James Becker - The Nosferatu Scroll

The blue powerboat steered to the left of the Sacca della Misericordia and, still travelling quickly, started heading down the Rio di Noale canal, which would lead them directly to the Grand Canal and its myriad tributaries. Bronson knew that if his quarry managed to reach there, they could vanish into any one of the smaller canals, and he would probably never see them again. At all costs, he had to keep them in sight.

He increased speed as much as he dared — smashing the boat into the side wall of the canal or into another vessel would absolutely ensure that his pursuit would end prematurely — and powered into the canal after them.

A short distance down the canal the waterway split in a Y-junction, the wider Rio di Noale veering to the right, while a slightly narrower canal, the Rio di San Felice, lay straight ahead. That was the quickest route straight through to the Grand Canal, Bronson guessed, as the blue boat kept to the left of the stone breakwater that marked the junction.

Then he saw something that made him smile. At the end of the canal, where it narrowed still further, was a veritable logjam of gondolas, all manoeuvring either in or out of the Grand Canal at the junction ahead. The blue powerboat would have to slow down to a crawl to get through the melee. Either that, or they’d have to take a different route.

In fact, the blue boat did both: it slowed and turned. Bronson saw the wake diminish markedly as the driver pulled back the throttle, slowing down, and then accelerated again as he steered the boat into the entrance to another canal on the left-hand side.

Bronson eased back the throttle, ensuring that he was travelling slowly enough to make the turn, then accelerated again once he was inside the other canal. The sound of the two fast revving engines on the boats echoed off the walls of the surrounding buildings, and the waves from their wakes slapped hard against the stones that lined the canal.

The waterway ran straight for a short distance, but at the end it swung through about ninety degrees to the left. There were also two other canals that had junctions with the one they were in, both on the left-hand side and leading away from the Grand Canal. Bronson had managed to keep up with the other boat so far, and he knew that he could go on chasing the two men through the canals of Venice until he ran out of fuel or miscalculated some corner and smashed up the boat, but this wouldn’t help him to find Angela. Instead, what he needed to do was convince the men he was chasing that he’d given up. He knew they wouldn’t head for home until they were sure he was no longer on their tail.

But how could he convince the two men that he was a spent force? At that moment he could think of only one way to do this. It was a risky manoeuvre, and if it went wrong, he’d be dead in minutes. It all depended on timing, and the inherent inaccuracy of semi-automatic pistols, especially when such pistols were being fired from an unstable platform, like a boat travelling at speed.

The driver of the blue boat turned the wheel hard to the left, steered the vessel into the first of the subsidiary canals and increased speed again. This canal was slightly narrower than the one they’d just left, and there were only a few other boats in it, mainly moored at various landing stages and jetties along the sides. There were no gondolas in sight. It was as good a place as any.

Bronson pulled the Browning semi-automatic pistol from his pocket, pointed it in the general direction of the boat in front of him, and pulled the trigger twice. The shots boomed out, deafeningly loud in the narrow canal. As far as he could see, neither bullet went anywhere near its target, but that wasn’t his intention. He wanted a reaction. A reaction he could use to his own advantage.

The driver of the blue boat obliged him.

He was just coming up to the entrance to another canal on the right, and swung the boat into it. As he did so, the man in the bow of the boat raised his own pistol and fired off a shot towards Bronson.

That was what he’d been waiting for. Pulling back on the throttle, Bronson spun the wheel hard to the right, to make sure that the boat would circle in more or less the same place. Then, rising in his seat, he clutched at his chest and slumped down out of sight, the Browning still in his hand, just in case the two men decided to come alongside his boat for a closer look.

From his position on the floor of the powerboat, Bronson could see nothing except the sky and the tops of the buildings that lined the canal, so he was relying entirely on his ears to deduce what was happening. He heard the sound of the engine of the other boat fade away sharply, which meant the driver had chopped back the throttle. Then the engine noise — and Bronson was sure it was the same engine — increased again, and appeared to be getting closer, though it was difficult to be certain of this because of the way the noise echoed from both sides of the man-made canyon. It certainly sounded as though the two men were approaching to make sure he was dead.

Bronson checked the Browning was ready to fire, and waited as the sound of the other boat’s engine grew louder.

About an hour later, Angela was taken out of the main door of the house into the pale watery light of a cloudy afternoon in the Venetian lagoon.

After the hooded man had left the drawing-room, Marco had instructed her to make a complete translation of the rest of that section of the diary as quickly as possible, obviously hoping that the remainder of the Latin text would provide details of the precise location of the source document. It didn’t. The only reference Angela found was to the ‘campanile of light’, which just served to confirm her assumption that the document must be somewhere in the ancient bell tower. From her reading of the chapter dealing with the history of Poveglia, she knew that the bell tower had for a time been converted into a lighthouse. But she still had no idea exactly where to start looking.

Marco and another of his men hustled her down the path towards the jetty at the end of the island, where two men were already waiting, standing in the stern of a powerboat, the rumble of the engine clearly audible.

‘Why do you want me to go with you?’ Angela asked, as Marco pushed her inside the small cabin.

‘You’ve read and translated the Latin,’ he replied. ‘We don’t know what we’ll find when we get there, but there might be something, some clue, that you’ll see and understand but we won’t. That’s why you’re here.’

‘What happens if you don’t find what you’re looking for?’

‘You’d better pray that we do. Finding the source document is the only thing that’s keeping you alive right now. If it isn’t there, then we have no further use for you.’

The casual, almost conversational, tone of his voice scared Angela even more than the words he’d used, and she sat in silence as Marco handcuffed her wrists together, looping the link between the cuffs behind a hand rail, immobilizing her. Then he left the cabin.

A few moments later the door opened again and the hooded man entered, the now familiar stench preceding him. Angela shrank back in her seat as the figure passed right beside her, and then took a seat at the opposite end of the cabin.

Moments later, she felt the boat start to move, and soon the bow was cutting through the choppy waters of the lagoon, the waves thumping rhythmically against the hull.

She had no idea how long the journey would take, because she didn’t know where she’d been imprisoned, and the view through the side windows of the boat was so restricted that she could see almost nothing of her surroundings. And in truth, her thoughts were dominated by the hooded man she was sharing the cabin with. He had said nothing to her, and gave no sign that he was even aware of her presence, but the all-pervasive smell of rotting meat seemed to fill the air, and she was simply terrified in case he came close or, worse, touched her.