The Venice Conspiracy (45 page)

‘Ha ha, very funny. Apparently it’s a crude variation of the Caesar Cipher.’

‘Caesar?’

‘Yes, all the way back to old Julius himself. Apparently he used to write battle messages in a simple code whereby the letter he put down was represented by a different letter or number. The letter A, for example, would be represented by a C – that would be a two-shift cipher.’

Vito runs a finger across the code and the translation made by the analysts. ‘But these aren’t letters, they’re numerals.’

‘I know,’ says Valentina. ‘Bale has put his own twist on it. He’s given each
letter its numeric equivalent in the alphabet then applied the classic Caesar cipher of two, so A is not represented by a 1, it’s represented by a 3, then he’s converted the 3 into the Roman numeral III.’

Vito now appreciates its simplicity. ‘And E itself is not a 5, it’s 5 plus 2, which in Roman numerals equals VII.’

‘Exactly.’

A rap on the door turns their heads.

Nuncio di Alberto enters, looking almost as pleased as Valentina has been. ‘Mario Fabianelli may well have been telling the truth – it’s possible that he doesn’t know anything about that company of his in the Cayman Islands, or the purchase of the artefact.’

‘How so?’ asks Vito.

‘Well, the forgery of his name on the company documents is very good – but just not good enough. Handwriting experts have now examined it and compared it to samples of documents we took from the billionaire’s home. It doesn’t match.’

‘It doesn’t? They’re sure?’

‘
Positive
. And there’s more. While Fabianelli didn’t know about the company or the purchase, his PA certainly did.’ Nuncio flashes his own piece of paper. ‘This is a copy of the insurance Mera Teale took out on the artefact, to the value of two million dollars. Teale always signed for insurance cover on all Mario’s art, so there was no need for her to forge anything. In fact, in this case, it would look peculiar if anyone but her had signed.’

‘
Bene
. This is real progress, but we still have no sightings of her, the lawyer Ancelotti or Tom.’ Vito looks hopefully at Nuncio.

‘I have heard nothing new. Rocco and Francesca told me they’d checked again with the Polizia – nothing there either.’

‘Tom can’t have just vanished from the earth,’ says Valentina.

‘He can,’ says Vito ominously, ‘if he’s already dead.’

They’ve jacked
enough drugs into Tom’s veins to stock a pharmacy.

But they’ve not done it properly. His body’s rejected the increased dosage and he’s vomited back a lot of the chemicals. As a result, the sedative is wearing off much quicker than before.

He’s still groggy, but far more aware of things.

His throat is viciously sore. His stomach growls like a frightened dog. His muscles cramp and ache. Behind the bandage, it feels as though burning grit has been glued to his pupils and lids.

Apart from that, he’s fine.

The thought almost makes him laugh. Fine.
Just fine
. No doubt only hours from being sacrificially murdered, but
just fine
. He puts his remarkable calmness down to the lingering effects of the sedative. A blessing in disguise.

Lying on his back has given him plenty of thinking time. The way he figures it, Lars Bale has worldwide followers who are ready to mark his execution with a spree of violence that would have Satan himself dancing with joy.

It’s going to be bloody.

So spectacularly gruesome that Bale will no doubt become even more infamous in death than he is in life.

A black saint.

Tom hears a key turn in the lock.

Decision time.

Is he strong enough?

Can he afford to wait any longer?

Does he have a choice?

The door swings open.

Tom hears it clunk shut. Someone’s playing it safe.

A brief pause.

The key goes in the lock from inside his room.

Click-click closed. They’re not taking any chances.

He hears a man cough, clear his throat a couple of times. Now start walking.

Clit-clat, clit-clat.

A single series of footsteps. One
man alone.

Tom’s heart races. He must decide.

Clit-clat, clit-clat.

Four more steps.

The jailer is just two steps away from him. If he remembers correctly, it’s one step forward and to the left of him.

Clit-clat.

Tom waits a beat. Hears a click of metal and glass next to him.

A spike of more sedatives in a steel bowl close by.

One more second and he’ll be jabbed again.

Two hundred sit-ups a day for fifteen years finally counts for something.

