Day of Confession Read online

  “A lot of women do both, have a career and a home life…”

  “Not this woman.” Adrianna held her ground, if anything becoming more serious. “I told you before, I like to fuck strangers.—You know why? It’s not only exciting, it’s total independence. And to me that’s the most important thing there is, because it lets me do my job the best way I can, lets me go as far as I have to to get to the truth of the stories…. Do you think as a mother I’m going to stand out in the middle of a fucking field under artillery fire covering somebody’s civil war?—Or, bringing it a little closer home, risk spending the rest of my life in an Italian prison because I provided one of the most wanted men in the country false identity papers?—No, Harry Addison, I would not, because I wouldn’t do that to children…. I’m a loner who likes it…. I make good money, I sleep with who I want, I travel to places even you could only dream of and have access to people most of the world’s leaders don’t…. I get a rush from it, and that rush gives me the balls to cover history like they used to but like nobody but me does anymore…. Is it selfish? I don’t know what the hell that means…. But it’s no charade, it’s who I am…. And if something happens and I lose, the only person who gets hurt is me…”

  “How does that play when you’re seventy?”

  “Ask me then.”

  Harry watched her a moment longer. It was why he felt as he had, that he knew her better on television than here. Her life and her intimacy were right there on the screen. It was who she was and all she wanted to be. And she was very good at it. A week ago he would have said something of the same about himself. Freedom was everything. It gave you incredible opportunities because you could take chances. You trusted your skills and ability and played everything on the surface as hard and fast as it came. And if you lost, you lost…. But now he wasn’t sure. Maybe it was because he no longer had freedom at all. Maybe there was a price for it he’d never realized. Maybe it was as simple as that…. But maybe it wasn’t…. And there was something else, something he knew he had yet to learn and understand…. And all this was a journey to help him find it….

  “Where I do go from here… and when…,” Harry suddenly found himself saying, “who do I communicate with—you or Eaton?”

  “Me.” Opening her purse, Adrianna took out a small cellular phone and handed it to him. “I know what the police are doing, and I make a hundred telephone calls a day. One more won’t raise an eyebrow.”

  “What about Eaton?”

  Adrianna hesitated, then turned her head slightly, the way she did on camera when she was about to explain something.

  “You’ve never heard of James Eaton… and he’s never heard of Harry Addison, except for what he’s read in the papers or seen on TV, or maybe had passed through the embassy about you…. You don’t know me either, except for that one time we were seen in the hotel together and I was trying to get a statement from you.”

  “What about all this?” Harry leaned forward and spread the Jonathan Arthur Roe passport, the Georgetown ID, the driver’s license across the table.

  “What happens if I turn left instead of right and walk into the arms of Gruppo Cardinale. What am I supposed to tell Roscani, that I always carry a second set of identification? He’s going to want to know how I got it and where.”

  “Harry.” Adrianna smiled warmly. “You are a very big boy. By now you should know your left from your right…. If you don’t, practice, huh?” Leaning forward she kissed him lightly on the lips. “Don’t turn the wrong way,” she whispered, and then she left. Turning only at the door to tell him to stay where he was, and when she had news she’d call him.

  He stood there and watched the door close behind her. Heard the click of the latch as it did. Slowly his eyes went to the table where the IDs were spread out. For the first time in his life he wished he had taken acting lessons.

  48

  Cortona, Italy. Still Saturday, July 11. 9:30 A.M.

  NURSING SISTER ELENA VOSO FINISHED HER shopping and came out of the small grocery on Piazza Signorelli with a large bag of fresh vegetables. She had picked the vegetables carefully, wanting to make a soup that would be as palatable and nutritious as possible. Not just for the three men who were with her but for Michael Roark. It was time at least to try to feed him solid food. Earlier she had moistened his lips and he had swallowed automatically in reaction. But when she had tried to get him to sip some water he’d only looked at her, as if the effort were too much. Still, if she offered a warm puree of fresh vegetables, perhaps the aroma itself might be enticing enough to make him at least attempt to get it down. Even a spoonful was better than nothing, because it would be a beginning, and the sooner he began taking solid food, the sooner she could get him off the IV and help him start regaining his physical strength.

