Hoping.
So far they had encountered no resistance. The reason, Hap said, was the time of day and the remoteness of the area, and that they had yet to approach the resort's security perimeter that was nearly a mile farther in—a gravel work road that cut the vineyard almost in half, with the inward side bordering the resort itself. That work road was where the first lines of security would be set up, lines that would ease out to encircle the entire Aragon complex, the size of which was staggering—the vineyards, the eighteen hole golf course, parking areas, tennis courts, forested walking trails, the eighteen resort buildings and bungalows, and finally their goal, the ancient church on the hill behind it.
The security force numbered five hundred and was made up of local and state police and controlled, as the president had guessed, by the Spanish Secret Service. If the president had been going to speak as originally planned Hap would have supplemented that force with an additional one hundred U.S. Secret Service agents. But that plan was abandoned after what had "officially" taken place in Madrid and the president was removed to the famous "undisclosed location." That the president would not be attending the Aragon sunrise service was something Hap knew had been transmitted formally to the New World Institute's hierarchy by White House Chief of Staff Tom Curran from the U.S. embassy in Madrid. It was just that situation Hap was counting on because he knew security would stand down to a lesser level of alert and was why he had taken the approach he had.
The vineyards at this time of year and particularly on an early Sunday morning would have at best a skeleton crew, if even that. The maintenance-building complex housed not only the vineyard, golf course and groundskeeping equipment and supplies, but also the resort's sizable laundry where, among other things, employee uniforms were laundered and stored. Reaching those maintenance buildings safely and unseen became the first step in his plan. Far more difficult would be getting the president the next mile and a half, up the long forested hill behind the resort to the four-hundred-year-old church where the New World sunrise service was to be held.
If Marten marveled at Hap's inventory of logistical particulars, he shouldn't have. It was part of the job, what the Secret Service did before a presidential visit anywhere. He just hoped Hap's memory was as good as he thought it was and that in the meantime no new and unknown security measures had been implemented by the Spanish forces.
142
• 5:40 A.M.
Five minutes more until Marten woke Hap. He knew that in his state of exhaustion, if he wasn't careful he would fall asleep where he was and if he did they all might sleep for days. Instead, he played mind games with himself; thinking of his work as a landscape architect at Fitzsimmons and Justice in Manchester and of the very pressing and yet unfinished Banfield project. Of Demi; where she was now, what her real motivation had been for delivering himself and the president to Merriman Foxx at Montserrat. Whatever it had been, one thing was certain: she could have had no idea at all about what was really going on, with Foxx, with his experiments, with any of the president's enemies. He had last seen her in the company of Foxx and Beck and Luciana at the monastery restaurant, but when he and the president had returned, Foxx had been alone. It meant she had gone somewhere with the others. But where and for what reason? All he could think was she had told the truth about her sister, and that finding her, or at least learning what had happened to her, was the most important thing in her life.
• 5:44 A.M.
"Cousin."
Marten started and looked up. The president stood before him, his bearded face more gaunt and drawn than ever.
"I know Hap was going to take second watch," he said quietly. "He's pretty banged up; let him sleep. Go get some yourself."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Want this?" Marten held up the Sig Sauer.
"Yes."
Marten handed it to him. "Thanks."
The president smiled, "You're wasting your precious forty winks."
"Don't fall back asleep."
"Can't. I've got a speech to practice."
143
• 6:30 A.M.
It was barely light enough to see when the president returned the Sig Sauer to Marten and the four left the outbuilding, starting up a long sloping hill, muddy from the rain, and lined with rows of just-budding grapevines. Marten first, then the president, then Hap, then José.
Moments earlier the president had thanked José for his courage and daring, and then told him he should turn back and go home before things got worse. But the teenager had refused, saying he wanted to stay, to be of any help that he could. Keeping José with them was something Hap wanted too. The youngster was not only a local who could speak easily to any worker they might come upon, but there was something else: if he went home Bill Strait would have the Secret Service, the CIA, or the Spanish police waiting for him, his presence in the shafts learned from Amado or Hector or both, his name and address taken. If they got him and he knew where the president was, it wouldn't be long before he told them everything, and in a blink the mountain teams would show up in full force, and that was something they couldn't have happen.
• 6:35 A.M.
Marten neared the crest of the hill, then suddenly stopped and dropped to one knee, motioning for the others to do the same. The maintenance buildings were just ahead. Four of them, large wooden barnlike structures built around a central courtyard. Immediately to their right and just beyond three rows of budding grape canes was the gravel work road that cut the vineyard in half and where the initial lines of security would be set up.
"What is it?" the president whispered.
"Listen." Marten had his head up and was looking toward the buildings.
"What?" Hap slid in beside them.
"Down," Marten motioned them flat on the ground.
