And then a lone thought turned him back. In the faint light of day, Palestrina approached the entry to the yellow-brick building that was Vatican Radio. Opening the door, he climbed the interior steps to the upper tower and then stepped out onto its circular walkway.
Resting his massive hands on the edge of the battlement, he stood and watched day begin to rise over the Roman hills. From there he could view the city, the Vatican Palace, St. Peter’s, and much of the Vatican gardens. It was a favorite place and one that not so coincidentally provided physical security should he ever need it. The building itself was on a hill some distance from the Vatican proper and therefore easily defended. The exterior walkway where he stood encircled the entire building, putting anyone approaching in clear view; and gave him a vantage point from which he could direct his defenders.
It was a fanciful sentiment perhaps, but one he took increasingly to heart. Especially in light of the singular thought that had brought him there—Farel’s observation that Father Daniel was like the cat that had not used up its lives, the one man alone who could make him lose China. Before, Father Daniel had been an unwelcome glitch, a festering sore to be eliminated. That he had been able to elude both Thomas Kind and all of Roscani’s men, and continued to do so, touched a chord deep in Palestrina that terrified him—his secret belief in a dark and pagan netherworld and the mystic depraved spirits who dwelled there. These spirits, he was certain, were responsible for the sudden onslaught of crippling fever and his subsequent cruel death at the age of thirty-three when he lived as Alexander. If it were they who were guiding Father Daniel—
“No!” Palestrina said out loud, then deliberately turned from his perch and left, walking back down the stairs and out into the gardens. He would not allow himself to think of the spirits, now or ever again. They were not real but rather of his own imagination, and he would not let his own imagination destroy him.
104
Hefei, China. Wednesday, July 15, 11:40 A.M.
BUREAUCRACY AND CONFUSION AND HIS OWN position as water-quality inspector had delayed Li Wen from leaving the filtration plant. But finally he had done so by simply walking out of the angry turmoil of arguing politicians and scientists, and leaving. And now, heavy briefcase in one hand, the other pressing a handkerchief against his nose in a futile attempt to keep out the stench of decaying bodies, he worked his way up Changjiang Lu. Walking in the street one moment, on the sidewalk the next. Alternately moving between a flow of backed-up ambulances and emergency vehicles and the hordes of frightened, confused people desperate to find a way out of the city, or looking for relatives, or waiting in dread to feel the first chills and nausea that meant the water they had drunk earlier, that they had been told was safe, had poisoned them, too. And most were doing all three at the same time.
Another block and he passed the Overseas Chinese Hotel, where he had stayed and left his suitcase and clothing. The hotel was no longer a hotel but now Anhui Province’s Anti-Poisoning Headquarters; it had been taken over in a matter of hours, with guests abruptly thrown out of their rooms, their luggage hurriedly stacked near the front of the lobby, some of it spilling out onto the street. But even if he had time, Li Wen would not go back there anyway. There were too many people who might recognize him, stop to ask him questions, delay him further. And the one thing Li Wen could not afford was further delay.
Head down, doing his best to avoid looking at the horror-stricken faces of the people around him, he walked the few remaining blocks to the railroad station, where army trucks waited in long lines to pick up the hundreds of soldiers arriving by train.
Soaked with sweat, lugging his briefcase, he pushed around soldiers and dodged military police, each step becoming more laborious than the last, as his decidedly out-of-shape forty-six-year-old body battled the strain of the last days, the persistent heat, and the putrid, inescapable odor of rotting corpses, which, by now, permeated everything. Finally, he reached the jicun chu, the left-luggage room, and collected the battered suitcase he’d checked early Monday when he’d first arrived; a suitcase containing the chemicals he would need to prepare more of his “snowballs.”