Tom sits bolt upright.

His bandaged head smashes into something hard.

A dull moan of pain from in front of him. He’s butted the man’s face, he’s sure of it.

Tom follows the noise. Falls to his left. Tumbles from the bed. One knee smashes on the floor, the other into the lower torso of whoever lies the other side of him.

His limbs feel like rubber and his hands are still in plastic restraints.

He launches another head butt.

Useless.

His skull crashes into the top of the jailer’s chest.

A fist slams into Tom’s temple. Adrenalin shoots through his body.

It’s what he needs. It neutralises the sedative. His fingers tingle, his senses sharpen.

Another blow thuds into his ear, makes it ring like crazy.

Tom daren’t kneel up, the guy will wriggle free and be gone.

He smashes his cuffed hands in an uppercut to where he guesses the guy’s balls are.

Bingo! Air whooshes out of a mouth somewhere above him.

Tom powers more double-handed blows between his kidnapper’s legs. Ruthless raw energy that leaves the guy creased up and choking for air. He’s immobilised. But he’s going to recover.

Kill him, Tom.

You know you have to.

You know you want to.

Tom hesitates.

The voices in his head make sense.
Kill or be killed.
But then demons
always make sense, it’s their stock in trade.

The injured jailer begins to stir. He’s going to shout for help.

Tom instinctively follows the noise and leans his right forearm across the man’s windpipe. If he was going to shout, he won’t now. He kicks and bucks like a wild animal, but Tom presses down hard. A hundred and eighty pounds hard.

The kicking stops.

Tom shifts his arm and rolls off him. His head cracks the floor, but he knows he has no time to let the pain register or to draw breath. He lifts his cuffed hands. Gets his thumbs under the bandages across his face and pulls upwards. It’s a real struggle to work them off. They rip at his mouth, snag and tear at his nose. Finally, they unravel like the skin of a cotton onion.

Tom still can’t see.

White light blinds him. Pain worse than a punch. He shifts on to his side, angles his head away from the brightness and towards the floor.

Better.

He’s not blind, just painfully sensitive to light.

The room is windowless. The burning light is from an overhead strip. So high he can’t hear it buzz.

In less than a second Tom takes in the rest of the room.

Bare brick. Stone floors with cracked tiles. One heavy door with no window and just a single lock.

It looks like an old hospital ward.

Small and dingy. Musty. Mould on the bottom part of the room. Paint and plaster peeling from damp and cracked walls.

His sight is returning.

The jailer on the floor coughs for air and moves his legs.

Tom turns towards him. The guy’s no giant, but he’s well-built enough to have thought he could have injected the drug into Tom without help.

The sedative.

Tom grabs the needle from its steel bowl and jabs it straight into the prostrate man’s neck. Squirts the whole chamber into his bloodstream.

Now he can relax.

The jailer’s out for the count, and his body is a treasure chest – a belt, a Swiss Army knife – and the most valuable trinket of all, a cellphone.

He works the blade open and suffers a few close misses with his wrist veins as he saws through the plastic cuff ties. He rubs blood and feeling back into his wrists and grabs the cellphone. Quickly punches in Valentina’s number.

No signal!

Damn!

He’s going to
have to leave the room. Make a run for it.

Tom wraps the man’s belt around his waist and notices for the first time what they’ve dressed him in.

A sort of gown. Long. Sleeveless. Black.

A robe of some kind.

Now he gets it.

A sacrificial robe.

Today is the day. The day they plan to kill him.

The walls of the incident room next to Vito Carvalho’s office are plastered with prints of Bale’s final painting. The blow-ups come in every shape and size – from as big as a boy-band poster in a young girl’s bedroom to as small as a postage stamp. There’s not a minute when someone on the task force isn’t staring at them, trying to make an inspired guess as to what messages and threats are hidden in the brushstrokes.

Three whiteboards have also been set up, each one dedicated to a different tablet. Almost everyone can now draw a netsvis, a horned devil or a couple lying together with a baby at their feet. In capital letters the word VENICE has been printed out on a giant sheet and pinned above the boards, with its coded Roman numerals running beneath.

