The Machiavelli Covenant (70 page)

"The nozzles in the monorail tunnel," the president said. "He planned it all far ahead of time. No one will find a thing. Not a trace of what he did. Nothing at all." Suddenly the president pulled away from the window to look at Marshall. "Is the monastery going up too?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You don't?"

"No, sir."

"It won't get to the monastery," Marten said quietly. "It's what he blew earlier. There's nothing left there. It'll stop at the end of the monorail."

The president looked to Hap, "Have the CNP alert the monastery. At least they'll have some kind of warning if it does go."

"Yes, sir."

The president's eyes shifted to Woody. "Major, are we fully fueled?"

"Yes, sir."

"Our range is what, one thousand two hundred nautical miles?"

"A little more, sir."

"Then take us out of Spanish airspace, Major, and clear airspace to Germany."

"Sir. I have orders to fly you to an airstrip outside Barcelona. Chief of staff has a CIA jet waiting."

Marten and Hap exchanged glances. Then Hap reached into his groundskeeper's shirt and slid out the machine pistol.

"Major, I've canceled that mission," the president said calmly. "I asked for airspace cleared to Germany; please do so. I'll tell you where exactly when we get closer."

"He can't do that, Mr. President," Marshall came toward him. "It's for your safety. It's all been planned out."

"Mr. National Security Adviser, I think you'll understand when I say the plans have changed. Very soon you and the vice president and every other one of my 'friends' will be taken into custody and charged with high treason. I'd suggest you go over there and sit down. Hap will be glad to escort you." The president stared at Marshall for a long moment. Finally he turned away and looked back to Woody.

"Major, change course now. That is a direct order from the commander-in-chief."

Woody looked at Marshall as if trying to decide what to do.

"Major," Marshall said firmly, "you have your orders. The president has been under a terrible strain. He has no idea at all what he is saying. It's our job to protect him. Hap's too. Along with Bill Strait. It's why we're all here."

Woody stared and then turned back to the controls.

"It's no good, Jim, you're done," the president said. "The Covenant is done."

"Covenant?" Marshall stared at him unbelieving.

"We know, Jim, and who was there. We saw it in operation. Hap, Mr. Marten, myself, even José. All of us."

"You're not well, Mr. President. I have no idea what you're talking about." Suddenly he looked to Woody.

"You have your orders, Major. Stay the course. Stay the course."

The president and Marten looked toward the flight deck. Hap started toward it, machine pistol out.

It was all the time Marshall needed. In two steps he had crossed the aircraft's midsection. A second later he had the crew door open. There was a thundering roar and a terrible blast of air.

"Grab him!" the president yelled.

It was too late. They were at two thousand feet. The doorway was empty. Marshall was gone.

•
SPANGDAHLEM AIR BASE, GERMANY, 3:15 A.M.

Marten rolled over in a half sleep, edging over gently to avoid putting pressure on the bandages covering the burns on his left arm and neck. He had his own room in the officers' quarters just down the hall from where Hap Daniels and Bill Strait slept in an adjoining room to the president's.

They'd come to the U.S. air base at Spangdahlem unannounced. Normally they would have landed under presidential colors at Ramstein Air Base, but not this time, not under these circumstances. The base commanding officer and several of his general staff knew, but that was all. The doctors accompanying them on the Chinook had cleared the president and sent him to rest, an unrecognized, unnamed VIP under heavy guard.

José, Demi, Marten, and Hap had been taken to the base hospital. As far as Marten knew, José and Demi were still there and would remain there for at least several more days. José's family had been notified, and Miguel and José's father were en route from Barcelona and would arrive soon.

Miguel—Marten smiled as he lay there in the dark. What he'd fallen into as a simple limousine driver. And what a great man and dear friend he had become in so short a time. The boys too, all of them—Amado, Hector, and especially José, the youngster who'd been frightened to death to go farther down in the chimney toward the monorail tunnel because he thought he would be descending straight into hell. Little had he known of the hell he would volunteer to be part of very soon afterward. And what hell Hector and Amado and Miguel had been put through by the Spanish police and U.S. Secret Service, all of it to buy the president time.

The president had pretty much left Marten alone as the Chinook traversed Europe, crossing the Pyrenees into French airspace and then flying north across France to pass over Luxembourg before entering German airspace near Trier and touching down at Spangdahlem very soon afterward. Understandably he had pressing business. First, and most important, the president had spoken personally to the chancellor of Germany and the president of France and then held a three-way conference call with them both. All had agreed that the long-planned NATO meeting set for one o'clock in the afternoon today should go on as scheduled, but, for security reasons, the venue should be changed. What a mighty scrambling of foreign offices it had been, the twenty-six member countries unanimously approving the move from Warsaw to a special site chosen by the president, one that under the circumstances seemed highly appropriate: the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in southern Poland. It was there he would give a brief speech explaining, among other things, his abrupt disappearance from Madrid the week before
and the sudden change of location from Warsaw to Auschwitz.

Second, the president informed White House Press Secretary Dick Greene, already on the press plane to Warsaw, of the change of venue to Auschwitz, adding that a major cabinet-level shake-up was imminent and that there was to be a total press blackout on anything pertaining to it.

Then, earlier informed by Bill Strait of Jake Lowe's "accidental" death and the vision of Dr. Jim Marshall's shocking suicide plunge from the Chinook still raw in their minds, and remembering too the poison capsule embedded in Merriman Foxx's teeth, the president had Hap call Roley Sandoval, special Secret Service agent in charge of the vice-presidential detail, and tell him without explanation to quietly assign extra agents to the vice president and to his entourage to prevent any attempt at "self-harm."