Doubly weighted now, he went back into the station, pushed through the platform entrance gate, and walked another fifty yards to the track area already jammed with refugees waiting for the next trains out. In fifteen minutes his train would come. The soldiers arriving on it would pile off, and he and the others would rush on. Because he was a government official, he would have a seat and for that he was extraordinarily grateful. After that, he could sit back and for a time relax. The trip to Wuhu would take nearly two hours, and then he would change trains for Nanjing, where he would spend the night at the Xuanwu Hotel on Zhongyang Lu as planned. It was there he would rest and let himself begin to feel his accomplishment and sense of retribution over the hated, dogmatic government that had so long ago killed his father and robbed him of his childhood.
Feel it and enjoy it, and wait to receive the order that would send him to his next objective.
105
Bellagio. Gruppo Cardinale Headquarters,Villa Lorenzi. Wednesday, July 15, 6:50 A.M.
SHIRT OPEN AT THE NECK, HIS JACKET OFF, Roscani looked out across the grand ballroom. A skeleton staff worked as they had in the hours since midnight, when, at the lack of any action at all, he had sent only the most critical of them off to the second floor to sleep in the cots brought in by the army. Personnel were still out in the field, and Castelletti had taken off in the helicopter at first light, while Scala had left before then to go back to the grotto with two of the Belgian Malinois and their handlers, still not convinced that they had searched all of it.
At two A.M. Roscani had put in a call for an additional eight hundred Italian Army troops and then gone to bed himself. By three-fifteen he was up and showered and back in the same clothes he had worn for two days. By four he’d decided they’d all had enough.
At six A.M. an announcement was broadcast over local radio and television and read in early parish masses. In exactly two hours, at eight o’clock sharp, the Italian Army would stage a massive door-to-door search of the entire area. The phrasing had been simple and direct: the fugitives were there and would be uncovered, and anyone found harboring them would be considered an accomplice and prosecuted accordingly.
Roscani’s move was more than a threat, it was a ploy to make the fugitives think they might have a chance if they made their move before the deadline, and it was why Gruppo Cardinale police and army troops had moved into position a full thirty minutes before the announcement was made; silently watching and waiting, hoping one or all of them would cut from their hiding places and run.
6:57
Roscani glanced at Eros Barbu’s elaborate rococo clock on the wall over the silent bandstand, then looked to the men and women at the computer terminals and phone banks, sifting information, coordinating the Gruppo Cardinale personnel in the field. Finally, he took a sip of cold, sweet coffee and went outside, glancing again around the elaborate ballroom as he did.
Outside, Lake Como was still, as was the air. Walking toward the water, Roscani turned and looked back toward the imposing villa. How anyone could afford to live in such a place and in the style of Eros Barbu boggled the mind, especially the mind of a policeman. Still, he wondered, as he had earlier, what it would have been like to be part of it. Invited there to dance and listen to the music of a live orchestra and perhaps, he smiled, to be just a little bit decadent.
It was a contemplation that faded as he walked along the gravel that bordered the lake, and his thoughts again turned to the INTERPOL dossier that had provided him no information whatsoever on his blond ice picker/razor man. At almost the same moment, he became aware of a strong scent of wild flowers. The odor was far more pungent than pleasant, and instantly he was transported back four years to when he had been temporarily assigned to a branch of the Ministero dell’Interno’s Antimafia section working to break a series of mafia murders in Sicily. He was in a field o
utside Palermo with several other investigators examining a body a farmer had found facedown in a ditch. It was the same early morning as it was now, the air crisp and still, the peppery smell of the wild flowers dominating the senses as they did here. When they rolled the body over and saw that the throat had been cut from ear to ear, a shout went up from all of the investigators at once. To a man they knew who their killer was.
“Thomas Kind,” Roscani said out loud, a chill punching through him from his head to his feet.
Thomas Kind. He’d never even thought of him. The terrorist had been out of the public eye for at least three years, maybe more, and thought to be ill or retired or both and living in the relative safety of Sudan.
“Christ!” Roscani was suddenly turning, running back toward the villa. It was seven-forty in the morning. Twenty minutes exactly before the door-to-door sweep was to begin.
