“Wuxi is the second lake.” Marsciano’s face was ashen. “I want it to be the last. I want you to stop the next.”
Palestrina smiled easily. “The Holy Father has been asking for you, Eminence. He wanted to visit. I told him you were very weak, and that it was best that for the time being you rested.”
“No more deaths, Umberto,” Marsciano whispered. “You already have me. Stop the horror in China. Stop it and I will give you what you have wanted from the beginning…”
“—Father Daniel?” Palestrina smiled again, this time benevolently. “You told me he was dead, Nicola…”
“He is not. If I ask him, he will come here. Call off the last lake and you can do with us as you wish…. The secret of your ‘Chinese Protocol’ passing with us.”
“Very noble, Eminence. But, unfortunately, too late on both counts…” Palestrina turned to glance for a moment at the television, then he looked back.
“The Chinese have capitulated and have already asked for the contracts…. Even so”—Palestrina added, smiling distantly—“in war there is no pulling back; the campaign must be concluded according to plan…” Palestrina hesistated long enough for Marsciano to know any further argument would be in vain, and then he continued. “As for Father Daniel. No need to summon him, he is on his way to see you. May even be in Rome as we speak.”
“Impossible!” Marsciano shouted. “How could he even know I was here?”
Again Palestrina smiled. “Father Bardoni told him.”
“No! Never!” Marsciano was flushed with anger and outrage. “He would never give up Father Daniel.”
“But he did, Eminence…. Ultimately he became convinced that I was right and that you and the cardinal vicar were wrong. That the future of the Church is worth more than the life of one single man, no matter who he is—Eminence…” Palestrina’s smile faded. “Have no doubt, Father Daniel will come.”
Marsciano had never hated in his life. But he hated now, with everything in him.
“I do not believe you.”
“Believe what you wish…”
Slowly Palestrina slipped his hand into the pocket of his priest’s jacket and took out a dark velvet drawstring purse. “Father Bardoni sends his ring to you as proof…”
Setting the purse on the writing table next to Marsciano, Palestrina fixed his eyes on the cardinal, then turned and walked to the door.
Marsciano did not see Palestrina leave. Did not hear the door open or close, or even the click of the lock as it was turned. His eyes were frozen on the dark velvet pouch in front of him. Slowly, his hand trembling, he picked it up and opened it.
Outside, a gardener looked up sharply at the sound of a hideous scream.
125
10:42 A.M.
ROSCANI WALKED ALONE DOWN VIA INNOcenzo III. It was hot, and getting hotter as the sun moved higher overhead. In front of him was Stazione San Pietro. He’d stepped from the car a half block back, leaving Scala and Castelletti to go on to the station. They were to come in separately from either side, one arriving before Roscani, the other just afterward. They would be looking for Harry Addison, but doing nothing to apprehend him unless he ran. The idea was to give Roscani room to operate comfortably one on one with the fugitive, to keep the thing as easy and relaxed as it could be; but at the same time to position themselves in such a way that if he did bolt, one or the other would be in his path. There were no other police, no backups. It was what Roscani had promised.
Harry Addison had been good. His call had come into the Questura switchboard at ten-twenty. He’d said simply:
“My name is Harry Addison. Roscani is looking for me.”
Then he’d given his cell-phone number and hung up. No time to trace. Nothing at all.
Five minutes later Roscani called him from where he had been since his plane had touched down in Rome and he and Scala and Castelletti had rushed there—the crime scene in Father Bardoni’s apartment.
ROSCANI: This is Roscani.
HARRY ADDISON: We should talk.
ROSCANI: Where are you?
HARRY ADDISON: The train station at St. Peter’s.
ROSCANI: Stay there. I’ll meet you.
HARRY ADDISON: Roscani, come alone. You won’t know me, I look different. If I see any police, I’ll leave.
ROSCANI: Where in the station?
HARRY ADDISON: I’ll find you.
