The Bonaparte Secret (6 page)

So much for their romantic tour of Venice by gondola.

He sniffed the air. There was something besides that odor of a salt swamp Venice carried like a lady’s favorite perfume. He looked around for an answer. A thin white trail of smoke was streaming from the craft’s exhaust. A look at the ruins of the instrument panel told him why: there was next to no oil pressure in the starboard engine. A bullet must have severed an oil line or the crank case or pump, or any number of vital parts of an internal-combustion engine. Worse, highly flammable fuel could be leaking into the engine compartment beneath his feet, waiting for the right temperature to set it off. His options were to shut the motor down or keep pressing it to the firewall until heat and friction froze it.

Not much of a choice.

“We’re going to have to end this pretty quick!” he yelled at Gurt.

“Is OK with me,” she hollered back. “The quicker the happier.”

Lang was not sure where he was but he guessed the Grand Canal that swept through the city like an reversed S was somewhere off to his left. To seek the crowded waterway and, perhaps, the police was tempting but unrealistic. There was too much traffic, and the consequences of hitting another craft would be just as deadly as the gunfire from behind.

He was going to have to think of something else.

And fast.

Before the engine quit.

Torcello
The same time

Wan Ng had chosen this small island northeast of Venice for a number of reasons. It, not Venice, had been the leading city of the lagoon for hundreds of years. It boasted the magnificent seventh- and eighth-century Romanesque cathedral of Santa Maria dell’Assunta and had been a thriving port and commercial center. Then its canals had silted up, sending commerce to Venice. Malaria had claimed a good number of those who remained.

Few tourists took the trouble to ride the vaporetto to the stop at the other end of one of the few remaining canals from the basilica. In fact, in this, the days of Carnevale, visitors were more likely to stay in Venice itself anyway. The innkeeper of the small hotel in sight of the cathedral’s tower was as willing to accept the explanation that the four Chinese men were from a university here to study the twelfth-and thirteenth-century mosaics as he was to accept advance payment in full.

Ng couldn’t have cared less about mosaics, the cathedral or, for that matter, Venice itself. He had a job to do. He had no idea why it had been necessary to steal a box sealed under the altar of San Marco, but that is exactly what he and his men had done. Had it not been for the untimely intervention of the man in the clown costume and the woman, the theft might well have gone undetected. Now, short a man, he had been ordered to take care of both of the intruders in spite of the serious doubts he had expressed to his superiors that there had been sufficient light for the clown and his female companion to recognize any faces, let alone be aware that the thieves were Chinese. That had been the reason that the body of his former comrade had been removed from the basilica where his neck had been broken and unceremoniously dumped in a canal after making sure he had no identifying evidence on him. By the time the police got around to comparing his face to any surveillance-camera pictures that might have been taken when he presented his false American passport entering the country, Ng and the others would be long gone.

Ng was used to carrying out orders he did not understand, and these would allow him to avenge the loss of the man the woman had killed so easily. He thought about that for a moment. The woman was obviously an expert in martial arts—kung fu, judo, jujitsu, the lot. The dead man had been trained in them as all Ng’s men had, but the woman was simply faster and better. What kind of female was that?

At least he was now forewarned that the woman, if not the man also, could be dangerous.

He only hoped his remaining two men succeeded in the task of eliminating the couple before it was necessary to use the information he was seeking on the laptop in front of him. Hacking into the credit-card company’s files had been surprisingly easy. It was a wonder the identity theft of which Americans constantly complained was not even more widely spread than it was. Once into the database, it was simply a matter of viewing all charges made that morning in Venice, Italy, at a specific costume shop during the time it took the Americans to return the clown outfit and the woman’s costume.

