The Machiavelli Covenant (62 page)

"He will, or one of the kids will tell us more, but it'll take time so I wouldn't count on a sudden revelation."

Marshall was tired and angry and frustrated. He was also becoming increasingly anxious and didn't like it. It made him feel like Jake Lowe. "We've got a Spanish limousine driver with an Australian accent and two local teenagers. Then we've got a guy who looks like Hap, or maybe
is
Hap, someplace out there with the president and this Nicholas Marten. We've got every piece of hi-tech equipment and an army of bodies and aircraft flying around and now we've got daylight, and still nobody can find them. Why?"

"Maybe it's because they're still somewhere in the tunnels," Strait said. "Or because they're not here at all."

"What the hell does that mean?"

Strait turned and walked over to a map of the area. "This," he said, sweeping a hand over the mountaintops, "is where we've been looking. Over here," he moved his hand far to the right, "is the Aragon Resort, where the president was originally to speak this morning."

Marshall perked. "You think that's where he's going?"

"I don't know. What I do know is we haven't found him here. We know he was in the tunnels, and Hap or no Hap, if he somehow got out and into these mountains . . ." Strait hesitated, then went on. "I can't get inside his head except to think that the resort is a place to go that's real and that he knows about and where there are very important people he can talk to, a number of whom he knows. How he'd do it, I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud."

Marshall turned and walked back to Captain Diaz to
pull her away from Miguel and the boys. "Would it be possible," he asked, "for the president to somehow get off these mountains and to the Aragon Resort?"

"Avoiding satellite detection?"

"What if he had a Mylar blanket like the limo driver? What if those were the things we saw in the water in the helicopter images. The president, Hap Daniels, Marten, and the driver."

"Then you're suggesting he went the rest of the way by foot, overland, and in the rain and dark."

"Yes."

Captain Diaz smiled. "It's not likely at all."

"Is-it-possible?" Marshall enunciated coldly.

"If he was crazy and if he had some idea of how to get there. I would say yes, I guess it's possible."

•
7:03 A.M.

They were dressed as groundskeepers. Dark green shirts with lighter green pants. The classic logo of
The Resort at Aragon
stitched in white italics over the left breast pocket, their old clothes hidden in a trash container near the back of the maintenance building where the rolling stock was. Of the four, only the president kept one personal item with him and it was tucked safely inside his shirt. It was the one thing he had kept all along and what he would wear when he addressed the New World Institute delegation. The thing that, despite his workman's uniform and growth of beard, would make him instantly recognizable to everyone there. His toupee.

José stood at the door, peering out. Marten eased the electric cart up to it and stopped. The president sat beside him, Hap in back, machine pistol in hand, along with a contingent of necessary props—rakes, brooms, plastic trash cans, and something else Hap had picked up simply because he felt it might come in handy later: a pair of binoculars, lifted from the top of what appeared to be a supervisor's desk.

"Any sign of him yet?" the president asked in Spanish.

José shook his head, then—"Sí," he said suddenly, and looked back. "The man in white just went back into the laundry," he said in Spanish and the president translated.

"Let's go," Hap said.

José slid the front door open, Marten eased the cart out and waited for José to close it again. Ten seconds later he jumped into the cart alongside Hap, and then they were going, moving silently past the buildings and turning onto the gravel road that would take them down behind the golf course and then up a winding mile-and-a-half-long service road through deep woods to the church.

•
7:12 A.M.

They crested a hill and stopped under the cover of a large conifer. For the first time they could see past the vineyards to the golf course and the resort itself. In front of the elegant white-stuccoed main building were seven unmarked highly polished jet-black tour buses with heavily tinted windows. The buses that had picked up the New World group from the airport in Barcelona Friday and that would take them back at the close of the sunrise service this morning.

Nearby were a dozen large black SUVs, Spanish Secret Service vehicles that would escort them to the
church and then to the airport. Farther out they could see a major force of police vehicles blocking the main road in from the highway. More were stationed every quarter mile or so along the work road that bisected the vineyard. Everything in place, as Hap knew it would be.

High above the resort itself and at the top of a long curving blacktop road, they could just make out the ancient stone and red-tile roof of the Romanesque structure that was La Iglesia de Santa Maria, the Church of Saint Mary.

"That it?" the president asked.

"Yes, sir," Hap said.

The president let out a breath. They were that close.

•
7:17 A.M.

The service road took them around the far edges of the golf course and then abruptly down into a wooded glade, then steeply up again, winding through thick conifers toward the church. Marten was just starting a turn and thinking about what they would do when they reached the rear of the church and the service entrance where they were headed when Hap suddenly intruded. He was looking uphill through the binoculars.

"Patrol vehicle coming down. Get off the road," he snapped.

Marten drove another dozen yards, then abruptly turned the cart off the road and through some trees to stop behind a low rock wall.

Hap lifted the machine pistol, Marten slid out the Sig Sauer and then they sat back and watched a four-wheel-drive police car come down the hill. It slowed as it approached, then slowed even more. They could see four uniformed men inside, all looking in the direction where they were hidden.

"Nothing here, nothing here, keep going," Marten breathed.

The car slowed even more, and for the briefest moment they were certain it was going to stop. But it didn't, the driver just rolled it slowly on past and kept on.

"Good boys," Marten said.