Seconds later two uniformed policemen on motorcycles passed by, their eyes scanning the vineyards on either side, heading slowly back down the road behind them.
Marten looked to Hap, "Think there are more?"
"Don't know."
"I'll find out," José said to the president in Spanish.
Before they could stop him he was up and running toward the quadrangle of buildings. Then he disappeared from sight.
• 6:43 A.M.
"No one else," José said in Spanish as he came back to kneel beside them. "Come quickly."
In no time he was leading them past the grape canes and onto the gravel road. Then they ran, moving like shadows toward the buildings in pale light. Fifty yards, thirty. Then twenty, ten, and they were there. José opened a side door and they went inside.
• 6:46 A.M.
The room was huge, the central garage for the resort's rolling stock. There were four pick-up trucks; four full size tractors; six small flat-bedded three-wheel trucks; four large golf-course mowers, and four open electric-powered service carts, parked nose to tail in a line. Backed up against a closed sliding door at the rear was a dust-covered faded green Toyota van that looked like it hadn't been driven for months.
"Watch the door," Hap said, and went to the line of carts, hoping to find one with keys in the ignition.
"Here," Marten had opened a cabinet beside an office door. Inside, arranged neatly on pegs, were the keys to each vehicle. It took three full minutes before they were sorted out and the key for the first cart in line was found. Immediately Hap got in and tried it. The engine light glowed green, indicating a full electric charge.
Thirty seconds later they were warily crossing toward the building that housed the laundry. The sky was much lighter now. The cover of darkness they'd relied on for so long had given way to a rapidly brightening day.
They left José at the door and entered the main laundry room. Three enormous open vatlike stainless-steel washers took up the center area, while a bank of stainless-steel dryers was positioned against a far wall. Opposite both was a large window that looked out to the other buildings. Just past it were the pressing machines, and beyond them
, stainless-steel clothing racks that held rows of assorted Aragon Resort uniforms, most on hangers and arranged by size: a necessary convenience for the exclusive five-star resort that Hap knew had more than two hundred employees who had to be in clean, well-pressed uniforms at all times.
"Viene un hombre." A man is coming, José said from the doorway, then quickly ducked out of sight.
The president motioned to Hap and Marten, and the three slipped out of sight behind the pressing machines. Hap took a breath and slid out the Steyr machine pistol. Marten raised the Sig Sauer.
A moment later a large curly-haired man in white pants and a white T-shirt came in. He flicked on the overhead lights, then went to a control panel and pressed a series of buttons. Almost immediately the washing machines began to fill with water. The man adjusted a temperature gauge, then walked to the washers and looked in. Satisfied, he turned and left.
Hap waited a half beat then crossed the room, pressing up against the big window to look out. He saw the laundryman walk to a far building and go inside, closing the door behind him. Immediately Hap turned to the others.
"He'll be back soon enough. We need to move and fast."
144
• 7:00 A.M.
Dr. James Marshall watched Captain Diaz and one of Bill Strait's Spanish-speaking Secret Service agents interrogating Miguel in an isolated area near the rear of the command post. The questions went from Spanish to English back to Spanish, then to English again. Handcuffed and more than a little nervous, CNP guards standing coldly alongside, Hector and Amado sat on folding chairs only feet away, deliberately made party to Miguel's grilling. If Miguel didn't break they were betting one of the boys would.
Abruptly Marshall turned and went to Bill Strait. "He's not telling them anything."
"He will, or one of the kids will tell us more, but it'll take time so I wouldn't count on a sudden revelation."
Marshall was tired and angry and frustrated. He was also becoming increasingly anxious and didn't like it. It made him feel like Jake Lowe. "We've got a Spanish limousine driver with an Australian accent and two local teenagers. Then we've got a guy who looks like Hap, or maybe is Hap, someplace out there with the president and this Nicholas Marten. We've got every piece of hi-tech equipment and an army of bodies and aircraft flying around and now we've got daylight, and still nobody can find them. Why?"
"Maybe it's because they're still somewhere in the tunnels," Strait said. "Or because they're not here at all."
"What the hell does that mean?"
Strait turned and walked over to a map of the area. "This," he said, sweeping a hand over the mountaintops, "is where we've been looking. Over here," he moved his hand far to the right, "is the Aragon Resort, where the president was originally to speak this morning."
Marshall perked. "You think that's where he's going?"
"I don't know. What I do know is we haven't found him here. We know he was in the tunnels, and Hap or no Hap, if he somehow got out and into these mountains . . ." Strait hesitated, then went on. "I can't get inside his head except to think that the resort is a place to go that's real and that he knows about and where there are very important people he can talk to, a number of whom he knows. How he'd do it, I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud."
Marshall turned and walked back to Captain Diaz to pull her away from Miguel and the boys. "Would it be possible," he asked, "for the president to somehow get off these mountains and to the Aragon Resort?"
