"At least you have a room, and I don't think they're going to let us in anywhere else. We'll have to fake our way past the people at the front desk."

"How are we going to get there?" Demi nodded toward the mass of snarled traffic. "If we take a cab we'll be stopped at the next roadblock. It's one thing if I'm alone. With you two we'll all be caught, and that will be that."

"She's right," the president said.

Marten hesitated, then looked back over his shoulder the way they had come. "We walk."

"What?" Demi blurted.

Marten looked back. "The same as here. We walk."

• RIVOLI JARDÍN HOTEL, SAME TIME, 4:20 A.M.

Intense, heavily controlled chaos. Very nearly an exact repeat of what had taken place less than twenty-four hours earlier at the Hotel Ritz in Madrid.

Uniformed Barcelona police under the supervision of GEO agents and CIA assets Ortega, Leon, and Tarrega checked the identification of every person in the hotel. Guests were awoken from sleep, their rooms searched, identifications checked. Hotel employees and patrons and musicians from the Jamboree Club were treated with the same polite ferocity. The police were following up on a tip that "known terrorists had checked into the hotel under false names"-two, it was rumored, had already been found and arrested. Even the affable Basque singer Fermín Murguruza was questioned and then released, all the while signing autographs for surrounding fans also being questioned. "Under the circumstances," Murguruza said proudly, "who would not try to help the authorities?"

Additionally, Hap Daniels's strict directive to check "every closet, toilet, hallway, every last inch, and that includes the goddamn air-conditioning ducts this time" was followed to the letter and then the entire procedure was repeated.

In room 408 a tech crew provided by Spanish intelligence and under the command of Special Agent Bill Strait inched over everything. One floor below, a meeting room had been turned into a Secret Service command post. A secure phone had been installed with a direct line to the U.S. embassy in Madrid and another to Washington and the working war room set up in the basement of the White House. Most obvious and pressing was the ongoing situation with the president, but increasingly worrisome was what to do about the upcoming NATO meeting Monday in Warsaw, where President Harris was to announce a new spirit of "political accord" and "solidarity against terrorism" despite the still-festering "difficulties" with Germany and France.

"Who's there with you?" Jake Lowe paced up and down, secure phone to his ear, on the line to Secretary of State David Chaplin at the White House while National Security Adviser James Marshall listened on the phone's extension just feet away. A weary, infuriated Hap Daniels stood partway across the room, one eye on Lowe and Marshall, the other on the small cadre of quickly-brought-in CIA techs working laptops and monitoring the Barcelona hunt for the president.

"Terry Langdon and Chet Keaton. The vice president is on his way," Chaplin said.

"The president's ill, we're more certain than ever of that now. Moreover, he seems to have this American-Brit, Nicholas Marten, helping him. How and why and to what end we don't know." Lowe's clear-cut explanation was wholly for Hap Daniels's benefit.

"Obviously he's very determined, and now he's got help," Chaplin said in the part of the conversation Daniels couldn't hear. "As long as he remains on the loose he's dangerous as hell because he will find a way to expose us. That said, Terry's insistent about Monday. Everything's in place and he feels we can't let this situation hold us back. If worse comes to worst we'll announce he's got the stomach flu or something and the vice president will take his place in Warsaw. Meanwhile the media is starting to push for more information on what happened in Madrid and where the POTUS is now. The honeymoon hours are almost over; we're going to have to give them something."

"Get the chief of staff and the press secretary on the line and we'll decide what to do now," Lowe snapped.

"David, can you hear me?" Marshall stepped in.

"Yes, Jim."

"Regarding Warsaw. Jake and I agree. We are going under the assumption all this will be put to bed and the president will be there as planned."

"Right."

"Terry, you there?"

"Yes, Jim," Secretary of Defense Langdon's voice came through strongly.

"I just explained to David, we all agree about Warsaw," Marshall glanced casually around the room, making certain Daniels or someone else wasn't being overcurious about his conversation. "We're going ahead as planned."

"Good."

"At this point no changes at all," Marshall turned to look at Jake Lowe.

"Right."

"More when we have something," Lowe said, and hung up. Marshall did the same. When he turned he saw Hap Daniels was watching him.

• 4:42 A.M.

The three were pushed back into the darkened doorway waiting for the police car to pass. When it did they lingered another twenty seconds to make sure a second car wasn't following behind it. Finally they stepped out and moved on. By now Marten, Demi, and President Harris had worked their way back to Ciutat Vella, the old city, with its ancient buildings and narrow streets. Streets that, except for the lone passerby or the startling wail of a stray cat underfoot or the bark of a dog at the end of an alley as they passed, were finally quiet. That they had come this far unmolested was due to luck and because they had stayed in the shadows and followed their instincts. A turn here, another there. A stepping back in the dark and waiting for a person or vehicle to pass. The president, floppy hat pulled low, had stopped once to speak Spanish to an old man sitting alone on a curbstone, asking the way to Rambla de Catalunya, where Demi's hotel was. The old man had not even looked up, just simply pointed off and mumbled.

"Sigue por ahí tres minutos y luego gire a la derecha." That way three minutes and then turn right.

"Gracias," the president said and they moved on.

Their constant fear was the stranger passing who, by some quirk of circumstance, might recognize the president and sound the alarm, or the police car still on patrol unexpectedly turning a corner, to have its officers suddenly stop and question them. Or that Spanish intelligence, the Secret Service or CIA assets were stationed on rooftops watching them through night-vision goggles and at any minute a helicopter would roar in from nowhere to hold them in the searing beam of its searchlight until unmarked cars arrived and special agents jumped out to take them away.

It was five, maybe ten minutes more before they would reach the relative safety of Demi's hotel. The plan was for Demi to go to her room and for them to follow shortly afterward. There in its quiet and relative safety they would have the chance to address the near-impossible task before them: find a way to get the president and Marten past the hundreds of police checkpoints and the thirty-odd miles to the monastery at Montserrat at or about the same time Demi arrived with Reverend Beck and the woman called Luciana for their rendezvous with Merriman Foxx.

It was a problem that brought Marten back to the question of Demi herself. She was a respected journalist and photographer using her profession, as she had said, to uncover the truth of her sister's disappearance from Malta two years earlier and trusting that Merriman Foxx might provide some answer to it. Whether the story of her sister was true or not, everything seemed to center on the Aldebaran coven of witches and with it, the Machiavellian tale of ritual murder. That Foxx, Luciana, Cristina, the young woman who had been a guest at the dinner table in Malta, the late Dr. Lorraine Stephenson in Washington, and possibly Beck all wore the identifying tattoo of the coven intrigued him immensely. That Demi did not-Marten had scrutinized both her thumbs carefully, without her knowing, on more than one occasion-was equally interesting because she seemed to have gained access to them without trouble, most probably by convincing Beck to be one of the subjects of her book. That in itself raised another question-why Beck had let her; even to the point of inviting her to Barcelona after he'd so abruptly left Malta and providing a means for her transportation as well. Two things came immediately to mind. Either the coven was wholly innocuous and, secretive as it might seem, had nothing to hide; or it wasn't, and Beck was leading her on for reasons of his own. If the second were true she could very well be walking into something exceedingly dangerous, maybe even deadly.