"Give them a minute to clear," Hap put down the machine pistol and picked up the binoculars, then turned to follow the police vehicle as it drove slowly down the hill.

"This is fill," the president said abruptly and out of the blue looking at the land around them. "This dirt, this soil base. I've been watching it all along. The further up the road we get, the more obvious it becomes. It's all landfill. Look around, most of these trees are young. Fifteen, twenty years old at most."

"Mr. President," Hap was still looking through the glasses, "the resort is barely twenty years old. They probably graded everything and replanted."

"Except for one thing. The church. How do you put a four-hundred-year-old church on twenty-year-old landfill?"

"Number the stones, then tear it down and rebuild it as it was," Marten said.

"But why? And where was it before?"

"Uh-oh," Hap said abruptly.

"What is it?" The president turned to follow his gaze.

"More security."

A second police SUV had come up the road from below, and the car going down was stopped next to it, their drivers chatting.

"What do we do now?" the president asked.

"Nothing. We try to leave, they'll see us."

"You mean we stay here?"

"Yes, sir. We stay here."

•
7:25 A.M.

Four black-robed monks brought Demi from her cell and walked her down a long, barren, and dimly lit hallway. She wore only sandals and the scarlet dress Cristina had brought for her to wear during the ritual ceremonies the night before. That she had been forced to strip naked and put the dress on in front of the monks meant nothing.

How could it? They had come to take her to her death.

•
7:28 A.M.

The first monk slipped a security card through an electronic reader beside a steel door. The door slid open and they entered another long corridor. To both left and right doors stood open to what looked like physicians' examination rooms. They were small, identical, and had opaque glass boxes mounted on the walls, the kind used for reading X-rays and prints of scans. A
stainless-steel examination table stood coldly in the center of each.

•
7:29 A.M.

They passed through another security door and entered a room filled with stainless-steel bunks, the same as the one in the cell she had just occupied. The only difference was that here they were stacked four high to the ceiling on either side of a center aisle and stretched to the far end of the chamber. Enough to easily accommodate two hundred people at a time.

Another corridor and she saw communal toilets and showers. Just past them was what looked like a small commercial kitchen and beyond it an area of stainless-steel tables with attached benches that might have been used for dining. These rooms, like the rooms and corridors she'd seen before it, were empty, as if the entire area had been a beehive of activity that had quickly and purposely been abandoned.

•
7:31 A.M.

The monks brought her through a series of five heavy security doors, one less than ten feet from the other. Then they entered a long, darkened subwaylike tunnel with a single monorail track running down its center. In front of them was a large, sledlike conveyance, completely open save for three rows of bench seats. Four more monks sat shoulder to shoulder on the rearmost bench. In front of them another monk sat alongside—Demi caught her breath as she saw her.

Cristina.

She wore the white gown of the night before and smiled pleasantly, even happily, when she saw Demi.

Immediately Demi was seated next to her. As quickly one of the monks slid in beside her. The remaining monks took the seats directly in front of them. Nine monks to escort two women into eternity.

Abruptly the sled moved off, quickly and silently picking up speed. A second passed, and then two, and then Cristina turned to Demi and smiled the most horrifying smile she had ever seen. Horrifying because it was so warm and genuine and childlike.

"We are going to join the ox," she said excitedly, as if they were about to go on some wonderful adventure.

"We mustn't," Demi whispered. "We have to find a way not to go."

"No!" Cristina suddenly pulled back, and her eyes shone with a terrible and immeasurable darkness. "We must go. Both of us. It has been written in the heavens since the beginning of time."

The sled began to slow and Demi saw they were approaching the end of the tunnel. Seconds later the sled stopped. The monks stood together and led both women onto a platform beside it. Immediately a large door slid open and they were taken into a large room. In the center of it was what appeared to be an oversized commercial furnace.

Demi felt the breath go out of her as she realized what it was—a steel-faced brick retort oven. The room was a crematory. The place where it all ended.

"The ox waits by the fire," Cristina smiled, and then four of the monks led her away.

A moment later the remaining monks took Demi into another room. A woman turned as they entered. It was Luciana. She was dressed in a long black clerical robe,
her black hair the same tight bun as the night before, her dark eye makeup accentuated by the same theatrical streaks that ran like daggers from the corners of her eyes to the hollows of her ears, the same hideously long nails once again fixed to the ends of her fingers.

"Sit down," Luciana indicated a lone chair in the center of the room.

"Why?"

"So that I may do your hair and makeup."

"My hair and makeup?" Demi was incredulous.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"You must be beautiful."

"To die?"

Luciana smiled cruelly. "It is a requirement of the tradition."

•
7:48 A.M.

The Sig Sauer in his lap, Marten drove the last quarter mile cautiously, the gravel road twisting in a large S through a thick stand of conifers. Through them they could just see the church and the small wooded parking lot that served its rear entrance. Hap glanced behind them. There was nothing. They'd had to wait an extraordinarily long time for the police vehicles to leave the area below. When finally they had and Hap gave Marten the okay and then they'd started up again, he'd still kept a close watch behind. The police might have gone but this road was clearly their assignment which
meant they could, and probably would, return at any time.

The first rays of the morning sun touched the mountain peaks behind them as Marten pulled into the parking lot and stopped beside three church vans.