The Machiavelli Covenant

  He had talked to Marten just after seven, little more than two hours earlier, a conversation Marten had abruptly ended by telling him he would get back to him as soon as he could. So far that hadn't happened, and three attempts to reach him had achieved nothing more than a connection to his voice mail. So where was he? What the hell had happened?

  If Fadden was right and the authorities were looking for a person or persons other than terrorists, as far as he'd been able to tell none of the other media people had yet picked up on it. That meant if he could break it he just might have an exclusive on an incident of major political, even historic, proportions.

  The question was how to handle it. He had been around far too long not to know that if he called his editor at The Washington Post, no matter how confidential their conversation, whatever he said would be reported to the executive editor. Because of it, there was every chance someone in the Washington press corps would learn about it, and soon the flood gates would open and he would be trampled in a stampede of others rushing to the scene; and that was something he wasn't about to let happen.

  • 9:35 A.M.

  Fadden watched the familiar landscape. They were on Calle de Alcalá and about to pass Madrid's famous bull ring, the Plaza de Toros. Moments later they would be crossing Avenida de la Paz. Fadden knew the way to the airport well. In five years as a Washington Post foreign correspondent in London, two in Rome, two in Paris, and one in Istanbul, he had been to Madrid countless times. By his calculation and with the flow of traffic, he should reach the terminal in less than twenty minutes, giving him just enough breathing room to make his Iberia flight to Barcelona.

  • 9:37 A.M.

  They passed Avenida de la Paz, and Fadden took a moment to close his eyes. He'd been up into the early morning talking to everyday staff at the Ritz—busboys, maids, kitchen, cleaning, and maintenance people, night managers, hotel security. Afterward he'd worked in his hotel room until nearly four making notes. At six thirty he was up showering and making his airline reservations and then calling Nick Marten. A little over two hours' sleep—no wonder he was tired.

  Suddenly he felt the taxi slow. He opened his eyes as the driver made a right turn onto a side street and continued down it.

  "Where are you going?" he snapped. "This isn't the way to the airport."

  "I am sorry, señor," the driver said in broken English. "There is nothing I can do about it."

  "About what?"

  The driver glanced in the rearview mirror. "Them."

  Fadden turned around. A black car was right behind them. Two men wearing dark glasses were in the front seat.

  "Who the hell are they?"

  "I'm sorry, señor. I have to stop."

  "Stop? Why?"

  "I'm sorry."

  Immediately the driver pulled to the curb, the oldies American rock still blasting from the radio. An instant later he threw open the door, then got out and took off on the dead run, never looking back.

  "Jesus God!" Fadden blurted, fear and realization stabbing through him. His hand went to the handle and he shoved the door open. His feet hit the curb just as the black car slid to a stop behind. He didn't even look, just took off running. Seconds later he reached a cross street and ran into it without looking. A blast of horn was followed by a shriek of tires. Fadden went up on his toes, pirouetted like a running back, and dodged around a blue Toyota van that nearly hit him. Then he was on the far sidewalk and charging into a small plaza. He darted left and then right around a fountain. Then took the gravel path on the far side of it. A brief glance over his shoulder and he could see them coming. They wore jeans and sweatshirts and had military haircuts. They looked and felt American.

  "Christ!" he breathed, and kept on.

  Just ahead he saw a shrub-lined pathway leading from the plaza and onto the street beyond. Lungs on fire, he took it. Ahead he saw a stopped city bus letting off passengers. There was no reason to look back. They would still be coming. The bus was still thirty feet away and he was running with everything he had. He fully expected a blow from behind or a flying tackle that would take his legs out from under him. Twenty feet more, then ten. The bus door was starting to close.

  "Wait!" he yelled, "wait!" The door opened again just as he reached it. In a heartbeat he was onboard, the door closed and the bus pulled away.

  75

  • MANCHESTER, ENGLAND. THE BANFIELD COUNTRY

  ESTATE,

  HALIFAX road. 9:43 A.M.

  A heavy mist hung across the rolling deep green fields. Rain clouds drifted above the distant hills. From the hilltop where Ian Graff stood he could see the river and if he turned, the Banfields' newly constructed great house—all twelve thousand square feet of the glass, steel and stone of it. None of which suited English history or the rolling rural setting where it sat. But it was the landscape Fitzsimmons and Justice had been paid to design not the house. It was the landscape, this damp Saturday morning, he had come to once again, plans rolled up and tucked under his arm, to survey one last time before presenting them—no thanks at all to Nicholas Marten—to Robert Fitzsimmons who would again submit them to the young, newly very wealthy, newly married, very testy, Mr. and Mrs. Banfield.

  Graff twisted his jacket collar up against the mist and was just turning his Wellington-booted feet back toward the main house when he saw the dark blue Rover sedan parked at the bottom of the hill and two men in raincoats coming up the muddy path toward him.

  "Mr. Ian Graff," the first man, stocky and black-haired with a touch of gray at the temples, called out. It wasn't a question as much as the voice of authority. They knew who he was.

  "Yes."

