The Machiavelli Covenant (68 page)

"What is it?"

"One score and five," he said then turned and walked quickly down the corridor, the way he had been going.

"One score and five," Luciana knew what had happened and what was soon to happen. It would be one score and five, twenty-five years, Foxx had told them, from the day construction began—of the resort, the tunnels, the monorail, the underground labs, the church, everything—to when it would be shut down and destroyed.

Today, on this date exactly, one score and five had passed and everything would be ended. Rightly so from Luciana's view. The coming of Demi Picard had signaled it. Her undying love for her mother had been a curse. One far worse than any of them had imagined. She'd known it the moment she'd seen her.

•
9:21 A.M.

"Demi! Demi!" Marten commanded, trying to shake her from her stupor. He saw her eyelids flutter. "It's okay. Don't move!" he said quickly, then had the tin snips at the heavy strap that bound her throat to the Aldebaran cross. His face and hands glistening with sweat, the searing heat all but unbearable, he was trying not to breathe at all. "Don't move!" he exhaled and closed the snips. Nothing happened. He pressured the cutters again and this time the teeth caught and the material gave. Demi's head fell forward, then she recovered, and he saw her look at him in disbelief.

"Mr. Marten!" José shouted from somewhere on the
far side of the flames. He looked up to see Luciana cross the front of the stage, heard her start to say something to the congregation.

Then he saw two monks coming right at him through the flames, one behind the other, machine pistols in their hands.

Boom! Boom!

Marten fired the Sig Sauer point blank. The first monk's face exploded and he slammed backward through the fog.

Boom! Boom!

Marten fired again. The second monk twisted away in the dark.

Marten heard the congregation scream as one.

"José! José!" he yelled, then cut the straps at Demi's wrists and feet. Her knees buckled as he pulled her from the cross. He got one hand under her waist trying to steady her. Then José was through the fire, his hair and groundskeeper's shirt burning.

Suddenly there was a burst of machine-pistol fire. A bullet nicked Marten's ear. A second seared his cheek. A half dozen more shot up the cross where Demi had just been.

Boom! Boom!

Marten fired blindly through the flames. The spit of the machine pistol continued. Rapid-fire hell coming through the flames.

Boom! Boom!

He fired again and the shooting stopped. He twisted around, shoving Demi at José.

"Go!" he yelled. "Go! Go! Go!"

He caught the briefest glimpse of José wrestling Demi through the flames to the stage behind them, then whirled to free Cristina. As he did, the innermost gas jets ignited,
and he was suddenly standing in the center of a blazing inferno. He screamed out loud and made a wild reach with the cutters, trying to find the straps that bound her.

Then he froze.

Most of Cristina's head was gone, chewed up by machine pistol fire. In the next instant her great mane of jet-black hair burst into flame. For a millisecond Marten's eyes registered sheer horror. Then, his own hair on fire, his hands and face scorched, he turned and leapt out through the conflagration.

•
9:23 A.M.

The room was at the far end of a darkened hallway. Like the video and electrical rooms below, it was little more than a concrete bunker. Beck had gained access to it through two separate doors. The first was wooden and hand carved, and like other doors throughout the church required a security card used in conjunction with a code punched into an electronic keypad. The second, only feet away, was made of heavy-gauge steel and required another keypad code, which opened a singular slot above it and into which he slipped a special key Foxx had given him. Once inside he sat down in front of a six-foot-long control panel that looked like something out of NASA and incorporated a series of television monitors, switches, dials, and gauges that were like those in an industrial natural-gas-transmission plant, which was very nearly what this room was. That the power was out in the rest of the building was not evident here. Every light, monitor,
switch, dial, and gauge operated perfectly, the entire system powered by Chinese-made heavy-duty polymer batteries.

Beck took a breath, then scrutinized the string of carefully labeled gauges in front of him.

Among them:

Pressure Transducer Cylinder Pressure Distortion
Centrifugal Surge and Pulsation Control
Piping Vibration Control
Piping Configuration Optimization
Leak Detection Control
Compressor Vibrations

Satisfied by their readings, he looked down and flipped five switches in succession. Then he took a second key, inserted it into an eyehole on the panel, and turned it. Immediately a half dozen gauges changed color from red to bright green. A digital timer started at sixty minutes. Beck ran it down to fifteen and stopped it. "One score and five," he breathed, "one score and five."

In a mechanical room in the tunnels far below a two thousand horsepower diesel engine was driving a gas, turbine-driven, centrifugal compressor. For the better part of two hours it had been pumping natural gas through massive twenty-inch pipelines and six-inch nozzles, charging the miles of old mining shafts, monorail transport tunnels, Foxx's laboratories, work areas, and holding cells with highly explosive, lethal fumes. The church itself was to have been the last charged, the filling to have begun once the hydraulic stage had been lowered to its hidden room below and the original floor was back in place, and when the services were over and the security forces had completed their sweep of the building and left.

Marten's presence changed that. In Foxx's absence, control fell to Beck as arranged by the Covenant's carefully designed rules for succession of power. While the Covenant's overall program fell this year to the U.S. in the revolving international chair of stewardship, the security of the Aragon project was, after Foxx's death, officially Beck's. Meaning its long-planned destruction was now fully in his hands.