"Avoiding satellite detection?"
"What if he had a Mylar blanket like the limo driver? What if those were the things we saw in the water in the helicopter images. The president, Hap Daniels, Marten, and the driver."
"Then you're suggesting he went the rest of the way by foot, overland, and in the rain and dark."
"Yes."
Captain Diaz smiled. "It's not likely at all."
"Is-it-possible?" Marshall enunciated coldly.
"If he was crazy and if he had some idea of how to get there. I would say yes, I guess it's possible."
145
• 7:03 A.M.
They were dressed as groundskeepers. Dark green shirts with lighter green pants. The classic logo of The Resort at Aragon stitched in white italics over the left breast pocket, their old clothes hidden in a trash container near the back of the maintenance building where the rolling stock was. Of the four, only the president kept one personal item with him and it was tucked safely inside his shirt. It was the one thing he had kept all along and what he would wear when he addressed the New World Institute delegation. The thing that, despite his workman's uniform and growth of beard, would make him instantly recognizable to everyone there. His toupee.
José stood at the door, peering out. Marten eased the electric cart up to it and stopped. The president sat beside him, Hap in back, machine pistol in hand, along with a contingent of necessary props—rakes, brooms, plastic trash cans, and something else Hap had picked up simply because he felt it might come in handy later: a pair of binoculars, lifted from the top of what appeared to be a supervisor's desk.
"Any sign of him yet?" the president asked in Spanish.
José shook his head, then—"Sí," he said suddenly, and looked back. "The man in white just went back into the laundry," he said in Spanish and the president translated.
"Let's go," Hap said.
José slid the front door open, Marten eased the cart out and waited for José to close it again. Ten seconds later he jumped into the cart alongside Hap, and then they were going, moving silently past the buildings and turning onto the gravel road that would take them down behind the golf course and then up a winding mile-and-a-half-long service road through deep woods to the church.
• 7:12 A.M.
They crested a hill and stopped under the cover of a large conifer. For the first time they could see past the vineyards to the golf course and the resort itself. In front of the elegant white-stuccoed main building were seven unmarked highly polished jet-black tour buses with heavily tinted windows. The buses that had picked up the New World group from the airport in Barcelona Friday and that would take them back at the close of the sunrise service this morning.
Nearby were a dozen large black SUVs, Spanish Secret Service vehicles that would escort them to the church and then to the airport. Farther out they could see a major force of police vehicles blocking the main road in from the highway. More were stationed every quarter mile or so along the work road that bisected the vineyard. Everything in place, as Hap knew it would be.
High above the resort itself and at the top of a long curving blacktop road, they could just make out the ancient stone and red-tile roof of the Romanesque structure that was La Iglesia de Santa Maria, the Church of Saint Mary.
"That it?" the president asked.
"Yes, sir," Hap said.
The president let out a breath. They were that close.
146
• 7:17 A.M.
The service road took them around the far edges of the golf course and then abruptly down into a wooded glade, then steeply up again, winding through thick conifers toward the church. Marten was just starting a turn and thinking about what they would do when they reached the rear of the church and the service entrance where they were headed when Hap suddenly intruded. He was looking uphill through the binoculars.
"Patrol vehicle coming down. Get off the road," he snapped.
Marten drove another dozen yards, then abruptly turned the cart off the road and through some trees to stop behind a low rock wall.
Hap lifted the machine pistol, Marten slid out the Sig Sauer and then they sat back and watched a four-wheel-drive police car come down the hill. It slowed as it approached, then slowed even more. They could see four uniformed men inside, all looking in the direction where they were hidden.
"Nothing here, nothing here, keep going," Marten breathed.
The car slowed even more, and for the briefest moment they were certain it was going to stop. But it didn't, the driv
er just rolled it slowly on past and kept on.
"Good boys," Marten said.
"Give them a minute to clear," Hap put down the machine pistol and picked up the binoculars, then turned to follow the police vehicle as it drove slowly down the hill.
"This is fill," the president said abruptly and out of the blue looking at the land around them. "This dirt, this soil base. I've been watching it all along. The further up the road we get, the more obvious it becomes. It's all landfill. Look around, most of these trees are young. Fifteen, twenty years old at most."
"Mr. President," Hap was still looking through the glasses, "the resort is barely twenty years old. They probably graded everything and replanted."
"Except for one thing. The church. How do you put a four-hundred-year-old church on twenty-year-old landfill?"
"Number the stones, then tear it down and rebuild it as it was," Marten said.
"But why? And where was it before?"
"Uh-oh," Hap said abruptly.
"What is it?" The president turned to follow his gaze.
"More security."
A second police SUV had come up the road from below, and the car going down was stopped next to it, their drivers chatting.