The Machiavelli Covenant (54 page)

"What the hell's going on down there?" he suddenly asked Bill Strait. But it wasn't a question as much as it was a demand, even an accusation.

For a moment Strait ignored him. Finally he turned. "Five teams are inside the main shaft," he said patiently. "Three more are searching side tunnels. The rest are on standby for relief duty. The team working this end just met up with the unit that broke in midpoint the other way. All they found was a lot of dark tunnel. They've called for lights and are retracing now."

"What about the satellite? Where is it?"

"Another forty minutes until it's overhead, sir," Strait glanced at Marshall as if he wished he'd take Lowe aside and away. "The satellite, the thermal imaging, is not an end-all. It will not show us what's going on underground."

"When
are
we going to know what's going on underground?" Lowe pushed him hard.

"I can't tell you that, sir. There's a lot of area down there."

"In the next ten minutes or the next ten hours?"

"We are in the tunnels, sir. The Secret Service, the CIA, the CNP."

"I know who the hell is down there."

"Maybe you would like to go down yourself, sir."

Lowe flared at the insubordination. "Maybe you'd like to find yourself shoveling shit in Oklahoma."

Suddenly Marshall stepped in and turned Lowe away. "Jake, everybody's a little strung out here. There's enough tension as it is. I told you before to relax, do it. It would be good for everyone."

Strait's hand suddenly went to his headset, "What? Where? How many?"

Diaz looked at him. So did the medical team. Lowe and Marshall turned back fast.

"Go over the entire area again. We're sending in the standby teams. Lights are on the way, yes."

"What the hell is it?" Lowe was right in his face.

"They found fragments of what looks like a recently burned undershirt. Like somebody was using it as a torch. There are what appear to be rather unclear footprints of two men. They lead back through the tunnel."

"Two?"

"Yes, sir, two."

•
10:05 P.M.

The tunnel was little more than the height of a man standing and about twice that wide and was dimly lit by battery-powered emergency lights mounted high on the tunnel walls every hundred feet or so. Wood timbers bolstered the walls and ceiling that had, between large pieces of natural stone, been sprayed with a thin cement coating, probably to keep the dust down. The steel track down the center was a single, shiny monorail that led, like the tunnel itself, into the murky distance in either direction.

"We wanted to know how Foxx got the bodies in and out of his lab," the president said quietly, "here it is."

Marten took a moment to get his bearings then looked down the shaft to his left, "As far as I can tell, that way leads back toward Foxx's lab." He looked right. "That has to be the direction where they came from. The bodies loaded on a monorail sled or something."

"Then that's the way we go," the president was already moving in that direction. "This tunnel was dug directly beneath the other so it couldn't be read by satellites or surveillance aircraft. Everyone knew of the old tunnels, so no one would suspect they were being used as cover for something else. This is all Foxx's design. I'll bet copied from the secret underground weapons factories that armed Germany for World War Two."

"It's well-engineered alright," Marten was looking up. "It wasn't just chance we found that vent, there are a lot more at this end at least, probably one every two hundred
feet. We missed them because they're well-hidden but soon enough those guys will find them too."

"Something else," the president kept moving. "Gas jets mounted near the emergency lights. Bigger than the ones in the lab, much bigger. Maybe five or six inches. Why this whole place didn't go up with the first blast I don't know."

"You make it sound like we're walking on the inside of a bomb."

"We are."

•
10:12 P.M.

The monks' chant echoed powerfully across the amphitheater. The moon had disappeared, replaced by steady rain and a show of lightning against the mountains that was accentuated every now and then by enormous claps of thunder. But the storm and its elements were incidental to what Demi saw before her, that held her frozen where she was.

A great live ox stood tethered by chains in the center of the Aldebaran circle. The chanting monks had formed a ring just outside it and were slowly moving counterclockwise around it as one by one the children came from the dark beyond the still fiercely burning bonfires to reverently place bouquets of flowers at the animal's feet. When the children were done, their elders came. More than a hundred of them, one by one in prayerful silence, to lay still more bouquets before the ox.

What astonished and held Demi's unwavering attention was that the animal stood in the center of a roaring fire. Yet it was seemingly at peace, unafraid, and either unfeeling of the intense heat and flame or unaware of what was happening to it.

"It is neither a trick nor magic," a voice behind her said gently. Demi whirled to see Luciana behind her. "The beast is on a spiritual journey. It feels no pain, only joy." Luciana smiled assuredly. "Go on, walk closer, go near. Photograph it. That's why you have come, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Then do it. Record it for all time. Especially its eyes. Record the peace, the joy all creatures feel when they take the journey. Do it and you will see."

Luciana swept an arm toward the spectacle, and Demi went. Gathering her cameras, she stepped through the ring of monks and moved toward the burning beast. As she did, an elderly woman moved in to lay spring flowers at the animal's feet and to say a brief prayer in the same language the monks were chanting.

Demi used the digital camera first, the one that would instantly transmit the images to her Web site in Paris. She took a wide shot first, then zoomed closer for another. Finally she moved in full on the beast's head. She felt the tremendous intensity of the fire, saw the heat waves through the lens. Again she heard Luciana's words:

Record it for all time. Especially its eyes. Record the peace, the joy all creatures feel when they take the journey. Do it and you will see
.

Luciana was right. What Demi saw in the eyes of the ox, what the camera recorded, was a look of exceeding peace and, if indeed animals did experience it, joy.

Suddenly the flames roared up and the ox disappeared from her view. She stepped back quickly. An instant later the animal's enormous body collapsed into the fire, sending a massive shower of sparks skyward into the night. At that moment the chanting stopped and everything went silent. All around her people had bowed their heads.

