Marten moved closer. The flame rose higher still.

Another blast of laser came from behind them. This time it held longer, lighting up the entire shaft a half mile back. The sound of men running toward them from the other direction became more distinct.

"Get in," Marten commanded. The president dropped to all fours and squeezed into the cutout. A heartbeat later Marten followed. Like that they were gone. The tunnel where they had been, black as coal. As if they were never there.

• 9:50 P.M.

Marten and the president pushed farther back into the cutout. One shoved breathlessly up against the other. Two full-size men crammed like rag dolls into an impossibly tiny space.

They could hear the rush of feet approaching in the tunnel outside. The sound got louder, then louder still. Then the men were just outside the opening only inches away. In another instant they were past it. There had easily been twenty, maybe more. Within the next minute they would come full on the force coming toward them from the opposite direction. They would confer for precious brief seconds, then each head back the way they had come. Checking and double-checking the route they had so swiftly passed through.

"Move! Now!" the president whispered, and started to shove out toward the tunnel.

"No." Marten pulled him back. "If there are more still coming we'll walk right into them."

"What do we do?"

"Wait."

"We don't have time. They'll turn back in a second when they run into the other squad. We have to take the chance and go now."

"Alright." Marten started to move, then suddenly stopped as the glow on the near-dead brand flared again. "Hold it," he moved the glowing pick handle to the side of the cutout. The glow became brighter. He blew on it and got a flame, then raised the torch and looked around.

"This place has been made with a different kind of tool than was used to dig the main tunnel. And it wasn't done eighty years ago either."

The president perked and followed the torch as Marten moved it around. "It's an air-transfer duct."

"Why? And from where to here?"

"Hand me the torch."

Marten did. The president turned up on an elbow and crawled farther back into the cutout.

"What do you see?"

"There's a steel vent, maybe two by three. It drops straight down into what looks like another shaft underneath."

"Can we fit through the vent?" Marten asked.

There was sudden noise in the tunnel outside. They heard the oncoming rush of feet, the snap of orders being given. The search team was coming back fast.

"We don't have a choice."

• 9:55 P.M.

The wind was rising, the heavy clouds beginning to spit rain, as an increasingly anxious Jake Lowe turned up the collar of his parka and pushed past Spanish police hastily erecting a protective tent over the command post. He reached the control area and moved in to look over the shoulders of Bill Strait and Captain Diaz.

For the last minutes he had been standing back, watching the communications teams monitor exchanges between the CIA, Secret Service, and CNP units in the tunnels and their counterparts scattered over the rock formations above. More than once he'd looked over at Jim Marshall, huddled to the side, chatting and drinking coffee with the presidential medical team waiting for the word that would put them into action. But that word had not come. Nothing seemed to be happening. A sudden shared laugh by Marshall and the medical crew pushed him over and sent him moving toward Strait and Diaz.

Was he the only one who was concerned about what would happen if the president suddenly turned up alive and well and talking and refusing to be taken to the CIA jet? Not only would Warsaw and their entire plan for the Middle East be dead in the water, they-all of them, from the vice president on down-ran the very real risk of being arrested and tried for attempting to overthrow the government. The penalty if convicted was death.

"What the hell's going on down there?" he suddenly asked Bill Strait. But it wasn't a question as much as it was a demand, even an accusation.

For a moment Strait ignored him. Finally he turned. "Five teams are inside the main shaft," he said patiently. "Three more are searching side tunnels. The rest are on standby for relief duty. The team working this end just met up with the unit that broke in midpoint the other way. All they found was a lot of dark tunnel. They've called for lights and are retracing now."

"What about the satellite? Where is it?"

"Another forty minutes until it's overhead, sir," Strait glanced at Marshall as if he wished he'd take Lowe aside and away. "The satellite, the thermal imaging, is not an end-all. It will not show us what's going on underground."

"When are we going to know what's going on underground?" Lowe pushed him hard.

"I can't tell you that, sir. There's a lot of area down there."

"In the next ten minutes or the next ten hours?"

"We are in the tunnels, sir. The Secret Service, the CIA, the CNP."

"I know who the hell is down there."

"Maybe you would like to go down yourself, sir."

Lowe flared at the insubordination. "Maybe you'd like to find yourself shoveling shit in Oklahoma."

Suddenly Marshall stepped in and turned Lowe away. "Jake, everybody's a little strung out here. There's enough tension as it is. I told you before to relax, do it. It would be good for everyone."

Strait's hand suddenly went to his headset, "What? Where? How many?"

Diaz looked at him. So did the medical team. Lowe and Marshall turned back fast.

"Go over the entire area again. We're sending in the standby teams. Lights are on the way, yes."

"What the hell is it?" Lowe was right in his face.

"They found fragments of what looks like a recently burned undershirt. Like somebody was using it as a torch. There are what appear to be rather unclear footprints of two men. They lead back through the tunnel."

"Two?"

"Yes, sir, two."

• 10:05 P.M.

The tunnel was little more than the height of a man standing and about twice that wide and was dimly lit by battery-powered emergency lights mounted high on the tunnel walls every hundred feet or so. Wood timbers bolstered the walls and ceiling that had, between large pieces of natural stone, been sprayed with a thin cement coating, probably to keep the dust down. The steel track down the center was a single, shiny monorail that led, like the tunnel itself, into the murky distance in either direction.

"We wanted to know how Foxx got the bodies in and out of his lab," the president said quietly, "here it is."

Marten took a moment to get his bearings then looked down the shaft to his left, "As far as I can tell, that way leads back toward Foxx's lab." He looked right. "That has to be the direction where they came from. The bodies loaded on a monorail sled or something."

"Then that's the way we go," the president was already moving in that direction. "This tunnel was dug directly beneath the other so it couldn't be read by satellites or surveillance aircraft. Everyone knew of the old tunnels, so no one would suspect they were being used as cover for something else. This is all Foxx's design. I'll bet copied from the secret underground weapons factories that armed Germany for World War Two."

"It's well-engineered alright," Marten was looking up. "It wasn't just chance we found that vent, there are a lot more at this end at least, probably one every two hundred feet. We missed them because they're well-hidden but soon enough those guys will find them too."

"Something else," the president kept moving. "Gas jets mounted near the emergency lights. Bigger than the ones in the lab, much bigger. Maybe five or six inches. Why this whole place didn't go up with the first blast I don't know."