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Langdon had visited the prison once, and was surprised to learn that the most terrifying cells were not those at water level, which often flooded, but those next door on the top floor of the palace proper—called piombi after their lead-tiled roofs—which made them torturously hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. The great lover Casanova had once been a prisoner in the piombi; charged by the Inquisition with adultery and spying, he had survived fifteen months of incarceration only to escape by beguiling his keeper.
“Sta’ attento!” Maurizio shouted to the pilot of a gondola as their limo slid into the berth the gondola was just vacating. He had found a spot in front of the Hotel Danieli, only a hundred yards from St. Mark’s Square and the Doge’s Palace.
Maurizio threw a line around a mooring post and leaped ashore as if he were auditioning for a swashbuckling movie. Once he had secured the boat, he turned and extended a hand down into the boat, offering to help his passengers out.
“Thanks,” Langdon said as the muscular Italian pulled him ashore.
Ferris followed, looking vaguely distracted and again glancing out to sea.
Sienna was the last to disembark. As the devilishly handsome Maurizio hoisted her ashore, he fixed her with a deep stare that seemed to imply that she’d have a better time if she ditched her two companions and stayed aboard with him. Sienna seemed not to notice.
“Grazie, Maurizio,” she said absently, her gaze focused on the nearby Doge’s Palace.
Then, without missing a stride, she led Langdon and Ferris into the crowd.
CHAPTER 70
APTLY NAMED AFTER one of history’s most famed travelers, the Marco Polo International Airport is located four miles north of St. Mark’s Square on the waters of the Laguna Veneta.
Because of the luxuries of private air travel, Elizabeth Sinskey had deplaned only ten minutes earlier and was already skimming across the lagoon in a futuristic black tender—a Dubois SR52 Blackbird—which had been sent by the stranger who had phoned earlier.
The provost.
For Sinskey, after being immobilized in the back of the van all day, the open air of the ocean felt invigorating. She turned her face to the salty wind and let her silver hair stream out behind her. Nearly two hours had passed since her last injection, and she was finally feeling alert. For the first time since last night, Elizabeth Sinskey was herself.
Agent Brüder was seated beside her along with his team of men. None of them said a word. If they had concerns about this unusual rendezvous, they knew their thoughts were irrelevant; the decision was not theirs to make.
As the tender raced on, a large island loomed up to them on the right, its shoreline dotted with squat brick buildings and smokestacks. Murano, Elizabeth realized, recognizing the illustrious glassblowing factories.
I can’t believe I’m back, she thought, enduring a sharp pang of sadness. Full circle.
Years ago, while in med school, she had come to Venice with her fiancé and stopped to visit the Murano Glass Museum. There, her fiancé had spied a beautiful handblown mobile and innocently commented that he wanted to hang one just like it someday in their baby’s nursery. Overcome with guilt for having kept a painful secret far too long, Elizabeth finally leveled with him about her childhood asthma and the tragic glucocorticoid treatments that had destroyed her reproductive system.
Whether it had been her dishonesty or her infertility that turned the young man’s heart to stone, Elizabeth would never know. But one week later, she left Venice without her engagement ring.
Her only memento of the heartbreaking trip had been a lapis lazuli amulet. The Rod of Asclepius was a fitting symbol of medicine—bitter medicine in this case—but she had worn it every day since.
My precious amulet, she thought. A parting gift from the man who wanted me to bear his children.
Nowadays, the Venetian islands carried no romance for her at all, their isolated villages sparking thoughts not of love but of the quarantine colonies that had once been established on them in an effort to curb the Black Death.
As the Blackbird tender raced on past Isola San Pietro, Elizabeth realized they were homing in on a massive gray yacht, which seemed to be anchored in a deep channel, awaiting their arrival.
The gunmetal-gray ship looked like something out of the U.S. military’s stealth program. The name emblazoned across the back offered no clue as to what kind of ship it might be.
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