by James Becker
65
The scream galvanized Bronson. It was almost feral in its intensity, a primeval howl of anguish and fear, the sound of a woman pushed to her breaking point. And somehow, he simply knew it was Angela. He hadn’t been able to recognize her through the binoculars, but the instant he heard the piercing scream he knew exactly where she was.
If he’d needed any confirmation, what happened next supplied it. There was a confused babble of voices, too far away for him even to tell what language they were speaking, and then he saw a faint but distinct blue flash, and the woman just seemed to collapse on to the path.
Bronson knew immediately what had happened to her: they’d used a taser. Then he looked on in horror as they unceremoniously dragged her into the ruined building behind the house.
For a few moments, he considered his options, limited though they were. He didn’t know how many people were on the island, but he’d already seen the two men with the woman he was sure was Angela, and at least four men had arrived in the launch, so he was severely outnumbered. He remembered the old Clint Eastwood line: ‘the three of us – that’s me, Smith and Wesson’; but even with the Browning Hi-Power as a force multiplier, he was still unsure if he could take on that many people, some of whom must be armed.
He definitely needed back-up. He took out his mobile phone and dialled the number Bianchi had given him at the police station in San Marco. His call was answered in a few seconds, but not by the inspector, who was now off duty. For a moment, Bronson considered trying to persuade the duty-sergeant to send a couple of boatloads of armed police out to the island, but after the fiasco of the earlier ‘investigation’, he doubted if he would be taken seriously. He really needed to speak to Bianchi himself.
‘I’ve found my wife,’ Bronson said, ‘and I need urgent help to rescue her. It’s essential that I speak with Inspector Bianchi as soon as possible. Can you please give me his mobile number?’
Bronson could almost hear the thought processes of the sergeant at the other end of the line, as he weighed up the possible consequences of giving a civilian – Bronson – Inspector Bianchi’s mobile number, with the even more dire consequences of not giving him the number if it turned out that Bronson really had located the kidnappers and the woman then died.
‘Very well,’ the sergeant said. ‘But if anyone asks, you got his number from the phone book, not from me. You understand?’
‘Whatever you want,’ Bronson agreed, and wrote down the number in his notebook, using the light from the mobile phone’s screen to see what he was doing.
Still worried sick about Angela, he scanned the island again through the binoculars: the two men were walking back from the ruins. Then he heard the sound of another boat approaching, and looked over to his left. He could just about make out a launch – it looked slightly smaller than the other boat – heading for the island, and a couple of minutes later that boat, too, edged its way slowly into the inlet and stopped beside the jetty. Even more people were arriving, increasing the odds against Bronson still further.
He dialled the number he’d written down, pressed the button to complete the call and lifted the phone to his ear. He heard the ringing tone, and simultaneously the shrill sound of a mobile phone rang out over the lagoon. Bronson couldn’t believe what he saw next: one of the figures walking from the jetty towards the house stopped and pulled a phone from his pocket. Bianchi was himself a member of the group that had abducted Angela.
66
‘Yes, Signor Bronson?’ Bianchi asked, his tone resigned. ‘What do you want now?’
Obviously the inspector had recognized Bronson’s mobile number or had stored it in his contacts list.
The one thing that Bronson wasn’t going to do, now that he knew of Bianchi’s involvement with the gang, was to reveal anything of what he knew. If the inspector realized that Bronson was only about a hundred yards away, he was sure that he’d be dead within minutes. They’d send out half a dozen men in a couple of boats, and they’d run him down in the dark and shoot him.
‘I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad moment, Inspector,’ Bronson asked.
‘Not really,’ Bianchi replied smoothly. ‘I’m just about to sit down to dinner with my family.’
A blatant lie, obviously, as Bronson could see the man through his binoculars, standing on the path right in front of him.
‘I just wondered if you had any more news.’
‘No, I’m afraid not. Let me assure you again that the moment I learn anything I will tell you. Now, good evening, Signor Bronson.’
Bronson kept his eyes fixed on the distant figure, and saw the man snap his phone closed. That was the final confirmation – if any was needed – that it really was Bianchi who was standing on the island in front of him.
Bronson nodded to himself. That also explained something else. When he’d told the inspector about the book Angela had recovered from the desecrated tomb on the Island of the Dead, and described the subsequent burglary at their hotel, Bianchi hadn’t asked how the burglars had known where to look for the diary. The only people who knew that Bronson and Angela had been in the graveyard that night, and who also knew where they were staying in Venice, were the two carabinieri officers. Bianchi had not asked the obvious question, because he’d already known the answer. Somebody in the Venetian police force – most likely Bianchi himself – must have given the information to the men on the island.
Bronson knew then that he was entirely on his own.
Pulling the Browning from his waistband, he removed the magazine and, working by feel, ejected all the cartridges from it. He repeated the process with the spare magazines he’d taken from the man in the graveyard on the Island of San Michele, and then carefully reloaded each magazine again. It was a technique he’d learned in the Army. Stoppages – the pistol jamming – were far more likely if the magazine had been left loaded for some time. Emptying it and then refilling it helped avoid the problem. And the one thing he could not afford was the possibility that the weapon would jam.
