Hap glared after him, his patience and very nearly his sanity all but gone. "I'll get you, you bastard," he breathed. "One day I'll find you and get you good!"
96
• 2:50 P.M.
It was all colors and images, as if floating through a dream.
Demi remembered only pieces of it.
"We have things to do," the Reverend Beck had said barely seconds after Nicholas Marten left the private room at the restaurant Abat Cisneros to find the president. In no time Demi had collected her cameras and small equipment bag and followed Beck and Luciana out the door. Seconds later they were crossing the plaza in front of the basilica and walking toward the funicular railway that climbed into the mountains above the monastery to the ancient hermitage of Saint Joan.
It was there as they entered the funicular's green car she began to feel a kind of euphoria she had never before experienced. At almost the same time the colors started to come and the reality around her—Reverend Beck, Luciana, the monastery, the funicular itself and the tourists crowding inside it—began to fade. Something in the coffee maybe. It was a fleeting thought that dissolved into a soothing, near-psychedelic mist of translucent crimson and then turquoise and then sienna. A slow, gentle swirling midnight blue tinged with yellow followed.
Hand in hand was the vague memory of walking past the ruins of an ancient church and seeing a small silver-colored SUV parked at the side of a narrow mountain road. A handsome young driver stood by as Reverend Beck helped her into the back seat. After that came the sense of the SUV moving off and then accelerating over the uneven road. Beck seemed to be in the seat beside her, with Luciana riding in front beside the young driver.
Soon they were traveling across a long rocky plateau and then the SUV forded a rushing mountain stream and climbed through an area of conifers; and then they were dropping down into a small valley filled with spring grasses and where a thin layer of fog was beginning to settle. Not long afterward they passed under a high stone arch and then shortly came upon the ruins of still another ancient church, this one near the base of a towering rock formation. It was here they stopped and got out and Beck led them up a steep winding path.
Moments later they passed beneath a towering rock formation and walked across a natural stone bridge with chasms on either side that fell away sharply hundreds of feet below. The far side was in deep shadow, and as they reached it she saw the entrance to a large cave with several monks in dark hooded robes standing watch on either side of it.
"La iglesia dentro de la montaña," Beck said as they entered. "The church within the mountain."
Inside, the cavern rose to an enormous height and was lighted by the flickering glow of what seemed a thousand votive candles. Here, more of the robed and hooded monks kept watch. Then they entered a second chamber. Like the first it was aglow with candlelight. Only here stalactites and stalagmites hung from the ceiling and rose up from the floor in spectacular combinations.
They were partway across this second chamber when she saw the church. It was a place that, in the state of euphoria she still experienced, seemed to be the sanctuary she had been expecting. Entering, she saw a series of stone arches rising far above the nave to form the ceiling, while beneath it two wooden galleries, one on either side and mounted on massive timbers, sat a dozen feet above huge hand-hewn paving stones that made up the floor. Directly ahead, at the nave's far end, was an ornate gilded altar.
Demi turned to look at Beck, as if to question him about it, when she saw a young woman in a white ankle-length dress coming toward them. She had striking brown eyes and a luxurious mane of black hair that fell to her waist. Quite possibly, she was the most beautiful creature Demi had ever seen.
"Demi," the woman smiled broadly as she neared, "I'm so pleased you came."
Demi stopped short. Who was this woman who seemed to know her? Suddenly she seemed strikingly familiar. But how did she know her? And from where or when? Then she realized: Cristina. The young woman who had been with them at the Café Tripoli in Malta.
"You must be tired from your journey," Cristina said warmly. "Please let me take you to your room so that you can rest."
"I—" Demi hesitated.
"Go with her, Demi," Reverend Beck smiled reassuringly, "you wanted to know about the coven of Aldebaran. This is a part of it. Tonight you will see more. And tomorrow, more than that. Everything you wanted to know, you will find out. Everything."
Demi studied him—his smile, his manner of being—as he stood there. At almost the same moment the feeling of euphoria faded, as if whatever drug she had ingested earlier had abruptly worn off. Suddenly she remembered her cameras and the equipment bag she had had with her earlier. "My things," she said to Beck.
