"The pleasure would be mine, reverend."

Five minutes later Marten stood on Triq id-Dejqa watching the taillights of a taxi carrying Reverend Beck, Cristina, and Demi Picard disappear in a swirling fog. He glanced back down the dampened alley toward the Café Tripoli. The door was closed. Nothing stirred. He wondered how Foxx had left without him seeing him, or if he had left at all. In either case there was nothing he could do about it now. He took a breath and then stepped off for the walk back to his hotel, Demi's words still clear as when she'd stopped at the bar on her way from the loo.

"I don't know who you really are or what you're doing here," she'd said forcefully with the same heated tone she used before. "But stay away from us before you ruin everything." With that she'd turned and gone up the stairs to where Cristina and the Reverend Beck waited.

Ruin everything. What did that mean?

And now as he walked, making his way in damp night air toward the R.A.F. war memorial and after it the Upper Baracca Gardens on the way to his hotel, Demi's words faded in favor of what Reverend Beck had said as he bade him goodbye.

It was a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Marten, perhaps we shall do it another time soon.

See you again-again.

It meant Beck knew who he was, and clearly remembered their meeting in Caroline's hospital room. At the time they'd met, the subject of Marten's profession had never come up, so it was possible that he might believe Marten did indeed work in Congresswoman Baker's office. Nonetheless it was a coincidence that would have been pointedly discussed with Foxx when he returned to the table. Couple that with the fact that Marten had not only brought up Caroline's name and that of Dr. Stephenson but that he'd said Mike Parsons had left a memo behind questioning the veracity of Foxx's testimony before the committee-Foxx would have put all those things together in a hurry, which was undoubtedly the reason the evening had ended so abruptly for everyone.

• MADRID, 10:40 P.M.

The lights of nighttime Madrid flashed by. The Palacio de la Moncloa, residence of the Spanish prime minister, the dinner there with the newly elected prime minister and the twenty or so top Spanish industrialists he had invited to join them, over and done with and left behind.

Only four people rode in the presidential limousine, the Secret Service agent driving, a second agent riding shotgun beside him, and the two in the back; President John Henry Harris and his Secret Service special agent in charge, Hap Daniels. The interior communications system was turned off. Whatever the president and Daniels said was wholly private.

The motorcade itself had been reduced to the presidential limousine, two black Secret Service SUVs, and the black communications Hummer following behind. This time there was no ambulance, no staff van, no press pool van-just a small presidential motorcade going to a private residence in the wealthy La Moraleja suburb to share a brief drink with an old friend, Evan Byrd. Byrd was a former network news correspondent and press secretary to the late president Charles Cabot. For a time he had been President Harris's press secretary, before he retired to this Madrid suburb. After that it was back to the Hotel Ritz where the presidential entourage had taken over the entire fourth floor and the president looked forward to a sound night's sleep.

"The plane carrying Representative Parsons and his son"-Hap Daniels was reading from notes taken in a small spiral notebook. No BlackBerry here, no chance that the information he had received could have been electronically monitored, just handwritten notes jotted down in an everyday notebook. What he had learned had come over the STU, or secure-line phone, he had as part of his own personal communications equipment-"went down due to pilot error, at least according to investigators from the NTSB. No part of the aircraft was found to have malfunctioned."

"We know the official word, Hap," Harris said, "Is that all you were able to find out?"

"As far as the crash is concerned, yes, sir. The thing that no one seems to know about, or at least to have brought up, was that Mrs. Parsons was to have been on the flight with them. Her plans changed at the last minute and she flew back to Washington on a commercial flight. It was coincidental. There certainly was no conspiracy theory behind the crash. No reason to expect foul play. She never made a thing of it, at least publicly. It appears to have been one of those things that just happened."

"One of those things…"

"Yes, sir."

President Harris nodded vaguely, trying to absorb whatever meaning there might or might not be in Caroline's change of plans, then immediately moved on.

"The man in Caroline's hospital room, the one Caroline gave legal access to her and Mike's private papers."

"All we have is what we knew before. His name is Nicholas Marten. He's an American ex-pat living in Manchester, England, and working as a landscape architect. He's seems to have known the Parsons family for a long time; at least that's what he told the D.C. police. Their feeling was that he and Caroline Parsons had had a relationship of some kind. He said they were just old friends. No proof of it. But no sense he was blackmailing her either."

"Why did the police talk to him?"

"He'd made some pretty strong phone calls to Mrs. Parsons's doctor after she died. He wanted to ask her about Mrs. Parsons's illness but she wouldn't talk to him, claimed privileged information between doctor and patient. They thought he might have been involved in her murder. But there was nothing to hold him on so they put him on a plane to England and basically told him not to come back."

"The murder of Caroline Parsons's doctor? What do we have on that?"

"That's a nasty one, Mr. President. She was beheaded."

"Beheaded?"

"Yes, sir. The head hasn't been found, and the police have kept it very quiet during their investigation. The FBI has its own people on it."

"When was someone going to inform the White House?"

"I don't know, sir. Probably they felt there was no need."

"Why a beheading?"

"You're thinking some kind of terrorist act. Some Islamic group."

"It doesn't make any difference what I think. It's what I know. And so far no one seems to know much of anything. Get somebody you're comfortable with in the FBI to keep you on top of it. Tell them I'm interested personally but don't want the media to jump on it and blow it out of proportion. We don't need to stir up the Islamic world any more than it's already stirred up, especially if there's nothing to it and the head business was done by some cuckoo out there."

"Yes, sir."

"Now," the president shifted gears. "Caroline Parsons. I want a report on what kind of infection she had, how she got it, and the treatment for it, from initial diagnosis to death. Again, I don't want to send up a flare, I just want the information as quietly as you can get it. We've got four people dead here in a very short time. Three from the same family and the last, Caroline's doctor."

"There's something else you should know, Mr. President. I don't know if it means anything but Representative Parsons…"

"What about him?"

"He tried to get an appointment to see you privately. Twice. Once during his subcommittee hearings on terrorism. Once again the day they were concluded."

"How do you know?"

"His secretary requested it, but she never heard back."

"Mike Parsons had full access to me, anytime. Chief of staff knew that, my secretary knew it too. What happened?"

"I don't know, sir. You'd have to ask them."

Suddenly Hap Daniels put a hand to his headset; at the same time the limousine slowed and then leaned as the Secret Service driver made a sharp right turn and started up a long private driveway.