Day of Confession Read online

  “My brother is alive, Father. And His Eminence knows where he is. Now, either he can take me to him himself, or we can call the police over here and let them convince him to do the same thing…”

  Father Bardoni studied Harry carefully, then his gaze caught a man in a blue shirt on the far side of the fountain watching them.

  “Perhaps we should go for a walk…”

  HARRY SAW THE MAN as they left, moving out of the crowd, following them at a distance as they crossed an open grassy area and started down a paved walkway through the park.

  “Who is he?” Harry pressed. “The man in the blue shirt.”

  Father Bardoni took his glasses off, rubbed them on his sleeve, then put them back on. Without them, he seemed stronger and more physical, and the thought crossed Harry’s mind that he didn’t need them at all, that they were there for effect in an attempt to soften his appearance. That maybe he was more like a bodyguard than a personal secretary. Or, if not that, a man much more involved with what was going on than he seemed to be.

  “Mr. Addison—” Father Bardoni glanced over his shoulder. The man in the blue shirt was still following them. Abruptly he stopped. Deliberately letting the man catch up. “He works for Farel,” he said quietly.

  The man was up to them, nodding as he passed. “Buon giorno.”

  “Buon giorno, “Father Bardoni said in return.

  Father Bardoni watched him go, then looked to Harry. “You have no idea what’s going on, or what you are getting into.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  Father Bardoni glanced after the man in the blue shirt. He was still walking up the path, moving away. Once again he took off his glasses and turned back to Harry.

  “I will speak with the cardinal, Mr. Addison,” Father Bardoni acquiesced for the moment. “I will tell him you wish to meet with him.”

  “It’s more than a wish, Father.”

  Father Bardoni hesitated, as if he were judging Harry’s determination, then slid the glasses back on. “Where are you staying?” he asked. “How can we get in touch with you?”

  “I’m not sure, Father. It’s best I get in touch with you.”

  At the end of the pathway, the man in the blue shirt stopped and glanced back. When he did, he saw the two priests shake hands and then Father Bardoni turn and walk off, going back the way he had come. The other priest, the one in the black beret, watched him go, then, taking another path, walked away.

  55

  CASTELLETTI TOOK A CIGARETTE FROM A pack on the table in front of him and started to light it. Then he saw Roscani staring at him.

  “You want me to go outside?”

  “No.”

  Abruptly Roscani took a bite out of a carrot stick. “Finish what you were saying,” he said, then, glancing at Scala, turned to stare at the bulletin board on the wall next to the window.

  They were in Roscani’s office, their jackets off, sleeves rolled up, talking over the din of the air conditioner. The detectives bringing Roscani current on their separate investigations.

  Castelletti had traced the numbers on the Harry Addison videocassette and found it had been bought at a store on Via Frattina, which was little more than a five-minute walk from the Hotel Hassler and the American’s room.

  Scala, looking for the source of the bandage seen on Addison’s forehead in the video, had canvassed every street within a half-mile circumference of the site where Pio had been slain. In that area were twenty-seven physicians and three clinics. None had treated anyone matching Harry Addison’s description the afternoon or evening of the murder. Furthermore, Roscani’s request to have the video’s image computer enhanced to get a more detailed look at the wallpaper behind Addison had proved a failure. There was simply not enough detail to find a clear pattern for a manufacturing source.

  Crunching on his carrot, trying to ignore the sweet nicotine smell of Castelletti’s cigarette, Roscani listened to it all. They had done their work and found nothing they could use; it was part of the game. Of far more interest was the bulletin board and the 3 × 5 cards listing the names of twenty-three of the twenty-four victims of the bombing of the Assisi bus. Beside them were photographs, some recent, some old, collected from family archives, mostly of the mutilated dead.

  Roscani, like Scala and Castelletti, had looked at the photos a hundred times. Saw them while falling asleep, while shaving, while driving. If Father Daniel was alive, whom had he replaced? Which one of the twenty-three others?

