The Machiavelli Covenant (21 page)

"Those familiar with the story believe the addendum, if it existed, never reached its intended audience—Florentines oppressed by the ruling Medici family that Machiavelli hoped he could unite in blood to overthrow—and instead was smuggled to Rome where it fell into the hands of an already powerful and influential group who used it, and have continued to use it over the centuries, as an ideology to further their own ends. For those who follow such things, the addendum has come to be known as the
Machiavelli Covenant."

"And you think that's what the Aldebaran coven is about, a present-day edition of the Covenant?"

"That, Mr. Marten, is what I have been trying to find out for a long time."

Abruptly something caught Marten's eye. He picked up his glass and sat back, casually scanning the room.

"What is it?"

"Get up as if you're mad at me, pick up your purse and walk out of the restaurant," Marten said quietly. "Go up the street, turn the corner, and wait."

"Why? What's going on?"

"Just do it. Now."

"Alright," deliberately Demi pushed back from the table, glared at Marten, then picked up her purse and left. He stared after her for a moment then signaled the waiter for the check. Purposely he took another sip of
cava,
then put the glass down and sat back. A moment later the waiter brought the check. Marten paid cash, then got up and walked out, passing without a glance the fortyish-looking tourist who had taken a table near them and was looking at a menu. A tourist with salt-and-pepper hair who now wore a dark-colored sport coat over his yellow polo shirt. If there was any doubt he had been handed off at the Barcelona airport, it was gone now.

•
3:40 P.M.

Marten stepped through the door and pulled on dark glasses against the glare of the sun, then walked quickly up the street. At the corner he glanced back toward the entrance to Els Quatre Gats. If Salt and Pepper was coming after him he hadn't done it yet. Another step and he was around the corner looking for Demi. The sidewalk was crowded and he didn't see her. For a moment he was afraid she might have gone off on her own, that she still didn't trust him and that he would have to find her and fight the same battle all over again. Then he saw her waiting beneath the overhang of a storefront.

"What is it?" she said as he reached her.

"A man with salt-and-pepper hair and a yellow polo
shirt. I've been followed, and all the way from Valletta. It's got to be Foxx's doing but I can't be sure."

"You were
followed."

"Yes."

"That means we've been seen together."

Marten could see the fire in her start to roar back. "You can dodge the whole thing by telling Beck straight off that I tracked you to Barcelona and insisted you talk to me. In the restaurant I asked you a bunch of crazy questions you knew nothing about and when I kept pushing you got mad and left."

"You're right, I did get mad and I am leaving," she said angrily and abruptly turned and started off into the crowd.

Marten caught up with her. She ignored him.

"Whether you like it or not we're in this together. You want to know what happened to your sister and I want to know what happened to Caroline Parsons." He glanced around and then lowered his voice, "Dr. Foxx seems to be key in both situations."

Still she ignored him, just kept walking.

Marten stayed in stride. "If Foxx is here and Reverend Beck is meeting him—where and when, that's all I want to know. Other than that I'll stay out of your hair, I promise."

She didn't reply. They reached the end of the block and stopped in a crowd waiting to cross a main boulevard. Marten stepped close to her. "You're alone in all this, aren't you?"

Demi said nothing. The light changed and she stepped off with the others. Again Marten caught up with her. "These are not terribly nice people, Foxx especially. At some point you're going to wish you had a friend."

They reached the far curb and she suddenly turned and confronted him.

"You won't go away, will you?"

"No."

She stared at him a second longer, "All you want to know is when and where," she said finally and in resignation.

"Yes."

"I'll do what I can."

"Thank you," he said, then quickly looked up and stepped off the curb to hail a passing taxi. The driver crossed two lanes of traffic and pulled up beside them.

Marten opened the rear door. "Go back to the hotel. Hopefully by now Beck will have checked in. See how comfortable he is with you, if you think the situation has calmed enough for him to actually talk about Foxx and his meeting with him." Demi slid in and he handed her a slip of paper, "The number of my cell phone. I don't hear from you by five o'clock, I'll call you." Abruptly he closed the door, the taxi moved off and Marten started quickly back the way they had come.

Marten and Salt and Pepper saw each other the moment Marten rounded the corner heading back to Els Quatre Gats.

At that instant Salt and Pepper realized what was happening and bolted. He ran across the narrow street, then darted down another, turning at the end of the block onto the heavily congested Via Laietana. Marten came
after him on the dead run. As he ran, Marten's foremost thought was how the man had tracked him to the restaurant when he was certain he had lost him earlier. All he could think of was their attentive waiter, maybe not so obviously pushing drinks to build the bill as he'd first thought but making sure he and Demi stayed where they were until Salt and Pepper was informed and could get there. If that was the case what was going on had far more reach than he had imagined. Some kind of cult embracing medieval witchcraft that controlled, or least paid, a network of street informers who probably had no idea where their money was coming from. People like Salt and Pepper and the young man who had followed him from Valletta.

Running, dodging around people on a sidewalk jammed with shoppers, Marten tried to keep his eye on his man. But there were too many people and he lost sight of him. He slowed and was about to give up when he saw him suddenly dart out of a crowd a half block ahead and then cut left onto a side street. Marten jostled around a pair of arguing shopkeepers, nearly knocked over a woman carrying a baby, then turned the corner just in time to see Salt and Pepper glance back, then cut left again, running onto a broader street filled with heavy traffic.