  Marco watched her come out and turn down the narrow cobblestone street toward the far end, where they had parked the car. Ordinarily he would have walked beside her and carried the bag. But not now, not here today in the bright sunshine. And even though they would drive off in the same car, it was not good that they be seen shopping or walking together. It was something someone might later remember. They were Italians, yes, yet strangers to Cortona—a nun and a man, obviously together, gathering supplies, taking them away. Why? What were they doing? It could be enough for someone to say, “Yes, they were here. I saw them.”

  Ahead of him Marco saw Elena stop, glance back, then turn and go into a small shop. Marco stopped, too, wondering what she was doing. To his left, a narrow street dropped steeply downward. Below he could see the distant plain and the roads leading up from it to the ancient walled city of the Umbrians and Etruscans, where he now stood. Cortona had been a fortress then; he hoped he would not have to make it one again.

  Looking back toward the shop, he saw Elena come out, turn her head toward him, and then walk away in the direction of the car. Five minutes later, she reached a small, silver Fiat, the car Pietro had driven when he followed them north from Pescara. A moment later Marco came up, waited for several pedestrians to pass, then took the bundle from Elena and unlocked the door.

  “Why did you go into the store?” he asked as they drove off.

  “I’m not allowed?”

  “Of course. I just wasn’t prepared.”

  “Neither was I, which was why I went in.” She lifted a package from the bag in her lap.

  Sanitary napkins.

  BY ELEVEN O’CLOCK both soup and puree were simmering on the kitchen stove and Elena was in the second-floor bedroom with Michael Roark. He was in an armchair, a pillow tucked under each arm, sitting upright for the first time. Marco had helped get him out of bed and into the chair and then had left, anxious to go outside for a cigarette. Above them, Luca slept in a third-floor bedroom. He was the night man, the same as he had been in the hospital in Pescara, sitting in the van outside from eleven at night until seven in the morning. Coming every two hours to help Elena turn her patient. Then going back out to wait and watch.

  For what? Or whom? she wondered again, as she had wondered about the men all along.

  From the bedroom she could see Marco, smoking and walking the southern periphery of the yard atop a stone wall. Below the wall was the road, and up from it, the gate and the driveway leading up to the house. Across the road was a large farm that went as far as the eye could see into the summer haze. A tractor worked it now, dust rising behind it as it plowed a stretch of open field behind the main house.

  Abruptly Pietro appeared, crossing between the cypress trees in front of the window and walking toward Marco, his sleeves rolled up, his shirt open against the growing heat of the day, the gun in his waistband no longer hidden. Reaching him, he stopped, and the men talked. After a moment Marco glanced back at the house, as if he knew the two were being watched.

  Elena turned to look at Michael Roark. “Are you comfortable sitting up?” she asked.

  He nodded ever so slightly, just a small tip of his head. But it was a definitive response, much
more dynamic than his previous blinking in reaction to her squeezing of his thumb or toes.

  “I’ve made something for you to eat. Would you like to try and see if you can get it down?”

  This time there was no response. He merely sat looking at her, then moved his eyes away and to the window. Elena watched him. His head, turned as it was against the light, gave him, despite the bandages, a profile she hadn’t before seen. She hesitated, studying him a moment longer, then went past him and into the nook that was her part of the room.

  Yes, she had turned into the store for sanitary napkins. But the move had been an excuse. Something else had caught her eye: a storefront rack with newspapers and a copy of La Repubblica with the bold headline FUGITIVES IN CARDINAL PARMA MURDER STILL AT LARGE, and beneath it, less bold, “Police Screen Victims of Assisi Bus Explosion.”

