Day of Confession Part 26

WHO I AM IS ME.

Instinctively he looked around to see if the person who had written it was nearby and watching. But he saw no one. Turning back, he studied the words again. And the longer he looked, the more he became convinced they had been put there solely for him. For the rest of the day and into the night he thought about it. Finally, just before he went to bed, he wrote them down in his school notebook. And when he did, they became his alone. It was his "Declaration of Independence." And in that one, single, momentous instant, he realized he was free.

WHO I AM IS ME.

Who he was and what he became were in his hands and no one else's. And he determined to keep it that way, promising himself never to have to rely on anyone else again.

And mostly it had worked.

SUDDENLY BRIGHT FLUORESCENT light hit Harry in the face, jolting him from his memory. Immediately there was a solid b.u.mp as the cage touched the bottom of the shaft and stopped.

Looking up, he saw Elena staring at him.

"What is it?"

"You should know your brother is deathly thin. Don't be afraid when you see him..."

"All right..." Harry nodded, then reached forward and pulled the cage door open.

HE FOLLOWED HER QUICKLY down a series of narrow pa.s.sageways lit on either side by ornate bronze sconces and marked on the floor by a line of green Athenian marble that showed the way. Above them, the ceiling heights rose and fell without warning, and more than once Harry had to hunch over just to get through.

Finally a course of short, abrupt turns brought them into what looked like a central corridor, long and wide, with benches cut into the ancient stone the length of it. Turning them left, Elena walked another twenty feet and stopped at a closed door. Knocking lightly, saying something in Italian, she pushed through.

Salvatore and Marta stood up suddenly as they entered. And then Harry saw him. Partway across the room. Asleep on a bed facing them. An IV strung from a rack above it. Gauze bandages covering part of his head and upper body. He was bearded like Harry. And, as Elena had warned, frightfully thin.

Danny.

80.

HARRY APPROACHED THE BED SLOWLY AND looked down at his brother. There was no doubt who it was, no chance it could be someone else. The years they had gone without seeing each other, or how physically changed he was now, made no difference. It was a feeling, a familiarity, that went back to childhood. Reaching out, he felt Danny's hand. It was warm, but there was no reflex to his touch.

"Signore." Marta moved forward to Harry, looking at Elena as she did. "I... we had to sedate him."

Elena turned quickly, concerned.

"After you left he became frightened," Salvatore said in Italian, looking from Harry to Elena. "He pulled himself out of bed, was crawling out toward the water, dragging his legs when we found him. He wouldn't listen. I tried to pick him up, but he fought me. I was afraid he would hurt himself if I let him go... or drown if he fell into the water.... You had medicine here, and a hypodermic, my wife knew what to do."

"It's all right," Elena said quietly, then told Harry what had happened.

Harry looked back toward his brother, and slowly a grin crept over him. "Still the same tough little cookie, aren't you?" He looked back to Elena. "How long will he be knocked out?"

"How much did you give him?" Elena asked Marta in Italian. Marta told her and Elena looked back. "An hour, maybe a little more..."

"We have to get him out of here."

"Where?" Elena looked to Marta and Salvatore. "One of the men who brought Father Daniel was found drowned in the lake."

There was an audible sound as the couple reacted. Elena turned back to Harry.

"I don't believe he drowned on his own. I think the same person who killed his wife is here looking for your brother. So for now it is best we stay here. I know of nowhere else he would be as safe."

EDWARD MOOI guided the motorboat between the rocks and into the grotto entrance. Once inside, he turned on the searchlight.

"Put it out!" Thomas Kind's eyes flashed viciously in the bright light.

Immediately Edward Mooi touched a switch, and the light went out. At the same instant he felt something nick his ear. Crying out, he drew back, putting his hand to it. Blood.

"A razor, Edward Mooi.... The same one used for the tongue in your shirt pocket."

