Allan Folsom - Day Of Confession

'Waiting for you.'

'There are men outside.'

'We're going out anyway.'

Glancing around, Harry saw the bathroom and went in. A moment later he came out carrying three wetted hand towels.

'Tie this over your nose and mouth.' Harry handed Marsciano a towel, then went quickly to the glass doors and threw them open. Heavy smoke wafted in. At the same time, an apparition dropped from the sky.

Marsciano started. A tiny man with a huge head and larger chest stood on the balcony, a rope harness slung around him.

'Eminence.' Hercules smiled, bowing his head respectfully.

Thomas Kind's radio picked it up the same time it came over Adrianna's cell phone, her open line patched into the radio communication between her crews.

'I don't know if anybody cares in all this, but the railroad gates are open in the Vatican wall, and a work engine's going toward it.'

'Skycam, are you sure?' Adrianna was talking to her helicopter pilot, who was just coming in over Vatican territory from the south.

'Affirmative.'

Adrianna turned quickly from the phone and looked to Eaton. 'The Vatican railroad gates are open, a work engine's going in.'

Eaton stared. 'Christ – it's how they're getting Marsciano out!'

'Skycam, stay on the engine. Stay on it!' Thomas Kind heard Adrianna finish and click off.

Suddenly he was turning the key, starting the Mercedes engine. There had been no communication from any of the men inside the tower, and he couldn't wait longer to find out what had happened. Throwing the car in gear, he fishtailed out of the gravel path and onto the narrow road beside the tower wall. Peering through the smoke and ash, he accelerated. Suddenly bushes were flying past. Then there was a loud bang as he sideswiped a tree and slid sideways into the thick of a hedgerow. Where the road had turned he had no idea. Violently, he threw it in reverse. There was a roar of engine and the whine of tires. The car shuddered but didn't move. Flinging open the door, he saw the wheels spinning on the green of the torn shrubbery as if it were ice.

Cursing in his native Spanish, he climbed out, choking against the smoke, and ran off on foot in the direction of the station.

10:48 a.m.

Danny and Elena came out into the smoke through an emergency door on the ground floor of the Apostolic Library.

'Left,' Danny commanded through his handkerchief, and Elena turned them that way along the narrow road to the gardens.

'Harry,' Danny spoke urgently into the cell phone.

Nothing.

'Harry, can you hear me?'

There was a hiss on the other end, as if the line were still open. Then:

CLICK. The line went dead.

'Dammit!' Danny said out loud.

'What's the matter?' Elena pressed, sudden fear for Harry jolting her.

'Don't know…'

Harry, Hercules, and Marsciano huddled in silence on Marsciano's platform, peering over the side in the smoke.

'You're sure they're there?' Harry said to Hercules.

'Yes, down there just past the door.'

Just as Hercules dropped from the roof to the platform he had seen two of the black suits take position on either side of the door. But now the settling smoke made it impossible to see.

'Send them away.' Harry was suddenly pulling Anton Pilger's two-way radio from his belt, giving it to Hercules.

Taking it, Hercules clicked on, winking at Harry as he did. 'They've come down the outside of the tower by rope!' he said urgently in Italian. 'They're moving toward the helipad!'

'Va bene,' – Okay – a voice came back.

'The helipad! The helipad!' Hercules barked for good measure, then abruptly shut the radio off.

Beneath them was a scurrying, and then they glimpsed one man and then another move off at a dead run away from the tower.

'Now!' Harry said.

'Eminence,' Hercules said. The rope suddenly twisted in his hands; he made one loop and brought it over Marsciano's shoulders, then a second around his waist. A moment later Hercules was balanced on the rail and Harry was helping Marsciano onto it. Then, turning it through the steel of the railing, he held on and stepped back, lowering both men to the ground.

'Mr Harry!' Hercules' voice floated up. Harry saw the rope tighten from the ground and knew Hercules was guiding it. Taking hold, he swung up on the railing, then went over himself. At the same instant, a shot rang out, the rope half severed, and Harry dropped like a stone fifteen feet before the rope caught again. He hung there for another instant, and then the rope broke and he dropped to the ground.

Rolling over, he looked up at the sound of a scream.

Hercules had a black suit at the edge of the bushes, his steel-like arms around the man's neck.

'Look out!' Harry yelled.

The black suit still had his gun, and Hercules didn't see it. It was coming up against the side of Hercules' head.

'GUN!' Harry yelled again, getting up, rushing up toward them.

There was a tremendous report as the pistol went off just as Hercules wrenched. There was a hideous scream and both men fell back.

Harry and Marsciano arrived at the same moment. The black suit lay still, his head twisted at a terrible angle. Hercules was on his back, blood covering half his face.

'Hercules.' Harry moved quickly, kneeling down, looking at him. 'Jesus God,' he whispered, his hand moving in to feel his neck for a pulse.

Then Hercules opened one eye, and his hand reached up and wiped the blood from the other. Abruptly he sat up, blinking the blood away. A second wipe from his hand took a huge smear of the blood from his face. A clear flesh wound with the sheer white of a powder burn ran, like an arrow, up the side of it.

'Can't kill me,' he said. 'Not like that.'

In the distance came the sound of a train whistle. Finding a crutch, Hercules pulled himself up.

'The engine, Mr Harry.' Blood or not, Hercules' eyes danced. 'The engine!'

Adrianna came out of the building to see Eaton running full tilt up the road behind St Peter's, then vanishing like a wisp in the smoke.

'Skycam, what do you have on the engine?' she spat into the phone as she ran, cutting up the hill and across the grass toward the Palace of the Government, the Vatican's city hall. She was three minutes, maybe four, from the railroad station.

Elena pulled Danny back into the overhang of a tree near the Church of San Stefano and waited for the helicopter to pass over. It did, then abruptly swung back toward the station.

At the same moment, Danny's cell phone chirped.

'Harry-'

'We have Marsciano with us. What about the engine?'

Elena could feel the pound of her heart at Harry's voice. He was all right, at least for the moment.

'Harry-,' Danny said, 'we've got air cover. I don't know who it is. Go the other way, come down by Vatican Radio and in past the Ethiopian College. By then we'll be closer, and I can see what the hell's going on.'

10:50 a.m.

'Stay here!' Roscani yelled at Scala and Castelletti. Then, turning, he ran down the track after the little oily-green engine just as it chugged in through the open gates and vanished in the massive hang of smoke.

For a moment Scala and Castelletti stood open-mouthed, watching him. Little by little Roscani had been walking down the track following the engine, but his move and the quickness of it had caught them by surprise. Suddenly they started to run after him. A dozen yards later they stopped as they saw him reach the opening in the wall and disappear into the gloom. From where they stood, it looked like the entire Vatican was either on fire or fully under siege.

Suddenly an Italian Army helicopter roared in directly overhead. At the same time Farel's voice crackled loudly over the radio, identifying himself and telling the WNN Skycam helicopter to vacate Vatican airspace immediately.