The Machiavelli Covenant

  Outside, the Barcelona cityscape flashed by. The only sound the scream of sirens of two Guàrdia Urbana police cars clearing the way in front of them. Directly behind followed the unmarked armored van with two Secret Service agents, two doctors, and two emergency medical technicians. Bringing up the rear were three unmarked Secret Service tail cars with four special agents in each.

  Twelve miles away at a private airstrip just north of the city a private CIA jet ordered by the White House chief of staff, Tom Curran, still working from the temporary "war room" at the U.S. embassy in Madrid, waited to fly the president to a still-undecided location Daniels thought would be in either central Switzerland or southern Germany.

  "Vector 4-7-7," a young, curly-haired intelligence specialist said suddenly.

  "What?" Hap Daniels responded.

  "4-7-7. We've got another call."

  Immediately Daniels switched frequencies. At the same time electronic triangulation began on the signal. Instantly a new set of geographical coordinates popped up, superimposed over a map of northeast Barcelona on the screen in front of him.

  "You're sure it's Marten's cell?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Jake Lowe and Dr. Marshall reacted intensely, each directly tuning his own headset to the audio feed.

  Again Daniels enhanced the picture on his screen, this time zeroing in on the green foothills north and just east of the Besós River. A half-second later he put a hand to the earpiece of his headset as if he was trying to hear more clearly. "What the hell are they saying?"

  "Not they. Just one voice, sir. It's the incoming call."

  "Incoming from where?"

  "Manchester, England."

  "Where in Manchester?" Dr. Marshall snapped.

  "Quiet!" Daniels was looking at no one, just trying to understand what was being said.

  What they heard was a lone male voice speaking softly but deliberately:

  "Alabamense. Albiflorum. Arborescens. Atlanticum. Austrinum. Calendulaceum. Camtschaticum. Canadense. Canescens."

  "What the hell is he talking about?" Jake Lowe's voice stabbed through a half dozen earpieces.

  "Cumberlandense. Flammeum."

  By now everyone was looking at each other. Lowe was right. What the hell was he saying?

  "Mucronulatum. Nudiflorum. Roseum."

  "Azaleas!" Bill Strait barked suddenly. "Somebody's reading off the names of azaleas."

  "Schlippenbachii!"

  Suddenly there was silence as Marten's cell phone went dead.

  "Did we pick up the coordinates?" Hap Daniels demanded from the techs behind him. Just then a crosshair of coordinates came up on his screen superimposed over an enhanced satellite picture of the piedmont and marked off in a five-square-mile grid.

  "He's in the area inside the grid, sir," the disembodied voice of an NSA navigator came back from three thousand miles away.

  "We have better than that, sir." The curly-haired intel specialist behind Daniels smiled, then touched his mouse. Abruptly all the screens shifted to a different view of the same image. Immediately he enhanced it five, and then tenfold, and they saw what looked like an apple orchard with a dirt road cutting through it. He enhanced it once more, and they saw a wisp of a vehicle's dust trail lift from the road itself.

  "Got 'em!" he said.

  68

  • CHANTILLY-GOUVIEUX SNCF RAILROAD STATION

  CHANTILLY, FRANCE, 7:44 A.M.

  Golf bag over one shoulder, suitcase in hand, Victor boarded first-class car number 22388 of the Chantilly to Paris train and found a window seat near the front.

  Ten minutes earlier he had checked out of his hotel and taken a taxi to the station. By then most of the frantic activity had died down. The police cars, the emergency response team, and the ambulances had long disappeared around a bend in the road, going, he was told, to a place he knew well—the Coeur de la Forêt.

  "Leave the weapon and walk away," Richard had told him over the headset. And he had, the same way he had left the similar M14 rifle in the rented Washington, D.C., office four days earlier when he'd shot and killed the Colombian national wearing the New York Yankees jacket as the man emerged from Union Station.

  • 7:50 A.M.