This was all old neighborhood, part of the Gothic Quarter, Barri Gòtic, with its thirteenth- to fifteenth-century buildings, outdoor cafés, street-level shops with apartments above. Lungs on fire, heart pounding, Marten ran on. Pulling up sharply to avoid a fast-moving motorcycle, he took the same turn Salt and Pepper had and ran on, his eyes searching the crowds on either side of the street. He was in full stride when he heard the sharp
blare of a horn. A split second later a cry of horror went up from the people on the block in front of him. Then the horn stopped and the entire area went silent.

Marten rushed forward, moving through people seemingly frozen in place and looking toward something in front of them. Then he saw a large delivery truck stopped in the middle of the street, its front grillwork badly dented, the body of Salt and Pepper on the ground in front of it.

People stood around silent, staring. Marten moved in slowly and went up to Salt and Pepper. Kneeling down, he put a hand to his carotid artery trying to find a pulse. The truck driver, a male, thirty at most, stood by the open door to his cab. Half in shock, motionless.

Marten suddenly looked to the crowd around him. "Call an ambulance. Ambulance! Ambulance!" he said loudly, then twisted back, opened Salt and Pepper's sport coat and put a hand on his heart. Again he touched the carotid artery, held his hand there a few seconds, then slowly reached over, closed Salt and Pepper's sport coat, and stood up.

"Ambulance!" he said again, then moved away and off through the crowd. Around him he could see people on cell phones calling for help. Behind him the truck driver stood where he had been, frozen in place beside his truck.

Marten kept walking. All he needed was for the police to arrive and question him about the man hit by the truck. They would want to know his name. Ask if he was a doctor. And finding he wasn't, want to know why he'd gone to help as he had. Want to know what he had seen. What details he could fill in. He had no knowledge of Spanish law and how it applied to accidents but the last
thing he wanted was to be interviewed by the police or the press or have his picture taken by the paparazzi or be a video snippet on local television news.

What he did want was no connection to Salt and Pepper at all.

•
ALTARIA TRAIN #01138, MADRID TO BARCELONA, 4:35 P.M.

President of the United States John Henry Harris nodded a thanks to the counterman in the cafeteria car, then took his purchase, a sandwich and bottle of mineral water, to a small side table to eat. Other than the counterman there were six other people in the car, four men and two women, one older than the other. Of the men, two sat by a window drinking beer; another stood, paper coffee cup in hand, staring out at the passing countryside. The last sat at a table sharing a platter of small sandwiches with the two women. These three seemed harmless, a brother and sister and maybe an aunt, or husband and wife and his or her older sibling. It was the other three he wasn't so sure about.

Minutes before, they had left the city of Lleida after a stop in Zaragoza and were moving northeast with a stop at Valls before they were to arrive at the Barcelona-Sants station at a little past six in the evening. For the most part the trip had been uneventful with no one giving him as much as a second look, but at Lleida several armed men in uniform had boarded and shortly afterward four more had come on, dressed in civilian clothes but with
the certain style and body movement that suggested they were some kind of plainclothes agents. It made him wonder if one or perhaps all of the other three men, the two sipping beer and the man standing, weren't some kind of agents as well, Spanish or American. All three had come into the car after he had and were close enough to the far door to prevent him going out of it if they chose. The uniformed men or other plainclothes agents who had come on in Lleida could easily come in and block the door behind him. If he was right and they did, the game was over.

Harris quickly finished his sandwich and took another sip of water. Then, dutifully putting the paper plate the sandwich had come on in a trash receptacle, he walked past the man and women and left.

He walked the length of the next car and entered the one behind it, taking his seat in the second-class car next to the man in the leather jacket and black beret who had been his seating companion since Madrid. By now the man had turned toward the window, his beret pulled down covering most of his head, and was apparently sleeping. Harris took a deep breath and relaxed, then picked his folded copy of
El País
newspaper from the seatback in front of him and opened it.

It was now 4:44. The next stop was Valls at 5:03 and Harris wasn't sure what to do when he got there. He knew Hap Daniels would be more than determined to bring him home. He would be feverish. Not only had he become the first Secret Service agent in charge of a presidential detail ever to lose a POTUS, he would also be embarrassed beyond measure and would take enormous flak from above to the point where there was every chance he would be fired. Personally he would feel he had monstrously let down a friend.

The Secret Service's first presumption would be that he had been a victim of foul play and would have acted accordingly. By now the CIA, FBI and NSA would be wholly involved. Madrid would have been scoured by Spanish intelligence and the Madrid state police. A larger search would have been expanded to include all of Europe and North Africa, with another team working out of the Rome field office covering the Middle East and into Russia and other former Soviet bloc countries. All of it done under blackout orders, or as they would call it, "under the cover of night." Yet by now they would have enough information to be reasonably certain of what had really happened, that he had gone out on his own. In result an angered Jake Lowe and National Security Adviser Jim Marshall would have made a convincing case that he had done it because something was gravely wrong, that he had suffered a mental breakdown of some kind. It was the only story they could make work, but it was a good one because, for the people responsible for protecting him, the whole thing would rise above the horror of the president being kidnapped to what Lowe and company would play as an achingly human story of the most powerful man in the world come apart.

Consequently everyone, from the group that had been in Evan Byrd's Madrid home the night before to the secretary of Homeland Security to the director of the Secret Service and on down would do everything in their power to make sure he was found and brought home and out of harm's way as quickly as possible, with only a few very select people having any knowledge at all of what was really going on.

"Home and out of harm's way" meant he would be delivered to Jake Lowe and company, who would already have arranged for him to be placed in their care. Once
that happened he knew the rest. He would immediately be spirited to a place remote enough and safe enough to isolate him and then kill him—a massive stroke or heart attack or something equally convincing.