Day Of Confession

49

Rome, same time

Why, of all times, had Roscani decided to quit smoking now? But as of seven this morning he had just stopped, stubbed the half-smoked cigarette into his ashtray and announced to himself that he no longer smoked. Since then, almost anything had done in place of tobacco. Coffee, gum, sweet rolls. Coffee, gum again. At the moment it was a chocolate gelato cone, and he was eating it against the July heat, licking the melting ice cream from his hand as he walked through the noonday crowds and back to the Questura. But neither melting gelato nor the lack of nicotine could pull him from the thing on his mind – the missing Llama automatic pistol with the silencer squirreled to its barrel.

It was a thought that had come in the middle of the night and kept him awake for the rest of it. The first thing this morning he'd looked at the 'Transfer of Evidence' form Pio and Jacov Farel had both signed at the farmhouse when Farel had transferred possession of the gun found at the Assisi bus site to Pio. Correct and legal. It meant Pio definitely had the gun, and after he was killed, it was gone, along with Harry Addison. But that was only routine detective work, not the thought that had waked him and had eaten at him all morning and still did. All along he'd believed the Spanish-made Llama had been carried by Father Daniel and was a definitive link between him and the dead Spanish Communist Miguel Valera, the man set up to take the blame for the assassination of the cardinal vicar of Rome.

But – and this was the thing – what if the gun had not belonged to Father Daniel at all but to someone else on the bus? Someone who was there to kill him. If that was the case, then they might be looking not at one crime but two: an attempt to murder the priest and the blowing up of the bus itself.

11:30 p.m.

Hot and sticky. The heat that had begun to build the previous week had not let go, and even at this late hour it was still eighty-three degrees.

Trying to get some relief against it, Cardinal Marsciano had changed from his wool vestments into khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt and gone outside to the small interior courtyard of his apartment, hoping for a breeze that might lighten the oppressiveness.

The light spill from his library window illuminated the tomatoes and peppers he had planted in late April. They had ripened early and now had fruit that was almost ready to pick. Ripened early because of the heat. Not that it was totally unexpected. It was July, and July was usually hot. For a moment Marsciano smiled, remembering the small two-story Tuscan farmhouse where he had grown up along with his parents and four brothers and three sisters. The heat of summer meant two things – exhaustively long days with the entire family getting up before sunrise and working in the fields almost until dusk and scorpions, by the thousands. Coming in and sweeping them out of the house was a two – or three-times-a-day chore, and one never got into bed or put on a pair of pants or shirt or shoe, for that matter, without shaking it out first. The sting of a scorpion would leave you with a welt and pain you would remember for a long time. The insect was the first of God's creatures he truly despised. But then that was long before he'd known Palestrina.

Filling a watering can, Marsciano soaked the ground beneath his vegetable plants, then set the can back where it had been and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Still there was no breeze, and the night air seemed more stifling than ever.

The heat.

He tried to push it from his mind but he couldn't, because he knew it was what had started Palestrina's China clock ticking. Every day Marsciano watched the papers and the global weather reports on television and scanned the Internet, monitoring as best he could the weather conditions across Asia, the same as he knew Palestrina was doing. Only the secretariat would have a far more comprehensive manner of information gathering than he did, mainly because, in light of his 'Chinese Protocol', Palestrina himself had taken up the study of meteorology, becoming a passionate student of the science of weather forecasting. In less than a year he had become a near-expert in the projection of computerized weather forecast models. Additionally, he established personal relationships with a half dozen professional weathercasters around the world with whom he could communicate for advice almost instantly via E-mail. If the secretariat hadn't had a more direct agenda before him, he could have easily settled into a second career as Italy's chief weather expert.

A prolonged spell of hot, humid weather across eastern China was what he was waiting for. With it, the sun-fed algae and its accompanying biological toxins would quickly begin to clot the surface of lakes, polluting the main water supplies of towns and cities along their shores. And when the conditions were right and the algae mass large enough, Palestrina would give the order and his 'protocol' would begin. Poisoning the lakes in a way that would be undetectable, making the cause appear to be the algae and the inability of the aging municipal water-filtration systems to correct it.

People would die in huge numbers, and an enormous public outcry would follow. And government leaders would be secretly worried that the provinces might panic and sense Beijing was not capable of running the water system and threaten to pull away from the central government, thereby putting China on the brink of its greatest fear, collapse, in the same way the Soviet Union had collapsed. And these government leaders would respond to a strong, very private recommendation by a longtime trusted ally that a consortium of international construction companies, many already working on projects within China, be quickly brought together to immediately rebuild the country's entire crumbling and near-archaic water-delivery/treatment infrastructure. From canals to reservoirs to filtration plants to dams and hydroelectric plants.

