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For Catherine Stone

. . . the Serbs reconquered Kosovo in 1912 and committed atrocities against the Albanians, who sided with Germany in 1914 and oppressed the Serbs, who regained control of Kosovo in 1918 and tyrannized the Albanians, who sided with the Germans again in 1939 and crushed the Serbs, who recaptured Kosovo in 1945 and persecuted the Albanians, who rioted in 1981 and beat and robbed the Serbs, who . . .

—P. J. O’Rourke,
Peace Kills

I would rather be the hammer than the anvil.

—Erwin Rommel

prologue

Venice

After the killings, Dalton went to Venice, where the rain fell for two days and three nights, a hard, slicing torrent, and, under it, the threat of worse things coming, the deep, hard cold of the Venetian winter. At first light, unable to sleep, he had watched as a swirling mist rose up around the boats out on Saint Mark’s Basin. By noon, the Palladian façade of the San Giorgio Maggiore across the lagoon was little more than a formless white blur. Dalton stared at his own reflection in the window of the suite—colorless eyes deep-set in a haggard face, his long blond hair limp, and gray in the half-light, his cheeks sunken and seamed. He drew in a lungful of acrid smoke, breathed it out in a harsh exhalation, erasing his reflection in a cloud of blue smoke.

Cora. Cora Vasari.

She kept a little study in the Museo Civico, overlooking the Piazza San Marco, where she liked to revise and sharpen her lectures before going back to the academy in Florence in late November. He’d called her number from a pay phone next to the equestrian statue of Garibaldionly thirty minutes ago. She had answered the phone herself. He had listened to her slow and steady breathing for thirty seconds, knowing that anything he said in the clear could trigger a voice-recognition relay at Crypto City. But her
. . . closeness . . .
her presence, held him fast. After a full minute, Cora had spoken, in a whisper, only six words:

Micah, do not come to Venice.

Too late for that, Cora,
he thought.
I’m already here.

Dalton poured a final glass of champagne, drained the crystal flute, and set it carefully down on the window ledge. He stubbed out his cigarette, shoved the Ruger into his shoulder holster, gave the suite one last look, and went out onto the crowded quay, pushing through the milling crush of oblivious tourists. The city was full to overflowing, even this late in the season; everyone had come to watch the Venice Marathon. They’d put a wooden boardwalk across the Grand Canal, a novelty and therefore an atrocity. Venice had its air of jaded carnival in place, although the streets were running with gray water, and the sky was low and sodden. He had to butt and shoulder his way through the cheering crowds lining the marathon route, moving right along the edges of the runners’ lanes, heading west along the Riva degli Schiavoni—the Quay of Slavs—toward the Piazza San Marco.

Reflexively, automatically, he searched each face in the throng, scanned every roofline, looking for something
wrong;
a fixed glare, a look that was a little too intense, eyes suddenly averted, a half-seen figure stepping back into a doorway as he bulled his way along the quay. But there was nothing: just the rain, the rank sewage smell of the flooding canals, the purring murmur of vaporettos and water taxis out on the fog-shrouded basin, the pressing crowds, the crush of runners pelting past his left shoulder.

In the middle of the crossing near the Bridge of Sighs, his attention zeroed in on the faces of the people streaming toward him, he was struck suddenly, forcefully, from behind; struck hard enough to knock him, reeling, into the balustrade, almost hard enough to send him over the edge and into the canal below. He slammed into the stone banister, turned and saw a skinny blond girl in runner’s shorts and a dripping tunic with a number on the back: 559. She was glaring at him, her hard, red mouth twisted. She hissed something at him in a language he could not understand—not Italian—and he opened his mouth to say something equally stinging in reply, but no sound came, only a bright red spike of agony deep in his rib. He fingered the area and doubled over when he found a sharp, searing pain.

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