  They were both stories she knew of, but in little detail. The assassination of the cardinal had, of course, been the talk of the convent, and then had come the explosion of the Assisi bus. But very shortly afterward she had gone to Pescara and had seen no papers or television since. Yet the moment she’d glimpsed the headlines, she’d reacted, making an instinctive correlation between the headline and Marco and the others—men who were armed and guarded her and her patient twenty-four hours a day. Men who seemed to know a great deal more about what was going on than she did.

  Inside the store, she’d picked up the paper and seen photographs of the men the police were looking for. Her mind raced. The bus explosion had taken place Friday. Michael Roark’s automobile accident had occurred in the mountains outside Pescara on Monday. Tuesday morning she’d been given the order to go to Pescara. Could not a survivor of the bus explosion be badly burned and in a coma? Perhaps even have broken legs? Could he have perhaps been secretly moved from one hospital to another, or even to a private residence for a day or more before arrangements had been made to bring him to Pescara?

  Quickly she’d bought the paper. And then as an afterthought—as a way to hide it from Marco and an unquestionable excuse for why she’d gone into the store—she’d bought the sanitary napkins and had both put into the same brown paper bag.

  Back at the house, she’d gone immediately to her nook and put the napkins on a shelf where they could be seen. And afterward she’d carefully folded the newspaper, putting it away under clothing still in her suitcase.

  “Dear God,” she’d thought over and over. “What if Michael Roark and Father Daniel Addison are the same person?”

  Washing her hands and changing into a fresh habit, she’d started to take the newspaper from her suitcase, wanting to hold it up next to her patient. To look at the photograph and see if there was any resemblance at all. But Marco had called her from the staircase, and she had not been able to do so. Putting the paper back, she’d closed the suitcase and gone to see what he wanted.

  Now Marco and Pietro were outside and Luca was sleeping. Now there was time.

  Michael Roark was still looking out the window, his back to her, as she came in. Moving closer, she folded the paper back and held it up so that the photograph of Father Daniel Addison was level with her patient. The bandages made it difficult to tell; moreover, Michael Roark’s beard was growing, while the photo of Father Daniel showed a man clean shaven, but… the forehead, the cheekbones, the nose, the way the—

  Abruptly, Michael Roark turned his head and looked directly at her. Elena started and jumped back, jerking the paper out of sight behind her as she did. For a long moment he seemed to glare at her and she was certain he knew what she had been doing. Then slowly his mouth opened.

  “Wa—a—ah—t—errr,” he garbled the word hoarsely. “Wa—a—ah—trrrrrr…”

  49

  Rome. Same time.

  WHY, OF ALL TIMES, HAD ROSCANI DECIDED to quit smoking now? But as of seven this morning he had just stopped, stubbed the half-smoked cigarette into his ashtray and announced to himself that he no longer smoked. Since then, almost anything had done in place of tobacco. Coffee, gum, sweet rolls. Coffee, gum again. At the moment it was a chocolate gelato cone, and he was eating it against the July heat, licking the melting ice cream from his hand as he walked through the noonday crowds and back to the Questura. But neither melting gelato nor the lack of nicotine could pull him from the thing on his mind—the missing Llama pistol with the silencer squirreled to its barrel.

  It was a thought that had come in the middle of the night and kept him awake for the rest of it. The first thing this morning he’d looked at the “Transfer of Evidence” form Pio and Jacov Farel had both signed at the farmhouse when Farel had transferred possession of the gun found at the Assisi bus site to Pio. Correct and legal. It meant Pio definitely had the gun, and after he was killed, it was gone, along with Harry Addison. But that was only routine detective work, not the thought that had waked him and had eaten at him all morning and still did. All along he’d believed the Spanish-made Llama had been carried by Father Daniel and was a definitive link between him and the dead Spanish Communist Miguel Valera, the man set up to take the blame for the assassination of the cardinal vicar of Rome.

