The Machiavelli Covenant (65 page)

The second was the head of a woman. "Lorraine Stephenson," Marten breathed in horror and sheer disbelief.

Caption:
LORRAINE STEPHENSON. PHYSICIAN. UNSTABLE. SUICIDE
.

Then came the last.

"Oh Lord, no!"
Marten cried out as he saw the familiar thickset face, the gray hair and trimmed gray beard. Stone-dead eyes staring out at nothing.

Caption:
PETER FADDEN. JOURNALIST, WASHINGTON POST. DANGEROUS. TERMINATED
.

The voices of the monks grew louder and they saw them file onto the stage through the fog. Heads bowed, their chant continuing, there were fifty of them at least, maybe more. Whatever they were singing was directed wholly at Cristina.

The president looked to Marten. "This is your 'Machiavelli Covenant,'" he said, his voice hushed and grave.

"Yes, I know," Marten rasped with anger. "Just as Demi described it. The only thing that seems changed from the sixteenth century is the technology. The elaborate sign-in process done by hand into a guarded journal
with a bloody thumbprint placed alongside the personal signature has been traded for an electronic photograph and DNA sample. The participant's presence in the audience intercut with the video of the ceremony. Confirmation that you were here and took part in what happened. The formal dress is a charming addition. It means you were all too pleased to attend."

"I don't understand," Hap said, bewildered.

"These people are here to witness ritual murder."

"Murder?"

"They're going to kill the girl," the president said quietly.

"How?"

"I don't know."

"Why?" Hap was incredulous.

"This is a very exclusive organization, Hap," Marten's eyes shifted from Hap to the monitors and then back. "The rules of membership require not only wealth and power but complicity in murder so that none dares stray from the chief objective."

"Which is what?"

"The accumulation of even greater wealth and power."

"To dominate globally and in perpetuity, I think is a better way to put it," the president said, thinking out loud as he painstakingly studied each monitor in turn, putting together the people and activity he saw on the screens with what Marten had told him about the Covenant and what he had learned as a Rhodes scholar. "This is an international fraternity of widely diverse and highly influential people who routinely make far-reaching agreements with one another. A great many of them, I would imagine, clandestine. It's an order that may well have been in operation for close to five hundred
years and as such would have been a major force in the making of history. A group who, for no greater good than their own benefit, positioned themselves to expand empires by surreptitiously underwriting wars, assassinations, political and religious movements, and even—knowing of Dr. Foxx's involvement here—genocides."

The president turned away from the monitors to look at Hap and Marten. "The idea of a single group being capable of things so huge and terrible and far-reaching and over so long a period, borders on the impossible if not the absurd. It's a statement I would wholly agree with if it weren't for the truth we see up there on those screens and the fact that these people, in particular the ones I know personally, are major global players in investment banking, insurance, law, transport, defense contracting, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, energy, media, and politics—the things every society on the planet depends on for its daily life. You could argue that a great many of them are direct competitors and in total opposition to one another, but taken as a group, in one way or another they control a major part of the world's commerce.

"What I would imagine this weekend has been about—the seminars, the golf and tennis, the dinners and cocktail parties—is how best to conduct business in the coming year. Primarily how to respond to what will happen after the Warsaw assassinations and then to the catastrophe in the Middle East that will take place once Merriman Foxx's plan is executed. The ritual about to be performed there on the stage will irrevocably bind them to whatever course of action has been agreed upon." He looked back at the screens. "It's one of those great conspiracy theories every political theorist, writer,
movie executive, and man and woman in the street around the world would love to believe exists. Well, it does exist and probably has for a very long time. The proof is right there in front of us."

•
8:44 A.M.

The chant of the monks abruptly stopped and the church filled with silence. Fog swirled on the stage where Cristina sat enraptured, joyfully waiting for the moment the fire would come and her journey, like that of the ox, would begin.

Suddenly a figure moved past her through the fog like some Shakespearean character. Another spotlight shone, illuminating Reverend Beck dressed in clerical vestments. He crossed to the front of the stage and lifted a cordless microphone.

"Hamilton Rogers," he said, his eyes searching the audience, his voice resounding through the church's state-of-the-art speaker system. "Where are you, Mr. Vice President?"

•
8:45 A.M.

A great roar came from the crowd as five separate remote cameras picked up Vice President Hamilton Rogers getting up from his seat and moving to the aisle, where monks escorted him toward the stage. When he reached it, he bounded up to embrace Reverend Beck as if this were some kind of revival meeting.

"Hamilton Rogers," Beck said to the congregation. "The next president of the United States!"

Thunderous applause followed.

Beck and Rogers again embraced warmly, then turned, grasped hands, and lifted their arms to the crowd. Wave after wave of applause followed. The revival had suddenly become a political grandstand.

•
8:46 A.M.

Marten looked to the president. "If there was ever any question about their plans for you, there's none now."

"The thing is," the president said, "it's not just 'my friends' anymore. It's all of them. They all know what's going on. It shows how incredibly intertwined and indoctrinated they are. They're not ordinary human beings. They're another species altogether. One whose entire ideology is filled with unbridled arrogance."

•
8:47 A.M.

Hamilton Rogers motioned for silence. In seconds the applause stopped, Reverend Beck handed the microphone to the vice president, and Rogers stepped to the front of the stage. He looked to the congregation and began calling out names, recognizing new members. One by one they stood: a young CEO of a Taiwanese export company; a middle-aged woman who was a strong, left-of-center Central American politician; a fifty-two-year-old Australian investment banker; a sixty-seven-year-old Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist from California; a seventy-year-old famously conservative Italian media mogul; and then another
and another. Thundering applause followed each. Politically left, right, or center, the affiliation didn't seem to matter.

