The Machiavelli Covenant (51 page)

By now they no longer walked single file but side by side in the center of the rails with Marten carrying the pick and sledgehammer, President Harris the torch. Both were hungry and nearing exhaustion but those were words never mentioned. Instead their focus was on the torch, with each man silent, waiting, praying, for the flare up that would indicate an air current.

"I have no proof," the president said suddenly. "None at all."

"Of what?"

"Of anything," he looked to Marten, his expression grave. It became all the more so as he put his thoughts into words. "As you know, the original plan was for me to take the information we got from Foxx and call the
secretaries general of the United Nations and NATO and the editors-in-chief of the
Washington Post
and
New York Times
and tell them all the truth. Instead we find ourselves trying to find a way out of these godforsaken tunnels so that I can address the congregation at Aragon. But why? To tell them what? That there is a massive conspiracy under way and that Dr. Foxx had full knowledge of its particulars?

"What good is that? Foxx is dead, the details for the genocide dead with him. His secret lab and everything in it we can assume is wholly destroyed because he planned it that way. We can say what we saw, but it's not there. My 'friends' will say I am 'ill,' that I have suffered a breakdown. That fleeing from my hotel room in Madrid in the manner I did and then running away and hiding are confirmation of it.

"You can stand up for me but it will do no good. President or not, it simply becomes my word against all of theirs. If I accuse them of planning the Warsaw assassinations they will smile compassionately as if that is proof of my illness and then simply postpone them. If I accuse them of plotting genocide against the Muslim states, I become even crazier, a ranting fool." In the dim flickering light, Marten saw the president's eyes fixed on his, and they were filled with utter despair. "I have no proof, Mr. Marten, of anything."

"No, you don't," Marten said forcefully, "but you can't forget the bodies, the body parts, the faces of those people floating in the tanks."

"Forget them? Their images are branded into me as if they were molten steel. But without some kind of proof . . . they never existed."

"But they did exist."

The president looked back to the torch and walked on
in silence, his shoulders hunched forward, almost as if he had given up. For the first time Marten realized that while it was personal courage and sheer determination that had brought him this far, the president was not the kind of man who was most comfortable alone and in his own company. He wanted others around him. He wanted the give-and-take of it, even to the point of disagreement. Perhaps to help him clarify his own thoughts or get another perspective on things, or to find some level of inspiration he had either lost or never had.

"Mr. President," Marten said firmly, "you must address the convention at Aragon. Speak of the Warsaw assassinations. Tell them what has happened. Tell them how and where and when and by whom the idea and then the ultimatum was presented to you. Do that and what you said will be correct. Your 'friends' will have no choice but to call off the killings, at least for now. If they don't they will prove you were right. In the meantime antennas will go up everywhere. You are still the president of the United States. The public will listen. The media will listen. You can order an investigation into everything Foxx was involved with, the same way you can order an investigation of your 'friends.' Yes, you will be putting yourself on the spot, but no more than you already have. Just the act of making it all public, whatever the reaction, will slow, maybe even stop, what they are planning to do.

"No, you don't have the evidence you would like, but it's
something
. You don't always need the deed to be done to kill its intent. If nothing else, you will have saved the lives of the president of France and the chancellor of Germany."

The president looked over as they walked. In the faint light of the torch Marten could see the extreme weariness in him. The burden that was his, the toll it had taken, was
taking still. He wished there were some way to ease it. He wished to hell that they could just sit down for a steak and a beer or a dozen beers and talk about baseball or the weather and forget everything else.

"Would you like to stop and rest for a few minutes?" he asked quietly.

For the briefest moment there was no response. Then, almost as if he had shifted into some other gear, the president's eyes sharpened, his shoulders came back, and he stood upright once again.

"No, Mr. Marten, we'll keep going."

•
7:40 P.M.

Bill Strait watched the darkening landscape below as they circled the area one last time and then came in across the flat of a rocky mesa. Seconds later the big Chinook helicopter touched down in a storm of flying dust and dry vegetation and the pilot cut the engines. Strait glanced across at Jake Lowe and National Security Adviser James Marshall, then unbuckled his harness and was the first out the door as the crewman pulled it open. Lowe, Marshall, and then seventeen Secret Service agents followed. Lowe and Marshall were dressed in hastily put together wardrobes of khaki pants, hiking shoes, and ski parkas. The agents, like Bill Strait, were armed, and wore jeans, windbreakers, and hiking boots. All carried night-vision goggles.

"This way," Strait said, then ducked under the still-churning rotors and walked rapidly toward a Spanish
CNP helicopter that had touched down on a rocky shelf fifty yards away and where CNP Captain Belinda Diaz waited with her twenty-man team.

Strait, in the absence of Hap Daniels, had become the SAIC, the special agent in charge of the entire mission. The situation—as the USSS, the CIA, and the CNP understood—was that the president was assumed to be somewhere in the tunnels, trapped there after what was officially being called "an earth movement." Although he was thought to be in the company of a man named Nicholas Marten it was necessarily assumed there could be others and that the president was now, and had been all along, a victim of foul play and therefore in grave danger. The mission, therefore, was a "live rescue" and was to be treated that way until they knew otherwise.

In all, nine helicopters had come in to land at exterior coordinates of a circular ten-mile perimeter. Aside from the Chinook, the other eight helos were CNP. Five carried twenty-man squads of heavily armed CNP mountain-trained police. The remaining three had eighteen-man CIA teams. All nine carried a two-man sound unit, audio experts equipped with hi-tech listening devices. In addition three more eighteen-man CIA teams were en route from Madrid and one hundred Secret Service agents were coming in from the USSS controlling field office in Paris to land at Costa Brava Airport in Gerona to then be ferried to the site here by CNP helicopters. ETA here for the CIA/Madrid teams was 8:20
P.M.
For the USSS/Paris, 9:30
P.M.

