Cortona, Italy.

The place where they brought Michael Roark was not a hospital but a private home – Casa Alberti, a restored, three-story stone farmhouse, named for an ancient Florentine family. Sister Elena saw it through the early mist as they drove through the iron gate and started up the long gravel drive.

Leaving Pescara they had circumvented the A14 Autostrada, taken the A24, and then rejoined the A14 to the north. Driving along the Adriatic coast to San Benedetto and then Civitanova Marche, they turned west sometime after midnight, later passing Foligno, Assisi, and Perugia before climbing into the hills to find Casa Alberti just east of the ancient Tuscan city of Cortona at daybreak.

Marco had unlocked the gate and opened it, walking up the drive in front of the van as Luca drove toward the house. Pietro, following in his car, had locked the gate behind them, then gone into the house first, checking it carefully before turning on the lights and letting them in.

Elena had watched without a word as, a few moments later, Marco and Luca carried the gurney up the steps and into the house and then up to the large second-floor suite that was to become Michael Roark's hospital room. Opening the shuttered window, she had seen the red globe of the sun just beginning to rise over the farmland in the distance.

Now, below her, Pietro came out of the house and moved his car to the front of the van so that it blocked the driveway, as if to make it all but impossible for another vehicle to get past and up to the house. Then she heard the engine stop and saw Pietro walk to the trunk and take out a shotgun. A moment later, he yawned and got back in the car with the door open, then folded his arms over his chest and went to sleep.

'Do you need anything?'

Marco stood in the doorway behind her.

'No.' She smiled.

'Luca will sleep in the room upstairs. I will be down in the kitchen if you need me.'

'Thank you…'

Marco looked at her and then left, closing the door behind him. Almost at once, Elena felt her own weariness. She had dozed off and on during most of the trip, but her senses and thoughts had kept her on edge. Now they were here at the Casa, and the thought of sleep was suddenly and overwhelmingly seductive.

To her right was a large bathroom with a tub and separate shower. To the left was a small nook with a bed and closet and a room divider for privacy.

In front of her Michael Roark was in a deep sleep. The trip, she knew, had exhausted him. He'd remained awake for a good deal of it. His eyes going from her to the men in the van and then back to her, as if he were trying to understand where he was and what was happening. If he'd been afraid, she hadn't seen it, but perhaps it was because of her constant reassurance, telling him her name and his, over and over, and the names of the men who were with them, friends taking him to a place where he could rest and recover. And then an hour or two before they'd arrived at the farmhouse, he'd fallen into the sound sleep he was in now.

Opening the medicine kit Marco had brought up and set on the chair, she took out the arm wrap with its pump and gauge and took his blood pressure, studying him as she did. His face beneath the bandages covering his head was gaunt, and she knew he had lost weight. She wondered what he had looked like before. What he might look like again when he began to recover and take solid food and rebuild his strength.

Finishing, she stood, and put the blood pressure gauge away. His blood pressure was the same as it had been that afternoon, the same as it had been when she'd first arrived in Pescara. Not better. Not worse. Simply unchanged. She marked it on his chart, then took off her habit, pulled on the light cotton sleeping gown, and got into bed, hoping to close her eyes for forty-five minutes or at most an hour. As she did, she looked at her watch.

It was eight-twenty in the morning, Friday, July 10.

Rome. Same time.

Cardinal Marsciano watched the press conference on a small television in his library. It was live, impromptu, and filled with anger. Marcello Taglia, the man in charge of Gruppo Cardinale, had been cornered as his car entered police headquarters, and he had stepped out to confront the mass of reporters and respond to their questions head on.

Where the videotape of the American attorney Harry Addison had come from he did not know, Taglia said. Nor did he have any idea who had leaked it to the press. Nor did he know who had leaked the photograph and speculation surrounding Addison's brother, Father Daniel Addison, a prime suspect in the murder of the cardinal vicar of Rome and thought killed in the bombing of the Assisi bus, but now possibly alive and in hiding somewhere in Italy. And, yes, it was true, a reward of one hundred million lire had been offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of either of the American brothers.

Abruptly the cameras cut away from Taglia and went to the television studio, where an attractive anchorwoman behind a glass desk introduced the video of Harry. When it was over, photographs of both brothers were put on the screen and a telephone number given that anyone seeing either man could call.

CLICK.

Marsciano turned off the television and stared at the empty screen, his world darker yet. It was a world that in the following hours could become even more impossible, if not unbearable.

Shortly he would sit before the four other cardinals who made up the commission overseeing the investments of the Holy See and present the new, and intentionally misleading, investment portfolio for ratification.

At one-thirty the meeting would break, and Marsciano would take the ten-minute walk from Vatican City to Armari, a small family-run trattoria on Viale Angelico. There, in a private upstairs room, he would meet with Palestrina to report on the outcome. It was an outcome upon which rested not only Palestrina's 'Chinese Protocol' but also Marsciano's own life, and with it, the life of Father Daniel.

Purposefully he had fought to keep the thought from his mind for fear it would weaken him and show him as desperate when he went before the cardinals. But, as the clock ticked forward, and as much as he battled to keep it locked away, the memory crept forward, chillingly, almost as if Palestrina had willed it.

And then, with a rush, it was there, and he saw himself in Pierre Weggen's office in Geneva the evening of the day that the Assisi bus had exploded. The phone had rung, and the call was for him. It was Palestrina informing him, in one breath, that Father Daniel had been on the bus and was presumed dead; and, in the next – Father in heaven! Marsciano could still feel the awful stab of Palestrina's words delivered in a voice so calm they were like the brush of silk – 'the police have found sufficient evidence to prove Father Daniel guilty of the assassination of Cardinal Parma.'

Marsciano remembered his own shout of outrage and then seeing Weggen's quiet grin in response, as if the investment banker knew full well the content of Palestrina's call, and then the continuing voice of Palestrina as he went on unmoved.

'Moreover, Eminence, if your presentation to the council of cardinals should fail, resulting in the investment proposal voted down, the police will soon discover that the road from Parma's murder does not end with Father Daniel but leads directly to you. And I can safely surmise that the first question the investigators will ask is if you and the cardinal vicar were lovers. A denial, of course, would be futile, because there would be sufficient evidence – notes, letters of a lurid and very personal sort, found in the private computer files of you both… Think then, Eminence, of seeing your face and his on the cover of every newspaper and magazine, on every television screen around the globe… Think of the repercussions throughout the Holy See, and the utter disgrace it would bring to the Holy Church.'