Earlier that morning he had breakfasted with Italian prime minister Aldo Visconti, and afterward he'd addressed the Italian parliament. His grand dinner at the Palazzo del Quirinale with Mario Tonti, the president of Italy, the night before, had been filled with warmth and goodwill and the two leaders developed a bond almost immediately. By evening's end Harris had invited the Italian president to visit him at his ranch in the California wine country, and Tonti had enthusiastically accepted. That the relationship had developed as it had was important politically, because even as the Italian populace was wary of America's moves and intentions in the Middle East, Tonti had gone out of his way to show the president that he had a strong and dependable ally in Europe. This morning Prime Minister Visconti had assured Harris of the same. The support of both men was a crucial gain for his tour and all the more important after his more painful experiences in Paris and Berlin, and he was grateful for it. Yet it was Paris and Berlin, or rather the leaders of France and Germany, that still hung in his mind. He had dropped his idea of discussing the Jake Lowe-Dr. James Marshall problem with either Secretary of State Chaplin or Defense Secretary Langdon because he knew that if he did, it would become an overriding cause for worry, and the attention to it would take away the focus on their overall mission.

Besides, frightening and unsettling as it had been, it was still only conversation, and neither man was on hand to take it any further. Earlier that morning Lowe had flown on to Madrid to meet with staff members and the advance Secret Service team at the Hotel Ritz, where he would be staying. Marshall had remained behind in Rome to spend the rest of the day in conference with his Italian counterpart.

Harris sat back, fingered a glass of orange juice, and wondered what he had missed in his judgment of Lowe and Marshall that they could be seriously discussing things he would have thought were so alien to their natures. Then he remembered Jake Lowe taking a phone call from Tom Curran during the motorcade in Berlin and being told afterward of the murder of Caroline Parsons's physician, Lorraine Stephenson. He remembered thinking out loud about the very recent deaths of Mike Parsons, his son, and then Caroline, all three compounded by the murder of Caroline's doctor. He remembered turning to Jake Lowe and saying something like: "They are all dead over so short a time. What is going on?"

"It's a tragic coincidence, Mr. President," Lowe had responded.

"Is it?"

"What else would it be?"

Maybe Lowe was right; maybe it was a tragic coincidence. Then again, maybe it wasn't, especially not in light of the "assassination" business. Immediately he pressed the intercom button at his sleeve.

"Yes, Mr. President," the voice of his chief of staff came back.

"Tom, would you please ask Hap Daniels to step in here? I'd like to chat with him about procedures in Madrid."

"Yes, sir."

Five seconds later the door opened and his forty-three-year-old Secret Service detail leader entered.

"You wanted to see me, Mr. President?"

"Come in, Hap," Harris said. "Please close the door."

Nicholas Marten felt the aircraft bank slightly as the pilot swung them southeast, crossing the Tyrrhenian Sea toward the lower boot of Italy. Soon they would drop down over Sicily and begin their approach to Malta.

At seven fifteen that morning his British Airways flight from Washington had touched down at London's Heathrow Airport. By eight he had retrieved his luggage and bought a ticket on Air Malta for a ten thirty flight that would get him to the Maltese capital of Valletta at three that afternoon. In between he had a cup of coffee and some poached eggs with marmalade toast, booked a room at Valletta's three-star Hotel Castille, and tried calling Peter Fadden in Washington to tell him what had happened with the police and that he was on his way to Malta. Fadden's cell phone had been answered by voice mail, so he'd left a brief message giving Fadden his cell phone number, then backed it up with a similar call to his Washington Post office, saying he'd try to reach him again later in the day. Then he'd waited for his flight and tried to put together the pieces of what had happened in Washington, the most curious of which was what the French writer and photojournalist Demi Picard had asked him outside the church just before the police arrived. Had Caroline mentioned "the witches" before she died?

Witches?

No, that wasn't quite it. She'd said "the witches."

The same as Caroline had said. "The ca-"

Whether she had been meaning to say "the committee" was still a guess, but it seemed more than reasonable if-and it was a big if-Dr. Merriman Foxx turned out to be not only "the whitehaired man" but also the "doctor" Lorraine Stephenson had so feared that she put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger in front of him.

Merriman Foxx and Dr. Lorraine Stephenson aside, there was no doubt Caroline had said "the ca." Just as Demi Picard had said "the witches." Both had been plural, meaning there had been more than one person involved. And if Caroline had indeed been referring to a committee, she would have been talking about a group.

• VALLETTA, MALTA, 3:30 P.M.

Marten took a taxi from the airport to the Hotel Castille and checked into a comfortable third-floor room with a large window that gave him a striking view of the city's Grand Harbor and its massive stone fortress, St. Angelo, which jutted into the sea from an island across from the city. The fortress had been built, his taxi driver told him on the way from the airport, in the sixteenth century at the behest of the Knights of St. John to protect the island from the invading Ottoman Turks. "It might have looked like the Knights of St. John versus the Turks," he'd said loudly and passionately. "But it was really West against East. Christianity versus Islam. The groundwork for today's terrorist devils was put down right here in Malta five hundred years ago."

He was exaggerating of course, but with Marten's first viewing of the harbor fortifications from his hotel window came an immediate, even eerie, awareness of that past. Despite its oversimplicity, what the cabdriver had said might well be true; the great distrust between East and West had indeed been established centuries earlier on this tiny Mediterranean archipelago.

Jet-lagged but energized, Marten took a quick shower and shaved, then pulled on a light turtleneck sweater, fresh slacks, and a tweed sport coat, from the clothes he had so hastily packed when he'd left Manchester on the run to be with Caroline.

Fifteen minutes later, a hotel-provided map of Valletta in his pocket, he was walking down Triq ir-Repubblika, or Republic Street, the city's main shopping venue, looking for Triq San Gwann, or St. John Street, and then number 200, which according to Peter Fadden was the home of Dr. Merriman Foxx.

What he would do when he got there he'd worked out in London during his wait in the Air Malta passenger lounge. He'd found a cubicle with an Internet connection, plugged in his electronic notebook, then logged on and accessed the U.S. Congressional Record Web page. There he'd scrolled down to the Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism Mike Parsons had been part of, then clicked on the list of its members and found the name of the committee's chairwoman: Representative Jane Dee Baker, a Democrat from Maine, who, as a further Internet search turned up, was at that moment part of a small contingent of congresspeople on a fact-finding tour of Iraq.