The Machiavelli Covenant

by Allan Folsom

  Finally he told Fadden about Caroline's fearful description of the "white-haired man with the long hideous fingers and that horrid thumb with its tiny balled cross" who had examined her at the clinic where she had been taken following her breakdown after the funerals of her husband and son.

  "Peter," Marten had said emphatically, "Foxx not only has white hair, he has extraordinarily long fingers and that same tattoo on his thumb. I can tell you he was involved both with Dr. Stephenson and with Caroline's death. One more thing—when I met him he was having dinner with congressional chaplain Rufus Beck."

  "Beck?" Fadden had been wholly surprised.

  "They weren't trying to hide it either. At least not tucked away the way they were in a café in Malta and thinking Foxx was meeting with a representative of Congresswoman Baker."

  "I don't get it," Fadden said.

  "I don't either. Reverend Beck and Dr. Foxx should be like oil and water."

  "Yet they're both comfortable enough to be around someone they think works for the chairwoman of the subcommittee Foxx was testifying in front of."

  "Not just testifying, Peter. Testifying in a classified investigation."

  Marten finished with the rest: that the French photo-journalist Demi Picard had been with Foxx and Reverend Beck at the Café Tripoli and had privately warned Marten to "stay away" before he "ruined everything"; and that early this morning Foxx and Reverend Beck had left Malta for places unknown and that Demi had left soon afterward, going to Barcelona with a reservation at the Hotel Regente Majestic, which was where Marten was headed now.

  "Peter," he'd said emphatically as his flight was called for boarding, "try to find the name of the clinic where Caroline Parsons was taken after Dr. Stephenson gave her the injection and before she was transferred to George Washington University Hospital. She had to have been there for several days. There has to be some record of it and of who treated her and for what."

  Marten felt the Aerobus slow and he looked up. The man with the dark glasses and light yellow polo shirt was watching him. Caught, he smiled casually, then turned away to look out the window. Several minutes later the bus made its first stop at Plaça d'Espanya. Four passengers got off, three got on, and the bus moved off. Then they stopped at Gran Via/Comte d'Urgell, and again at Plaça de la Universitat where three more passengers collected their luggage and got off. Marten watched carefully, hoping his man in the yellow shirt and salt-and-pepper hair would stand and get off with them. He didn't and the bus continued on.

  The next stop, Plaça Catalunya, within walking distance of the Hotel Regente Majestic, was his. The bus pulled to the curb and Marten stood with a half dozen others. Gathering his traveling bag, he moved toward the front of the bus, glancing at his man as he did. The man stayed where he was, sitting back, his hands in his lap, waiting for the bus to go on. Marten was the last off. He stepped around several people waiting to get on and walked off looking for the street called Rambla de Catalunya and the Hotel Regente Majestic. A moment later the Aerobus passed him, moving away in traffic. He walked on a moment longer, then something made him turn and look back. The man with salt-and-pepper hair and the yellow polo shirt was standing at the bus stop staring after him.

  39

  • MADRID, ATOCHA STATION, 1:05 P.M.

  A folded copy of the Spanish language newspaper El País under his arm, President of the United States John Henry Harris walked down a platform in a group of passengers toward the Altaria train number 1138 that would take him on a five-hour trip northeast to Barcelona. There he would transfer to the Catalunya Express for the hour-plus ride to the one-time Moorish stronghold city of Gerona.

  Everything had been thought through the night before on the ride back to the hotel from Evan Byrd's home following his surprise meeting with "his friends," as he called them. Right off, there had been no doubt that if he refused their demands, they would kill him. It meant he had no choice but to run. And he had. Freeing himself from his Secret Service protection and escaping the hotel had been difficult enough. Carrying out the next piece of action was something else entirely.

  Included in his European agenda had been time set aside to address the annual conference of the New World Institute, a think tank of celebrated international business, academic, and former political leaders who met annually for the express purpose of exploring the future of the world community.

  An institution for more than two hundred years, the NWI had met in various exotic locations around the globe for most of the last century, but for the last twenty-two years it had made its home the exclusive resort of Aragon in the mountains outside of Barcelona. As the newly elected president of the United States he had been invited to be this year's "surprise guest speaker" and give the main address at its Sunday sunrise service. It was something he had agreed to when prevailed upon by the host clergyman, Rabbi David Aznar, a cousin of his late wife and a highly respected leader in the Spanish city of Gerona's large Jewish community.

  That his wife had been Jewish was thought at first to be a political liability to him, but it had proven otherwise. She had been a funny, brilliant, outspoken, and extraordinary life's companion whom the public had adored. That she had been unable to bear children was a sadness they both accepted, but as he climbed the political ladder, they found themselves embraced as if the entire electorate were their family. There were nonstop invitations to spend holidays or other special occasions at the homes of private citizens across a broad economic, racial, and religious range, and often they accepted. The media loved it, the people loved it, his political machinery loved it, and he and his wife loved it.