  The train lurched and began to move forward. As it did, Victor saw a police car pull into the station parking lot and four heavily armed policemen emerge from it. For a moment he tensed, worried the stationmaster had been alerted and the train would be stopped, its passengers questioned about the incident that had taken place little more than ninety minutes earlier when two jockeys had been shot and killed on the Chantilly racecourse practice track by someone hiding in the woods.

  Someone who was an excellent marksman and who had taken both men down with a single shot from a hundred yards away as they'd raced past on thoroughbreds running neck and neck, the bullet passing through the skull of one rider and then a hundredth of a second later through that of the other. Someone who, as the riderless horses ran on, left the murder weapon behind and simply walked away in the gray morning mist of the Coeur de la Forêt.

  • 7:52 A.M.

  The train picked up speed and in a blink the Chantilly-Gouvieux station was out of sight. Victor sat back and relaxed. Richard had told him there was nothing to worry about, to take his time, have coffee, even breakfast, and not make a show of leaving; and he'd been right. At every step, Richard had been right.

  He looked out the window and watched the French countryside pass by. Here, as in Coeur de la Forêt, the deciduous trees were beginning to leaf out. Bright green and filled with the hope of a glorious summer. He felt happy, even mischievous and, most particularly, alive.

  Like a boy who had just turned fourteen and was gobbling up the world around him.

  69

  • RURAL FOOTHILLS NORTHEAST OF BARCELONA, 7:55 A.M.

  Aterrible thudding roar followed by a huge shadow passing directly overhead made the young driver of the farm truck suddenly slow and look up through its cracked windshield. For an instant he saw nothing but fruit trees and sky; then a Mossos d'Esquadra jet helicopter came straight toward him over the treetops. In a blink it was gone. Five seconds later another police helicopter followed, this one flying lower than the first and blinding them in a storm of whirling dust.

  "¿Qué demonios pasa?" What the hell? he cried out and looked wide-eyed at the two young farmworkers squeezed into the seat beside him.

  In the next instant two Mossos d'Esquadra cars screamed down the dirt road directly in front of him. Two more raced in from the rear.

  "¡Joder!" he yelled. Immediately his right foot slammed the brake pedal and the truck slid to a stop in the whirlwind of dust kicked up by the police cars and the helicopters hovering just overhead, one two hundred feet higher than the other.

  Seconds later the three men were facedown in the dirt, uniformed police everywhere, submachine guns at their heads. The doors to the truck were thrown wide open.

  Slowly the driver dared to look up. When he did he saw men in dark suits and sunglasses emerge from unmarked cars that had come in from the grove on either side and start toward them. Then something else caught his eye. A huge, polished black SUV appeared through the shade of the orchard trees and slowly approached.

  "¡Dios mío! ¿Que ha pasado?" My God, what is it? The young worker next to him breathed.

  "¡Cállate!" Shut up! A barrel-chested policeman shoved the barrel of his submachine hard against the side of his head.

  Hap Daniels was the first from the SUV. Then came Bill Strait. Then Jake Lowe and then James Marshall. Daniels glanced at them and then started for the truck.

  The whirling dust and the thudding roar from the police helicopters overhead made it almost impossible to see, let alone hear or think. Daniels said something into his headset, and almost immediately the helicopters moved up and away to hover five or six hundred feet higher. The dust settled and the sound diminished.

  Lowe and Marshall watched Daniels reach the truck, look inside the cab, then
walk around it. Seconds later he motioned to one of the Mossos d'Esquadra officers to climb into the vehicle's open staked flatbed. A second policeman followed. Immediately two of Hap Daniels's dark-suited, sunglass-wearing Secret Service agents joined them.

  "It's right there, sir," Daniels heard the voice of the curly-haired intel specialist from inside the SUV come through his headset.

  "Where?"

  "Somewhere near their feet."

  "Here!" One of the agents said sharply.

  Lowe and Marshall rushed forward. The special agents helped Daniels into the truck and then showed him.

