The Machiavelli Covenant (32 page)

"Not just a trace. The NSA will have intercepted it and given the Secret Service the geographic coordinates in seconds. I know my men—they'll be scrambling like hell to get here as fast as they can. I appreciate why you took the call, and I let you. I shouldn't have. Just hope we got out of there in time."

"Mr. President," Marten leaned in, "that call was not from Demi."

"I gathered."

"It wasn't trivial. It came from a
Washington Post
investigative reporter. He knows about Caroline Parsons and her suspicion that she and her husband and son were murdered. He knows about Merriman Foxx and Dr. Stephenson. He's even found the clinic outside Washington where Caroline was treated by Foxx. The Silver Spring Rehabilitation Center in Silver Spring, Maryland.

"He's in Madrid, Mr. President. He's questioned the staff at your hotel there. He doesn't believe the official White House story that you were taken away in the middle of the night. He thinks you are the reason for the Spanish intelligence presence in Barcelona. That you may have been kidnapped and that Merriman Foxx had something to do with it."

"Who is this reporter?"

"His name is Peter Fadden."

"I know him. Not well, but I know him. He's a good man."

"I told him I'd call him back."

"You can't."

"If I don't he'll call me."

"We can't chance that, Mr. Marten. Turn the phone off and leave it off. We'll have to let Mr. Fadden assume what he wants. We'll also have to trust that there has been no change in Ms. Picard's plans."

Now they were at the end of the beach road, and Balius swung the Mercedes left onto a narrow tarmac highway that led away from the shoreline and toward the distant hills. As the limousine straightened out, President Harris glanced at the small screen mounted in the rear of the front seat. The channel was tuned to CNN. A story about deadly rains in India played on the screen. The president watched a second longer, then touched the intercom button. "Miguel."

"Yes, sir."

"Friends were telling us about a place in the mountains near here, a monastery I believe," the president said easily, conversationally. "They said it was a place every tourist should visit."

Balius looked in the mirror and smiled proudly. "You mean Montserrat."

The president looked at Marten. "Was that the name, Cousin?"

"Yes, Montserrat."

"We would like to go there, Miguel."

"Yes, sir."

"Can we get there by noon? That would give us time to look around before we are due back in the city."

"I think we can, sir. Unless we run into more roadblocks."

"Why can't the police catch these people? There are hundreds of them, how hard can it be?" the president added an edge of crankiness and irritation to what before had been an easy, congenial manner. "People have other things to do besides wait in line at some checkpoint only to be passed through and ten minutes later stopped at another one."

"I agree, sir."

"We don't want to be late getting back to the city. You got around them before, Miguel. We're confident you can do it again."

"I appreciate that, sir. I'll do my best."

"We know you will, Miguel. We know you will."

•
BARCELONA, 7:34 A.M.

"Sobrevolar. Zona de coordenadas abandonada. Repito, sobrevolar. Zona de coordenadas abandonada."
Fly over. Coordinate area deserted. Repeat. Fly over. Coordinate area deserted.

Hap Daniels perked up at the sharp declaration of the lead Grupo Especial de Operaciones jet helicopter pilot. A heartbeat later came the voice of the pilot of a second GEO helicopter pilot.

"Confirmado. Zona de coordenadas abandonada."
Confirm. Coordinate area deserted.

Hap Daniels was staring at a computer screen in front of him looking at an NSA satellite photograph of the Barcelona coast. He could see the city, the airport, the run of the Llobregat River from the mountains to the sea, the port of Barcelona, and to the north the Besós River and the coast beyond it reaching toward the Costa Brava. Daniels touched the keyboard in front of him and the picture enhanced once, then twice, then three times until the image zeroed in on 41° 24'04'' N and 2° 6'22'' E, the geographical coordinates the NSA had picked up from Nicholas Marten's cell phone signal. It was the coastline in an area north of the city and what looked like a stretch of deserted beach.

"Colonel, this is Tigre Uno," Daniels spoke calmly into his headset, talking to the commander in charge of the GEO air units and using the code name—Tigre Uno or Tiger One—given him by Spanish intelligence. "Please ask your lead pilot to pull up to fifteen hundred
feet and survey the entire area. Please ask your second pilot to set down for an on-ground inspection."

"Roger, Tigre Uno."

"Thank you, Colonel."

Daniels took a breath and sat back. He was exhausted, exasperated, and still mad as hell, mostly at himself for letting all this happen. The reason didn't matter. The president should never have been able to slip away undetected. It was unforgivable.

Surrounded by computer screens, he rode in the command chair of the Secret Service's huge black SUV electronic communications unit that had been flown in from Madrid. In front of him, riding shotgun next to the driver, was his chief deputy, Bill Strait. Behind him, four Secret Service intelligence specialists manned computer screens monitoring surveillance traffic from a half dozen different security agencies and at the same time hoping, as they all were, that Marten would again use his cell phone.

Daniels glanced at the screen in front of him again and then looked around the vehicle's narrow confines to where Jake Lowe and Dr. James Marshall were buckled into fold-down jumpseats, staring in silence at nothing. They looked like deeply troubled warriors: fierce, strong, angry and uncertain.

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.

•
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.

•
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.