He knew the Secret Service advance team would have checked those shafts and made certain they were secure long before the presidential party arrived. It meant they would be locked at the specific points of entry: the access panels on the roof and in the basement. What they would have had no reason to consider was that at both roof and basement those same access panels would have internal safety latches to prevent anyone from becoming trapped inside. Meaning the panels could be opened from the inside and would lock again automatically once someone had come out. Considering any commercial building's need for usable space—and the Ritz, as an old renovated building, would be no different—it was more than probable that the bottom of the air ducts would be incorporated into already existent areas of the basement, a storage area or furnace room, perhaps even the laundry.
It was this knowledge and this assumption that Johnny Harris had counted on to make his escape. It had taken nearly two hours and been considerably more difficult than he had expected. The side ducts had been smaller than he'd anticipated and he'd made a number of turns that led to dead ends that had to be retraced backwards in the dark. He'd used up several books of matches lighting his way and was beginning to think he might be trapped in there forever until he finally found a main duct and started down.
Several knuckles and a part of his shin had been scraped raw, and every bit of him was strained and sore from the sheer physical effort, but nonetheless his main sense of it had been right and it had worked—the principal air shaft opened through an access panel into a large supply room in the building's cellar. Once out, the panel had automatically locked closed behind him, and he'd walked down a short, dimly lit hallway to an area near the loading ramp, where he'd hidden behind a large walk-in freezer until a produce truck arrived at a little after three in the morning. He'd watched carefully, biding his time as two men unloaded it. Then, when they went to the truck's cab to sign the delivery manifest, he slipped into the back and hid behind a stack of lettuce crates until the driver got in and drove off, passing both his own Secret Service agents and Spanish security posted outside. The next delivery stop was another hotel several blocks away. Here he waited until the driver went inside, then simply jumped down and walked off in the darkness.
Now, with the time closing on noon, he sat, still unrecognized, sipping coffee in the small old-town café, his wallet in his back pocket—a wallet that held his California driver's license, personal credit cards, and nearly a thousand euros in cash, and minus the toupee no one except his personal barber had any idea he wore—fully aware of the chaos that would have exploded once it had been discovered he was missing and trying to decide how best to get from where he was to where he was going without someone recognizing him and sounding the alarm.
36
• HOTEL RITZ, 11:50 A.M.
The entire fourth floor was a screaming beehive as Hap Daniels had known it would be. White House Press Secretary Dick Greene was about to make a special statement to the crush of world media who had swarmed the building, adding chaos to the throng of reporters in the White House press pool already following the president on his European tour. Word had been leaked that the president was no longer in Madrid, that he had secretly been taken to an undisclosed location in the middle of the night after a credible terrorist threat was intercepted by Spanish intelligence. As the Secret Service senior official supervising the investigation, Daniels had already been in contact with George Kellner, CIA chief of station Madrid, and Emilio Vasquez, the head of Spanish intelligence, setting up a joint task force that would coordinate their own bureaus with Spanish law enforcement authorities in an all-out, fullblown search for the president; one that would be designated a national security operation, meaning TOP SECRET on every level. Immediately afterward Daniels had been on a secure phone to the special agent in charge of the Secret Service field office at the U.S. embassy in Paris, asking that the Paris office go on full standby alert in the event additional bodies were needed in Madrid. Soon to be added to the chaotic stew was Ted Langway, an assistant director of the Secret Service at USSS headquarters in Washington, who was already en route to Madrid to liaise with Daniels and then to set up a twenty-four-hour communication with the director of the Secret Service in Washington who would in turn advise the secretary of U.S. Department of Homeland Security, under which the Secret Service now operated.
And then there was the rest, the trail that led Hap to the air-conditioning access panel in the drop ceiling of the presidential suite's bathroom.