ROSCANI CROSSED THE street, closing in on the station. He remembered how he’d first planned to come upon Harry Addison. Alone, with a gun. To kill him for murdering Gianni Pio. But things had turned wildly, and with a complexity he could never have imagined.
If Harry Addison was here, in the station as promised, he was still outside Vatican territory. So, Roscani hoped, was Father Daniel. Perhaps he had a chance yet, before the whole thing crumbled into the hands of Taglia and the politicians.
HARRY SAW ROSCANI come in and cross the lobby, then walk out to stand near the tracks. Stazione San Pietro was small, a depot serving a small circuitous route through Rome. There were few people. Looking around, he saw a man in a sport coat and tie who might be a plainclothes policeman. But he had noticed the man a few moments earlier, before Roscani had come in, and that made it hard to tell.
Leaving the station by another door, he walked around to the side, and came down the platform from another angle, slowly, without energy. A priest waiting for his train; a priest who had purposely left his false identification tucked under the bottom of the refrigerator in the kitchen of the apartment on Via Nicolò V.
Through an open door, he saw another man come into the station. His shirt was open at the throat, but he wore a sport coat like the first man.
Now Roscani saw him, watched him approach.
Harry stopped, a dozen feet away. “You were supposed to come alone.”
“I did.”
“No, there are two men with you.” Harry was guessing, but he thought he was guessing correctly. One man was still in the station, the other had come out onto the platform and was watching them.
“Keep your hands where I can see them.” Roscani’s eyes were frozen on Harry’s.
“I’m not armed.”
“Do as I say.”
Harry moved his hands out from his waist. It felt awkward and uncomfortable.
“Where is your brother?” Roscani’s voice was flat. No emotion at all.
“He’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s—someplace else…. In a wheelchair. His legs are broken.”
“Other than that, he’s all right?”
“Mostly.”
“The nurse is still with him? Sister Elena Voso?”
“Yes…”
Harry felt a thud of emotion as Roscani said Elena’s name. He’d been right when he’d said they would identify her from what she’d left behind in the grotto. And now he knew they were treating her as a willing accomplice. He didn’t want her to be this involved, but she was anyway, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Abruptly, he glanced behind him. The second man had come out onto the platform, keeping his distance, the same as the first. Beyond him, a group of teenagers waited for a train, chattering, laughing. But it was the police who were closest.
“You don’t want to take me in, Roscani, not now, anyway.”
“Why did you call me?” The policeman continued to stare at him. He was strong and very focused. The same as Harry remembered.
“I told you, we need to talk.”
“About what?”
“Getting Cardinal Marsciano out of the Vatican.”
126
THEY DROVE THROUGH MIDDAY TRAFFIC. Harry and Roscani in back. Scala up front, with Castelletti driving. Along the Tiber, and then across it and through city streets to the Colosseum, down Via di San Gregorio past the ruins of the Palatine and the ancient Circus Maximus, and then down Via Ostiense and into the EUR, Esposizione Universale Roma—a grand tour of Rome, a way to talk and not be seen.
And Harry did talk, laying it out for them as simply and succinctly as he could.
The one person, he told them, who could reveal the truth behind the murder of the cardinal vicar of Rome, the killing of Gianni Pio, and, very probably, the explosion of the Assisi bus was Cardinal Marsciano, who was being held incommunicado and under the threat of death inside the Vatican by Cardinal Palestrina.
Harry knew this because his brother, Father Daniel Addison, had told him. It was all he knew, a revelation from one brother to another. But it was only a scratch on the surface; the real substance, the details, had been told to Father Daniel by Marsciano in confession, a confession secretly recorded by Palestrina.
Because of what Father Daniel had learned, Palestrina ordered him killed; but even before that, to keep leverage over Marsciano, Jacov Farel had set Father Daniel up, planting evidence to make it look as if he was the assassin of the cardinal vicar. And later, when Palestrina suspected Father Daniel was still alive, it was very probably he, through Farel, who had okayed the murder of Pio; because immediately afterward, they had taken Harry away and tortured him, trying to make him tell where Father Daniel was.
