• 3:24 A.M.

Miguel stood inside the command post with his arms folded over his chest. Captain Diaz stood in front of him. So did Bill Strait. So too did Dr. James Marshall. Hector and Amado were off to one side, silent, in the custody of two CNP officers. To Miguel's relief and delight, everyone seemed to be as exhausted as he was. It meant the longer he could drag this out, the longer it would be before they took action.

Hap had bought the president, Marten, and himself precious time earlier by giving up Hector and Amado. Miguel had given them a bit more by going off on his own and then watching the movement of the helicopter searchlights from the hilltop. When he'd seen the helos start downstream he'd taken off the Mylar blanket and exposed himself to the satellite's thermal imaging. It had worked almost instantly. In seconds the three helos pulled away and headed straight for him. Less than a minute later he was in the blaze of a searchlight. Then the helos touched down and armed men came running.

He'd told them his story at gunpoint, then repeated it to CNP and U.S. Secret Service agents in the helicopter on the way here. And now he was determined to tell it once more. Using up time was everything.

"Look," he said patiently in his Australian-accented Barcelonan English. "I will try and explain it to you once again. My name is Miguel Balius. I am a limousine driver from Barcelona. I came to visit my cousin in El Borràs. When I arrived he was not there and his wife was crazy because my nephew Amado and his friend Hector were missing. Amado," he pointed at his nephew, "is that chap there. Hector is him," he gestured directly at Hector. "They were gone all day, did not come home for supper, nobody knows where they are, everybody's upset. Except I know where they are. Or I think I know. They're where they're not supposed to be. Up in the old mine tunnels looking for gold that's not there but everyone thinks it is. There is no gold in these mountains, but nobody believes it. Anyway, I tell no one, and take my cousin's motorcycle and come up here. I find their motorcycles where they always leave them. It starts to rain. I start to look. Eventually I find what I think are footprints. I follow them. It gets later. I'm wet and cold. Then, all of sudden, boom! Bright lights from the sky and in come these helicopters. Men jump out with guns. They want to know about the president of the United States. I say, 'I understand he's a nice man.' They say, 'What else do you know?' I say that I saw on the news he was taken away from Madrid in the middle of the night because of some terrorist threat. Next thing I know here I am and luckily I find Amado and Hector safe."

"You were with the president, out there on the mountain," Bill Strait said flatly.

"The president of the United States is out there on the mountain?"

"Where is he?"

"I came up here after Amado and Hector."

"What were you doing with a Mylar blanket?" Strait's manner was like ice, his questioning increasingly accusatory.

"I'm going into the mountains alone in the cold and rain and dark. I'm going to take something to help protect me. It's all I had."

"The protection you were looking for was from satellite surveillance."

Miguel laughed. "I'm running around in the dark and you've got a satellite looking for me? Thanks very much. I appreciate the help."

"Where is the president?" Strait pushed hard. "Who else was with him?"

"I said I came up here after Amado and Hector."

"Where is he?" Strait was right in Miguel's face, his eyes like stone, his stare cutting him in half.

"The president?"

"Yes."

"You mean now?"

"Yes, now."

Miguel suddenly stopped his banter and looked Bill Strait in the eye. "I have absolutely no idea."

• 3:30 A.M.

They sat on the flat of a rock-strewn trail at the bottom of the chute. They were shaking, breathless, scraped, bloodied, torn, wasted. But they'd made it. Each man accounted for. Each had said something to make sure he still had a grip on his senses. Each was enormously thankful to have made it down alive.

Far above they could see the helos still moving back and forth, playing their searchlights over the high pinnacles and the conifer forest below them. It meant that, for the moment at least, no one had found their trail or the drop into hell they had used for their escape.

The president took a deep breath and looked to José. "You are a very special person," he said in Spanish. "I thank you for myself and for all of us. I would like to call you my friend." He reached out and extended his hand.

José hesitated for the briefest moment, then looked to the others and back at the president. A shy, proud smile crept over his face as he reached out to take the president's hand.

"Gracias, sir. Usted es mi amigo," he looked to the others and nodded. "You es todos mis amigos." Thank you, sir. You are my friend. You are all my friends.

Abruptly the president stood. "Where do we go now?"

"There," José stood, nodding toward a narrow path leading through a rocky canyon. Just then the clouds parted enough for the moon to appear, lighting the entire area-from the deep canyon floor where they were to the pinnacles and mountaintops far above-like a silver moonscape. They could see the chute clearly, how deathly steep and narrow it really was and how far they had come down it. At any other time the idea of a grown man, let alone four, sliding down it out of his own choosing would have been insane if not suicidal, but this was hardly any other time.

The president looked to José. "Vámonos," he said. Let's go.

José nodded and led them off quickly toward the canyon.

• 5:20 A.M.

Nicholas Marten stood in the open doorway of a tiny tin-roof and stone outbuilding on the edge of the Aragon vineyard, a structure Hap had remembered from his walk-through of the resort site a month earlier when the Secret Service had been preparing for the president's visit. Mylar blanket finally taken off, Hap's Sig Sauer automatic stuck in his belt, he was eating a handful of dried dates they'd found in a bag on the shelf when they arrived, and looking up at the sky. The weather was clear now, the moon just dipping behind the high peaks to the west. In another hour the horizon would begin to pale. In two it would be fully light. Sunup would come a half hour later.

Marten stood there a moment longer trying to visualize the steep zigzag trail they had come down after they'd left the base of the chute. So far he had seen nothing of the helicopters nor anything else to suggest that their tracks had been found and that their trail was being followed. With luck, Marine Corps Major George Herman "Woody" Woods and the other helo pilots were still confining their search to the mountains and would continue to do so until well after daybreak. What they did afterward would be of little consequence, because by then, if things worked the way Hap had outlined, they would have breached the Aragon resort's massive security force, and the president would long since have arrived at the church on the hill and given the speech of his life to the highly prestigious members of the New World Institute.

• 5:23 A.M.

Marten turned and went back inside. José was curled up asleep on the floor just inside the door. A few feet to his left, Hap slept the sleep of the dead, the Steyr machine pistol in the crook of his arm. Safely back from the doorway on Hap's far side, President Harris slept too.

Marten slid the Sig Sauer from his belt and sat down in the doorway. They had reached the outbuilding just before 4:30. Five minutes afterward Hap had determined that the area was secure. It was then they found a watering hose tethered to a wall outside the building and the bag of dates inside, and all four ate and drank. Almost immediately extreme weariness began to overtake them and Marten volunteered first watch. At 5:45 he was to wake Hap and then have some forty-odd minutes of sleep himself before they were up and moving at 6:30, hoping to cover the three-quarters of a mile across the vineyards and up the hill, to where the resort's maintenance buildings were, just before daybreak.