He stopped scrolling and smiled. There was only one. Here it was now: the card belonged to Langford Reilly. Accommodatingly, the list also provided an address in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

If his men did not succeed in taking care of the pair today, Ng could look forward to a trip to the States, something he enjoyed. He had learned English, a requirement of his service, and had had ample opportunity to polish it at China’s American Academy. The institution was a requisite for his service and turned out fluent, American-idiom-speaking graduates conversant in rap music, sports teams and other singularly American institutions. He had been told he had the accent of the American Midwest.

He almost looked forward for a chance to use it again.

Venice

Reluctantly, Lang flicked his eyes at the oil-pressure gauge. It was almost at the bottom of the dial. He didn’t have a lot of time before the right engine went belly-up. He was slowly losing ground. The craft were about equally powered, but he was zigzagging erratically to throw off the aim of his adversaries, while they had the luxury of a straight path.

The small speedboat careened around the corner of another intersecting canal. This time the side of the craft scraped a set of steps with a protesting crunch of wood against stone. Without reducing speed, Lang continued the turn, completing a 180-degree sweep and almost swamping the ship. He had no sooner straightened out before his pursuers rounded the turn. He passed them before they could react.

The windshield shattered as bullets whined evilly past his head. Reflexively, he ducked, losing sight of where the boat was headed. Within the split second before he could see again, a four-story palazzo loomed above him. He just had time to spin the wheel, but it was close enough for him to see the expressions of faces pressed against a window.

A lot of people had to be looking out onto the canal, attracted by the sound of gunfire. One or more of them had called the cops, he guessed from the sound of sirens. By the time the police found the right place in this watery spiderweb of canals, they would be too late.

The starboard engine gave a cough and went silent.

Lang yelled directions at Gurt and she dove overboard. Turning the boat around again, he aimed it at the spot he guessed the Riva craft would be seconds later. Then Lang took a dive himself, beginning to swim as fast as he could the second he was in the water. His head came above the greasy green surface just in time to see the Riva veer wildly to avoid the boat Lang had just vacated. They missed the speedboat by inches, started to regain control and smashed head-on into the steps of one of the residences.

Lang ducked back underwater when he saw the collision was inevitable. Even so, the resulting explosion was clearly audible and seemed to shake the water itself.

He resurfaced to a sea of floating debris, some of it burning. There was no sign of the two men.

Ahead of him, Gurt was dragging herself onto a set of stairs that led to an old wooden door with signs of rot at the edges. He noted her purse was slung over one arm, and as she climbed out of the water, she still had her shoes on.

The latter was hardly surprising. She had just purchased the pair of Pradas before leaving home. Gurt was very fond of the brand.

Lang pulled himself up beside her. “And what did you learn on our tour of the canals of Venice?”

Later that evening, after Gurt had retired to the Gulf-stream’s small but comfortable bedroom, Lang found himself staring at the same page of the novel at which he had been looking for several minutes. Sleep aboard an aircraft, even a luxurious private one, was next to impossible for him. Gurt and others had pointed out to him that there wasn’t a lot he could do about an engine failure, fire or other disaster at thirty-five thousand feet asleep or awake, and that he had a superbly trained crew no matter whether he slept or not. It did no good. A couple of drinks and a fine wine from the galley with dinner were no help. He simply couldn’t doze off. The drone of the engines should have acted as a sedative. Instead, they were a stimulant to his nervous system.

He sighed, put the book down and looked out into the Stygian darkness of a night over the ocean. There were questions bouncing around inside his head like Ping-Pong balls, questions for which he had no answers. The Chinese weapon in the church, the obviously Asian man in the square. For reasons he would not like to try and explain, he would have given odds the men in the pursuing boat had been Asian, perhaps Chinese, too. Long ago Lang had learned to reject coincidence, an explanation used by weaker minds. He was right 90 percent of the time.

The only reason he could come up with was that the afternoon’s affair had to do with his and Gurt’s interruption of last night’s theft of Saint Mark’s relics. But why? Whoever had wanted the bones had apparently succeeded in making off with them. Perhaps the thieves feared he and Gurt could recognize them, give a description to the police, even though he would have needed a cat’s vision to see facial features in that darkly lit place. And if the theft plus the Asian man were connected, what would an Asian want with the remains of a Christian saint?

