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By Root 1006 0

their age, not so much as themselves but as someone’s children—his own, at three or four or eight or twelve—each deserving to live life to its end without such terrible and vicious interruption. In that, Cardinal Parma was as much a mother’s son as Pio had been. It made finding the guilty all the more imperative. Get them before they did it again. But how often had he gotten them, only to have the courts, for one reason or another, let them go? It had driven him to rail against injustice, within the law or without. He was fighting an unwinnable war, but the thing was, he kept fighting anyway. And maybe the reason he did was simply that he was his father’s son and, like him, had grown up to be a bulldog.

Abruptly, Roscani reached out and picked up the TV’s remote, then pointed it at the large-screen television. There was a click as it came on. He hit REWIND and then PLAY and watched the video again. Saw Harry on the stool, watched him talk behind dark glasses.

“Danny, I’m asking you to come in…. To give yourself up…. They know everything…. Please, for me…. Come in… please…. Please…”

Roscani saw Harry pause at the end, then start to say something more just as the tape itself ended. He hit REWIND once more and played it again. And then again. And again. The more he watched, the more he felt the anger build inside him. He wanted to look up and see Pio come through the door, smiling and easy as always, talking about his family, asking Roscani about his. Instead he saw Harry, Mr. Hollywood in sunglasses, sitting on a stool, begging his own brother to give himself up so that he could be killed.

CLICK.

Roscani shut off the television. In the semidarkness the thoughts came back. He didn’t want them to, but they did. How he would kill Harry Addison when he got him. And there was no doubt at all that he would get him.

CLICK.

He turned the TV back on and lit a cigarette, forcefully blowing out the match afterward. He couldn’t allow himself to think like that. He wondered how his father would have reacted if he had been in his place.

Distance was what he needed. And he got it by playing the tape again. And once more. And once more after that. Forcing himself to watch it coldly, analytically, the experienced policeman looking for the smallest piece of something that would help.

The more he watched, the more two things began to intrigue him—the textured, patterned wallpaper barely visible behind Harry; and what happened just before the end, when Harry’s head started to come up with his mouth open as if to say something more, but he never did because the tape finished. Sliding a small notebook from his jacket, he made a note.

—Have video image computer enhanced/wallpaper.

—Have English-speaking lip reader analyze unspoken word(s).

REWIND.

PLAY.

Roscani hit the MUTE button and watched in silence. When it was finished, he did the same thing and watched it again.

26

Rome. The Vatican Embassy to Italy,

Via Po. Same time.

IN THEIR FIRST PUBLIC APPEARANCE SINCE the murder of the cardinal vicar of Rome, the pope’s remaining men of trust—Cardinal Umberto Palestrina, Cardinal Joseph Matadi, Monsignor Fabio Capizzi, and Cardinal Nicola Marsciano—mixed freely with the members of the Council of Ministers of the European Union, who were in Rome for a meeting on economic relations with emerging nations, and who had been invited to an informal cocktail party given by Archbishop Giovanni Bellini, the apostolic nuncio to Italy.

Of the four it was the Vatican secretariat of state, the sixty-two-year-old Palestrina, who seemed most at ease. Dressed not in the clerical garments the others wore but in a simple black suit with white Roman collar, and unmindful of the plainclothes Swiss Guards watching the room, the cardinal moved affably from one guest to the next, chatting energetically with each.

Palestrina’s size alone—two hundred and seventy pounds over a six-foot seven-inch frame—turned heads. But it was the unexpected intensity of the rest of him—the grace with which he moved, his broad smile and riveting gray eyes under an