Trying to get some relief against it, Cardinal Marsciano had changed from his wool vestments into khaki trousers and a short-sleeved shirt and gone outside to the small interior courtyard of his apartment, hoping for a breeze that might lighten the oppressiveness.
The light spill from his library window illuminated the tomatoes and peppers he had planted in late April. They had ripened early and now had fruit that was almost ready to pick. Ripened early because of the heat. Not that it was totally unexpected. It was July, and July was usually hot. For a moment Marsciano smiled, remembering the small two-story Tuscan farmhouse where he had grown up along with his parents and four brothers and three sisters. The heat of summer meant two things – exhaustively long days with the entire family getting up before sunrise and working in the fields almost until dusk and scorpions, by the thousands. Coming in and sweeping them out of the house was a two – or three-times-a-day chore, and one never got into bed or put on a pair of pants or shirt or shoe, for that matter, without shaking it out first. The sting of a scorpion would leave you with a welt and pain you would remember for a long time. The insect was the first of God's creatures he truly despised. But then that was long before he'd known Palestrina.
Filling a watering can, Marsciano soaked the ground beneath his vegetable plants, then set the can back where it had been and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Still there was no breeze, and the night air seemed more stifling than ever.
The heat.
He tried to push it from his mind but he couldn't, because he knew it was what had started Palestrina's China clock ticking. Every day Marsciano watched the papers and the global weather reports on television and scanned the Internet, monitoring as best he could the weather conditions across Asia, the same as he knew Palestrina was doing. Only the secretariat would have a far more comprehensive manner of information gathering than he did, mainly because, in light of his 'Chinese Protocol', Palestrina himself had taken up the study of meteorology, becoming a passionate student of the science of weather forecasting. In less than a year he had become a near-expert in the projection of computerized weather forecast models. Additionally, he established personal relationships with a half dozen professional weathercasters around the world with whom he could communicate for advice almost instantly via E-mail. If the secretariat hadn't had a more direct agenda before him, he could have easily settled into a second career as Italy's chief weather expert.
A prolonged spell of hot, humid weather across eastern China was what he was waiting for. With it, the sun-fed algae and its accompanying biological toxins would quickly begin to clot the surface of lakes, polluting the main water supplies of towns and cities along their shores. And when the conditions were right and the algae mass large enough, Palestrina would give the order and his 'protocol' would begin. Poisoning the lakes in a way that would be undetectable, making the cause appear to be the algae and the inability of the aging municipal water-filtration systems to correct it.
People would die in huge numbers, and an enormous public outcry would follow. And government leaders would be secretly worried that the provinces might panic and sense Beijing was not capable of running the water system and threaten to pull away from the central government, thereby putting China on the brink of its greatest fear, collapse, in the same way the Soviet Union had collapsed. And these government leaders would respond to a strong, very private recommendation by a longtime trusted ally that a consortium of international construction companies, many already working on projects within China, be quickly brought together to immediately rebuild the country's entire crumbling and near-archaic water-delivery/treatment infrastructure. From canals to reservoirs to filtration plants to dams and hydroelectric plants.
That longtime trusted ally would, of course, be Pierre Weggen. And the companies and corporations to do the work would, of course, be those silently controlled by the Vatican. It was the heart of Palestrina's plan: control China's water and you control China.
And to begin to control the water he needed hot weather, and today it was hot in Italy, and it was hot in eastern China. And Marsciano knew that, save an unlikely and abrupt change of weather over Asia, it was only a matter of days before Palestrina would send word and the horror would begin.
Turning to go inside, Marsciano caught a glimpse of a face at an upper window. Just a glimpse, then it was gone, pulled back quickly – Sister Maria-Louisa, his new housekeeper, or, rather, Palestrina's new housekeeper, put there to let him know he was constantly watched, that no matter what he did, Palestrina sat on his shoulder.
Back inside, Marsciano went wearily to his desk and began to go over the final draft of the minutes of the meeting of the day before, the new investment portfolio approved by the council of cardinals. Monday morning he would put it before Palestrina for his signature. And then it would become part of the permanent record.
As Marsciano worked, an immeasurable darkness in the form of questions rose from the depths of his mind, one that lurked in the shadows of his soul as if it were a living thing, rising whenever there was a quiet moment to torment him – what they had allowed Palestrina to become and, more pointedly, his own deeply despised inability to do anything about it himself. Why had he not requested a private meeting with the Holy Father or sent a secretive memo to the College of Cardinals admitting what had happened and what was about to happen and begging for their help to stop it?
The tragedy was that the answers were all too familiar because he had wrestled with them a thousand times before. The Holy Father was old and altogether devoted to his secretariat of state and therefore would be unswayable to anything said against him. And who presided over the College of Cardinals more than Palestrina himself? His esteem was enormous, his allies everywhere. A charge of this magnitude would either be laughed off or treated with outrage, as if it were heresy, or as if his accuser were deranged.
Making it even more impossible was Palestrina's threat to reveal him as the man who had ordered the murder of Cardinal Parma, the result of a sordid love affair. How could Marsciano defend against a lie like that to the pope or the cardinals? The answer was, he couldn't, because Palestrina held all the cards and could manipulate them at will.
Complicating things further was the fact that what had happened had originated entirely from the secrecy and sanctity of the pope's inner circle, the follow-up to a papal request to find a way to expand the reach of the Church in the next century. Any number of studies had been done and proposals made before Palestrina presented his – deliberately and fully fleshed out. And when he had, Marsciano, like the others, had laughed, taking it as a joke. Hut it was not a joke. The secretariat was utterly serious.
To Marsciano's horror, only Cardinal Parma voiced opposition. The others – Monsignor Capizzi and Cardinal Matadi – had remained silent. In retrospect Marsciano should not have been surprised. Palestrina had obviously evaluated them all carefully beforehand. Parma, old school, staunchly conservative and unyielding, would never have gone along. But Capizzi, graduate of Oxford and Yale and chief of the Vatican Bank, and Matadi, prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, whose family was among the most prominent in Zaire, were altogether different. Both were highly ambitious political animals who had not reached the pinnacles they had by accident. Profoundly driven and exceedingly canny, each man had a huge following inside the Church. And, knowing full well that Palestrina had no desire for the office himself, each had his eyes directly on the papacy, knowing that it was wholly within Palestrina's whim and power to seat either one of them there.