The Machiavelli Covenant Read online

  "Yes, sir."

  "And do it fast."

  "Yes, sir."

  53

  • BARCELONA, RIVOLI JARDÍN HOTEL, 2:15 A.M.

  Still party time. Horns, cars, motorcycles, unending traffic. People crowding the sidewalks. The sound of Brazilian and Argentine jazz filtering in through the double-glazed windows.

  President Harris was asleep on the bed with Marten curled up on a small couch nearby when the chirp of Marten's cell phone woke them both.

  "Who is it?" Harris was instantly awake and alert in the dark.

  "I don't know."

  The phone chirped again

  "You better answer."

  Marten picked the phone off a small table beside him and clicked on, "Hello."

  "It's Demi," her voice was hushed and at the same time charged with immediacy. "You checked out. Where are you? I need to see you right away. I don't want to talk over the phone."

  The president turned on a small bedside lamp just as Marten slid a hand over the telephone's receiver, "It's a woman. She wants to see me now. Four hours ago I would have killed for this call."

  Harris smiled.

  "It's not that," he took his hand away and spoke into the phone. "Are you still at the Regente Majestic?"

  "Yes."

  "Hold on." Again he covered the phone and looked to Harris. "This has to do with Caroline's death. The woman's name is Demi Picard. She's a French journalist traveling with congressional chaplain Rufus Beck. They're both here in Barcelona." Marten hesitated for the smallest moment. "I don't know if you're aware but the reverend is a close friend of Dr. Merriman Foxx."

  "The Merriman Foxx?"

  "Yes," Marten nodded, then spoke into the phone. "Give me your cell number, I'll call you back." Marten scribbled a number on a bedside table scratch pad. "Five minutes."

  With that he clicked off and looked to the president, telling him what he had told Peter Fadden: that he had followed Foxx to his home in Malta and arranged to meet him by pretending to be a member of Congress-woman Baker's staff who needed some questions finalized before the subcommittee report was made final; that he met him in a restaurant and that Beck, another woman, and Demi Picard were with him; that he pressed him for information about his bio-weapons program and brought up the names of Caroline Parsons and her doctor, Lorraine Stephenson; and that he made up a story that Mike Parsons had left a memo questioning the veracity of his testimony. And then Foxx's angry reaction to everything.

  "I found out early the next morning that both he and Reverend Beck had suddenly left Malta for places unknown. Ms. Picard was leaving too and wanted nothing to do with me when I questioned her about it. I found out where she was going and followed her here to Barcelona.

  "You said you knew Caroline had been murdered, Mr. President. I wonder if you know Foxx was behind it, he and the same Dr. Stephenson he denied knowing. They inoculated her with some kind of bacteria that killed her. I'm all but certain it was one of his experiments, a piece of his bio-weapons program that was supposed to be dead but wasn't the same thing Mike Parsons's committee was investigating when he and his son were killed. How Beck is involved I don't know, but he and Foxx are meeting somewhere near here soon, maybe even tomorrow. Demi knows more about it or she wouldn't be calling like this." Marten hesitated, trying to decide how to put the next part. He didn't have to, the president did it for him.

  "You're thinking Dr. Foxx is part of the coup against me."

  "Maybe, but there's no proof. All I know is that he was at the center of the subcommittee hearings denying his program was still in existence while at the same time he was still working his tricks on a live human being—Caroline Parsons."

  "How is this Picard woman involved?"

  "Supposedly she used Reverend Beck to get an introduction to Foxx. Her sister disappeared from Malta two years ago and she thought Foxx might open some doors that would help her to find out what happened, at least that's what she tells me."

  "So she's incidental in all this."

  "Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But it's Foxx who's central here. He not only knows the how but the why about Caroline's death, and both of those answers may have a lot to do with the things you're up against."

  The president looked away, trying to digest it all. "If you're right, it's the part of the package that's missing, the specifics of what they're planning to do. I know I should be surprised about Chaplain Beck, but nothing surprises me now."

