Pulling himself back he saw they had reached the altar, and several of the Australians broke from the group to cross themselves and kneel on benches in front of it, bowing their heads in prayer.

Harry did the same. As he did, emotion swept him. Tears came to his eyes, and he had to fight to hold back a sob. Never had he felt as lost or frightened or alone as he felt now. He had no idea where to go or what to do next. Irrationally, he wished to hell he had stayed with Hercules.

Still kneeling, Harry turned and looked over his shoulder. His Australian group was filing out, but other people were coming in. With them came two security guards. Watching the crowds. Making their presence known. They wore white shirts with epaulets, and dark pants. It was hard to tell from the distance, but it looked as if they carried two-way radios on their belts.

Harry turned back. Stay where you are, he told himself. They won't approach unless you give them reason.

Take your time. Think it through. Where to go next. What to do.

Think.

40

Noon

The dogs sniffed and strained against their harnesses, leading their handlers forward – with Roscani, Scala, and Castelletti scrambling after them – through a series of dirty, dimly lit tunnels to finally stop at the end of an air shaft above Manzoni Station.

Castelletti, the smallest of the three detectives, pulled off his jacket and crawled into the air shaft. At the far end he found the cover loosened. Sliding it off, he stuck his head out and looked down onto a public walkway that led out of the station itself.

'He went out here.' Castelletti's voice echoed as he inched his way backward on elbows and knees.

'Could he have come in that way?' Roscani yelled back.

'Not without a ladder.'

Roscani looked to the lead dog handler. 'Let's find where he came in.'

Ten minutes later they were back in the main tunnel, following the path Harry had taken when he left Hercules' encampment, the dogs following by the scent from a pullover sweater taken from Harry's room at the Hotel Hassler.

'He's in Rome for only four days – how the hell does he know his way around here?' Scala's voice bounced off the walls, the harsh beam of his flashlight cutting a path behind the dogs and their keepers, whose own flashlights lit the way ahead for their animals.

Suddenly the lead dog stopped, its nose upward, sniffing. The others stopped behind it. Quickly, Roscani moved ahead.

'What is it?'

'They've lost the scent.'

'How? They got this far. We're in the middle of a tunnel. How could they-?'

The lead handler moved past his animal, sniffing the air himself.

'What is it?' Roscani came up beside him.

'Smell.'

Roscani sniffed. Then sniffed again.

'Tea. Bitter tea.'

Stepping forward, he flashed his light on the tunnel floor. There it was, scattered over the ground for fifty or sixty feet. Tea leaves. Hundreds, thousands of them. As if they had been broadcast by the handful for the very purpose of throwing the dogs off.

Roscani picked a few from the floor and brought them to his nose. Then let them fall in disgust.

'Gypsies.'

41

The Vatican. Same time.

Marsciano listened patiently as Jean Tremblay, cardinal of Montreal, read from the thick dossier on the table before him.

'Energy, steel, shipping, engineering and construction, energy, earth-moving equipment, construction and mining, engineering equipment, transportation, heavy-duty cranes, excavators.' Tremblay turned the dossier's pages slowly, skipping over the names of corporations listed, emphasizing instead the businesses in which they were engaged. 'Heavy equipment, construction, construction, construction.' Finally he closed the document and looked up. 'The Holy See is now in the construction business.'

'In a manner of speaking, yes,' Marsciano answered Cardinal Tremblay directly, fighting the dryness in his mouth, trying not to hear the echo of his own voice inside his head as he spoke. Knowing that to show weakness would be to lose. And if he lost, Father Daniel would be lost too.

Cardinal Mazetti of Italy, Cardinal Rosales of Argentina, Cardinal Boothe of Australia – like members of a high court, each man sat with his hands folded on top of the now-closed dossiers, staring at Marsciano across from them.

Mazetti: 'Why have we gone from a balanced portfolio to this?'

Boothe: 'It's too heavily weighted and ungainly. A world recession would leave us and every one of these companies literally stuck in the mud. Factories frozen, equipment parked like so many multiton sculptures, useless, except to look at and marvel at the expense.'

Marsciano: 'True.'

Cardinal Rosales smiled and raised his elbows to lean on his chin. 'Emerging economies and politics.'

Marsciano lifted a glass of water and drank, then set the glass down. 'Correct,' he said.

Rosales: 'And the guiding hand of Palestrina.'

Marsciano: 'His Holiness believes the Church should extend, in both spirit and manner, encouragement to less fortunate countries. Help them take their place in the expanding world marketplace.'

Rosales: 'His Holiness or Palestrina?'

Marsciano: 'Both.'

Tremblay: 'We are to encourage world leaders to bring the emerging nations up to speed in the new century, while at the same time profiting from it?'

Marsciano: 'Another way to look at it, Eminence, is that we are following our own beliefs, and in doing so, attempting to enrich them.'

The meeting was running long. It was nearly one-thirty and time to break. And Marsciano did not want to report to Palestrina that a vote had not yet been taken. Moreover, he knew that if he let them go now without a positive consensus, they would talk about it among themselves at lunch. The more they talked, the more, he knew, they would begin to dislike the entire plan. Maybe even sense there was something intangibly wrong with it, maybe suspect they were being asked to approve something that had other purposes than what was apparent.

Palestrina had purposely kept himself out of it, wanting none to sense his influence over something he ostensibly had no part in. And as much as Marsciano despised him, he knew the power of his name and the respect and fear that came with it.

Pushing back from the table, Marsciano stood. 'It is time to break. In all fairness I should tell you I am meeting with Cardinal Palestrina over lunch. He will ask me about your reaction to what has been discussed here this morning. I would like to tell him that in general your response has been positive. That you like what we have done and – with a few minor changes – will approve it by the end of the day.'

The cardinals stared back in silence. Marsciano had taken them by surprise and knew it. In essence he had said, 'Give me what I want now or risk dealing with Palestrina yourselves.'

'Well-?'

Cardinal Boothe raised his hands as if in prayer and stared at the table.

'Yes,' he murmured.

Cardinal Tremblay: '-Yes.'

Cardinal Mazetti: '-Yes.'

Rosales was the last. Finally he looked up at Marsciano. 'Yes,' he said sharply, then stood and walked angrily from the room.

Marsciano looked to the others and nodded. 'Thank you,' he said. 'Thank you.'