"Affirmative," Marshall said. "No question. It's simply a matter of alerting his chain of command."

"Do we know details of what happened to him? Was the president there and involved?"

"We don't know. But whatever happened, we couldn't have had his body found there and then have an investigation take place."

"People will have seen him at the monastery."

"He was there off and on all the time. He had his office, his clean labs that he openly showed people. Officially he will have departed right after he left the restaurant. It won't be a problem."

"The Secret Service," General Keaton said from Virginia, "the agents who were there will make a report if they haven't already. Then what?"

Lowe glanced at Marshall, then spoke into the phone, "There were two men, Chet. Only one identified himself as Secret Service. It was the president's SAIC, Hap Daniels. Who the other man was we don't know. How either of them got there we don't know either. But Daniels was shot and hasn't been heard from since. When and if he reports in, the orders are to have him brought directly to us for debriefing. Once that happens he will be informed that the ops he encountered were South African Special Forces commandos working under orders to secretly repatriate Dr. Foxx to South Africa for new hearings regarding himself and the Tenth Medical. The circumstances under which he was discovered made it politically expedient that he be found dead at his home in Malta. The South African government fully apologizes for any mix-up that might have caused agent Daniels his injury."

"I don't like it."

"None of us likes it. But there it is. Besides, he has no idea who the ops were and he certainly didn't find the president. And if he says he went there based on information from our embassy in Madrid it will be pointed out that all concerned mistakenly thought the information had come from the CIA and not the South Africans."

"If there was an explosion in the tunnel someone is going to go in to check it out," Vice President Rogers raised another concern. "What happens when they find the president's body?"

"They won't," Lowe said with cold confidence. "That tunnel leads to Foxx's Number Six lab, the ugly one. As Foxx described it, it was designed to automatically destruct if the proper codes weren't keyed in upon entry. At the same time any access to it would be sealed off. If that happened, and according to the ops report from the scene we have to presume that it did, right now that tunnel is blocked by a two-hundred-thousand-pound slab of rock crushed down against the door to the last of Foxx's monastery-side labs. The other end is sealed off by a thousand cubic yards of interior landslide. Foxx was a perfectionist. What's there will look like a natural earth-fall inside an old mining tunnel. There would be no reason to believe anyone would be in there. It's one of a whole chain of tunnels the authorities know have been sealed off for decades."

"Gentlemen," Marshall cut in, "unless the president was in the lab itself, which he might well have been, the only other place he could be is in the tunnel. If he's there he has no way out. For all intents it will become his tomb. If it has not already. How we go about officially discovering what happened and how we recover the body we will contend with later. Right now and most thankfully he and his ideas are no longer an issue. We need to move on, and quickly."

"Agreed," Secretary of State Chaplin said from London.

"Jim-" Langdon jumped in from Brussels.

"Still here, Terry," Marshall said.

"We're damn short on time. The final go ahead for Warsaw has to be given and soon."

"I concur."

"Vote." Langdon said.

His demand was followed by an immediate and unanimous chorus of "Agreed."

"Nays?"

From Madrid, London, Brussels. From rural Virginia. From the men in the room at the Hotel Grand Palace in Barcelona came only silence.

"Then the vice president will sign the Warsaw order forthwith," Lowe said. "Correct, Ham? No backing out from you."

"I'm a hundred-percenter, Jake, you know that. You all know that. Always have been. No backing out here," Vice President Hamilton Rogers said from Madrid. "Chet, you will confirm the Warsaw operation when it is operational."

"Yes sir. You bet," Air Force General Chester Keaton's powerful voice stabbed across three thousand miles of ocean.

"Good," Lowe said, "then we're done and on to the next. See you in Warsaw, gentlemen. Thank you and good luck."

With that Lowe hung up and looked to Marshall. "I want to feel relieved. Somehow I don't."

"You're thinking about the president."

"We don't know for sure, do we? What if somehow he's still down there and alive?"

"Then he's got a hell of a lot of digging to do," Marshall took off his headset, then got up and crossed to a side table to pour drinks. Malt scotch, neat. Double shot for each. Done, he handed a glass to Lowe.

"It's less than forty-eight hours to Warsaw. The vice president believes he's in charge, the others accept it. Even if somehow the president did manage to pull off an Easter surprise it would be all but impossible for him to do it in that time. And if he did, the only way out would be over, under, or through that monster two-hundred-thousand-pound slab of rock and into Foxx's monastery chambers. He does that, shows up Christlike, we get him the hell out of there in one damn hurry. Soon after that he's dead from a heart attack and the vice president officially becomes president. Unnerving, yes, a little. But either way it's still all ours."

Lowe stared at him. "Do we have ops waiting if he does show?"

"In Foxx's office?"

"Or anywhere else."

"Jake, it can't happen."

"Do-we-have-ops-waiting?" Lowe articulated deliberately.

"You're serious."

"I'm damn serious. I want ops in Foxx's monastery chambers and anywhere else he might show up Easter-like. Inside, outside, upside down. There's a whole series of mining tunnels back there. What if he did escape the explosion and is alive and in one of them trying to find a hole to climb out through? What if he finds it? What then?"

"That could take a lot of bodies."

"Mr. National Security Adviser, we are at war, if you haven't noticed."

Marshall studied Lowe for a long moment, then touched his glass to his. "You want it done, it is."

Lowe didn't move, just stood there, glass in hand.

"Have a little faith in your own organization, man," Marshall said. "Have a little faith."

Lowe drained his glass in one swallow and set it down. "The last time I had that kind of faith it was in a son of a bitch named John Henry Harris. Twenty-two years of faith, Jim. Everything was right with him until it went wrong. So until we either have him or confirm he's dead, I don't know a goddamn thing," Lowe's eyes came up and found Marshall's and held there. "Not a thing."