  He turned back and Marten could see the anguish in his eyes. "They are planning something horrendous, Mr. Marten. More terrible, I think, than either you or I could imagine. Part of it I know, the rest I don't. The whole thing came out of the blue. It's a major breakdown on my part. I should have known something was happening and seen through it; I didn't. As I said earlier, the timetable for me to do anything about it is incredibly short. If I'm caught, it's nonexistent."

  Marten nodded toward the phone, "Maybe she can help. How much I can't guess, but it's more than we have right now."

  Harris stared at him. "You said she wanted nothing to do with you. What makes you think you can trust her now?"

  "That is a multimillion-dollar question."

  "Can you trust her, Mr. Marten?"

  "When I left my hotel in Malta I was tailed all the way to Barcelona by a young man. At the airport I was handed off to someone else. He was the dead man in the newspaper photo. He followed Demi and me to a restaurant where we went to talk. Afterward I tried to confront and question him. He ran away and I chased him. That was when he ran in front of the truck."

  "You think it was Foxx who had you followed?"

  "Yes, to see who I might be reporting to."

  "And you're suggesting this Picard woman had something to do with it?"

  "That's what I don't know. She might be legitimate and a great help to us or she might bring the whole mountain down. For me it's one thing, for you, Mr. President, it's something else entirely. I guess what I'm saying—the call is yours to make."

  Marten saw President Harris hesitate for the slightest moment and then make up his mind. "Ask her to come here now," he said, "but to tell no one where she is going. Give her the room number and tell her to come directly to it. Say nothing about me."

  "You're certain?"

  "Yes, I'm certain."

  54

  • 2:25 A.M.

  Room lights out, Marten stood by the window watching for Demi. Below, the street remained a swirl of nightlife. Traffic at a crawl, the sidewalks filled with pedestrians, music floating from cars and open doorways. For Spain, for Barcelona, the night was still a pup.

  Marten could hear the shower running in the bathroom, then heard it stop as the president turned off the water. A short while earlier an embarrassed John Henry Harris had asked to borrow Marten's toothbrush, and he'd given it to him without thought. Then he'd asked to use his razor to shave, but Marten suggested he let his beard continue to grow as another level of cover and the president had agreed.

  • 2:27 A.M.

  Still no sign of Demi.

  Marten looked back to the room. Not fifteen feet away, in the confines of the bathroom, the president of the United States was drying himself and dressing, preparing for what was to come next. The whole situation was impossible, even absurd, but it was happening nonetheless. The truth of it made Marten think of his brief conversation with the president just before he'd gone in to shower.

  "You told me Dr. Foxx had been directly involved with Caroline's death, that he'd given her some kind of bacteria that had killed her," the president had said. "How did you know that?"

  "Caroline had been injected with something by Dr. Stephenson after she broke down following the funeral of her husband and son. She woke up in a clinic where Foxx was, and he seemed to be overseeing her treatment. It was her sense and fear that either Stephenson had given her whatever poisoned her or that Foxx had done it himself at the clinic."

  "Sense and fear?"

  "Yes."

&n
bsp; "Sense and fear mean uncertainty. You were certain when you told me. Why?"

  "Because of what Dr. Stephenson told me just before she died. She thought I was one of 'them,' whoever 'they' are, your 'friends' maybe, and that I was going to take her to 'the doctor,' as she put it. She meant Merriman Foxx."

  "Just before she died?" the president had stared at him, incredulous. "You were there when she was murdered? When she was decapitated?"

  For a long moment Marten said nothing. He was the only one in the world who knew the truth. Then he realized that now, at this point, there was no reason to hold it back, especially from the man who faced him. "She wasn't murdered, Mr. President. She committed suicide."

  "Suicide?" The president was stunned.

  "On the street near her home. It was night. I waited for her to come home and was trying to question her about what had happened to Caroline. She was frightened, I think more about being taken to 'the doctor' and what he might do to her than anything. She had a pistol. I thought she was going to shoot me. Instead she put it in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

  "There was nothing I could do, and I didn't want to explain things to the police because then Foxx would find out about it. So I got out of there fast. The decapitation had to have been done shortly afterward. It meant someone had been watching her."

