The Venice Code by J Robert Kennedy Page A

him closing his eyes and massaging his temples with his free hand. No one had come to check on him yet, but he had heard muffled voices and footsteps overhead the entire time.
    He wasn’t alone.
    And with his hand cuffed, the windows tiny, and the only set of stairs probably leading directly into the room where his captors were, there was no hope of escape.
    What the hell am I supposed to do?
    He had debated this for much of the past hour after his racing heart had settled and he could begin to think clearly. Don’t panic! had become his mantra, something he repeated over and over every time he felt a twinge of fear begin to settle in again. He knew he had to keep a cool head if he were to survive this.
    Survive!
    What were their intentions? They had killed his security detail, so he knew they had no qualms about murder. He was still alive, so this wasn’t an assassination attempt, though why anyone would want to assassinate him was beyond him. Then again, why anyone would want to kidnap him was equally so.
    What would Dad have done?
    Asking this question was how he solved most problems where the answer wasn’t immediately evident. The outcome however wasn’t always to his satisfaction, either he misjudged what his father would have done, or he was naïve enough to think his father had never been wrong.
    He got himself assassinated by his best friend. How on the ball could he have been?
    He mentally kicked himself for insulting his father. He knew Darbinger wasn’t himself, the brain tumor having affected him to the point he didn’t even know who was who, the doctors saying he most likely was suffering from extreme paranoia, in the end thinking everyone around him was an enemy. He had cried tears of sorrow and anger when they concluded that Darbinger most likely had acted in what he thought was self-defense, Grant’s father his final victim.
    The state funeral had been impressive, the outpouring of emotion from the country moving to say the least, but none of it was any comfort to him. He had lost his father in a most violent and unexpected way, decades before he expected it to happen, and it had crushed him. He had hated Lesley Darbinger with every fiber of his being, even shunning Nora, Darbinger’s wife, when she had tried to see him to apologize for her husband’s actions.
    He felt guilty about that now, but had never made amends. Perhaps if he made it out of this nightmare he now found himself in, he’d do so. It was obvious Darbinger wasn’t in control. There was nothing he could have done since he had no clue about the tumor and the effect it was having on him.
    It wasn’t his fault.
    But if it wasn’t his fault, then his father died for nothing.
    The thought of a useless death for the greatest man he had ever known pissed him off even more.
    “Hey! What the hell do you want with me?” he screamed in fury, in frustration, in desperation. He wasn’t sure if it was what his father would have done, but he was certain the man wouldn’t have lain there feeling sorry for himself. He would have confronted his captors, even if it meant his death.
    But probably would have done it more eloquently.
    He heard chairs scrape and footsteps, then a door creaked open at the top of the stairs. A light switch was flipped and several bulbs began to burn brilliantly, no moronic mercury-laden overpriced compact fluorescents here. He sometimes wondered whether or not the powers that be who banned the incandescent light bulb realized that millions of CFLs would end up in landfills and in the future contaminate our water supplies with mercury leading to birth defects and mental handicaps. But of course that was the worst case scenario—which never happens.
    Two men descended the stairs, their faces uncovered, and to his surprise, both smiling—not sneers, but genuine smiles.
    And they appeared unarmed.
    The first approached him with a key in hand.
    “Here, let me get those off you,” he said as he bent over and unlocked