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By Root 803 0

far-reaching power and for so many reasons not being able to draw on it was one of the hells of his office and made the trouble with Marten all the worse. Six weeks earlier he would have sent Hap Daniels, his Secret Service special agent in charge, a man he trusted completely and who knew Marten well, to Berlin to sift through the goings-on. Daniels was canny enough and experienced enough to find a way to let Marten know he was there and where to find him without the police or anyone else learning about it, no matter how deeply Marten was hidden. Once contact was made, Daniels could get him the hell out of there, and then both could go after the photos. But in the those six weeks Daniels had undergone heart bypass surgery, and he was at home on medical leave and in no shape to be working that kind of assignment. David Watson, his replacement, was a likable, able man but one Harris didn’t know well enough to send on a mission that would be delicate at best. Moreover, Marten didn’t know him at all and so would have no reason to come out of hiding even if Watson made himself known. That left no one at all the president could turn to for help.

“Dammit,” Harris swore out loud then glanced at his suit coat thrown over the seat across from him. He’d put it there himself, making sure it was in reach. Tucked into an inside pocket was the thing he’d carried everywhere since he’d left Washington: the cheap slate gray cell phone that was his direct and only connection to Nicholas Marten. That was, if Marten called, because he had no way to contact the throwaway cell phone or phones Marten would be using.

He’d hoped all the while Marten would get in touch with him, but he hadn’t. Probably because of the police, or because he was hurt, or even—he hated to think—dead. Or maybe he was just in a situation where phoning anyone was not possible. Or maybe because he had nothing to tell him. What was the thing he’d said when they’d last spoken? “I’ll call you when I have something to report.”

Whatever the reason, the gray phone remained silent, and the stillness was gut-wrenching. It was more than the urgency to find the photographs, or the gnawing reminder that it was he who had sent Marten to Equatorial Guinea in the first place. The thing was he cared about Nicholas Marten enormously. What they had been through together, barely a year earlier in Spain and the close friendship that had come out of it, made them almost like brothers. More than anything he wanted him out of harm’s way. It made him think what it must be like for a parent of a missing child, imagining the worst and waiting and hoping and praying that the phone at your elbow would suddenly come to life and that your daughter or son would be on the other end with a “Hi, Mom” or “Hi, Dad,” all perky and safe and sounding as if nothing at all had happened.

“Damn it to hell,” John Henry Harris spat out loud to the smooth, indifferent walls of Air Force One’s presidential cabin. Then he stoically reached for a breakdown of the federal budget and went to work.

49

POTSDAM, 6:20 P.M.

Marten, Anne, and Hartmann Erlanger stood in an open field near Erlanger’s van shading their eyes from a late-afternoon sun that at long last had poked through the drizzle and overcast. Their attention was on a twin-engine Cessna 340 as it dropped down through broken clouds, then flew at treetop level until it neared the far end of a private airstrip. Seconds later its landing gear touched the tarmac and it roared past them, giving them a glimpse of its fuselage registration, D-VKRD. The aircraft slowed as it reached the end of the runway, then turned and came back toward them.

“Piston engine. It’s the best I could do, all things considered.” Erlanger crushed a cigarette butt under his heel, then picked it up and put in his pocket. “It will get you wherever you’re going within the parameters you gave me. Maybe not as fast as you would like, but you’ll get there just the same.”

“It’s fine, Hartmann, thank you,” Anne said.

He looked at her the way he had in his study earlier, and she smiled and