Vito’s working on a strategy of best guesses. The cubist drawings – the ones Gloria Cucchi suggested were titans of industry, building a city, have prompted him to raise extra security around banks and finance houses. Bale’s impressionistic waterfall of blood and his attempt at Canaletto’s view of the Canal Grande have resulted in him deploying extra boat patrols throughout the whole of Venice’s canal system. Right now, he’s stretched the Carabinieri’s resources to their limits.

But of course, all the interpretations could be wrong. And the fear of that haunts every passing second. So much so, that Vito has a team of officers scouring the web, trying desperately to find works of painters – new or old – that
might give further clues to anything shown in Bale’s work.

He and Valentina sit in the far corner of the room, a stack of papers and bottles of water in front of them, a hundred operational actions and hopes behind them.

‘We know it’s today, and we know it’s going to be some kind of attack on Venice,’ says the major.

‘We know it will probably involve Teale and Ancelotti,’ adds Valentina.

‘And Tom.’

She flinches. ‘
And
Tom.’

‘If it’s local, it will be one of the remote islands, perhaps underground and out of sight.’

‘Maybe in an old mansion?’

‘That takes us back to Fabianelli’s place.’ Vito points across the room to a blow-up of the billionaire’s mansion. ‘And we’ve now flipped that place more times than a crêpe.’

Francesca Totti joins them, looking exhausted.

‘And you thought undercover work was tiring,’ says Vito with a smile. ‘Welcome to the weary world of homicide.’

Francesca tries to smile. She has a printout in her hands. ‘A message from the FBI in California for Lieutenant Morassi: San Quentin finally came up with IDs on
all
Bale’s visitors. There are several photo matches with Mera Teale, though she used a different name for the visitor’s pass.’

‘What was it?’ asks Valentina excitedly.

‘Lourdes di Natas.’ Francesca scrapes a long strand of unwashed hair off her face and fleetingly dreams of a hot shower. ‘She used a false driver’s licence tied to an address that doesn’t exist. Made three visits, starting just five years ago.’

‘Di Natas sounds Hispanic,’ observes Valentina. ‘She probably guessed the system would be filled with Latinos and would go unnoticed.’

‘Don’t be racist,’ says Vito. ‘Anyway, it’s not Hispanic. Lourdes is an allusion to Lord, and also to both the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and a place in France noted for its apparitions. As for “Natas”
–
well, our girl Mera really is having some fun at everyone’s expense –
Natas
is the reverse of the word
Satan
.’

Valentina gets up and paces out of frustration. ‘It’s all a game, isn’t it? Just one sick game that these animals are playing on us.’ She scrubs her hands through her hair out of anger. ‘God, this case is driving me crazy.’

‘I know how you feel,’ says Vito, looking up from his chair. ‘If I had any hair, I’d probably do the same.’

She manages a
laugh. So too does Francesca.

One of the search-team officers shouts from behind his computer. ‘Major! Major, please look at this!’

Vito walks to the terminal, closely followed by his female lieutenants.

A young officer with bloodshot eyes points at his screen. ‘It is Salto Angel – Angel Falls in Venezuela.’

‘So?’ says Vito, not quite on the same wavelength.

Officer Bloodshot points to a blow-up on the wall. ‘It is in the painting.’

Vito frowns and squints at Bale’s waterfall. ‘Similar. Certainly similar.’

Valentina reads from the computer. ‘Salto Angel is in Venezuela and is the tallest waterfall in the world.’

‘Venezuela?’ queries Francesca.

‘The villages there, the
palafitos
,’ says Vito, suddenly starting to see the connection, ‘are built over water, just like in Venice. They made the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci think of Venezia. He took the Italian
Venez
and added the Spanish suffix
zuola
– meaning little – and named the place Venezuola.’

‘So what does it mean?’ asks Valentina, looking up at the painting. ‘Something is going to happen
there
instead of
here
?’

‘Or both? There
as well
as here,’ adds Francesca.

Vito’s back in front of the painting. Staring hard into the eddy of symbols and codes. ‘Three tablets. We now have two locations, both linked to Venice and a waterfall of blood. There’s going to be a third location in here, somewhere. Now, where the hell is it?’