They crossed the dimly lit antechamber to stop halfway across at a translucent curtain made of heavy plastic. A slit down the middle ran from top to bottom, permitting entry. Whatever was on the far side was in darkness.

"Light switch anywhere?" the president asked.

"Not that I can see." Marten stepped to the curtain, carefully put a hand through the slit in the middle, then spread it and stepped through.

Immediately a sensor activated and the room was bathed in light.

"Oh God!" Marten exhaled in horror as he saw what was before him.

Row upon row of human bodies or parts of them lined the sides of two central aisles that reached nearly the length of a football field to the end of what was a huge limestone cavern. All were encased in large aquatic holding tanks filled with some kind of preservative liquid. Tanks that for another purpose might have held tropical fish or live lobsters.

Numb with shock and disbelief, they walked forward in silence, Merriman Foxx's last and seminal work before them. The bodies and body parts floated as if entombed in their own dreams. Men, women, children, of every race and age imaginable. Each tank had a handwritten card marked with what was apparently a specimen number followed by an entry and removal date. Dates and specimen numbers of previous inhabitants were neatly crossed out above. A closer look revealed that the subjects were kept in the solution for approximately three months before being replaced. The records were in descending order and revealed that the earliest experiments had begun seventeen years earlier. What the three-month waiting period was for they had no answer other than to assume it involved some part of Foxx's research. Whatever that research was, the questions it raised were enormous. How had these people been selected? How had they come to be there? Where and how had they died? Where and how long had they been kept alive beforehand, and what had been done to them during that time? Finally, what had happened to their bodies-in all those years there would have been hundreds if not thousands of them-afterward?

And then there were the corpses themselves. Tragic, hideous, floating. Their eyes, the ones that still had eyes, stared blankly out through the brine at nothing. The expression of each nearly the same, extreme pain-and with it a desperate pleading for help, pity, intervention, anything at all to stop it.

Curiously, in none was there a look of anger or a seething for revenge. That wasn't part of it. Clearly, they had no idea they were victims of human action or carried a suspicion that anything unnatural had been done to them.

Halfway down Marten stopped and looked at the president, "You know what these people represent?"

"The general populace."

"Yes. And I think they had no idea. No thought at all that they were guinea pigs. They had become ill, that's all they knew."

"That's my sense too," President Harris said. Almost immediately the chilling thought struck, "What if that is the plan? The thing Foxx was working on and finally developed to production level. Disease. Bacteria. A virus. Some kind of massive, fast-moving, deadly force that seems wholly natural and is uncontrollable except by the people doing it."

"A man-made pandemic."

"One that has no appearance of being a weapon," the president looked to the floating corpse in front of him. A woman, twenty-five at most, her eyes pleading for help like the others. Abruptly he turned back to Marten. "The world is already being set up for it. One way or another it's in the media almost every day. Right now all it's doing is alarming the public. With the main beneficiaries being higher stock prices for drug companies and giving more power to those already in power, both declaring they are doing everything they can to prevent it from happening. Yet all the while the real thing is being planned."

The president stepped away from Marten to walk along the tanks, deliberately looking in at the victims, as if to fix in his mind forever the awfulness of what he saw. Finally he looked back, his eyes stark with fury.

"God bless these people here and all the ones that have gone before them. And God damn Merriman Foxx. And God damn all of them who are involved in this. And may God help all of us if what Foxx learned and developed has already been put in motion."

"We need tissue samples," Marten said urgently-his own anger and certainty that Caroline Parsons was dead because of these experiments-muted by what had to be done. "We have to find his files. His notes, charts, everything and anything we can get our hands on. We have to know what this is."

From somewhere came a distinctive hiss. Both men looked up at once. Along the edge of the ceiling, running the length of the chamber, were heretofore unseen gas jets. The hiss increased as more jets opened.

"Gas!" Marten said sharply. "Poison or explosive, don't know which. I'll bet controlled by a timer the minute the lights went on. Take a deep breath and hold it! We're getting the hell out of here!"

"Tissue samples! Foxx's files! His notes!" The president was going nowhere without them.

"My call this time, Cousin," Marten abruptly clamped his hand over the president's mouth and nose and wrestled him hard toward the plastic curtain at the end of the room. "We're leaving. Right now!"

• 3:11 P.M.

Hap Daniels watched a lone commercial helicopter come in over the mountaintop. It circled once then dropped down toward the monastery's helipad. Hap knew what none of the curious onlookers could know: the emergency services/VIP helipad had just become a landing site for a covert CIA operation ordered to find the president of the United States and take him out of there.

After the confrontation with the motorcycle rider it had taken Hap almost twenty minutes to find a questionably legal parking space close to the helipad. If, as he suspected, the ops were coming by command of the group the president was running from, they would already know where within the huge complex he was. How many there would be he didn't know, but in all likelihood they would have at least four ground agents plus the pilot and probably a copilot. Then there would be the second helo, circling somewhere out of sight, a backup team waiting in the event they were needed. Whether any of them knew the truth behind their assignment, who had ordered it and why, or that they were making an end run around the Secret Service made little difference, they would all be highly trained operatives whose obligation was to protect and maintain the continuation of government and whose sole assignment would be to rescue the president and get him out of there safely, fast and unseen, with as little attention as possible. After that they would take him to the CIA jet the chief of staff had waiting at the private airfield outside Barcelona and from there to a location even the Secret Service hadn't been alerted to. What would happen after that he didn't want to think about.

What it all did was give Hap one simple directive: prevent them from getting the president onto the helicopter. Somehow he had to take custody of him before they got him anywhere near the aircraft. It would be a hugely difficult and dangerous undertaking even if they were legitimate CIA because the safety of the president would come before anything, and anyone, himself included, who tried to interfere ran a very good chance of being shot dead on the spot.

If they were not legitimate CIA, or if they were part of some special covert branch of it, or even some special operations military force working at the order of the vice president and the others, his task would not be just difficult, it would be about as suicidal as you could get.

Whoever they were, his plan had to be simple, and it was: watch them land, follow them to their destination, then wait and watch. It was when they brought the president out and neared the helicopter his work would begin. With the Audi positioned nearby, his move would have to be ultrafast and utterly decisive. Under other circumstances a specific protocol would be in place. He would call a trusted CIA supervisor and say he needed the name of the POC (point of contact) on this operation. Getting it, he would call out the man's name, flash his Secret Service credentials and say he was the special agent in charge and was taking custody of POTUS himself.