Until that point, Bronson had been keeping the pistol purely for his own protection. But venturing on to that island meant he was taking the fight directly into the enemy’s camp, and for that he needed all the help he could get. That included carrying the pistol in its holster instead of simply stuffed into his waistband, where it might snag on his belt or shirt.
Bronson clipped on both the holster and the magazine pouch, on the right- and left-hand sides respectively of his belt, and then did it up again. The pouch held the two magazines slightly separated so that each of them could be grasped easily. He inserted the magazines so that they faced in the same direction, with the forward lip pointing behind him, so that when he pulled out one of the magazines to reload the weapon, it would be the right way round to slide into the butt of the Browning. A fast and fumble-free magazine change could make the difference between life and death in a close-combat situation.
He loaded the last magazine into the Browning, pulled back the slide to chamber the first cartridge and ensured that the safety catch was on. Cocking any semi-automatic pistol makes a very distinctive sound, and he didn’t want to risk doing it on the island – anybody hearing it would know immediately what it was. He slid the Browning into the holster, and ensured it was held firmly. Then he switched off his mobile phone and slid it into his pocket.
His preparations complete, Bronson climbed over the side of the boat on to the swampy vegetation, and pushed the vessel back into the water so that it floated free, then he stepped back on board.
67
Angela’s eyes flickered open and she looked around her. Or rather, she tried to, because wherever she looked she could see absolutely nothing. Impenetrable, Stygian blackness surrounded her. For a moment, she wondered if she was actually blindfolded, if somebody had put something over her head or her eyes to block out the light. She lifted her right hand to her face and felt her cheeks and eyelids and mouth, and realized that wasn’t the case.
; She sucked in a deep breath through her mouth. She knew she was in a very, very dark room, and for several seconds the confusion in her mind almost overwhelmed her, and she had no idea where she was or what had happened to her, or what had caused the dull ache she could feel in the centre of her chest between and below her breasts. Her nerves seemed to be screaming at the after effects of some trauma and her whole body was trembling in shock.
And then she remembered Marco’s instruction to the two men, to put her in the cellar. And with a sudden rush she also remembered fighting them every inch of the way, outside the house and along a gravel path, until one of the men had pulled out some kind of a gun and shot her. Instantly, her hand flew to her torso, her fingers probing for the bullet hole that she fully expected to find there. But that made no sense. If she’d been shot in the chest, she’d be dead, wouldn’t she?
‘What happened to me?’ she muttered. She lifted her hands to her face, and only then heard the clanking of a chain next to her and felt the pressure of the handcuff which had been secured around her left wrist.
Then, from somewhere quite close by she heard a voice and realized she wasn’t alone.
‘Hello? Who’s there?’ Angela called out.
‘I speak only a little English. My name is Marietta. They probably used a taser on you. They had to carry you down the stairs. You’ll be sore all over, but it will pass.’
That helped a little. At least Angela now knew why she felt the way she did. And not being alone in the dark was a huge comfort.
‘My name is Angela, and I don’t speak any Italian. What are you doing here?’ she asked.
The only response was a snuffling sound, as if the girl was crying. And then Angela realized that that was exactly what she was doing. Marietta – whoever she was – was sobbing her heart out, and for a few minutes she didn’t say another word. Then the girl seemed to pull herself together and spoke a single sentence that chilled Angela to the bone.
‘I’ve been brought here to be killed,’ she said quietly.
There really was no adequate answer to that statement and for a few seconds Angela just lay on the bed, stunned into silence. Then she spoke again.
‘You can’t be sure of that. You can—’
‘I’m very sure,’ Marietta interrupted. ‘Last night I watched them do it.’
Angela wasn’t quite certain what the girl meant. She was obviously alive so she had to be talking about someone else, unless Angela had completely misunderstood what she was saying.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There was another girl down here. Her name was Benedetta.’ Marietta’s voice was fracturing under the emotional strain she was feeling, the words indistinct.
‘Just tell me, Marietta. Take your time.’
‘There’s a ceremony. They made me wash and put on a robe. But they took Benedetta first and I watched.’ Marietta’s voice broke again, and for several minutes she sobbed uncontrollably before she regained some semblance of composure.
In a shaking voice, she hesitantly described the rest of the ceremony she’d witnessed. As she did so, Angela’s terror increased. What the other girl was describing was an almost exact match for the ritual that had been described in the scroll – the Noble Vampyr document.
Until that moment, Angela had harboured the faint and completely irrational belief that what she was experiencing was somehow unreal, an elaborate charade or something of that sort. But Marietta’s words, as she described the brutal rape and murder of another girl in that very room the previous day, completely destroyed even that tiny hope.
She shuddered when she heard Marietta’s description of the ritual rape, but it was the very last part of the ceremony, the last acts that Marietta had witnessed, which frightened her the most.
‘Please tell me that again,’ Angela asked.
‘The man who killed her, the man who bit into her neck, he was a vampire.’
