Standing, he whirled the rope once more and let it fly. Again it came back slack and he cursed himself. And threw it again.

On the fifth toss it snagged, and he tested his weight on it. The tension held and he went up, grinning, straight up the side of the Tower, crutches dangling from his back. Moments later he disappeared from sight over its red-and-white-tile roof.

'Dammit!' Eaton choked against the smoke, handkerchief to his mouth, watery eyes searching the courtyard from the upper window of the Gallery of Tapestries, watching for wheelchairs in the mass exodus. He had already seen two of the handicapped people and discounted them. Where the hell Father Daniel and the nurse were in this confusion was impossible to tell.

Smoke, coughing, tearing eyes, and insanity aside, none of it was keeping Adrianna from rattling into her cell phone. She had two camera crews outside, one in St Peter's, the other at the entrance to the Vatican museums. Two more were on the way, and a Skycam helicopter pulled from the Adriatic coast, where it had been covering an Italian Navy exercise, was due any minute.

Suddenly Eaton was pulling her around, taking the phone from her, covering it.

'Tell them to watch for a bearded man in a wheelchair being cared for by a young woman,' he said urgently, his stare cutting into her. 'Tell them he's suspected of starting the fire or whatever. Tell them if they spot him to keep him in sight and let you know right then. Thomas Kind gets to him first, that's it.'

Adrianna nodded and Eaton gave her back the phone.

Grimacing at the pain in his legs, Danny struggled up in his wheelchair and pressed his full weight against the window frame. For a moment nothing happened. Finally, there was a loud creak. The old casing gave and the window swung open just enough to see out and onto the Belvedere Courtyard. The fire department was directly across, and the throw at this angle, awkward. Still-

Opening the camera bag, he took out one of the oil-and-rum-filled beer bottles, with the short wick sticking from the neck. Now he looked up to Elena, her face barely visible behind the bandana covering it.

'You all right?'

'Yes.'

Danny glanced back, then raised the bottle and touched a match to the wick.

Leaning back, he counted to five.

'Oorah!' he grunted and flung the bottle through the open window. Outside, a resounding crash was followed by a wall of flame as the shattering glass spread burning oil across the pavement and into the shrubbery beneath the window.

'Other side,' he said quickly, pulling the window closed, sitting back down.

Three minutes later a second bottle exploded on the gravel near the Courtyard of the Triangle – the closest point yet toward the papal palace – like the first firebomb, sending a sheet of flame across the open ground and igniting the brush around it.

Farel's office was pandemonium. The fire chief was on the line, demanding to know what the hell was going on, screaming that water pressure had been reduced to a dribble everywhere, when the first bomb exploded outside the fire department. Instantly the chiefs tone changed. Were they under a terrorist siege or not? He was not sending his fire fighters against armed terrorists. That was Farel's job.

Farel well knew this and was already scrambling his black suits toward the museums to assist the fully armed regiment of Swiss Guards, leaving only the six, including Thomas Kind and Anton Pilger, to keep the trap at the tower. It was then that the second firebomb went off.

No more chances could be taken. This might be the Addisons, it might not.

'The water is your problem, Capo.' Farel ran a sweaty hand across his shaved head, his husky voice deeper than usual.

'The Vigilanza and Swiss Guards will get the public to safety. My concern is one thing alone. The safety of the Holy Father. Nothing else matters.' With that he hung up and started for the door.

Hercules could see Harry's fourth fire go up. Then he saw him cross out of the smoke and start toward the tower, then duck behind a row of ancient olive trees and disappear.

Securing the rope in a double twist around the iron railing at the top of the tower, then letting it slip through his fingers, Hercules eased himself down the steep pitch of roof to the edge and looked over. Some twenty feet beneath him he could see the small platform that stuck out from Marsciano's prison room. And twenty, thirty feet below that was the ground. Easy enough, unless people were shooting at you.

Across the way he saw another fire go up. And then another, the thick smoke filtering the sunlight and turning the landscape blood red. Suddenly the bright morning had become dark. The combination of Harry's fires, the smoke from the museums, and the absolute lack of wind had, in the matter of the last few minutes, come together and turned Vatican Hill into an eerie, nearly invisible, foglike dreamscape, a choking, ghostly canvas where objects floated free-form and disembodied, where seeing more than a few feet in any direction was all but impossible.

Beneath him Hercules could hear coughing and gagging. Then, for a briefest moment the smoke cleared and he saw the two black suits nearest the front door move quickly away toward where the others were hidden, desperate to find fresh air.

At the same time he saw a figure dart across the road in the direction of the railroad station and into the tall hedges on the far side. Slinging off his crutches, Hercules moved up on his knees, waving them over his head. A moment later Harry's head popped up. And Hercules used the crutches to point across the roadway, where the four black suits were gathered. Harry waved back, then the smoke came again, and he vanished from sight. Fifteen seconds later, bright red flame shot up from the spot where he had been.

10:38 a.m.

Roscani, Scala, and Castelletti stood beside the blue Alfa, watching the smoke and listening to the sirens, like most all of Rome. The police radio gave them more, the ongoing exchanges between Vatican Police and Fire and Rome City Police and Fire. They had heard Farel himself call for a helicopter for the pope, not to land on the helipad at the rear of the Vatican gardens but on the ancient roof of the papal apartments.

At almost the same moment, they saw a puff of diesel smoke from the work engine. Then a second puff came, and the little green engine began to inch forward toward the Vatican gates. That the pope was being evacuated, as was most of the Vatican proper, had no bearing on orders. The railroad wasn't on fire, and no one had called them back. So, forward they went, wanting only to retrieve an aging freight car.

'Who has a cigarette?' Abruptly Roscani turned from the train to look at his policemen.

'Come on, Otello,' Scala said. 'You quit, you can't start again…'

'I didn't say I was going to light it,' Roscani snapped harshly.

Scala hesitated. He could see Roscani's disquiet. 'You're worried about the whole thing, especially what happens to the Americans.'

Roscani looked at Scala a moment longer. 'Yes,' he said, half nodding, then turned and walked away by himself. Back down the track, stopping finally to watch the work engine as it crept toward the Vatican wall.