"Yet they're both comfortable enough to be around someone they think works for the chairwoman of the subcommittee Foxx was testifying in front of."

"Not just testifying, Peter. Testifying in a classified investigation."

Marten finished with the rest: that the French photo-journalist Demi Picard had been with Foxx and Reverend Beck at the Café Tripoli and had privately warned Marten to "stay away" before he "ruined everything"; and that early this morning Foxx and Reverend Beck had left Malta for places unknown and that Demi had left soon afterward, going to Barcelona with a reservation at the Hotel Regente Majestic, which was where Marten was headed now.

"Peter," he'd said emphatically as his flight was called for boarding, "try to find the name of the clinic where Caroline Parsons was taken after Dr. Stephenson gave her the injection and before she was transferred to George Washington University Hospital. She had to have been there for several days. There has to be some record of it and of who treated her and for what."

Marten felt the Aerobus slow and he looked up. The man with the dark glasses and light yellow polo shirt was watching him. Caught, he smiled casually, then turned away to look out the window. Several minutes later the bus made its first stop at Plaça d'Espanya. Four passengers got off, three got on, and the bus moved off. Then they stopped at Gran Via/Comte d'Urgell, and again at Plaça de la Universitat where three more passengers collected their luggage and got off. Marten watched carefully, hoping his man in the yellow shirt and salt-and-pepper hair would stand and get off with them. He didn't and the bus continued on.

The next stop, Plaça Catalunya, within walking distance of the Hotel Regente Majestic, was his. The bus pulled to the curb and Marten stood with a half dozen others. Gathering his traveling bag, he moved toward the front of the bus, glancing at his man as he did. The man stayed where he was, sitting back, his hands in his lap, waiting for the bus to go on. Marten was the last off. He stepped around several people waiting to get on and walked off looking for the street called Rambla de Catalunya and the Hotel Regente Majestic. A moment later the Aerobus passed him, moving away in traffic. He walked on a moment longer, then something made him turn and look back. The man with salt-and-pepper hair and the yellow polo shirt was standing at the bus stop staring after him.

• MADRID, ATOCHA STATION, 1:05 P.M.

A folded copy of the Spanish language newspaper El País under his arm, President of the United States John Henry Harris walked down a platform in a group of passengers toward the Altaria train number 1138 that would take him on a five-hour trip northeast to Barcelona. There he would transfer to the Catalunya Express for the hour-plus ride to the one-time Moorish stronghold city of Gerona.

Everything had been thought through the night before on the ride back to the hotel from Evan Byrd's home following his surprise meeting with "his friends," as he called them. Right off, there had been no doubt that if he refused their demands, they would kill him. It meant he had no choice but to run. And he had. Freeing himself from his Secret Service protection and escaping the hotel had been difficult enough. Carrying out the next piece of action was something else entirely.

Included in his European agenda had been time set aside to address the annual conference of the New World Institute, a think tank of celebrated international business, academic, and former political leaders who met annually for the express purpose of exploring the future of the world community.

An institution for more than two hundred years, the NWI had met in various exotic locations around the globe for most of the last century, but for the last twenty-two years it had made its home the exclusive resort of Aragon in the mountains outside of Barcelona. As the newly elected president of the United States he had been invited to be this year's "surprise guest speaker" and give the main address at its Sunday sunrise service. It was something he had agreed to when prevailed upon by the host clergyman, Rabbi David Aznar, a cousin of his late wife and a highly respected leader in the Spanish city of Gerona's large Jewish community.

That his wife had been Jewish was thought at first to be a political liability to him, but it had proven otherwise. She had been a funny, brilliant, outspoken, and extraordinary life's companion whom the public had adored. That she had been unable to bear children was a sadness they both accepted, but as he climbed the political ladder, they found themselves embraced as if the entire electorate were their family. There were nonstop invitations to spend holidays or other special occasions at the homes of private citizens across a broad economic, racial, and religious range, and often they accepted. The media loved it, the people loved it, his political machinery loved it, and he and his wife loved it.

It was through her the president had come to know Rabbi David, and the two had become close when the rabbi had traveled several times from Spain to Washington to be with them during his wife's illness and rapid decline. He had been there when she died and had officiated at her funeral; had been there to embrace him on election night; had been a personal guest at his inauguration; and then had invited him to be the surprise speaker at the convention at Aragon. It was to Rabbi David's home in Gerona he was going now, the only person within physical reach he dared trust and confide in, and the only place he knew, for the moment anyway, he could hide.

Head down, he reached the train and boarded a second-class car in a crowd of other passengers in the same unassuming way he had conducted himself inside the station, when he'd waited patiently in line to pay cash for his ticket. The same way he had all along. On the streets of Madrid and in the café where he'd taken refuge before coming to the station-trying to blend in, not attract attention. So far his luck had held; no one had paid him the slightest notice.

So far.

He knew that by now Hap Daniels would have Spanish intelligence, the FBI and CIA, and probably a half-dozen other security agencies working frantically to bring him back under Secret Service control. He was equally certain that the NSA would be using satellites to electronically monitor communications across the whole of Spain. It was the reason he'd left his communications equipment behind-his cell phone, his BlackBerry-because he knew any contact he tried to initiate would be intercepted in seconds, and they'd be on him before he could go a half block.

Scant hours earlier he'd been the most powerful, protected man on the planet, with every agency and state-of-the-art piece of technology at his fingertips. Now he was a man alone, stripped to nothing but his guile and wits, and charged with the task of stopping the first genuine attempted coup d'état that he knew of in the history of the United States.

Not just stopping it but crushing it. Whatever it was. Assassinating the leaders of France and Germany and replacing them with leaders they could trust to do their bidding in the United Nations was only the beginning. Part two was putting the Middle East under their control and in the process crushing the Muslim states that comprised it. How they would do that was the real horror: the unknown plan for what had to be a campaign of mass destruction, which he was certain had been devised and developed by the former South African army scientist Merriman Foxx. It was a nightmare beyond anything imaginable.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Henry IV, Part 2

• 1:22 P.M.

There was a lurch and the train moved slowly out of Atocha Station. The car he had chosen was nearly full when he'd boarded and he'd taken the first available seat on the aisle, next to a man about his age in a leather jacket wearing a beret and reading a magazine. In a show of normalcy he unfolded his newspaper and began to read it. At the same time he tried to stay aware of what was going on around him, alert for anyone-young, old, man, woman-who could be a member of the security forces trying to find him.