The Machiavelli Covenant (38 page)

The concierge pressed his fingertips together, "Ms. Picard is a guest here. She ordered the limousine this morning for people she said were her cousins. They had just flown in from New York, were jet-lagged and could not sleep, and wanted to see the sights of Barcelona."

"One man was older and nearly bald. The other tall and in his early thirties."

"Yes."

"Where is Ms. Picard now?"

"I believe she left the hotel some time ago," the concierge shifted positions behind the front desk.

"Do you know where she went?"

"I have told you all I know, señor."

Daniels stared at him; it was the same "privacy of clients" treatment he'd received at the limousine company. Only here he could hardly threaten a visit by Spanish intelligence. The hotel, he guessed, probably had three hundred rooms. The argument over a threat to have Spanish intelligence, or tax or local civil authorities demand an accounting of who had stayed there and why over even a short period would, at the very best, be time consuming, and time was something he had precious little of.

"Muchas gracias," he said finally, and started for the door, then turned back, "I wonder if you could tell me the time?"

The man looked at him.

"The time of day?" Daniels tapped his watch. "It stopped." Hap leaned in earnestly, resting his hand on the counter in front of him, the corner of a hundred-euro bill sticking out from under it.

"This Ms. Picard," Hap said quietly. "What does she look like?"

The concierge smiled and looked at his own watch,
then leaned in and lowered his voice. "Very attractive. French, a professional photographer. Short dark hair. Navy blazer, tan slacks. Cameras over one shoulder and small equipment bag over the other. She left with a middle-aged African-American male and an older European woman in a white van with the lettering of the monastery at Montserrat."

"I'm sorry, I didn't get the time," Hap said loudly enough to be heard by people passing by.

"Eleven twenty-three, señor," the concierge matched his own watch to Hap's and at the same time palmed the hundred-euro bill.

"Eleven twenty-three," Hap smiled. "Gracias."

"Eleven twenty-four now, señor."

"Gracias," Hap said again. "Muchas gracias."

"Photographer? Montserrat?" Hap said to himself as he came through the Regente Majestic's front door. A half-beat later his cell phone rang. He picked it from his belt and clicked on. "Daniels."

"Where the damn hell are you?" It was Jake Lowe and he left no chance for reply. "We need you at the hotel right away!"

"What is it?"

"Now, Hap! Right now!"

•
THE HOTEL GRAND PALACE, 11:45 A.M.

Jake Lowe, National Security Adviser Marshall, and Hap Daniels stood alone in the special communications room of the four-room suite Lowe and Marshall had taken as their Barcelona crisis headquarters. The door was closed and they were gathered in front of a video monitor waiting for a secure feed to come through from the White House communications center in Washington.

"Go ahead," Lowe said into a headset connected to a secure phone on the table beside him. There was a short pause; then static showed up on the screen followed immediately by the beginning of a thirty-second video clip. A clip that upon their approval would be sent to Fox News for immediate distribution to major television and cable networks worldwide. The video was complete with a time and date stamp that began at 2:23
P.M.
yesterday, Friday, April 7. It showed President Harris, alive and well at the "undisclosed location" he had been taken to following the terrorist threat in Madrid. He was seen in a rustic conference room with National Security Adviser Marshall, Secretary of Defense Terrence Langdon and Secretary of State David Chaplin. They were all in shirtsleeves, notepads and bottled water in front of them, diligently going over what was reported to be notes and text for the speech the president would give to NATO leaders Monday in Warsaw.

It wasn't old recycled video from another place and
time; it was all new, and in a setting Hap had never seen before.

"How the hell did you do that?" he said as the screen went blank at the finish and he looked at Marshall. "You're here. Langdon's in Brussels, Chaplin's in London," his eyes went to Lowe, "and Crop Duster's someplace . . . else."

"I asked for your opinion," Lowe said coldly. "Is the video credible from a Secret Service point of view? From the point of view of any global security professional who might see it?"

