"The story Dick Greene is telling the media downstairs-that the Secret Service hustled him away in the middle of the night to an undisclosed location following a credible terrorist threat we can't talk about-is the one we'll continue to use even when we get him back. That way he gets enough time for a full medical exam and then, assuming he's alright, to rest and recover before he goes to the NATO meeting in Warsaw." Lowe came back across the room. Before, he had been talking to them both; now he was looking directly at Hap Daniels.

"We know what he was wearing when he went out and the places where the delivery truck stopped after it left the hotel. He's on his own, maybe even disoriented. It's not like he can walk around like a tourist without being recognized. With your people, the CIA, Spanish intelligence, and Madrid law enforcement working together, my guess is he's not going to stay missing for very long."

Daniels said nothing. He just hoped to hell Lowe was right.

"Chief of staff is arranging for a place to take him once we have him. It's up to us-Jim, myself, chief of staff, Press Secretary Greene here in Madrid and the vice president and secretary of state in Washington-to dance with other governments and the media until we can bring him public again. It's up to you to find him and get him the hell out of here fast and unseen to the marker location. You guys got President Bush secretly to Iraq twice, the first time nobody even knew he was gone until he was back home in Texas." Lowe paused and his eyes narrowed, "Hap, we need, we have to have, that same efficiency here. The situation is infinitely more critical."

"I understand, sir. This happened on our watch. We'll take care of it."

"I know you will, Hap," Lowe looked at Marshall, then walked Daniels to the door and opened it. "Good luck to us all," he said, and Special Agent Hap Daniels left. Lowe closed the door and came back into the room. "He buy it?"

"That the president went off the deep end?"

"Yes."

"I don't think he had any choice. His feathers are really ruffled. The president is gone, it happened while he was in charge and he feels personally responsible. He's not just protecting the man, he's protecting the office. He wants exactly what we want, the president back as quickly and with as little noise as possible. As if he'd never left."

Lowe walked to a mahogany sideboard, turned over two glasses and picked up a bottle of whiskey. He poured a double shot into each glass and handed one to Marshall.

"It seems we have a president who has decided he wants to be his own man and who has very definite ideas of how he wants the country run," Lowe took a stiff tug at his drink. "In all the years I've known him I never had the slightest clue he wasn't a team player all the way. Until now."

Marshall took a drink then set his glass on a table next to him. "It's a humbling lesson, Jake. One that's going to cost the president his life. Let's just hope to hell it doesn't get that expensive for us."

• 12:25 P.M.

Nicholas Marten heard the grind of hydraulics as the aircraft's landing gear came down. Ten minutes later he was on the ground at Barcelona's El Prat Airport and heading into the terminal. Twenty minutes after that he had collected his luggage and was in line to board the Aerobus for the twenty-five-minute trip into the city. His thoughts-only moments earlier on Merriman Foxx and Demi Picard and the brief phone conversation he'd had with Peter Fadden while waiting to board his flight in Malta-had now shifted to a man three passengers in line behind him. He was about five-foot ten, Caucasian, and maybe forty, with salt and pepper hair. He wore sunglasses and a light yellow polo shirt tucked into blue jeans; a small red traveling bag was thrown indifferently over his left shoulder. He looked like a tourist, one accustomed to traveling casually and lightly. There was nothing about him to attract attention, and Marten probably wouldn't have noticed him at all if he had not seen him nod in passing at the young man in jeans and baggy jacket who had been in the lobby of his hotel in Valletta and then on the flights from Valletta to Rome and Rome to Barcelona. And now that young man was no longer there but this other man was, waiting in line behind him to board the blue Aerobus into Barcelona. If the first man had indeed followed him from Valletta, then there was every possibility this second man was now tailing him. In essence, one had handed him off to the other.

• 12:30 P.M.

That second man was now two seats in front of him and on the other side of the bus looking out the window as they turned out of the airport for the drive into the city. Marten watched him for a long moment and then sat back and tried to relax.

Today was Friday, April 7. The day before yesterday the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police had escorted him from Caroline's memorial service and put him on a plane to London, where he'd arrived the next day, yesterday, and soon afterward boarded another flight to Malta. Then this morning, following last evening's encounter with Merriman Foxx, he'd hurriedly left the island following Demi Picard to Barcelona. He was jet-lagged, had had very little sleep, and was running on little more than adrenaline. He knew he had to be aware of his own state of mind. In situations like this it was easy to make monsters out of what in reality were only furry little animals. Meaning there was every chance he was wrong about the salt and pepper-haired man in the dark glasses and yellow polo shirt, and that the nod that had taken place between him the baggy-jacketed young man might well have been nothing at all, and in truth that neither man had any design on him whatsoever. So he let it go and thought back to the telephone conversation he'd had earlier with Peter Fadden, reaching him in London shortly after the Washington Post reporter arrived on a stopover on the way to cover the upcoming NATO summit in Warsaw.

Marten had quickly briefed him on his encounter with Merriman Foxx at the Café Tripoli the night before, telling him how he had played himself off as an aide to Subcommittee Chairwoman Baker and how Foxx's initial congeniality had quickly become heated over Marten's questions about the testing of experimental toxins on humans after South Africa's biological weapons had been officially destroyed. He'd become even more heated when Marten told him the made-up story about a memo Congressman Mike Parsons left shortly before his death in a plane crash suggesting that Foxx had consulted in secret with Dr. Lorraine Stephenson, over the course of the committee hearings. Adding separately, that Parsons had questioned the truthfulness of Foxx's testimony. Foxx's reaction, Marten said, had been to fiercely defend his testimony and to deny knowing Dr. Stephenson, after which he'd abruptly ended the conversation and walked off.

Finally he told Fadden about Caroline's fearful description of the "white-haired man with the long hideous fingers and that horrid thumb with its tiny balled cross" who had examined her at the clinic where she had been taken following her breakdown after the funerals of her husband and son.

"Peter," Marten had said emphatically, "Foxx not only has white hair, he has extraordinarily long fingers and that same tattoo on his thumb. I can tell you he was involved both with Dr. Stephenson and with Caroline's death. One more thing-when I met him he was having dinner with congressional chaplain Rufus Beck."

"Beck?" Fadden had been wholly surprised.

"They weren't trying to hide it either. At least not tucked away the way they were in a café in Malta and thinking Foxx was meeting with a representative of Congresswoman Baker."

"I don't get it," Fadden said.

"I don't either. Reverend Beck and Dr. Foxx should be like oil and water."