A painstaking review of digital videos made by the roof-mounted security cameras showed a produce truck arriving at the hotel at 0302 hours. It had been stopped and searched by Secret Service agents and then cleared to enter the hotel. Security cameras in the hotel's underground parking area showed the same truck coming down a ramp and stopping at a loading dock at 0308 hours (eight minutes past three that morning).
A hotel worker and the truck driver unloaded several cartons of produce and then went to the front of the truck, where the hotel worker signed the delivery manifest. In that moment a vague shadowlike movement was seen near the rear of the truck. It began near the top of the screen, coming from the area of a walk-in freezer, then approached the rear of the truck and went out of view. A moment later the hotel worker stepped away from the truck, and the driver got in and drove away. Security cameras outside the building caught the vehicle as it left the building, turned onto a side street, and disappeared from view.
"Somebody got into the truck while the hotel worker went to talk to the driver. Whoever it was was still in the truck when it left," Hap Daniels had barked in response to what he saw. The vehicle's driver had since been taken into custody by the CNI and had given them the location of his delivery stops immediately after he had left the Ritz.
Meantime, the Secret Service and hotel officials had traced the phantom's progress backward from the truck across to a large walk-in freezer, then to the dimly lit hallway behind it, searching every room and corridor that led from it. Within minutes they'd found a large closed storage area and inside it a main heating and air-conditioning shaft that led to the roof, with side ducting leading to every room on every floor of the building. That the access door to the shaft was locked and had been checked and verified secure by the advance Secret Service team and then checked and verified once again just before the president arrived seemed to rule out the possibility that anyone had gone in that way—using the shafts to get to the presidential suite and kidnap the president and take him back out the same way—especially when the video cameras had caught a lone shadow entering the truck.
In one moment everyone realized the same thing: their entire approach had been designed to prevent someone from getting into the hotel without being seen, not someone trying to get out of it: especially someone who had full knowledge of the concentric blankets of security the Secret Service used—someone like the president himself. Moreover, it appeared he had done it with forethought and purpose. An inventory of the clothes the president's valet packed when they left Washington revealed what was missing—a pair of underwear, athletic socks, running shoes, a black sweater and blue jeans. The clothes the president liked to relax in when his official day was over. His wallet was gone as well. Exactly how much money he might have had in it no one seemed to know for certain, but his personal secretary confirmed she had given him a thousand euros before he left the White House for the European trip. Carrying a fair amount of cash wherever he went was a habit that dated back to President Harris's farm days, when he paid cash for almost everything.
As for his use of the hotel's ventilation ducts to avoid Secret Service surveillance, hotel maintenance people had demonstrated how the access panels to the main ducting system could be opened from the inside, and that those same panels would automatically relock once whoever had been inside came out and the panel had been closed behind them. Moreover there were built-in footholds that ran from roof to basement in the main shafts, and the side ducts leading to the guest and
public rooms were wide enough for a man to squeeze through.
As skeptical as Hap Daniels might have been at the start that the president had acted alone and used the ducting system as a means to make his escape from the hotel, the clincher came when the remains of several recently burned wooden matches were found at the bottom of the shaft that opened into the storage area. The president's friend, Evan Byrd, was a pipe smoker and had little collections of small decorative boxes of wooden matches near ashtrays throughout his home. Daniels had seen President Harris pick up several of those boxes as they left Byrd's residence the night before and put them in his pocket. The president didn't smoke and as far as Daniels knew, never had, so what he'd wanted the matches for had been anyone's guess. Now he understood. They had been to light his way through the hotel's ducting system without having to turn on the system's interior lights and thereby take the chance he might trip some kind of alarm.
"Hap?" Jake Lowe's voice came at him from the other room.
"In here."
A moment later Lowe and National Security Adviser Marshall entered the presidential suite's bathroom, where Daniels and two other Secret Service agents were examining an open access panel in the bathroom's drop ceiling.
"This is where he went out," Hap was looking up into the duct area where a third Secret Service agent could be heard moving around in the duct work.
"Anything?" Daniels called up.