  The second man was tall and his hair was all gray. He reached into his raincoat pocket as he drew closer and took out a small leather case. He flipped it open and held it up, "John Harrison, Security Service, this is Special Agent Russell. One hour and twenty minutes ago you placed a call from your office to the cell phone of a Nicholas Marten."

  "Yes. Why? Is he in some sort of trouble?"

  "Why did you make the call?"

  "I am his supervisor at the architectural landscape firm of Fitzsimmons and Justice."

  "Please answer the question," Agent Russell moved closer.

  "I called him because he asked me to. If you look around you will see the acreage that we are about to begin landscaping. Among the many plantings are to be azaleas. He was working on the plan and asked me to go down the azalea list because he had forgotten the name of a specific type he wished to use. I retrieved the list and called him and recited the names."

  "Then what?"

  "The connection went dead. I tried calling him back but I had no luck."

  "You said he asked you to call him," Agent Russell spoke again. "Are you saying he called you and asked you to call him back?"

  "In a manner of speaking, yes. He called my house thinking it was Saturday and I would be at home. My housekeeper took the call and then relayed the message to me at my office."

  "Your housekeeper."

  "Yes, sir. Although I'm not sure why he called the house. He knew I would be at the office, we are far behind on a critical project. This one," Graff gestured at house and the land around them.

  Agent Harrison stared at Graff for a moment longer, then glanced at the surrounding countryside. "Nice piece of dirt. Don't like the house though, style doesn't fit."

  "I agree with you, sir."

  "Thank you for your time, Mr. Graff."

  With that Security Service agents Harrison and Russell turned and started back through the mud for their car.

  "Is he in trouble?" Graff called after them. "Is Mr. Marten in trouble with the government?"

  There was no reply.

  76

  • MADRID, 10:15 A.M.

  Peter Fadden had ridden the city bus for two stops, gotten off, then walked a half block where he turned down a side street and entered a small café sprinkled with a few midmorning customers. Immediately he went to the men's restroom.
Several moments later he came out, glanced down the hallway into the kitchen and established that there was a rear entrance and way out if he needed it. Satisfied, he went back into the main room and took a seat at a table where he could see the door and ordered a cup of coffee.

  He had his wallet, his passport, his BlackBerry, and, for the moment at least, his life and his freedom. The rest—his suitcase and his briefcase containing his laptop—he'd left in the taxi, things the men who'd come after him would now have in their possession. It was the laptop that concerned him most. The hard drive contained all of his notes: his interviews with hotel staff people at the Madrid Ritz, his collection of material about Merriman Foxx, Dr. Lorraine Stephenson, the Washington, D.C., clinic where Caroline Parsons had been taken before she was admitted to University Hospital, and his suspicions about the manhunt in Barcelona and the possible fate of the president.

  The problem now was what to do about all of it.

  At this point he desperately wanted to get in touch with his editor at The Washington Post but he knew that was problematical at best. The only way the men who had come after him could have known who he was was because they had been tapped into the frequency of Marten's cell phone. It meant they had heard their conversation, probably even recorded it. Worse, it meant they had the number of his BlackBerry, which was no doubt how they found him at his hotel and probably the reason the first taxi had driven away without picking him up—because the second had a driver who worked for them and would do as he was told. It was the reason he had taken the side street as he had and then pulled the taxi to the curb and run away.

  Now that they had his BlackBerry frequency they would be monitoring it, so he couldn't use it without giving his position away. Moreover, because he had said what he had about the president and Mike Parsons's committee and Merriman Foxx, he could be all but certain the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of anyone listed in his BlackBerry Rolodex—nearly everyone he knew in Washington and in Post bureaus around the world—would be under surveillance as well. Who was doing all this, he had no idea, but it had to be at a very high level if they were monitoring Marten's cell phone and then, so soon afterward, sending the crewcuts after him. The business of the taxi cabs meant they hadn't been sent to have a simple conversation with him. That they could have done at the hotel.

  Topping off everything was the element of time. Whatever was happening was happening fast. If the president was in trouble, he was in trouble right now. It meant Fadden had to find someone out of the loop. Someone who had a prestigious voice that would be listened to and whom he could trust unconditionally needed to be told about it as quickly as possible.

  • 10:22 A.M.

  Fadden entered a small tobacco shop four doors down from the café. He glanced around, then went up to the only other person in there, the shop's heavyset proprietor sitting behind the counter smoking a cigar.

  "Do you speak English?"

  "Poco." A little. The man said.

  "I would like to buy a phone card."

  "Sí," the man said, "sí," and stood up.

  • WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, GENEVA, SWITZERLAND. 10:27 A.M.

  Dr. Matunde Ngotho, executive director of the WHO/OMS Human Genetics Program, had just left a Saturday-morning investigative conference and was entering his office on Avenue Appia when his cell phone rang.

  "Matunde here," he said, clicking on.

  "Matunde, it's Peter Fadden."

  "Peter!" the research doctor smiled broadly at the voice of his old and dear friend. "Where are you? In Geneva I hope. Yes?"

