"What do we do now?" the president asked.
"Nothing. We try to leave, they'll see us."
"You mean we stay here?"
"Yes, sir. We stay here."
147
• 7:25 A.M.
Four black-robed monks brought Demi from her cell and walked her down a long, barren, and dimly lit hallway. She wore only sandals and the scarlet dress Cristina had brought for her to wear during the ritual ceremonies the night before. That she had been forced to strip naked and put the dress on in front of the monks meant nothing.
How could it? They had come to take her to her death.
• 7:28 A.M.
The first monk slipped a security card through an electronic reader beside a steel door. The door slid open and they entered another long corridor. To both left and right doors stood open to what looked like physicians' examination rooms. They were small, identical, and had opaque glass boxes mounted on the walls, the kind used for reading X-rays and prints of scans. A stainless-steel examination table stood coldly in the center of each.
• 7:29 A.M.
They passed through another security door and entered a room filled with stainless-steel bunks, the same as the one in the cell she had just occupied. The only difference was that here they were stacked four high to the ceiling on either side of a center aisle and stretched to the far end of the chamber. Enough to easily accommodate two hundred people at a time.
Another corridor and she saw communal toilets and showers. Just past them was what looked like a small commercial kitchen and beyond it an area of stainless-steel tables with attached benches that might have been used for dining. These rooms, like the rooms and corridors she'd seen before it, were empty, as if the entire area had been a beehive of activity that had quickly and purposely been abandoned.
• 7:31 A.M.
The monks brought her through a series of five heavy security doors, one less than ten feet from the other. Then they entered a long, darkened subwaylike tunnel with a single monorail track running down its center. In front of them was a large, sledlike conveyance, completely open save for three rows of bench seats. Four more monks sat shoulder to shoulder on the rearmost bench. In front of them another monk sat alongside—Demi caught her breath as she saw her.
Cristina.
She wore the white gown of the night before and smiled pleasantly, even happily, when she saw Demi.
Immediately Demi was seated next to her. As quickly one of the monks slid in beside her. The remaining monks took the seats directly in front of them. Nine monks to escort two women into eternity.
Abruptly the sled moved off, quickly and silently picking up speed. A second passed, and then two, and then Cristina turned to Demi and smiled the most horrifying smile she had ever seen. Horrifying because it was so warm and genuine and childlike.
"We are going to join the ox," she said excitedly, as if they were about to go on some wonderful adventure.
"We mustn't," Demi whispered. "We have to find a way not to go."
"No!" Cristina suddenly pulled back, and her eyes shone with a terrible and immeasurable darkness. "We must go. Both of us. It has been written in the heavens since the beginning of time."
The sled began to slow and Demi saw they were approaching the end of the tunnel. Seconds later the sled stopped. The monks stood together and led both women onto a platform beside it. Immediately a large door slid open and they were taken into a large room. In the center of it was what appeared to be an oversized commercial furnace.
Demi felt the breath go out of her as she realized what it was—a steel-faced brick retort oven. The room was a crematory. The place where it all ended.
"The ox waits by the fire," Cristina smiled, and then four of the monks led her away.
A moment later the remaining monks took Demi into another room. A woman turned as they entered. It was Luciana. She was dressed in a long black clerical robe, her black hair the same tight bun as the night before, her dark eye makeup accentuated by the same theatrical streaks that ran like daggers from the corners of her eyes to the hollows of her ears, the same hideously long nails once again fixed to the ends of her fingers.
"Sit down," Luciana indicated a lone chair in the center of the room.
"Why?"
"So that I may do your hair and makeup."
"My hair and makeup?" Demi was incredulous.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"You must be beautiful."
"To die?"
Luciana smiled cruelly. "It is a requirement of the tradition."
148
• 7:48 A.M.
The Sig Sauer in his lap, Marten drove the last quarter mile cautiously, the gravel road twisting in a large S through a thick stand of conifers. Through them they could just see the church and the small wooded parking lot that served its rear entrance. Hap glanced behind them. There was nothing. They'd had to wait an extraordinarily long time for the police vehicles to leave the area below. When finally they had and Hap gave Marten the okay and then they'd started up again, he'd still kept a close watch behind. The police might have gone but this road was clearly their assignment which meant they could, and probably would, return at any time.
The first rays of the morning sun touched the mountain peaks behind them as Marten pulled into the parking lot and stopped beside three church vans.
"Those should be church staff getting ready for the service," Hap said of the vans. "They'll be inside and upstairs in the main part of the church." He glanced around quickly, then gave the okay, and the four got out of the cart, looking for all the world as if they belonged there, taking the rakes and brooms and trash cans and setting them near the rear entry door as if preparing for work.
The elevation here was higher than at the church's main entrance in the front and gave them a view of the large central parking area and the long curving road leading up to it from the rolling sprawl of the resort and vineyards below.