  But—and this was the thing—what if the gun had not belonged to Father Daniel at all but to someone else on the bus? Someone who was there to kill him. If that was the case, then they might be looking not at one crime but two: an attempt to murder the priest and the blowing up of the bus itself.

  11:30 p.m.

  Hot and sticky. The heat that had begun to build the previous week had not let go, and even at this late hour it was still eighty-three degrees.

  Trying to get some relief against it, Cardinal Marsciano had changed from his wool vestments into khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt and gone outside to the small interior courtyard of his apartment, hoping for a breeze that might lighten the oppressiveness.

  The light spill from his library window illuminated the tomatoes and peppers he had planted in late April. They had ripened early and now had fruit that was almost ready to pick. Ripened early because of the heat. Not that it was totally unexpected. It was July, and July was usually hot. For a moment Marsciano smiled, remembering the small two-story Tuscan farmhouse where he had grown up along with his parents and four brothers and three sisters. The heat of summer meant two things—exhaustively long days with the entire family getting up before sunrise and working in the fields almost until dusk and scorpions, by the thousands. Coming in and sweeping them out of the house was a two-or three-times-a-day chore, and one never got into bed or put on a pair of pants or shirt or shoe, for that matter, without shaking it out first. The sting of a scorpion would leave you with a welt and pain you would remember for a long time. The insect was the first of God’s creatures he truly despised. But then that was long before he’d known Palestrina.

  Filling a watering can, Marsciano soaked the ground beneath his vegetable plants, then set the can back where it had been and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Still there was no breeze, and the night air seemed more stifling than ever.

  The heat.

  He tried to push it from his mind but he couldn’t, because he knew it was what had started Palestrina’s China clock ticking. Every day Marsciano watched the papers and the global weather reports on television and scanned the Internet, monitoring as best he could the weather conditions across Asia, the same as he knew Palestrina was doing. Only the secretariat would have a far more comprehensive manner of information gathering than he did, mainly because, in light of his “Chinese Protocol,” Palestrina himself had taken up the study of meteorology, becoming a passionate student of the science of weather forecasting. In less than a year he had become a near-expert in the projection of computerized weather forecast models. Additionally, he established personal relationships with a half dozen professional weathercasters around the world with whom he could communicate for advice almost instantly via E-mail. If the secretariat hadn’t had a more direct agenda before him, he could have easily settled into a second career as Italy’s chief weathe
r expert.

  A prolonged spell of hot, humid weather across eastern China was what he was waiting for. With it, the sun-fed algae and its accompanying biological toxins would quickly begin to clot the surface of lakes, polluting the main water supplies of towns and cities along their shores. And when the conditions were right and the algae mass large enough, Palestrina would give the order and his “protocol” would begin. Poisoning the lakes in a way that would be undetectable, making the cause appear to be the algae and the inability of the aging municipal water-filtration systems to correct it.

  People would die in huge numbers, and an enormous public outcry would follow. And government leaders would be secretly worried that the provinces might panic and sense Beijing was not capable of running the water system and threaten to pull away from the central government, thereby putting China on the brink of its greatest fear, collapse, in the same way the Soviet Union had collapsed. And these government leaders would respond to a strong, very private recommendation by a longtime trusted ally that a consortium of international construction companies, many already working on projects within China, be quickly brought together to immediately rebuild the country’s entire crumbling and near-archaic water-delivery/treatment infrastructure. From canals to reservoirs to filtration plants to dams and hydroelectric plants.

  That longtime trusted ally would, of course, be Pierre Weggen. And the companies and corporations to do the work would, of course, be those silently controlled by the Vatican. It was the heart of Palestrina’s plan: control China’s water and you control China.

  And to begin to control the water he needed hot weather, and today it was hot in Italy, and it was hot in eastern China. And Marsciano knew that, save an unlikely and abrupt change of weather over Asia, it was only a matter of days before Palestrina would send word and the horror would begin.