The Machiavelli Covenant by Allan Folsom

then didn't seem appropriate, so he decided to hold off until later.
    "We're here, Mr. President." The voice of Hap Daniels, his broad-shouldered, curly-haired SAIC (pronounced
SACK)
—special agent in charge of the Secret Service detail traveling with him—came over the intercom from where Hap rode shotgun in the limousine's front seat. Seconds later the motorcade pulled to a stop in front of the Palazzo del Quirinale. A military band in full dress uniform struck up the United States national anthem, and through a wash of armed men in uniforms and plain clothes, Harris saw the smiling, resplendent Mario Tonti, the president of Italy, step from a red carpet and come forward through the sea of pomp and security to greet him.

19

    • NATIONAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D.C.,
MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR CAROLINE PARSONS, 2:35 P.M.

    Nicholas Marten sat near the back of the cathedral listening to the deep velvety voice and gentle words of the distinguished African-American minister who led the service, congressional chaplain Rufus Beck, who was pastor of Caroline's church and had made the call to Dr. Stephenson when Caroline had broken down following the funerals of her husband and son. A man he had met briefly in her hospital room.
    Emotionally Marten had done everything he could to divorce himself from the event and from the official stamp the service itself gave, the awful acknowledgment that Caroline was truly dead. To that end he had created his own distraction, which he hoped would somehow bear fruit. It was to continually scan the mourners packing the church in the hope that the white-haired man, Dr. Merriman Foxx, had not yet left Washington and had instead come here to take some sort of perverse pleasure in the results of his work. But if he was here, if he was indeed as Peter Fadden had described him, sixty years old and looking like Einstein, so far Marten hadn't seen him.
    Those he did see—and there were more than several hundred—were political figures he recognized from the press or television, and many others whom he did not recognize but who had to have been friends or at least associates of Caroline and her family. Just the size of thegathering gave him a very real sense of how rich and expansive their lives here had been.
    On a more personal level he saw Caroline's sister, Katy, and her husband, escorted quickly to the front of the church as they arrived, once again, and in so short a time, making an unbearably tragic flight from Hawaii to Washington.
    Marten had no way to know if Caroline had shared any of her fears with her sister. Or if Katy knew that Caroline had asked him to come to Washington to be with her for the last hours of her life. It would have been wholly in character for Caroline to have been mindful of what Katy was going through, caring for their Alzheimer's-debilitated mother in Hawaii and not wanting to add another level of anguish, deciding instead to keep her beliefs about some kind of conspiracy between herself and Marten. But whatever Katy knew or didn't, the question of what to do about her lingered. If he went to her, reminded her who he was, told her a little of what had happened in the years since she knew him in Los Angeles, and then confided what Caroline had told him and showed her the notarized letter she'd had prepared for him, it was all but certain Katy would accompany him to Caroline's law firm and demand that he be allowed access to the Parsons' private papers, thereby breaking the firm's reluctance to give him access to those things.
    That was on the one hand. On the other was the idea that his initial investigation had been smothered by someone in the firm powerful enough to be concerned about what he might find. If that were the case, and considering the situation with Dr. Stephenson, had he and Katy showed up to file a protest, there was every chancethat before long the same fate the Parsons family had suffered would befall either Katy or himself or both. It made the