106
Bellagio. The car-ferry landing. Same time.
HARRY WATCHED THE HEAVILY ARMED CARAbinieri questioning the man and woman in the dark Lancia in front of them. Immediately the police ordered the man out of the car and walked with him as he opened the trunk. Finding nothing, the police waved the couple on. Then as the Lancia drove across the ramp and onto the ferry, the police turned toward them.
“Here we go,” Harry said under his breath.
Five of them were in a white Ford van with Church of Santa Chiara neatly stenciled on the doors. Father Renato was at the wheel with Elena beside him. Harry, Danny, and a young, almost baby-faced priest, Father Natalini, sat in back. Elena was dressed in a business suit and wearing tortoiseshell glasses, her hair pulled back tightly and twisted in a bun. The priests were in their everyday black with white clerical collars. Danny wore glasses as well, and he and Harry, still bearded, were also in black. Long black coats buttoned to the throat with black zucchettos on their heads. They looked like rabbis, which was the idea.
“I know them,” Father Renato said quietly in Italian as the carabinieri came to either window.
“Buon giorno, Alfonso. Massimo.”
“Padre Renato! Buon giorno.” Alfonso, the first carabiniere, was tall and hulking and physically intimidating, but he smiled broadly as he recognized the van and Father Renato and then Father Natalini. “Buon giorno, Padre.”
“Buon giorno.” Father Natalini smiled from where he sat beside Danny.
For the next ninety seconds Harry felt as though his heart was coming to full arrest as Father Renato and the policemen chatted in Italian. Once in a while he caught a word or phrase he understood. “Rabbino.” “Israele.” “Conferenza Cristianolgiudea.”
The rabbi business had been Harry’s idea. It was straight out of the movies. Crazy and preposterous. And sitting there, breathless, terrified, waiting for the carabinieri to suddenly stop talking and order them all out of the van the way they had the man in the Lancia, he wondered what the hell he must have been thinking. Still, they’d had to do something, and quickly, after Elena had come hurriedly into his room before dawn with Father Renato, saying her mother general had arranged a place for them to stay just over the border in Switzerland.
With the approval of his superior, Father Renato had agreed to help get them there—but he had no idea how. It was while Harry was dressing that he’d absently looked in the mirror and seen his growth of beard and remembered Danny’s. It was nuts, but it might work, considering they had bluffed their way through police checkpoints twice before; and because Father Renato and Father Natalini were not only clergy but also locals who knew everyone, including the police.
And then there was the L.A. thing. Harry might have been Catholic, but one didn’t move far in the entertainment business without having Jewish friends and clients. He’d been invited to Passover seders for years, had shared uncountable breakfasts at Nate and Al’s deli in Beverly Hills, an oasis for Jewish writers and comedians; gone regularly with clients visiting relatives to the ethnic neighborhoods around Fairfax and Beverly, Pico and Robertson. More than once he’d marveled at the similarity of the yarmulke to the Catholic skullcap, the zucchetto, the black coats of the rabbis to those of bishops and priests. And now, for better or worse, he and Danny had become visiting rabbis from Israel, touring Italy as part of an ongoing discourse between Christians and Jews. Elena had become an Italian guide and translator from Rome, traveling with them. Though God forbid anyone should ask her, or them, to speak Hebrew.
“Fuggitivo,” one of the carabinieri said sharply. Bringing Harry back with a rush.
“Fuggitivo, “Father Renato nodded, adding a succinct, fiery reply in Italian. Obviously both carabinieri agreed with what he said, because they suddenly stepped back, saluted, and waved the van forward.
Harry looked to Elena, then saw Father Renato shift into gear. Felt the van move forward. Up onto the ramp and across it into the hold of the ferry. Turning back, he saw the policemen advance on the next vehicle in line. Saw the occupants made to get out, show identification, while the vehicle itself was aggressively searched.
