Day of Confession (2 page)

1

Los Angeles. Thursday, July 2, 9:00
P.M
.

THE VOICE ON THE ANSWERING MACHINE resonated with fear.

“Harry, it’s your brother, Danny…. I… don’t mean to call you like this… after so much time…. But… there’s… no one else I can talk to…. I’m scared, Harry…. I don’t know what to do… or… what will happen next. God help me. If you’re there, please pick up—Harry, are you there?—I guess not…. I’ll try to call you back.”

“Dammit.”

Harry Addison hung up the car phone, kept his hand on it, then picked it up again and pushed
REDIAL
. He heard the digital tones as the numbers redialed automatically. Then there was silence, and then the measured “buzz, buzz,” “buzz, buzz” of the Italian phone system as the call rang through.

“Come on, Danny, answer…”

After the twelfth ring Harry set the receiver back in its cradle and looked off, the lights of oncoming traffic dancing over his face, making him lose track of where he was—in a limousine with his driver on a race to the airport to make the ten-o’clock red-eye to New York.

It was nine at night in L.A., six in the morning in Rome. Where would a priest be at six in the morning? An early mass? Maybe that’s where he was and why he wasn’t answering.

“Harry, it’s your brother, Danny…. I’m scared…. I don’t know what to do…. God help me.”

“Jesus Christ.” Harry felt helplessness and panic at the same time. Not a word or a note between them in years, and then there was Danny’s voice on Harry’s answering machine, jumping out suddenly among a string of others. And not just a voice, but someone in grave trouble.

Harry had heard a rustling as though Danny was starting to hang up, but then he had come back on the line and left his phone number, asking Harry to please call if he got in soon. For Harry, soon was moments ago, when he’d picked up the calls from his home machine. But Danny’s call had come two hours earlier, at a little after seven California time, just after four in the morning in Rome—what the hell had
soon
meant to him at that time of day?

Picking up the phone again, Harry dialed his law office in Beverly Hills. There had been an important partners’ meeting. People might still be there.

“Joyce, it’s Harry. Is Byron—?”

“He just left, Mr. Addison. You want me to try his car?”

“Please.”

Harry heard the static as Byron Willis’s secretary tried to connect with his car phone.

“I’m sorry, he’s not picking up. He said something about dinner. Should I leave word at the house?”

There was a blur of lights, and Harry felt the limo lean as the driver took the cloverleaf off the Ventura Freeway and accelerated into traffic on the San Diego, heading south toward LAX. Take it easy, he thought. Danny could be at mass or at work or out for a walk. Don’t start driving yourself or other people crazy when you don’t even know what’s going on.

“No, never mind. I’m on my way to New York. I’ll get him in the morning. Thanks.”

Clicking off, Harry hesitated, then tried Rome once more. He heard the same digital sounds, the same silence, and then the now-familiar “buzz, buzz,” “buzz, buzz” as the phone rang through. There was still no answer.

2

Italy. Friday, July 3, 10:20
A.M
.

FATHER DANIEL ADDISON DOZED LIGHTLY in a window seat near the back of the tour bus, his senses purposefully concentrated on the soft whine of the diesel and hum of the tires as the coach moved north along the Autostrada toward Assisi.

Dressed in civilian clothes, he had his clerical garments and toiletries in a small bag on the overhead rack above, his glasses and identification papers tucked into the inside pocket of the nylon windbreaker he wore over jeans and a short-sleeved shirt. Father Daniel was thirty-three and looked like a graduate student, an everyday tourist traveling alone. Which was what he wanted.

An American priest assigned to the Vatican, he had been living in Rome for nine years and going to Assisi for almost as long. Birthplace of the humble priest who became a saint, the ancient town in the Umbrian hills had given him a sense of cleansing and grace that put him more in touch with his own spiritual journey than any place he’d ever been. But now that journey was in shambles, his faith all but destroyed. Confusion, dread, and fear overrode everything. Keeping any shred of sanity at all was a major psychological struggle. Still, he was on the bus and going. But with no idea what he would do or say when he got there.

In front of him, the twenty or so other passengers chatted or read or rested as he did, enjoying the cool of the coach’s air-conditioning. Outside, the summer heat shimmered in waves across the rural landscape, ripening crops, sweetening vineyards, and, little by little, decaying the few ancient walls and fortresses that still existed here and there and were visible in the distance as the bus passed.

