The Pigeon Project Read Online Free PDF

the man in the business suit was silently beckoning him.
    Confused, bewildered, MacDonald turned around to the boatmen. “Where am I? This isn’t Venice.”
    “Arrivederci,” the burly boatman called out, pushing the motor launch away from the pilings. It was drifting away, and MacDonald saw in a panic that already the gap of water between himself and the boat was too wide to cover.
    He turned back to the pier steps, heart tripping.
    He waited.
    “Come up here,” he heard someone order him. “We have a gun pointed at you.”
    His legs leaden, MacDonald slowly began to climb up the steps. As he attained the pier, he found the two men directly before him. The squat one in khaki uniform, a white strap running from his shoulder to one hip, plainly an Italian, possibly a member of the carabinieri, was pointing a small-caliber pistol at him. The other man, curly black hair, beady eyes, a pointed nose on an angular Slavic face, attired in a natty double-breasted dark blue suit, wore an expression of amiability.
    “What is this?” demanded MacDonald, voice quavering. “I’m supposed to be in Venice. Where am I?”
    “You are on the island of San Lazzaro,” the one in the business suit said, with the trace of a Russian accent. “You are eight minutes outside Venice.”
    “What does this mean? Why am I here?”
    “For your own safety, my friend. You are far too valuable a property to be anywhere but here.”
    MacDonald felt panic. “What are you going to do with me?”
    “We are going to hold you in protective custody, Professor. Then, after a few days, we are going to send you home. Yes, home. We are going to send you back to the Soviet Union.”
    * * *
    In the morning, neither the warm sunlight slanting through the barred windows nor the delicious breakfast served a half hour ago could comfort him. The cold fact of his situation remained. He had not escaped. He was not free. He was a prisoner.
    MacDonald, in mussed shirt and wrinkled trousers, still slumped before his breakfast tray, which sat on what resembled a bridge table, felt confused and helpless. Normally a calm and pacific man, who handled each of life’s new experiences thoughtfully and logically, he had never suffered or enjoyed high drama in his existence. Except for his visits to foreign countries, his interviews with native octogenarians, his work was largely mental and his routine somewhat sedentary. The events of the last sixteen hours following his discovery of C-98—his flight from Sukhumi, his abduction in Venice—were events he had always assumed happened in the cinema or suspense novels. Now, to have had them happen in real life, and to himself, of all people, was almost too unreal to accept.
    Yet here he was, an innocent, harmless scientist with one of history’s greatest secrets locked in his head, being held captive by a foreign nation in a medieval monastery on an island in Italy. The consequences of this captivity—imprisonment for the rest of his life in an alien land—were too frightening for him to imagine.
    He recalled that last night, at gunpoint, he had been led from the pier across a court into the entry of what he had been told was a monastery. He had been prodded up four short flights of stone steps to the second floor. There, after passing through a long corridor hung with framed tapestries, he had been brought to a gilded doorway where another armed member of the Italian carabinieri, fiercely moustached, stood guard.
    The door had been unlocked, and MacDonald had gone inside, followed by his civilian Russian host.
    “This is a library housing Armenian manuscripts as well as other rare treasures,” his captor had told him. “You will find it roomy and comfortable. We’ve moved in a cot for you. You will take your meals here. A monk will deliver them. If you have need for the water closet, tug at that maroon bell rope in the corner. It will summon the monk assigned to you, and he will take you down the hall. Since we have