The Machiavelli Covenant (37 page)

"Yes."

"This is Special Agent Harrison, MI5 in Manchester, England. We've just interviewed a Mr. Ian Graff, Nicholas Marten's employment supervisor in Manchester. He says Marten contacted him via his housekeeper earlier this morning and asked him to call his cell phone with a listing of types of azaleas."

"What do you mean 'via his housekeeper'?"

"He called his home and had the housekeeper call Mr. Graff at work. Though Graff seems to think Marten would have known he was at work all the while and called there directly."

"How in hell did Marten contact him? We would have picked up his cell phone location in seconds. What was it, a pay phone?"

"No, sir, he's getting sloppy. He used the mobile phone of a Barcelona limousine service, Limousines Barcelona. The car is currently out for day hire to two gentlemen. They were picked up at the Hotel Regente Majestic just before seven this morning."

"Do we know where the car is right now?"

"No, sir. But we have its description, license number, and mobile phone number."

"You didn't tell the limo company why you called?"

"No, sir. We were just gathering information. Done via a phone company billing and records check."

"Thank you, MI5. Good work. We appreciate it very much."

"Our pleasure, sir. Anything else, let us know."

Daniels took down the limousine's numbers, then clicked off. This was the break he'd been hoping for. The question was what to do about it. Give it to anyone else—his own people, the CIA, Spanish intel, or the Barcelona police—and Jake Lowe and Dr. Marshall would know about it in seconds. Give it to no one, and before long somebody at MI5 would be wondering why no action had been taken on their information and start making noise about it. What he had to do was think. Hard to do surrounded by a roomful of police and special agents working computers and dissecting information. He decided the best thing was to join Bill Strait in the cafeteria for a cup of good Spanish coffee.

•
10:55 A.M.

Miguel Balius's concentration was on the road in front of him. The small village they were passing through led to familiar hilly countryside beyond. Soon afterward they would begin the long winding climb into the mountains toward Montserrat.

"Miguel," Cousin Harold's voice came over the intercom. "Do you have a map of Barcelona and the surrounding area?"

"Yes, sir. It's in the seat pocket in front of you."

He glanced in the mirror to make sure Cousin Harold found it, then looked back to the road. Excluding accidents or more roadblocks, it should take them no more than forty minutes to reach the monastery, unless they changed their mind and wanted to go somewhere else, and that had been the reason for the map.

"Here, here, here, and here," Marten had the map spread out on the seat between them and was using a pen to draw vertical and then crossing horizontal lines on it, making a grid that went outward from Barcelona itself and into the countryside. It was the kind of framework he was certain the Secret Service and Spanish forces would be using to find them and close them off. By now the immense expansion and regrouping of the units that had concerned them earlier would be fully under way. The number of troops looking for them would be at least double the original force, if not more, and they all would
be working the grid, scouring each area foot by foot, then securing it and moving on. This time there could be no backtracking as they had done in the city the night before and was the reason Marten had taken the chance and used the limo's mobile phone to call Ian Graff in Manchester.

Marten looked to the president. "By now the NSA will have traced the call Ian Graff made back to my cell phone and some agency, the police or British intelligence, will have tracked him down in Manchester, listened to his story, then traced the call I made to his home to the mobile phone here in the car. My hope then was that we would already have been at the monastery and Miguel would have been long on his way. When the authorities caught up with him all he'd have had to say was that we asked him to drop us off at some village or other along the way and he had. He could name any of the half-dozen we passed through. No one would ever know he wasn't telling the truth. After all he said 'discreet' was the company policy."

"Well, so far, nothing's happened. So maybe your Mr. Graff was harder to find than you think," the president said. "Maybe luck is finally on our side."

"We're not at the monastery yet, either. If they call Miguel, they'll probably use his cell. We wouldn't know who placed the call—it could be his wife—until we were surrounded and it was too late."

"So far he hasn't picked up his phone," the president said.

"Maybe they don't want to tell him. Just broadcast the license number and description of the car. It might take a little longer but they'd still get us."

"What are you suggesting?"

"We either have him drop us off and soon, then try to get to Montserrat on our own or—"

"Or what?"

"Tell Miguel some of what's happening and ask for his help. Both are dangerous. The only thing we have going for us is Miguel himself and the company policy. It's the old joke; our chances of getting out of this are between slim and none and slim just left town."

President Harris glanced out at the rugged countryside, then pressed the intercom. "Miguel," he said evenly.

"Yes, sir."

"How much longer before we get to the monastery?"

"Without roadblocks or other problems, a half hour or so."

"How far by miles?"

"The route we're going twenty or so, sir. Mostly uphill."

"Thank you."

The president clicked off the intercom and took a breath, then looked to Marten. He was as drawn and grave and intense as Marten had ever seen him. "Miguel seems decent and honest. He knows the land, the roads, and the people. He knows intricacies of the language I do not. Under the circumstances he seems far more an asset than a liability."

•
BARCELONA, 11:05 A.M.

Armed with the MI5 information about Marten's limousine number and a fake business card he kept for a variety of "necessary circumstances," Hap Daniels stepped from a taxi, paid the driver and waited until the cab pulled away. Then he turned and started toward the garagelike structure that housed Limousines Barcelona.

Minutes earlier he'd been in the cafeteria at Barcelona Police Headquarters where Bill Strait had confirmed he'd talked to Emilio Vasquez at Spanish intel in Madrid and asked him in Hap's name to very quietly put electronic surveillance on all of Evan Byrd's telephone communications.

