stopped there. Attached to one wall was a steel ladder, around which metal hoops had been bolted to prevent anyone climbing it from falling off. Like the spiral staircase, the metal looked old and rusty, and none too safe.
‘Keep going,’ Marco ordered again.
Angela swallowed hard. Heights didn’t particularly bother her, but she had a horror of falling, and even the metal hoops around the ladder weren’t much of a safe-guard against that happening. But she knew she had no option. She tucked both the torches into the waistband of her trousers, because she’d definitely need both hands free to make the climb, then reached up and began the ascent.
It wasn’t a long climb, perhaps twenty steps in all, and at the top she was faced with a wooden trapdoor set into the underside of a narrow platform. There was no bolt or catch, and the trapdoor swung open fairly easily as she pushed up on it. As it swung back against the wall with a dull thud, she took out one of the torches and shone the beam into the void above. Apart from an old broom, it appeared to be completely empty.
She reached up and placed both torches on the floor of the small platform, then heaved herself through the hole and stood up.
Angela could see that Marco was just beginning to make the same climb, and for a fleeting instant she debated dropping some heavy object down on to the top of his head, but then dismissed the thought. Even if she succeeded in hitting him, she would still have to contend with the men waiting on the ground floor down below, and if Marco didn’t reappear, she guessed that she wouldn’t leave the tower alive.
The platform was about eight feet long and three feet wide, and the walls appeared to be just as solid and featureless as those on the two platforms below her. As far she could see, there was nowhere here where anything of any size could be concealed.
Marco pulled himself through the trapdoor and stood next to her. ‘What now?’ he demanded. ‘Where is it?’
Angela shook her head in despair. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘I can only tell you what I translated from the Latin text. That didn’t give any indication of where the document might be hidden, apart from mentioning this tower, and even that was far from explicit.’ She looked around at the featureless walls of the platform. ‘If it was ever here, maybe somebody found it and removed it, years ago.’
‘I’ve already told you: if it had been found, we would know about it. It must be here somewhere.’
‘But there’s no possible hiding place here.’
Then a thought struck her and she walked back to the trapdoor and peered down the square-sided shaft up which they had both climbed. She turned back to Marco.
‘How high do you think we’ve climbed?’ she asked.
‘Why?’
‘Because the walls are square,’ she replied. ‘At the top of this tower is a tall steeple. If we’d climbed to the very top of the tower, the walls would meet at a point above our heads. There must still be a space somewhere above us.’
Marco glanced down through the trapdoor, then looked around and nodded. ‘So where’s the access?’ he asked.
The ceiling of the space they were standing in was only about seven feet above their heads. Angela didn’t reply, but simply picked up the broom and began gently tapping its handle against the ceiling. It didn’t take long to cover the small space, and in one corner this technique generated a hollow-sounding thud.
‘Here,’ she said, and shone the torch beam at the ceiling. Almost invisible in the grubby whitewash that covered the ceiling was the outline of an oblong shape. If they hadn’t been looking for it, there was no way they would ever have seen it. At one end of it was a small hole, inside which a few strands of frayed material could be seen poking out.
‘What’s that?’
‘I think it’s the end of a length of rope, probably used to pull the trapdoor closed from here. And then they cut the rest off to hide the fact there was an opening in the ceiling. Just hold this,’ Angela snapped, the spirit of the quest taking over, despite the circumstances. She passed the torch to Marco, who looked surprised, but did as she had told him and aimed the beam where she indicated.
She pressed her hands firmly against one end of the oblong mark and pushed upwards. There was a creaking and tearing sound, the noise of old dry wood moving against a solid object, and the section of ceiling lifted a fraction of an inch. She changed position, and pushed again, but the panel wouldn’t budge.
‘You hold the torch and I’ll lift it,’ Marco told her.
Angela took a few paces backwards and aimed the beam of her torch at the ceiling. Marco raised his arms and shoved against the wood. Nothing happened, so he stepped back a few inches and tried again, his face contorted from the effort. With a final snapping sound, the panel suddenly gave way and flew upwards.
A cloud of dust and small pieces of wood cascaded down over his head. Angela looked on in horror as a skeletal arm, held together within a carapace of leathery skin, swung down, the bony hand seeming almost to grab for Marco. Above his head, framed in the dark opening, she found herself staring into the sightless eye sockets of a partially fleshed human skull.
51
Bronson steered the powerboat out of the end of the Grand Canal and swung the bow around to the south. Directly in front of him, on the opposite side of the Canale della Giudecca, lay the long and narrow, almost banana- shaped, island of Giudecca, with the much smaller triangular island of San Giorgio Maggiore to the left.
If he was right, and the men were heading for the southern part of the lagoon, a good place to wait for them to pass would be near the end of Giudecca. He stopped his turn and aimed for the Canale della Grazia which separated the two islands in front of him. Once he’d motored through the gap, he steered the boat over to the right, stopping alongside the southern coast of the island just below Campiello Campalto.
Like almost everywhere else in Venice, the island of Giudecca was bordered not by a wall but by a level walkway perched only two or three feet above the surface of the virtually tide-less Adriatic. The edge of the walkway was interrupted by sets of shallow steps to allow people to disembark from boats, and by substantial lengths of timber driven vertically down into the seabed to act as mooring posts. A line of old-fashioned metal streetlamps marked the seaward side of the walkway, and on the opposite side of it were the front walls and doors of the houses and shops.
Several powerboats and launches were already secured alongside the walkway, but Bronson had no trouble finding a vacant mooring post. He looped the bow line of the boat around it and secured it with a quick-release knot, so that he would be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. He shut down the outboard motor to conserve fuel, and checked to see how much he had left. It looked like about half a tank, which he hoped would be enough.
Then he pulled his binoculars out of his jacket pocket and climbed up on to 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