“That was when the video was made, when you asked your brother to give himself up,” Roscani said quietly.
Harry nodded. “I was still in shock from the torture, I was told what to say over a headset.”
For a long time Roscani did nothing, simply sat and studied the American.
“Why?” he said, finally.
Harry hesitated. “—Because there’s something else,” he said. “Another part of Marsciano’s confession…”
“What other part?” Roscani suddenly leaned forward.
“—It has to do with the disaster in China.”
“China?” Roscani tilted his head as if he didn’t get it. “You mean the mass deaths?”
“Yes…”
“What does that have to do with what’s happened here?”
This was the beat Harry was looking for. As much as Danny loved and cared for Marsciano, it was crazy to think that he and Danny and Elena alone could free him. But with Roscani’s help they might have a chance. Moreover—the emotional part of it aside—the truth was, Cardinal Marsciano was the only one whose testimony could vindicate Danny and Elena and him. It was the reason Harry was here, why he had taken the chance and called Roscani.
“Whatever I said, Ispettore Capo, would only be hearsay and therefore useless…. And, as a priest, my brother can say nothing at all…. It’s Marsciano who knows everything…”
Roscani sat back abruptly, pulling a crushed cigarette pack from his jacket. “So, we ask Cardinal Marsciano, he tells us on the record what, before, he would say only in confession, and everything is resolved.”
“—Maybe, yes,” Harry said. “His situation is a great deal different than it was.”
“You’re speaking for him?” Roscani said quickly. “You’re saying he will talk to us. He will name names and give us facts.”
“No, I’m not speaking for him. I’m only saying that he knows and we don’t…. And won’t, unless we get him out of there and give him the chance.”
Roscani sat back. His suit was wrinkled and he needed a shave. He was still a young man but looked tired and older than he had the first time he and Harry had met.
“Gruppo Cardinale police blanket the country,” he said softly. “Your photograph is on television and in the newspapers. A substantial reward offered for your arrest. How did you manage to get from Rome to Lake Como… and back?”
“Dressed as I am now, as a priest…. Your country has a great reverence for the clergy. Especially if they are Catholic.”
“You had help.”
“Some people were kind, yes…”
Roscani looked at the crumpled pack of cigarettes in his hand, then slowly crushed it and held it in his tightened fist.
“Let me tell you a truth, Mr. Addison…. All the evidence is against you and your brother…. Even if I said I believed you, who else do you think would?” He gestured toward the front. “Scala? Castelletti? The Italian court? The people of Vatican City?”
Harry kept his eyes on the policeman, knowing that to do anything else would make it seem as if he were lying.
“Let me tell you a truth, Roscani. Something only I would know because I was there…. The afternoon Pio was killed I was called from my hotel by Farel. His driver took me to the country, near where the bus exploded. Pio was there. There was a scorched gun some boys had found. Farel wanted me to see it. Insinuated it had belonged to my brother. It was more pressure on me to tell Farel where Danny was…. The trouble was, at that time I didn’t even know if he was alive let alone where he was…”
“Where is the gun now?” Roscani asked.
“You don’t have it?” Harry was surprised.
“No.”
“It was in an evidence bag in the trunk of Pio’s car…”
Roscani said nothing. Just sat there, watching him with no expression at all. No expression, but his mind was churning. Yes, it had been the truth. How could Harry Addison even know about the pistol if he hadn’t been there? And he had been genuinely surprised the police didn’t have the gun. And the other things he said rang true with most of Roscani’s own investigation—from the missing gun to bits and pieces of a high-level struggle going on inside the Vatican.
What he said also answered why so many people had sheltered, cared for, and protected Father Daniel and lied about it: because Cardinal Marsciano had asked them to.
