Allan Folsom - Day Of Confession

Fifty yards away, Harry traversed the square in a crowd heading for the basilica, Scala's pistol in his waistband, the black beret pulled almost rakishly over his forehead, and the papers Eaton had provided in his pocket identifying him as Father Jonathan Roe of Georgetown University, just in case. Unseen beneath the priest's clothing, he wore chinos and a work shirt. Danny's clothes from the apartment on Via Nicolo V.

Reaching a flight of steps, he climbed them with the crowd and then stopped. In front of him several hundred more people were massed, waiting for the doors to the basilica to open. It was now eight-fifty-five. The doors would, be opened at nine. Two hours exactly before the work engine came. Head down, praying someone wouldn't suddenly look over and recognize him, Harry took a deep breath and waited.

Hercules crouched in the battlements of the ancient fortified wall abutting the Tower of San Giovanni. He was at the rampart's far end, right at the tower itself and maybe twenty feet beneath its tiled, circular roof.

It had taken nearly three hours to work his way up the far side of the wall, handhold to handhold, using the morning shadows to hide him. But then he'd made the top and scrambled to where he was now, cramped and thirsty, but precisely where he was supposed to be and when he was supposed to be.

Below, he could see two of Farel's black-suited men hidden in bushes near the tower entrance. Two more waited behind the cover of a high hedge across the narrow roadway. The main door, directly beneath him, appeared unprotected. How many more black-suited men were inside the tower he had no way of knowing. One, two, twenty, none? What was clear was what Danny had predicted: the black suits would stay back and out of sight, spiders hoping their prey would unwittingly lurch into their web.

Danny! Hercules grinned. He liked that, calling a priest by his first name, the way Mr Harry had. It made him feel like part of the family, one in which he somehow wished he belonged. And for now, for today at least, he decided he did belong. It was that important. The stalwart dwarf who'd been abandoned by his family shortly after his birth and who had made his own way ever since, taking life as it came, all the while refusing to be its victim, suddenly found himself longing to belong. It surprised him because the pain and want were much more acute than he could have imagined. It told him one thing: he was much more human than he supposed, no matter what he looked like. Harry and Danny had included him because they needed him for what he could do, and that, in itself, gave him purpose and dignity for the first time in his life. They had entrusted him with their lives, and Elena's life, and that of a cardinal of the Church. Whatever happened, at whatever cost to himself, he would not let them down.

Squinting against the glare of the sun, he. looked down the narrow road toward the railroad station, the way they would go later. Almost directly across, beyond the bushes where the second group of black suits were secreted, he could see the landing pad for the papal heliport. In the other direction, to his right and beyond the trees, was another tower building, Vatican Radio. He looked at his watch.

9:07 a.m.

Danny and Elena came in through the main entrance to the Vatican museums with the three other wheelchair couples who had been on the shuttle bus with them: a retirement-age American couple – the man in an L.A. Dodgers baseball cap who kept staring at Danny and his New York Yankees cap, as if he either recognized him or had had enough of museums and touring and simply wanted to talk baseball, his wife, plump and smiling pleasantly, pushing him in the wheelchair; a father and his son, probably twelve, wearing leg braces, seemingly French; a middle-aged woman caring for an elderly white-haired woman, apparently her mother, and apparently English, though it was hard to tell because the older woman was so abrupt with the younger.

One by one they went through the line to buy museum tickets and then were instructed to wait for the elevator that would take them all to the second floor.

'Stop over there. Closer to the door,' the white-haired English woman snapped at her daughter. 'Why you insisted on wearing that dress when you know I don't like it is beyond me.'

Elena adjusted the camera bag over her shoulder, glancing at Danny's as she did. They were nondescript black nylon camera bags any tourist might carry, but inside them, instead of cameras and film, were cigarettes and matchbooks; the olive oil and rum-soaked rags rolled up and packed in the plastic Ziploc baggies; and the four Moretti beer bottles – two in each case – plugged and wicked, with the same incendiary fluid.

There was a dinging sound, a light came on, and the elevator door opened. They waited while a few people got out, and then entered, squeezing in together, with the white-haired woman pushing ahead.

'We will be first, if you don't mind.'

And she was, and in the order of things, this made Elena and Danny last, forcing them to press in against the others, with the doors closing against their backs. Had they been first, or even second or third, and turned around like the others, Danny might have seen Eaton, with Adrianna. Seen him turn from the ticket window and glimpse them inside the elevator just as the doors closed.

Harry walked slowly inside the basilica, moving just behind a cascade of Canadian tourists, stopping, as they did, to look at Michelangelo's Pieta, his impassioned statue of the Madonna with the dead Christ. Then he eased away from the Canadians to the center of the nave, casually studying the interior of the towering dome, finally bringing his gaze down to the papal altar and Bernini's Baldacchino, the grand canopy over it.

Then, following Danny's directions, he moved off alone.

Crossing to the right, passing the wooden confessionals, looking easily at the sculptures of the saints Michele Arcangelo and Petronilla, he reached the monument of Pope Clement XIII. Just past it, he found a protrusion of wall. Turning measuredly around it, he saw a decorative drapery that looked as though it hung from a solid wall.

Glancing back and seeing no one, he pushed quickly through it to a narrow hallway and walked to the door at the end of it. Opening it, he walked down a short stairway to another door at the bottom and went out, finding himself instantly out of doors and squinting in the bright sunshine of the Vatican gardens.

9:25 a.m.

9:32 a.m.

Elena pushed open the emergency exit door, carefully holding it with her foot, while she put a piece of clear plastic tape over the latch to make certain it wouldn't lock behind her.

Satisfied, she stepped out into the daylight and let the door close behind her. Then she walked off, glancing up at the second floor of the building she had just come out of, where she had been moments before when she'd left Danny alone in a hallway outside a men's rest room near the entrance to the Sistine Chapel – the same hallway to which she would return a few minutes later.

Adjusting the camera bag over her shoulder, she walked quickly across a small courtyard and out into a convergence of tended walkways, lawns, and ornamental hedges that was one of the many entrances to the Vatican gardens. Ahead, on her right, was the split stairway rising to the Fountain of the Sacrament.

She moved toward it quickly but carefully, looking around every so often as if unsure where she was going, knowing that if she was stopped she would say simply that she had taken a wrong door from the museums and was lost.

Climbing the stairs to the right, she entered the area of the fountain proper and turned right again to see a number of large planters near the base of a conifer. Again, she looked around, puzzled, as if she were indeed lost. Then, seeing no one, she took a black nylon waist pack from her camera case and tucked it carefully behind the planters at the base of the tree. Standing, she looked around once more, and went back the way she had come, passing through the courtyard, then pulling open the door and peeling the tape from the latch. Reentering the building, she let the door close behind her, and then took the stairs to the second floor.