  The president was clearly puzzled. "Why do something like that when she was already dead?"

  "I asked myself that and came to the conclusion that a suicide by a physician of her prominence coming so soon after the death of one of her high-profile patients might raise eyebrows and have people start asking questions. Especially when it happened so soon after the deaths of that patient's congressman husband and their son. Murder is different. It's impersonal, it could happen to anyone. Besides there's no way to cover up a suicide done like that, Mr. President. It means whoever did it understood that and simply took her head."

  "My God," the president breathed.

  "That's what I said."

  • 2:30 A.M.

  Marten looked back to the street.

  Still no sign of Demi.

  55

  • U.S. SECRET SERVICE COMMAND POST, MADRID, 2:30 A.M.

  "A woman made the Barcelona hotel calls, sir." Again the voice of Secret Service intelligence specialist Sandra Rodriguez came through Hap Daniels's headset. He was standing in front of a computer screen in the CIA warehouse clicking through an endless stream of reports from the mass of intelligence agencies trying and failing to locate the president.

  "She sounded young and was speaking Spanish with a Danish accent. It took a while for Spanish intelligence to run the tapes and make some sense of it."

  "What was she trying to find out?" Daniels pressed her.

  "She was looking for a man, a hotel employee or guest, she didn't specify. All she had was a name, a Señor Nicholas Marten. Marten with an e not an i."

  "Marten?" Hap Daniels said abruptly and looked up. Jake Lowe was staring at him from across the room, Daniels turned back. "Do we know if she located this Nicholas Marten?"

  "Yes, sir. He's at the Rivoli Jardín Hotel. Barcelona, 080002."

  "Thank you."

  Jake Lowe had turned his back to the room and was talking by secure phone to National Security Adviser Jim Marshall in the war room at the U.S. embassy in Madrid.

  "We may have something hot," Lowe said lowly and with urgency. "Spanish intel has located a Nicholas Marten at a hotel in Barcelona. Someone made a number of calls trying to find out where he was."

  "Marten?" Marshall perked. "The same Marten connected to the Caroline Parsons circumstance?"

  "Not certain."

  "Do we know who was trying to find him?"

  "A woman. We don't know who she is or why she was looking for him. Or even if it's the Nicholas Marten. But if it is, the president certainly would recognize him; he saw him in Parsons's hospital room then asked for more information on him later, and we delivered it."

  "Mr. Lowe," Hap Daniels's voice came through a separate channel in his headset and he turned to see Daniels motioning to him, "you might want to look at this."

  Immediately Lowe crossed the room to look at the computer screen Daniels, Station Chief Kellner, and Secret Service Assistant Director Ted Langway were staring at. On it was the newspaper photograph of Marten taken on the Barcelona street—the same photo the president had used to identify him.

  "From yesterday's special late edition of the Barcelona La Vanguardia. That is Marten," Daniels said definitively.

  "You sure?"

  "Yes, I'm sure. I was with the president when we saw him at University Hospital."

  "We have a confirm on Marten," Lowe said to Marshall through his headset, then looked to Daniels. "Locate him. But that's all. Just locate him and watch him. Don't let him know we're onto him."

  Abruptly Daniels turned to Kellner. "You have assets in place in Barcelona?"

  "Yes."

  "Put them to work."

  "Right."

  "Hap," Lowe's eyes found Daniels's. "What's your gut tell you? Is the president with him?"

  "I want to say yes, but there's no way to know until we get a confirm."

  "I want us to do that ourselves."

  Daniels's eyebrows furrowed in puzzlement. "I'm not sure I understand."

