or if there were others with him. Or if he was there to kill him or simply take him to Merriman Foxx.

Suddenly there was movement and he could see a lone male figure come toward him in the dark. In a swift move Marten undid his belt buckle and ripped the belt from his pants, wrapping it around his hand as a makeshift weapon.

"You won't need that, Mr. Marten."

Abruptly his "guest" stepped from the dark and into the spill of the hallway light. As he did, Marten's breath went out of him. The man who stood there was John Henry Harris, the president of the United States.

"I need your help," he said.

51

Nicholas Marten pulled the room curtains and then switched on a small lamp and turned to face the president, who had taken a chair and now sat facing him. If he had been startled before, he was all the more so now. The man he had met moments before was probably the most recognizable person in the world, but in an instant he looked entirely different, almost unrecognizable. His full head of hair was gone, showing a nearly bald pate, and he wore glasses. It made him seem older, even slimmer, or as he had thought, just "different."

"A toupee, Mr. Marten. They make them very well these days," the president said. "I've worn one for years. Only my personal barber knows about it. The glasses are clear, an addition picked up in a store in Madrid. A simple stage prop that helps with the overall appearance."

"I don't understand, sir. Any of it. Even how you found me or why you wanted to. You're supposed to be in-"

"An undisclosed location because of a terrorist threat, I know. Well, I am in an undisclosed location, at least for the moment." The president reached to a side table and picked up the copy of La Vanguardia he had taken from the rest room in the train station. A page was folded back and he handed it to Marten.

A quick glance told Marten everything. On it was the photograph of himself with the body of his Salt and Pepper man hit and killed by the truck. The same photograph the cabdriver had shown him earlier.

"I saw your picture, Mr. Marten. I hired a young woman to help me find you. I was alone and desperately in need of a place to go, and for the moment, at least, you have provided it. Serendipity or kismet, I think it's called."

Marten was still wholly puzzled. "I'm sorry, but I still don't understand."

"The young woman found where you were registered. It wasn't that far from where I was, so we walked here. I was let into your room by a generous desk clerk after I told him I was your uncle and had planned to meet you earlier but that my plane was late in arriving. He was skeptical but a few euros convinced him."

"That's not what I mean. You are the president of the United States. How could you be on your own like this, and even if you were why come to me when you could have called anyone?"

"That's just it, Mr. Marten, I couldn't have called anyone. And I mean anyone." The president fixed Marten with a look that told him how truly desperate his situation had been and still was. "I remembered you from our brief meeting at University Hospital in Washington. Caroline Parsons had just died and very nearly in your arms. You asked if you might have a moment alone with her. You remember?"

"Of course."

"I found out later that she had had a legal document drawn up giving you access to her private papers and those of her husband, Congressman Parsons."

"That's true."

"I assume it was because she thought her husband and son had been deliberately killed and hoped maybe you could find out what happened."

Marten was stunned. "How did you know that?"

"For the moment suffice it to say it's the primary reason I'm here and seek your help. Both Caroline and Mike Parsons were my very close friends. Obviously Caroline trusted you a great deal and you were equally devoted to her, or," John Henry Harris half smiled, "you wouldn't have kicked the president of the United States out of the hospital room." Harris's smile faded and he hesitated as if he weren't sure exactly what to say next, or how much to reveal. Then Marten saw a look of deep resolve come over him, and he continued. "Mr. Marten, Mike Parsons and his son were murdered. So, I'm afraid, was Caroline."

Marten stared at him. "You know that for a fact?"

"Yes. No, I shouldn't say for a fact, but it was an admission by the people responsible for it."

"What people?"

"Mr. Marten, I want to trust you, I have to trust you because there is nowhere else for me to turn. And because of Caroline, I believe I can trust you." Again the president hesitated. Then Marten saw the resolve rise in him once more. "There was no terrorist threat. I left the hotel in Madrid on my own and under very difficult circumstances. You might say I escaped."

Marten didn't understand. "Escaped from what? From whom?"

"Our country is at war, Mr. Marten. A war that is being secretly waged against me and our country by a group of people at the highest levels of government. It is made up of my personal advisers and people in my own cabinet. People that I have known and trusted for years. But people who, in reality and as a group, are probably the most dangerous and powerful in the country. To my knowledge this is the closest thing to a coup d'état America has ever experienced. As a result, my life is in grave danger, and so is the future of not just our country but many other countries. Moreover, the window in which I can attempt to do something about it is extremely short. A little over three days at most. There is no longer anyone in the government that I can trust unconditionally. Nor do I have any friends or relatives this group won't have under close physical and electronic surveillance.

"That's why when I saw your photograph in the paper I knew I had to take the chance and find you. I had to have the confidence of someone and fortunately or unfortunately you are that person."

Marten was dumbfounded. Maybe in fiction the president of the United States came alone to your hotel room in the middle of the night and told you these things. Sat down and told you the country was being taken over from the inside and that you were the only person in the world he could trust to help him stop it. Maybe in fiction all that happened, yet this was not fiction, this was real. The president was here, not three feet away and visibly drained, looking at you with bloodshot eyes and relating these awful things and asking for your help.

"What do you want me to do?" Marten said finally in a voice that was little more than a whisper.

"At this moment I'm not exactly sure. Except-" John Henry Harris took a long, deep breath that was closer to a sigh of absolute exhaustion, "-that for an hour or two I would ask you to keep guard. It's been a damned long day. I need to think. But I need to sleep first."

"I understand."

Absently the president ran a hand over a stubble beard that was beginning to show. "This is still Friday, the seventh, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good," the president smiled and Marten could see the fatigue begin to overtake him. As it did his eyes found Marten's. "Thank you," he said genuinely. "Thank you very much."