He smiled in spite of the questions he could not answer. The face of the elderly woman who had answered the persistent banging on her door to the canal was worth remembering. With typical Italian hospitality (or was it curiosity?), she had offered towels to the two wet, bedraggled people who had mysteriously appeared on her doorstep. Manners of another age prevented her from asking questions, and she had simply accepted that the fates had sent her two people very much in need of help, or at least admission to her home.

Or had it been the tradition of
fregatura?
There was no exact English translation for this uniquely Italian concept.
Fregatura
was an act somewhat less than entirely legal but short of egregious. It also had the hint of getting away with something, as their elderly hostess would be doing by not notifying the police that the people they were undoubtedly looking for were right here in her parlor.

Once toweled off, Gurt and Lang had declined her offer to send a servant for dry clothes, explaining their hotel was nearby and only a misstep along the canal had resulted in their falling in. The graciousness of a bygone era prevented the signora from inquiring about the explosion that had surely rattled the shelves of Venetian glass against one of the walls of her centuries-old home. Perhaps she had been too deaf to hear the wailing of the sirens from the police boats.

The concierge at their Lido hotel had given them an astonished expression as the two wet, rumpled guests, still trailing wet prints from soaked shoes, trudged through his lobby. Obviously, the hotel’s boat driver had not made it back there yet.

“Signor Reilly?” he had asked.

“Your boat had engine trouble,” Lang said just as the elevator doors shut. “We had to swim for it.”

CHAPTER TWO

Law offices of Langford Reilly
Peachtree Center
227 Peachtree Street, Atlanta
Three days later

Lang Reilly tossed the last of the pink telephone-message slips into the trash and turned on his desktop computer. Sara had taken most of his e-mail but there was enough requiring his attention to keep him busy most of the morning: a notice of hearing on a motion to suppress evidence in the federal court here in Atlanta, a judge’s questions about a pretrial order he had filed in another case, a bond hearing in the local state court. He shook his head at the last. The client, one of the inventory of pro bono clients Lang kept, couldn’t afford a lawyer. He surely couldn’t pay the bondsman, no matter how low the bail. A total waste of time but one of the procedures the court required.

The phone on his desk buzzed. A quick glance showed the intercom between him and the outer office was the line being used.

“Yes ma’am?”

“The Reverend Bishop Groom is here.”

Sara’s voice bristled with resentment, no doubt at the bishop’s failure to make an appointment. A white-haired prototype of someone’s grandmother, Sara had served as surrogate mother and would-be social director before Gurt’s arrival. She still was secretary, accountant, office manager and a zealous guardian of his time. “Can you see him now?”

The question was for the visitor’s benefit. Sara knew exactly what Lang was doing at the moment.

“Send him in.”

The Reverend Bishop William Groom was, as far as Lang could tell, self-ordained. His nondenominational church in one of Atlanta’s bedroom communities had grown from a few hundred members to well over six thousand, necessitating no less than four services every Sunday and several during the week, plus a televangelical ministry on Sunday nights. More significantly, donations had shown a commensurate increase. Had a number of his parishioners not become disenchanted with both a lifestyle that could only be described as opulent and a more-than-priestly interest in a number of church members’ wives, he might have remained beneath the IRS’s radar indefinitely.

Currently, Lang was anticipating federal indictment of the good bishop for multiple counts of tax evasion, conspiracy to evade taxes, fraud, mail fraud and a laundry list of related offenses. It would seem Lang’s client had not only been dipping his pen into the company inkwell, his fingers had been in the church’s purse as well.

Groom came through the door, hand extended. “Thank you so much for seeing me without an appointment.”

Lang stood to shake hands. “Glad I was available.” He sat behind his desk, indicating one of two leather wing chairs separated by a small French commode. “What can I do for you?”