The Venice Conspiracy (46 page)

Tom’s legs wobble and splay like a deer on ice.

He strips the guard and puts on his clothes. The shoes are too tight to get on, so he goes barefoot.

He locks the door of his cell behind him. Heads down a corridor of old glazed brick and broken floor tiles that instantly cut his feet. Slithers along the wall, partly for support, partly to avoid the glare of overhead strips. His eyes are still stinging. Vision blurred by haloes of intense whiteness.

There’s a
door to his left. Identical to his.

Another ward.

He slips past and slides along the next wall.

Stops.

The door was
closed.

Why?

He can’t help it. He goes back. If the door is
locked
, then maybe someone else is being held inside. Someone due to suffer the same fate as him.

He hopes the sliver of steel in his hands is a master key.

He pushes it into the lock.

It doesn’t turn.

He wriggles it deeper and tries again.

Chambers click and hidden metal teeth finally clack into play.

Tom cautiously pushes the door open.

The room is identical to his. Even smells the same. There’s a rough metal hospital bed, jacked high. On it is a body.

Unconscious or asleep?

His heart thumps as he edges closer.

Tina.

The plump, moist lips he once kissed are dry and scabbed. Her vibrant eyes are rimmed with black bruising and are crusted shut. He shakes her.

Nothing.

Dead?

He bends close. Hears her breathe.

Thank God.

Tom knows he doesn’t have the strength to carry her. There’s no choice but to leave. Leave, get help and come back.

He glances down at the cellphone he took from the guard.

Still no signal.

He moves quickly. Locks the door again from the outside. Prays no one is coming as he slips back down the corridor.

Seeing Tina has given him energy. Determination. Hope.

Maybe there’s more to her betrayal than he thought. An explanation.

He turns right at the bottom.

Another long corridor opens before him. His spirit sinks.

An iron gate.

Slap bang in the middle of his escape route is an iron, ceiling-to-floor, wall-to-wall gate. There’s no chance his key will fit it. He can tell without even trying that the lock is much bigger.

There’s a door on the wall on the right-hand side just metres away. He has
no option but to go for it.

Five paces and he’s there.

It’s not locked.

He shuts the door behind him. Quickly checks the phone again.

Still
no signal.

The room is pale green, cobwebbed and bare. Three deep wooden shelves run around the walls. In years gone by it must have been a storage area of some kind. There’s a small window but it’s barred from the outside. He can see trees through the dirt.

Tom figures he’s in an old storeroom, or laundry, maybe two floors up. A place for dumping dirty bedding and distributing new sheets and towels.

A glance beneath the bottom shelf confirms his suspicions.

A laundry hatch.

He doesn’t know where it goes, or whether he’ll be able to fit in it.

The cover is pinned with nails. Big ones.

He hunkers down beneath the shelf and tries to pull a corner off, then remembers the Swiss Army knife he took from the guard. The blade is sharp enough to whittle out wood around a nail head. The slide-out screwdriver strong enough to get a little leverage.

It’s a struggle.

But he gets there. The nail in the top corner comes away. He forces two, three fingers behind and tugs.

Slowly the plywood bends, then splits diagonally across the middle. Tom tosses the broken part and pulls on the pinned remains. Splinters stick into his skin. Jagged edges cut his flesh, but he keeps straining.

He falls backwards as it comes away.

Voices outside. The clunk of the iron gate. Footsteps.

A black hole faces him.

Unhesitatingly, Tom slips into it. Unaware of where it goes, or whether he’s going to be able to get all the way through and reach the bottom.

The drop is
not at all
what he imagined.

It’s sheer.

Deep.

Over in seconds.

What saves him from serious injury is that the laundry chute is as securely nailed at the bottom as it was at the top.

His six-foot-three-inch frame hits the board in total blackness. Jars both his ankles and knees but breaks his fall.

The backs of his thighs are ripped
raw by the splintered wood as he tumbles out of the hole and drops three feet into a crunching heap on the ground.

Tom lies still for a second. Takes stock of the damage.

