Allan Folsom - Day Of Confession

'What?-'

Harry was bent over, recovering the tossed phone and at the same time sucking on his bloody knuckle.

'What's wrong?'

'The fucking water's off, okay?'

Danny put up a hand as they reached the far end of the gallery. Elena stopped the wheelchair. In front of them was a closed gate to the gallery beyond. The Galleria Lapidaria, the Gallery of Inscriptions. As far as they could tell, no one was inside.

For the first time they were alone, the crowd, the rush, the panic moving in the opposite direction.

'I'm going for fire three. Are you out of there?' Harry's voice came through the phone.

'Two more stops.'

'Hurry the hell up.'

'The Swiss Guards are outside in force.'

'Forget the last two stops.'

'We do, you'll have Farel and the Swiss Guards all over you.'

'Then stop talking and do it.'

'Harry.' Danny looked back. Through the window he could see the Swiss Guards pulling on gas masks, and firemen with breathing tanks and fire axes.

'Eaton is somewhere here. Adrianna Hall is with him.'

'How the hell did-?'

'I don't know.'

'Jesus Christ, Danny, forget Eaton. Just get the hell out of there!'

'It's a diversion.' Thomas Kind stood on the roadway just below the tower, watching the smoke from the Vatican museums billow up, talking into the two-way radio in his hand. In the distance he could hear the scream of emergency vehicles en route from various Rome City locations.

'What will you do?' Farel's voice came back at him.

'My plans have not changed. Nor should yours either.' Suddenly Thomas Kind clicked off, and turned back for the tower.

Hercules crouched in his perch, tying the last of the heavy knots in the snout of his climbing rope, and watched Thomas Kind come back up the pathway toward the tower, radio in hand, talking into it as he came. Below, he saw the black suits on the far side of the hedge.

Hercules waited for Thomas Kind to pass the tower. Then, crutches tied together by a short length of rope and tossed over his shoulder, he moved up on the wall, hesitated briefly, and whirled a length of rope with its heavily knotted snout overhead. Standing up fully, balancing almost on air, he flung the rope up and over the roof.

The knotted end settled around a heavy iron railing, then fell back. As the rope went slack Hercules glanced around once more. In the distance he could see the smoke from Vatican buildings, and over the hill beyond the trees in front of him, still more smoke rising.

Standing, he whirled the rope once more and let it fly. Again it came back slack and he cursed himself. And threw it again.

On the fifth toss it snagged, and he tested his weight on it. The tension held and he went up, grinning, straight up the side of the Tower, crutches dangling from his back. Moments later he disappeared from sight over its red-and-white-tile roof.

'Dammit!' Eaton choked against the smoke, handkerchief to his mouth, watery eyes searching the courtyard from the upper window of the Gallery of Tapestries, watching for wheelchairs in the mass exodus. He had already seen two of the handicapped people and discounted them. Where the hell Father Daniel and the nurse were in this confusion was impossible to tell.

Smoke, coughing, tearing eyes, and insanity aside, none of it was keeping Adrianna from rattling into her cell phone. She had two camera crews outside, one in St Peter's, the other at the entrance to the Vatican museums. Two more were on the way, and a Skycam helicopter pulled from the Adriatic coast, where it had been covering an Italian Navy exercise, was due any minute.

Suddenly Eaton was pulling her around, taking the phone from her, covering it.

'Tell them to watch for a bearded man in a wheelchair being cared for by a young woman,' he said urgently, his stare cutting into her. 'Tell them he's suspected of starting the fire or whatever. Tell them if they spot him to keep him in sight and let you know right then. Thomas Kind gets to him first, that's it.'

Adrianna nodded and Eaton gave her back the phone.

Grimacing at the pain in his legs, Danny struggled up in his wheelchair and pressed his full weight against the window frame. For a moment nothing happened. Finally, there was a loud creak. The old casing gave and the window swung open just enough to see out and onto the Belvedere Courtyard. The fire department was directly across, and the throw at this angle, awkward. Still-

Opening the camera bag, he took out one of the oil-and-rum-filled beer bottles, with the short wick sticking from the neck. Now he looked up to Elena, her face barely visible behind the bandana covering it.

'You all right?'

'Yes.'

Danny glanced back, then raised the bottle and touched a match to the wick.

Leaning back, he counted to five.

'Oorah!' he grunted and flung the bottle through the open window. Outside, a resounding crash was followed by a wall of flame as the shattering glass spread burning oil across the pavement and into the shrubbery beneath the window.

'Other side,' he said quickly, pulling the window closed, sitting back down.

Three minutes later a second bottle exploded on the gravel near the Courtyard of the Triangle – the closest point yet toward the papal palace – like the first firebomb, sending a sheet of flame across the open ground and igniting the brush around it.

Farel's office was pandemonium. The fire chief was on the line, demanding to know what the hell was going on, screaming that water pressure had been reduced to a dribble everywhere, when the first bomb exploded outside the fire department. Instantly the chiefs tone changed. Were they under a terrorist siege or not? He was not sending his fire fighters against armed terrorists. That was Farel's job.

Farel well knew this and was already scrambling his black suits toward the museums to assist the fully armed regiment of Swiss Guards, leaving only the six, including Thomas Kind and Anton Pilger, to keep the trap at the tower. It was then that the second firebomb went off.

No more chances could be taken. This might be the Addisons, it might not.

'The water is your problem, Capo.' Farel ran a sweaty hand across his shaved head, his husky voice deeper than usual.

'The Vigilanza and Swiss Guards will get the public to safety. My concern is one thing alone. The safety of the Holy Father. Nothing else matters.' With that he hung up and started for the door.

Hercules could see Harry's fourth fire go up. Then he saw him cross out of the smoke and start toward the tower, then duck behind a row of ancient olive trees and disappear.

Securing the rope in a double twist around the iron railing at the top of the tower, then letting it slip through his fingers, Hercules eased himself down the steep pitch of roof to the edge and looked over. Some twenty feet beneath him he could see the small platform that stuck out from Marsciano's prison room. And twenty, thirty feet below that was the ground. Easy enough, unless people were shooting at you.

Across the way he saw another fire go up. And then another, the thick smoke filtering the sunlight and turning the landscape blood red. Suddenly the bright morning had become dark. The combination of Harry's fires, the smoke from the museums, and the absolute lack of wind had, in the matter of the last few minutes, come together and turned Vatican Hill into an eerie, nearly invisible, foglike dreamscape, a choking, ghostly canvas where objects floated free-form and disembodied, where seeing more than a few feet in any direction was all but impossible.

Beneath him Hercules could hear coughing and gagging. Then, for a briefest moment the smoke cleared and he saw the two black suits nearest the front door move quickly away toward where the others were hidden, desperate to find fresh air.