Beck studied the gauges and monitors once more. Satisfied, he looked at the timer. Once started, it would activate the nozzles in the church's basement and the building would begin to fill with gas. In fifteen minutes it would rise to the level of the jets burning onstage. When it did the building and everything in it would explode. At the same time igniters in the tunnels would trigger, and a firestorm reaching as much as 2,500 degrees would roll through everything below. A "slow buildup of methane gas over the decades" the authorities would call it, and connect it to the explosion that the day before had rocked the ground beneath the monastery at Montserrat. It was an inferno the authorities would let burn itself out, and it would be weeks if not months before it did. In the end there would be nothing left but collapsed tunnels and a residue of super-heated dust.

Three decades earlier the membership had agreed on a far-reaching strategy for the Middle East and engaged a recently initiated member named Merriman Foxx to devise the plan for it. Three years later he had presented that plan to the membership. In it, and in precise terms, he outlined what needed to be done and where, how much it would cost and how long it would take, and what would happen to it afterward. They had agreed, and the project was put in motion. Two years after that the land
had been bought and construction on what they termed "The Aragon Project" had begun. And now, twenty-five years later to the day, Beck, fully employing the authority invested in him, had taken control and moved up the hour.

"One score and five," he said once more, as if in final homage to that authority and to his own loyalty, then started the timer. Immediately he turned to a small computer beside it, slid a ThumbDrive from his pocket, and inserted it into the computer's USB port, then looked at the monitor just above it. A moment later a bar came up asking for a password. His fingers went to the keyboard, he typed in a password, then repeated it. A split second later he moved the cursor to Drive C: and clicked on, then dragged the entire contents to Drive A:. Ten seconds later he asked the computer for permission to remove the mass storage drive from the USB port. Permission was given, and he slipped the ThumbDrive from the machine and put it back in his pocket. The power outage had affected everything in the building but this room here and the backup battery supply for the master computer in the bunker below, where the Covenant's archive files were recorded and stored. Both machines were interconnected so no matter what might happen there the same information was always backed up here. It was just those files, that information, that Beck had safely copied onto the ThumbDrive.

Beck stood and took one last look around. Satisfied everything was in order, he left, securing the doors behind him. It was 9:25
A.M.
At 9:40 precisely the rising gas would reach the burning jets on the stage and the inferno would begin.

•
9:27 A.M.

His nerves on edge, machine pistol in hand, Hap hustled the president up the stairs and down the corridor toward the rear exit. They were already four minutes past the time he had allocated to Marten and José to get to the women and get them out, and he didn't like it. That he had the two hard drives from Foxx's master computers in his pants pocket was little solace. His sense was the same now as it had been when he'd cautioned the president at the beginning, that without entering the correct password before removing them they would be corrupted and therefore useless. Useless hard drives in exchange for the life of the president made no sense at all, but it had been done, and all they could do was move on. And they were.

Thirty feet down the corridor was the door leading out to the church's back parking lot where they had left the electric cart. Hap took out the BlackBerry he had preprogrammed with the text message he would send to Woody the moment he was free of the building and had a clear signal.

Ten feet more and he saw the president look up anxiously as they passed the stairway Marten and José would have used to get up to the church proper. It was dark and quiet and he knew what the president was thinking. That maybe they had rescued the women and were already outside waiting. But that, like the uncorrupted removal of the hard drives, was a pipe dream and he knew it. The situation in the upper church was far too
complex for two men, or rather a man and a boy, to navigate successfully. By now he was certain both Marten and José were dead. The women too.

"Hap!" he heard the sharp cry of Marten's voice behind them. They whirled to see Marten and José appear at the bottom of the stairs with Demi between them. Her complexion was deadly white, her head slumped on her chest, her hair and scarlet dress burned and still smoldering. Seemingly half conscious, she sobbed uncontrollably.

"Marten, my God!" The president turned and was heading toward them. Hap caught him and turned him back.

"Dammit! No! Mr. President, we're going! Now!"

"The other girl?" The president's eyes were still on Marten.

Marten shook his head as he moved them forward. His hair was singed, his face and hands burned and blackened. José was much the same.

Now they were at the door. Hap held them up, then opened it cautiously. A half second later he stepped out alone, lifted the BlackBerry, and sent the rescue message to Woody.

•
9:30 A.M.

Hap turned to go back inside. His intention was to hold them all just inside the door for the six to eight minutes it would take for Woody to arrive with the chopper. He'd barely gone two paces when he heard the
unmistakable sound of a helicopter starting up at the front of the church. Immediately came the high whine of a second helo firing up. He glanced at the door, then turned back and went up on the knoll he'd climbed when they first came in for a better view. Forty yards away he saw Marine Two and its identical companion helicopter, their doors open, in pre-preparation for take-off. Beyond them evening clothes-clad members of the New World Institute were streaming from the church and heading for the black buses. Spanish Secret Service were everywhere. He wished he knew what was going on in the church, if the gas jets had been shut off and the stage lowered away and out of sight in favor of the building's original floor. And what about the other woman, Cristina? From Marten's expression and shake of his head she had to be dead. What happened to her body? And what role would the monks play in this now? Were the church vans parked here at the back of the church theirs? Was that how they had arrived? If so, at any moment they would be coming down the stairs inside the church toward the door where the president and the others were huddled.

Suddenly he caught sight of Roley Sandoval, special agent in charge of the vice-presidential detail, leading a group of U.S. Secret Service agents hastily escorting Vice President Rogers, the secretaries of state and defense, and the rest of Rogers's elite entourage which now included Congresswoman Jane Dee Baker toward Marine Two.

Whatever had happened, whatever was going on, and if it hadn't been before, time now had suddenly become everything. The monks aside, the moment the helos left and the buses were loaded, the Spanish Secret Service would sweep the building and then secure it. It meant
they had nowhere to hide until Woody arrived, except maybe among the trees that surrounded the parking area.