More than a grand, beloved, and all-persuasive politician. More than a man who had risen to the second-most powerful position in the Roman Catholic Church. More, even, than a corrupt, increasingly mad, and paranoid being, prime architect of one of the most gruesome civilian massacres in history. The smiling, ruddy-cheeked, white-haired giant who walked through Eden's dappled sunlight with the Holy Father ravished in his spell was darkness itself, a whole and complete incarnation of evil.

8:35 p.m.

'Mr Harry!' Hercules blurted as Harry opened the door to Piano 3a and Roscani gestured for him to enter. In complete surprise the dwarf swung into the apartment on his crutches, with Roscani, Scala, and Castelletti following.

Closing the door and locking it, Castelletti remained alongside it while Scala, with a glance at Danny and Elena, walked off and through the rest of the apartment.

'The climbing rope you asked for is in the hallway outside,' Roscani said.

Harry nodded, then looked to Hercules hanging on his crutches in front of Castelletti, open-mouthed and totally baffled.

'Come in and sit down, please… This is my brother, Father Daniel, and this is Sister Elena…' he said to both Roscani and Hercules, introducing the priest in a wheelchair and an attractive young woman beside him as if both men had been invited there for dinner.

Hercules followed Harry across the room as bewildered as ever and with no idea at all of what was going on. All he knew was that he'd been suddenly hustled away from a work detail in the central jail and told he was being transferred to another prison. Fifteen minutes later he was being whisked across Rome in the backseat of a dark blue Alfa Romeo with the top cop of Gruppo Cardinale sitting next to him.

'Nobody else,' Scala said, coming back into the room, looking at Roscani. 'One door through the kitchen to a rear stairway. Single-bolt lock on the door. Anybody tries to come in from the roof, he's going to have to break glass and make a lot of noise doing it.'

Roscani nodded, then, with a studied glance at Danny as if he were trying to get the measure of him, looked to Harry. 'Hercules is signed out in a transfer from one jail to another. The paperwork got mixed up on the way… This time tomorrow, I want him back.'

'This time tomorrow you may have all of us,' Harry said. 'What about the handgun?'

Roscani hesitated, then abruptly looked to Scala and nodded. Opening his jacket, Scala took a semiautomatic pistol from his waistband and gave it to Harry.

'Nine-millimeter Calico parabellum. Sixteen-shot magazine,' he said in heavily accented English. Then he pulled a second clip from his pocket and gave it to Harry as well.

'The serial numbers have been filed off,' Roscani said flatly. 'If you get caught, you don't remember where you got it. If you say anything about what's gone on here, it will be denied completely and your trial will become more difficult than you could ever imagine.'

'We've only met once, Ispettore Capo,' Harry said. 'The day you picked me up at the airport… The others here have never seen you…'

Roscani's eyes crossed the room. He looked at Hercules. At Elena. Then at Danny and, finally, at Harry.

'Tomorrow,' he said, 'the freight car is to be taken from the Vatican to a siding between Stazione Trastevere and Stazione Ostiense, where it will be left to be picked up later. We will follow it the entire way. When the work engine leaves, we will come in.

'As for the rest… My advice is to avoid Farel's men at all cost… There are too many and they have too much communication…'

Roscani slipped a 5 x 7 photograph from his inside jacket pocket and gave it to Harry.

'This is Thomas Kind, as of three years ago. I don't know if it will help, because he changes his appearance as often as most of us change clothes. Dark hair, blond, man, woman – he speaks a half dozen languages. If you see him, don't even think, just pull the trigger. And keep pulling it until he's dead. Then walk away. Let Farel take the credit for it.' Roscani glanced around the room. 'One of us will be outside all night.'

'I thought you trusted-'

'In the event Thomas Kind has found where you are…'

Harry nodded. 'Thank you,' he said and meant it.

Roscani glanced once more at the others. 'Buona fortuna,' he said, then looked to Scala and Castelletti.

A moment later the door closed behind them and they were gone.

Buona fortuna. Good luck.

Wuxi, China. Friday, July 17, 3:20 a.m.

FLASH!

Li Wen grimaced in the brilliant pop of the strobe light, trying to look away. A hand pushed him back.

FLASH! FLASH! FLASH!

He had no idea who these people were. Or where he was. Or how they had found him in the shoving, terrified mass on Chezhan Lu as he made his way toward the railroad station. He'd merely been trying to leave Wuxi, after a frenzied discussion with officials at Water Treatment Plant number 2. The water he'd tested just after daybreak that morning had shown alarming levels of blue-green algae toxin, the same as Hefei. And he'd said so. But the only result of his warning was a rush of local politicians and safety inspectors to the scene. By the time the arguments were done and the city's water-treatment plants along with the water intake systems from Taihu Lake, the Grand Canal, and Liangxi River were shut down, a full-scale emergency was in process.

'Confess,' a voice commanded in Chinese.

Li Wen's head was jerked back and he looked into the face of an officer of the People's Liberation Army, but instantly Li Wen knew he was more than that. He belonged to the Guojia Anquan Bu, the Ministry of State Security.

'Confess,' he said once again.

Suddenly Li Wen was shoved face forward toward papers spread out on a table before him. He stared at them. They were the pages of formulas, received in the Beijing hotel from the American hydrobiologist James Hawley, and had been in his briefcase when he had been caught and arrested.

'The recipes for mass murder,' the voice said again.

Slowly Li Wen looked up. 'I have done nothing,' he said.

Rome. Thursday, July 16, 9:30 p.m.

Scala sat in a chair, watching his wife and mother-in-law play cards. His children – ages one, three, five, and eight – were asleep. He was home for the first time in what seemed like months and wanted to stay there. If for no other reason than to hear the women talk and smell the smell of the apartment and know his children were as close as the next room. But he couldn't. He was to relieve Castelletti outside the apartment on Via Nicolo V at midnight, taking the watch until Castelletti came back with Roscani at seven. Then he would have three hours to sleep before he met them again at ten-thirty and they waited for the work engine to go into – and then come out of – the Vatican through the monstrous iron doorway in its immense walls.

Scala was starting to get up, to go into the kitchen and make fresh coffee when the phone rang.

'Si,' he said, picking up quickly.

'Harry Addison is in Rome…' It was Adrianna Hall.

'I know…'

'His brother is with him.'

'I…'

'Where are they, Sandro?'

'I don't know…'

'You do know, Sandro, don't lie. Not on this one, not after all these years.'

All these years - Scala flashed back to the time when Adrianna was a young reporter newly assigned to the Rome bureau. She was about to break a story that would have rocketed her career forward but would have greatly jeopardized a murder case he was about to close. He'd asked her to hold her story back, and with great reluctance she had. But because of it she had become fidarsi di, someone to trust. And he had trusted her, secretly slipping her privileged information over the years, and she had responded with information of her own that helped the police. But this time it was different. What was happening here was much too dangerous, with too much at stake. God help him if the media learned the police were helping the Addison brothers.