Everything
hurts.

Nothing has escaped either the jolt of the surprise impact or the brutal scraping of the splintered and jagged wood.

He gets to his feet. Hobbles. Feels a burning in his right ankle. Twisted. Sprained. But not broken.

His eyesight is still blurred. Hazy, but better.

The room is big and open. Two windows. Both barred – just like the ones in the room where he’d been held.

At the far end – a door. Closed. Maybe locked. Maybe not.

He looks for the cellphone. It dropped from his hand when he fell through the chute. He hopes it’s not broken.

He bends down and sees straight away –

– a signal!

He grabs it and hits Valentina’s number.

Misdial!

He tries to clear it and start again.

The screen floods with a menu in Italian offering a camera, games, text messaging, calendar and a dozen other things that he doesn’t want. He struggles to get back to just the dial function.

An internet browser pops up.

Internet on a damned phone!

He finally dials Valentina.

She answers within three rings.

‘
Pronto
.’ Her voice is cautious, no doubt because of the unrecognised number on her display.

‘Valentina, it’s Tom.’

‘Tom?’

‘I don’t have long. I don’t even know where I am. I’ve been drugged and held hostage.’

‘Wait, Tom! Wait!’ She looks across the office to Francesca. ‘Get a trace on this call. Quick! It’s from a cell. Get a GPS lock on it straight away.’

A noise outside the room makes him back into the corner.

Tom hears voices now. He knows they’re closing in on him. He can’t talk any longer.

He places the phone on the floor to free his hands, but leaves the call connected.

The door bursts
open.

Two people rush in.

He recognises one of them straight away. The one pointing a gun straight at his head.

Mera Teale is dressed in full Satanic robes.

Not even Christian Lacroix could have designed a garment more sensuous than her silver-lined black alba. Though the Glock in her hand seems an excessive fashion accessory. Tom notes it’s in her left hand. For a split second he remembers Carvalho’s description in the morgue of how Monica had probably been killed by a left-handed person.

A male acolyte steps towards Tom. ‘Hold out your hands.’

Eyes glued to the gun, he does as demanded.

The black-hooded disciple loops a sturdy plastic tie around Tom’s wrists and begins to thread the end into the locking hoop.

It provides the split-second distraction that Tom needs. He breaks his hands apart, grabs the guy’s arm and swings him like an Olympic hammer towards Teale.

There’s a deafening roar.

Blood splatters Tom’s face. The window behind him splinters.

Teale’s shot has gone straight through the acolyte’s chest.

Tom drops to the ground. Sweeps a left-footed kick at the side of her knee.

She goes down like a snapped cane.

The gun drops free. He grabs it and glances at the barred window. Maybe, just maybe, he can use his weight and force his way through.

There’s no hesitation in his run. He hits the centre of the window with a deafening crash. The old wooden frame buckles. The central iron bar slams into his shoulder and pain roars through the side of his head.

The strength of his leap and the weight of his body have broken the top of the bar free from the concrete lintel and it’s given way, but the bottom of the bar has held firm.

He’s stuck there.

Stranded.

Half in, half out
of the window.

He glances back. Two other black-caped figures are now in the room and they have guns.

Tom raises Teale’s Glock and pulls the trigger.

His shots are wide and wild. They zing across the walls but don’t hit anyone. But they buy him enough time to twist around on the iron bar and heave his weight down on the metal.

It jerks and bends, then finally gives way.

He tumbles backwards and hits the ground with a thud that thumps the wind out of him.

Glass is stuck in his face. His shoulder is ripped and bleeding.

And he’s dropped the gun.

The grass around him is long and time to search dangerously short.

He has no choice but to leave it.

Getting a GPS check on Tom’s whereabouts seems to take an age. These things always do. Only in films do techies work at warp-speed 9. In real life, time drags like a leg with a bullet in it.

Vito stays in the incident room while Valentina, Rocco and Nuncio finally get on the move. He’s already mobilising troops and issuing weapons by the time Francesca Totti gets a fix on Tom’s position.