Marsciano’s shadow was huge. A Tuscan farm boy with roots deep in the Italian soil, a man of the people who had been loved and admired as a priest long before he’d risen to his high place inside the Church. It was a given that when such a man asked for help, it would be dispensed without question, a “why?” never asked, that it had been done never revealed.
And Palestrina, as evil architect of it all—somehow, for some reason, involved in the mass deaths in China—and as a major figure in global diplomacy, was certain to have contacts that could have put him in touch with an international terrorist like Thomas Kind.
Furthermore, Cardinal Marsciano controlled the real purse strings of the Holy See, the type of huge financial base Palestrina would need to realize some immense ambition.
Harry could see Roscani weighing what he had said and wondering whether to believe him. To win him over, to have him fully on his side with no doubts at all, Harry knew he had to give him something else.
“A priest who worked for Cardinal Marsciano came to Lugano where we were hiding,” Harry said, his eyes locked on Roscani’s, “and asked my brother to come back to Rome. He did that because Cardinal Palestrina threatened to kill Marsciano if he didn’t. So he came and told us. He arranged for a Mercedes and provided Vatican license plates and a place for us to stay when we got here…. This morning I went to his apartment. He was dead. His left hand had been cut off…. I was scared as hell and ran away…. I’ll give you the address, you can—”
Roscani cut him off. “We know about the license plates, Mr. Addison, and we know about Father Bardoni.”
“What do you know?” Harry kept going. “That it was Father Bardoni who found my brother still alive in the pandemonium of the hospital after the bus explosion? Found him, and got him out of there in his own car. Took him to the home of a doctor friend outside Rome and saw that he was cared for until he could make arrangements for the hospital in Pescara and the people to protect him there?—Do you know that, Ispettore Capo?” Harry stared at Roscani, letting what he’d said penetrate, then his manner softened and he finished. “You have to believe I’m telling you the truth about the rest.”
Castelletti was turning now, heading up Viale dell’Oceano Pacifico and back toward the Tiber.
“Mr. Addison, do you know who killed Father Bardoni?” Roscani asked quietly.
“I have a good idea. The blond man who tried to kill us in the grotto in Bellagio.”
“Do you know who he is?”
/>
“No…”
“Does the name Thomas Kind mean anything to you?”
“Thomas Kind?”Harry felt the name stab through him.
“Then you know who he is—“
“Yes,” he said. It was like asking if he knew who Charles Manson was. Not only was Thomas Kind one of the most publicized, brutal, and elusive outlaws in the world, to some he was one of the most romantic. “Some,” meaning Hollywood. In the last months, four major movie and television projects had been announced with Thomas Kind spinning as the central character. And Harry knew firsthand, because he’d been involved in negotiating two of them, one for a star, the other for a director.
“Even if your brother weren’t confined to a wheelchair, he is in a very dangerous situation…. Kind is ingenious in finding people he wants to find. As he proved in Pescara and Bellagio, and now here, in Rome. I would suggest you tell us where he is.”
Harry hesitated. “If you take Danny in, it’s even more dangerous. Once Farel knows where he is, they’ll kill Marsciano and then they’ll send somebody after Danny wherever you’ve got him. Maybe Kind, maybe somebody else…”
Roscani hunched forward, his eyes on Harry. “We’ll do our best not to let that happen.”
“What does that mean?” Suddenly a red flag went up. Harry’s palms felt sticky, and there was sweat on his upper lip.
“It means, Mr. Addison, there is no evidence that what you’ve said is true. There is, however, substantial evidence to prosecute both you and your brother for the crimes of murder.”
Harry’s heart jumped for his throat. Roscani was going to arrest him right then. He couldn’t let it happen. “You are willing to let the prime witness be killed without any attempt to stop it?”
“There is nothing I can do, Mr. Addison. I have no authority to send people into Vatican territory. No power to arrest, if I did….” Roscani’s words, how he said them, at least showed Harry that he did believe his story. At least he wanted to.