The Machiavelli Covenant (47 page)

Hap stared at him. "Who the hell are you?"

"My name is Miguel Balius. Get your damn feet under you!"

Miguel grabbed Hap's good arm and pulled him up, propping him against the wall while he scooped up his cell phone and the Sig Sauer. Then he had Hap's good arm again and was taking him fast toward the door.

Fresh air hit them and they were outside, the motorcycle right there. Miguel helped him into the sidecar, then jumped onto the seat, started the engine, and they were off and flying down the walkway as fire brigade and police units rushed toward them. A wall of uniformed men and women going door to door checking for people who might have been injured in the earthquake or whatever it had been that had so violently shaken the buildings.

Miguel reached the end of the walkway and turned the motorcycle down another. At almost the same moment a heavy, pulsating roar came from the far side of the basilica. A half second later the ops helicopter lifted up over the top of the building, hovered overhead for the briefest moment, and then flew off to the north.

•
BARCELONA, HOTEL GRAND PALACE, 4:10 P.M.

Jake Lowe and Dr. James Marshall were alone in the special communications room set up in their suite. Suit jacket off, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, Lowe paced up and down, a secure phone to his ear. Marshall, all six-foot-four of him, sat at a work desk in the room's center, two laptops in front of him, yellow scratch pad at his sleeve, a headset plugged into Lowe's secure line.

"Gentlemen," Lowe said into the phone, then abruptly
paused, as if to make certain what he said next would be absolutely clear.

"This is where we stand," he said finally. "The ops have come and gone from the monastery. Dr. Foxx was found dead in one of his 'clean' labs. His remains were evacuated after a brief battle with the Secret Service. The ops did not identify themselves, nor did they identify Dr. Foxx. They left the monastery by civilian helicopter without further incident.

"There was no sign of the president. I repeat, there was no sign of the president. Earlier communication with Dr. Foxx confirmed his presence and that of Nicholas Marten at the monastery.

"Dr. Foxx's body was found in an innermost 'clean' laboratory and strongly suggests he was confronted by a hostile situation. Since neither the president nor Marten was found at the scene and because any doors they might have used for escape were electronically locked behind them, we must presume that they took the only route available, and that was the tunnel to the rear of the lab where Dr. Foxx was found.

"Very shortly after the ops arrived there was an explosion in that tunnel. Most likely, gentlemen, the result of mechanisms Foxx put in place during construction."

Gentlemen
.

Plugged into the same secure transmission and scattered across Europe and in the United States were the others: Vice President Hamilton Rogers with President John Henry Harris's chief of staff, Tom Curran, in the U.S. embassy in Madrid; Secretary of State David Chaplin, at the U.S. Embassy, London; Secretary of Defense Terrence Langdon at NATO headquarters in Brussels; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Air Force General Chester Keaton, at his home office in rural Virginia.

"Are we to believe the president is dead?"
Terrence Langdon asked from Brussels.

"Terry, it's Jim," Marshall cut in, "I don't think we can assume anything. But based on the info received from Foxx earlier and from what the ops observed, it's all but certain he and Marten were in that tunnel when the explosion occurred. If that is the case there is very little chance—let me qualify that—there is 'no chance' either could have survived."

"We know Foxx set up a line of succession in the event anything happened to him. It was how he ran the top-secret programs in the Tenth Medical Brigade. But let me ask a very direct question. In truth, can we proceed without him?"

"Affirmative," Marshall said. "No question. It's simply a matter of alerting his chain of command."

"Do we know details of what happened to him? Was the president there and involved?"

"We don't know. But whatever happened, we couldn't have had his body found there and then have an investigation take place."

"People will have seen him at the monastery."

"He was there off and on all the time. He had his office, his clean labs that he openly showed people. Officially he will have departed right after he left the restaurant. It won't be a problem."

"The Secret Service,"
General Keaton said from Virginia,
"the agents who were there will make a report if they haven't already. Then what?"

Lowe glanced at Marshall, then spoke into the phone, "There were two men, Chet. Only one identified himself as Secret Service. It was the president's SAIC, Hap Daniels. Who the other man was we don't know. How either of them got there we don't know either. But Daniels
was shot and hasn't been heard from since. When and if he reports in, the orders are to have him brought directly to us for debriefing. Once that happens he will be informed that the ops he encountered were South African Special Forces commandos working under orders to secretly repatriate Dr. Foxx to South Africa for new hearings regarding himself and the Tenth Medical. The circumstances under which he was discovered made it politically expedient that he be found dead at his home in Malta. The South African government fully apologizes for any mix-up that might have caused agent Daniels his injury."

"I don't like it."

"None of us likes it. But there it is. Besides, he has no idea who the ops were and he certainly didn't find the president. And if he says he went there based on information from our embassy in Madrid it will be pointed out that all concerned mistakenly thought the information had come from the CIA and not the South Africans."

"If there was an explosion in the tunnel someone is going to go in to check it out,"
Vice President Rogers raised another concern.
"What happens when they find the president's body?"

"They won't," Lowe said with cold confidence. "That tunnel leads to Foxx's Number Six lab, the ugly one. As Foxx described it, it was designed to automatically destruct if the proper codes weren't keyed in upon entry. At the same time any access to it would be sealed off. If that happened, and according to the ops report from the scene we have to presume that it did, right now that tunnel is blocked by a two-hundred-thousand-pound slab of rock crushed down against the door to the last of Foxx's monastery-side labs. The other end is sealed off by a thousand cubic yards of interior landslide. Foxx
was a perfectionist. What's there will look like a natural earth-fall inside an old mining tunnel. There would be no reason to believe anyone would be in there. It's one of a whole chain of tunnels the authorities know have been sealed off for decades."