•
7:44 P.M.

Captain Diaz glanced at Lowe and Marshall, then looked to Bill Strait. "We are here," she said in English,
her right index finger touching a terrain map open on the ground as a radio clipped to her belt crackled in Spanish with the give-and-take of CNP communication between other units. Diaz was probably thirty-five, attractive, confident and very fit, and, like all the CNP, heavily armed and dressed in a camouflage jumpsuit.

"We are looking at a large mountainous area covering approximately one hundred square miles." Diaz put the terrain map aside and opened another. It was a copy of a 1922 ore company map showing the location of its shafts. Diaz pointed to it.

"These lines represent the tunnels in use at the time the mine was closed. As you can see, the main shafts run here, here, here, and here. The largest tunnel coming from the direction of the monastery would be this one," she indicated a line drawn in red, "and the one a person or group coming from there most likely would follow if they were trying to get out. That is, as far as we can tell. These tunnels, these shafts, are very old, not used for more than eighty years. Sections of many will have collapsed. It means the map is helpful but not reliable."

"Suppose they did take this tunnel," Strait said. "Two of them or twenty," Strait indicated the main shaft, "and using the 3:37 time of the earth movement as a starting time, how far would they be along it by now?"

"It would depend on the state of the president's health. If they have to carry him. Or stop to give him medical attention. Or if they have lights. As you might imagine, the shafts are dark as a tomb. Also if they chose this tunnel and not one of the several dozen others down there."

"Might they have gone another way?"

"We are not with them. They could have done anything for any reason. This main tunnel could have been
blocked and so they took some other. We have come to this location because it is the most direct and therefore the most likely route out if it has not been blocked by cave-ins. We are on the outermost edge of it and will make our way toward the monastery while other teams will work from there toward us while others still will explore the side tunnels. We—" Diaz stopped suddenly to listen to a radio communication directed at her.

"Sí, sí," she said finally into the tiny microphone on her lapel. "Gracias." Again she glanced at Lowe and Marshall, then turned to Bill Strait.

"Drilling equipment is being flown in now. Soon they will begin to bore into the tunnels from above and then send down night-vision cameras equipped with listening devices."

"Good," Strait said, then turned back to the map. "Assume they are in this tunnel. How close are we to an exterior entryway, a chimney where we can get in?"

"Very difficult to answer. The chimneys are not mapped. We have to find them and have asked help from the Agentes Rurales, the mountain and forest patrol, who know the area. But even if we find chimneys or access points there is no way to know how big they are. If someone can get down and into the shaft or if they would have to be cut or drilled or blasted. Something else," Captain Diaz shifted her gaze to take in Marshall and Jake Lowe, "something you must understand, gentlemen. It is quite possible that those inside, if in fact they are down there, are dead, your president included."

"That's why we're here, captain," Lowe said quietly. "One way or the other, we're going to bring him out."

•
PARIS, GARE DU NORD, 8:10 P.M.

"Thank you," Victor smiled and pocketed his first-class ticket, then turned from the passenger services window and walked back toward the platform area. Train 243 for Berlin was to leave at 8:46 but would not arrive in the station until 8:34. That gave him a little more than thirty minutes to kill. The last ten would be spent on the train making sure he had his assigned seat and that his suitcase was stored. Taking one's seat early was important because even with a reservation people often sat where they wanted. If one's assigned seat was already taken trying to get it back usually involved some level of confrontation that was often in a foreign language. He had seen more than one of these become heated, and an argument over a seat that might bring a trainman or the police was the last thing he needed; especially the police, who might ask to see his passport and want to know where he was going and where he had been. But at the moment there was no train and therefore no seat, which meant he still had nearly twenty minutes to either sit and wait or wander around the station, neither of which he liked because it left him at the mercy of the public. The major story of the day, at least in the Paris tabloids, seemed to be the single-shot murder of the two jockeys early that morning in Chantilly. And newspapers at kiosks throughout the station had it as their lead.

L'OMS A TUÉ LES JOCKEYS?
DEUX AVEC UN PROJECTILE!
MUERTRE DANS LES BOIS DE CHANTILLY!

(Who killed the jockeys?
Two with one shot!
Murder in the Chantilly woods!)

Chantilly was twenty minutes by train from Paris, and the Gare du Nord, where he was now, was the same station he had arrived in when he'd come from Chantilly. How did he know that someone there, someone he might simply pass by, hadn't seen him in both places; a railroad worker maybe or a commuter he had shared the morning train with who was returning home and might suddenly remember him?

Victor kept his head down as he walked. When he had killed the man in the New York Yankees jacket in Washington, Richard had been right there to meet him and get him out of there, driving him straight to the airport and putting him on a plane before the story was even reported. Here it was different, here he was alone and at the mercy of the faces in the crowd and he didn't like it. All he wanted was for the train to come so that he could board it and claim his seat and at least get that much out of sight.

He carried his bag into a small restaurant across from the tracks. There was room at the counter and he sat down. "Coffee," he said to the counterman, "black, please."

"Café noir?"

Victor nodded. "Café noir."

•
LA IGLESIA DENTRO DE LA MONTAÑA,
THE CHURCH WITHIN THE MOUNTAIN. 8:20 P.M.

Demi walked alongside the line of sixty monks, photographing them as they left the candlelit caverns and entered the church, walking single file, heads bowed, chanting as they went. She used the Canon digital first and then switched to the 35mm Nikon, then back to the Canon, the smart phone concealed beneath the long scarlet dress Cristina had brought her, secretly transmitting the Canon's images to her Web site in Paris.