“Police or no police, Chiasso is too close not to try…. You understand, Mr. Harry…”
“I understand, Hercules…. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do more…”
“Then good luck, Mr. Harry.” Hercules smiled and suddenly put out his hand, and Harry took it.
“You, too…”
And like that, Hercules was out of the car and gone. Harry watched for a moment as he crossed the street in the path of oncoming traffic. At the far curb, he looked back and grinned, then swung away on his crutches into the growing twilight. Walking, if that was the word, to Switzerland.
Ten minutes later Harry parked the Fiat on a side street down from the railroad station and wiped the steering wheel and gearshift clean of his fingerprints with a handkerchief. Getting out carefully, locking the car, he made his way to Via Borsieri and then onto Viale Varese, following the street signs for the lake and for Piazza Cavour. He walked at the same pace as the people around him, trying to blend in, to seem nothing more than a priest out to enjoy the warm summer evening.
Now and again someone would nod or smile as he passed. And he would return the pleasantry, and then turn casually and glance back, make sure one of them hadn’t recognized him or told others, or wasn’t coming back for a closer look.
Crossing a square, watching the signs, he was suddenly aware of people walking more slowly, the crowd thickening. Ahead he could see people gathered at a news kiosk. As he neared, he saw Danny’s face staring from the late editions. Each paper carried nearly the same headline:
SACERDOTE FUGGITIVO A BELLAGIO?
Was the fugitive priest in Bellagio?
Quickly he turned away and walked on.
Turning down one street and then another, Harry tried to follow the confusion of signs toward the lakefront and the Piazza Cavour. Dodging a chattering couple walking hand in hand, he turned a corner and stopped. The street directly ahead was blocked off by police barricades. Beyond them were police vehicles, media vans, and satellite trucks. Farther down he could see police headquarters.
“Christ.” Harry waited a half second, then moved on, trying to regain his composure. Ahead was a cross street and he went left on a whim, certain he’d find himself back at the police barricades or the kiosk or even the railroad station. Instead he saw the lake, traffic flowing along the boulevard at its edge. Immediately in front of him was a street sign for the Piazza Cavour.
Another half block and he was on the boulevard. To his right was the Palace Hotel, a huge brownstone with a busy outdoor café in front. Festive music played. People ate and drank, white-aproned waiters moving among them. They were normal, everyday people, doing everyday things, yet never knowing how close they sat to a potential climax of the first order had but one of them recognized the bearded priest in the black beret walking past them and sounded the alarm. In seconds the street would be filled with police. It would be like an American action movie. A Gruppo Cardinale showdown with a cop killer, the outlaw brother of the assassin of the cardinal vicar of Rome. Flashing lights. Helicopters. Chiseled extras running everywhere with machine guns and flak jackets. A Lee Harvey Oswald ride at an amusement park. Watch the bad guy get it from all sides. Buy your tickets, be there when it happens.
But none of them did. And then Harry was gone, just someone else walking by. A moment later he turned a corner and entered Piazza Cavour. Directly ahead was the Hotel Barchetta Excelsior.
67
HARRY PRESSED THE BUZZER FOR ROOM 525 and waited, beret in hand, soaked with sweat. From his own rattled nerves as much as from the July heat. Still eighty-some degrees at almost sunset.
He started to push the buzzer again when the door abruptly opened and Adrianna stood there, hair wet from the shower, a white hotel bathrobe around her, a cell phone to her ear. Harry went in quickly, closing the door behind him and locking it.
“He’s here now.” Adrianna was at the window pulling the curtains, talking into the phone as she did. The television next to the window was on, tuned to the news channel, the sound off. Somebody was doing a standup in front of the White House. As quickly the scene shifted to the British Parliament.
Crossing to a dressing table, Adrianna bent in front of the mirror to scribble something on a notepad.
“Tonight, okay…. I have it….”
Clicking off the phone, she looked up. Harry was watching her in the mirror.
“That was Eaton… ,” he said.
