Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [85]
He had said nothing to the others about his idea that the Spanish Llama pistol found at the site of the bus explosion might not have belonged to Father Daniel but to someone on the bus who was there to kill him—Why? because there were no facts to back it up, and without some kind of evidence, thinking in that direction was a waste of time and energy. But, fuse that concept with the idea of a twenty-fifth man, and you had your uncounted passenger, perhaps one who bought a ticket at the last minute as he got on, a ticket the driver had not had time to tally before the bus blew up. If that were so, and it was he who was in the box, it would certainly explain why no one had come forward to identify him.
Still, he argued, it was conjecture. On the other hand, it was a feeling that kept coming back, more now than ever. It was a hunch, something all his years of experience told him—there had been a twenty-fifth passenger, and he had been onboard to kill Father Daniel. And if he was the assassin—Roscani stared at the horizon—then who blew up the bus? And why?
56
Xi’an, China. Monday, July 13, 2:30 A.M.
LI WEN LIT A CIGARETTE AND SAT BACK, moving his body as far away as he could from the sleeping, overweight man crowding the seat beside him. In fifteen minutes the train would reach Xi’an. When it did he’d get off, and the fat man could have both seats for all he cared. Li Wen had made this same trip in May and then again in June, only that time he’d splurged and traveled in luxury on the Marco Polo Express, the green-and-cream train that follows the route of the old Silk Road, 2,000 miles from Beijing to Ürümqui, the capital of Xinjiang Uygur province, the first great east-west link. The train the Chinese hoped would lure the same monied traveler who frequented the fabled Orient Express from Paris to Istanbul.
But tonight Li rode in the hard-seat class of a packed train that was already almost fours hours behind schedule. He hated the packed trains. Hated the loud music, the weather forecasts, and the “no-news” news that was broadcast ceaselessly over the train’s loudspeakers. Beside him the fat man shifted his weight, and his elbow dug into Li’s rib cage. At the same time, the middle-aged woman in the seat in front of him hucked up and spit on the floor, angling it to hit between the shoe of the man standing in the aisle beside her and the young man jammed in next to him.
Pushing at the fat man’s elbow, Li took a heavy drag on his cigarette. In Xi’an he would change trains, he hoped to one less crowded, and then be on his way to Hefei and his room at the Overseas Chinese Hotel and maybe a few hours’ sleep. The same as he had done in May and then again in June. And would again in August. These were the months when the heat grew the algae in the lakes and rivers that provided drinking water for the municipal water supplies throughout his area of Central China. A former assistant professor of research at the Hydrobiological Institute in Wuhan, Li Wen was a midlevel civil worker, a water-quality-control engineer for the central government. His job was to monitor the bacterial content of the water released for public use by water-filtration plants throughout the region. Today his chores would be the same as always. Arrive by five in the morning. Spend the day and perhaps the next inspecting the plant and testing the water, then record his findings and recommendations for forwarding to the central committee; and move on to the next. It was a gray life and tedious, boring, and, for the most part, uneventful. At least it had been until now.
57
Lake Como, Italy.
Sunday, July 12, 8:40 P.M.
THE SOUND OF THE MOTORS CHANGED FROM a whine to a low drone, and nursing sister Elena Voso could feel the hydrofoil slow as the boat’s hull settled into the water. Ahead, a great stone villa sat on the lake’s edge, and they were moving toward