The Venetian Betrayal

“If I’d known you were going to bring it over in the rain,” Malone said, “I’d have insisted on a security deposit.”

“You need to see this.”

“I told him about Ely,” Thorvaldsen said.

The dining room was dim and deserted. Malone ate here three or four times a week, always at the same table, near the same hour. He enjoyed the solitude.

Cassiopeia faced him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it.

“I appreciate that.”

“I appreciate you saving my ass.”

“You would have found a way out. I just sped things up.”

He recalled his predicament and wasn’t so sure about her conclusion.

He wanted to ask more about Ely Lund, curious as to how he’d managed to crack her emotional vault. Like his own, there were a multitude of locks and alarms. But he kept silent-as always when feelings were unavoidable.

Cassiopeia switched on the laptop and brought several sca

“About a week after Alexander the Great died, in 323 BCE,” Cassiopeia said, “Egyptian embalmers arrived in Babylon. Though it was summer, hot as hell, they found his corpse uncorrupted, its complexion still lifelike. That was taken as a sign from the gods of Alexander’s greatness.”

He’d read about that earlier. “Some sign. He was probably still alive, in a terminal coma.”

“That’s the modern consensus. But that medical state was unknown then. So they went about their task and mummified the body.”

He shook his head. “Amazing. The greatest conqueror of his time, killed by embalmers.”

Cassiopeia smiled in agreement. “Mummification usually took seventy days, the idea being to dry the body beyond further decay. But with Alexander, they used a different method. He was immersed in white honey.”

He knew about honey, a substance that did not rot. Time would crystallize, but never destroy, its basic composition, which could easily be reconstituted with heat.

“The honey,” she said, “would have preserved Alexander, inside and out, better than mummification. The body was eventually wrapped in gold carto

“Which is when the funerary games began,” he said.

Cassiopeia nodded. “In a ma

Malone recalled the details of what he’d read earlier. Fighting actually broke out around Alexander’s deathbed. Perdiccas then called an assembly of Macedonians and, to keep order, placed Alexander’s corpse in their midst. The assembly voted to abandon the pla

“What was it,” Malone asked, “six years later when the half brother was murdered by Olympias, Alexander’s mother? She’d hated that child from birth, since Philip of Macedonia had divorced her to marry the mother. Then, a few years later, Roxane and Alexander IV were both poisoned. None of them ever ruled anything.”

“Eventually, Alexander’s sister was murdered, too,” Thorvaldsen said. “His entire bloodline eradicated. Not a single legitimate heir survived. And the greatest empire in the world crumbled away.”

“So what does all that have to do with elephant medallions? And what possible relevance could that have today?”

“Ely believed a great deal,” she said.

He saw there was more. “And what do you believe?”

She sat silent, as if unsure, but not wanting to voice her reservations.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You tell me when you’re ready.”

Then something else occurred to him and he said to Thorvaldsen, “What about the last two medallions here in Europe? I heard you ask Viktor about them. He’s probably headed after those next.”

“We’re ahead of him there.”

“Someone’s already got them?”

Thorvaldsen glanced at his watch. “At least one, I hope, by now.”

TWENTY-THREE

AMSTERDAM

STEPHANIE STEPPED FROM THE CAFÉ BACK INTO THE RAIN. AS SHE yanked the hood over her head she found her earpiece and spoke into the mike hidden beneath her jacket.

“Two men just left here. They have what I want.”

“Fifty meters ahead, heading for the bridge,” came a reply.

“Stop them.”

She hustled into the night.

She’d brought two Secret Service agents, requisitioned from President Da

“They’re armed,” one of the agents said in her ear.

“Knives in the café,” she said.

“Guns out here.”

Her spine stiffened. This was turning nasty. “Where are they?”

“At the pedestrian bridge.”

She heard shots and removed a Magellan Billet-issue Beretta from beneath her jacket.

More shots.

She rounded a corner.

People were scattering. Tan and Fair were huddled on a bridge behind a chest-high iron railing, shooting at the two Secret Servicemen, one on either side of the canal.

Glass shattered, as a bullet found one of the brothels.

A woman screamed.

More frightened people rushed by Stephanie. She lowered her gun, concealing it by her side. “Let’s contain this,” she said into the mike.

“Tell it to them,” one of the agents answered.

Last week, when she’d agreed to do Cassiopeia the favor, she’d not seen the harm, but yesterday something had told her to come prepared, especially when she remembered that Cassiopeia had said she and Henrik Thorvaldsen appreciated the gesture. Anything Thorvaldsen was involved with signaled trouble.

More shots from the bridge.

“You’re not getting out of here,” she yelled out.

Fair whirled and aimed a gun her way.

She dove into a sunken alcove. A bullet pinged off the bricks a few feet away. She hugged the stairs and eased herself back up. Rain gushed down each ru

She fired two shots.

Now the two men lay in the center of a triangle. No way out.

Tan shifted position, trying to lessen his exposure, but one of the agents shot him in the chest. He staggered until another round sent him teetering onto the bridge railing, his frame folding over the side and splashing into the canal.

Wonderful. Now there were bodies.

Fair scampered to the railing and tried to look over. He seemed as if he wanted to jump, but more shots kept him pi