None in the van dared look at another. Just waited in silence for an agonizing ten minutes before the last car came on board, the gangway doors closed, and the ferry got under way.
Harry felt the sweat run down his neck, trickle from his armpits. How many more of these could they get away with? How long would their luck, if that’s what it was, hold?
THE FERRY HAD BEEN STEP ONE, sailing for Mennagio at seven fifty-six, exactly four minutes before the Italian Army sweep of the entire peninsula would begin, and fifteen minutes after Salvatore Belsito’s farm truck had been found parked on a street a half mile from Santa Chiara. Father Natalini had left it there just before six, carefully wiping the steering wheel and gearshift clean of his fingerprints, then walking quickly back to Santa Chiara.
Step two, the crossing of the border from Italy into Switzerland, would have been more difficult, if not impossible, because neither Father Renato nor Father Natalini knew Gruppo Cardinale personnel at the border checkpoint. What saved them was that Father Natalini had grown up in Porlezza, a small town inland from Mennagio, and knew as only a native could know, the narrow country roads that wound and twisted through the hills and rose up into the Alps; roads that enabled them to bypass the Gruppo Cardinale checkpoint at Oria and brought them into Switzerland unmolested at ten twenty-two in the morning.
107
The Vatican. The Tower of San Giovanni. 11:00 A.M.
MARSCIANO STOOD AT THE GLASS DOOR, THE only opening in the room to admit daylight; and, other than the locked and guarded entry door from the hallway outside, its only exit. Behind him, the television screen he could no longer bear to watch glowed like an all-seeing eye.
He could turn the TV off, of course, but he hadn’t and wouldn’t. It was a trait of character Palestrina understood all too well in Marsciano, which was why he’d ordered the twenty-inch Nokia left behind when he’d had the formerly luxurious one-room apartment stripped of all but its essentials—bed, writing table, chair—and ordered the apartment itself shut off from the rest of the building.
“The death toll in Hefei has reached sixty thousand, six hundred and is still rising. There remains no estimation where the number will end.”
The field correspondent’s voice was crisp behind him. Marsciano did not need to see the screen. It would be the same color graphic they used every hour to project the number of deaths, as if they were doing exit polls projecting votes in an election.
Finally, Marsciano pulled the door open and stepped out onto the tiny balcony. Fresh air touched him, and, mercifully, the resonance of the television diminished.
Grasping the iron safety railing, he closed his eyes. As if not seeing would somehow lessen the awfulness. In his darkness he saw another vision—the cold, conspiratorial faces of Cardinal Matadi and Monsignor Capizzi watching him dispassionately from their seats inside the limousine on the drive back to the Vatican from the Chinese Embassy. Then he saw Palestrina pick up the car phone and quietly ask for
Farel, the secretariat’s gaze rising up to hold on Marsciano’s as he waited for the Vatican policeman to come on the line. And then came the secretariat’s soft-spoken words—
“Cardinal Marsciano has been taken ill in the car. Prepare a room for him in the Tower of San Giovanni.”
The chilling remembrance made Marsciano suddenly open his eyes to where he was now. Below, a Vatican gardener was looking up at him. The man stared for a moment and then turned back to what he had been doing.
How many hundreds of times, Marsciano thought, had he come to the tower to visit foreign dignitaries staying in its ornate apartments? How many times had he looked up from the gardens below, as the worker had, to see this curious little platform on which he stood, never giving a thought to how darkly sinister it was?
Hanging like a diver’s platform forty feet off the ground, it was the only opening in the cylindrical wall from top to bottom. An exit that led nowhere. Surrounded by a thin, iron safety railing, the platform was hardly wider than the door itself and no more than two feet across. The sheer wall above it rose another thirty feet to the point where the windows of the other apartments jutted sharply out. Looking upward, one could not see past those windows, but Marsciano knew they were near the top, and above them was a circular walkway and then the tower’s turreted crown.