Mooi could feel his hand on the wheel and the lump in his shirt pocket where Thomas Kind had stuck the severed tongue as a reminder. He could sense too the familiar rocks as they slipped past on either side. He was going to die anyway. Why had he brought this madman here? He could have yelled for the police and run and taken his chances. But he had not. It was out of total fear and nothing else that he had done the man's bidding.

His life had been given to words and the creation of poetry. Reading his work, Eros Barbu had rescued him from a nothing life as a recorder of public records in South Africa, given him a place to live and a means to continue working. In return he asked only that he take care of the villa as best he could. And he had, and little by little his work had become known.

And then, at what was nearly the end of his seventh year at Villa Lorenzi, Barbu had made one more request. Protect a man who was coming by hydrofoil. He could have refused, but he did not. And because he had not, both he and that man were about to lose their lives.

Edward Mooi nosed the motorboat around a stand of rock in the dark. One hundred yards. Two more turns and they would see the lights and then the landing. The water here was deep and still. Slowly the poet's long black thumb reached up and flipped the emergency "kill" switch. The Yamaha outboards went silent.

The final action in the life of Edward Mooi was extraordinarily brief. His left hand pressing the motorboat's warning siren. His right pushing him up and over the side. The move of the razor across his throat as he fell was like silk. It mattered not. His prayers had been said.

81.

SALVATORE HAD LEFT FATHER DANIEL'S CHAMBER at the first scream of the boat siren, running down the central pa.s.sageway toward the landing. When he saw only the dark of the channel and heard nothing more, he came back.

They must leave immediately, he said in Italian. Other than Eros Barbu himself, only Edward Mooi knew how to bring a boat in through the channels, and the boat had not come. The siren had been a signal, a warning.

If it had been the police Mooi was warning them about, they would have been there by now-Roscani and an army of Gruppo Cardinale people with him-and the media close behind. But since the boat siren, there had been only silence. So Mooi was telling them something else.

"Salvatore is right." Harry was suddenly looking at Elena. "We have to get out. And now."

"How? We can't take your brother up the elevator. Even if we could get him there, the cage is too small."

"Ask Salvatore if there is another boat."

"I don't have to ask. There is not. Luca and the others took the only one there was."

"Ask him anyway!" Harry could feel time closing in. "A raft. A float. Anything we can put Danny on to take him out by water."

Elena looked to Salvatore and repeated Harry's plea in Italian.

"Forse," Salvatore said. "Forse."

Maybe.

82.

IT WASN'T A BOAT SO MUCH AS AN ALUMINUM skiff, flat bottomed, twelve feet long and five feet wide, and designed to be towed behind a boat to haul supplies or to take away garbage. Salvatore had found it near a smaller landing, around a turn in the ca.n.a.l, a hundred or more yards down from the first, propped up against a wall just outside a heavy door that led to Eros Barbu's legendary wine cellar. With it were two oars, and Harry and Salvatore carried it to the water and put it in, securing it to the landing with a rope.

Then Harry stepped in and tested it.

It floated, didn't leak, and held his weight. Bending, he set the oarlocks into place and slid the oars into them. "Okay, let's get him in."

Salvatore pushed the gurney forward, then he and Harry hefted it into the skiff, setting it sideways across the stern. Next, he handed Harry a bag holding a minimum of medical supplies. Then Harry helped Elena in and looked expectantly to Salvatore, but the Italian and his wife stepped back.

The skiff was too small for all of them, he said, Elena translating. There were markings on the walls high above the waterlines that would guide them out of the tunnels. Follow those and they would be all right.

"What about you?" Harry looked at Salvatore with concern.

Salvatore and Marta would ride the cage back up. Again Elena translated. They would meet them with the farm truck at a cove farther south on the lake. Glancing at Elena, he explained how to find it. Finally he looked back to Harry.

"Arrivederci," he said, almost apologetically, as if he were abandoning them. Then he quickly took Marta's hand, and the two disappeared back into the cave.

83.

THE NOTCHES WERE CUT INTO THE CAVERN walls above the waterline, as Salvatore had said. Elena stood in the bow playing the beam of a flashlight on them as Harry rowed the skiff slowly down the channel.

