I didn’t see the boat until we landed in it. It was sitting low in the canal on the far side of the concrete embankment, hidden among a row of blue tarped gondolas and a narrow water taxi with a glass canopy and a battered hull. My right foot plunged forward, my ankle twisting as the rest of my weight came down on it, and I slammed facefirst into one of the seats.
Blackness…
Wait.
I grabbed the moment and dragged myself back up into consciousness through sheer willpower. Momentum took hold of me and I rolled backwards across the deck, trying to hold on to something that wasn’t actively attempting to pull away from me. The blow to the face had made my eyes water, honing my senses to stinging awareness, and I smelled open seawater and the coppery odor of my own blood trickling from my nostrils. The boat’s motor was deafening. Up at the wheel, Gobi swerved through the canal. I sat up and saw the lights of the bridge coming up. It was too low for us to pass under it.
“I told you I had other targets in Venice.”
“Armitage?” I shouted.
Gobi jammed the throttle all the way forward so the bow of the boat spiked higher in the air, as if she could somehow intimidate the bridge into getting out of our way. For a second I thought about jumping out, but we were going too fast and I’d heard about people getting sucked back into the motor, which at this point might have been a blessing. I looked straight ahead, less than twenty meters from impact. At this distance, there was no question. We were either going to crash straight into the stone buttresses or decapitate ourselves-it just wasn’t high enough.
“Gobi!” I shouted, one last attempt. “Don’t!”
Then it was too late and we were underneath it, the cavernous low-hanging darkness lunging forward. I ducked, dropping down to my hands and knees, and heard the bridge rip off the top of the glass canopy, covering my shoulders and head in a brittle spray of glass, splintering metal and wood. There was a scraping screech and the boat stopped, stuck halfway underneath arching stone.
I breathed. It was dark under here, cold, the only light coming from the glow of the instrument panel. Up front, Gobi was still leaning forward, draped over the wheel.
Sirens.
I got ready to jump.
“Wait.”
I looked around. In the shadows off to our right, I saw a second boat floating just a foot or two away, tied to a ringbolt under the bridge. It had been sitting here the whole time.
Reaching over, Gobi pulled the knots, leaned in, and started the engine. She flicked a switch and I saw a red light blinking under the console of the other boat. Still leaning over, she nudged the throttle forward and sent it out the far side of the canal. As it disappeared I realized it looked like ours, the one we were in now.
I looked at her. The first wave of adrenaline had passed and left me feeling wrung out and shaky, full of questions that needed immediate answers.
“Why did you do it?” My voice was shaking so hard that I could barely get the words out. “Why did you kill Armitage? He didn’t-”
From out on the far side of the bridge, an explosion tore a hole through the world. It wasn’t so much loud as simply big-BIG-and it shook the entire canal, pulsed through the water around us, bouncing off the sides of ancient buildings so hard that I actually thought I saw them tremble. My mind flashed to the second boat that had been waiting here, the one that looked like ours, the one she’d sent out, the decoy. A moment later, I smelled smoke pouring up the canal, thick and acrid.
Gobi never took her eyes off me. I felt a jagged lump in my throat, filling my sinuses, pushing up into the bottoms of my eyes. There was only one question left, and I didn’t want to ask it. Not that it mattered.
“What about Paula?”
Gobi didn’t say anything.
“What about Paula?”
“She would have killed you.”
“Why?”
A slight shrug. “You had served your purpose.”
“What was that, exactly?”
“Drawing me into the open, so Armitage’s hired guns could take me down.”
I thought of the gunfire from above. “That sniper on the rooftop…?”
“There was more than one. Armitage meant to turn the plaza into a killing box.”
“A killing box,” I said. “That’s great. A freaking killing box? Why?”
“Because he knew that I was coming for him.”
I glared at her and felt angry tears pricking in my eyes that had nothing to do with the smoke. They were rising up from the pit where my stomach had once been, a space that was now somehow hollow and sickly heavy at the same time, a deep aching place, like someone had kicked my heart in the balls.
“How long have you been … hunting him?”
“Kaya gave me assignment four months ago, after New York. But Armitage knew.”
I thought about the gunshots that had come from the rooftops overhead, snipers on the cathedral.
“Armitage knew it was you coming for him?”
Gobi nodded.
“For how long?”
“At least since August, he has been trying to draw me out.”
August. The sickness inside me folded over on top of itself like a map of conquered territory, and for a moment I was miserably sure I was going to throw up. My mind flashed to the night I’d met Paula at the party in Brooklyn, how fortuitous the whole thing had been, the way she had initiated our first conversation and everything afterward. How incredulous I’d been that such a hot woman would be interested in me. Drawing me in. Then the invitation to Europe. Then Venice. Then the gun.
Move and he dies.
“You were only a pawn, Perry,” Gobi said. “How do you say, leverage. . for them to find me.”
My throat felt tight. I didn’t say anything.
“Is time to go.”
“No.” I took a step back and my heel bumped into something black piled under the seat in front of me. Diving suits and masks. Oxygen tanks. Regulators.
“Oh, no,” I said. “No way.”
Gobi was moving faster now, putting on the wetsuit.
“Screw that. I’m not doing this. I’m done.”
She spat in the mask and rinsed it with water from the canal, checked the oxygen gauge, and looked up at me. The sirens were very close now.
“It’s an island,” I said. “They’ll just keep looking for you.”
“Not now.” She nodded in the direction of the explosion. “We are dead. At least until they do not recover bodies.”
“We can’t just-”
Gobi thrust a pair of swim fins toward me.
“I’m not going any farther,” I said. “I’m calling my dad, he’ll get a lawyer. I’m going home.”
“That is not possible anymore.”
“Why not?”
She looked up at me one more time through the swim mask, staring right through me. I saw something new in her face then. Sadness.
That was when she held up Paula’s iPad.