That longtime trusted ally would, of course, be Pierre Weggen. And the companies and corporations to do the work would, of course, be those silently controlled by the Vatican. It was the heart of Palestrina's plan: control China's water and you control China.

And to begin to control the water he needed hot weather, and today it was hot in Italy, and it was hot in eastern China. And Marsciano knew that, save an unlikely and abrupt change of weather over Asia, it was only a matter of days before Palestrina would send word and the horror would begin.

Turning to go inside, Marsciano caught a glimpse of a face at an upper window. Just a glimpse, then it was gone, pulled back quickly – Sister Maria-Louisa, his new housekeeper, or, rather, Palestrina's new housekeeper, put there to let him know he was constantly watched, that no matter what he did, Palestrina sat on his shoulder.

Back inside, Marsciano went wearily to his desk and began to go over the final draft of the minutes of the meeting of the day before, the new investment portfolio approved by the council of cardinals. Monday morning he would put it before Palestrina for his signature. And then it would become part of the permanent record.

As Marsciano worked, an immeasurable darkness in the form of questions rose from the depths of his mind, one that lurked in the shadows of his soul as if it were a living thing, rising whenever there was a quiet moment to torment him – what they had allowed Palestrina to become and, more pointedly, his own deeply despised inability to do anything about it himself. Why had he not requested a private meeting with the Holy Father or sent a secretive memo to the College of Cardinals admitting what had happened and what was about to happen and begging for their help to stop it?

The tragedy was that the answers were all too familiar because he had wrestled with them a thousand times before. The Holy Father was old and altogether devoted to his secretariat of state and therefore would be unswayable to anything said against him. And who presided over the College of Cardinals more than Palestrina himself? His esteem was enormous, his allies everywhere. A charge of this magnitude would either be laughed off or treated with outrage, as if it were heresy, or as if his accuser were deranged.

Making it even more impossible was Palestrina's threat to reveal him as the man who had ordered the murder of Cardinal Parma, the result of a sordid love affair. How could Marsciano defend against a lie like that to the pope or the cardinals? The answer was, he couldn't, because Palestrina held all the cards and could manipulate them at will.

Complicating things further was the fact that what had happened had originated entirely from the secrecy and sanctity of the pope's inner circle, the follow-up to a papal request to find a way to expand the reach of the Church in the next century. Any number of studies had been done and proposals made before Palestrina presented his – deliberately and fully fleshed out. And when he had, Marsciano, like the others, had laughed, taking it as a joke. Hut it was not a joke. The secretariat was utterly serious.

To Marsciano's horror, only Cardinal Parma voiced opposition. The others – Monsignor Capizzi and Cardinal Matadi – had remained silent. In retrospect Marsciano should not have been surprised. Palestrina had obviously evaluated them all carefully beforehand. Parma, old school, staunchly conservative and unyielding, would never have gone along. But Capizzi, graduate of Oxford and Yale and chief of the Vatican Bank, and Matadi, prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, whose family was among the most prominent in Zaire, were altogether different. Both were highly ambitious political animals who had not reached the pinnacles they had by accident. Profoundly driven and exceedingly canny, each man had a huge following inside the Church. And, knowing full well that Palestrina had no desire for the office himself, each had his eyes directly on the papacy, knowing that it was wholly within Palestrina's whim and power to seat either one of them there.

Marsciano was another creature altogether, a man who had achieved what he had because he was not only intelligent and decidedly unpolitical but at heart a simple priest who believed in his Church and in God. It made him truly a 'man of trust', an innocent who would find it impossible to conceive that a man like Palestrina could exist inside the modern Church, thereby making it easy to use his faith as an instrument to manipulate him.

Suddenly Marsciano slammed his fist down on the table in front of him, in the same instant damning himself in anger for his weakness and naivete, even his own godliness, in pursuit of the calling he been drawn to his entire life. If his fury and self-realization had come earlier, he might have been able to do something, but by now it was far too late. Control of the Holy See had been all but relinquished to Palestrina by the Holy Father, and the only voice against him, Cardinal Parma's, had been silenced. And Capizzi and Matadi had bowed to their leader and followed him. As had Marsciano himself, hopelessly trapped by the substance of his own character. In result, Palestrina had taken the reins, setting in motion a horror that could not, and would not, be called back. Leaving them all to wait only for the broiling heat of Chinese summer.