Harry worked from the center, his back to Elena, his concentration on the oars, trying to keep them silent as they lifted from the water and then dropped back in.

"Listen-" Elena clicked off the flashlight.

Harry stopped, oars raised, the boat drifting. But he heard nothing other than the soft lapping of water against the rock walls as the skiff slid past.

"What was it?" Harry's voice was barely a whisper.

"I.... There-"

This time he heard it. A distant rumbling, the sound reverberating off the walls. Then it stopped.

"What is it?"

"Outboard motors. Run for a few seconds, then shut off."

"Who?"

"Whoever Edward Mooi warned us about. They're here, in the ca.n.a.ls... trying to find us..."

Hefei, China. City of Hefei Water Filtration Plant "A."

Still Tuesday, July 14. 6:30 P.M P.M.

Li Wen stood back, calmly watching the people hover around the wall of gauges and meters measuring the pressure, turbidity, flow rates, and chemical levels. Why they were still standing there, he had no idea. The gauges and meters were still. The plant had been shut down completely. Nothing moved.

Zhu Yubing, governor of Anhui Province, merely stared, as did Mou Qiyan, deputy director of Anhui Province Water Conservancy and Power Department. The angry words, the accusations, had been made as the official word was given-Chao Lake had not been poisoned deliberately, by accident, by terrorists, or by anyone else; nor was pollution, caused by untreated water discharged from local farms and factories, the cause of the catastrophe; sun-fed algae, with its production of biological toxins, was. Both men had complained for years that this was a time bomb that had to be defused, a dangerous problem that had to be solved. But it never was. And now they stood in shock at this incredible horror. Putrid and deadly water pouring from the city taps like a plague before it had been shut off. The sheer numbers were beyond belief.

Chao Lake, water supply to nearly a million. In the last ten hours: Twenty-seven thousand, five hundred and eight confirmed dead. Another fifty-five thousand seriously ill. Thousands who ingested the water in common everyday circ.u.mstances still unaccounted for. The toll in sickness and death was mounting by the minute. And little could be done, even by the Chinese Army disaster teams, except take away the dead. And wait and count. The same as Li Wen watched them do now.

Lake Como, Italy. Same time.

The only sound was the lap of water against the rock. That and Danny's regular breathing. Elena stood frozen in the bow, while Harry let the skiff drift with the current, holding it just off the rock with his hands so it wouldn't sc.r.a.pe. Trying to keep it silent.

The dark was infinite. Impenetrable. Harry knew Elena's thoughts, her anxiety, was the same as his. Finally his whisper broke the silence. "Put your hand over the front of the flashlight. Let as little of the beam out as possible. Keep it high on the wall. If you hear anything anything, shut it off."

Harry waited and then the dark was cut by a narrow wand of light that searched the granite wall above them. For a long moment it inched over the ancient stone, looking for the directional markers but finding nothing.

"Mr. Addison-" Elena's whisper was abrupt, and Harry heard the fear in her voice.

"Keep the light moving."

Immediately, he pushed the skiff back from the wall, then eased the oars into the water and pulled gently. The craft moved forward against a barely perceptible current.

Elena could feel the perspiration on the palms of her hands as she watched the sliver of light play fruitlessly over the rock.

Harry watched it, too, trying not to think they had drifted too far in the darkness and were moving deeper into the labyrinth. Suddenly Elena's light pa.s.sed over notches cut in the stone, and he heard her stifle a cry.

"Okay, we're still okay," he whispered.

Twenty feet pa.s.sed, then thirty. Then more notches.

"Turn the light down the channel."

Elena did. The rocky cavern went straight for as far as they could see.

"Put it out."

Immediately Elena snapped the flashlight off, then turned forward and peered into the dark in front of them, praying to see a dot of light that would mean the end of the ca.n.a.l and the way out to the lake. But she saw only blackness. Felt only the same cool damp of the air. Heard the light sound of the oars as Harry moved them forward.