The Machiavelli Covenant (28 page)

The Jamboree Club was smoky and sweltering, packed wall to wall with mostly young and sweaty dancers. In the last hours the Cuban jazz had given way to Brazilian bossa nova and then to Argentine jazz.

"Vino blanco otra vez, por favor."
White wine again, please. "Bob," as President Harris had introduced himself to Demi, smiled at the young waitress and motioned for her to refill their drinks, then watched as she twisted away through the dancers toward the bar.

At 3:07
A.M.
Demi had alerted them to the police downstairs. By 3:08 Marten had shoved his electronic notebook, tape recorder, toiletries, and other belongings into his traveling bag and thrown it over his shoulder. At 3:09 they were out the door and down the fire stairs at the end of the corridor. At 3:11 they entered the hotel lobby from a side hallway near the Jamboree Club and stopped.

"There," Demi said, pointing out Iuliana Ortega, the woman she had seen enter the hotel with the two men at the same time she had. She was sitting in an overstuffed
lobby chair with a clear view of both the front entrance from the street and the elevators as if she were waiting for someone.

"Do you see the two men that were with her?" Bob asked.

"No."

The president looked at Marten. "They aren't police," he said quietly, then nodded toward the Jamboree Club. "It's as good a place as any."

At 3:13 they found a table and sat down. Quickly the waitress arrived and the president ordered white wine for the three of them. As the waitress left he took a napkin and made a note on it, then folded it and looked at Marten and Demi.

"By now they will have learned which room Mr. Marten is in and where they assume I am, since the clerk who let me in will have told them. The men will have gone up and be covering it, but they won't go in until the big guns arrive."

Marten leaned in, "There's a side entrance on the far side of the lobby, why don't we just go out that way?"

"There will be more outside," the president said quietly, "and watching all the entrances."

"How do you know all this?" Demi was looking at Bob carefully. Something was going on here and she didn't like it. "Who are you?"

"Bob," he said flatly.

Just then the waitress came back with their drinks. Marten paid her and she left. At the same time an exuberant voice came over the club's PA system announcing in Catalan: "Please welcome sizzling Basque singer-songwriter Fermín Murguruza!"

With that a spotlight came on and the handsome Murguruza bounded onstage singing. The audience went
crazy. In seconds people were on their feet dancing as if everything else in their lives had been forgotten. It was a moment the president used to slip Marten the napkin he had written on. Marten pulled it into his lap and unfolded it. On it the president had scrawled:

The woman is CIA, probably the men too
—
Secret Service imminent!

Marten felt his pulse quicken and looked to the president. As he did, he heard Demi's breathless exclamation.

"Oh, mon Dieu!"
Oh, my God! she said in French.

Marten glanced at her. She was staring wide-eyed at Bob.

Quickly Harris's eyes found hers. "So now you know. Don't say a word."

"I won't," she breathed. She stared a second longer in disbelief, then turned uncertainly to Marten. "What's happening here? I don't understand."

"Listen to me," the president leaned in trying to make himself heard over the din of Fermín Murguruza's music. "Any minute now the special agent in charge of my Secret Service detail will arrive. He and his men will have flown from Madrid. They have no idea what I'm doing or why, and frankly, at this point they don't care. Their job is to protect me at all costs. Above all they will not want known what's going on or that I am anywhere near here. Which is most likely the reason they haven't evacuated the building or locked it down. It would draw too much attention, and that's the last thing any of them wants.

"They work very quickly and very efficiently. If they had arrived when we were still in the room by now we would have been hustled out the back way, thrown into waiting cars, and gone. No one would ever know I or
they had even been here, let alone that something had happened.

"At the same time, those tactics give us a tiny window of opportunity because when they arrive, when my agent in charge comes through the door with his deputy and starts up to the room, the focus of every other agent will be on the plan to evacuate me. It's then, the moment he goes up, we go out. The three of us, right out the side entrance, onto the street, and into the crowd. I looked at both entrances carefully before I came in. Once outside we turn right and walk as a threesome down the block. At the end of it, maybe two hundred feet away, is a line of taxi cabs. Take the first one available and let me do the talking."

Marten leaned in, "You're basing all this on the certainty your special agent will come in through the front and not some other way."

"You're right, I'm not certain, I'm guessing. But that's because I know him well. Not only is he horrified the president vanished on his watch, he's worried as hell about my well-being and will want to get me out of here and into his custody as fast as he can. To do that he will take the shortest route to the object, and that is through the front door and up the elevators directly to the room."

"What if he doesn't? What if he goes in another way, crashes the room, and finds you gone. No one's seen you go out. It means you're still somewhere in the building. Attention or not, this place will be shut down before any of us can take another breath."

The president half smiled. "Let's just hope I know my man well enough to be right." Immediately he looked to Demi. "You were thrust into this because of Mr. Marten and what you might know about Dr. Foxx."

Demi started.

"Am I correct?" President Harris pushed her.

Marten calmed her, "I told you before, he knows, it's alright to talk in front of him."

"Yes, you are correct," Demi said.

"Then you understand that if Mr. Marten or I are caught whatever information you have come to Mr. Marten with will go for nothing because I won't be able to do anything about it and neither will he. That puts you directly on the spot."

"I don't understand," she said.

"Because of the newspaper photo they will know what Mr. Marten looks like, and quite obviously my people know what I look like, and if they were surprised by my lack of hair they won't be now that they've talked to the desk clerk. That brings us back to you because none of them know you," the president paused, looking her in the eye. Marten knew he was using the moment to judge her.