  "We don't know his physical or psychological condition. What we do know is that he's ill and so whatever happens has to be done with extreme delicacy. When we go in it needs to be with people he will instantly recognize. Not strange faces, not CIA or Spanish intelligence," he glanced at Assistant Director Ted Langway, "not even you, Mr. Langway. I'd suggest you stay in Madrid." Lowe looked back to Daniels, "I don't want to make it any worse for him than it already is. If you want a direct order I can get it from the vice president."

  "I won't need it, sir."

  "Dr. Marshall will want to be there too."

  "Dr. Marshall?"

  "Yes."

  Hap Daniels's eyes held Lowe's for the briefest second,

  "Yes, sir," he said and then turned and walked away, speaking into his headset as he went.

  "I want a lead car, an armored van set up as an ambulance with two doctors and two EMT techs, and three security tail cars ready in Barcelona within the hour. Have a car pick up Dr. Marshall at the embassy and take him to the airport."

  Again he looked to Station Chief Kellner. "Can you get Spanish intelligence to facilitate priority air clearance for a flight to Barcelona?"

  "I think so."

  "Hap," Lowe was looking directly at him. "How soon can we be in the air?"

  "We get clearance, wheels up in twenty minutes."

  "Good."

  56

  • BARCELONA, RIVOLI JARDÍN HOTEL, 3:00 A.M.

  Marten pulled back the curtain in the semidarkness in time to glimpse Demi Picard dodge through traffic and cross the street coming toward the hotel. She wore a light-colored trench coat with a large purse thrown over one shoulder and had a floppy hat pulled low over her forehead. If he hadn't been looking for her she would have been difficult to recognize, which was probably the idea.

  Marten let the curtain go and stepped back from the window just as President Harris came out of the bathroom, pulling on his clear-lensed eyeglasses.

  "She's just crossed the street. She should be here in a few minutes," Marten said. "How do you want to play it?"

  The president stopped and looked at him. He was still without his toupee and had put back on the same khaki pants, blue sport shirt, and brown jacket he had been wearing when Marten first saw him in the room several hours earlier.

  "Mr. Marten," he said with an urgency Marten hadn't heard before. "I knew when I came to you I was taking a chance, but I had to find a place out of sight to rest, if even for a short time. Standing in the shower I had a chance to collect my thoughts. It's now three in the morning. Spanish federal police boarded the train I took from Madrid to Barcelona late this afternoon. Very luckily I got away without them recognizin
g me. The same as when I managed to avoid them in the train station here. The hunt for me, secretive as it will be, will be massive. I know the procedures and agencies the Secret Service will use in trying to bring me in. That means there's every chance that by now they will have some idea where I've gone. It's possible they may even have intercepted the phone calls my female friend made in trying to find you. It won't be long before they put it all together and learn where I am. It means I need to get out of here right away, and the sooner the better."

  "To go where?"

  "If I told you and they found you, believe me when I say you would tell them."

  "Then I can't let them find me, can I?"

  The president studied him carefully. "Mr. Marten, you've helped a great deal already. If you try to do more you'll be getting in dangerously over your head."

  "I'm already in over my head," Marten half smiled. "I'm probably going to get fired from my job too." The smile vanished, "If they come here looking for you they'll know who I am anyway. You asked for my help, Mr. President, and you still have it," Marten paused, then went on. "Besides, I've come this far because of what happened to Caroline Parsons and in a way so have you. If you're going, I am too."

  "You're certain?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Then I thank you most gratefully, Mr. Marten. But I also want you to understand something." The urgency in the president's voice was now compounded by a look of almost unbearable anguish, as if for the first time he realized the true enormity of his situation. "Out here, like this, I have nothing of the power of my office to draw upon. I have no authority at all. If they catch me and bring me back they will kill me. That makes me just some poor fellow on the run with the clock ticking down, and at the same time trying to stay alive and keep his country and I think an ungodly number of other countries afloat as well. To do that I have to find out what my 'friends' are planning to do and what they have the ability to do, and then find a way to stop it, whatever it is. Dr. Foxx seems to be a key figure here, maybe even its prime architect. Your friend, this Demi Picard, may be able to help us find him. She might even know where he is."