The voices of the monks rose again, echoing though the speakers in the video room. The three went back to watch. Seconds later Beck proclaimed something. The monks' chant became stronger. Abruptly a second wall of flame rose through the fog encircling the women like fiery snakes. These were like the first outer rings that continued to burn, only they were closer. A tantalizing entertainment that was like a slow striptease, only this was no striptease but a heinously choreographed murder designed to inflict as much human pain as possible.

Now a third ring of fire exploded from below, circled, and came closer still. Cristina shrieked as the flame touched the base of her throne. She looked frantically to Demi for help. But there was no help. For either of them.

Marten glanced at José in the doorway, then looked to Hap. "Shoot the door hinges. If you can't get it open, try the sensor above it." He took Foxx's BlackBerry-like device from his jacket pocket and tossed it to him. "It was Foxx's. I tried to get it to work before, couldn't. You would've been schooled in some of this stuff, maybe you can." Immediately he looked at the president. "We're going. Forty seconds and cut the power."

"Good luck, Cousin," the president said.

For the briefest moment their eyes met and they knew that it might be for the last time. "You too."

"Marten, two things," Hap offered. "I'm giving you an extra sixty seconds."

"Why?"

"To get to the women you'll have to go through that fire. Stop at the room marked 'W/C,' soak your hair and your clothes. That'll take up the extra minute. Next, I'd wager a million bucks that those monks are armed. Weapons concealed under their robes. Any one of them makes a move toward you, shoot him in the face. You'll scare the hell out of the rest."

"I hope," Marten glanced at José, then back to Hap. "Let us out."

• ONE MINUTE, 38 SECONDS

The door clicked behind them, Marten slid the Sig Sauer from his belt, and they started down the hallway.

• ONE MINUTE, 32 SECONDS

They were at the storeroom door and then inside.

• ONE MINUTE, 28 SECONDS

Marten picked two flashlights from a shelf near the workbench and handed one to José, then lifted a pair of tin snips from where they hung on the board behind it.

• ONE MINUTE, 24 SECONDS

Marten closed the storeroom door and they moved into the hallway, heading for the W/C, the restroom.

• ONE MINUTE, 20 SECONDS

José watched the door while Marten took off his groundskeeper's uniform. Shirt first, then pants, and dunked them both in the toilet. When they were sopping wet he pulled them back on and stopped at the washbasin to drench his hair.

Sixty seconds later exactly, they left the W/C.

• 19 SECONDS

Now they were at the stairs and starting up, Marten first, tin snips and flashlight in his belt, Sig Sauer in his hand, his mind on the stage, the altar behind it, and the door they would go through to reach both. Thinking too, about the emergency lights that would come on as soon as the power was cut. Where they were located and how much they would illuminate.

Marten had taken the tin snips to cut the women free, but now he worried what the material was that had been used to bind them. If the snips didn't work, his only alternative would be to shoot the bindings free. Tricky under any circumstances because it would have to be done very quickly and accurately, never mind the dark. The situation with Demi was made all the worse because she was bound not only at the wrists and feet but at the throat. A missed shot there could be fatal.

• 14 SECONDS

They reached the top of the stairs and saw the hallway to the side that Hap had described. Marten turned José quickly down it.

• 10 SECONDS

The hallway ended. The door was right there. Marten suddenly worried it might be locked. He turned the knob. There was a slight click as the mechanism released. He pushed against it ever so slightly. The door gave and opened a crack. He pulled it back.

• 6 SECONDS

He looked at José. The teenager smiled and nodded.

"Gracias, José, gracias."

José smiled again and fisted him on the shoulder. Marten smiled and fisted him back. This kid was terrific. He could do anything and already had.

• 2 SECONDS

One!

The hallway went dark.

• 9:16 A.M.

Marten and José stepped through the door in the dark. Twenty feet in front of them they could see the fog-shrouded stage and in the center of it the roaring circles of fire surrounding Demi on the right and Cristina on the left. As yet, and mercifully, neither had begun to burn.

From what Marten could see there was one more ring yet to ignite, and that was directly at the feet of both women. Once the gas jets opened and caught fire, the women would begin to burn and the screaming would start. Clearly the Covenant's hellish cabaret had been designed to create as much titillating drama as possible before the actual murder began. Heinous as it was, it was just this deliberately measured tempo that had so far kept the women alive.

"Go," Marten whispered, and they moved to the darkness to the right of the altar. From there they could just make out the members of the congregation, all talking in confusion about the sudden loss of power. They were a collection of vague figures lighted only by the spill from three stained-glass windows high above and by the soft flood of a half dozen emergency lights that illuminated the exits leading to the main doors. Everything else was dark.

Marten took José by the arm and motioned him forward, making a semicircular motion that meant he should go to the front of the stage and then come in from the side, waiting until then before turning on his flashlight and beginning his decoy act as a maintenance man.

• 9:17 A.M.

"What happened?" Luciana found Beck and three monks huddled in the dimness just off the stage.

"We don't know, we accessed the two main breaker panels off the nave. Everything was in order," Beck said brusquely. Abruptly he looked to one of the monks. "Cover the doors, no one in or out. Put six men on the vice president's section. We have no idea what this is."

• 9:18 A.M.

"Where and what, exactly?" Captain Diaz demanded in Spanish from a large curly-haired man in white pants and a white T-shirt. The two were standing nose to nose in the center of the Aragon Resort's laundry, Bill Strait, Dr. James Marshall, and three CNP officers hovering just feet away.

"Four clean groundskeeper's uniforms are missing," the laundryman said hurriedly in Spanish. "The opening man counts inventory every morning. The closing man does the same at night. Because it's Sunday and because of all the security we have very few people on; I only came in to count them about ten minutes ago."

Immediately Diaz turned to Strait and Marshall. "Four groundskeeper's uniforms are missing. He found them gone a little after nine."

• SAME TIME

Hap cursed out loud as the aging screwdriver he'd retrieved from the storage room slipped out of the slot of the final screw of eight. By now they should have been outside, texting Woody for help. Instead they were in Merriman Foxx's inner bunker trying to remove the housing from dual interconnected computers in an effort to remove their hard drives; hard drives, the president insisted, reflecting what Marten had said, very possibly containing the Covenant's own DNA and "a treasure trove of vital information." Despite Hap's protest and the ticking clock, he'd steadfastly refused to leave without doing everything possible to retrieve them. At that point Hap knew he had no choice but to go along and had given themselves the four to five minutes-the time he'd allotted to Marten to get the women out-to do it.