Before she’d arrived in Venice, Angela would have unhesitatingly countered such a claim with a calm and reasoned statement of her own. Vampires, she would have said, do not exist and have never existed. Belief in such creatures is a pre-mediaeval legend with no basis whatsoever in reality.
She was tempted to say something like that to Marietta, but for a moment she didn’t. Because, whatever the truth or otherwise of the vampire legend, she knew beyond any doubt that the group of people who were holding them believed absolutely in the reality of the undead. For them, vampires were undeniably real.
And, though she wouldn’t even admit it to himself, the hooded man, the apparent leader of the group, bothered her more than she could say. His ability to move in complete silence, the fact that she’d never seen his face because it was kept permanently in shadow under his hood, and above all the stench of rotting flesh that clung to him all seemed so totally non-human that she was beginning to doubt her own mind. Her rational brain still rejected utterly the concept of the existence of vampires, but at that moment, in those circumstances and in that place, she was no longer certain that she was right.
But she tried to persuade the girl anyway. ‘Vampires are not real, Marietta,’ she said soothingly. ‘You must have seen something else.’
‘You didn’t see him. He had huge teeth, long and pointed, and he drank the blood from her neck.’
Angela let it go. ‘So what happened then?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. I screamed and one of the men hit me with the taser and knocked me out. When I came round, the cellar was empty and Benedetta was gone. One of the men told me they’d taken her to San Michele, so I know she was dead.’
For a few moments, Angela sat in silence, wondering if she should share what she knew about the group, about the lapsed Hungarian monk Amadeus, about Nicodema Diluca, the Venetian who had claimed descent from the Princess Eleonora Amalia von Schwarzenberg, and who both Marietta and the dead girl had unfortunately been related to. But she knew that wouldn’t help, wouldn’t help either of them, and so she held her tongue.
There was just one last question she needed to ask, though she already knew the answer: ‘But how do you know they’re going to kill you as well?’
Marietta sobbed out her reply. ‘Because they told me it’s my turn on the table tonight,’ she said.
68
The last group of men who had arrived by launch – including Inspector Bianchi – had now disappeared inside the house, and there was no sign of anyone moving about on the island. But that didn’t mean that nobody was watching, so Bronson wasn’t going to drive his boat into the inlet and moor it there. Instead, he decided that his best option was to steer a course that would take him well away from the island and allow him to approach it from the southern end, the shore opposite the jetty and furthest away from the house.
Bronson started the engine of his boat and immediately closed the throttle almost fully, muting the outboard’s exhaust note as much as he could. Then he steered away from the island, out to the west, before starting a gentle turn that would take him on a semicircular course around to the south of his objective. The boat was moving at little more than walking pace, but that suited him fine. He knew that silence and stealth were both far more important than speed.
Keeping the boat moving slowly until he estimated that he was directly behind the grey stone house on the island, he turned the wheel to point the bow of the craft towards his objective. When he estimated that he was probably about fifty yards from the shore, he cut the engine completely and let the boat drift on in silence. A lot of the water in the Venetian lagoon was very shallow, and he guessed he might well be able to wade ashore, pulling the boat behind him. He should have checked the chart before the light faded, he realized, but it was too late to try to do so now. At worst, once the boat stopped moving forwards, he might have to swim ashore and pull it.
In fact, he wouldn’t have to do either, because the shore of the island was looming up in front of him out of the murk, and the boat still had enough forward speed to reach it without a
ny difficulty. The bow of the powerboat ran through a clump of reeds, and then grounded on something solid. Immediately Bronson stepped over the side, trying to be as quiet as he could, strode forward and tied the bow line around a projecting tree stump. With the boat secured, he crouched down to avoid being seen in silhouette, and studied the ground around him.
Over to his left was an old jetty, much smaller than the large landing stage he’d seen at the front of the house, and tied up to it was a small powerboat.
As he’d already established from his survey of the island before night fell, the land was reasonably flat, and projected only a matter of a few feet above the water level in the lagoon. There were no fences or barriers that he could see, and the most distinctive feature was the bulk of the house that stood at the northern end of the island and was blotting out the night sky directly in front of him, a massive, featureless grey monolith, its shape relieved only by the lighter grey outlines of the shuttered windows.
Between Bronson and the house were the walls of the ruined building, which he now thought might be the remains of another house, or possibly a chapel or small church. The light wasn’t good enough for him to tell for sure. And a short distance over to his left was the other structure, which looked like a wooden stable or a farm outhouse.
Bronson sniffed the air. He’d never thought he had a particularly sensitive nose, but he’d detected an unusual smell. He sniffed again. Whatever it was, it seemed to be emanating from the wooden structure.
He checked around him, then ran across to it. There was a single door on one side, and a window to the right, through which he looked cautiously. The interior was completely dark, but he had the strange sense that there was something, something large, moving around inside. He pressed his ear against the wooden wall, and quite clearly detected a rubbing, scuffing sound from the interior. The door was secured by a large new padlock and a substantial hasp, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to unlock it or force it without tools. He could probably shoot off the padlock with the Browning, but that was hardly an option.