"It has to do with the effort at hand," Vasquez had said without emotion, a statement more than a question.

"Yes."

"Considering the situation, if Tigre Uno asks, then it will be done."

"N-O," Strait said.

"N-O, of course." N-O. Not Officially. There would be no official tapping of Evan Byrd's phones. It was to be done covertly with anyone involved fully aware and prepared to deny it had ever been done.

Immediately afterward Hap finished his coffee and left, telling Strait he needed a walk to think things over. If they needed him they had his BlackBerry, his emergency pager, everything. He walked for three deliberate blocks before turning a corner and hailing a taxi. Asking the driver to take
him to a cross street address that was within short walking distance of Limousines Barcelona, he suddenly began to understand what POTUS, or "Crop Duster," must be feeling and had felt when he'd crawled through the air ducts at the Hotel Ritz; that he had no idea who he could trust. And for Hap that meant Bill Strait, even the entire Secret Service detail. Maybe they were wholly innocent but there was no way for him to be absolutely certain.

What he did know was that he didn't trust Chief of Staff Tom Curran; didn't trust Crop Duster's chief political adviser Jake Lowe; didn't trust National Security Adviser Dr. James Marshall; and he didn't like the overtly opportunistic feel of the vice president suddenly flying into Barcelona for a twenty-minute photo and sound bite op and then retreating to Madrid and Evan Byrd's home. It immediately put VPOTUS alongside the others on his "do not trust" list.

Now, thinking about it, he remembered who else was at the late-night meeting at Byrd's residence: Secretary of State David Chaplin, Secretary of Defense Terrence Langdon, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Air Force General Chester Keaton.

"Christ," he said under his breath. What if they were all in this together?

But in
what?
And what had they asked or demanded of the president that had put him so into a corner that he had no other choice but to run?

•
11:10 A.M.

Romeo J. Brown
      Private Investigator
        Long Island City, NY

Limousines Barcelona's day manager, smartly dressed, forty-year-old Beto Nahmans, turned the business card over in his hand then looked to Hap Daniels sitting in one of two stylish chrome and black leather chairs across from his desk.

"I understand you have the mobile number and license plate number of one of our cars," Nahmans said in crisp English.

Daniels nodded. "I've been retained by a security firm investigating insurance fraud. We believe one of the people we are following is a passenger in that limousine. It's my job to find him and give him the chance to voluntarily return to the U.S. for prosecution before we ask that he be taken into custody."

"And what might this person's name be?"

"Marten. Nicholas Marten. Marten with an
e
."

Nahmans swiveled in his chair, punched a series of numbers into a keyboard, and then looked at the computer screen in front of him.

"I'm sorry, sir. We have no record of a Nicholas Marten as a passenger in the vehicle you are referring to. Or any other for that matter."

"No?"

"No, sir."

Daniels's manner hardened. "That's not an answer I like."

"It's what we have," Nahmans smiled faintly. "I'm afraid it's all I can tell you."

Hap Daniels sighed and looked at the floor, then tugged at an ear and looked back. "What if I were to have Spanish intelligence ask for that information?"

"The answer would be the same. I apologize."

"Suppose they presented an official document requiring you to submit a list of each and all of your clients for
the past two years. Their names. Where they were picked up, who was with them, how long they were gone, and what address they were returned to."

"I don't think that would be legal." Uncertainty flashed through Beto Nahmans's eyes and Daniels took full advantage of it.

"Would you like to find out?"

Three minutes later Daniels walked out of Limousines Barcelona. Day manager Nahmans had given him three names. A
Cousin Jack. A Cousin Harold
. And
Demi Pi-card,
a woman who had ordered the limousine a little before seven that morning, charging it to her room at the Hotel Regente Majestic.

•
11:15 A.M.

Miguel Balius stood wide-eyed and in shadow next to a broken-down table in the corner of what had once been some kind of stone millhouse. Above him most of the roof was open to the sky, while outside, a roaring stream passed just feet from what at one time must have been a supporting wall.

"It's alright, Miguel. Take a deep breath. Relax. No bad men here." Cousin Jack leaned against the far corner of the same table talking easily. He no longer wore the glasses he had sported from the beginning when Miguel first picked them up at the Hotel Regente Majestic. He also had a full head of hair, or rather a perfectly fitting hairpiece Miguel
had not seen before. That was until "Cousin Jack" had stepped from the rear seat of the limousine moments earlier suddenly transformed into the man the entire world recognized as the president of the United States.

"Discreet, Miguel, discreet," Cousin Harold, Nicholas Marten, urged gently from behind.

"Discreet, yes, sir," Miguel breathed, his entire being glued to the man in front of him. At the cousins' request he had driven off the main road and taken a dirt road through the woods to the edge of a stream and the remains of this stone building where he'd parked the Mercedes. The cousins, it seemed, had wanted to wade in a "Spanish stream" as they'd earlier waded in the Mediterranean. At the time the request seemed no more odd than any of their other behavior. Then Cousin Jack had emerged from the car, his hairpiece on and without his glasses, and said:

"Miguel, my name is John Henry Harris, and I
am
the president of the United States. This is Nicholas Marten. We need your help."

Miguel Balius said simply, humbly, and instantaneously, "What can I do for you, sir?"

•
BARCELONA, HOTEL REGENTE MAJESTIC. 11:20 A.M.

Romeo J. Brown
      Private Investigator
        Long Island City, NY

The concierge studied Hap Daniels's business card. "Insurance fraud?"

"In the U.S., yes, sir."