Day Of Confession

128

The Vatican. The Tower of San Giovanni. Same time.

Cardinal Marsciano sat in a straight-backed armchair, staring trancelike at the television screen five feet in front of him. Its sound was still turned off. A commercial played now. It was animated. Whatever was being sold did not penetrate.

Across the room was the velvet purse Palestrina had left him. The hideous thing inside it affirmation, as if more were needed, of the secretariat's descent into total madness. Barely able to look at it let alone touch it, Marsciano had tried to get them to take it away, but Anton Pilger had merely stood in the doorway and refused, saying nothing could be brought in or taken out without specific orders, and there were none. With that he had said he was sorry and closed the door, the sound of the bolted lock as it clicked into place, by now, almost ear shattering.

Abruptly a graphic flashed on the television screen in front of Marsciano. It played over a map of China that highlighted both Wuxi and Hefei.

As of 10:20 p.m. Beijing time: WUXI, CHINA – FATALITIES: 1,700 HEFEI, CHINA – FATALITIES: 87,553

Immediately the picture cut to Beijing. A field reporter was standing in Tiananmen Square.

Marsciano picked up the remote:

CLICK.

The sound came up. The reporter was speaking in Italian: A major announcement regarding the disasters in Hefei and Wuxi was imminent, he said. Speculation centered on an announcement to the provinces of an immediate and massive rebuilding of China's entire water and power infrastructures.

CLICK.

The reporter spoke on in silence. Marsciano put down the remote. Palestrina had won. He had won, yet there was still to be a third city, another mass poisoning. What hell was this?

Seeing what had already happened, knowing what was yet to come, Marsciano closed his eyes and wished Father Daniel had died in the bus explosion, so that he never would have known of the horror caused by Marsciano's loathsome weakness and inaction against Palestrina. Wished he had died then rather than be killed here by Farel's thugs when he came looking for Marsciano – after China had already happened.

Turning from the cold cruelty of the television screen, Marsciano looked across the room. Early-afternoon sunlight radiated through the glass door, beckoning him toward it. Besides sleep and prayer, the door had been his only solace. From it, he could look out over the Vatican gardens and see a pastoral world of peace and beauty.

Going there now, he pulled aside the curtains to stand at the glass, watching the sunlight stream through the trees to make a grand chiaroscuro of the landscape beneath. In a moment he would turn from the doorway to kneel at his bed and beg – as he had so often in the last days and hours – God's forgiveness for the terror he had helped create.

His mind on his prayers, he was about to turn back when suddenly the beauty he looked upon vanished. What he saw in its place shook him to his soul. It was an image he had seen a hundred times before, but never had it filled him with the revulsion it did now.

Two men walked toward him along a gravel pathway. One was huge physically and wore black. The other was older and much smaller and dressed in white. The first was Palestrina. The other, the one in white, was the Holy Father, Giacomo Pecci, Pope Leo XIV.

Palestrina was animated as they walked. Chatting, gesturing with infectious energy. As if the world and everything in it were filled with joy. While the pope, beside him, was, as always, enamored by his charisma and utterly trusting. And because of it, wholly blind to the truth.

As they drew closer, Marsciano felt a chill creep across his shoulders and ease like frozen breath down his spine. For the first time, and with profound horror, he saw who this scugnizzo, this common street urchin from Naples, as Palestrina called himself, really was.

More than a grand, beloved, and all-persuasive politician. More than a man who had risen to the second-most powerful position in the Roman Catholic Church. More, even, than a corrupt, increasingly mad, and paranoid being, prime architect of one of the most gruesome civilian massacres in history. The smiling, ruddy-cheeked, white-haired giant who walked through Eden's dappled sunlight with the Holy Father ravished in his spell was darkness itself, a whole and complete incarnation of evil.