“Yes.” Adrianna turned to face him
“Where the hell is Danny?”
“Nobody knows….” Her gaze drifted off to the TV-always half watching in case something happened, an ongoing habit, the disease of a field reporter—then back to Harry. “Roscani and his men went over the villa in Bellagio where he was supposed to be with a toothbrush just a few hours ago…. They found nothing.”
“The police are certain it was Danny, not somebody else.”
“As certain as they can be without having been on the hydrofoil themselves. Roscani’s back here, in Como, coordinating Gruppo Cardinale forces. They’re not leaving. That should say enough in itself….” Adrianna tucked a sprig of still-wet hair behind an ear. “You look like you’re going to melt. You can take your jacket off, you know. You want a drink?”
“No.”
“I will…”
Crossing to a console, Adrianna opened it and took out a small bottle of cognac. Pouring most of it into a glass, she turned back.
Harry stared at her. “What do I do next? How do I get to Bellagio?”
“You’re angry with me, aren’t you? About what happened in Rome, about bringing Eaton into this.”
“Yes and no. But I could never have gotten this far without your help or Eaton’s. You both stuck your necks out, for your own reasons, but you did anyway…. The sex just made me feel a little cozier about it. So why don’t we just forget it and you tell me what I’m supposed to do…”
“All right….” Adrianna watched him for a moment, then, glass in hand, leaned back against the dressing table.
“You’re to take the late hydrofoil to Bellagio. Check into the Hotel Du Lac across the street from the boat landing. The reservations have been made—Father Jonathan Roe of Georgetown University. You’ll have the phone number of the man who runs Villa Lorenzi. His name is Edward Mooi.”
“I’m to call him?”
“Yes…”
“What makes you think he knows where Danny is?”
“Because the police think he does.”
“Then they’ll have his phone tapped.”
“And—what are they going to hear?” Adrianna took a tug at her drink. “An American priest offering to help simply because he’s seen the news coverage and would like to do anything he can…”
“If I were him, I’d think the call was a setup. A police sting.”
“So would I, except that between now and when you phone him, he’ll get a fax sent from a religious bookshop in Milan. He won’t know what it means at the time—neither will the police if they intercept it because it will look like an advertisement—but Edward Mooi is an educated man, and after you call, he’ll go back and find the fax and look at it again, even if he has to dig it out of the trash. When he does, he’ll understand.”
“What fax?”
Setting down her glass, Adrianna fished a sheet of paper from a battered leather traveling bag on the bed and handed it to him. Then, putting a hand on her hip, she leaned back against the dressing table. With the movement, her robe came open. Not a lot, but enough for Harry to see part of one breast and a hint of the dark where her legs came together.
“Read it…”
Harry hesitated, then glanced at the paper.
!Read!
“GENESIS 4:9”
A new book by
Father Jonathan Roe
That was all. Neatly typed. Nothing else.
“You remember your Bible, Harry…. Genesis 4:9—“
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” Harry dropped the pape
r on the bed.
“He’s an educated man. He’ll understand.”
“Then what?”
“We wait…. I’ll be in Bellagio, Harry. Maybe even before you are.” Adrianna’s voice became soft, seductive. Her eyes found Harry’s and held there. “And I’ll know how to reach you…. The phone in your pocket, you know.” She paused. “The way we—did it in Rome…”
For a long moment Harry said nothing, just stood looking at her. Finally, he let his eyes fall the length of her body.
“Your robe is open…”
“I know…”
HE TOOK HER FROM BEHIND, the way she liked, the way he had in her apartment in Rome. The difference this time was that the lights were on and they were in the bathroom standing up. With Adrianna bent slightly at the waist, her hands on the edge of the marble sink, both of them facing the mirror, watching.
He could see her pleasure as he came into her. Saw it intensify all the more with each deliberate stroke. He could see himself behind her. His jaw set. Firm. Becoming more so as the force and rapidity of his thrusting increased. In a way it was indecent, seeing his own face. It was almost as if he were doing it to himself. Except he wasn’t.