Immediately afterward he placed calls to Vice President Hamilton Rogers, Secretary of State David Chaplin, Secretary of Defense Terrence Langdon, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chester Keaton, and Presidential Chief of Staff Tom Curran. The conversations had been terse and exceedingly brief. In them he demanded that each man present his resignation to the speaker of the house by fax within the hour. Failing that, he would be fired immediately. Further, he demanded they present themselves at the U.S. embassy in London no later than noon tomorrow to be taken into custody and charged with high treason against the government and people of the United States. Last, he called the director of the FBI in Washington to inform him of what had happened and direct him to take United States
Congresswoman Jane Dee Baker, who was traveling with the vice president in Europe, and expatriate U.S. citizen Evan Byrd, residing in Madrid, quietly into custody and charge them with the same crime, urging precaution against suicide.

After that he had walked the length of the Chinook to confer with the doctors on the condition of both José and Demi, then spent a few moments with them both and come back to share a cup of coffee with Hap and Marten before moving off to a bunk, a medical litter really, to sleep. As he left he touched briefly on the speech he would give at Auschwitz. What he would say, what it would entail, he hadn't yet decided but it was something he hoped would be as fitting to what had happened and to what they had uncovered, as the hallowed ground on which he had chosen to deliver it. He had retired to his room to work on the speech almost immediately after their arrival at Spangdahlem.

Marten rolled over again. In the distance he could hear the roar and rumble of fighter jets taking off, which he gathered was an on-going situation that one got used to. Spangdahlem was the home of the 52nd Fighter Wing, which oversaw twenty-four-hour deployments of U.S. fighter aircraft around the world.

Demi.

She had come to him little more than an hour into their flight in the Chinook. The doctors had treated her burns and mildly sedated her, then put her in a hospital gown and suggested she sleep. Instead she had asked to sit with him and the doctors had let her. For a long time she had simply stared off at nothing. Her crying had stopped but her eyes were still filled with tears. Tears, he felt, that were no longer born out of fear and horror but
rather out of sheer relief, maybe even disbelief, that it was over.

Why she had wanted to sit with him he didn't know, nor did she say. His sense was that she wanted to talk to him but didn't quite know what to say or how to put it, or that maybe at this point the physical effort itself was too great. Finally she turned and her eyes locked on his.

"It was my mother, not my sister. She disappeared from the streets of Paris when I was eight years old and my father died very soon afterward," she said in a voice barely above a whisper. "I have been trying to find out what happened to her ever since. Now I know I loved her very much and I know . . . she . . . loved . . . me . . ." The tears welled up and ran down her cheeks. He started to say something but she stopped him. "Are you alright?"

"Yes."

She tried to smile. "I'm very sorry for what I did to you. To you and to the president."

He put a hand to her face and gently wiped the tears away. "It's alright," he whispered, "it's alright. We're okay now. We're all okay."

At that moment she reached up and took his hand in hers and held it. Still holding it she leaned back, and he saw exhaustion overtake her. A moment later she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

Marten watched her for a moment and then turned away, certain that if he didn't he would start weeping himself. The feeling was not just a release of emotion from what they had been through but for something else.

Over
cava
and lunch at the Four Cats in Barcelona Demi had asked him about Caroline and why he had followed Foxx, first to Malta and then to Spain. When he'd told her she'd half smiled and said, "Then you are here because of love."

Now he realized she had been talking as much about herself and her mother as she was referring to himself and Caroline. They had both done what they had because of love.

That was the thing here as she slept beside him, physically and emotionally wounded, dressed in a hospital gown and holding his hand. The closeness, the intimacy, was an all-but-unbearable reminder of Caroline at the hospital in Washington as she slept with her hand in his during the last hours of her life.

Demi he had known for little more than a week. Caroline he had loved most all of his life.

And still did.

•
6:10 A.M.

A knock on Marten's door woke him from deep sleep. A second knock brought him around.

"Yes," he said with no idea where he was.

The door opened and the president came in alone and closed the door behind him. "Sorry to wake you," he said quietly.

"What is it?" Marten got up on an elbow. "Cousin Jack" was still without his hairpiece and still wore the nonprescription eyeglasses he'd bought in Madrid to help change his appearance. To this moment no one, unless they had been alerted and were looking, would recognize him as John Henry Harris, president of the United States. That he wore a pair of borrowed, ill-fitting light blue pajamas wouldn't have done much to clue them in either.

"We're leaving for the NATO meeting at Auschwitz in an hour. Taking the Chinook."

Marten threw back the covers and got out of bed. "Then this is it, the formal good-bye."

"Not good-bye at all. I want you to come with me, to be there when I give my speech."

"Me?"

"Yes."

"Mr. President, that's your stage not mine. I was planning to go home to Manchester. I've got a lot of work to catch up on. That is, if I haven't been fired."

The president smiled. "I'll write you a note. 'Nicholas Marten couldn't come to work last week because he was saving the world.'"

"Mr. President, I . . ." He hesitated, uncomfortable with what he had to say and unsure not only how to put it, but how it would be taken. "I can't be seen with you in public. There will be too many people, too many cameras. It's not just me. I have a sister living in Switzerland, I can't risk putting her in . . . danger . . ." his voice trailed off.

The president studied him. "Someone's trying to find you."

"Yes."

"What Foxx said about you once being a policeman. Were you?"