  It was through her the president had come to know Rabbi David, and the two had become close when the rabbi had traveled several times from Spain to Washington to be with them during his wife's illness and rapid decline. He had been there when she died and had officiated at her funeral; had been there to embrace him on election night; had been a personal guest at his inauguration; and then had invited him to be the surprise speaker at the convention at Aragon. It was to Rabbi David's home in Gerona he was going now, the only person within physical reach he dared trust and confide in, and the only place he knew, for the moment anyway, he could hide.

  Head down, he reached the train and boarded a second-class car in a crowd of other passengers in the same unassuming way he had conducted himself inside the station, when he'd waited patiently in line to pay cash for his ticket. The same way he had all along. On the streets of Madrid and in the café where he'd taken refuge before coming to the station—trying to blend in, not attract attention. So far his luck had held; no one had paid him the slightest notice.

  So far.

  He knew that by now Hap Daniels would have Spanish intelligence, the FBI and CIA, and probably a half-dozen other security agencies working frantically to bring him back under Secret Service control. He was equally certain that the NSA would be using satellites to electronically monitor communications across the whole of Spain. It was the reason he'd left his communications equipment behind—his cell phone, his BlackBerry—because he knew any contact he tried to initiate would be intercepted in seconds, and they'd be on him before he could go a half block.

  Scant hours earlier he'd been the most powerful, protected man on the planet, with every agency and state-of-the-art piece of technology at his fingertips. Now he was a man alone, stripped to nothing but his guile and wits, and charged with the task of stopping the first genuine attempted coup d'état that he knew of in the history of the United States.

  Not just stopping it but crushing it. Whatever it was. Assassinating the leaders of France and Germany and replacing them with leaders they could trust to do their bidding in the United Nations was only the beginning. Part two was putting the Middle East under their control and in the process crushing the Muslim states that comprised it. How they would do that was the real horror: the unknown plan for what had to be a campaign of mass destruction, which he was certain had been devised and developed by the former S
outh African army scientist Merriman Foxx. It was a nightmare beyond anything imaginable.

  Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

  Henry IV, Part 2

  • 1:22 P.M.

  There was a lurch and the train moved slowly out of Atocha Station. The car he had chosen was nearly full when he'd boarded and he'd taken the first available seat on the aisle, next to a man about his age in a leather jacket wearing a beret and reading a magazine. In a show of normalcy he unfolded his newspaper and began to read it. At the same time he tried to stay aware of what was going on around him, alert for anyone—young, old, man, woman—who could be a member of the security forces trying to find him.

  The one thing he had known from the start was that when the Secret Service realized he was gone not only would a massive and very clandestine manhunt have begun in the search for him, but they would also have gone over every inch of the presidential suite trying to put together what had happened. Among those they would call in would be his valet, who would have done an immediate inventory of his clothing and determined that he had worn a black sweater, blue jeans, and running shoes when he left. Those clothes were now in a trash can in a back alley of Madrid's old town and had been replaced by a pair of khaki pants, a blue sport shirt, an inexpensive brown jacket, and brown walking shoes. All paid for with cash and purchased at an El Corte d'Inglés department store. Added to that was the pair of cheap reading glasses bought at a shop near the railway station, and the thing he was certain was helping most of all—he had removed his hairpiece. Hap Daniels and everyone else would be looking for POTUS as they knew him, not the balding, eyeglass-wearing, Spanish-speaking public school administrator or minor civil servant he appeared to be, one carrying a Spanish language newspaper and riding tourist class on the train to Barcelona.

  40

  • BARCELONA, HOTEL REGENTE MAJESTIC, 2:25 P.M.

  Do you know if Ms. Picard has arrived?" Nicholas Marten smiled at the attractive female clerk at the front desk. "My name is Marten. I'm with The Washington Post. We were told to check in here for room assignments."

  "I'm sorry," she smiled. "I don't understand."

  "We're in Barcelona for the Newspaper Writers and Photographers conference. Her name is Picard. P-I-C-A-R-D. First name, Demi."

  "One moment," the woman's fingers danced on her computer keyboard. "Yes, Ms. Picard checked in about noon," she said without looking up. "You said your name was—"

  "Marten. With an 'e.' Nicholas Marten."

  "I don't seem to have a reservation for you, Mr. Marten. Is there any other name it might be under?"

  "I—" Marten hesitated; she'd given him an opening he would be foolish not to use. "I was to have been registered with the small group that included Ms. Picard and Reverend Rufus Beck from Washington, D.C. Reverend Beck has checked in too hasn't he?"

  Again the woman's fingers worked the keyboard. "Reverend Beck has a reservation but has not yet arrived."

  Marten was right. Demi had followed Beck here. "And you say you have no reservation for me?" he asked with all sincerity.

  "No, sir."

  "I was afraid something like this would happen. Never trust a new secretary to do your own work." Marten looked off, as if trying to decide what to do next, then looked back. "Do you have a room? Anything will do," he smiled, "Please, it's been a very long day already."