  Of the eight who had survived and the sixteen dead, all but one—the remains originally thought to be Father Daniel Addison—had been positively identified; even those five burned beyond recognition had had their identities confirmed through dental and medical records.

  The one missing, victim number 24—with no card or name or photograph—was the charred body in the box, the one originally thought to be that of Father Daniel Addison. So far he was without identity. Tests had shown no scars or other visible means of identification. A dental chart had been made from what little was left of the mouth, but as yet there was nothing with which to compare it. And files of missing persons had turned up nothing. And yet someone obviously was missing. A Caucasian male, probably in his late thirties or early forties. Five foot nine to six feet and weighing somewhere between—

  Suddenly Roscani turned to look at his detectives.

  “What if there were twenty-five people on the bus, not twenty-four? In the mass of confusion afterward, who could know exactly how many there were? The living and dead are taken to two different hospitals. Extra doctors and nurses are called in. Ambulances are banging around like rush-hour traffic. There are people terribly burned, some without arms or legs. We’ve got gurneys piling up in hallways. People are running. Yelling. Trying to keep some kind of order and the victims alive at the same time. Add that to whatever else was going on in those emergency rooms at the time. Who the hell sits there keeping track? There isn’t enough help to begin with.

  “And what did it take afterward? Almost a full day of talking to rescuers, looking at hospital records, talking to bus company people trying to tally up tickets sold. Another day after that working through the identities of the people we had. And in the end, everyone—us included—simply accepted the total count as twenty-four.

  “It’s not impossible at all to think one person could have been overlooked in that chaos. Someone who was never even formally admitted. Somebody who, if he was ambulatory enough, might have simply wandered off, walked away in the middle of everything. Or, maybe even had help getting the hell out of there.

  “Damn it!” Roscani slammed his hand down on his desk. All the while they had been looking at what they had, not at what they didn’t have. What they had to do now was go back to the hospitals. Check every record of every admittance that day. Talk to anyone who had been on duty. Find out what had happened to that one victim. Where he might have gone by himself or been taken.

  FORTY MINUTES LATER Roscani was on the Autostrada, driving north toward Fiano Romano and the hospital there, a juggler with too many balls in the air, a jigsaw man confounded by the sheer number of pieces. His mind swam and tried to push them away. For a while to think of nothing at all, let his subconscious work. Use the soft hum of the tires over the road as background to his splendid silence, his assoluta tranquillità.

  Reaching up, he lowered the visor against the glare of the setting sun. God, he wanted a cigarette, and there was a pack still in the glove box. He started to reach for it, then caught himself and instead opened a brown bag on the seat next to him and took out not one of the carrot sticks his wife had cut for him but a large biscotto, one of a half dozen he had bought himself. He was about to bite into it when everything came full circle.

  He had said nothing to the others about his idea that the Spanish Llama pistol found at the site of the bus explosion might not have belonged to Father Daniel but to someone on the bus who was there to kill him—Why? because there were no facts to back it up, and without
some kind of evidence, thinking in that direction was a waste of time and energy. But, fuse that concept with the idea of a twenty-fifth man, and you had your uncounted passenger, perhaps one who bought a ticket at the last minute as he got on, a ticket the driver had not had time to tally before the bus blew up. If that were so, and it was he who was in the box, it would certainly explain why no one had come forward to identify him.

  Still, he argued, it was conjecture. On the other hand, it was a feeling that kept coming back, more now than ever. It was a hunch, something all his years of experience told him—there had been a twenty-fifth passenger, and he had been onboard to kill Father Daniel. And if he was the assassin—Roscani stared at the horizon—then who blew up the bus? And why?

  56

  Xi’an, China. Monday, July 13, 2:30 A.M.

