"If there was an explosion in the tunnel someone is going to go in to check it out," Vice President Rogers raised another concern. "What happens when they find the president's body?"
"They won't," Lowe said with cold confidence. "That tunnel leads to Foxx's Number Six lab, the ugly one. As Foxx described it, it was designed to automatically destruct if the proper codes weren't keyed in upon entry. At the same time any access to it would be sealed off. If that happened, and according to the ops report from the scene we have to presume that it did, right now that tunnel is blocked by a two-hundred-thousand-pound slab of rock crushed down against the door to the last of Foxx's monastery-side labs. The other end is sealed off by a thousand cubic yards of interior landslide. Foxx was a perfectionist. What's there will look like a natural earth-fall inside an old mining tunnel. There would be no reason to believe anyone would be in there. It's one of a whole chain of tunnels the authorities know have been sealed off for decades."
"Gentlemen," Marshall cut in, "unless the president was in the lab itself, which he might well have been, the only other place he could be is in the tunnel. If he's there he has no way out. For all intents it will become his tomb. If it has not already. How we go about officially discovering what happened and how we recover the body we will contend with later. Right now and most thankfully he and his ideas are no longer an issue. We need to move on, and quickly."
"Agreed," Secretary of State Chaplin said from London.
"Jim—" Langdon jumped in from Brussels.
"Still here, Terry," Marshall said.
"We're damn short on time. The final go ahead for Warsaw has to be given and soon."
"I concur."
"Vote." Langdon said.
His demand was followed by an immediate and unanimous chorus of "Agreed."
"Nays?"
From Madrid, London, Brussels. From rural Virginia. From the men in the room at the Hotel Grand Palace in Barcelona came only silence.
"Then the vice president will sign the Warsaw order forthwith," Lowe said. "Correct, Ham? No backing out from you."
"I'm a hundred-percenter, Jake, you know that. You all know that. Always have been. No backing out here," Vice President Hamilton Rogers said from Madrid. "Chet, you will confirm the Warsaw operation when it is operational."
"Yes sir. You bet," Air Force General Chester Keaton's powerful voice stabbed across three thousand miles of ocean.
"Good," Lowe said, "then we're done and on to the next. See you in Warsaw, gentlemen. Thank you and good luck."
With that Lowe hung up and looked to Marshall. "I want to feel relieved. Somehow I don't."
"You're thinking about the president."
"We don't know for sure, do we? What if somehow he's still down there and alive?"
"Then he's got a hell of a lot of digging to do," Marshall took off his headset, then got up and crossed to a side table to pour drinks. Malt scotch, neat. Double shot for each. Done, he handed a glass to Lowe.
"It's less than forty-eight hours to Warsaw. The vice president believes he's in charge, the others accept it. Even if somehow the president did manage to pull off an Easter surprise it would be all but impossible for him to do it in that time. And if he did, the only way out would be over, under, or through that monster two-hundred-thousand-pound slab of rock and into Foxx's monastery chambers. He does that, shows up Christlike, we get him the hell out of there in one damn hurry. Soon after that he's dead from a heart attack and the vice president officially becomes president. Unnerving, yes, a little. But either way it's still all ours."
Lowe stared at him. "Do we have ops waiting if he does show?"
"In Foxx's office?"
"Or anywhere else."
"Jake, it can't happen."
"Do-we-have-ops-waiting?" Lowe articulated deliberately.
"You're serious."
"I'm damn serious. I want ops in Foxx's monastery chambers and anywhere else he might show up Easter-like. Inside, outside, upside down. There's a whole series of mining tunnels back there. What if he did escape the explosion and is alive and in one of them trying to find a hole to climb out through? What if he finds it? What then?"
"That could take a lot of bodies."
"Mr. National Security Adviser, we are at war, if you haven't noticed."
Marshall studied Lowe for a long moment, then touched his glass to his. "You want it done, it is."
Lowe didn't move, just stood there, glass in hand.
"Have a little faith in your own organization, man," Marshall said. "Have a little faith."
Lowe drained his glass in one swallow and set it down. "The last time I had that kind of faith it was in a son of a bitch named John Henry Harris. Twenty-two years of faith, Jim. Everything was right with him until it went wrong. So until we either have him or confirm he's dead, I don't know a goddamn thing," Lowe's eyes came up and found Marshall's and held there. "Not a thing."
103
• 4:50 P.M.
Matches.
The matches the president still carried from the diversionary fire he'd started in the Barcelona train station to escape the Spanish police. By Marten's count there were eleven left. Seven had already been used to get them this far in the pitch black of the tunnel, wherever "this far" was and whatever tunnel this was. He could hear the president breathing and knew he was resting somewhere close by. "You okay?" he asked in the darkness.
"Yes. You?" the president's voice came back.
"So far."
