Allan Folsom - Day Of Confession

He heard nothing.

He panned back. Wall right to wall left.

Still nothing.

Leaning forward, he turned off the searchlight, and the cavern went dark. Then he waited. Twenty seconds. Thirty. A minute.

Again, he swung the microphone. Left to right. And then back. And then back again.

'… wait…'

He froze at the sound of Harry Addison's voice, a whisper. He waited for more.

Nothing.

Ever so slowly, he swung back.

'… without an IV…' nursing sister Elena Voso said, her voice low and hushed like the American's.

They were there. Somewhere in the dark ahead of him.

Villa Lorenzi. Same time.

Roscani squinted in the bright sunlight of Edward Mooi's bedroom. The tech crew was still working the bathroom. Traces of blood had been found in the sink, the vague outline of a bare foot on the floor.

No one had seen the poet since he had returned to his apartment following Roscani's early-morning search. None of the staff, none of the dozen carabinieri on posted guard. No one. Mooi, like Eros Barbu's motorboat, had simply vanished.

Through the window, Roscani could see two of the police boats on the lake. Castelletti was still in one, coordinating the ongoing search on the water. Scala, a former army commando, had gone ashore with ten mountain-trained carabinieri, and they were walking the shoreline, south from the villa. It was assumed Mooi had not gone north, because that would have led him directly into Bellagio, where he was well known and where there were large numbers of uniformed police. So Scala had chosen the southern course, where coves and dense overgrowth provided cover where a boat could be hidden from view from both the lake and the air.

Turning from the window, Roscani left the room and went out into the hallway just as an aide arrived. Saluting, he handed Roscani a thick envelope, then turned and left. Opening it, Roscani quickly scanned its contents. The cover sheet bore the heading INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL POLICE ORGANIZATION, with the familiar INTERPOL crest directly beneath, while the word URGENTISSIMO had been hand stamped on every page.

The pages were the INTERPOL reply to his request for information on the suspected whereabouts of known terrorists and, separately, the personality profiles of killers still at large and thought to be in Europe.

Pages still in hand, Roscani looked back into the room. Seeing Edward Mooi's bathrobe where it had been tossed on the bed, seeing the tech people still at work through the open door to the bathroom, he suddenly had the sense they were already too late. His ice picker had already been there.

Harry heard the scrape of the hull against rock in the dark and knew the blond man was working the boat back down the channel by hand, coming toward them. How did he know they were there? How could he be that close in all the miles of underground waterways? From the single glimpse Harry had as the boat passed going upchannel, Salvatore had seemed to be the man's prisoner, but even if he weren't, if he were there of his own free will, it would still be next to impossible for him to know where they were. Yet somehow he did. And he was only yards, maybe even feet, from the entrance to their hiding place.

The only thing to their advantage, if they had an advantage at all, was that the outcroppings of rock into the channel made the cave entrance difficult to see. Elena had seen it only because of the angle of the motorboat's searchlight as it turned into the channel. Without that, it would have appeared as nothing more than a shadow from an outcropping, a darkening above the waterline.

The sound came again. Closer than before. Wood or fiberglass scraping rock. Then again, closer still. Then it stopped, and Harry was certain the boat was directly in front of the entrance, so near that Elena, in the skiff's stern, could reach out a hand in the pitch black and touch it.

Harry held his breath, his senses electric, every nerve sparking, the thump of his heart like a bass drum. He was certain Elena was the same, waiting helplessly, praying the boat and the men in it would move on.

Thomas Kind stood silent, one hand holding the boat against the granite wall, the other pressing the headset to his ear as he listened. His upper body turned slowly, left to right, and then back, listening, but there was nothing.

Maybe they weren't here after all. Maybe he had been wrong in staying in this channel. Both the microphone and listening device were extremely sensitive. And the jagged rock walls and flat surface of the water were hard surfaces that acted like huge, multidirectional speakers that bounced sound everywhere. The voices could as easily have come from somewhere else. From the channel he had just left, or the one behind, which he had not yet ventured into.

There was a soft creak in the darkness just beyond her, and then Elena felt fresh air waft in from the channel. The motorboat was moving away from the entrance of the cave. The blond man was leaving. She crossed herself in relief, then whispered in the dark.

'He's gone…'

'Give him a few min-'

Suddenly, a loud, sharp wail echoed from the blackness inches away.

Elena froze where she was. A hand thrown to her mouth in horror.

The wail came again. Longer and louder than before.

'Jesus Christ!' Harry whispered.

Danny was waking.

A shrill whine echoed across the cavern as Thomas Kind touched the starter. The twin two-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower Yamahas thundered to life, and the searchlight came on full, swinging in a wide arc across the channel as Kind brought the motorboat's bow around sharply and roared back the way he had come. As quickly he cut the motors and let the boat drift, playing the light across the cavern walls.

Harry dug in with his hands, grabbing at the rock overhead, pulling the skiff deeper into the recess. Beyond him, over his chest he could see the searchlight swing toward the mouth of the cave. In between, Elena was huddled against Danny on the flattened gurney that lay just below the top of the stern. Whatever sound Danny had made had stopped. He was still and breathing silently as before.

The light swung past the opening and moved on. In that brief second Harry saw more of the cave. It went straight back for another ten or fifteen feet before its height suddenly dropped and it narrowed sharply. There was no way to tell where it went from there. But it was all they had. That was, if the skiff would fit through it.

Thomas Kind swung the light back across the rock out-croppings. All he saw were the shadows where one ended and another began. But he'd heard the cry or whatever it had been. And this time there was no doubt where it had come from, somewhere here, along the wall in this section of the channel.

Now he swung the light back, his eyes intent, the deep scratches Marta had made on his face glistening in its spill.

Behind him, Salvatore sat in a kind of fascinated terror and watched, a spectator at a game. It was who Salvatore was, the most he could be.

There!

Thomas Kind saw it. The low ledge, the dark opening beneath it. Gratification tugged in a cruel smile as he turned the boat toward it.

There was a loud scrape and then a dull bang as the skiff suddenly stopped.

'The flashlight. Quickly,' Harry whispered.

The dull rumble of the outboards grew louder, and the light became appreciably brighter as it danced off the granite walls, moving toward them.

'Here!' Elena leaned toward Harry with the flashlight. Their eyes met for an instant, and then Harry took it, turning, playing it into the cave behind them.

The skiff had caught up against the passage entrance. With a little maneuvering, the skiff would make it inside. But after that, who knew? The blond man knew where they were and would stay there, waiting for them to come out. And if they went on, trying to find an exit at the far end… If there was one, tremendous. If not, what then?