  LI WEN LIT A CIGARETTE AND SAT BACK, moving his body as far away as he could from the sleeping, overweight man crowding the seat beside him. In fifteen minutes the train would reach Xi’an. When it did he’d get off, and the fat man could have both seats for all he cared. Li Wen had made this same trip in May and then again in June, only that time he’d splurged and traveled in luxury on the Marco Polo Express, the green-and-cream train that follows the route of the old Silk Road, 2,000 miles from Beijing to Ürümqui, the capital of Xinjiang Uygur province, the first great east-west link. The train the Chinese hoped would lure the same monied traveler who frequented the fabled Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul.

  But tonight Li rode in the hard-seat class of a packed train that was already almost fours hours behind schedule. He hated the packed trains. Hated the loud music, the weather forecasts, and the “no-news” news that was broadcast ceaselessly over the train’s loudspeakers. Beside him the fat man shifted his weight, and his elbow dug into Li’s rib cage. At the same time, the middle-aged woman in the seat in front of him hucked up and spit on the floor, angling it to hit between the shoe of the man standing in the aisle beside her and the young man jammed in next to him.

  Pushing at the fat man’s elbow, Li took a heavy drag on his cigarette. In Xi’an he would change trains, he hoped to one less crowded, and then be on his way to Hefei and his room at the Overseas Chinese Hotel and maybe a few hours’ sleep. The same as he had done in May and then again in June. And would again in August. These were the months when the heat grew the algae in the lakes and rivers that provided drinking water for the municipal water supplies throughout his area of Central China. A former assistant professor of research at the Hydrobiological Institute in Wuhan, Li Wen was a midlevel civil worker, a water-quality-control engineer for the central government. His job was to monitor the bacterial content of the water released for public use by water-filtration plants throughout the region. Today his chores would be the same as always. Arrive by five in the morning. Spend the day and perhaps the next inspecting the plant and testing the water, then record his findings and recommendations for forwarding to the central committee; and move on to the next. It was a gray life and tedious, boring, and, for the most part, uneventful. At least it had been until now.

  57

  Lake Como, Italy.Sunday, July 12, 8:40 P.M.

  THE SOUND OF THE MOTORS CHANGED FROM a whine to a low drone, and nursing sister Elena Voso could feel the hydrofoil slow as the boat’s hull settled into the water. Ahead, a great stone villa sat on the lake’s edge, and they were moving toward it. In the twilight, she could see a man on the dock looking toward them, a large rope in his hand.

  Marco stepped down from the pilot house and went out onto the deck as they neared. Behind her, Luca and Pietro stood up to unhook the safety straps that had held the gurney secure on the trip from shore. The hydrofoil was large, able to seat, she guessed, maybe as many as sixty passengers and was used for public transportation between the towns sitting on the edge of the thirty-mile-long lake. But this trip, they were the only travelers—she, Marco, Luca, and Pietro. And Michael Roark.

  They had left the house in Cortona just after noon the day before. Going quickly, leaving almost everything but Michael Roark’s medical supplies behind. A telephone call had come for Luca, and Elena answered. Luca was sleeping, she’d said, but the voice told her to wake him, to tell him that it was urgent, and Luca had taken the call on the upstairs extension.

  “Get out, now,” she’d heard the voice say as she’d returned to the kitchen to hang up. She’d started to listen, but Luca knew she was there and told her to hang up. And she had.

  Immediately Pietro had driven off in his car, only to return three-quarters of an hour later at the wheel of another van. Less than fifty minutes after that they were in it, all of them, leaving behind the vehicle they’d come in.

  Driving north, they’d taken the Al Autostrada to Florence and then gone on to Milan to a private apartment in the suburbs where they’d spent the night and most of that day. There Michael Roark had his first real food, rice pudding Marco had bought at a local store. He’d taken it slowly, between sips of water, but he managed, and it had stayed down. But it hadn’t been enough, and so she kept him on the IV.

  The newspaper she’d bought, with the photograph of Father Daniel Addison, had been left behind in the rush to depart. Whether Roark had seen her hide it away behind her as he’d so abruptly turned toward her she didn’t know. All she did know was that the comparison had been inconclusive. He might be the American priest, he might not. Her entire effort had been in vain.