‘
Lazzaretto Vecchio
?’ Vito repeats it like it’s a curse. ‘And all this time we’ve been so focused on Isola Mario. I should punch myself.’

Valentina can still hear him mumbling as her Carabinieri patrol boat kicks up a break of white water and roars away from its berth. Despite Tom’s call for help part of her mind is preoccupied with Bale’s painting.

Every brushstroke is branded into her memory.

The use of Roman numerals to spell out the word Venice over all three sections of the canvas is what’s worrying her. She and Vito are both sure it means three locations – including Venice itself – are going to bear the brunt of whatever evil Bale
has been orchestrating. Their best guess is that Venezuela is the second target, but what about the third?

The speedboat pulls left and Valentina lurches violently to her right. The shock seems to do her good. Like a cure for hiccups. Her disparate thoughts all come together and she comes up with a third location –
Muscle Beach, Venice
– the Californian hotspot where bodybuilders work out and pose. She ducks low from the wind and engine noise, cups her hand over the cellphone and calls it in. ‘Major, the third target is not here, it’s California – I’m sure of it. Muscle Beach, Venice. That’s why those big cubes are there on Bale’s painting, they’re building giant muscle, not giant buildings.’

‘Got it!’ confirms Vito Carvalho, feeling a surge of adrenalin. He puts the phone down and hands out the instruction to call the FBI. With luck they’ll safely shift everyone from the sands of Venice Beach. The Venezuelan government has already been alerted and they’ve assured him the area around Angel Falls is being evacuated. Back home, he has every available man and woman out on the streets and waterways searching for anything suspicious. Collectively, law-enforcement offices across the world are winning the battle against Bale. But maybe too slowly.

Vito glances at his watch.

Almost midday.

Coming up to 3 a.m. in California.

A hundred and eighty minutes until Lars Bale is executed.

Just three hours to find out if they’ve all been panicking unnecessarily, or if their worst nightmares are about to come true.

Lazzaretto Vecchio, Venice

Tom can barely see.

The sun is so dazzlingly fierce he can’t look up from the ground. His ankle is swelling fast and buckles every time he tries to sprint.

He hobbles away from the building and heads as quickly as possible into the forest
ahead. He knows he can’t outrun them, so he keeps altering direction, hoping to throw them off his scent.

Water!

A vast stretch of water in front of him. He’s run out of anywhere to go. The lagoon stretches as far as he can see. There’s a small boat by the shore, but he doesn’t fancy his chances of being caught in it and stranded in the open water.

Tom heads off at another angle. Darts into a thicket of straw-thin cypress trees so tall they look as if they’re sucking sunlight from the sky. He grits his teeth and hobbles quickly towards the biggest one he can see.

He gets a grip on a lower branch and manages to pull himself up into the layers of foliage.

It’s a real giant. Sturdy branches shoot off all over the place and he’s soon so high he can barely see the ground.

Across the lagoon in a shimmering haze he sees gondolas ploughing their channels, and distant domes of ancient buildings. A mile out from the shoreline waves are broken white by the bows of speeding Carabinieri patrol boats. The cavalry is coming!

A branch to one side of him cracks.

Then he hears the gunshot.

They know where he is.

Tom climbs higher.

A flash of Greek mythology enters his mind – the cypress was symbolic of death, grief and mourning. Come to think of it, even the Romans and Muslims planted them by graves. Just his luck to pick one to hide in.

Another shot rings out.

Buries itself into the trunk of the tree at his feet.

They’re close.
Too
close for comfort.

A third bullet rips up through the dense green canopy. A branch to his left collapses. They’re adjusting their aim. It’s only a matter of time before someone hits him.

Tom swings a hundred and eighty degrees around the trunk of the tree. He glimpses the Carabinieri landing on the island. Tiny ants swarming towards the building where he was held. He pulls himself into the final branches of the cypress and sees his prison clearly now. They had him in some kind of hospital. Run-down, derelict. To the side of the buildings is a stack of what looks like a kids’ bonfire.