Day Of Confession

130

Wuxi, China. Friday, July 17, 3:20 a.m.

FLASH!

Li Wen grimaced in the brilliant pop of the strobe light, trying to look away. A hand pushed him back.

FLASH! FLASH! FLASH!

He had no idea who these people were. Or where he was. Or how they had found him in the shoving, terrified mass on Chezhan Lu as he made his way toward the railroad station. He'd merely been trying to leave Wuxi, after a frenzied discussion with officials at Water Treatment Plant number 2. The water he'd tested just after daybreak that morning had shown alarming levels of blue-green algae toxin, the same as Hefei. And he'd said so. But the only result of his warning was a rush of local politicians and safety inspectors to the scene. By the time the arguments were done and the city's water-treatment plants along with the water intake systems from Taihu Lake, the Grand Canal, and Liangxi River were shut down, a full-scale emergency was in process.

'Confess,' a voice commanded in Chinese.

Li Wen's head was jerked back and he looked into the face of an officer of the People's Liberation Army, but instantly Li Wen knew he was more than that. He belonged to the Guojia Anquan Bu, the Ministry of State Security.

'Confess,' he said once again.

Suddenly Li Wen was shoved face forward toward papers spread out on a table before him. He stared at them. They were the pages of formulas, received in the Beijing hotel from the American hydrobiologist James Hawley, and had been in his briefcase when he had been caught and arrested.

'The recipes for mass murder,' the voice said again.

Slowly Li Wen looked up. 'I have done nothing,' he said.

Rome. Thursday, July 16, 9:30 p.m.

Scala sat in a chair, watching his wife and mother-in-law play cards. His children – ages one, three, five, and eight – were asleep. He was home for the first time in what seemed like months and wanted to stay there. If for no other reason than to hear the women talk and smell the smell of the apartment and know his children were as close as the next room. But he couldn't. He was to relieve Castelletti outside the apartment on Via Nicolo V at midnight, taking the watch until Castelletti came back with Roscani at seven. Then he would have three hours to sleep before he met them again at ten-thirty and they waited for the work engine to go into – and then come out of – the Vatican through the monstrous iron doorway in its immense walls.

Scala was starting to get up, to go into the kitchen and make fresh coffee when the phone rang.

'Si,' he said, picking up quickly.

'Harry Addison is in Rome…' It was Adrianna Hall.

'I know…'

'His brother is with him.'

'I…'

'Where are they, Sandro?'

'I don't know…'

'You do know, Sandro, don't lie. Not on this one, not after all these years.'

All these years - Scala flashed back to the time when Adrianna was a young reporter newly assigned to the Rome bureau. She was about to break a story that would have rocketed her career forward but would have greatly jeopardized a murder case he was about to close. He'd asked her to hold her story back, and with great reluctance she had. But because of it she had become fidarsi di, someone to trust. And he had trusted her, secretly slipping her privileged information over the years, and she had responded with information of her own that helped the police. But this time it was different. What was happening here was much too dangerous, with too much at stake. God help him if the media learned the police were helping the Addison brothers.

'I'm sorry. I have no information… It's late, you understand…' Scala said quietly and hung up.