The naked edge

14

Venice.

The suite in the hotel-a converted twelfth-century Doge palace-had a dramatic view of St. Mark's piazza. Crowds persisted, despite a chill spray from rising waves.

"Glass making," the Internet tycoon said.

"Glass making?" The head of his protective detail frowned.

"Nobody comes to Venice without taking the boat across the lagoon to Murano," the tycoon's wife said. "For certain, I don't. Murano's the most famous glass-making town in the world. Its pieces are museum quality."

The protective agent nodded. "Give me twenty-four hours to set up the security."

"In twenty-four hours, we'll be in Madrid," the tycoon's wife told him.

"Madrid? That isn't on the schedule."

"We decided during breakfast. This city's too damp."

The agent, a former member of Britain's Strategic Air Service, nodded again. "Yes, all those canals." One hundred and fifty of them, to be exact. Four hundred bridges. One hundred and seventeen islands, every nook and cranny of them a security nightmare.

"So that's the plan." The tycoon's wife dropped her napkin onto a half-eaten bowl of fruit. "In ten minutes, we leave for Murano."

There wasn't much to be said after that. The agent, whose name was Miller, had five men at his disposal, three of whom were resting after the night shift. Because the change in schedule was last minute, a predator couldn't know about it, so there wasn't any point in sending a man to scout the location. Miller took some consolation that he didn't need to be overly concerned about a long-distance threat from a sniper. With a business executive, the likely threat was kidnappers wanting a ransom.

The bumpy twenty-minute lagoon crossing made the tycoon and his wife slightly nauseous. As Miller's eyes roamed the choppy water, on guard against any boats that might speed toward them, he studied the island of San Michele, Venice's main cemetery. Several boats were docked there, draped with funeral cloths and wreaths. He'd read somewhere that, with land so scarce in the Venice area, soil had to be brought to the cemetery so that it could continue accepting coffins.

He switched his gaze toward Murano, the heart of which had two rows of Renaissance buildings separated by a canal. Yellow and brown, the long, stone structures adjoined one another, almost all of them glass-making factories.

My God, if we need to go into every one of these buildings, Miller thought, we'll be here all day.

But the tycoon and his wife had made phone calls and knew precisely where they were heading. Miller instructed one of his men to stay behind and guard the launch, to make sure it wasn't tampered with. Then Miller and his remaining agent flanked their clients, never looking at them, always peering outward at potential threats. The tycoon and his wife ignored the tourists, crossed the street next to the canal, and entered a building, where two well-dressed owners waited for them.

Miller didn't like the shadowy corridor he faced-or the roar at the end of it. He entered a large area that consisted of several blazing furnaces, their hatches open. Men wearing fire-retardant aprons and gloves held metal poles into the flames, turning them, softening the large pieces of glass suspended from their tips. At a precisely judged moment, one of the workers removed the pole and applied various tools to the molten glass, cutting, twisting, and shaping it, sometimes blowing through a tube to expand it into a globe.

Keeping his attention on the corridor through which they'd entered, Miller heard a conversation behind him, the two owners using English to explain to the client and his wife how time-intensive a hand-crafted piece of glass was, how it could take all day to make one perfect vase and certainly much longer to fashion a glass peacock, its fanned-out tail as multi-colored as that of an actual bird. The most ambitious pieces, the most complexly contoured and layered, required centuries of glass-making experience. The techniques were handed down from generation to generation.

Miller straightened as a man and woman came along the corridor. In their mid-thirties, pleasant looking, they wore shorts and sandals. The man's shirt was tucked in. So was the woman's blouse. No outline of a gun or a knife. No fanny packs. Nothing to cause concern. The man had a camera around his neck. He nodded to Miller, a little puzzled that Miller wasn't watching the activity around the ovens. Miller nodded in return.

Behind him, the two owners were telling the tycoon and his wife that the almost finished vases they saw on a table required one more procedure and then would be ready for exhibition.

"Twenty of them. How much will their total value be?" the tycoon asked.

The answer was a very long number in lira.

More tourists entered.

Miller scanned them. Nothing threatening.

"How much in dollars?" the tycoon asked.

Miller heard fingers tapping a calculator. "Four hundred thousand."

The tycoon said, "I assume they can be safely packaged and sent by air."

"Of course."

"Signore," one of the executives said, presumably to a tourist who'd entered, "photographs are not permitted."

The man answered in French that he didn't understand.

The executive switched to French and repeated that photographs were not allowed.

The room became more crowded.

"No, don't touch that," the other executive said in Italian.

Glass shattered.

The startle reflex cannot be eliminated. It's hardwired into the human nervous system. Knees bend. Shoulders hunch forward. Hands rise to the chest, palms outward. These movements provide an instinctive defense against an attack. His reaction unwilled and automatic, Miller swung his gaze from the corridor toward the scene behind him, where the two executives and Miller's clients gaped at an almost finished vase that the man with the camera had knocked over. Chunks of colored glass lay at their feet.

"I'm so sorry, so sorry," the man kept saying in French.

Miller suddenly felt light-headed. His leg was wet. He peered down, gasping when he discovered that his right pant leg was cascading crimson, that he was standing in a pool of swiftly spreading blood.

Femoral artery was all he could think. Somebody cut my-

A knife slash with a sharp blade almost never caused pain unless delivered with force. As the skin parted, there was only a stinging sensation. Spinning, Miller saw the woman who'd followed the group into the factory. Shorts. Sandals. She walked along the murky corridor toward the bright sunlight that formed the exit, looking once over her shoulder.

Abruptly, Miller's vision turned gray. Groping to find something to keep him from falling, he stumbled toward his client's wife, who jerked away in horror. Somebody screamed, but Miller barely heard. The roar of the furnaces became muted. Their blazes dimmed. Despite the heat radiating from them, he felt cold. Reaching, falling, he struck the table, upended it, and sent the remainder of the vases crashing onto the floor.

With his head sideways on the concrete floor, he stared at colored chunks of now-worthless glass shimmering around him. Their luster faded, as did his vision. The last he saw were the chunks being covered by his blood.