Allan Folsom - Day Of Confession

Doubly weighted now, he went back into the station, pushed through the platform entrance gate, and walked another fifty yards to the track area already jammed with refugees waiting for the next trains out. In fifteen minutes his train would come. The soldiers arriving on it would pile off, and he and the others would rush on. Because he was a government official, he would have a seat and for that he was extraordinarily grateful. After that, he could sit back and for a time relax. The trip to Wuhu would take nearly two hours, and then he would change trains for Nanjing, where he would spend the night at the Xuanwu Hotel on Zhongyang Lu as planned. It was there he would rest and let himself begin to feel his accomplishment and sense of retribution over the hated, dogmatic government that had so long ago killed his father and robbed him of his childhood.

Feel it and enjoy it, and wait to receive the order that would send him to his next target.

Bellagio. Gruppo Cardinale Headquarters, Villa Lorenzi. Wednesday, July 15, 6:50 a.m.

Shirt open at the neck, his jacket off, Roscani looked out across the grand ballroom. A skeleton staff worked as they had in the hours since midnight, when, at the lack of any action at all, he had sent only the most critical of them off to the second floor to sleep in the cots brought in by the army. Personnel were still out in the field, and Castelletti had taken off in the helicopter at first light, while Scala had left before then to go back to the grotto with two of the Belgian Malinois and their handlers, still not convinced that they had searched all of it.

At two a.m. Roscani had put in a call for an additional eight hundred Italian Army troops and then gone to bed himself. By three-fifteen he was up and showered and back in the same clothes he had worn for two days. By four he'd decided they'd all had enough.

At six a.m. an announcement was broadcast over local radio and television and read in early parish masses. In exactly two hours, at eight o'clock sharp, the Italian Army would stage a massive door-to-door search of the entire area. The phrasing had been simple and direct: the fugitives were there and would be uncovered, and anyone found harboring them would be considered an accomplice and prosecuted accordingly.

Roscani's move was more than a threat, it was a ploy to make the fugitives think they might have a chance if they made their move before the deadline, and it was why Gruppo Cardinale police and army troops had moved into position a full thirty minutes before the announcement was made; silently watching and waiting, hoping one or all of them would cut from their hiding places and run.

Roscani glanced at Eros Barbu's elaborate rococo clock on the wall over the silent bandstand, then looked to the men and women at the computer terminals and phone banks, sifting information, coordinating the Gruppo Cardinale personnel in the field. Finally, he took a sip of cold, sweet coffee and went outside, glancing again around the elaborate ballroom as he did.

Outside, Lake Como was still, as was the air. Walking toward the water, Roscani turned and looked back toward the imposing villa. How anyone could afford to live in such a place and in the style of Eros Barbu boggled the mind, especially the mind of a policeman. Still, he wondered, as he had earlier, what it would have been like to be part of it. Invited there to dance and listen to the music of a live orchestra and perhaps, he smiled, to be just a little bit decadent.

It was a contemplation that faded as he walked along the gravel path that bordered the lake and his thoughts again turned to the INTERPOL dossier that had provided him no information whatsoever on his blond ice picker/razor man. At almost the same moment, he became aware of a strong scent of wild flowers. The odor was far more pungent than pleasant, and instantly he was transported back four years to when he had been temporarily assigned to a branch of the Ministero dell' Interno's Antimafia section working to break a series of mafia murders in Sicily. He was in a field outside Palermo with several other investigators examining a body a farmer had found facedown in a ditch. It was the same early morning as it was now, the air crisp and still, the peppery smell of the wild flowers dominating the senses as they did here. When they rolled the body over and saw that the throat had been cut from ear to ear, a shout went up from all of the investigators at once. To a man they knew who their killer was.

'Thomas Kind,' Roscani said out loud, a chill punching through him from his head to his feet.

Thomas Kind. He'd never even thought of him. The terrorist had been out of the public eye for at least three years, maybe more, and thought to be ill or retired or both and living in the relative safety of Sudan.

'Christ!' Roscani was suddenly turning, running back toward the villa. It was seventy-forty in the morning. Twenty minutes exactly before the door-to-door sweep was to begin.

Bellagio. The car-ferry landing. Same time.

Harry watched the heavily armed carabinieri questioning the man and woman in the dark Lancia in front of them. Immediately the police ordered the man out of the car and walked with him as he opened the trunk. Finding nothing, the police waved the couple on. Then as the Lancia drove across the ramp and onto the ferry, the police turned toward them.

'Here we go,' Harry said under his breath, the sound of his own pulse deafening.

Five of them were in a white Ford van with Church of Santa Chiara neatly stenciled on the doors. Father Renato was at the wheel with Elena beside him. Harry, Danny, and a young, almost baby-faced priest, Father Natalini, sat in back. Elena was dressed in a business suit and wearing tortoiseshell glasses, her hair pulled back tightly and twisted in a bun. The priests were in their everyday black with white clerical collars. Danny wore glasses as well, and he and Harry, still bearded, were also in black. Long black coats buttoned to the throat with black zucchettos on their heads. They looked like rabbis, which was the idea.

'I know them,' Father Renato said quietly in Italian as the carabinieri came to either window.

i Buon giorno, Alfonso. Massimo.'

'Padre Renato! Buongiorno.'' Alfonso, the first carabiniere, was tall and hulking and physically intimidating, but he smiled broadly as he recognized the van and Father Renato and then Father Natalini. Buon giorno, Padre.'

'Buon giorno. ' Father Natalini smiled from where he sat beside Danny.

For the next ninety seconds Harry felt as though his heart was coming to full arrest as Father Renato and the policemen chatted in Italian. Once in a while he caught a word or phrase he understood. 'Rabbino.' 'Israele.' 'Conferenza Cristiano /giudea.'

The rabbi business had been Harry's idea. It was straight out of the movies. Crazy and preposterous. And sitting there, breathless, terrified, waiting for the carabinieri to suddenly stop talking and order them all out of the van the way they had the man in the Lancia, he wondered what the hell he must have been thinking. Still, they'd had to do something, and quickly, after Elena had come hurriedly into his room before dawn with Father Renato, saying her mother general had arranged a place for them to stay just over the border in Switzerland.

With the approval of his superior, Father Renato had agreed to help get them there – but he had no idea how. It was while Harry was dressing that he'd absently looked in the mirror and seen his growth of beard and remembered Danny's. It was nuts, but it might work, considering they had bluffed their way through police checkpoints twice before; and because Father Renato and Father Natalini were not only clergy but also locals who knew everyone, including the police.