And then there was the rest, the trail that led Hap to the air-conditioning access panel in the drop ceiling of the presidential suite's bathroom.

A painstaking review of digital videos made by the roof-mounted security cameras showed a produce truck arriving at the hotel at 0302 hours. It had been stopped and searched by Secret Service agents and then cleared to enter the hotel. Security cameras in the hotel's underground parking area showed the same truck coming down a ramp and stopping at a loading dock at 0308 hours (eight minutes past three that morning).

A hotel worker and the truck driver unloaded several cartons of produce and then went to the front of the truck, where the hotel worker signed the delivery manifest. In that moment a vague shadowlike movement was seen near the rear of the truck. It began near the top of the screen, coming from the area of a walk-in freezer, then approached the rear of the truck and went out of view. A moment later the hotel worker stepped away from the truck, and the driver got in and drove away. Security cameras outside the building caught the vehicle as it left the building, turned onto a side street, and disappeared from view.

"Somebody got into the truck while the hotel worker went to talk to the driver. Whoever it was was still in the truck when it left," Hap Daniels had barked in response to what he saw. The vehicle's driver had since been taken into custody by the CNI and had given them the location of his delivery stops immediately after he had left the Ritz.

Meantime, the Secret Service and hotel officials had traced the phantom's progress backward from the truck across to a large walk-in freezer, then to the dimly lit hallway behind it, searching every room and corridor that led from it. Within minutes they'd found a large closed storage area and inside it a main heating and air-conditioning shaft that led to the roof, with side ducting leading to every room on every floor of the building. That the access door to the shaft was locked and had been checked and verified secure by the advance Secret Service team and then checked and verified once again just before the president arrived seemed to rule out the possibility that anyone had gone in that way-using the shafts to get to the presidential suite and kidnap the president and take him back out the same way-especially when the video cameras had caught a lone shadow entering the truck.

In one moment everyone realized the same thing: their entire approach had been designed to prevent someone from getting into the hotel without being seen, not someone trying to get out of it: especially someone who had full knowledge of the concentric blankets of security the Secret Service used-someone like the president himself. Moreover, it appeared he had done it with forethought and purpose. An inventory of the clothes the president's valet packed when they left Washington revealed what was missing-a pair of underwear, athletic socks, running shoes, a black sweater and blue jeans. The clothes the president liked to relax in when his official day was over. His wallet was gone as well. Exactly how much money he might have had in it no one seemed to know for certain, but his personal secretary confirmed she had given him a thousand euros before he left the White House for the European trip. Carrying a fair amount of cash wherever he went was a habit that dated back to President Harris's farm days, when he paid cash for almost everything.

As for his use of the hotel's ventilation ducts to avoid Secret Service surveillance, hotel maintenance people had demonstrated how the access panels to the main ducting system could be opened from the inside, and that those same panels would automatically relock once whoever had been inside came out and the panel had been closed behind them. Moreover there were built-in footholds that ran from roof to basement in the main shafts, and the side ducts leading to the guest and public rooms were wide enough for a man to squeeze through.

As skeptical as Hap Daniels might have been at the start that the president had acted alone and used the ducting system as a means to make his escape from the hotel, the clincher came when the remains of several recently burned wooden matches were found at the bottom of the shaft that opened into the storage area. The president's friend, Evan Byrd, was a pipe smoker and had little collections of small decorative boxes of wooden matches near ashtrays throughout his home. Daniels had seen President Harris pick up several of those boxes as they left Byrd's residence the night before and put them in his pocket. The president didn't smoke and as far as Daniels knew, never had, so what he'd wanted the matches for had been anyone's guess. Now he understood. They had been to light his way through the hotel's ducting system without having to turn on the system's interior lights and thereby take the chance he might trip some kind of alarm.

"Hap?" Jake Lowe's voice came at him from the other room.

"In here."

A moment later Lowe and National Security Adviser Marshall entered the presidential suite's bathroom, where Daniels and two other Secret Service agents were examining an open access panel in the bathroom's drop ceiling.

"This is where he went out," Hap was looking up into the duct area where a third Secret Service agent could be heard moving around in the duct work.

"Anything?" Daniels called up.

"Yeah," the agent's head suddenly appeared in the open rectangle. "For one thing, the maintenance guys were right. You get up here and slide the panel closed behind you. A simple turn of a bolt will relock it. Nobody would know anyone ever used it."

"How did he get it open from down here? It takes a special key."

"You want it, you got it. Catch." The agent dropped a twisted piece of steel into Daniels's hand. "It's a spoon. Bent to operate like a key. Crude, but it works. I tried it."

Lowe stared at the spoon and then looked to Jim Marshall. "Room service. A sandwich. A beer. Ice cream. You need a spoon to eat ice cream. He knew what he was going to do all along." Abruptly he turned to Daniels. "Let's go talk."

• 12:00 P.M.

Sixty seconds later Lowe, Jim Marshall, and Hap Daniels entered the secure room they had used earlier. Lowe closed the door behind them.

"I think by now we can presume the president did this on his own," Lowe looked at Daniels. "You agree?"

"Yes, sir, I agree. The question is why?"

Lowe and Marshall exchanged the briefest glance, then Lowe walked across the room. "Obviously none of us has that answer," he said. "But my sense is that too much has happened too quickly for him. To the point he was pushed to sheer psychological exhaustion. I'm no psychologist, but this trip, the way it's been going, France and Germany in particular, and coming so soon on the heels of a long and enormously draining election campaign, followed almost point-blank by the inauguration, fine-tuning the cabinet and what's going on in the Middle East, has been, strong as he is, exceedingly trying, as it would be for anybody. I know because we've had private conversations about it. He even asked me once if I thought he was really suited for the job. Add the thing he doesn't talk about but that I know still haunts him, the death of his wife-think of him winning the election and then spending his first Christmas in thirty-three years without her and alone in the White House to boot. On top of that we all know how close he was to Mike and Caroline Parsons and their son.

"Maybe if he was the kind of guy to complain or get testy or even get drunk once in a while it would be different, but he isn't. Put it all together and you've got a man who's kept it all inside and is emotionally spent. All of sudden it catches up with him and he does something crazy, just to keep from suffocating.