Letting himself drift, Father Daniel’s thoughts went to Harry and the call he’d left on his answering machine in the hours just before dawn. He wondered if Harry had even picked up the message. Or, if he had, if he’d been resentful of it and had not called back on purpose. It was a chance he had taken. He and Harry had been estranged since they were teenagers. It had been eight years since they’d spoken, ten since they’d seen each other. And that had been only briefly, when they’d gone back to Maine for the funeral of their mother. Harry had been twenty-six then, and Danny twenty-three. It was not unreasonable to assume that by now Harry had written his younger brother off and simply no longer gave a damn.

But, at that moment, what Harry thought or what had kept them apart hadn’t mattered. All Danny wanted was to hear Harry’s voice, to somehow touch him and to ask for his help. He had made the call as much out of fear as love, and because there had been nowhere else to turn. He had become part of a horror from which there was no return. One that would only grow darker and become more obscene. And because of it, he knew he might very well die without ever being with his brother again.

A movement down the aisle in front of him shook him from his muse. A man was walking toward him. He was in his early forties, clean shaven, and dressed in a light sport coat and khaki trousers. The man had gotten on the bus at the last moment, just as it was pulling out of the terminal in Rome. For a moment Father Daniel thought he might pass and go into the lavatory behind him. Instead, he stopped at his side.

“You’re American, aren’t you?” he said with a British accent.

Father Daniel glanced past him. The other passengers were riding as they had been, looking out, talking, relaxing. The nearest, a half dozen seats away.

”—Yes…”

“I thought so.” The man grinned broadly. He was pleasant, even jovial. “My name is Livermore. I’m English if you can’t tell. Do you mind if I sit down?” Without waiting for a reply, he slid into the seat next to Father Daniel.

“I’m a civil engineer. On vacation. Two weeks in Italy. Next year it’s the States. Never been there before. Been kind of asking Yanks as I meet them where I should visit.” He was talky, even pushy, but pleasant about it, and that seemed to be his manner. “Mind if I ask what part of the country you’re from?”

“—Maine…” Something was wrong, but Father Daniel wasn’t sure what it was.

“That would be up the map a bit from New York, yes?”

“Quite a bit…” Again Father Daniel looked toward the front of the bus. Passengers the same as before. Busy with what they were doing. None looking back. His eyes came back to Livermore in time to see him glance at the emergency exit in the seat in front of them.

“You live in Rome?” Livermore smiled amiably.

Why had he looked at the emergency exit? What was that for? “You asked if I was American. Why would you think I lived in Rome?”

“I’ve been there off and on. You look familiar, that’s all.” Livermore’s right hand was in his lap, but his left was out of sight. “What do you do?”

The conversation was innocent, but it wasn’t. “I’m a writer…”

“What do you write?”

“For American television…”

“No, you don’t.” Abruptly Livermore’s demeanor changed. His eyes hardened, and he leaned in, pressing against Father Daniel. “You’re a priest.”

“What?”

“I said you’re a priest. You work at the Vatican. For Cardinal Marsciano.”

Father Daniel stared at him. “Who are you?”

Livermore’s left hand came up. A small automatic in it. A silencer squirreled to the barrel. “Your executioner.”

At the same instant a digital timer beneath the bus clicked to 00:00. A split second later there was a thundering explosion. Liver-more vanished. Windows blew out. Seats and bodies flew. A scything piece of razor-sharp steel decapitated the driver, sending the bus careening right, crushing a white Ford against the guardrail. Bouncing off it, the bus came crashing back through traffic, a screaming, whirling, twenty-ton fireball of burning steel and rubber. A motorcycle rider disappeared under its wheels. Then it clipped the rear of a big-rig truck and spun sideways. Slamming into a silver-gray Lancia, the bus carried it full force through the center divider, throwing it directly into the path of an oncoming gasoline tanker.

Reacting violently, the tanker driver jammed on his brakes, jerking the wheel right. Wheels locked, tires shrieking, the enormous truck slid forward and sideways, at the same time knocking the Lancia off the bus like a billiard ball and sending the burning coach plunging off the highway and down a steep hill. Tilting up on two wheels, it held for a second, then rolled over, ejecting the bodies of its passengers, many of them dismembered and on fire, across the summer landscape. Fifty yards later it came to a rest, igniting the dry grass in a crackling rush around it.

