Then he pulled his binoculars out of his jacket pocket and climbed up onto the walkway using the nearest set of steps. He sat down, dangling his legs over the edge of the walkway. He could have begun his surveillance of the water traffic around the island from his boat, but the boat was bouncing and rolling in the waves that continuously washed against the shore of the island, and in the wake of every passing vessel; focusing on anything through the binoculars would have proved difficult. It made much better sense to use his binoculars from the stable platform that the walkway offered.
He had carried out numerous surveillance operations
in his short career as an army officer, and later in the police force, but in those tasks he had been part of a large team, both static and mobile, and the target had usually been a particular individual to be followed and watched. If he’d been covering a building, it had generally been a single dwelling with only one or two entrances, and one team would be assigned to cover each. The emphasis had always been on team operations—a large number of people blanketing a small target—never would one man cover even a single location with any degree of success.
But out here, in the choppy waters of the Venetian lagoon, Bronson was going to try to do exactly this. He intended to look at every boat heading south that passed on either side of his position. If he’d been right in his guess, and his attackers had originally intended to sail around the eastern end of Venice, and they’d left the canal system on the north side of the city after their confrontation with him, then they would have to pass fairly close to him now to reach the same area. But he was also keenly aware that if the blue powerboat had managed to reach the Grand Canal before him, his attackers could already be well beyond his reach.
He started by checking all the small boats he could see out in the lagoon, and which were already a good distance away from him.
As he’d expected, there was a huge number of boats and launches in a variety of shapes and sizes and types and colors. Blue seemed to be quite popular, and twice he saw
vessels that looked remarkably like the one he was searching for, but in both cases he was able to reject the sightings. One of the boats had three people in it and the other one at least four, possibly five, and he was fairly certain that the men he was chasing wouldn’t have stopped to pick up passengers. What was more, these two boats were a long way to the south of where he was sitting, and whatever route the two men had taken, he doubted if they could possibly have gotten that far ahead of him.
Although he was concentrating on checking the vessels at the far end of the lagoon, Bronson was also watching those passing much closer to him. He knew that if he was to stand any chance at all of spotting the boat, he would have to establish a pattern for his surveillance, and not get fixated on watching just a single part of the lagoon. In fact, he knew he ought to use the binoculars as sparingly as possible, because it would be a fairly unusual thing for someone to be doing on the island, and he definitely didn’t want to draw attention to himself. If this was going to work, he had to look pretty much like any of the other people going about their business on Giudecca.
So Bronson relied largely on his eyes, and quickly worked out a kind of pattern search that he thought would give him the best chance of spotting the boat and its occupants before they saw him. The most likely area for them to enter the southern half of the lagoon was, he
believed, over to the east, so he concentrated most of his attention there. He looked that way for about thirty seconds, then looked down to the south of the lagoon for fifteen seconds, and finished his one-minute scan by looking over to the west, then back to the east again. It was boring and repetitive, but Bronson didn’t care. It offered the best chance he was going to get to find Angela, and for that he could endure almost anything.
So he sat on the walkway, beside his powerboat, and watched, and kept watching, never letting his concentration flag for an instant, as the hull of his vessel rose and fell gently beneath him. Fifteen minutes passed. Then twenty, and then twenty-five. After half an hour, Bronson began to feel desperate. Either his guess about the destination of the two men was completely wrong or they had slipped past him somehow. Or maybe they’d just been much faster than he’d expected. In any case, he’d blown it.
Bronson sat there, following the pattern search that he was now convinced was a waste of time, and wondering what the hell he could do next. He toyed with the idea of simply getting back into the boat and motoring around the islands scattered about the lagoon in the hope that he might catch a glimpse of the blue powerboat that way. But even as he considered this course of action, he realized it would be a complete waste of time. There were more than one hundred islands out there, and almost every one would have a powerboat secured to its jetty,
and there was a fair chance that quite a lot of them would be blue.
He picked up the binoculars to check out another flash of blue he’d spotted some way down to the south, then muttered in irritation. That particular boat was blue and white, a completely different color scheme. He lowered the binoculars again and for a few seconds just sat staring vacantly across the glistening blue waters of the Laguna Veneta, trying to work out his next move.
And then, almost without him being aware of it, he found himself looking directly at the blue boat with the two men on board. It had just emerged from around the east end of the main island of Venice, as part of a group of perhaps half a dozen other small boats and one larger launch, all of whose courses then began to diverge as they headed for their individual destinations.
Bronson didn’t react in any way at all. He just sat on the walkway, looking back toward Venice while his eyes, invisible behind his mirrored shades under the peak of his baseball cap, remained locked on the vessel. The men in the boat appeared to be looking around casually as they headed south, but gave no sign that they were in any way suspicious of the man wearing sunglasses sitting by himself on the southeast side of the island of Giudecca.
Bronson waited until the boat was a couple of hundred yards distant. Then he climbed casually down the steps into his craft and started the outboard engine, which immediately rumbled into life. He released the
bowline, and swung the boat around to follow the other vessel, keeping his speed well down, to ensure that he wouldn’t get close enough to attract attention.
Then, as if linked by an invisible tether, the two powerboats, now almost three hundred yards apart, headed south across the Laguna Veneta, away from the city and toward the scatter of outlying islands.
Angela couldn’t help it. She squealed in fright and stepped backward, away from the horrendous apparition that had just appeared. But in seconds she’d recovered her composure. She was no stranger to old bones, and ancient corpses interested, rather than frightened, her. It was just the shock, and the unexpected appearance of the old body.
Marco had jumped back with a yell of fear, lashing out with his torch at the dangling corpse.
For a few seconds, neither of them moved, the beams of their flashlights shining across the open space toward the trapdoor, and illuminating the grisly body that had partially fallen through it.
