Alex looked round and saw one of the men from the square standing at the corner, watching him. He realized he had outstayed his welcome—and no one had been that pleased to see him in the first place.
He decided to have one last try. “I’m looking for Scorpia,” he said.
The old woman stared at him as if she had been slapped in the face. She picked up the broom and her eyes darted over to the man watching them. It was lucky he hadn’t heard the exchange. He had sensed something was wrong, but he hadn’t moved. Even so, Alex knew it was time to go.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Thank you for your help.”
He made his way quickly up the canal. Yet another bridge loomed ahead of him and he crossed it. Although he didn’t know exactly why, he was grateful to leave the Widow’s Palace behind him.
As soon as he was out of sight, he stopped and considered what he had learnt. A boat with a silver scorpion had led him to a palace, which was owned by a beautiful and wealthy woman who didn’t smile. The palace was protected by a number of mean-looking men, and the moment he had mentioned the name Scorpia to a cleaning lady, he had suddenly become as welcome as the plague.
It wasn’t much to go on, but it was enough. There was going to be a masked ball tonight, a birthday party.
Important people had been invited. Alex wasn’t one of them, but already he had decided. He planned to be there all the same.
INVISIBLE SWORD
« ^ »
The full name of the woman who had entered the palazzo was Julia Charlotte Glenys Rothman. This was her home—or one of them, anyway. She also had a flat in New York, a mews house in London and a villa overlooking the Caribbean Sea and the white sands of Turtle Bay on the island of Tobago.
She walked along a softly lit corridor that ran the full length of the building from the jetty at one end to a private lift at the other, her high heels clicking on the terracotta tiles. There was not one servant in sight. She reached out and pressed the lift button, the white silk of her glove briefly touching silver, and the door opened.
It was a small lift, barely big enough for one person. But she lived alone. The servants used the stairs.
The lift took her to the third floor and opened directly onto a modern conference room with no carpet, no pictures on the walls, no ornamentation of any sort. Stranger still, although it should have offered some of the most beautiful views in the world, the room had been built without a single window. But if no one could look out, nor could anyone look in. It was safer that way. The lighting came from halogen lamps built into the walls, and the only furniture in the room was a long glass table surrounded by leather chairs. There was a door opposite the lift but it was locked. Two guards were standing on the other side, armed and ready to kill anyone who so much as approached in the next half-hour.
There were eight men waiting for her around the table. One was in his seventies, bald and wheezy with sore eyes, wearing a crumpled grey suit. The man sitting next to him was Chinese, while the man opposite, fair-haired, wearing an open-necked shirt, was from Australia. It was clear that the people congregated in this place came from many different parts of the world, but they had one thing in common: a stillness, a coldness even, that made the room as cheerful as a morgue. Not one of them greeted Mrs Rothman as she took her seat at the head of the table. Nor did they bother looking at the time. If she had arrived, it must be exactly one o’clock.
That was when the meeting was meant to begin.
“Good afternoon,” Mrs Rothman said.
A few heads nodded but nobody spoke. Greetings were a waste of words.
The nine people sitting around the table on the third floor of the Widow’s Palace made up the executive board of one of the most ruthless and successful criminal organizations in the world. The old man’s name was Max Grendel; the Chinese man was Dr Three. The Australian had no name at all. They had come to this room without windows to go over the final details of an operation that would, in just a few weeks, make them richer by the sum of one hundred million pounds.
The organization was called Scorpia.
It was a fanciful name, they all knew it, invented by someone who had probably read too much James Bond.
But they had to call themselves something, and in the end they had chosen a name drawn from their four main fields of activity.
Sabotage. Corruption. Intelligence. Assassination.
Scorpia. A name which worked in a surprising number of languages and which rolled off the tongue of anyone who might wish to employ them. Scorpia. Seven letters that were now on the database of every police force and security agency in the world.
The organization was formed in the early eighties, during the so-called Cold War, the secret war that had been fought for decades between the Soviet Union, China, America and Europe. Every government in the world had its own army of spies and assassins, all of them prepared to kill or to die for their country. What they weren’t prepared for, though, was to find themselves out of work; and twelve of them, seeing that the Cold War would soon be over, realized that was exactly what they would be. They wouldn’t be needed any more. It was time to go into business for themselves.
They came together one Sunday morning in Paris. Their first meeting took place at the Maison Berthillon, a famous ice-cream parlour on the Ile St-Louis, not far from Notre-Dame. They were all acquainted: they had tried to kill each other often enough. But now, in the pretty, wood-panelled room with its antique mirrors and lace curtains, and over twelve dishes of Berthillon’s famous wild strawberry ice cream, they discussed how they might work together and make themselves rich. At this meeting, Scorpia was born.
Since then it had flourished. Scorpia was all over the world. It had brought down two governments and arranged for a third to be unfairly elected. It had destroyed dozens of businesses, corrupted politicians and civil servants, engineered several major ecological disasters, and killed anyone who got in its way. It was now responsible for a tenth of the world’s terrorism, which it undertook on a contract basis. Scorpia liked to think of itself as the IBM of crime—but in fact, compared to Scorpia, IBM was strictly small-time.
Of the original twelve, only nine were left. One had died of cancer; two had been murdered. But that wasn’t a bad record after twenty years of violent crime. There had never been a single leader of Scorpia. All nine were equal partners but one executive was always assigned to each new project, working in alphabetical order.