Seconds afterward its fuel tank exploded, sending flame and smoke roaring heavenward in a fire storm that raged until there was nothing left but a molten, burned-out shell and a small, insignificant wisp of smoke.

3

Delta Airlines flight 148, New York to Rome.

Monday, July 6, 7:30
A.M
.

DANNY WAS DEAD, AND HARRY WAS ON HIS way to Rome to bring his body back to the U.S. for burial. The last hour, like most of the flight, had been a dream. Harry had seen the morning sun touch the Alps. Seen it glint off the Tyrrhenian Sea as they’d turned, dropping down over the Italian farmland on approach to Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci International Airport at Fiumicino.

“Harry, it’s your brother, Danny….”
.

All he could hear was Danny’s voice on the answering machine. It played over and over in his mind, like a tape on a loop. Fearful, distraught, and now silent.

“Harry, it’s your brother, Danny.…”

Waving off a pour of coffee from a smiling and pert flight attendant, Harry leaned back against the plush seat of the first-class cabin and closed his eyes, replaying what had happened in between.

He’d tried to call Danny twice more from the plane. And then again when he checked into his hotel. Still, there had been no answer. His apprehension growing, he’d called the Vatican directly, hoping to find Danny at work, and what he’d learned, after being passed from one department to another and being spoken to in broken English and then Italian and then a combination of both, was that Father Daniel was “not here until Monday.”

To Harry that had meant he was away for the weekend. And no matter his mental state, it was a legitimate reason why Danny was not answering his phone. In response, Harry had left a message on his answering machine at home, giving his hotel number in New York in the event Danny called back as he said he would.

And then Harry had turned, with some sense of relief, to business as usual and to why he had gone to New York—a last-minute huddle with Warner Brothers distribution and marketing chiefs over this Fourth of July weekend’s opening of
Dog on the Moon
, Warner’s major summer release, the story of a dog taken to the moon in a NASA experiment and accidentally left there, and the Little League team that learns about it and finds a way to bring him back; a film written and directed by Harry’s twenty-four-year-old client Jesus Arroyo.

Single and handsome enough to be a movie star, Harry Addison was not only one of the entertainment community’s most eligible bachelors, he was also one of its most successful attorneys. His firm represented the cream of multimillion-dollar Hollywood talent. His own list of clients had either starred in or were responsible for some of the highest-grossing movies and successful television shows of the past five years. His friends were household names, the same people who stared weekly from the covers of national magazines.

His success—as the daily Hollywood trade paper
Variety
had recently put it—was due to “a combination of smarts, hard work, and a temperament markedly different from the savagely competitive young warrior agents and attorneys to whom the ‘deal’ is everything and whose only disposition is ‘take no prisoners.’ With his Ivy League haircut and trademark white shirt and dark blue Armani suit, the Harry Addison approach is that the most beneficial thing for everyone is to cause as little all-around bleeding as possible. It’s why his deals go through, his clients love him, the studios and networks respect him, and why he makes a million dollars a year.”

Dammit, what did any of that mean now? His brother’s death overshadowed everything. All he could think of was what he might have done to help Danny that he hadn’t. Call the U.S. Embassy or the Rome police and send them to his apartment. Apartment? He didn’t even know where Danny lived. That was why he had started to call Byron Willis, his boss and mentor and best friend, from the limo when he’d first heard his brother’s message. Who did they know in Rome who could help? was what he had intended to ask but hadn’t because the call had never gone through. If he had, and if they had found someone in Rome, would Danny still be alive? The answer was probably no because there wouldn’t have been time.

Christ.

Over the years how many times had he tried to communicate with Danny? Christmas and birthday cards formally exchanged for a short while after their mother’s death. Then one holiday missed, then another. Finally nothing at all. And busy with his life and career, Harry had let it ride, eventually accepting it as the way it was. Brothers at opposites. Angry, at times even hostile, living a world apart, as they always would. With both probably wondering during the odd quiet moment if he should be the one to take the initiative and find a way to bring them back together. But neither had.

