Allan Folsom - Day Of Confession

12:35 a.m.

Harry opened the door to the kitchen and turned on the light. Crossing to the counter, he double-checked the battery charger, making certain life was being pumped into the ultra-slim batteries of the cell phones. They had two of them, the one that had been in the apartment and the one Adrianna had given Harry. In the morning when they left for the Vatican, Danny would carry one, Harry the other. It was how they would communicate when they went in after Marsciano, trusting that between the masses of tourists and Vatican personnel, random conversations would be difficult, if not impossible, for Farel to monitor, even if he knew they were there.

Satisfied the charger was working, Harry turned out the light and started back into the hallway.

'You should sleep.' Elena stood in the open doorway of her room, directly across from the bedroom Harry was sharing with Danny. Her hair was brushed back and she wore a thin cotton nightshirt. Farther down the darkened hallway was the living room, and they could hear Hercules snoring loudly as he slept on the couch.

Harry moved closer. 'I don't want you to go with us,' Harry said, quietly. 'Danny and I and Hercules can handle it alone.'

'Hercules has his own job, and someone has to take Father Daniel in the wheelchair, and you can't be two places at once…'

'Elena… It's too unpredictable and too dangerous…'

The light from the beside lamp behind her shone through the material of her nightshirt. She was wearing nothing at all underneath. She moved closer, and Harry could see the rise and fall of her full breasts under the nightshirt as she breathed.

'Elena, I don't want you to go,' Harry said definitively. 'If something were to happen-'

Reaching up, Elena gently pressed her fingers to his mouth. Then, in almost the same motion, slid her fingers away and brushed her lips against his.

'We have now, Harry,' she whispered. 'Whatever happens, we still have now… Use it to love me…'

1:40 a.m.

Fifteen minutes later than the last time Danny had looked at his bedside clock. If he'd slept in those minutes, he didn't know. Harry had come in only a few moments earlier and gone to bed. It had been more than an hour since he'd gone out to check the battery chargers. Where he had been or what he had been doing in the meantime he didn't know, but he assumed he had been with Elena.

He had seen electricity building between them since Bellagio, and he knew that at some point it had to spark. It made little difference that she was a nun. Danny had known almost from the time she had come to care for him in Pescara that Elena was not the kind of woman who could continue to live the lifelong, cloistered, contemplative life required of her. That she should fall in love with his brother, of all people, was something he could never have foreseen under the wildest circumstances. And these – he grinned in the dark – were, far and away, the most turbulent circumstances that anyone could have ever foreseen. Turbulent and – the humor abruptly faded – terribly, terribly tragic. In his mind he saw the man with the gun on the bus to Assisi, felt again the explosion. Remembered the fire, the screaming, the confusion, the bus swinging circles. Remembered his reflex reaction of getting up, sticking as much of his identification as he could in the gunman's jacket. Abruptly that vision left, and he saw Marsciano through the wire mesh of the confessional, heard the pained sound of his voice. 'Bless me Father, for I have sinned…' Abruptly Danny turned away, put his head to his pillow, trying to drown out the rest of it. But he couldn't. He knew every word by heart.

Adrianna stirred at the sound and looked up. Eaton was getting out of the car, straightening his beige summer suit jacket, then walking off along the sidewalk toward where Scala was parked. She saw him sidestep the throw of a streetlight, all the while looking up at the dark loom of the apartment building partway down the street, then he disappeared in the darkness. Immediately her eyes went to the dull orange illumine of the dashboard clock and wondered how long she had been dozing.

2:17 A.M.

Now Eaton came back, sliding into the seat beside her.

'Scala still there?' she asked.

'Sitting in the car, smoking…'

'No lights on in the apartment building?'

'No lights.' Eaton looked over at her. 'Go back to sleep. You'll know when something happens.'

Adrianna smiled lightly. 'I used to think I loved you, James Eaton…'

'You loved the office, not the man…' Eaton looked back at the apartment building.

'The man, too, for a while.' Adrianna pulled her loose-fitting denim over-shirt around her, then curled up on the seat. For a long time she watched Eaton watch the building, then finally she drifted off.

Beijing, China. Still Friday, July 17. 9:40 a.m.

'James Hawley. An American hydrobiological engineer,' Li Wen said in Chinese. His mouth was dry and he was soaked with sweat. 'He… he lives in Walnut Creek, California. The procedure came from him. I… I… didn't know what they were. I… thought they were a new test… for wa… water toxicity…'

The man in the army uniform who stared at Li Wen across the hard wooden table was the same man who had demanded he confess what he had done six hours earlier in Wuxi. The same man who had handcuffed him and accompanied him on the military jet to Beijing and taken him here to this brightly lit cement-block building somewhere on the air base where they had landed.

'There is no James Hawley of Walnut Creek, California,' the man said softly.

'Yes, there is. There has to be. I did not have the formulas, he did.'

'I repeat… there is no James Hawley. It has already been checked out from the papers you provided us.'

Li Wen felt the breath go out of him as suddenly he realized he'd played the fool the entire time. If something went wrong he alone was the one who would pay for it.

'Confess.'

Slowly Li Wen looked up. Just behind the man at the table was a videocamera, its red light on, recording what was happening. And behind the camera he could see the faces of a half dozen uniformed soldiers – military police, or, worse, men like his interrogator, members of the Ministry of State Security.

Finally he nodded, and looking directly into the camera, told how he had introduced his 'snowballs' – the deadly, nonmonitored constituent polycyclic, unsaturated alcohol – into the water systems. Explaining extensively and in scientific terms the details of the formula, what it was designed to do, and how many it was expected to kill.

As he finished, wiping sweat from his forehead with the palm of his hand, he saw two of the uniformed men suddenly step forward. In an instant they had him on his feet and he was marched through a door and down a dimly lit concrete corridor. They went for twenty or thirty feet before he saw a man step out of a side door. The soldiers froze in surprise. In an instant the man had stepped forward. He had a pistol in his hand, a silencer on the barrel. Li Wen's eyes went wide. The man was Chen Yin. His finger squeezed back on the trigger and he fired point-blank.

PTTT! PTTT!

Li Wen was blown backward, his body twisting away from the soldiers, his blood splattering across the wall behind him.

Chen Yin looked at the soldiers and smiled, then started to back away. Suddenly his grin turned to horror. The first soldier was raising a submachine gun. Chen Yin backed away.

'NO!' he screamed. 'NO, YOU DON'T UNDERSTA-' Suddenly he turned and ran for the door. There was a sound like a dull jackhammer, the first shots spinning Chen Yin around, the last taking off the top of his head just over his right eye. He, like Li Wen, was dead before his body hit the ground.