The Machiavelli Covenant (29 page)

In one move he slid the electronic key into the latch. A half second later the red light on the lock turned green and he shoved the door open.

•
THE HOTEL FOYER

"Excusez-moi. Mes amis sont partis. Pouvez-vous me dire quelle manière c'est au port? Là où mon hôtel est."
Excuse me. My friends have left. Can you tell me which way it is to the harbor? Where my hotel is.

Demi had stepped in front of Iuliana Ortega, blocking her view of the hotel entrance. As she did, Marten and the president slipped past and vanished into crowded sidewalk outside.

"Trouvez un taxi, il est une longue promenade."
Find a taxi, it's a long walk, Ortega said brusquely, then immediately stepped around her, trying to keep an eye on the door.

"Merci," Demi said, then turned and walked out.

•
3:58 A.M

"God dammit!" Hap Daniels yelled out loud.

Special Agent Bill Strait was right behind him. Jake Lowe and Dr. James Marshall rushed in from the hallway.

Room 408 was empty.

"Was he here?" Lowe pushed into the room with Marshall on his heels.

Daniels ignored him, instead spoke into his headset. "Lock down the building now! Nobody in or out. I want every last damn person checked. Along with every closet, toilet, hallway, every last inch, and that includes the goddamn air-conditioning ducts this time."

Suddenly Jake Lowe was in his face. "I asked you if he was here. Was the president here in this room?"

Daniels glared at him for a heartbeat, then calmed, "Don't know, sir," he said professionally, then abruptly turned back to his headset. "Alert Spanish intel. Have their people already on post seal down a two-mile perimeter around the hotel. Ask them to authorize the detention of any Caucasian male inside it between forty and seventy who is either bald or partially bald. Also to authorize the apprehension and detention of Nicholas Marten. And keep the media as far away from this as possible."

Daniels looked to Marshall. "I think you'd better inform the chief of staff and the White House press secretary. They're both going to have a helluva lot of work and in a big hurry if this gets out."

"Was he here?" Jake Lowe asked again. This time quietly but very deliberately, his eyes stark with anger.

Hap Daniels looked at him, then tugged on an ear and glanced around the room. The bed was disheveled, as if someone had been sleeping in it. A chair was pulled back from a small writing desk.

Daniels turned and went down the hall and into the bathroom. A washcloth and several wet towels were on the sink. The bathtub was still wet, the shower head slowly dripping. For a moment Daniels did nothing, just stood there thinking. A second later he brushed past Marshall and Bill Strait, went back into the bedroom, and stared at the bed. He studied it for a moment and then went over and bent down and sniffed the sheets and then the rumpled pillow.

"What the hell are you doing?" Jake Lowe snapped. "Was he here or wasn't he? Or don't you know?"

Abruptly Daniels straightened up. "Aftershave."

"What?"

"Aftershave. On the pillow. The president has been using the same cheap stuff ever since I've known him."

"You mean he
was
here."

"Yes, sir, he was." Daniels looked at Bill Strait, "Get a tech team up here now, see what we can find out."

"Yes, sir." Strait turned and walked off down the hallway speaking into his own headset.

"Hap," Marshall leaned his six-foot, four-inch frame against the writing desk and crossed his arms in front of him. His manner was icy. "What do we do now?"

"Hope like hell we find him in the next twenty minutes. We don't, we can begin the whole process all over again."

•
4:03 A.M.

"La estación del tren Barcelona-Sants."
Barcelona-Sants Train Station, the president said as he, Demi, and Marten climbed into the back seat of crisp yellow-and-black taxi number 6622.

"Sí." The driver put the taxi in gear and sped off just as the sound of sirens filled the air. The driver crossed a square, turned left and then slowed quickly to avoid hitting two Barcelona police cars crossing directly in front of him.

"The alarm is out," Marten said quietly. "They'll be watching the station."

"I know," the president said.

"Then—?"

"We'll see," the president sat back and pulled Demi's big floppy hat a little farther down over his forehead.

Demi looked at him, then turned to Marten. "Wherever you're going, I can't join you. It's what I had to talk to you about, why I came."

Suddenly two more police cars screamed past going in the direction of Marten's hotel. Just then they saw the line of stopped traffic.

"Mossos d'Esquadra. ¿Qué demonios pasa aqui?"
Catalan state police. What the hell is going on? The cab driver looked at them in the mirror.

"¿Algo, pero, quién sabe qué?"
Something, who knows? The president shrugged, then quickly looked to Marten.

"Road block," he said sotto voce. "They'll be doing a
vehicle search. There'll be more and then more after that. They build these things in concentric circles. Roadblocks funneled into checkpoints and then more outside them."

"Then we'll walk," Marten said

"Yes." Immediately the president looked to the driver.
"Pare, por favor."
Please pull over.

"
¿Aquí?" Here?

"Sí."

The driver shrugged and abruptly pulled to the curb. The three got out and the president paid the driver, giving him a large tip.
"Usted nunca nos vio,"
he said, the big hat hiding his features. You never saw us.

"Nunca,"
the driver winked. Never.

Marten slammed the door and the cab drove off.

Uneasy pedestrians moved around them, increasingly concerned about what was going on.

"Terroristas."
Terrorists. Some said out loud,
"Terroristas,"
others whispered.
"¿Vascos, ETA?"
someone asked. "No," several voices spat fearfully at once, "al Qaeda."

Drivers backed up for the roadblock were eerily quiet. Tension and dread anticipation filled the air. At another point in history they would have been impatiently yelling and honking their horns. Not now.

"Keep moving," the president said quickly, "stay in the crowd."