"Yeah," the agent's head suddenly appeared in the open rectangle. "For one thing, the maintenance guys were right. You get up here and slide the panel closed behind you. A simple turn of a bolt will relock it. Nobody would know anyone ever used it."
"How did he get it open from down here? It takes a special key."
"You want it, you got it. Catch." The agent dropped a twisted piece of steel into Daniels's hand. "It's a spoon. Bent to operate like a key. Crude, but it works. I tried it."
Lowe stared at the spoon and then looked to Jim Marshall. "Room service. A sandwich. A beer. Ice cream. You need a spoon to eat ice cream. He knew what he was going to do all along." Abruptly he turned to Daniels. "Let's go talk."
37
• 12:00 P.M.
Sixty seconds later Lowe, Jim Marshall, and Hap Daniels entered the secure room they had used earlier. Lowe closed the door behind them.
"I think by now we can presume the president did this on his own," Lowe looked at Daniels. "You agree?"
"Yes, sir, I agree. The question is why?"
Lowe and Marshall exchanged the briefest glance, then Lowe walked across the room. "Obviously none of us has that answer," he said. "But my sense is that too much has happened too quickly for him. To the point he was pushed to sheer psychological exhaustion. I'm no psychologist, but this trip, the way it's been going, France and Germany in particular, and coming so soon on the heels of a long and enormously draining election campaign, followed almost point-blank by the inauguration, fine-tuning the cabinet and what's going on in the Middle East, has been, strong as he is, exceedingly trying, as it would be for anybody. I know because we've had private conversations about it. He even asked me once if I thought he was really suited for the job. Add the thing he doesn't talk about but that I know still haunts him, the death of his wife—think of him winning the election and then spending his first Christmas in thirty-three years without her and alone in the White House to boot. On top of that we all know how close he was to Mike and Caroline Parsons and their son.
"Maybe if he was the kind of guy to complain or get testy or even get drunk once in a while it would be different, but he isn't. Put it all together and you've got a man who's kept it all inside and is emotionally spent. All of sudden it catches up with him and he does something crazy, just to keep from suffocating.
"The story Dick Greene is telling the media downstairs—that the Secret Service hustled him away in the middle of the night to an undisclosed location following a credible terrorist threat we can't talk about—is the one we'll continue to use even when we get him back. That way he gets enough time for a full medical exam and then, assuming he's alright, to rest and recover before he goes to the NATO meeting in Warsaw." Lowe came back across the room. Before, he had been talking to them both; now he was looking directly at Hap Daniels.
"We know what he was wearing when he went out and the places where the delivery truck stopped after it left the hotel. He's on his own, maybe even disoriented. It's not like he can walk around like a tourist without being recognized. With your people, the CIA, Spanish intelligence, and Madrid law enforcement working together, my guess is he's not going to stay missing for very long."
Daniels said nothing. He just hoped to hell Lowe was right.
"Chief of staff is arranging for a place to take him once we have him. It's up to us—Jim, myself, chief of staff, Press Secretary Greene here in Madrid and the vice president and secretary of state in Washington—to dance with other governments and the media until we can bring him public again. It's up to you to find him and get him the hell out of here fast and unseen to the marker location. You guys got President Bush secretly to Iraq twice, the first time nobody even knew he was gone until he was back home in Texas." Lowe paused and his eyes narrowed, "Hap, we need, we have to have, that same efficiency here. The situation is infinitely more critical."
"I understand, sir. This happened on our watch. We'll take care of it."
"I know you will, Hap," Lowe looked at Marshall, then walked Daniels to the door and opened it. "Good luck to us all," he said, and Special Agent Hap Daniels left. Lowe closed the door and came back into the room. "He buy it?"
"That the president went off the deep end?"
"Yes."
"I don't think he had any choice. His feathers are really ruffled. The president is gone, it happened while he was in charge and he feels personally responsible. He's not just protecting the man, he's protecting the office. He wants exactly what we want, the president back as quickly and with as little noise as possible. As if he'd never left."
