Day Of Confession

45

11 P.M.

Harry lay in bed in Eaton's apartment trying to sleep, the door locked, a chair propped under the knob, just in case. Trying to tell himself that it was all right. And that Eaton had been right. Up until now he had been alone in an impossible situation. Suddenly he had a place to stay and two people willing to help him.

Eaton had gone out, saying he would get Harry something to eat, suggesting that in the meantime Harry shower and wash his healing wounds as best he could. But not shave. For the moment the new beard was protecting him, making him someone else.

But he wanted Harry to think who he wanted to become. Something he might know if questioned, a law school professor or perhaps a journalist who wrote about the entertainment industry on holiday in Italy, or an aspiring screenwriter or novelist doing research on ancient Rome.

'I'll remain what I was, a priest,' Harry had said when Eaton came back with pizza and a bottle of red wine and some bread and coffee for the morning.

'An American priest is who they are looking for.'

'There are priests everywhere. And I would assume more than one is American.'

Eaton had hesitated, then simply nodded and gone into the bedroom and brought out two of his shirts and a sweater. Then, pulling a 35mm camera from a drawer, he'd loaded it with film and positioned Harry against a blank wall. He took eighteen photographs. Six with Harry wearing one shirt, six with the other, six with the sweater.

After that he'd left, telling Harry to go nowhere. That either he or Adrianna would be back by noon the next day.

Why?

Why had he chosen to remain a priest? Had he thought it out? Yes. As a priest, he could become a civilian at will by a simple change of clothes. And, as he had suggested, how unusual would it be to find any number who were American? Hercules had said, Hide in plain sight. Right next to them. He had, and it had worked. Any number of times. Once right under the nose of the carabinieri.

On the other hand Eaton had been right: the police were looking for Danny. And Danny was an American priest. A priest who spoke English with an American dialect would be a natural suspect. People would look at him and wonder if, despite the beard, the face wasn't familiar. And don't forget the reward. A hundred million lire. Some sixty thousand U.S. dollars. Who wouldn't risk a little embarrassment by taking a chance and calling the police, even if it turned out to be the wrong person?

Moreover, what did he know about the priesthood? What if another clergyman engaged him in talk? What if someone asked him for help? Still, the decision had been made, the photos taken, with Eaton certain to give him a background along with his papers.

A priest.

Outside, Harry heard the sounds of Rome at night. Via di Montoro was a side street and a great deal quieter than the din outside his hotel at the top of the Spanish Steps. But still the noise was there. Traffic. The incessant putt of motor scooters. People walking by outside.

Little by little it all became background, drifting into a distant symphony of nothingness. The shower, the clean bed, the whole of the ordeal carried Harry toward sleep, gently forcing him to accept his true exhaustion. Perhaps that was why he had chosen to stay a priest. Simply because it was easy. And because it had worked. And not at all for another reason… that he wished in some curious way to understand who Danny really was. To do as Hercules had offhandedly suggested. To, for a while at least, become his brother.

Closing his eyes, he began to drift off. As he did, he saw the Christmas card once more: the decorated tree behind the posed faces smiling from under Santa Claus hats – his mother and father, himself, Madeline, and Danny.

'MERRY CHRISTMAS from the Addisons'

Then the vision faded, and in the dark he heard Pio's voice. It whispered again the thing he had said in the car on the way back to Rome – 'You know what I would be thinking if I were you… Is my brother still alive? And if he is, where is he?

Marsciano was alone in his library, his desktop computer dark. The books, which filled every open space floor to ceiling, seemed, in his mood, little more than decorations. The only illumination was from a halogen lamp sitting near the back of his wooden desk. On top of it, and in the lamp's glow, was the envelope that had been delivered to him in Geneva in the package marked URGENTE. The same envelope he had brought back with him on the train. Inside it was the audiocassette he had heard that once but never played again. Why he wanted to hear it now, he didn't know. But he was drawn to it nonetheless.

Opening a drawer, he set a palm-sized tape player on the desk, then opened the envelope and slid the cassette into it. For a moment he hesitated, then deliberately he pressed the play button. There was a dull whirring as the tape came to speed. Then he heard the voice, hushed but perfectly clear:

'In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. May God, who has enlightened every heart, help you to know your sins and trust in His mercy.'

Then came another voice: 'Amen.'

'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,' the other voice continued. 'It has been many days since my last confession. These are my sins-'

Abruptly Marsciano's thumb pushed the stop button and he sat there, unable to go on, to hear any more.

A confession had been recorded without the knowledge of either the penitent or the priest. The penitent, the confessor, was himself. The priest, Father Daniel.