"Keep an eye on the door," Hap said to Marten, then took the binoculars and walked up a small hill to squat next to a large tree. Through the glasses he could see the force of uniformed police and police vehicles guarding the surrounding roads. A pan to the main parking lot and he could see the Spanish Secret Service SUVs taking positions in front of and behind the sleek black buses and the line of New World delegates boarding them. He wrinkled his forehead in puzzlement and looked back to the others.
"The people getting on the buses are dressed in evening clothes. All of them, men and women."
"What?" The president moved in, Hap handed him the glasses, and he looked through them. "Formal evening clothes for a nondenominational sunrise service? Was this brought up to you in the briefing?"
"No," Hap said.
The president shook his head, "I don't get it."
"Neither do I."
• 7:50 A.M.
They left José outside to serve as a lookout, clearing leaves from a flower bed and guardedly entered the church through the rear door.
Hap led them down a narrow limestone hallway. To their right was a meeting room of some kind and past it another stairway leading up that the president would take to reach the church proper. Twenty feet more and Hap turned them left and down a stone stairway that led to a basement storage area where he felt it was safe for them to wait until the service began.
Partway down, the staircase made a large semicircular turn as if it were circumventing a turret or something large and rounded on the far side of the wall. It was curious architecture for a church building as old as this one, reconstructed or not. Even the president mentioned it.
"There shouldn't be round walls inside an essentially rectangular building, not one like this," he said, almost eerily.
"Whatever it is, it's not noted on the blueprints the resort management gave us. The Spanish Secret Service made no reference to it either," Hap said.
The president studied it again and then let it pass as they reached the bottom of the staircase and started along a
hallway with doors open to rooms on both left and right and one closed with a "W/C" on the door, water closet or restroom.
"Meeting and classrooms, restroom," Hap said, then abruptly stopped at a closed door and opened it. "In here," he said, and flicked on a wall switch. The room filled with light, and they entered the small storage room he had promised. Cleaning materials and paper supplies filled shelves on either side. Everyday tools—hammers, wrenches, pliers, tin snips, screwdrivers, hand drills, plug-in work lights and several well-used flashlights—were mounted neatly on a rack above a workbench near the rear. A far corner was stacked with a dozen cardboard boxes labeled Biblias Santas. Holy Bibles.
Hap closed the door and looked at his watch. "It's seven fifty-six," he said, looking to the president. "I have no way to know if your friend Rabbi Aznar is still scheduled to be part of the service, but whoever is giving the convocation, it should begin about ten after eight. The Spanish Secret Service will sweep it before people come in. I don't want us going up there blindly and having to wait in the hallway before everyone is seated and the doors are closed. We might convince the Spaniards but most likely not, especially if their orders came from Madrid. They'd think what they all think, they're doing the right thing by hustling you out of here. So to wait up there is too dangerous. The Spaniards will stand down to a degree once the convocation begins. That's when we go up."
"How are we going to know when that is? We can't post someone up there, not even José."
"At the end of the hallway is the church's video room. In it are monitors for twenty automated security cameras mounted throughout the upper church and in the parking lot outside that are fed to central security at the resort. Trouble is, the room is locked. But if I can get us in, we'll be able to see everything that's going on in the church proper and the area outside it. What worries me is that it could take time to get that door open, if I can get it open at all. Somebody comes along in the meantime, sees us and alerts security, this whole thing can turn real nasty in a hurry."
"Hap," the president pressed him, "somebody comes along, I'm the same as you two fellas and José outside," he half-smiled and pointed to the resort logo on his work shirt, "just some half-bald guy who works here."
• 7:58 A.M.
The door to the control room was fifty feet down the hallway from the storage room, made of steel and locked. On the wall next to it was an electronic keypad and a slot for a coded security card.
Marten stood lookout, his back against the wall, the Sig Sauer held at his side. Hap put his hand on the doorknob and turned it. Nothing happened.
"Most of these devices have a master override, a special code technicians use to get inside them. You just have to find it."
He punched a code into the keypad and tried the door again. Nothing. He tried a different code. Still nothing. He tried another series of numbers, and then another series still. And then another. Still nothing. Finally he shook his head and turned to the president. "It's not going to work, and we can't break the door down. We'll have to go back to the storeroom and judge the start of services as best we can."
"Cousin," Marten looked to the president. "When we got up here to the church I looked back the way we had come. You can see way out across the valley, past the maintenance buildings to the mountains where we were last night.
"I drew an imaginary line from the big door where the monorail ended in the tunnel to here. It went across the vineyards, through the maintenance buildings, and to the church here in a line about as straight as you can get. If Foxx had that tunnel dug at the same time this resort was built, he would have had to put the dirt somewhere. That tunnel is ten miles long inside the mountain itself; it's probably another eight or more miles over here if he brought it that far. Any way you look at it, it's a lot of dirt and rock. You said this soil was all fill, maybe that's where it came from."