Lowe walked to a mahogany sideboard, turned over two glasses and picked up a bottle of whiskey. He poured a double shot into each glass and handed one to Marshall.
"It seems we have a president who has decided he wants to be his own man and who has very definite ideas of how he wants the country run," Lowe took a stiff tug at his drink. "In all the years I've known him I never had the slightest clue he wasn't a team player all the way. Until now."
Marshall took a drink then set his glass on a table next to him. "It's a humbling lesson, Jake. One that's going to cost the president his life. Let's just hope to hell it doesn't get that expensive for us."
38
• 12:25 P.M.
Nicholas Marten heard the grind of hydraulics as the aircraft's landing gear came down. Ten minutes later he was on the ground at Barcelona's El Prat Airport and heading into the terminal. Twenty minutes after that he had collected his luggage and was in line to board the Aerobus for the twenty-five-minute trip into the city. His thoughts—only moments earlier on Merriman Foxx and Demi Picard and the brief phone conversation he'd had with Peter Fadden while waiting to board his flight in Malta—had now shifted to a man three passengers in line behind him. He was about five-foot ten, Caucasian, and maybe forty, with salt and pepper hair. He wore sunglasses and a light yellow polo shirt tucked into blue jeans; a small red traveling bag was thrown indifferently over his left shoulder. He looked like a tourist, one accustomed to traveling casually and lightly. There was nothing about him to attract attention, and Marten probably wouldn't have noticed him at all if he had not seen him nod in passing at the young man in jeans and baggy jacket who had been in the lobby of his hotel in Valletta and then on the flights from Valletta to Rome and Rome to Barcelona. And now that young man was no longer there but this other man was, waiting in line behind him to board the blue Aerobus into Barcelona. If the first man had indeed followed him from Valletta, then there was every possibility this second man was now tailing him. In essence, one had handed him
off to the other.
• 12:30 P.M.
That second man was now two seats in front of him and on the other side of the bus looking out the window as they turned out of the airport for the drive into the city. Marten watched him for a long moment and then sat back and tried to relax.
Today was Friday, April 7. The day before yesterday the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police had escorted him from Caroline's memorial service and put him on a plane to London, where he'd arrived the next day, yesterday, and soon afterward boarded another flight to Malta. Then this morning, following last evening's encounter with Merriman Foxx, he'd hurriedly left the island following Demi Picard to Barcelona. He was jet-lagged, had had very little sleep, and was running on little more than adrenaline. He knew he had to be aware of his own state of mind. In situations like this it was easy to make monsters out of what in reality were only furry little animals. Meaning there was every chance he was wrong about the salt and pepper-haired man in the dark glasses and yellow polo shirt, and that the nod that had taken place between him the baggy-jacketed young man might well have been nothing at all, and in truth that neither man had any design on him whatsoever. So he let it go and thought back to the telephone conversation he'd had earlier with Peter Fadden, reaching him in London shortly after the Washington Post reporter arrived on a stopover on the way to cover the upcoming NATO summit in Warsaw.
Marten had quickly briefed him on his encounter with Merriman Foxx at the Café Tripoli the night before, telling him how he had played himself off as an aide to Subcommittee Chairwoman Baker and how Foxx's initial congeniality had quickly become heated over Marten's questions about the testing of experimental toxins on humans after South Africa's biological weapons had been officially destroyed. He'd become even more heated when Marten told him the made-up story about a memo Congressman Mike Parsons left shortly before his death in a plane crash suggesting that Foxx had consulted in secret with Dr. Lorraine Stephenson, over the course of the committee hearings. Adding separately, that Parsons had questioned the truthfulness of Foxx's testimony. Foxx's reaction, Marten said, had been to fiercely defend his testimony and to deny knowing Dr. Stephenson, after which he'd abruptly ended the conversation and walked off.