Filled with horror and revulsion, pushed to the darkest edges of his soul by Palestrina, he had turned to the only place he could. Father Daniel was not only an honorable co-worker and as devoted a friend as he had had in his life, he was a priest given to God, and whatever was said would be protected by the Seal of Confession and would go no farther than the confessional.

Except that it had.

Because Palestrina had recorded it. And he no doubt had had Farel implant electronic devices in other places, private or otherwise – any place Marsciano or the others might go.

Increasingly paranoid, the secretariat was protecting himself on all fronts, playing the stirring military leader he had years earlier told Marsciano he was certain he was. He had been drunk, but in all seriousness and with great pride, he had boasted that from the day he was old enough to know such things, he believed he was the reincarnation of Alexander of Macedon, ancient conqueror of the Persian empire. It was how he had lived his life from then on, and why he had risen to become who he was and in the place he was. Whether anyone else believed it made no difference, because he did. And little by little Marsciano could see him taking on the mantle of a general at war.

How quickly and brutally he had acted after hearing the recording! Marsciano had given his confession late Thursday night, and early Friday morning Father Daniel had left for Assisi, no doubt as horrified as Marsciano and seeking his own solace. There had never been a question in Marsciano's mind who had reached out to stop him, blowing up the bus and killing how many innocents in the process. It was the same ruthless disregard for humanity as his stratagem for China, the same cold-blooded paranoia that made him distrust not only those around him but the Seal of Confession, and in that, the canon law of the Church.

It was something Marsciano should have expected. Because, by then, he had seen the true horror of Palestrina unveiled. The specter of it frozen in his memory as if it had been stamped from steel.

On the morning following the immense public funeral for the cardinal vicar of Rome, the secretariat had called the still deeply shaken remaining members of the cabal – himself; prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, Joseph Matadi; and director general of the Vatican Bank, Fabio Capizzi – to a conference at a private villa in Grottaferata, outside Rome, a retreat Palestrina often used for 'introspective' gatherings and the place where he had first presented his 'Chinese Protocol'.

On arrival, they had been taken to a small, formal courtyard nestled among manicured foliage away from the main house where Palestrina waited at a wrought-iron table, sipping coffee and making entries into a laptop computer. Farel was with him, standing behind his chair like some iron-fisted majordomo. A third person was there as well – a quietly handsome man, not yet forty. Slim and of medium height, he had jet-black hair and piercing blue eyes and was dressed – Marsciano remembered – in a double-breasted navy blazer, white shirt, dark tie, and gray slacks.

'You have not met Thomas Kind,' Palestrina said as they sat down, sweeping his hand as if he were introducing a new member of a private club.

'He is helping coordinate our "situation" in China.'

Marsciano could still feel the rush of horror and disbelief and saw the same in the others as well – the sudden, involuntary inward twist of Capizzi's tight, thin lips; the immediate and grave apprehension in the once humor-filled eyes of Joseph Matadi – as Thomas Kind stood up and politely greeted them by name, his eyes fixing on each as he did.

'Buon giorno, Monsignor Capizzi.'

'-Cardinal Matadi.'

'-Cardinal Marsciano.'

Marsciano had remembered seeing Kind there a year earlier in the company of a short middle-aged Chinese, but only at a distance, when he and Father Daniel had come for a meeting with Pierre Weggen. At the time he'd had no idea who he was and hadn't given it much thought, except for the China connection. But now, seeing him this close and being told who he was, and realizing who he was as he looked at you and said your name, was a horrifying experience.

And Palestrina's quiet delight in their not-well-concealed reactions told them, as clearly as if he had announced it, who murdered the cardinal vicar and at whose order. Their summons to the villa had been simply a warning that if any of them secretly harbored the late cardinal's views, disagreed with Palestrina's plan for China and had thoughts of going to the Holy Father or the College of Cardinals about it, they would have Thomas Kind to deal with. It was pure and terrifying Palestrina gall, a theatrical sideshow to his ever-increasing circus of horror. Moreover, it was a clear signal that his war to control China was about to begin.

And afterward, as if it were possible to be more audacious, Palestrina had simply pushed a huge hand through his great white mane and dismissed them.

Marsciano's eyes came back to the dim light of his study and the tiny recorder on his desk. With his confession he had told Father Daniel of the assassination of Cardinal Parma and of his own complicity in Palestrina's master plan for the expansion of the Church into China – one that would involve not only the surreptitious maneuvering of Vatican investments but, more horrifically, the deaths of untold numbers of innocent Chinese citizens.

With his confession, and wholly unknowingly, he had condemned Father Daniel to death. The first time, God or perhaps fate had intervened. But once they knew for certain he was still alive, Thomas Kind would take up the hunt. And to escape someone like Kind would be all but undoable. Palestrina would not fail twice.