"I don't understand."
"If I'm right, all of this, the labs, the monorail tunnel, this church, even the resort, is Foxx's work. His idea, his design, his construction, everything."
"What if it is?"
"He might have left keypads and entry codes for others, but why would he complicate things for himself and have a dozen electronic security keys when one would do?" He took Merriman Foxx's security card from his jacket, went to the door, and slid it through the slot next to the door, as he had done to get them into Foxx's experimentation labs under the monastery.
There was a distinct click. Marten turned the knob, and the door opened.
"It seems Dr. Foxx's interests were even more encompassing than we thought."
149
• 8:00 A.M.
The control room was carpeted, with bunkerlike concrete walls and painted a deep metallic gray. A lone hi-tech office chair sat before a control console above which a bank of twenty closed-circuit television monitors were mounted. To one side was what looked like a narrow panel built into the wall. It was made of steel and painted the same color as the room. What it was was a door; one with flush-set hinges, two inset locks, one above the other, and nothing else. What it was for or where it led, Hap didn't know. The only information he had came from the blueprints the resort management had given to the Secret Service. The room they were in had been designated as "video control room," the inset-panel door had been labeled "emergency access to electrical panels." Hap had been in the video room during his earlier security walk-through but had not asked that the door be unlocked and opened. Although as a potential hiding place for bombs or persons bent on doing harm to the president it would have been checked during the final Secret Service sweep of the grounds in the hours just prior to the president's arrival.
"What would Foxx's interest in all this have been? The resort as some kind of ostentatious cover for his work?" the president asked as they turned their attention to the monitors.
"Don't know," Marten said, "I would have made no connection at all if you hadn't mentioned the composition of the hillside, and if I hadn't drawn my imaginary line, and if his card hadn't just opened this door."
"Here come the buses." Hap was staring at the monitors, where a line of the sleek black buses could be seen coming up the road from the resort. Other monitors picked up the Spanish Secret Service's black SUVs escorting them. Still others showed the inside of the church from a dozen or more angles.
One was focused on the central aisle just inside the main doors where a dozen black-robed monks waited. Another showed the altar. Another still the choir bays on either side of it. There was an angle on the pulpit. One on the door behind it and to the side, where the president planned to enter. Another showed a long empty corridor somewhere. Another yet gave a view of the chapel's seating area, where the seats were not rows of pews but rather more like a theater with stadium seating.
Another monitor revealed an area to the side of the altar where a door suddenly opened and another black-robed monk entered followed by two people in clerical robes.
"Reverend Beck," the president said in surprise as they saw the first person. Then the second person came into view, a woman.
"The witch Luciana," Marten said.
"Congressional chaplain Rufus Beck?" Hap was as surprised as the president.
"Señor?" There was a sudden pounding on the door. "Señor?"
"José," Marten said.
Machine pistol in hand, Hap stepped to the door and carefully opened it.
"I couldn't find you. Helicopters are coming," Jose was talking excitedly to the president in Spanish. "Out there," he pointed off, "from the mountains."
The president snapped a quick translation.
"Christ!" Hap blurted. "They figured it out. We've got to go, Mr. President, and now. We're caught in here, we're dead, all of us."
• 8:06 A.M.
They could hear the thudding chop of approaching helicopters as they came out. Hap first, cautiously, machine pistol ready. Then José, the president, and Marten with the Sig Sauer. Hap started them for the cart, then suddenly pulled them bac
k behind the cover of one of the church vans. A police SUV was coming up the gravel work road toward them.
In the next moment the helicopters arrived. There were two of them and they were identical, painted dark green and white with the American flag just above the doors. They were United States Marine Squadron One, U.S. Marine helicopters that ferried the president and other ranking administration officials wherever they needed to go.
"Marine Two," Hap said in astonishment as the helos circled over the parking lot and then suddenly dropped down to land. Marine One was the designation when the president was aboard, Marine Two when it was the vice president.
"So much for your speech, Cousin," Marten said as the helos touched down and were instantly surrounded by shining black SUVs. Immediately the doors opened and the vice president's Secret Service detail got out. They waited for the helicopter engines to shut down, then the agents went directly to them. A half second later the doors were pulled back and those inside stepped out.
Vice President Hamilton Rogers. Secretary of Defense Terrence Langdon. Secretary of State David Chaplin. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Air Force General Chester Keaton. Presidential Chief of Staff Tom Curran. And Evan Byrd. Of the group that had faced the president in Madrid only his chief political advisor, Jake Lowe and national security advisor, Dr. James Marshall, were missing.
"My God," the president breathed.
"Hap," Marten warned, nodding toward the grove of trees and the approaching police SUV.
Hap glanced at it, then back at the helos and the swarm of Secret Service agents surrounding the president's "friends."