Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [188]
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.
Two 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.
152
FAREL’S OFFICE WAS PANDEMONIUM. THE fire chief was on the telephone, 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 chief’s 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 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.
“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. 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