Marten nodded and took Demi by the arm, positioning her between himself and the president as they went. There was no doubt now the Secret Service knew the president had been in Marten's hotel room and that every stop had been pulled out to find them. All they could do was try and blend in to what was a long line of frightened people, people, they prayed, who would not recognize the man in the floppy hat shuffling along
among them and then raise the alarm out of sheer surprise if nothing else.

Marten let three young men shove past them, then looked at Demi, "Before, in the taxi, you said you couldn't go with us. Why?"

Demi hesitated, then glanced at the president and looked back to Marten. "Reverend Beck is meeting Dr. Foxx
tomorrow
. In the early afternoon at the Benedictine Monastery at Montserrat in the mountains northeast of here. He asked me to go with him and I agreed. I have to go back to the hotel. We're leaving from there."

Marten and the president exchanged glances, then Marten turned back to Demi.

"He asked you to go, just like that?"

"Yes. For the same reason I came to Barcelona, to continue the photo shoot for the book."

"Did he say why he canceled your Balkan trip or why he left Malta the way he did?"

"All he said was that something came up unexpectedly and he had to meet someone here in the city. He didn't say anything more. Just apologized for leaving so abruptly."

Suddenly there was a convergence of sirens ahead. People surged past them as if something was happening. More followed in their wake. They moved with them, trying to stay hidden in the crowd. Demi glanced at the president, then looked back to Marten.

"I did what you recommended and told Beck you followed me to Barcelona, and that we met and talked. I expected him to show some anger or surprise. He didn't. Instead, he said something in passing to the effect that he wished you and Dr. Foxx had left things on a more congenial note in Malta. He didn't say why or even ask
why you had followed me here or what we had talked about. It seemed to be of little interest to him, as if he had other things on his mind, but it gave me the sense that if you showed up in Montserrat while we were there he might find a way for you and Foxx to meet and talk things through. You could even say it was my idea, that way it wouldn't spoil my situation with him, especially when I ask his help in finding my sister."

Marten studied her. Even now, after what they'd just been through, it was hard to know if he could trust her; if she was lying, if the whole melodrama of Foxx and Beck so abruptly leaving Malta and then having her come to Barcelona afterward was all part of whatever they were involved with. And this seemingly offhand "peace offering" to Marten, this wish by Beck that he and Merriman Foxx had left things on a "more congenial note" seemed a very convenient way to get him to come to Montserrat on his own—to an isolated monastery where they could get him alone, then demand to know whom he worked for and was reporting to and afterward get rid of him altogether. If that were the case and Demi's late night call to rendezvous with him was their idea and not hers, he needed to learn as much as he could about what was going on before she went back to her hotel.

"Is the woman in black going with you to Montserrat?"

"Who?" Demi seemed wholly surprised.

"Earlier tonight you and Beck left the hotel and went to the cathedral. A woman in black was with you, an older woman."

"How did you know?"

"How I know isn't important. I'm interested in who she is and what she has to do with Beck."

"Her name is Luciana," Demi answered matter-of-factly and without hesitation. "She's an Italian friend of the reverend. She was with him at the hotel when I arrived."

"Is she the one he had to leave Malta to come here to meet?"

"I don't know, but it was she who arranged the trip to the monastery through a priest at the cathedral." Demi glanced at the people around her, then looked back to Marten and lowered her voice. "She belongs to the coven. She has the tattoo on her thumb. And yes, she's going with us."

Marten looked at the president. He could see he was puzzled. He knew there was information being passed but he had no idea what it was. Marten was about to say something, to try and explain but was cut off by the scream of a siren as another police car shot past them, its loudspeaker blaring, ordering drivers to pull to the side. Following in its wake were two large dark blue trucks marked Mossos d'Esquadra. A hundred yards ahead the vehicles stopped dead, the trucks' rear doors flew open, and at least two dozen heavily armed police jumped out.

"Dammit," the president blurted under his breath.

All around them people stared wide-eyed. "Terroristas." "Al Qaeda." The words came more quickly this time, more numerous and more fearful.

The president looked to Marten. "They're widening their net and turning up the heat. From here on out they'll have every street, every alley, shut down tight."

"Then we turn and go back," Marten said calmly.

"To where?"

"We're considerate fellows. The young lady was trying to get to her hotel and we thoughtfully escorted her."

Demi started. "You're going to my hotel?"

"At least you have a room, and I don't think they're going to let us in anywhere else. We'll have to fake our way past the people at the front desk."

"How are we going to get there?" Demi nodded toward the mass of snarled traffic. "If we take a cab we'll be stopped at the next roadblock. It's one thing if I'm alone. With you two we'll all be caught, and that will be that."

"She's right," the president said.

Marten hesitated, then looked back over his shoulder the way they had come. "We walk."

"What?" Demi blurted.

Marten looked back. "The same as here. We walk."

•
RIVOLI JARDÍN HOTEL, SAME TIME, 4:20 A.M.

Intense, heavily controlled chaos. Very nearly an exact repeat of what had taken place less than twenty-four hours earlier at the Hotel Ritz in Madrid.

Uniformed Barcelona police under the supervision of GEO agents and CIA assets Ortega, Leon, and Tarrega checked the identification of every person in the hotel. Guests were awoken from sleep, their rooms searched, identifications checked. Hotel employees and patrons and musicians from the Jamboree Club were treated with the same polite ferocity. The police were following up on a tip that "known terrorists had checked into the hotel under false names"—two, it was rumored, had already been found and arrested. Even the affable Basque
singer Fermín Murguruza was questioned and then released, all the while signing autographs for surrounding fans also being questioned. "Under the circumstances," Murguruza said proudly, "who would not try to help the authorities?"