Allan Folsom - Day Of Confession

How many times had Palestrina been here before? To pray alone with the pope or with the few select guests who might have been invited to join them. Kings, presidents, statesmen.

But this was the first time he had been summoned on the spur of the moment to pray alone with the Holy Father. And now as he came in, he found the pope seated in his bronze chair in front of the altar, head bent in prayer.

He looked up as Palestrina approached. Outstretching his hands, he took Palestrina's in his and studied him, his eyes intense and filled with worry.

'What is it?' Palestrina asked.

'This is not a good day, Eminence.' The pope's voice was barely audible. 'There is a sense of foreboding. And dread and fearfulness in my heart. It was there on arising and has sat perched on my shoulder ever since. I don't know what it is, but you are a part of it, Eminence… a part of whatever this darkness is…' The pope hesitated and his eyes probed Palestrina's. 'Tell me what it is…'

'I do not know, Holiness. To me the day seems bright, and warm with the summer sun.'

'Then pray with me that I am wrong, that it is only a feeling and will pass… Pray for the salvation of the spirit…'

The pope stood from his chair and both men knelt before the altar. Palestrina bowed his head as Pope Leo XIV led them in prayer, knowing that whatever the Holy Father felt, he was wrong.

The forbidding horror that had begun in the early morning hours as Palestrina had waked from his nightmare of the disease-bringing spirits, even as Thomas Kind was calling to tell him of the situation with Li Wen, had turned suddenly and inconceivably to good fortune.

Less than an hour earlier, Pierre Weggen had called to tell him that despite the revelation that the lakes had been deliberately poisoned by, in the official words of the Chinese, 'a mentally ill co-worker and water-quality engineer' – Beijing had decided to go ahead with the massive plan to rebuild the country's entire water-delivery system. It was a gesture designed to comfort and unite a traumatized, still-fearful, and unsettled nation, and at the same time show the world the central government remained in control. It meant that despite everything Palestrina's 'Chinese Protocol' was in place and would not be turned back. In addition, what Thomas Kind had promised he had delivered – with the deaths of Li Wen and Chen Yin, any chance that a road might be discovered that would lead from China to Rome was closed forever. And under Thomas Kind's sure hand, the final chapter removing the last possible connection would soon be written here, inside the Vatican, for, as the moth comes to the flame – neither Father Daniel nor his brother were Death sent by the spirits, but simply a worry that had only to be eliminated.

So the Holy Father was mistaken, and the thing sitting perched on his shoulder was not the shadow of Palestrina's death but the emotional and spiritual infirmities of an old and fearful man.

10:15 a.m.

Roscani bit down restlessly on a knuckle and watched as the work engine came slowly down the track toward them. It was old and creaky with oily soot muddying most of the once bright green paint beneath.

'It's early,' Scala said from the backseat.

'Early, late. At least it's here,' Castelletti said, sitting in front with Roscani.

They were watching from Roscani's blue Alfa parked on the roadside halfway between the railroad spur to the gates in the Vatican wall and Stazione San Pietro. As the green engine drew closer, they could hear a grating of steel on steel as the engineer applied the brakes and the rumbling machine began to slow. A moment later it drifted past them, slowing even more. Then it stopped. A brakeman jumped from it and walked up the track to the spur. They saw him unlock a mechanical hand switch, then reach up and tug on a steel bar connecting it to the rail switches. A moment later he waved to the engine. There was a puff of brown diesel exhaust from the smokestack and it moved forward onto the spur. When it had gone far enough, the brakeman signaled, and it stopped. Then he threw the switch back the way it had been and climbed back onboard the engine.

Scala leaned forward against the front seat. 'They go in now, it's going to fuck up everyone's timetable inside.'

Castelletti shook his head. 'They won't. It's the Vatican. They'll sit there until precisely the time it takes to open the gates and go inside at eleven on the dot. No Italian trainman is going to risk pissing off the pope by being early or late.'

Roscani glanced at Castelletti, then looked back to the work engine. He was increasingly troubled by what he had done. Maybe he had wanted justice too much and had let some part of him reason the Addisons could somehow deliver it to him. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized they were all crazy. And he most of all for letting it happen. The Addisons might think they were prepared for what they were getting into, but the truth was, they weren't, not when they were going up against Farel's black-suited secret service, never mind someone like Thomas Kind. The trouble was, Roscani's insight had come too late, the event had already begun.

10:17 a.m.

Danny was out of his wheelchair and on the floor, his legs in the blue fiberglass casts twisted out awkwardly from his body. In front of him was a large blanket of crumpled newspaper. On top of it, he placed the last of eight of the rolled olive-oil-and-rum-soaked rags, setting them side by side and approximately eight inches apart and directly in front of the main air intake for the Vatican museums' central ventilating system.

'Oorah!' Danny said to himself. 'Oorah!' Ready to kill! The ancient Celtic battle cry the marines had taken as their own. It was both arousing and chilling and came from the soul. Everything to now had been the setup, here and now was where it all began. Emotionally he had shifted gears, working himself up to where he needed to be, his mind-set become that of a warrior.

'Oorah!' he said again under his breath as he finished, then looked over his shoulder to Elena standing at a work sink behind him, waiting with a battered galvanized bucket containing a dozen water-soaked equipment-maintenance towels.

'Ready?'

She nodded.

'Okay.'

With a glance at his watch, Danny lit a match and touched it in turn to the rags. Instantly they caught, throwing up a cloud of oily brown smoke and igniting the newspapers. Twisting abruptly left, Danny picked up more of the crumpled newspapers and fed them on top of those already burning. In seconds he had a roaring inferno.

'Now!' he said.

Elena came in a rush. Wincing against the heat and flame, they took the wet towels from the bucket, laying them one by one across the top of the fire.

Almost instantly the flames died away. In their stead was a thick billow of heavy brown-and-white smoke, all of it drawn, not into the room, but into the ventilating system. Satisfied, Danny pushed back, and Elena helped him into the wheelchair. As she did, he looked up at her.

'Next,' he said.

10:25 a.m.

Harry stood in the deep shade of pine trees just east and north of the Carriage Museum, waiting until a gardener's electric cart passed. When it did, he stepped out, cursing and fumbling with the stuck zipper on the waist pack inside his shirt. Finally, it came open and he reached in to take out a Ziploc bag. Opening it, he pulled out one of the rolled, oily rags, then closed the bag again and put it back in the waist pack.

It the distance near St Peter's he could see two white-shirted Vigilanza patrolmen walking along the road away from him and toward the Ufficio Centrale di Vigilanza, the Vatican police station, a building that he now realized was probably no more than a hundred yards from the railroad station.