They had left Foxx's hideous lab at 3:09, escaping the rush of gas pouring from the jets built into the room and going back up the tunnel the way they'd come in. The trouble was the door at the far end was locked and there was no other entrance. It meant they had no place to go except the hideous lab from which they'd just escaped. That left only the tunnel they were in and gave them nothing to do but wait until the gas escaped Foxx's chamber and the shaft filled with it. It was in that moment of terrible realization they felt the slightest waft of fresh air. They followed it twenty feet or so and found a slender opening in the tunnel wall just wide enough for a man to slip through. On the far side was a narrow sandstone passage that dropped swiftly away and then quickly became little more than a crawl space. Marten lit one more match and they could see it continue on for another thirty feet before it turned and disappeared from sight. Where it went or if it simply ended there was no way to know. But it was filled with fresh air and they didn't dare go back to the main tunnel, so they took it. Marten first, wriggling through with his feet and elbows, the president right behind doing the same.
At the end of the thirty feet the shaft turned sharply and they had to inch around it. They continued that way in pitch black for another hundred feet and then the narrowness and tight press of the passage suddenly gave way to a larger chamber and they were able to stand upright. Another match and they could see they were in what appeared to be an old mining tunnel with a rusted narrow-gauge ore-car track running down its center. Apparently they had entered somewhere midtunnel so to know which direction to go was nothing more than a guess, which they did, turning right and moving off in the dark, using the rails as a guide. By Marten's watch it was then 3:24.
Seven minutes later, at 3:31, the tunnel veered left and they followed it. At 3:37 exactly a thundering explosion rocked the entire mountain. The tunnel ceiling fifty feet behind them collapsed and in seconds the entire shaft filled with a rolling cloud of choking dust.
Immediately they dropped to the floor, hugging it, fearful even to breathe. Then, hands clamped over noses, coughing and spitting and still following the ore-car rails, they crawled off in the only direction they could go.
By 3:50 most of the dust had settled and they got to their feet and moved on, one following the other, the one behind holding the belt of the man in front so as not to get separated in the inky darkness, ready to pull him back in the event the ground suddenly disappeared beneath his feet.
At 4:32 they heard the sound of dripping water and stop
ped. Another match showed the tunnel continuing on around a bend and at the same time revealed a small pool of collected groundwater where the tunnel wall touched the floor. Water to drink and to wash the dust from the face and eyes.
"You first, Cousin," the president coughed.
Marten grinned, "Sure, get the peasant to test for poison before the king tries it."
Marten saw the president smile just as the match went out. The moment was fleeting but in the awful black that followed it was a moment of humor shared. Not much but something.
Afterward they drank and washed out the dust and then sat down to rest.
104
• 5:10 P.M.
Hap Daniels sat on the edge of the bed watching the young doctor finish bandaging his shoulder. They were in the cramped upstairs bedroom of a small house near the Llobregat River and on the outskirts of El Borràs, a town in a valley north and east of Montserrat, that belonged to Pau Savall, Miguel's uncle. A stonemason and house-painter, it was Pau who had lent Miguel the motorcycle and behind whose home the Limousines Barcelona Mercedes was now hidden.
A final layer of bandage and the doctor was done. Standing, he looked at Hap through rimless glasses.
"Usted ha tenido mucha suerte," he said quietly. "Las dos heridas son leves, del tejido blando. Tendrá que descansar esta noche, pero mañana podrá irse."
"He says you are very lucky," Miguel said from where he stood at the foot of the bed. "You have taken two wounds. Both are in the soft tissue. The bullets went all the way through. You will be quite sore and stiff but alright. He wants you to rest for tonight, tomorrow you may go."
"You have much luck, mi amigo," the doctor said in a halting mixture of English and Spanish. "God only knows the reason for it. That is why you have un amigo like this," he nodded toward Miguel, "he is God's helper. Now, if you will permit me, my children await me at supper." With that he said something in Spanish to Miguel and the two started across the room.
Hap saw them stop briefly at the door and the doctor handed Miguel something, and then they both left.
• 5:20 P.M.
Hap took a breath and ran a hand over his bandaged shoulder, remembering the painful ride down from the monastery in the cramped sidecar of Miguel's motorcycle. It had seemed to take a lifetime but in truth had been little more than twenty minutes. Twenty minutes after that the doctor had come.
By that time he'd had a couple of solid hits of local brandy, learned who Miguel was, who the men he had called his "cousins" were, and that the reason Miguel had helped him was because he had identified himself as a Secret Service agent and risked his life to save the man he thought was the president. He learned too that Miguel was the limousine driver who had brought the president and Marten to Montserrat from Barcelona and how he had come to have the keypad combination that allowed him to enter Foxx's office.
Miguel had gone to the monastery's restaurant to find his "cousins." The headwaiter had seen them leave with Merriman Foxx and gave him directions to Foxx's office. He'd been almost to the door when the ops had come and he'd quickly stepped back into the nearby shadows. When Broad Nose used the keypad, he'd watched carefully. The numbers were 4-4-4-2. Remembering numbers came easily to him, the result of too many days playing the national lottery, of too much money spent, of too many numbers remembered out of sheer hope.
It was then Hap had learned it was Foxx who had been the slumped white-haired figure the ops had carried out. He'd known him only by reputation and because of the secret subcommittee hearings on terrorism. He'd never seen him or even seen a photograph of him until that moment when Miguel charged the ops thinking they had the president, and the jacket came off, exposing him.