  Nicholas Marten's cell phone lay in a large cardboard box filled with irrigation equipment, hose connectors, and sprinkler heads. No apparent effort had been made to conceal it. It was right on top, as if someone had walked by, seen the box, and dropped it in.

  Hap Daniels stared at it for a long moment, then slowly turned and looked off. This time there was no need curse out loud. His expression said everything.

  The game was still on.

  70

  • 8:07 A.M.

  Miguel Balius pressed down on the accelerator, and the Mercedes picked up speed. They were headed away from the coast and toward the mountains. Earlier he had avoided a checkpoint for vehicles leaving Barcelona simply by heading back toward it. Several miles later he'd taken a side road near Palau de Plegamans, then turned north onto a country highway. Shortly afterward Cousin Harold had asked how to use the limousine's phone, saying he wanted to place a call abroad. Miguel had explained and Cousin Harold had picked up the phone and punched in a number. Quite obviously he'd reached his party because he chatted for a few brief moments, then hung up and turned to talk with Cousin Jack. Several minutes later he'd made his one and only stop—at the edge of a dusty apple grove, where Cousin Harold relieved himself behind a parked farm truck. As quickly they were off again.

  Whoever his passengers were they were clearly middle-class Americans, hardly the terrorists the government troops were searching for, or at least the dark-skinned Islamic stereotypes he and most of the world had come to expect when the word "terrorist" was mentioned. His customers were jet-lagged and tired and simply wanted to spend the day away from the city and seeing the sights, with Montserrat as their current destination. If they didn't relish going through the traffic backups and tedious procedures of roadblocks and checkpoints, neither did he. Besides, there was nothing illegal in what he was doing. It was his job to do what his clients asked, not wait in lines of traffic.

  Miguel glanced in the mirror at his passengers and saw them watching the small television screen. They came to see the countryside and were watching TV. What the hell, he said to himself, it's their business.

  And it was their business.

  Wholly.

  The attention of both men was locked on the small screen, where a female CNN reporter was doing a live stand-up in front of the White House, where it was still early morning. There had been no further reports on the circumstances of the president's hasty middle-of-the-night retreat from the Hotel Ritz in Madrid, she said. Nor was there information on the location where he had been taken, nor anything definitive about the nature of the terrorist threat or the terrorists themselves. But the people thought to be directly responsible had been traced to Barcelona, where they narrowly escaped a police raid and were now the subject of a massive manhunt that covered most of Spain and led all the way to the French border.

  The piece ended and CNN went to a commercial. At the same time the president picked up the TV's remote and pressed the mute button and the television went silent.

  "The Warsaw assassinations," he said to Marten quietly. "On a normal day I would have immediate access to the French and German leaders and could warn them personally. I no longer have that luxury. Still, somehow, the president of France and the chancellor of Germany must be told of the danger at Warsaw, and I don't know how to do it."

  "You're certain it will be Warsaw?" Marten asked.

  "Yes, I'm certain. They want to make a public show of it to instantly gain world sympathy for the people of Germany and France. It will help smooth the call for rapid elections in both countries and work to quell any political infighting that might keep their people from being elected."

  "Then we need to find a way to alert them in a way that's not tied directly to you."

  "Yes."

  "What about the media? What if it came from The New York Times, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN or any other major news organization?"

  "Who's going to tell them? Me? It's impossible for me to use any electronic communications device, period. Neither can you. You took Peter Fadden's call. They will have recorded your voice. They will be listening as much for yours as mine. At one point I even thought about entrusting Ms. Picard but decided against it for any number of reasons, primarily because no one would believe her, and if she tried to explain and the tabloids got hold of it there would be a massive story that the president had run away from the Secret Service and gone crazy. It's the last thing we need."

  "What about Fadden himself?" Marten said.

  "I considered that. He has the credibility to call the press secretaries of both people and be put through. He could tell them he has classified information that comes from the very highest sources and then alert them to what is to happen in Warsaw. If he did it that way they would take the warning very, very seriously and make certain it was passed on to their Secret Service people. The trouble is there's no way to reach him, even if we found a way to have a third party do it."

