At five minutes to ten the waiting room door opened and a surgeon, still in his surgical scrubs, entered.

'He will be all right,' he said in Italian. 'Hercules will live…'

There was no need for translation. Harry knew right away.

'Grazie,' he said getting up. 'Grazie.'

'Prego.' Glancing around the room, the surgeon said he would have more information later, then nodding, turned and left, the door closing behind him.

The collective silence that followed was vast and deep, touching each one of them. That the dwarf from the sewers would recover was an enormously bright and joyous note in a long, twisted, and painful journey they had all shared, no matter how disparately. That it was over, for the most part, was something that had yet to sink in. Yet it was over, the tidying up already well under way.

In a blink Farel had personally taken over and become a one-man damage control, as much to protect himself as the Holy See. In a matter of hours the chief of the Vatican police had called a press briefing that was broadcast live on Italian state television. In it he announced that late this morning the infamous South American terrorist Thomas Jose Alvarez-Rios Kind had instigated a bold and murderous fire-bombing rampage inside the Vatican in a presumed attempt to reach the pope himself. In the process, he had shot to death World News Network correspondent Adrianna Hall and Rome CIA station chief James Eaton, who had been nearby and gone to her aid. Meanwhile, in an attempt to protect the Holy Father, the Vatican's beloved secretariat of state, Cardinal Umberto Palestrina, had suffered a massive heart attack and died. Farel closed the briefing with a terse pronouncement that Thomas Kind had become the only suspect in the murders of the cardinal vicar of Rome and the Italian police detective Gianni Pio and in the bombing of the Assisi bus; and, finally, that he had been killed when a firebomb exploded as he was trying to ignite it. Farel made no mention at all about Roscani's presence inside Vatican territory.

Roscani looked around the room. He had left his own hospital room and come there personally to inform the Addisons and Elena Voso about Farel's press announcement and tell them that no charges would be made against them. Marsciano's presence had been a surprise, and for a short time he hoped that he might find a way to get the prelate to talk to him privately about what had really happened concerning the murders of both the cardinal vicar of Rome and Palestrina, the employment of Thomas Kind, and the horror in China. But the cardinal had squashed that ambition quickly with a simple apology – saying that he was sorry but because of the circumstances, questions regarding the state of the Holy See would be addressed only through official Vatican channels. It meant that what Marsciano really knew he was not about to disclose to anyone, now or ever. And, having no choice, Roscani accepted it and turned back to the others.

What surprised him was that though he could have left then, he didn't. Tired as Roscani was from his ordeal, he had stayed, waiting with the rest for word of Hercules' condition. It was more than something he felt he should do, it was something he wanted to do. Maybe it was because he felt he was as much a part of it all as they were. Or maybe he just wanted to be with them because in some crazy way Hercules had gotten to him, and he cared as much as they did. In the exhausted, confused state they were all in, who the hell knew about anything? At least he'd given up smoking, and that had to be good for something.

Pushed in his chair by the orderly, Roscani went to each of them, taking their hands, saying if there was anything he could do to please call on him. Then he said goodnight. But he wasn't quite done; purposely he made Harry the last and asked him to come to the door with him.

'Why?' Harry tensed.

'Please,' Roscani said. 'It's a personal thing…'

With a glance at Danny and Elena, Harry took a breath and went with him. At the door they stopped.

'The video they made of you,' Roscani said, 'after Pio was killed.'

'What about it?'

'At the end – whoever made it cut something out. A last word or phrase. I tried to figure out what it was. I even had a lip-reading expert look at it. She couldn't get it either… Do you remember what you said?'

Harry nodded. 'Yes…'

'What was it?'

'I'd been tortured, it took me that long to realize what was going on. I wanted help, I called out a name.'

'Whose name?' Roscani was as much in the dark as ever.

Harry hesitated. 'Yours.'

'Mine?'

'You were the only person I knew who could help.'

Slowly Roscani grinned.

So did Harry.

EPILOGUE

Bath, Maine.

The pact had been to leave and never come back. But two days after the state funeral for Cardinal Palestrina, Harry and Danny did come back. With Harry manning the carry-ons and Danny hobbling on crutches – flying to New York and then Portland, Maine, and driving up from there on a bright summer day.

Elena had gone home to be with her parents and tell them of her plans to leave the convent and then to go to Siena and request dispensation of her vows, and afterward to join Harry in Los Angeles.

Harry drove the rented Chevy through the familiar towns of Freeport and Brunswick and finally into Bath. The old neighborhood had changed little, if at all, the white clapboard houses and faded shingle cottages brilliant in the July sunshine, the big elm and oak trees flush with summer growth as stately and timeless as ever. Passing Bath Iron Works, the ship-building yard where their father worked and died, they drove slowly south in the direction of Boothbay Harbor, then veering off Route 209, Harry took the fork onto High Street and shortly afterward a right onto Cemetery Road.

The family plot was on a grassy knoll on a hill overlooking the distant bay. It was as they both remembered, well tended, quiet, and peaceful with the chirp of birds in the nearby trees the only sound. Their father had bought the parcel with savings just after Madeline was born, knowing there would be no more children. The plot was for five, and three rested there now. Madeline, their father, and their mother, who had stipulated in her will that she be buried not with her new husband but with Madeline and the father of her children. The last two plots were for Harry and Danny if they chose.

Before, it would have been unthinkable for either brother to consider being buried there. But things had changed, as the two of them had. And who knew what life was yet to bring? It was lovely and tranquil, and in a way the idea was comforting and brought things full circle.

They left it like that, tender and up in the air, discussed but not discussed, in the way siblings talk of such things.

A day later Danny flew out of Boston for Rome and Harry for Los Angeles, their lives sadder, richer, wiser, and immeasurably changed. Together they had ventured into a nightmare and managed to come out of it alive. In the process they had collected a crazy, improbable, ragtag little band that included a nun, a crippled dwarf, and three exceptional Italian policemen and had become a team, working together for the first time since boyhood.

Heroes? – Maybe… They had saved Marsciano's life and prevented further untold thousands of innocent deaths in China… But there was the other side of it, too, the horror they had not been able to stop. And for that there would always be sorrow and emptiness and heartache. Yet it was over and in the past, and there was nothing they could do to change it. What they had to do now was try to pick things up somewhere where they had left off. Each with his own extended family – Danny with Cardinal Marsciano and the Church, Harry with the madness that was Hollywood, appended hugely by an entirely new and fantastic core that was Elena. And each with the all-so-real cognizance that he had a brother again.