Why the president had enough interest in Foxx to risk coming all the way to Montserrat he had no idea until Miguel confirmed some of what he already suspected; that the president's Washington "friends" had planned an action the president refused to take part in—a mass genocide against the Muslim states—and that Merriman Foxx was the prime engineer of it. The president had no details of the plan and that was the reason he and Marten had gone to the monastary: to force Foxx to reveal the plan's particulars in an effort to stop it. Whether they had been successful or not, there was no way to know.
• 5:35 P.M.
Miguel came back into the room carrying a glass of water and a small envelope. "Take these," he handed Hap the water and slid two white pills from the envelope. "For pain. The doctor gave them to me. There are more in here." He set the envelope on the bedside table.
"After the ops left and before I blacked out, you went through that door in Foxx's office," Hap took a drink of water but ignored the pills. "I would guess to look for the president. You didn't find him or we wouldn't be here like this. Was there any sign he had actually been there?"
"Please take the medication."
"Had the president been there?" Hap pressed him forcefully. "And if he had, where the hell did he go that the ops didn't find him?"
"My uncle is downstairs with his wife," Miguel said quietly. "Only they and the doctor know you are here. They will check on you before they go to bed. They can be trusted. Anything you want or need they will provide." Miguel started for the door.
"You're leaving?"
"I will see you when I get back."
"You have my BlackBerry."
"Yes," Miguel took it from his jacket pocket, then came back and handed it to Hap.
"What about the guns? There were two of them."
Miguel opened his jacket, slid Hap's Sig Sauer automatic from his waistband, and set it on the table next to him.
"Where's the other one, the machine pistol?"
"I need it."
"For what?"
Miguel smiled gently. "I think you are a good man who must rest."
"I said, for what?" Hap pressed him.
"Age nineteen to twenty-four, Fourth Battalion, Royal Australian Army, Special Operations Command. I know how to use it."
Hap stared at him. "I didn't ask for your résumé, I asked why you need the machine pistol!"
"Good night, sir," Miguel turned for the door.
"You don't know if the president was even there, do you?" Hap barked after him. "You're guessing!"
Miguel turned back. "He was there, sir." He took a step, lifted something from a dresser top, then walked over and set it on Hap's lap. It was Demi's big floppy hat.
"He was wearing it when I left him, part of his disguise. I found it in one of the laboratories beyond the office we were in. The door and part of the wall leading from the laboratories to whatever was beyond them was crushed. Blocked by a huge wall of stone. Probably the result of the earthquake or whatever it was that knocked us to the floor. In a day or two people with heavy digging equipment might be able to break through it to the other side. Even then there would be no guarantee of what they might find.
"Somewhere on the far side of that mass of stone, inside the mountain and those surrounding it, caves connected by old mining tunnels run for miles. If he is alive he will be in one of those caves or tunnels. A storm is coming but for a time there will be moonlight and there are ways in from the top. That's where I'm going. To me your president and Nicholas Marten are family. It's my duty and choice to find them, whether they are alive or dead."
"Your limousine, it's parked out back under some trees."
"What about it?"
"You bring people up into the mountains a lot?"
"Yes, I bring people to the mountains quite often." Miguel was impatient, time was everything, this questioning wasting it.
"Keep an emergency kit in the trunk?"
"Yes."
"A large one?"
"Señor Hap, I am trying to get to your president. Please excuse me," again Miguel started for the door.
"The kit. It has those small, folding survival blankets, the kind that have a reflective side? You know, Mylar, like the firefighters use?"
Miguel angrily swung back. "Why these questions?"
"Answer me."
"Yes, we have them. It's a company regulation. One for each passenger and the driver. We keep ten."
"What about food? Emergency rations?"
"Some health bars, that's all."
"Good, bring the whole damn kit." Abruptly Hap stood up. Then immediately put out a hand to steady himself.
"What are you doing?"
Hap grabbed the 9mm Sig Sauer, stuck in it his belt and put the pain pills in his pocket. "I'll be damned if you're going alone."
105
• PARIS, HOTEL BEST WESTERN AURORE, 5:45 P.M.
"Good evening, Victor."
"Hello, Richard. I've been waiting all afternoon for your call."
"There was a delay, I'm sorry."
"I saw the story on TV about the shooting at the Chantilly race course. They talked about the two dead jockeys. But there wasn't much more."
"You haven't been approached by the police, have you?"
"No."
"Good."
Victor was in his underwear, lying on the bed, the television on in the background. He'd come that morning by train from Chantilly and taken a cab from the train station, the Gare du Nord, to the hotel where he was now, opposite another railroad station, Gare de Lyon. There he'd had a room-service breakfast, then showered and slept until two. After that he'd waited, as instructed, for Richard to call. As in Madrid, he'd grown more anxious as the hours passed, worrying that Richard would not call, maybe not ever. If the night went by without hearing from him he didn't know what he would do. He honestly didn't. In fact the idea of killing himself had crossed his mind more than once. It was certainly an answer. Something he could do. And very possibly would do if Richard had not called by—he set the time—eight the next morning. But then Richard had called and it was alright and he felt warm and wanted and respected again.