  Matunde waited for a response. He got none.

  "Peter?" he said. "Peter, are you there?"

  Peter Fadden stood frozen in place, staring wide-eyed at the tall crew-cut man standing just behind him at the street corner public telephone. For some reason he felt cold though the temperature outside was nearly eighty degrees. Now the crewcut reached in and lifted the receiver from his hand and hung it up on the phone's cradle. Vaguely Fadden remembered reaching his old college roommate in Geneva. Remembered hearing his voice and at the same time feeling a sharp pain near his right kidney, as if a needle had suddenly been inserted and then withdrawn. He saw an umbrella in the crewcut's hand. He wondered why. It wasn't raining. In fact there wasn't a cloud in the sky.

  77

  • 10:30 A.M.

  Nicholas Marten stared vacantly out the window as Miguel Balius maneuvered the limousine over a narrow bridge spanning a muddy river. A full minute passed and then two, then Marten's focus abruptly sharpened as if he had just completed a thought process. With a glance at President Harris, he touched the intercom button.

  "Miguel?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "You must have been to Montserrat before."

  "Many times."

  "What's it like?"

  "Like? Like a small city built into a mountainside half a mile straight up from the valley floor. A feat of incredible engineering."

  The president sat forward, suddenly aware that Marten was gathering information and in the process working on a plan for what they might do when they got there.

  "There are many buildings, some centuries old; the basilica, a museum, a hotel that has a restaurant, there's a library, a refectory, too many to list." Miguel bubbled with the enthusiasm of a tour guide, alternately looking at Marten in the mirror and watching the road in front of him as he drove. "You can drive to it or reach it by cable car from the valley floor. A funicular railway takes you higher into the cliffs if you want. All around are pathways that go off in every direction. Some have ancient chapels along the way, but most are long abandoned and nothing but ruins. The saying goes there are 'a thousand and one paths that crisscross the mountain.' You won't be disappointed. But be warned, it will be crowded. It always is. Montserrat has become as much a tourist stop as a religious retreat."

  "There's a chance we might meet some friends there," Marten dug deeper. "You said there's a restaurant. If we wanted to have lunch, is it just a sandwich shop or is there more to it?"

  "No, not a sandwich shop. A regular restaurant. Tables and chairs, everything."

  "Do you know if they serve soft drinks? Colas, mineral water, things like that? I ask because one of the gentlemen has a personal medical situation and has certain needs because of it."

  "Sure, colas, mineral water, coffee, wine, beer, anything you want."

  The president listened carefully. Marten was asking very specific questions, as if he knew precisely what he wanted.

  "Is there a restroom, you know, a toilet, nearby? I wouldn't want to suggest something that wouldn't be appropriate for his condition."

  This part Harris understood. Marten was trying find a public place where Merriman Foxx might meet him and then a place not far off where they could get him alone.

  "I think, yes," Miguel kept his eyes on the road. "It's in the back, near the door where they bring in the supplies."

  Marten perked. "A door that leads outside?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "This door, is it near any of the thousand and one pathways you mentioned? Say if we wanted to take a walk after lunch."

  "Right you are, sir," Miguel beamed, his Australian accent and his years there creeping through, clearly enjoying the part of helpful host. "One way goes down to the loading dock, the other up the hill and into the mountain trails. In fact one of the old ruined chapels is right up the trail from it."

  "You paint a wonderful picture, Miguel."

  "It's my job, sir. Besides, Montserrat is wonderful. At least for the first fifty visits or so."

  Marten smiled, then clicked off the intercom and looked to the president. "Before, I suggested the way to get answers from Foxx depended on where and under what circumstances the questions were put to him. If we play it right and we're lucky we can get him up that path to the chapel alone. After that it might have to get physical."

  "Go on."

  "We get to Montserrat and let Demi find us. When she does I'll arrange to m
eet Foxx and suggest the restaurant. If he agrees, the two of us will come in and find a table near the back. Meantime you're already there, at a table near the door to the rear pathway. You've got your big hat on, you're drinking something and have your head down, maybe reading a newspaper. He doesn't even look at you. Or if he does he has no idea who you are. Hopefully no one else does either.

  "Foxx and I sit down, look at the menu, talk about nothing for a few minutes. Then I tell him I'm not comfortable having a serious exchange in public and suggest we go for a walk alone outside. The door's there, probably with an exit sign. I ask the waiter where it goes. He tells me. I ask Foxx if it's okay with him. Even if he's got people with him he'll agree because he wants to know what I know. We get up and go out the door. Thirty seconds later you follow. By then we should be up the path and nearing the chapel."

  "You think he'll go? Just like that?"

  "I told you, he wants to know about me and will have no reason to suspect anything. Montserrat is his call not mine. If he's nervous I'll tell him he can frisk me, I have nothing to hide."

  The president studied Marten carefully. "Alright, so everything works and you're alone on the path with him and near the chapel."

  "We see you coming up the trail behind us. I suggest we go inside, have our talk in there in case more people come."