The Confessor

engine, gazed across the square toward the Bronze Doors, and waited.
    Lange's hopes of slipping quietly out of the Vatican were all but gone. The entrance hall of the palace was filled with Swiss Guards and Vatican police, and it appeared as though the Bronze Doors had been sealed. Obviously someone had ignored his warnings and sounded an alarm. Lange would have to use other means of escaping. In a hasty attempt to alter his appearance, he removed his eyeglasses and shoved them into his pocket. Then he headed calmly toward the Bronze Doors.
    A Swiss Guard put a hand on his chest. "No one in or out for the time being."
    "I'm afraid I can't be detained," Lange said calmly. "I need to leave at once for a pressing appointment."
    "Orders are orders, Monsignor. There's been a shooting. No one can leave."
    "A shooting in the Vatican? Dear God."
    For the benefit of the Swiss Guard, Lange made the sign of the cross before reaching inside the jacket of his clerical suit and drawing the Stechkin. The Swiss Guard fumbled in his Renaissance costume trying desperately to remove his own weapon, but before he could bring it into play Lange shot him twice in the chest.
    A scream filled the hall as Lange lunged toward the Bronze Doors. A Swiss Guard stepped into his path, a Beretta in his outstretched hands. He hesitated; Lange was surrounded by shouting clerics and Vatican bureaucrats. The man who spent eight hours a
    day holding a halberd didn't have the nerve to fire into a crowd and risk innocent casualties. Lange had no such worries. The Stechkin swung up, and he blew the Swiss Guard from his feet.
    Lange sprinted through the Bronze Doors. A carabiniere walked toward him, gun leveled on his hip, shouting at him in Italian to lay down his weapon. Lange turned and fired. The carabiniere fell to the paving stones of St. Peter's.
    What he saw next was something out of his nightmares: a half dozen carabinieri, running across the square directly toward him, I automatic weapons drawn. There would be no shooting his way out of this. Come on, Katrine. Where are you?
    Standing a few feet away was a woman, an American girl by the look of her, about twenty-five years old, too terrified to move. Lange closed the distance between himself and the girl in three powerful strides, then seized her hair and pulled her to his body. The carabinieri skidded to a stop. Lange placed his Stechkin against the side of the girl's head and started dragging her across the square.
    Gabriel heard screaming outside the window of Cardinal Brindisi's office. He parted the heavy curtains and looked down. The square was in turmoil: carabinieri running with weapons drawn, tourists scurrying for cover in the colonnade. And walking across the center of the square was a man in a clerical suit, holding a gun to the head of a woman.
    Katrine Boussard saw him too, though from a different vantage point: her position at the end of Bernini's Colonnade. As
    the square erupted into chaos, the carabiniere who had opened the barricade to the two men on motorcycle left his position and ran toward the palace. Katrine kicked the bike into gear and rolled forward, then she turned through the gap in the fence and started across the square.
    Lange saw her coming. When she was a few feet away he pushed the American girl to the ground, climbed on the bike in front of Katrine took hold of the handlebars, then turned the bike around and headed for the edge of St. Peter's Square. A carabiniere was sprinting along the barricade, trying to close the breach before the bike arrived. Lange took aim and squeezed off the last two rounds in his magazine. The carabiniere tumbled to the pavement.
    Lange sped through the opening in the barricade and leaned the bike south. A moment later, they were gone.
    ST. Peter's square was in chaos. Clearly, the first priority of the police would be to secure the area and tend to the victims rather than pursue the man who had wreaked the havoc. Gabriel knew it would take only a matter of seconds for a trained professional to disappear into the labyrinth of Rome. Indeed, he had done it once himself. In a moment, the Leopard, the man who had murdered Benjamin and countless others, would be gone forever.
    The motorcycle Gabriel and Father Donati had ridden from the synagogue was where they had left it, resting on its kickstand a few meters from the Bronze Doors. Gabriel still had the keys in his pocket. He climbed into the saddle and roared across the