"Somebody breaks it down technically, I don't know. But from where I stand, yeah, it works," Hap said evenly. "There's just enough, and so far no one should have a reason to scrutinize it closer or believe it's anything but what it's supposed to be."

"So far?" Marshall said quietly. "What do you mean by 'so far'?"

"If POTUS suddenly shows up somewhere on his own, then what? How do we explain that?"

Lowe stared at him in icy silence, and Daniels could feel his rage, his pent-up anger at the whole thing. Abruptly Lowe turned away and spoke into his headset. "Release the video," he said, "release it now."

•
11:55 A.M.

Demi put out a hand to steady herself as the white Monasterio Benedictino Montserrat van made a sharp turn up the long, winding mountain road leading to the monastery. High above her and in the distance she could see the structure itself. It looked like a medieval fortress in miniature, a tiny city built into the cliffs.

Now she shifted her gaze and looked back inside the van. Raphael, the driver, was intent on the road and a large tour bus directly in front of them. Behind him, Beck and Luciana were silent, intent on something they were reading.

Demi looked at Luciana more closely. She was dressed in black and had a large black purse on the seat beside her. It was essentially the same thing she'd worn yesterday when Demi first met her. It made her wonder if it was a uniform of sorts, a classic costume for a classic witch, if there was such a thing.

Demi had told Marten and the president she had no idea who Luciana was. It was a lie. Luciana had been the center of her attention for years and was the wellspring of everything. For the last two decades she had been the
sacerdotessa,
the high priestess of the secret Aldebaran
boschetto,
the coven. As such she had mastered the intricate skills of her craft, most specifically those of ritual and psychic influence, and it meant she had authority over all of the coven's followers and that included Reverend Beck and Merriman Foxx.

A widow with piercing green eyes and striking black
hair and still remarkably handsome at sixty-six, Luciana owned Pensione Madonnella, a small hotel on the Italian island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples where she had been born. Further research—in the form of a hired private investigator—had established that she left the island two or three times a year for ten days or so at a time to visit small towns and villages in north and central Italy where she would meet with others of the coven, men and women alike, who carried the tattoo of Aldebaran on their left thumb. Immediately afterward she returned to Ischia to oversee her business.

Then, and always at this same time of year, she came to the monastery at Montserrat, where she would check into the Hotel Abat Cisneros and spend the greater part of a week. What she did there or even if it involved the
boschetto,
Demi had not been able to discover. But whatever it was, it apparently involved Reverend Beck and probably had for some time, because for the last dozen years he had taken his vacation and gone to Europe during the same period. Yet it had not been until yesterday when Demi came to Beck's suite at the Regente Majestic and found the
sacerdotessa
seated on a couch and having coffee with him that she put Beck's excursions to Europe together with Luciana's sojourns to Montserrat. In retrospect it was a moment of revelation she might well have been prepared for, but she wasn't and finding Luciana there, introduced by Beck as his "good friend," nearly took her breath away.

•
12:00 NOON

A sharp jolt as the van bounced over a hole in the road brought Demi back from her muse. To one side steep sandstone cliffs rose straight up almost within arm's
reach. On the other, across the Llobregat River and the valley below, lesser hills faded into the distance. Again she looked at the driver and then to Beck and Luciana, still silent, still intent on their reading.

Patience,
she told herself,
patience and calm. You are almost there. After all these years, after everything. Soon we will be at the monastery. After that
—
pray it all works
—
we will meet Dr. Foxx and then be taken to wherever the ritual takes place. There, finally, to witness the rites of the coven
.

Suddenly time compressed and with it came a kaleidoscope of memories. Like her supposed innocence concerning Luciana. The story she had told Marten of the search for her missing sister had been a lie. There was no sister. She was searching for her mother. And she had been missing not for two years but eighteen, vanished when Demi was eight. Nor had she gone missing from Malta but from Paris, where her parents had moved from their native Italy soon after they were married, her father changing their name from the Italian Piacenti to the French Picard.

