The Nosferatu Scroll

51

Bronson steered the powerboat out of the end of the Grand Canal and swung the bow around to the south. Directly in front of him, on the opposite side of the Canale della Giudecca, lay the long and narrow, almost banana-shaped, island of Giudecca, with the much smaller triangular island of San Giorgio Maggiore to the left.

If he was right, and the men were heading for the southern part of the lagoon, a good place to wait for them to pass would be near the end of Giudecca. He stopped his turn and aimed for the Canale della Grazia which separated the two islands in front of him. Once he’d motored through the gap, he steered the boat over to the right, stopping alongside the southern coast of the island just below Campiello Campalto.

Like almost everywhere else in Venice, the island of Giudecca was bordered not by a wall but by a level walkway perched only two or three feet above the surface of the virtually tide-less Adriatic. The edge of the walkway was interrupted by sets of shallow steps to allow people to disembark from boats, and by substantial lengths of timber driven vertically down into the seabed to act as mooring posts. A line of old-fashioned metal streetlamps marked the seaward side of the walkway, and on the opposite side of it were the front walls and doors of the houses and shops.

Several powerboats and launches were already secured alongside the walkway, but Bronson had no trouble finding a vacant mooring post. He looped the bow line of the boat around it and secured it with a quick-release knot, so that he would be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. He shut down the outboard motor to conserve fuel, and checked to see how much he had left. It looked like about half a tank, which he hoped would be enough.

Then he pulled his binoculars out of his jacket pocket and climbed up on to the walkway using the nearest set of steps. He sat down, dangling his legs over the edge of the walkway. He could have begun his surveillance of the water traffic around the island from his boat, but the boat was bouncing and rolling in the waves that continuously washed against the shore of the island, and in the wake of every passing vessel; focusing on anything through the binoculars would have proved difficult. It made much better sense to use his binoculars from the stable platform that the walkway offered.

He had carried out numerous surveillance operations in his short career as an Army officer, and later in the police force, but in those tasks he had been part of a large team, both static and mobile, and the target had usually been a particular individual to be followed and watched. If he’d been covering a building, it had generally been a single dwelling with only one or two entrances, and one team would be assigned to cover each. The emphasis had always been on team operations – a large number of people blanketing a small target – never would one man cover even a single location with any degree of success.

But out here, in the choppy waters of the Venetian lagoon, Bronson was going to try to do exactly this. He intended to look at every boat heading south that passed on either side of his position. If he’d been right in his guess, and his attackers had originally intended to sail around the eastern end of Venice, and they’d left the canal system on the north side of the city after their confrontation with him, then they would have to pass fairly close to him now to reach the same area. But he was also keenly aware that if the blue powerboat had managed to reach the Grand Canal before him, his attackers could already be well beyond his reach.

He started by checking all the small boats he could see out in the lagoon, and which were already a good distance away from him.

As he’d expected, there was a huge number of boats and launches in a variety of shapes and sizes and types and colours. Blue seemed to be quite popular, and twice he saw vessels that looked remarkably like the one he was searching for, but in both cases he was able to reject the sightings. One of the boats had three people in it and the other one at least four, possibly five, and he was fairly certain that the men he was chasing wouldn’t have stopped to pick up passengers. What’s more, these two boats were a long way to the south of where he was sitting, and whatever route the two men had taken, he doubted if they could possibly have got that far ahead of him.

Although he was concentrating on checking the vessels at the far end of the lagoon, Bronson was also watching those passing much closer to him. He knew that if he was to stand any chance at all of spotting the boat, he would have to establish a pattern for his surveillance, and not get fixated on watching just a single part of the lagoon. In fact, he knew he ought to use the binoculars as sparingly as possible, because it would be a fairly unusual thing for someone to be doing on the island, and he definitely didn’t want to draw attention to himself. If this was going to work, he had to look pretty much like any of the other people going about their business on Giudecca.

So Bronson relied largely on his eyes, and quickly worked out a kind of pattern search that he thought would give him the best chance of spotting the boat and its occupants before they saw him. The most likely area for them to enter the southern half of the lagoon was, he believed, over to the east, so he concentrated most of his attention there. He looked that way for about thirty seconds, then looked down to the south of the lagoon for fifteen seconds, and finished his one-minute scan by looking over to the west, then back to the east again. It was boring and repetitive, but Bronson didn’t care. It offered the best chance he was going to get to find Angela, and for that he could endure almost anything.

So he sat on the walkway, beside his powerboat, and watched, and kept watching, never letting his concentration flag for an instant, as the hull of his vessel rose and fell gently beneath him. Fifteen minutes passed. Then twenty, and then twenty-five. After half an hour, Bronson began to feel desperate. Either his guess about the destination of the two men was completely wrong or they had slipped past him somehow. Or maybe they’d just been much faster than he’d expected. In any case, he’d blown it.

Bronson sat there, following the pattern search that he was now convinced was a waste of time, and wondering what the hell he could do next. He toyed with the idea of simply getting back into the boat and motoring around the islands scattered about the lagoon in the hope that he might catch a glimpse of the blue powerboat that way. But even as he considered this course of action, he realized it would be a complete waste of time. There were over one hundred islands out there, and almost every one would have a powerboat secured to its jetty, and there was a fair chance that quite a lot of them would be blue.

He picked up the binoculars to check out another flash of blue he’d spotted some way down to the south, then muttered in irritation. That particular boat was blue and white, a completely different colour scheme. He lowered the binoculars again and for a few seconds just sat staring vacantly across the glistening blue waters of the Laguna Veneta, trying to work out his next move.

And then, almost without him being aware of it, he found himself looking directly at the blue boat with the two men on board. It had just emerged from around the east end of the main island of Venice, as part of a group of perhaps half a dozen other small boats and one larger launch, all of whose courses then began to diverge as they headed for their individual destinations.

Bronson didn’t react in any way at all. He just sat on the walkway, looking back towards Venice while his eyes, invisible behind his mirrored shades under the peak of his baseball cap, remained locked on the vessel. The men in the boat appeared to be looking around casually as they headed south, but gave no sign that they were in any way suspicious of the man wearing sunglasses sitting by himself on the south-east side of the island of Giudecca.

Bronson waited until the boat was a couple of hundred yards distant. Then he climbed casually down the steps into his craft and started the outboard engine, which immediately rumbled into life. He released the bow line, and swung the boat around to follow the other vessel, keeping his speed well down, to ensure that he wouldn’t get close enough to attract attention.

Then, as if linked by an invisible tether, the two powerboats, now almost three hundred yards apart, headed south across the Laguna Veneta, away from the city and towards the scatter of outlying islands.