And then Vice President Rogers called out the rest. These were not new members but "old friends," he said, "dear, dear friends, longtime members joining us up here for this momentous occasion.

"United States Congresswoman Jane Dee Baker. United States Secretary of State David Chaplin. Secretary of Defense Terrence Langdon. United States Air Force General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chester Keaton. Presidential Chief of Staff Tom Curran. Presidential confidant Evan Byrd."

Again the church filled with ear-shattering applause. Applause that grew louder and louder as one by one the audience stood to proudly and patriotically salute those whom Rogers had designated.

•
8:53 A.M.

Marten whirled at the knock on the control-room door, the Sig Sauer coming up in his hand. Hap stepped in front of the president, swinging the machine pistol.

Hurriedly the knock came again. One, two, three.

"It's José," Marten said.

Hap nodded and Marten went to the door and cautiously opened it. José stood there alone. His eyes intense, his body wound tight. Marten let him in and then locked the door.

"What is it?" the president asked in Spanish.

"I went down into the church as far as I could," he said in Spanish. "Through the door there are big wide stairs and then a big steel door. Also an elevator, I think. But everything is locked. No one is there. If there is a tunnel further down we cannot get to it."

"Gracias, José, muchas gracias," the president said gratefully, then smiled.
"Está bien, relájate."
It's alright, relax.

Immediately the president looked to Marten and Hap and translated.

"All we can do is wait and hope no one comes," Hap nodded at the monitors. "I'm assuming that when the ceremony is over the hydraulic stage will come back down, the original floor will slide back into place, and the monks will unlock the doors. After that everyone will go out to the buses as if nothing has happened. That's when we move. Up the stairs and out the way we came in. We don't go then we're dead in the water because the minute the guests have cleared the area the Spanish Secret Service will sweep the building and then lock it up tight."

"What about Cristina?" Marten snapped. "They're going to kill her."

Hap stared at him. "There's nothing we can do about her without endangering the president. Understand that and put her out of your mind."

"I understand it. I don't like it."

"Neither do I. It's just the way it is."

Marten stared back, then finally relented. "We get out. Then what?" he said quietly. "Where do we go? There are five hundred men out there, most of them focused on this building and the people inside it."

"We go out," Hap said calmly, "get in the cart, go back to the place we hid coming up. Security should depart the area in less than an hour after everyone leaves. After that we take it from there."

"Hap, your people are still out there with the Spanish police. They don't find us on the mountain, they'll start this way—maybe they already have. They're not going home until they have the president."

"Marten, we can't stay here."

"Woody," the president looked at Hap.

"Woody?"

"We take the chance he's not corrupted. As soon as we're out and you have a clear signal, text-message him on his cell phone. Tell him where we are and to get the hell in here fast with his chopper. Just him and the helo, nobody else. People will be leaving. It's a Marine Corps helicopter, nobody will know what's going on. He touches down in the back parking lot where we left the cart. Thirty seconds, we're on it and out of here."

"Mr. President, even if it works, he flies in and picks us up, we don't know what he'll do afterward. He could fly us straight to the waiting CIA jet. He does that and there're twenty guys under orders to get you to wherever they're supposed to take you and what you or I say won't matter."

"Hap," the president took a deliberate breath, "at some point damn soon we're going to have to trust somebody. I like Major Woods for a lot of reasons and always have. What I've given you are orders."

"Yes, sir."

Suddenly Reverend Beck's voice boomed through the speakers. They turned to see the congressional chaplain on every monitor. Speaking into the cordless microphone,
red, green, and amber light playing on him from below, he crossed the darkened stage in a trail of theatrical fog. Whatever he was saying was in a language none of them had ever heard. He spoke again, as if it was a line of verse in adoration of someone or something. The New World members responded like a chorus in the same language, the way the families had the night before in the amphitheater.

Beck spoke again, then stopped and extended his hand to Cristina, still spotlighted on the darkened stage. She smiled proudly as Beck spoke again. A second spotlight followed him as he turned from Cristina and addressed the congregation, his right hand circling the stage the way he had done in the amphitheater. It was a call that demanded response from the congregation, and they did, repeating in enthusiastic unison what he had said. Abruptly the light swung from Beck and onto Luciana, her sharply pulled-back hair and daggered eye makeup radiating the power and nightmare fear of witchcraft.

In her hand was the ruby wand, and she moved behind Cristina, using it to draw a circle in the air above her head. Then her eyes found the congregation, and she called out a phrase. Everything about her was controlling and certain. She called it out once again, then turned and crossed the stage, the remote cameras following her through the fog.

Now she was on a dozen monitors, her eyes frozen on something before her. Then a half dozen cameras showed what it was.

Demi. Her body bound to a massive Aldebaran cross. Her eyes frozen in terror said everything. She was a living creature on the threshold of certain and horrific death.

"My God!" Marten blurted in shock and disbelief.

Luciana stopped before her, and the monks' chant began anew. Their voices rose to a crescendo, then fell quickly, only to rise again. Luciana stared at Demi, her posture grand and filled with contempt. Then Demi's eyes rose to meet hers and she returned the stare, defying her, giving the witch nothing. Luciana smiled cruelly and turned to the crowd.