And then Saturday evening as he’d been in the Warners New York offices celebrating the huge numbers
Dog on the Moon
was realizing—nineteen million dollars with Saturday night, Sunday, and Monday still to come, making a projected weekend gross of thirty-eight to forty-two million—Byron Willis had called from Los Angeles. The Catholic archdiocese had been trying to reach Harry and was reluctant to leave word at his hotel. They’d traced Willis through Harry’s office, and Byron himself had chosen to make the call. Danny was dead, he’d said quietly, killed in what appeared to be a terrorist bombing of a tour bus on the way to Assisi.

In the emotional gyration immediately afterward, Harry canceled his plans to return to L.A. and booked himself on a Sunday-evening flight to Italy. He would go there and bring Danny home personally. It was the last and only thing he could do.

Then, on Sunday morning, he’d contacted the State Department, requesting the U.S. Embassy in Rome arrange a meeting between himself and the people investigating the bombing of the bus. Danny had been frightened and distraught; maybe what he had said might help shed some light on what had happened and who had been responsible. Afterward, and for the first time in as long as Harry could remember, he had gone to church. And prayed and wept.

BENEATH HIM, HARRY HEARD the sound of the landing gear being lowered. Looking out, he saw the runway come up and the Italian countryside fly past. Open fields, drainage ditches, more open fields. Then there was a bump and they were down. Slowing, turning, taxiing back toward the long, low sunlit buildings of Aeroporto Leonardo da Vinci.

THE UNIFORMED WOMAN behind the glass at Passport Control asked him to wait and picked up the telephone. Harry saw himself reflected in the glass as he waited. He was still in his dark blue Armani suit and white shirt, the way he was described in the
Variety
article. There was another suit and shirt in his suitcase, along with a light sweater, workout gear, polo shirt, jeans, and running shoes. The same bag he had packed for New York.

The woman hung up and looked at him. A moment later two policemen with Uzi submachine guns slung over their shoulders walked up to her. One stepped into the booth and looked at his passport, then glanced at Harry and motioned him through.

“Would you come with us, please?”

“Of course.”

As they walked off, Harry saw the first policeman ease the Uzi around, his right hand sliding to its grip. Immediately two more uniformed police moved in to walk with them as they crossed the terminal. Passengers moved aside quickly, then turned to look back when they were safely out of the way.

At the far side of the terminal they stopped at a security door. One of the policeman punched a code into a chrome keypad. A buzzer sounded, and the man opened the door. Then they went up a flight of stairs and turned down a corridor. A moment later they stopped at another door. The first policeman knocked, and they entered a windowless room where two men in suits waited. Harry’s passport was handed to one of them, and the uniforms left, closing the door behind them.

“You are Harry Addison—“

“Yes.”

“The brother of the Vatican priest Father Daniel Addison.”

Harry nodded. “Thank you for meeting me…”

The man who held his passport was probably forty-five, tall and tanned, and very fit. He wore a blue suit, over a lighter blue shirt with a carefully knotted maroon tie. His English was accented but understandable. The other man was a little older and almost as tall but with a slighter build and salt-and-pepper hair. His shirt was checkered. His suit, a light brown, the same as his tie.

“I am Ispettore Capo Otello Roscani, Polizia di Stato. This is Ispettore Capo Pio.”

“How do you do…”

“Why have you come to Italy, Mr. Addison?”

Harry was puzzled. They knew why he was there or they wouldn’t have met him as they had.“—To bring my brother’s body home…. And to talk with you people.”

“When had you planned to come to Rome?”

“I hadn’t
planned
to come at all…”

“Answer the question, please.”

“Saturday night.”

“Not before?”

“Before? No, of course not.”

“You made the reservations yourself?” Pio spoke for the first time. His English had almost no accent at all, as if he were either American himself or had spent a lot of time in the U.S.

“Yes.”

“On Saturday.”

“Saturday night. I told you that.” Harry looked from one to the other. “I don’t understand your questions. You knew I was coming. I asked the U.S. Embassy to arrange for me to talk to you.”

Roscani slid Harry’s passport into his pocket. “We are going to ask you to accompany us into Rome, Mr. Addison.”

“Why?—We can talk right here. There’s not that much to tell.” Suddenly Harry could feel sweat on his palms. They were leaving something out. What was it?

“Perhaps you should let us decide, Mr. Addison.”

Again, Harry looked from one to the other. “What’s going on? What is it you’re not telling me?”

“We simply wish to talk further, Mr. Addison.”

“About what?”

“The assassination of the cardinal vicar of Rome.”