  THERE WAS AN ABRUPT ROAR as the propellers reversed, then a gentle bump as the hydrofoil touched the dock. Elena saw Marco toss the mooring line to the man onshore and turned from her musing to see Luca and Pietro lift the gurney and carry it forward to the steps. As they did, Michael Roark raised his head and looked at her, more for comfort and the assurance she was coming with them, she thought, than for anything else. As far as he had come, he could talk only in hoarse, guttural sounds and was still extremely weak. She realized she had become his emotional anchor as well as his caregiver. It was a tender dependency, and for all her nursing experience, it touched her in a way she’d never felt before. She wondered what it meant, whether somehow she was changing. It made her think, too, and ask herself, if he were the fugitive priest, would it make any difference?

  Moments later they had him up and out, with Marco leading them up the gangway to bring him ashore. And then Elena was ashore as well, listening as the engines of the hydrofoil revved up, then turning to see the boat pull away in the enveloping darkness, its running lights glowing on the stern, the Italian flag above the pilot house flapping in the wind. Then the vessel picked up speed, and its hull rose out of the water so that the boat stood up on stilts like a huge, ungainly bird. And like that it was gone, the black water closing behind it, washing over its wake. As if it had never been.

  “Sister Elena,” Marco called, and she turned to follow them up the stone steps toward the lights of the immense villa above.

  58

  Rome. Same time.

  HARRY STOOD IN EATON’S TINY KITCHEN, staring at the cell phone on the counter. Next to it was a partially eaten loaf of bread and, with it, some cheese he’d picked up at one of the few stores open on Sunday. By now Marsciano would know what had transpired between him and Father Bardoni in the park. And the cardinal would have made a decision what to do when Harry called.

  If he called.

  “You have no idea what’s going on, or what you’re getting into.” Father Bardoni’s warning hung chillingly in his mind.

  The man in the blue shirt had been one of Farel’s policemen, and he had been watching Father Bardoni, not Harry. Eaton had been certain some dark intrigue was going on at the highest levels of the Holy See. And maybe that was what Father Bardoni had been talking about, cautioning Harry that his intrusion was more than unwelcome—it was very dangerous. Suggesting he was close to drowning them all in his own waves.

  Harry looked away from the phone. He didn’t know what to do. By pushing Marsciano further he could make things far worse than they already
were. But for whom? Marsciano. Farel’s people. Anyone else involved. Who?

  For no reason he picked up the knife he had used to slice the bread and cheese. It was an everyday kitchen knife, its cutting edge a little bit dull like most. As a knife it wasn’t very impressive, but it did the job. Holding it up, he rotated it in his hand, saw the blade glint in the overhead light. Then, with the easiest of motions, he turned and slid it deep into what remained of the bread. The safety and well-being of his brother was all that mattered. All the rest—the Vatican, its power struggles and intrigues—could go to hell.

  59

  The Hospital of St. John.Via dell’ Amba Aradam, 9:50 P.M.

  HARRY WAS ALONE IN THE SMALL CHAPEL, sitting in a pew three rows back from the altar, his black beret tucked inside his jacket pocket, his head bowed, seemingly in prayer. He’d been there fifteen minutes when the door opened and a man in a short-sleeved shirt and what looked like tan Levi Dockers came in and sat down nearby.

  Harry glanced at his watch and then back toward the door. Marsciano was to have met him there twenty minutes ago. It was only when he decided he would give the cardinal another five minutes and then leave that he looked again at the man who had come in and realized in amazement that it was Marsciano.

  For a long while the cardinal remained still. Head bowed, silent. Finally he looked up, made eye contact, and nodded toward a door to the left. Then he stood, crossed himself before the altar, and pushed through the door. At the same moment, a young couple entered, knelt before the altar and crossed themselves, taking seats together in the front row.