But now, Sharon wondered, did she see some signs of regret? His brother Francesco was among the cardinals who had been slain attempting to flee Rome. His nephew, Antonio, had made good his escape to Sharon’s refugee embassy by only the slimmest of margins himself, and would not have succeeded at all had not her husband Ruy chanced upon him while he was trying to find a way to escape the city’s walls.

Urban’s hands were folded passively on the front of his cassock. “I shall pray for your friends and father, Ambassadora. I owe them all a great debt. And, in the case of Thomas Simpson, I owe him my very life-along with you, Senor Casador y Ortiz. If it was not for your bold rescue of me from Sant’Angelo, the rubble of Hadrian’s tomb would surely be my burial mound, now.”

Urban extended one hand and placed it briefly upon Ruy’s head. Then he turned and left. When Ruy rose, his face was transformed-utterly open, utterly without pretense-rather like a man who remembers, for one brief instant, the innocent hope and faith he had as a young boy. Sharon felt the strangest rush of both tenderness and arousal, seeing him so stripped of his facade for that moment-and then Ruy as she knew him was back: he smoothed aside one wing of his mustaches and turned to her, his dark brown eyes glittering and alert. “We should send word to the exfiltration team in Switzerland,” he said.

“Word to-? Yes, of course!” Sharon turned to the waiting radio operator. “Odo, raise the exfiltration team. Let them know that contact has been lost with both the group they are to extract and Colonel North’s security detachment. They may have been monitoring and heard it themselves, but it’s also possible that the signal didn’t get through to Chur.”

“And is there any other message for Chur?”

“Yes. The extraction team there is to start for the rendezvous point now.”

“Ambassador, it will be night before they arrive. And if they reach the site early, and must loiter-”