"You mean these," Luciana came up from behind. One of the hooded monks accompanied her and carried Demi's cameras and equipment bag. Bowing gently, he handed them to her.
"Thank you," she said, still shaken by the uncomfortable memory of her drugged journey there.
"Please," Cristina took her by the arm and together they crossed the nave toward an area Demi had not yet seen. As they went Demi looked down at the large paving stones beneath their feet. Most had been polished to a high sheen by the trample of feet over time. Similarly, most all had names carved into them; family names, she thought. The curious thing was they were not Spanish but Italian.
"They are family tombs," Cristina said quietly. "Beneath this floor are the earthly remains of the honored dead, interred over the centuries."
"Honored dead?"
"Yes."
Again Demi heard her father's warning and in the next instant saw the tortured face of the armless octogenarian scholar Giacomo Gela. At the same time a voice deep inside her whispered that she had opened one door too many, that this was a place to which she should never have come. Abruptly she looked back, as if for a way out.
Luciana was gone and Beck was alone in the center of the room watching her and at the same time talking on a cell phone. Behind him, at the far end of the nave where the church ended and the caves began, four of the hooded monks stood guard. She realized then that they—and those outside by the stone bridge and no doubt others she had yet to see—were the keepers of this place and that in all probability no one ever entered or left without their consent.
"Are you alright, Demi?" Cristina asked gently.
"Yes," she said, "I'm quite alright. Why wouldn't I be?"
97
• 2:55 P.M.
Marten and the president stared at the horror. Neither man able to speak, barely able to breathe. They had entered Merriman Foxx's most interior laboratory. Come there almost as if the madman had deliberately planned it that way. Were he still alive he might well have had the audacity to show it to them himself. That he was dead mattered little. One way or another, it seemed, he had simply wanted them to see it. Or rather, experience it.
They'd found their way here because there had been nowhere else for them to go. The security card Marten had taken from Foxx's jacket pocket only permitted them to go forward, not back the way they had come. They could enter a room, cave, shaft, or chamber through the sliding burnished steel doors that marked each, but they could not leave by that same door. The security system would not allow it. The only way out was through a similar door at each room's farthest end. A door that, one after another, led only deeper into the core of the mountain and into more of his laboratories.
The first three had been little more than medium-sized, well-lit rooms, either natural caves or carved from the stone itself. Connected by the same dripping tunnels and boardwalks they had passed over at the beginning, each had contained the complex machinery of an advanced biochemist's lab. From the layman's point of view the equipment appeared to be apparatus for continued agriculture study and application. Among them were machines that tested and analyzed water for various contaminants: viruses, bacteria, salts, metals, or things radioactive.
Each chamber was checked carefully and then they moved
on. In none had they found so much as a computer, file cabinet, or other kind of information-storage device, primitive or otherwise. What they did find were computer screens with keyboards and mouses that suggested they were all wired into a master unit located elsewhere.
"If I wasn't claustrophobic before I'm getting there now," Marten said as they left the last chamber, then were immediately forced into what was nearly a twenty-foot-long crawl space beneath a huge slab of rock.
"Don't think about it," the president said as they reached the end, then stood upright and started down a rickety boardwalk over a particularly damp section of dimly lit shaft.
The tunnel here went downward at a steep angle and then turned sharply at a right angle and went down farther still. By Marten's guess each section was at least five hundred feet long, which made the combined total the longest distance between chambers by far. Finally they saw another burnished door at the end of it. Reaching it, Marten swiped the card and they entered a narrow entry-way that led to a darkened room beyond. This time he picked up a small piece of wood that had broken off from the boardwalk and slipped it between the door and the wall frame, leaving the smallest opening as the door slid closed behind them. Not much, but something they could pry open if they wanted to, or had to. He hadn't done it before because if they'd chosen to go back it would only have been into the previous shaft or chamber, where the door was already locked. It would have been a retreat to nothing. He'd done it this time because of a sudden and unnerving sense of dread, a feeling that the space they were about to enter was nothing like anything they had seen before, and going back into the tunnel where they'd been would be far better than staying where they were.
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!"
98
• 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 assign
ment 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.