Day Of Confession

98

In a blaze of landing lights and swirling dust, Roscani's helicopter set down on the driveway in front of Villa Lorenzi.

Ducking the still-churning rotor blades, he crossed the formal gardens and entered into the smoky chaos of the command post set up in the late Eros Barbu's grand ballroom. Gilded, polished, and dripping with chandeliers, it was the kind of place an invading army might have set up in, which, in a sense, was exactly what it was.

Pushing through the clamor, answering a fusillade of questions as he went, he glanced at the huge wall map with the small Italian flags marking the checkpoints and worried, as he had before, whether what they were doing, necessary as it seemed, was too big, too loud, too unwieldy. They were an army, and that made them think and act like an army, and made them subject to the limitations of a large force; while their prey, as they had proven so far, were essentially guerillas with the freedom of daring and creativity.

Going into a small office at the far end of the ballroom, he closed the door and sat down. There were calls waiting – from Taglia in Rome, Farel in the Vatican, his wife at home.

The call to his wife would be first. And then Taglia and then Farel. After that he would see no one for twenty minutes. He would take that time for himself. For assoluta tranquillita. His splendid silence. To be calm and to think. And then quietly go over the data he'd received from INTERPOL, to see if somewhere in those pages he could determine the identity of his blond man.

Bellagio. Hotel Florence. 8:40 p.m.

Thomas Kind sat at the dressing table in his room and looked at himself in the mirror. Astringent had cleaned the deep facial scratches made by Marta's clawing nails and drawn the wounds tightly enough to apply the makeup that he was now using to cover them.

He'd arrived back at the hotel a little before five after hitching a ride on the Bellagio road from two English university students on vacation. He'd been in a fight with his girlfriend, he'd told them; she'd lashed out, scratching his face, and he'd simply walked off – he was going back to Holland that night, and as far as he was concerned, she could go to hell. A half mile from the police checkpoint, he asked to be let out, saying he was still angry and wanted to walk it off. When the students had driven off, he'd left the road, crossed a field behind some trees, then come back to the road on the far side of the checkpoint. From there it had been less than a twenty-minute walk into Bellagio.

Coming into the hotel, he'd taken the back stairs to his room, then called the front desk to say he was checking out early in the morning and that whatever final payment was due should be added to his credit card and forwarded with the bill to his home in Amsterdam. Afterward, he'd looked at himself in the mirror and decided the thing to do was to take a shower and then change. And change he had.

Leaning toward the mirror, he touched mascara to his eyelashes, then dabbed once again at the eyeshadow. Satisfied, he stood back and looked at himself. He wore heels, beige slacks, and a loose white blouse under a lightweight blue linen blazer. Small gold earrings and a string of pearls finished the look. Closing his suitcase, he glanced once more in the mirror and then, pulling on a large straw hat, tossed the room keys on the bed, opened the door and left.

Thomas Jose Alvarez-Rios Kind of Quito, Ecuador, alias Frederick Voor of Amsterdam, was now Julia Louise Phelps, a real estate agent from San Francisco, California.