The beast's great journey had begun.

•
10:24 P.M.

Marten and President Harris were half running, half walking, purposely staying on the monorail's wooden ties, trying desperately to leave no footprints, no sign they had been there, nothing to follow. That the president had a good thirty years on Marten made little difference. Both men were sweating and exhausted, running on little more than fumes. Their mental and physical state made all the worse by the certainty that it was only a matter of time, minutes, even seconds, before their pursuers found one or more of the vents that would lead them down to the shaft where they were now.

The best they could do was trust they would reach the end of the tunnel before that happened, and when they did they'd have enough time to find a way out through whatever entryway Foxx had used to bring his victims to the holding tanks. Yet hopeful as that idea was, it brought up something else. What if that area, whatever it was, was still active? What if there were guards? Or others of
Foxx's crew? It was a thought that chilled but at this point could make no difference. They had only one way to go and that was straight ahead.

•
10:27 P.M.

National Security Adviser Marshall was tucked in the back of the Chinook making notes on his laptop when the helicopter's door slid open and Jake Lowe came in soaking wet from the rain. Up front the helicopter crew dozed in the cockpit. Halfway down, the medical team played cards. All the while Bill Strait's ongoing communication with the search teams working underground crackled incessantly over the speaker system.

Lowe walked directly to Marshall, "I need to talk to you," he said. "Alone."

Thirty seconds later they stepped out of the Chinook's warmth and light and into the dark and rain. Lowe slid the door closed behind them. Marshall flipped up the hood of his parka.

"Treason," Lowe said fearfully, and jabbed a finger in the direction of the mountains lit by intermittent flashes of lightning. "He gets out of those tunnels alive. He talks and people start to believe him. The same thing Hap said not long after all this started—what happens when he shows up? And where the hell is Hap anyway?" Lowe kept on. "Was he really shot? Is he dead? Or is he out there somewhere knowing what the hell's going on and doing something about it?"

Marshall studied him. What he saw was a mentally fatigued, increasingly upset Lowe finally beginning to lose it.

"Let's walk," Marshall said, and started off in the rain, heading them across a rocky flat and away from the Chinook's light spill. "Jake, you're tired," he said after a time.
Paranoid
was the word he wanted to use but didn't.

"We're all tired," Lowe shot back. "What the hell's the difference? The thing is we have to call Warsaw off. Right now. Before it gets to where it can't be called off. We do that and he comes out of those tunnels talking, accusing us, warning the French and Germans about it. Then nothing happens. It makes him a loony, gone over the edge, the way we've played it all along. But if the killings take place, we're all waiting for the hangman. And it won't be just for treason either. There are other things they can come after us with, especially when they find out about Foxx and what he was doing. The kind of things that came out of the Nuremberg trials. War crimes: performing medical experiments without the subjects' consent. Conspiracy to commit war crimes. Crimes against humanity."

They walked farther into the storm. "I thought we talked about that, Jake," Marshall's tone was even, wholly without emotion. "Calling it off. We can't do it. Too many things are already in motion."

The rain came down harder. Lightning danced across the nearby peaks. Lowe was unwavering.

"You don't understand any of what I'm saying, do you? He's still the goddam president. He comes out of those tunnels alive and talking and the assassinations take place? For chrissakes listen to me! The vice president has to withdraw his order. Now, tonight! We don't, we lose everything!"

They were a hundred yards from the Chinook. The same distance to their left was the glow of the command post.

"You really think he's coming out alive and we can't handle it?"

"That's right, I think he's coming out alive and we can't handle it. We're not prepared to handle it. This is a situation no one ever considered."

Just then a huge lightning flash lit up the countryside for miles around. For an instant everything was as bright as midday. They could see the rugged terrain, the Chinook, the hastily put-up tent housing the command post, the steep canyons that fell sharply away from the path they were on. Then the dark came again and with it a deafening clap of thunder.

Marshall took Lowe by the arm. "Watch your step. This is a narrow trail, you don't want to go over the side."

Lowe took Marshall's hand away. "Damn it, you're still not listening!"

"I am listening, Jake, and I believe you're right," Marshall was calm and thoughtful. "We were never prepared for anything like this, none of us. Maybe the risk is too great. We can't chance blowing the whole thing, not this far into it." Another lightning flash and Marshall's eyes found Lowe's. "Okay, Jake. Let's make the call. Tell them what we think. Have the vice president withdraw the order. Put it on hold."

"That's good," Lowe said with immense relief. "Damn, damn good."

•
10:37 P.M.

"No! No!" José suddenly pulled back in the narrow chimney and refused to go farther.

"What the hell's wrong?" Hap looked sharply to Miguel.

They were probably four hundred feet underground in an awkwardly twisting limestone channel that dropped sharply downward into a claustrophobic darkness that, even with the illumination of their flashlights, had become increasingly disquieting. Moreover, this was a second chimney down, one far beneath the first one they had descended through, and all of them, the boys included, were becoming more and more on edge.

"Tell him it's okay, we understand," Hap was pale, his shoulder throbbing, already into a second pain pill. "Tell him we all feel the same way. But we have to keep going."

Miguel started to speak to José in Spanish. He'd barely started when the youngster shook his head again. "No!" he spat. "No
más!"
No more!

Nearly forty minutes earlier they had reached the section of tunnel where the boys thought Miguel's friends might be, if they were there at all, Amado and Hector getting to it first and the others soon afterward. They'd hardly gone a hundred yards when they heard the rush of men coming toward them in the dark. Miguel started to turn them back when Hector took him by the arm.