"You mean you want to take her with us."

"Mr. Marten, I've said time is very short. If she knows something about Dr. Foxx, I need to learn what it is. As I said before, I have probably lingered here too long as it is. So yes, dangerous and foolhardy as it might be if she is working for Foxx, I want to take her with us. That is if she'll go."

"I don't doubt that she'll go, because she wants very much to talk to me. But if she does, you'll run a great risk of having her realize who you are."

"I run the same risk here. If she can get us to Dr. Foxx or even near enough so we can find him ourselves, it's worth the chance," the president paused and his voice became nearly a whisper. "Mr. Marten, it means that much."

Abruptly there was a sharp knock at the door. A second knock followed. "It's Demi," she said from the hallway.

Marten looked at the president, "You're sure?"

"Yes."

Marten nodded, then opened the door. Demi came in quickly and he closed it. In almost the same instant he felt her hand on his arm. "Who is he?" She was staring at President Harris.

"I, uh-" Marten stammered. This was something they hadn't discussed at all. How to introduce the president to her.

"Bob," Harris took care of the situation himself, smiling and extending his hand. "Bob Rader, I'm an old friend of Nicholas. We bumped into each other unexpectedly."

She stared at him for a heartbeat longer, just enough to digest his presence, then looked back to Marten. "We have to talk. Alone. Now."

"Demi, Bob knows what's going on. Whatever you have to say you can say in front of him."

"No, it's something else."

"What?"

Her eyes flashed from one man to the other, "Four people came in off the street and into the hotel when I did. One was a hotel guest who rode up in the elevator with me. The other three, two men and a woman, went to the front desk. One of them carried a copy of La Van-guardia, the edition of the newspaper your photograph was in. The one taken with our friend in the yellow polo shirt from the restaurant, the dead man you were kneeling beside in the street."

"So?"

"I think they were police."

• RIVOLI JARDÍN HOTEL, LOBBY, 3:07 A.M.

"¿Es este Señor Marten?" Is this Mr. Marten? Barcelona police plainclothes detective Iuliana Ortega demanded, showing Marten's newspaper photo to a young, razor-thin night desk clerk. He looked at it and then to the two men behind her watching him, plain-clothes detectives Alfonso Leon and Sanzo Tarrega.

Outside were ten more undercover officers. Two each in cars watching the building's two street-level public entrances, two more in a car parked at the rear of the building near a service/delivery entrance. The other four were on the rooftop of an apartment building across the street, two with night-vision binoculars, the others were sharpshooters armed with.50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles fitted with night-vision scopes. The first pair watched the street below, the second, the window of room 408.

In all there were thirteen card-carrying members of Guàrdia Urbana, the Barcelona police, yet none of them were what they pretended to be. The six in the stakeout cars were special agents from GEO, Grupo Especial de Operaciones, Spain's elite counterterrorism corps; the others, those across the street on the roof and detectives Ortega, Leon and Tarrega were CIA-Madrid Station Chief Kellner's Barcelona "assets," CIA agents operating with the permission of the Barcelona police and Spanish intelligence.

"I asked you if this is Señor Marten." Detective Ortega pressed the clerk in Spanish once more, gesturing to Marten's newspaper photograph and trying to ignore the loud, pulsating Cuban jazz spilling from the hotel's Jamboree Club on the far side of the lobby.

"Sí," the young man nodded, his eyes darting nervously between Detective Ortega and the men behind her. "Sí."

"Another man is with him," she said definitively.

The clerk nodded again. Clearly he had no idea what this was about or what was going on.

Detective Tarrega moved in. "They are both in Señor Marten's room now?"

"Yes, I think," the clerk said nervously. "I can't swear to it, because I've been busy. But they would have to pass by the desk to leave, and I didn't see them. I've been here all night. The manager made me work a double shift. I didn't ask for the extra time, he just told me that was what I was doing."

"This other man. Who is he?" Detective Ortega pressed. "What is his name?"

"I don't know. He said he was Señor Marten's uncle. I let him into the room myself."

"What does he look like?"

"Like somebody's uncle," the clerk grinned sheepishly.

"Answer the question, please," Ortega demanded. "What does he look like?"

"Old-well not too old, but a little. Almost bald, with glasses."

"Bald?"

"Almost, yes."

Detective Tarrega glanced at Detective Leon and nodded toward the elevator, then looked back to the clerk. "Please give us a key to Marten's room."

"I-it's against hotel pol-" the clerk started to argue, then quickly decided against it. Anxiously he picked up a blank electronic key, programmed it, and handed it to Tarrega.

Abruptly Tarrega looked at Iuliana Ortega, "Cover here. We're going up."

• 3:12 A.M.

The fourth-floor elevator door slid open and Tarrega and Leon stepped out. Seconds later they had taken up positions at either end of the hallway where they could clearly see the door to room 408.

They knew 408 was Marten's room. Not because they had asked the clerk but because they had hacked into the hotel's reservation system before they arrived and confirmed it. Confirmed too that Marten had made no calls from 408's telephone or ordered anything from room service. To them and to the agents outside, and for all intents, Nicholas Marten and his balding "guest" were still in the room.

• U.S. ARMY CHINOOK HELICOPTER, TWENTY-ONE

MINUTES OUT OF MADRID EN ROUTE

TO BARCELONA, 3.l6 A.M.

"Bald?" Hap Daniels took the radio call over the roar of the Chinook's engines. Immediately he looked to Jake Lowe and National Security Adviser James Marshall buckled into seats across from him.

"Assets are reporting a man was let into Marten's room claiming to be his uncle. He was bald. Or almost bald. Unless the POTUS shaved his head, we've got the wrong man."

"Maybe he did shave his head," Lowe glanced at Marshall, then looked back to Daniels. "Keep the assets where they are. Bald or not, treat the situation as if he is POTUS."

"When do we get there?" Marshall asked.

"Wheels down at Barcelona police headquarters at 03:40 hours. Another ten minutes to the hotel."

• CHANTILLY, FRANCE, 3:25 A.M.

Victor was nestled in dark woods three-quarters of a mile from the Hippodrome de Chantilly alongside a turf practice track for the Chantilly racetrack's thoroughbreds called Coeur de la Forêt, the Heart of the Forest. It was still more than three and half hours before his targets would come by, yet even in the dark and damp of the woods Victor was comfortable and content.

They had flown him as promised first-class from Madrid to Paris. After that he'd done as instructed: taken a taxi from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport to Gare du Nord Railway Station and from there a train to the town of Chantilly, where he'd checked into a room reserved for him at the Hotel Chantilly and where the M14 rifle and ammunition he would need-packed inside a locked golf bag with his name on the luggage tag and forwarded by rail from a hotel in Nice-were waiting. After that he'd taken a stroll in the woods, found the Coeur de la Forêt practice track and selected the spot where he was now and from where he would shoot when the jockeys worked out their thoroughbreds just after dawn.