Free The Sacred Scroll by Anton Gill Page B

Dandolo’s smooth tones interrupted his chain of thought. He pulled himself together and came to the decision his mind had been leading him to all along. Venice would have to crack the whip. Get these dogs back into line. It was then thatVitale Michele gave orders for a war fleet to be made ready. The Venetians would moan about the extra taxes, but if they could be made to see the long-term benefits, they would acquiesce. He would lead the expedition himself.
    ‘And you’ll come with me,’ Vitale told his aide. Dandolo was a man he preferred to keep under his eye. Another one who was far too ambitious and intelligent for his own good. But the man was also a master spy. He’d have his uses in the East.
    By the autumn, they were ready. The armada sailed out of the lagoon in September but, after a ten-day voyage, anchored well to the south of their goal, at the island of Chios, to prepare themselves for the assault. While there, they had news that Manuel wanted to open negotiations which might – who knows? – lead to some kind of deal being hammered out without the need to fight.
    ‘Don’t listen to him’ was Dandolo’s advice.
    ‘Of course I’ll listen to him,’ the doge snapped back. ‘If we can save ourselves the cost of a war …’
    ‘He’s playing for time.’
    ‘Even if he were, he’d be no match for us. There’s no one in the world who can defeat Venice at sea.’
    Dandolo demurred, and suggested that at least a mission might be useful – a secret mission, of course – to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Christians had been in control of the Holy Land for nearly a hundred years and, small though their resources were, it might be worth getting the kingdom on the side of Venice.
    That made sense to the doge, and Vitale gave his permission, but not without extracting an undertaking fromhis underling to return, no matter what, the moment he was summoned. Dandolo took three ships and sailed south and east on the very same day the Venetian ambassadors sailed north to meet the Greek leaders at Constantinople. Meanwhile, the Venetian fleet at Chios lay up, and waited.

14
     
    Istanbul, the Present
     
    ‘There’ve been bomb attacks here very recently, and who knows when there will be more?’ Major Haki was saying. ‘But we can find nothing so far to link this case to Islamist terrorists. After all, there have been bomb attacks all over the world now; most major capitals and towns have experienced something of the kind. But this … this is somehow different.’
    ‘You’re telling me you think the men who followed us, searched the hotel, weren’t terrorists,’ said Graves, kicking herself immediately for being over eager. She remembered what Hudson had told her: too clinical for terrorists.
    ‘Does it look like that to you, Laura?’ said Marlow, impatiently.
    ‘We are not ruling it out,’ said Haki. ‘We are ruling nothing out. But we need to be certain of what we’ve got to go on before we go in that direction. There has been no announcement from any recognized group, no ransom demand, no tapes on YouTube, nothing.’
    ‘So what
have
you got?’ said Marlow.
    ‘We found the van where they’d left it. Bloodstains, but nothing else. They’d taken their gunman with them – injured or dead – but we’re working on it.’
    They’d already seen the archaeologists’ laboratory atIstanbul University. It was empty – so empty it looked as if it had never been used. Major Haki had left Marlow and Graves to it, and they’d gone over the place with a fine-toothed comb, but there wasn’t a fingerprint, a hair, to indicate that the lab had been in constant use a week earlier. They sent what details they had, together with police photos of Dandolo’s tomb, back to New York, where Lopez was cutting through whatever bureaucracy it took to reach the right people at Yale and Venice universities to extract the findings the archaeologists had sent before their disappearance.
    Now, they were driving