“I didn’t expect that,” Marco said, brushing dust from his clothes.
“Nor did I.”
Angela moved forward and shone her flashlight upward. The skeleton—or what she could see of it—appeared
to be largely articulated, skin and desiccated muscle still clinging to the bones. It looked old.
“There’s a story,” Marco said, “that the mad doctor from the lunatic asylum didn’t jump from the tower, but was actually walled up here. Could that be him?”
Angela shook her head. “I don’t think so, because that was a hundred years later. The Latin text referred to a ‘guardian’ for the source document. I think this body was placed up here to act as a kind of warning to anyone who wanted to get into the space above us. I think this is what Carmelita meant.”
“You mean this corpse was once a member of her group?”
“Not necessarily. From what I’ve read, finding a dead body on this island wouldn’t be difficult. I think they just dug one up and positioned the corpse above the trapdoor before they closed it.”
It took a moment for the implication to hit them both.
“A plague victim?” Marco asked, his voice hushed as realization dawned.
“It’s possible,” Angela said. “We both know this island is covered in plague pits. But that doesn’t mean that the corpse is still infectious. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know how long the bacteria can survive once the host is dead.”
“But it could still be carrying the disease?”
Angela shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. But these days there are treatments available for the plague,” she added reassuringly.
She was silent for a moment before she voiced the
logical conclusion. “If I’m right—and the corpse was positioned there as a form of protection for the source document—my guess is that the people responsible probably thought the body was infected. That’s why Carmelita referred to a ‘guardian.’”
“So you think the document might be up there?” Marco asked, pointing upward.
“That would seem likely, and I really hope so.”
“Well, we’ll soon find out. Or you will, to be exact.”
There was an old broom, almost all the bristles long vanished, standing in one corner of the space. Marco picked it up, placed the head under the skull of the corpse and pushed upward. The skeleton vanished from sight, the dangling arm disappearing as quickly as it had materialized.
Angela shone her flashlight through the trapdoor. In the void above her, it was surprisingly light, the daylight spearing in through gaps between the tiles, and she could clearly see the pointed shape of the top of the tower.
She turned to Marco. “If you want me to climb up there,” she said, “you’re going to have to give me a hand.”
He nodded, put his flashlight down on the floor so that it illuminated that end of the platform, then walked across to Angela. Unceremoniously, he wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her straight up through the open trapdoor.
Angela used her arms to lever herself completely through the opening, and shone the flashlight around her. The skeletonized remains of the body lay just a couple
of feet away, but she ignored it completely. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was looking for but, if her deductions had been correct, the lost source document that Marco and his cronies were seeking had to be somewhere nearby.
The sides of the steeple sloped gently toward one another, to meet at a point perhaps twenty feet above her head: it was difficult to estimate the distance exactly. She doubted if the hiding place would be that inaccessible. It was more likely to be within reach of her at that moment, somewhere on the floor or the walls nearby, simply because of the difficulty of getting to the top of the steeple. Even maneuvering a ladder into the void would have been a virtual impossibility, and the sloping walls were unclimbable.
If the document—this scroll or codex or whatever it was—had survived, and was still hidden somewhere in the old bell tower, it had to be close by.
Angela moved the beam of the flashlight slowly around her in a complete circle. She was standing on what appeared to be a solid stone floor, pierced only by the open trapdoor. It seemed unlikely that there could be a cavity anywhere within it. She shifted her glance to the walls. Formed from solid timbers, with horizontal braces every few feet, they didn’t look too hopeful either. She ran the flashlight over the walls from floor level up to about eight feet, the maximum height that most men could reach, but saw nothing that looked like a box or other kind of container.
Then she stopped. Among the pinpricks of light filtering through the gaps between the tiles, she thought she’d spotted something else. A glint. Something shiny. Without altering her position, she moved the flashlight back in the opposite direction, the beam of light illuminating the opposite wall. As it passed over one of the vertical timbers, she spotted something reflective.
She strode over to the upright, her sense of excitement mounting. The glint she’d seen was slightly to the right of the old timber, on one of the horizontal braces about five feet off the ground. The odd thing was that there seemed to be nothing on the wood that could have reflected the flashlight. Then she saw a long split that ran along the length of the brace. She bent slightly forward to peer into the crack, and discovered that the object that had attracted her attention was actually inside the timber. That really didn’t make sense.
Angela looked at the top of the brace, and noticed two deep cuts running across it. Immediately after she saw those, she guessed the reason for the wide longitudinal crack: over the years, the wood must have dried out and warped slightly. Somebody had fashioned a kind of box out of the timber, cutting off the top section and cutting out a hollow underneath it.
She took hold of the top of the brace and lifted the wood, which came away quite easily. Lying in a shallow depression underneath was something metallic. It was that that had reflected the flashlight, the metal glinting in the darkness.
Angela reached up and lifted it down. It was a metal cylinder about ten inches long and three inches in diameter, one end sealed by a cap. Originally it had been painted dark brown, presumably to match the color of the wood, but much of the paint had flaked off.
The cylinder was too small to contain a codex or a book, but it was easily big enough for a scroll or a rolled length of parchment.
“What is it?” Marco asked. He had levered himself up so that his head and shoulders were inside the void, and he was watching her closely.
“A steel cylinder,” Angela replied. “Do you want me to open it?”
“No. Give it to me.”
She walked across the floor to the trapdoor and looked down at Marco. He’d dropped back to the floor below, his hand raised up ready to receive the object. Angela passed him the metal cylinder and then lowered herself back down through the trapdoor. By the time she’d dropped the last couple of feet, Marco had already twisted off the steel cap and was examining a length of parchment, a cruel smile on his face.