"Gentlemen," Marshall cut in, "unless the president was in the lab itself, which he might well have been, the only other place he could be is in the tunnel. If he's there he has no way out. For all intents it will become his tomb. If it has not already. How we go about officially discovering what happened and how we recover the body we will contend with later. Right now and most thankfully he and his ideas are no longer an issue. We need to move on, and quickly."

"Agreed,"
Secretary of State Chaplin said from London.

"Jim
—" Langdon jumped in from Brussels.

"Still here, Terry," Marshall said.

"We're damn short on time. The final go ahead for Warsaw has to be given and soon."

"I concur."

"Vote."
Langdon said.

His demand was followed by an immediate and unanimous chorus of "Agreed."

"Nays?"

From Madrid, London, Brussels. From rural Virginia. From the men in the room at the Hotel Grand Palace in Barcelona came only silence.

"Then the vice president will sign the Warsaw order forthwith," Lowe said. "Correct, Ham? No backing out from you."

"I'm a hundred-percenter, Jake, you know that. You all know that. Always have been. No backing out here,"
Vice President Hamilton Rogers said from Madrid.
"Chet, you will confirm the Warsaw operation when it is operational."

"Yes sir. You bet,"
Air Force General Chester Keaton's powerful voice stabbed across three thousand miles of ocean.

"Good," Lowe said, "then we're done and on to the next. See you in Warsaw, gentlemen. Thank you and good luck."

With that Lowe hung up and looked to Marshall. "I want to feel relieved. Somehow I don't."

"You're thinking about the president."

"We don't know for sure, do we? What if somehow he's still down there and alive?"

"Then he's got a hell of a lot of digging to do," Marshall took off his headset, then got up and crossed to a side table to pour drinks. Malt scotch, neat. Double shot for each. Done, he handed a glass to Lowe.

"It's less than forty-eight hours to Warsaw. The vice president believes he's in charge, the others accept it. Even if somehow the president did manage to pull off an Easter surprise it would be all but impossible for him to do it in that time. And if he did, the only way out would be over, under, or through that monster two-hundred-thousand-pound slab of rock and into Foxx's monastery chambers. He does that, shows up Christlike, we get him the hell out of there in one damn hurry. Soon after that he's dead from a heart attack and the vice president officially becomes president. Unnerving, yes, a little. But either way it's still all ours."

Lowe stared at him. "Do we have ops waiting if he does show?"

"In Foxx's office?"

"Or anywhere else."

"Jake, it can't happen."

"Do-we-have-ops-waiting?" Lowe articulated deliberately.

"You're serious."

"I'm damn serious. I want ops in Foxx's monastery chambers and anywhere else he might show up Easter-like. Inside, outside, upside down. There's a whole series of mining tunnels back there. What if he did escape the explosion and is alive and in one of them trying to find a hole to climb out through? What if he finds it? What then?"

"That could take a lot of bodies."

"Mr. National Security Adviser, we are at war, if you haven't noticed."

Marshall studied Lowe for a long moment, then touched his glass to his. "You want it done, it is."

Lowe didn't move, just stood there, glass in hand.

"Have a little faith in your own organization, man," Marshall said. "Have a little faith."

Lowe drained his glass in one swallow and set it down. "The last time I had that kind of faith it was in a son of a bitch named John Henry Harris. Twenty-two years of faith, Jim. Everything was right with him until it went wrong. So until we either have him or confirm he's dead, I don't know a goddamn thing," Lowe's eyes came up and found Marshall's and held there. "Not a thing."

•
4:50 P.M.

Matches.

The matches the president still carried from the diversionary fire he'd started in the Barcelona train station to escape the Spanish police. By Marten's count there were eleven left. Seven had already been used to get them this far in the pitch black of the tunnel, wherever "this far" was and whatever tunnel this was. He could hear the president breathing and knew he was resting somewhere close by. "You okay?" he asked in the darkness.

"Yes. You?" the president's voice came back.

"So far."

They had left Foxx's hideous lab at 3:09, escaping the rush of gas pouring from the jets built into the room and going back up the tunnel the way they'd come in. The trouble was the door at the far end was locked and there was no other entrance. It meant they had no place to go except the hideous lab from which they'd just escaped. That left only the tunnel they were in and gave them nothing to do but wait until the gas escaped Foxx's chamber and the shaft filled with it. It was in that moment of terrible realization they felt the slightest waft of fresh air. They followed it twenty feet or so and found a slender opening in the tunnel wall just wide enough for a man to slip through. On the far side was a narrow sandstone passage that dropped swiftly away and then quickly became little more than a crawl space. Marten lit one more match and they could see it continue on for
another thirty feet before it turned and disappeared from sight. Where it went or if it simply ended there was no way to know. But it was filled with fresh air and they didn't dare go back to the main tunnel, so they took it. Marten first, wriggling through with his feet and elbows, the president right behind doing the same.

At the end of the thirty feet the shaft turned sharply and they had to inch around it. They continued that way in pitch black for another hundred feet and then the narrowness and tight press of the passage suddenly gave way to a larger chamber and they were able to stand upright. Another match and they could see they were in what appeared to be an old mining tunnel with a rusted narrow-gauge ore-car track running down its center. Apparently they had entered somewhere midtunnel so to know which direction to go was nothing more than a guess, which they did, turning right and moving off in the dark, using the rails as a guide. By Marten's watch it was then 3:24.