"What I'm doing, Ms. Picard, is putting your well-being and Mr. Marten's and mine fully into your hands. I'm asking for your help. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Will
you help?"

Demi glanced at Marten, then looked back to the president, "What do you want me to do?"

•
3:45 A.M.

Demi got up from the table and went out into the lobby carrying her large purse. Left behind was the big floppy hat she had been wearing and her light-colored trench coat.

•
3:46 A.M.

Demi used a napkin to fan herself as she mingled with sweaty, high-spirited dancers getting air just outside the open doors to the Jamboree Club. Her real attention was on the main entrance.

Ten feet away Marten and President Harris stood watching just inside the club's doors. Marten had mussed up his hair, opened his shirt and had Demi's trench coat thrown cavalierly over one shoulder to hide his travel bag beneath it. The president, still wearing his clear glasses, had taken her big floppy hat and pulled it foppishly down over one ear, effectively, and for the most part, covering his baldness.

•
3:50 A.M.

Demi saw the four come through the front door and head directly for the elevators, one of them with a raincoat over his arm. The president's descriptions of Hap Daniels and Bill Strait had been perfect, as had been his prediction of their actions. The two men with them she recognized from her time in Washington: presidential adviser Jake Lowe and U.S. National Security Adviser Dr. James Marshall. Abruptly she turned and walked back into the club.

"Now," she said.

•
3:51 A.M.

The threesome came out of the Jamboree Club walking arm in arm across the crowded lobby toward the side entrance. They were self-absorbed, laughing, half-dancing to the music as they moved through the crowd. They looked exactly as they wanted to look, a couple of
half-drunken gay men and their party-loving straight girl out for the evening.

Five seconds and they were halfway to the door. Another three and they were almost to it.

"Not quite yet," the president said, forcing a smile and stopping. "One more drink before we go." As quickly he turned them back. "Just outside," he said, "Secret Service agent who's been on my detail since the inauguration."

•
3:52 A.M.

The elevator slowed and stopped, the door opened and Hap Daniels, Bill Strait, Jake Lowe and James Marshall stepped out into the fourth floor hallway.

There was no need for Daniels to identify any of them to either Alfonso Leon or Sanzo Tarrega. They had known who they were and what they would be doing the moment the Chinook touched down at police headquarters. That agent Strait carried a raincoat was no surprise either. It was to throw over the president's head just before they brought him out, making certain no accidental passerby or alert media person or any paparazzi lurking undetected would have the slightest chance for recognition, let alone a photograph.

•
3:53 A.M.

The three remaining Secret Service agents who had accompanied Daniels from Madrid made contact with the Spanish GEO operatives at the hotel's rear service/delivery entrance and then went inside to the service elevator.

At the same time, the rolling stock Daniels had re
quested little more than an hour earlier from Madrid—a lead car, an armored van with two doctors and two EMT techs inside, and three security tail cars—pulled up and stopped beside the GEO car. Immediately their lights were turned off.

•
3:54 A.M.

The president, Nicholas Marten, and Demi stood in the crowd just outside the open doors to the Jamboree Club. Across the lobby they could see the slim desk clerk and CIA asset Ortega. The clerk was on the phone and busy. Ortega had moved from the chair where she had been sitting and now stood near the main entrance, watching it carefully.

"We're running out of time," the president said quietly. "We'll have to use the main entrance and hope the woman posted there is the only one and that the others are on strict assignment elsewhere. If we get past her, turn right outside and move into the crowd. If for some reason they get me, just keep going. If you try to help, somebody might get killed."

The president was about to start toward the door. "Wait," Marten said quickly and turned to Demi. "You speak French."

"Of course."

"You go first. When you get to the woman speak to her as if you were a French tourist separated from your group and looking for directions to the harbor. She might understand, she might not; it doesn't matter. We'll be right behind you. All we need is about five seconds of distraction to get past her. Once we're out, just thank her and leave. We'll meet you halfway down the block. Can you do that?"

"Yes."

"Good."

•
3:55 A.M.

Jake Lowe and Dr. Marshall stood pressed against the wall as Hap Daniels and Bill Strait moved to the door of room 408. The corridor behind them was covered by CIA assets Tarrega and Leon in the event they needed help or that a hotel guest tried to leave his or her room.

The three Secret Service agents who had taken the service elevator up from the rear entrance waited twenty feet down the hallway in a small L-shaped nook that housed the service elevator, the way the president would be taken down once they had him. The central elevator Hap and the others had taken up was locked and "temporarily out of service."

Electronic room card in hand, Hap Daniels looked at Bill Strait, who held the raincoat to be thrown over the president's head, then glanced at Jake Lowe and Dr. Marshall.

"Five seconds," he said quietly into the tiny microphone at his collar. He put up one finger, then two.

The four CIA assets on the roof of the building across the street tensed. The two watching the street shifted their binoculars to the window of room 408. The two sharpshooters with Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifles and night-vision scopes were already squared on it. If someone or some group was holding the president hostage he, she or they, would be dead in the next few seconds.

•
THE HOTEL LOBBY, SAME TIME

Marten and the president were steps behind Demi. Just beyond her they could see the female CIA asset standing just inside the hotel's main foyer. To their right they saw the desk clerk hang up the phone, then turn away and talk to someone.

•
THE FOURTH FLOOR CORRIDOR

Hap Daniels threw up fingers four, then five.