"Nice beach," Marten said offhandedly. "Anything new about what's going on in the city?"

"Only what we heard before, sir. The authorities are looking for terrorists they thought they had trapped in a hotel but who escaped. That's all they're saying. Very close-lipped about the whole thing."

"I guess they have to be these days," Marten glanced at the president. Just then his cell phone rang. He started to reach for it, then saw the president shake his head in a clear warning not to answer it.

The phone rang again.

"What if it's Demi?" Marten said carefully. "What if the family plans have changed and we are to meet somewhere else?"

The president took a breath. He didn't like it, but Marten was right; anything could have happened, and the last thing they could afford was to lose their lone connection to Merriman Foxx.

"Make it brief. Very."

Marten opened his phone and clicked on, "Demi," he said quickly as Balius handed the president a towel and he sat down on the limousine's rear seat to clean the sand from his feet.

"What the hell's going on in Barcelona?" It was Peter Fadden, keyed up and gruff as usual.

"The police are looking for terrorists." Marten said clearly so that the president and especially Miguel Balius could hear him. "Supposedly they had them trapped in a hotel but it didn't work out. They're checking everyone. The whole city feels like a war zone. You still in Madrid?"

"Yes. And whatever started here seems to have shifted there."

"What do you mean?"

"I've interviewed maybe twenty employees at the Ritz and none of them saw or knows anyone who saw the Secret Service make a move to take the president out of the hotel. Then yesterday morning the Secret Service was all over the place interviewing everyone about what they saw the night before. It was like something has happened to the president but nobody's talking. Then the entire press contingent that was supposed to follow him to Warsaw was flown back to Washington riding on the official story that he was taken to an undisclosed location in the middle of the night because of a reliable terrorist threat. Now the whole of Spanish intelligence seems zeroed in on Barcelona. Something big is going on. Is it really terrorists, or does somebody have the president and they're trying to keep it quiet?"

Marten glanced at the president. "You're asking the wrong guy."

"No, I'm asking a guy who's there and who might have some sense of it. I'm not thinking terrorists, Nick, I'm thinking Mike Parsons's committee. I'm thinking Merriman Foxx."

Suddenly President Harris was dragging his hand across his throat. Once, twice, three times. He meant for Marten to cut his conversation right away and get off the phone.

"Peter, let me get back to you," Marten said quickly, "soon as I can."

Marten clicked off and watched the president slide out of sight into the dark of the limousine's interior.

"Towel, sir," Miguel Balius held a fresh towel out to Marten.

"Cousin Harold can clean his feet in the car, Miguel. I would like to leave the area right away," the president said firmly.

"Now, sir?"

"Now."

"Yes, sir."

• 7:17 A.M.

Miguel Balius's foot touched the accelerator. For an instant the Mercedes' rear tires spun in the roadside gravel, then they caught and the limousine roared off, bouncing over what was little more than a dirt lane.

"Miguel?" President Harris said out loud, looking through the privacy glass that separated the driver's compartment from the passengers'. It was a test to see if he could hear their conversation without the passenger pushing the intercom button. Marten had done the same thing when they had driven from the Hotel Regente Majestic through the city's back roads to the beach. But he wanted to test it again to make sure.

"Miguel?" he said once more, but Balius didn't respond. Immediately he looked to Marten. "Your phone," he said.

"I understand," Marten said. "The Secret Service knows who I am and will have the number. They'll have a global satellite trace on it."

"Not just a trace. The NSA will have intercepted it and given the Secret Service the geographic coordinates in seconds. I know my men-they'll be scrambling like hell to get here as fast as they can. I appreciate why you took the call, and I let you. I shouldn't have. Just hope we got out of there in time."

"Mr. President," Marten leaned in, "that call was not from Demi."

"I gathered."

"It wasn't trivial. It came from a Washington Post investigative reporter. He knows about Caroline Parsons and her suspicion that she and her husband and son were murdered. He knows about Merriman Foxx and Dr. Stephenson. He's even found the clinic outside Washington where Caroline was treated by Foxx. The Silver Spring Rehabilitation Center in Silver Spring, Maryland.

"He's in Madrid, Mr. President. He's questioned the staff at your hotel there. He doesn't believe the official White House story that you were taken away in the middle of the night. He thinks you are the reason for the Spanish intelligence presence in Barcelona. That you may have been kidnapped and that Merriman Foxx had something to do with it."

"Who is this reporter?"

"His name is Peter Fadden."

"I know him. Not well, but I know him. He's a good man."

"I told him I'd call him back."

"You can't."

"If I don't he'll call me."

"We can't chance that, Mr. Marten. Turn the phone off and leave it off. We'll have to let Mr. Fadden assume what he wants. We'll also have to trust that there has been no change in Ms. Picard's plans."

Now they were at the end of the beach road, and Balius swung the Mercedes left onto a narrow tarmac highway that led away from the shoreline and toward the distant hills. As the limousine straightened out, President Harris glanced at the small screen mounted in the rear of the front seat. The channel was tuned to CNN. A story about deadly rains in India played on the screen. The president watched a second longer, then touched the intercom button. "Miguel."

"Yes, sir."

"Friends were telling us about a place in the mountains near here, a monastery I believe," the president said easily, conversationally. "They said it was a place every tourist should visit."

Balius looked in the mirror and smiled proudly. "You mean Montserrat."

The president looked at Marten. "Was that the name, Cousin?"

"Yes, Montserrat."

"We would like to go there, Miguel."

"Yes, sir."

"Can we get there by noon? That would give us time to look around before we are due back in the city."

"I think we can, sir. Unless we run into more roadblocks."

"Why can't the police catch these people? There are hundreds of them, how hard can it be?" the president added an edge of crankiness and irritation to what before had been an easy, congenial manner. "People have other things to do besides wait in line at some checkpoint only to be passed through and ten minutes later stopped at another one."

"I agree, sir."

"We don't want to be late getting back to the city. You got around them before, Miguel. We're confident you can do it again."

"I appreciate that, sir. I'll do my best."

"We know you will, Miguel. We know you will."