“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes—“
With her sound, his own being faded and he saw only her as she threw back her head, her eyes closed, gripping him with her secret muscles, magnifying each stroke for both of them.
“More,” she whispered. “More. Harder. Yes. Break me, Harry. Break me…”
He felt his pulse go up and the heat of her body grow against his. Both of them glistening with sweat. It was like before. In her bed in Rome. Spots danced in front of his eyes. His heart pounded. The sound of her breathing was like a roar overlapping the slap of their flesh as it came together. Again and again. And again. Then suddenly she cried out and he saw her head dip between her shoulders. At the same time he ejaculated. It felt like a cannon. One that kept on firing, round after round, all on its own, with no control at all. And then his knees buckled and he had to catch himself on the edge of the sink to keep from falling. And he knew there was nothing left.
For either of them.
68
Hefei, China. City of Hefei, Anhui Province,Water Filtration Plant “A.” Tuesday, July 14, 4:30 A.M.
LI WEN ENTERED AS HE ALWAYS DID, THROUGH the front door, heavy leather briefcase in one hand, identification badge clipped to the lapel of his jacket, nodding to the half-asleep Chinese Army security officer sitting at a table just beyond. Then, opening another door, he turned down a hallway and walked by the main control room, where a lone female engineer kept one eye loosely on a back wall of gauges and meters that measured, among other things, pressure, turbidity, flow rates, and chemical levels, and the other on a magazine she was reading.
“Good morning,” Li Wen said with authority. Instantly the magazine disappeared.
“Everything is in order?”
“Yes, sir.”
Li Wen stared at her a moment longer, letting her know he was not pleased with the magazine business. Then, with a definitive nod, he turned, pushed through a door and went down a long flight of steps to the filter area on the floor below, a long, concrete reinforced room where the final stages of filtration took place before the water was pumped into the clear well for outflow into the city’s water mains. The area was below ground level and felt immediately cool compared to the heat and humidity of the outdoors and even of the upper level.
The plant had been shut down for nearly six months for upgrading three years earlier but still had no air-conditioning. That, it was said, would be left for the new plant, the one to be built after the turn of the century. It was the same with most water-treatment and -filtration plants throughout China. They were old, and most in disrepair. Some, like this one, had been upgraded when the great water wheel in Beijing finally turned and the central committee provided funds. Small funds with big promises for the future.
What was true was that in some places the future had already arrived; and new ventures with western construction and engineering firms, such as the Sino-French hundred-and-seventy-million-dollar drinking-water plant in the city of Guangzhou, or the massive thirty-six-billion-dollar Three Gorges dam project along the Yangtze River, were well under way. But in the main, water-delivery and water-filtration plants across China were old, some bordering on the ancient, with hollowed-out trees serving as conduit pipes, hobbling along at best.
And at certain times of the year—as now, in the middle of summer when the long hot days provided ideal growing conditions for sun-fed algae and its accompanying biological toxins—the filtration plants became nearly ineffectual, providing little more than putrid lake or river water to the taps of Chinese homes.
It was, of course, why Li Wen was here—to oversee the quality of water flowing from Chao Lake, Hefei’s primary water source to the city of a million. It was a job he had been doing day in and day out for nearly eighteen years. Eighteen years of never realizing money could be made from it. Real money, enough to flee the country and at the same time wreak havoc against a government he despised; a government that in 1957 had branded his father a “counterrevolutionary” when he protested against the corruption and abuses of power inside the Communist Party and had imprisoned him in a labor camp, where he died three years later, when Li Wen was five. Li grew up revering his father’s memory while dutifully caring for a mother who never recovered from her husband’s death or the public scorn surrounding his imprisonment. Li Wen had become a hydrobiological engineer only because he had an aptitude for science and simply followed the path of least resistance. Outwardly he seemed soft and faceless, a man without passion or emotion. Inwardly, he burned with rage against the state, secretly belonging to a group of Taiwanese sympathizers dedicated to the overthrow of the Beijing regime, and to the return of Nationalist rule to the mainland.
