For the moment, Lang forgot him as the sleek little wooden speedboat from the hotel nudged its way between gondolas and other craft.
Helping Gurt and Lang aboard, the driver began, “I understand you want a canal tour, yes?”
They did.
“We start here, the Rio del Palazzo, the Canal of the Palace, which, as you can see, runs along the back, or eastern side, of the Doge’s Palace. We take this canal, join some of the smaller ones and we come out on the Grand Canal to come back here.”
Gurt’s elbow gave Lang a sharp nudge as she whispered, “Don’t look so bored! You might learn something on this tour of the canals of Venice.”
The man spoke excellent English as he continued, pointing to an enclosed bridge. “This is the Bridge of Sighs. It connected the Doge’s Palace, which was where criminal court was held, with the prison. The bridge takes its name from the sighs of prisoners as they were led to trial. Now, if you look to your left…”
Lang was more concerned about the motorboat that had entered the canal behind them, a fiberglass Italian-made Riva. The craft’s slow speed matched their own, bow level rather than raised as would be the case on open water. He could see two men on board, but the distance was too great to make out facial features.
What made him think he knew what one of them looked like?
The hotel’s boat turned left onto a canal not fifteen feet wide. Even at their slow speed, a sluggish wake washed over steps to doors less than a foot above the water. The houses themselves formed the banks of the canal. The height of the reddish ochre buildings, three to four stories, provided perpetual twilight. What Lang noticed most, though, was that this hundred-, hundred-and-a-half-yard stretch of canal was empty of any other craft.
As though his mind had been read, the roar of throttles pushed forward echoed from plaster facades more used to the songs of boatmen and the oohs and aahs of tourists.
Lang and Gurt’s guide turned to look over his shoulder. “He crazy! Not allowed to make wake here!”
Its bow pointed well above the water now, the Riva was closing the distance between them quickly.
“Never mind the wake,” Lang shouted. “Get us the hell out of here!”
“But signor…”
Lang didn’t have time for a debate. Shoving the astonished boatman aside, he leaned over the control panel and slammed both throttles forward as far as they would go. It was as if the small craft had been shoved by a giant hand. The Cris-Craft look-alike stood on its stern like a rearing horse as twin props dug into the water. A quick look behind him showed Gurt clutching the starboard gunwale for all she was worth. More gratifying, the rate at which the following craft was gaining was diminishing rapidly.
The man from the hotel wasn’t going to give up so easily. He was trying to wrestle the wheel from Lang when a staccato burst of gunfire reverberated against the surrounding buildings, and splinters of what had been the boat’s control panel whined past Lang’s face.
Terrified, the guide let go of the wheel, off balance just long enough for Lang to hit his legs with a jerk of the hip that sent him flying into the canal. Lang had a split-second view of a mouth open in a terrified scream he could not hear above the motors’ roar before the man hit the water.
Another fusillade of automatic-weapon fire stitched across the boat’s stern. Up ahead was a right-angle turn into another canal, one even more narrow. Lang took it at full speed, the boat heeled over so steeply that the left gunwale seemed to scrape the water’s surface.
Squarely in front was a gondola, black, curved bow and stern and taking up the middle of the waterway.
Gurt saw it, too, and squeezed her eyes shut, yelling, “Look out!”
Lang cut savagely to the right, missing the gondola by inches, though it did the gondolier little good. Standing on a raised platform at the stern of the flat-bottomed craft designed for shallow and placid waters, holding onto nothing but a single long oar, the wake of the speeding craft that all but swamped it rolled it with a violence that sent him into the canal also.
Dividing his time between looking ahead for more canal traffic and keeping track of the pursuing craft, Lang saw it also dodge the gondola, this time sending both of its passengers, a white-haired man and woman, splashing into the water.
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
