'Why did you go into the store?' he asked as they drove off.

'I'm not allowed?'

'Of course. I just wasn't prepared.'

'Neither was I, which was why I went in.' She lifted a package from the bag in her lap.

Sanitary napkins.

By eleven o'clock both soup and puree were simmering on the kitchen stove and Elena was in the second-floor bedroom with Michael Roark. He was in an armchair, a pillow tucked under each arm, sitting upright for the first time. Marco had helped get him out of bed and into the chair and then had left, anxious to go outside for a cigarette. Above them, Luca slept in a third-floor bedroom. He was the night man, the same as he had been in the hospital in Pescara, sitting in the van outside from eleven at night until seven in the morning. Coming every two hours to help Elena turn her patient. Then going back out to wait and watch.

For what? Or whom? she wondered again, as she had wondered about the men all along.

From the bedroom she could see Marco, smoking and walking the southern periphery of the yard atop a stone wall. Below the wall was the road, and up from it, the gate and the driveway leading up to the house. Across the road was a large farm that went as far as the eye could see into the summer haze. A tractor worked it now, dust rising behind it as it plowed a stretch of open field behind the main house.

Abruptly Pietro appeared, crossing between the cypress trees in front of the window and walking toward Marco, his sleeves rolled up, his shirt open against the growing heat of the day, the gun in his waistband no longer hidden. Reaching him, he stopped, and the men talked. After a moment Marco glanced back at the house, as if he knew the two were being watched.

Elena turned to look at Michael Roark. 'Are you comfortable sitting up?' she asked.

He nodded ever so slightly, just a small tip of his head. But it was a definitive response, much more dynamic than his previous blinking in reaction to her squeezing of his thumb or toes.

'I've made something for you to eat. Would you like to try and see if you can get it down?'

This time there was no response. He merely sat looking at her, then his eyes moved away and to the window. Elena watched him. His head, turned as it was against the light, gave him, despite the bandages, a profile she hadn't before seen. She hesitated, studying him a moment longer, then went past him and into the nook that was her part of the room.

Yes, she had turned into the store for sanitary napkins. But the move had been an excuse. Something else had caught her eye: a storefront rack with newspapers and a copy of La Repubblica with the bold headline fugitives in CARDINAL PARMA MURDER STILL AT LARGE, and beneath it, less bold, 'Police Screen Victims of Assisi Bus Explosion.'

They were both stories she knew of, but in little detail. The assassination of the cardinal had, of course, been the talk of the convent, and then had come the explosion of the Assisi bus. But very shortly afterward she had gone to Pescara and had seen no papers or television since. Yet the moment she'd glimpsed the headlines, she'd reacted, making an instinctive correlation between the headline and Marco and the others – men who were armed and guarded her and her patient twenty-four hours a day. Men who seemed to know a great deal more about what was going on than she did.

Inside the store, she'd picked up the paper and seen photographs of the men the police were looking for. Her mind raced. The bus explosion had taken place Friday. Michael Roark's automobile accident had occurred in the mountains outside Pescara on Monday. Tuesday morning she'd been given the order to go to Pescara. Could not a survivor of the bus explosion be badly burned and in a coma? Perhaps even have broken legs? Could he have perhaps been secretly moved from one hospital to another, or even to a private residence for a day or more before arrangements had been made to bring him to Pescara?

Quickly she'd bought the paper. And then as an afterthought – as a way to hide it from Marco and an unquestionable excuse for why she'd gone into the store – she'd bought the sanitary napkins and had both put into the same brown paper bag.

Back at the house, she'd gone immediately to her nook and put the napkins on a shelf where they could be seen. And afterward she'd carefully folded the newspaper, putting it away under clothing still in her suitcase.

'Dear God,' she'd thought over and over. 'What if Michael Roark and Father Daniel Addison are the same person?'

Washing her hands and changing into a fresh habit, she'd started to take the newspaper from her suitcase, wanting to hold it up next to her patient. To look at the photograph and see if there was any resemblance at all. But Marco had called her from the staircase, and she had not been able to do so. Putting the paper back, she'd closed the suitcase and gone to see what he wanted.

Now Marco and Pietro were outside and Luca was sleeping. Now there was time.

Michael Roark was still looking out the window, his back to her, as she came in. Moving closer, she folded the paper back and held it up so that the photograph of Father Daniel Addison was level with her patient. The bandages made it difficult to tell; moreover, Michael Roark's beard was growing, while the photo of Father Daniel showed a man clean shaven, but… the forehead, the cheekbones, the nose, the way the-

Abruptly, Michael Roark turned his head and looked directly at her. Elena started and jumped back, jerking the paper out of sight behind her as she did. For a long moment he seemed to glare at her and she was certain he knew what she had been doing. Then slowly his mouth opened.

'Wa – a – ah – t – errr,' he garbled the word hoarsely. 'Wa – a – ah – trrrrrr…'

49

Rome, same time

Why, of all times, had Roscani decided to quit smoking now? But as of seven this morning he had just stopped, stubbed the half-smoked cigarette into his ashtray and announced to himself that he no longer smoked. Since then, almost anything had done in place of tobacco. Coffee, gum, sweet rolls. Coffee, gum again. At the moment it was a chocolate gelato cone, and he was eating it against the July heat, licking the melting ice cream from his hand as he walked through the noonday crowds and back to the Questura. But neither melting gelato nor the lack of nicotine could pull him from the thing on his mind – the missing Llama automatic pistol with the silencer squirreled to its barrel.

It was a thought that had come in the middle of the night and kept him awake for the rest of it. The first thing this morning he'd looked at the 'Transfer of Evidence' form Pio and Jacov Farel had both signed at the farmhouse when Farel had transferred possession of the gun found at the Assisi bus site to Pio. Correct and legal. It meant Pio definitely had the gun, and after he was killed, it was gone, along with Harry Addison. But that was only routine detective work, not the thought that had waked him and had eaten at him all morning and still did. All along he'd believed the Spanish-made Llama had been carried by Father Daniel and was a definitive link between him and the dead Spanish Communist Miguel Valera, the man set up to take the blame for the assassination of the cardinal vicar of Rome.

But – and this was the thing – what if the gun had not belonged to Father Daniel at all but to someone else on the bus? Someone who was there to kill him. If that was the case, then they might be looking not at one crime but two: an attempt to murder the priest and the blowing up of the bus itself.

11:30 p.m.

Hot and sticky. The heat that had begun to build the previous week had not let go, and even at this late hour it was still eighty-three degrees.