The Machiavelli Covenant

  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."

  SATURDAY

  APRIL 8

  52

  • MADRID, 1:45 A.M.

  "I don't know if it means anything, sir," Hap Daniels heard the voice of Secret Service intelligence specialist Sandra Rodriguez through his headset. "It's a pattern NSA analytical software picked up earlier this evening in Barcelona and was just evaluated."

  "What pattern?" Daniels snapped. He'd been living on hope, black coffee, and adrenaline in the seemingly interminable hours since the president was first reported missing. Under emergency orders issued by the office of the vice president and overseen by George Kellner, CIA chief of station Madrid, the Secret Service had taken over a high level command post in a nondescript warehouse in Poblenou, an area of old factories and storehouses; a command post originally constructed by the CIA for their use in the event of a "terrorist issue" involving the U.S. embassy.

  It was now approaching nineteen hours since the president had gone missing, and Daniels—encircled by the broad-shouldered bulldog Bill Strait, his deputy special agent in charge; the pale, expressionless Ted Langway, the Secret Service's assistant director in from Washington, CIA-Madrid Station Chief George Kellner, and a half-dozen other Secret Service presidential detail supervisors—sat in the darkened central control room of that converted CIA warehouse in the glow of dozens of computer screens manned by Secret Service and CIA technical analysts culling information from what was now a massive top-secret worldwide intelligence operation.

  Standing in the background like a steel shadow and pacing back and forth as if his wife were about to give birth and was taking too long to do it, was the president's chief political adviser, Jake Lowe. BlackBerry in hand and wearing a headset connected to whatever line Hap Daniels was on at the time, Lowe had another line ready at voice command that would instantly connect him to a secure phone at the United States embassy a half dozen miles away, where National Security Adviser Dr. James Marshall and White House Chief of Staff Tom Curran had established what they called "a working war room." There they were connected by secure phone to the basement of the White House in Washington, where Vice President Hamilton Rogers, Secretary of State David Chaplin, Secretary of Defense Terrence Langdon, and Air Force General Chester Keaton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had set up a war room of their own.

  "We've got a record of twenty-seven phone calls placed between 2000 hours and 2040 hours this evening from six separate pay telephones all within a two-mile semicircle of the Barcelona-Sants Station," Rodriguez said. "They were paid for with a phone card purchased at a toba
cco shop on Carrer de Robrenyo."

  Barcelona had been a watch point ever since a small fire had broken out at a newspaper kiosk inside the city's main railroad station early Friday evening. A fire, officials had quickly determined, that had been purposely set but with no apparent reason—theft, vandalism, or as a terrorist act—and that Spanish CNP officers on the scene were now calling a "diversionary tactic." But "diversionary" for what purpose? The only answer seemed to be that because the fire had erupted near an exit where the Spanish police were checking identifications someone inside the station—maybe the president, but more likely someone with a criminal record or on a terrorist watch list—had been trying to get past the police checkpoint. If so it may have worked because the officers at the door had, for a very brief time, left their post to investigate the fire and commotion inside.

  "What's the connection to POTUS?" Daniels pushed, weariness and frustration beginning to override his generally composed demeanor.

  "That's why I said I don't know if it means anything, sir."

  "If what means anything? What the hell are you talking about?"

  "The pattern, sir. The calls were placed to local hotels. One after the other as if someone were trying to locate a hotel guest but didn't know in which hotel the person was staying."

  "Get me the name of the tobacco shop where the card was purchased, the numbers and locations of the phones the calls were placed from, and the names and numbers of the hotels that were called."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Thank you," Daniels punched a number on the keyboard in front of him. "Find out if Spanish intelligence did an intercept of public telephones in Barcelona between 2000 and 2040 tonight. If so, see if they have a voice record of a series of calls made to area hotels in that time frame. I want to know if the calls were made by a man or a woman, what they were about, and what language the caller spoke in."