Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [93]
Tuesday, July 14.
Li Wen rolled over, restless. It was hot and still, and he was unable to sleep. Thirty seconds later he rolled over again and looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty in the morning. In three hours he would have to get up. In four he would be at work. He lay back. This night, more than any, he needed to sleep, but it didn’t come. He tried to erase thought from his mind, not think of what he was about to do, or what Hefei would be like twenty-four hours from now after he had introduced the deadly product of American hydro-biologist James Hawley’s formula to the water supply at the treatment plant’s clear-water outflow wells. Polycyclic unsaturated alcohol was not a monitored constituent in the water systems, nor could it be detected visually or by taste or odor in the drinking water. Introduced in frozen snowball-like form to melt in the already-treated water, the effect would be to cause severe digestive-system cramping, followed by intense diarrhea, and, ultimately, intestinal bleeding and death within six to twenty-four hours. The amount introduced, calculated at ten-parts-per-million concentration in a glass of drinking water, would have sufficient fatal contamination for one hundred thousand individuals.
Ten parts per million.
One hundred thousand deaths.
Li Wen tried to stop his mind from working, but he could not. Then, in the distance, he heard the crackle of thunder. At almost the same time he felt a breeze and saw the curtains billow slightly at the open window. A front was approaching, and with it would come wind and warm rain. By the time he got up it should have passed, and tomorrow would be muggy and even hotter. Not-so-distant lightning flashed, for an instant lighting up his hotel room. Eight seconds later there was a clap of thunder.
Li Wen moved up on an elbow, alert, his gaze crossing the room. In the corner next to his suitcase was a small refrigerator. Few hotels in China had room refrigerators, especially hotels in the smaller cities like Hefei, away from the major centers, but this one did. It was the reason he had chosen this hotel and asked for this room. Not only was there a refrigerator, but the appliance itself had a freezer, which was even more important because it was where he had frozen the polycyclic “snowballs” after he had blended the formula. And where they would remain until he left for the treatment plant in something over three hours.
Again lightning flashed. For an instant the lights illuminating the hotel sign outside his window went out, then they came back on. Li Wen was wide awake now. Staring in the dark. The last thing he needed was to have the electricity go out.
64
Como, Italy. Still Monday, July 13. 7:00 P.M.
A TROUBLED AND ANXIOUS ROSCANI WORKED his way across a jammed, hastily set-up communications room deep inside Como’s central carabinieri headquarters. A dozen uniformed officers manned phone banks set on desks in the middle of the room, while as many others hacked at computer terminals plopped down haphazard, wherever they could fit into the too-small quarters. Others still—anxious, smoking, drinking coffee—moved in between. It was a war room set up in hours to coordinate an all-out manhunt after a search of Villa Lorenzi turned up no sign of the fugitive priest.
Roscani’s destination was an enormous map of the Lake Como area that covered one entire wall. On it, pinpointed with small Italian flags, were the locations of roadway checkpoints where heavily armed Gruppo Cardinale personnel were stopping and searching every vehicle passing through—a major undertaking, considering the variety of terrain and the number of roads that could be used as escape routes.
Bellagio was at the northern tip of a landmass triangle that jutted northward into the lake. The lake itself extended farther north, while at the same time spilling, in long fingers, down either side of the triangle to Lecco on the southeast and Como on the southwest, with Chiasso and the Swiss border just inland and northwest of it.
Because of its location, Chiasso