  "Because he called me."

  The president nodded somberly. "Every electronic transmission he makes or receives will be intercepted and his every move watched. I'm sure the Secret Service is all over him right now. I just hope for his sake that he stays in Madrid and doesn't press the issue of what he knows about Merriman Foxx or suspects about me. If he gets aggressive it could get him arrested, maybe even killed. So we're back to square one, Cousin. What in the damn hell to do now. We have this information that has to get out but there's no way to do it."

  Marten was about to say something when something caught his eye. He looked toward the front of the car. Miguel Balius was watching them intently in the mirror. Whatever he was doing, Marten didn't like it. Immediately he pressed the intercom button, "What is it, Miguel?"

  Miguel started in surprise. "Nothing, sir."

  "Something must have interested you."

  "It's just that your cousin, sir, well he seems vaguely familiar." Miguel was embarrassed to have been caught but told the truth anyway. He looked to the president, "I know I've seen you somewhere before."

  The president smiled easily, "I don't know where that would have been. This is my first time in Barcelona."

  "My memory's quite decent, sir, I'm sure I'll think of it." Miguel watched him a moment longer, then looked back to the road.

  Marten glanced at the president, "Remember what Cousin Demi told them about us?"

  "That we're a little crazy."

  Marten nodded. "Now's the time to show it. Tell him before he figures it out."

  The president was suddenly apprehensive, "Tell him what?"

  Marten didn't reply. Instead he looked to Miguel and pressed the intercom. "You know why he looks familiar, Miguel?"

  "Still working on it, sir."

  "Well stop trying. He's the president of the United States."

  President Harris felt his heart come up in his throat. Then he saw Marten grin broadly. Miguel Balius stared at them in the mirror and then a smile crept over his face as well.

  "Of course he is, sir."

  "You don't believe me, do you?" Marten kept on. "Well my cousin is the president of the United States. He's trying to have a day or two of peace and quiet away from the pressures of the job. That's why we wanted to avoid the roadblocks. It could be very dangerous if someone found out he was riding around without the Secret Service protecting him."

  "That right, sir?" Miguel was looking
at the president.

  The president was caught; all he could do was go along. "I'm afraid you've guessed our secret. It's why we want to take back roads, farm roads, anything to stay off the beaten path."

  Miguel's smile grew broader. They were playing with him and he knew it, "I understand your situation completely, sir. Later I can tell my grandkids I chauffeured you all over, took you to the beach, then helped you get the sand off your feet and drove you straight to Montserrat, all the while avoiding a thousand police roadblocks set up to nab terrorists."

  Abruptly Marten tensed. "You have grandchildren, Miguel?"

  "Not yet, sir. My daughter's expecting."

  Marten relaxed. "Congratulations on becoming a grandfather. But you understand you're not to tell anyone else about this, not your daughter, not even your wife."

  Miguel Balius raised a ceremonious hand from the steering wheel. "On my word, sir, not a soul. 'Discreet' is the company motto."

  Marten smiled, "All in a day's work."

  "Yes, sir. All in a day's work."

  Marten sat back and looked at the president. Harris's expression said everything. Miguel was one thing. The problem of Warsaw and how to warn the leaders of France and Germany about what lay ahead was something else entirely. Something that, for the moment at least, there was nothing at all they could do to correct.

  71

  • THE HOTEL GRAND PALACE, BARCELONA, 8:40 A.M.

  Jake Lowe and James Marshall entered a four-room suite reserved by White House Chief of Staff Tom Curran, still working out of the U.S. embassy in Madrid. Secret Service tech specialists had taken over one of the three bedrooms and were working quickly to set up a communications center that would include secure phones to the Madrid embassy and to the working war room at the White House. Neither man had slept in over twenty-four hours, and both were grubby and exhausted and sported stubble beards. Moreover, it had been some time since they'd had the luxury of an extended private conversation. Lowe led them into a small drawing room and closed the door.