Tom can see smoke around the barrel. From the look on the gunman's face he's expecting Tom to fall.
He's been shot.
He knows he has but he can't yet feel it.
Tom glances down. Blood is dripping onto the wood. But he still can't feel it.
Now the pain arrives.
Hot and angry. Raw and intense. The bullet's gone clean through his left hand, piercing the web of flesh between his thumb and index finger.
The high priest fires again.
The shot zips over Tom's left shoulder. He rushes towards the smoking barrel, swings the iron bar one-handed. It connects with a rib but the Satanist pushes Tom into the side of the wooden altar.
Tom loses his footing – and cracks his head on the decking.
The high priest raises his pistol towards Tom's fallen body.
Another shot rings out.
Then another.
Tom's still on the deck recovering from the fall when the high priest drops beside him. Shot dead.
One to the head. Dead centre. Another in the heart.
Valentina Morassi lowers her weapon.
Tom crawls away from the corpse and groggily lurches towards Tina.
She's out of it. Spiked full of sedative.
Soldiers are everywhere now. He's still holding Tina's face as a Carabinieri paramedic moves him to one side and checks her pulse and breathing. Valentina holsters her gun as she walks towards Tom. 'I thought I told you to stay by the trees.'
He almost manages a smile. 'It was good advice. I should have taken it.' They pause as two officers pass them with the now-unmasked deacon – a small-time businessman from the mainland.
Other soldiers lift Tina and carry her out of the boathouse. 'Will she be okay?' Tom asks.
'I don't know,' says Valentina. 'We've got good equipment on the boats, they'll treat her quickly.'
He glances down at his injured hand, still dripping blood on to the decking boards. 'This isn't over, you know.' He motions to the dead high priest, now flat on his back with his mask off. 'Whoever this guy is, he was only part of it. Lars Bale planned something much bigger than just this.'
Valentina looks towards the man she killed. 'I know who he is. It's Dino Ancelotti – Fabianelli's lawyer.' She nods at Tom's hand. 'We need to get stitches in that.'
He's about to say something brave when two male soldiers drag the deaconess past them.
'Wait!' shouts Valentina. 'I need to talk to this witch.'
CHAPTER 82
San Quentin, California All Lars Bale has seen of the Death Watch wing is his eight-by-eight-foot cell. That, and the ugly mug of the guard earning overtime watching him twenty-four seven.
Out of his view lie fifteen other rooms, including the death chamber itself, the holding area for his corpse, the press viewing area, staff rooms, equipment rooms, viewing areas on one side for those associated with the victim, and on the other side for those linked to the prisoner.
Behind the scenes, a whole army of people are hard at work planning how to kill him and how to process the good, the bad and the ugly who've come to watch him die.
Officer Jim Tiffany has walked every foot of the complex in the last hour, checking things over. He's one of several guards who volunteered to be part of the execution team. After his earlier altercations with Bale, today is personal.
It's payback.
Tiffany feels a delicious thrill as he shouts through the high-security door. 'Get up, Bale. Turn around. Hands behind your back.'
The prisoner slowly does as he's told, sticking his wrists through a gap in the bars.
Tiffany and two other guards snap on cuffs, open up the door and then add leg chains before hobbling him off to the shake-down room. 'Turn again. We're going to un-cuff you and then we need you to strip for a medical.'
'How ironic,' says Bale, his voice sounding tired and bored. 'You are legally obliged to examine me, presumably to make sure that I'm healthy enough to die.'
Tiffany steps up close to him. 'Just do it, smartmouth.'
As Bale begins to strip, a guard lets a nervous young doctor into the room. He pulls on a pair of ghostly white latex gloves and – as advised by the governor – painstakingly avoids eye contact with the inmate as he starts the routine of checking his pulse and blood pressure.
'What are you doing, Doc?' Bale asks, as the medic runs his gloved fingers up the inside of the prisoner's right forearm.
Tiffany answers for him. 'He's trying to find a vein, Bale. Looking for the best place to hose you full of killer drugs.'
The young doctor turns his head and shoots the old guard a horrified scowl. He then returns to the task of checking the back of Bale's hands, the tops of his feet, ankles and lower legs. He makes notes then nods to the officers and retreats to the back of the room. He hasn't said anything and doesn't say anything – he wants out as quickly as possible. The whole thing makes his skin crawl. He pulls off his gloves, bins them and waits to be buzzed through the electronically locked door.
'Cuff him again,' instructs Tiffany, 'we're ready to take him back to his cell.' The big guard smiles in Bale's face. 'If it was me, I'd stick the needle right in your eye and it'd take me until Thanksgiving to inject enough chemicals to put you to sleep.' He glances at his watch. 'One hour, you piece of shit, one hour's all you've got left.'
CHAPTER 83
Lazzaretto Vecchio, Venice Mera Teale no longer looks or feels quite as sexy as she did a few hours ago. The Satanic deaconess is bleeding, bruised and soaked from her dip in the boathouse water, the place where she and Dino Ancelotti took so many innocent lives.
Valentina has no time for the protocol of a courteous and judicious interrogation. She walks the handcuffed Teale outside the boathouse, away from everyone else. 'So here's how it goes. Either you tell me everything you know, or I put a bullet through your head and make it look like you were escaping.'
Teale smiles. 'You really are as sexy as fuck when you're mad. I wish I had my camera right now.'
Valentina holds Teale's shoulders and expertly back-kicks her to her knees. Within a flash she has her Beretta drawn and pushed into the floored Satanist's mouth. 'I swear to Christ I will kill you if you don't start helping me.'
Whether it's the taste of gunmetal between her teeth or the look of sheer rage in Valentina's eyes, Teale is persuaded it's time to cooperate. Her eyes signal total submission.
Valentina drags her to her feet and re-holsters the weapon. 'So, tell me.'
Teale's lost her arrogance now. 'I don't know much. Just that there are bombs.'
'Bombs?'
'One at the Ponte della Liberta. Another in Venezuela at Angel Falls. And one in America. At the Venetian – the hotel in Las Vegas.' A twitch of a smile touches her lips. A reminder of the old Teale. 'You're too late to stop them.'
Valentina's in shock. She's made a terrible mistake. It's not Muscle Beach in Venice. She calls it in to the control room and prays they can warn the Americans in time.
CHAPTER 84
Carvalho's instructions to clear and close the Ponte della Liberta are relayed at lightning speed.
But Italians are not good at doing things in a hurry.
By the time the major gets there, the roadway is still jammed with tourists. The more his men try to hurry them, the more tempers break, horns sound and everything grinds to a halt.
The bridge, opened by Mussolini in 1933, is more than three kilometres long and has no emergency lanes. It is Venice's only road connection to the village of Mestre and beyond it, mainland Italy. Known as 'the Freedom Bridge', Vito supposes Bale picked it because it signifies his own imminent freedom from prison.
Vito gazes out along the perfectly rectilinear bridge and its two hundred and twenty-two arches. He remembers being told at school that it was specifically designed so it could be rigged with explosives and blown up, with the intention of leaving attacking armies stranded on the mainland. There's no telling the extent of the damage Bale's explosion is going to have. Vito knows he can't search every arch in time.