The Venice Conspiracy Read Free Page B

She pauses. ‘In fact, I’m not sure what you dress like.’ A small laugh – not unkind – confident and warm. ‘And I guess the big giveaway is that you’re drinking cappuccino in the afternoon and playing with it, with a spoon.’ She nods to the middle-aged guy across from them. ‘The Brits are probably the only Europeans unsophisticated enough to drink cappuccino after breakfast. So I have you down as a fellow American, and judging from the tan, West Coast.’
    Tom nods. ‘You’re on the money.’ He places her accent as Manhattan. Uptown. ‘What are you, some kind of cop?’
    She laughs again, deeper and longer this time, even nicer to hear. ‘Me? No. No way. I’m atravel writer. Freelance. Everything from Lonely Planet to Condé Nast.’ She leans across the tables. ‘Tina – Tina Ricci.’
    ‘Pleased to meet you, Tina.’ He shakes her hand.
    She looks into his warm brown eyes and waits for his move. Waits to be asked to his table. Waits for the follow-up line that she’s sure will come.
    It doesn’t. Tom says nothing. He grows awkward and looks away, his heart beating like he’s just gone three rounds back in the boxing ring in Compton. He can feel her still staring. The bell’s rung and, for the first time in his life, he’s stuck in his corner wondering what to do.

CHAPTER 5

    Present Day
    Venice
    The stranger looks different now.
    No longer the good Samaritan who helped her when she was lost in the labyrinth of shadowy streets.
    No longer a friendly local lending a helping hand to a confused and anxious teenager who’d stormed off after a row with her father.
    He’s dressed differently too. Long black robes and a sinister silver mask shielding his face.
    The girl grimaces as her bound and gagged body is dragged along the moss-slimed deck boards. He’s taking her to his sacred area. The libation altar. The spot where he will let her blood feed the water.
    He pushes the teenager’s head over the edge. Makes it dangle in that supernatural space between sky and earth. Limbo. The place where he’ll steal her soul.
    Only when she stares directly up at him does he begin.
    An incision by the left ear. A long red slice beneath her cute little chin.
    A popping noise in her slender throat.
    The gag in her mouth slackens.
    A fountain of red. Then a splutter. The greedy black water drinks until she’s bled dry.
    Indifferently, he drops her skull with a dull thump on the wooden decking, then unwraps the tools he needs to complete his bloody ritual.
    He kneels andprays.
    A doctrine handed down across the centuries. A verbal chain of unbreakable belief.
    Now there’s a whispering in his mind. A swelling choir of voices. Communal prayers of those who came and killed before him. The chants of the believers climax as he completes his ceremony.
    He wraps the sinner’s sticky corpse in sheets of black plastic then tucks it beneath the tarpaulin in the gondola and waits for night to come.
    Ribbons of milky moonlight finally flutter across the boards of the boathouse.
    A long, deathly nothingness hums in his ears and fizzes in his blood.
    He breathes it in. Absorbs its blackness. Feels it transform him.
    The unlit, black gondola glides invisibly through the city’s canals and out into the lagoon.
    The end is beginning.
    An end planned six hundred years before the birth of Christ.

CHAPTER 6

    The Following Day
    Venice
    The streets are cool, dark and deserted. It’s just after 5 a.m., and Tom’s already been up for an hour and is walking the city’s majestic bridges. Locals say that the best way to get to know Venice is to get lost, and Tom is at least halfway there. The most he’s aware of is that he’s meandering vaguely towards the Rialto. Maybe it’s years of rising early that shook him from his bed, or the fact that crossing time zones has messed up his body clock. Then again, it could be that he’s still trying to understand why yesterday he didn’t ask Tina –
was her full name Tina, or