Her mother had been fifteen when Demi was born and twenty-three when she disappeared while on her way to a neighborhood market she had visited countless times. A police investigation turned up but one single fact: her mother had never reached the market. A check of hospitals and the city morgue turned up nothing. A week passed. And then two, and then three, with no sign of her whatsoever. People wandered off all the time, the police said, and for a myriad of reasons. Sometimes they came back; more often they didn't. Not because anything had happened to them but because they didn't want to. And
that was how it was left. An open police report and her and her father, nothing else.

A second blow came barely four months later when her father was killed in an industrial accident at the automobile factory where he worked. Suddenly an orphan, and following a provision in her father's will, Demi was sent to live with a distant aunt who taught French and Italian at an exclusive boarding school outside of London. There the two shared a small apartment on campus, and because her aunt was on the faculty, she was enrolled in the school. Her aunt, it turned out, was distant in more ways than one, which made the chief benefits of her new life a good education and that she would learn English. The rest of growing up was left solely to her.

She'd been living with her aunt for several months when a trunk arrived from Paris. In it were some of her mother's personal things: clothes; a photograph taken only days before she disappeared, her brown eyes intense, yet calm and very peaceful; some books—mostly in Italian; and a number of abstract sketches her mother had drawn as a hobby. Aside from her mother's photograph and a few of her clothes, the rest was of very little interest to a girl approaching her ninth birthday; a girl still heartbroken and confused, feeling abandoned and terribly alone; a girl too, who was convinced her mother was still alive and who watched the mail every day hoping for the letter from her that never came; a girl who carried her mother's picture everywhere and who searched the face of every female stranger she saw—hoping, praying, certain, that one day she would see that familiar face, one that would suddenly smile in recognition and throw her arms around her, promising never to let her go again.

The passage of time did little to ease Demi's pain or sense of loss. And although her aunt strongly tried to dissuade her, the idea that her mother was alive grew stronger with every beat of her heart. But as the days and years passed and nothing came of it, all she could do was immerse herself in her schoolwork and watch in abject loneliness as she saw her classmates' mothers and fathers come to pick them up to take them home. For weekends, holidays, vacation trips, and summer breaks.

Then, on the morning of her seventeenth birthday, a letter arrived from an attorney in Paris. Inside was a small envelope and with it a brief note telling her that by codicil to his last will and testament it was her late father's wish that "this be held to be delivered to you on the occasion of your seventeenth birthday."

Puzzled, she opened the envelope to find a note written in her father's hand and dated shortly before his death.

My darling Demi
—

   
I am writing this and then putting it away for you to read later when you might better understand. I know you loved your mother terribly and must miss her enormously still. It would be unnatural for you not to wonder what happened to her, most probably for years to come, if not for the rest of your life. But for your sake and the sake of your children and theirs, accept it that your mother loved you as much as any mother can love her child and leave it at that. Do not, I underscore,
do not,
under any circumstances, attempt to learn her fate. Some things are far too dangerous to know, let alone try to understand. Please take this warning deeply to
heart as an everlasting plea for your own safety and welfare
.

I love you so much and always will,
Dad

The note stunned her. Immediately she called the lawyer in Paris who had sent the letter, wanting to know more. That was all there was, he told her, adding that he had no idea what the note contained, only that the firm was simply executing a provision in her father's will. Afterward she'd hung up and gone scurrying to the only place she thought she might find more, the trunk. But there had been nothing other than what she'd seen a hundred times: the clothes, books in Italian, and her mother's artistic drawings. This time—and maybe because she had found nothing else and because they were in her mother's hand and therefore very personal—she concentrated on the drawings. There were thirty-four in all and in a variety of sizes, some of which were small, the size of greeting cards. It was one of these that caught her attention; a simple sketch of a
balled cross
. In the lower right hand corner beneath it, written in small letters and in her mother's hand, was one word—
Boschetto
.