Unmarried and always traveling, he counted as his closest friend Tong Qing, an uninhibited, twenty-five-year-old computer programmer-artist he had met two years earlier in an underground meeting in Nanjing. It was she who had introduced him to the persuasive flower merchant Chen Yin, whom he had liked immediately. Through Chen Yin’s familial connections in the central government, he had been able to travel widely, a hydrobiologist visiting various water treatment plants in Europe and North America to see how other governments did things. And through Chen Yin he had met Thomas Kind, who had taken him to the villa outside Rome where he had briefly met the man on whose mission he now worked—a giant of a man who dressed as a priest and whose name he was never told, but a man of power and position who had a unique design for the future of the People’s Republic.
That meeting alone set Li Wen’s entire future in motion, making the past year more exhilarating than any he’d ever known. At last and finally, he would avenge his father’s death and he would be paid handsomely to do it. And afterward, through Chen Yin, he would be spirited out of the country and into Canada, with a new identity and a new life. There to sit and watch gleefully as the years turned and the government that had robbed him of his childhood, the government he so profoundly abhorred, slowly crumbled at the hands of the ardent revolutionary from Rome.
SETTING HIS HEAVY BRIEFCASE on a wooden bench, Li Wen looked back across the room toward the door through which he had come in. Certain he was alone, he approached one of the four two-foot-square cutouts where he could look directly into the treated water being pumped into the city’s water mains. The water ran fast, but instead of being clear as it was in the winter months, it was cloudy and putrid smelling, the result of the summer heat and the buildup of sun-fed algae in Lake Chao. This was the thing the government had done nothing about, and the thing he was counting on.
Turning, he went quickly back to his briefcase. Opening it, he slipped on a pair of thin surgical gloves and then opened its large, insulated, inner compartment. A half dozen frozen gray-white “snowballs” sat in what looked like a Styrofoam egg crate, their coats just beginning to
melt, glistening in the overhead light.
Glancing again at the door, Li Wen picked the egg crate from the case and carried it to the cutouts above the flowing water. Picking up the first “snowball,” he reached over the side and dropped it in, feeling a triumphant flutter of his heart as he did. Then quickly he did the same with the rest, dropping them in one by one, and watching them whirl away to vanish in the swift flow of murky water.
As quickly, he turned back, put the egg crate and gloves in his briefcase and closed it. Then crossing to the cutouts once more, he lifted a vial from a metal case on the wall and took a sample of the water, then quietly went about the business of testing for what he was certain was its government-acceptable “purity.”
69
Bellagio, Lake Como, Italy.
Monday, July 13, 10:40 P.M.
HARRY PICKED UP THE SMALL SUITCASE Adrianna had given him when he’d left the hotel in Como and walked with the handful of other late-night passengers off the hydrofoil and up the landing toward the street. Ahead was the Navigazione Lago di Como ticket booth, unmanned at this hour and overhung by the dense summer foliage of the lakeside trees around it. Past it, he could see the lighted street and across it the Hotel Du Lac. Another minute, two at the most, and he would be there.
The trip from Como—with stops at the small towns of Argegno, Lezzeno, Lenno, and Tremezzo—had been nerve-wracking. At each stop Harry had fully expected armed police to come onboard, checking the identity of travelers. But none had. And finally, after the stop in Tremezzo, with Bellagio next, Harry started to relax like the rest of the passengers. For the first time in as long as he could remember, there was no sense of danger. No sense of being hunted. Nothing but the sound of the motors and the rush of water under the hull.
It was the same now as he walked up the landing behind the others, the way he might as a tourist, another passenger walking off a boat and into a lazy summer’s night. He was tired, he realized, emotionally and physically. He wanted to lie down and turn off the world and sleep for a week. But this was hardly the place. He was in Bellagio. The heart of the Gruppo Cardinale search. And it wasn’t only Danny they were looking for. He needed to be more guarded and alert than ever.