  She looked at him sympathetically. "Let me see what I can find."

  Room 3117 was small but with a view of the street below and Marten stood at the edge of the window looking down at it. He hadn't liked using his own name to check in, but he had hardly come prepared with an alias or false documents, so he'd had no choice.

  Still, he was reasonably certain he'd lost his salt-and-pepper-haired, yellow-polo-shirted tail—and he was sure the man had been tailing him. He'd followed him at a distance the first five blocks Marten had walked after leaving the Aerobus stop at Plaça Catalunya. Then Marten had deliberately entered a tapas bar on Pelai Street, where he'd had a light lunch and lingered for nearly an hour. Then, playing the tourist and taking his time, he left and walked toward the Plaça de la Universitat, stopping to browse in a bookstore, then a shoe store, and then spending a solid thirty minutes exploring a huge Zara department store before going out a side exit and making his way to the hotel on Rambla de Catalunya. In none of those places had he seen Salt and Pepper.

  Who he was or who the baggy-jacketed man who had followed him from Valletta was, he had no idea, except that it had begun in Malta, where the main attraction had been Merriman Foxx. Assuming Foxx had finally done his homework and found Marten had no connection whatsoever to Congresswoman Baker then his displeasure would be greater now than it had been at the Café Tripoli the night before. He would want to know who Marten was and what else he knew and why he was doing what he was, and if he reported to someone. And once he learned enough to satisfy him, Marten could almost certainly be assured the South African would find a way to permanently put an end to his curiosity.

  Marten watched a moment longer then turned from the window and started back across the room. As he did, his cell phone rang. Immediately he clicked on, hoping it was Peter Fadden with information about the Washington, D.C., clinic where Caroline had been taken. Instead he heard the familiar voice of Ian Graff, his supervisor at Fitzsimmons and Justice. Marten loved his work and his employers and he liked Graff a great deal. But he needed none of it now.

  "Ian," he said, surprised, trying to be pleasant. "Hello."

  "Marten, where the hell are you?"

  The rotund, widely read, highly educated Graff, normally pleasant and easygoing, became difficult and quick-tempered under pressure. And Marten knew all too well the ever-increasing pressure to finalize the plans for the large and costly Banfield country estate project they were working on.

  "I'm in—" there was no point in lying, "Barcelona."

  "Barcelona? We tried your hotel in Washington. They said you'd checked out. We assumed you were on your way back here."

  "I'm sorry, I should have called."

  "Yes, you should have. You should also be at your desk right now."

  "I apologize, but this is something very important."

  "So is the Banfield project, if you understand what I'm saying."

  "I understand, Ian. I do. Completely."

  "Just how long is this 'very important' whatever it is going to keep you occupied?"

  "I don't know," Marten crossed to the window and looked out. Still no Salt and Pepper, at least that he could see. Just traffic and pedestrians. "What do you need that I can walk you through from here? Is the problem with the plant selection, the grading permits, the ordering, what?"

  "The problem is Mr. Banfield and his wife. They have decided the rhododendron woods should be on the south hill not the north and that the north hill should be planted instead with eighty to a hundred ginkgo trees."

  "Ginkgo trees?"

  "Yes."

  Marten turned from the window. "They'll grow too high and too thick and will block their view of the river."

  "Exactly what we told them. But that's nothing compared to what they want to do with the forsythia, azalea, and hydrangea placements."

  "They approved all those ten days ago."

  "Well they disapproved all those this morning. They've agreed to pay for the changes. They just won't have the schedule interrupted. If I were you I would hustle my bum back here on the next plane out."

  "I can't do that, Ian. Not right now."

  "Are you employed by us or not?"

  "Please try to understand what I'm doing here is difficult and very personal. If—" A sudden loud knock on Marten's door stopped him in mid sentence. A second knock followed immediately.

  "Ian, hang on a moment, please."

  Marten went into the short hallway that separated the room from the front door. He was almost to the door when the thought suddenly hit—what if he hadn't lost Salt and Pepper after all? What if he was right outside in the corrido
r and Merriman Foxx had decided he wasn't going to play who-what-and-why but was simply going to have him eliminated right then?

  The knock came again.

  "Christ," Marten breathed. Immediately he brought the phone to his ear. "Ian," he said in a voice just above a whisper, "I need to take care of something. E-mail the changes and I'll get back to you as soon as I can."

  He clicked off and the knock came once more, louder and harder. Whoever it was wasn't giving up. He looked around for a weapon of some kind. All he saw was a room telephone on the wall next to him. Immediately he picked it up and rang room service.

  A voice answered in Spanish.

  "Do you speak English?" he said into the phone.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Good. Hold on please."

  Phone in hand, a lifeline to the room service operator if he needed it, Marten took a breath, then turned the lock and opened the door.

  Demi Picard stood in the hallway, hands on her hips, glaring at him. "What Newspaper Writers and Photographers conference?" she spat angrily in her French accent. "How did you find me? What the damn hell are you doing here?"