T HE ROOM HAD NO WINDOWS , and that in itself was strange as it was situated in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. If someone had thought to cut through the soundproofed panels, the reinforced steel walls, and the complicated circuitry designed to prevent any form of outside surveillance, they would have found themselves looking at the Grand Canal with the churches and palaces of Venice, Italy, stretching into the distance.

But windows were a security risk—and anyway, the people who met here had no interest in beauty. The room’s only door was sealed with a seven-figure security code and two guards, both armed with German-made Heckler and Koch 9mm machine guns, stood impassively in their dark suits, one on either side. A narrow corridor with a plush, gold-colored carpet led to an elevator at the end. It had been a few minutes since the last person—a woman—had appeared behind the sliding doors. She had walked along the corridor past the guards without so much as a glance and they had been careful not to catch her eye. She was wearing X by Clive Christian, one of the most expensive perfumes in the world. The scent had lingered in the air for a moment and then it was gone as the door closed softly behind her.

Julia Charlotte Glennis Rothman had arrived.

She sat at the head of a highly polished conference table—cut from a type of tree that was now extinct—and briefly surveyed the men who had gathered here.

There were eight of them. The oldest, bold and wheezy with sore eyes, was about seventy, wearing a crumpled gray suit. The man next to him was Chinese, while the man opposite, fair-haired with an open-neck shirt, was from Australia. It was clear that the people who had congregated in this place came from many different parts of the world, but they had one thing in common; a stillness, a coldness even, that made the room as cheerful as a morgue. Not one of them greeted Mrs. Rothman as she took her seat. Nor did they bother looking at the time. If she had arrived, it must be exactly one o’clock. That was when the meeting was meant to begin.

“Good afternoon,” Mrs. Rothman said.

A few heads nodded, but nobody spoke. Greetings were a waste of words.

The nine people sitting around the table made up the executive board of one of the most ruthless and successful criminal organizations in the world. The old man’s name was Max Grendel. The Chinese man was Dr. Three. The Australian had many names but seldom used any of them. They had come to this room without windows to go over the final details of an operation that would, in just a few weeks, make them richer by the sum of one hundred million dollars.

The organization was called Scorpia.

It was a fanciful name, they all knew it, invented by someone who had probably read too much James Bond. But they had to call themselves something and in the end they had chosen a name drawn from their four main fields of activity.

Sabotage. Corruption. Intelligence. Assassination.

Scorpia. A name that worked in a surprising number of languages and that rolled off the tongue of anyone who might wish to employ them. Scorpia. Seven letters that were now on the database of every police force and security agency in the world.

The organization was formed in the early eighties, at the end of the so-called Cold War, the secret war that had been fought for decades between Russia, China, America, and Europe. Every government in the world had its own army of spies and assassins…all of them prepared to kill, or to die for their country. What they weren’t prepared to do, though, was to find themselves out of work. And with the end of the Cold War, a number of them saw that was exactly what they would soon be. They weren’t needed anymore. It was time to go into business for themselves.

They came together one Sunday morning in Paris. Their first meeting took place at the Maison Berthillon, a famous ice cream parlor on the Ile Saint-Louis, not far from Notre Dame. They all knew each other. They had tried to kill each other often enough. But now, in the pretty, wood-paneled room with its antique mirrors and lace curtains, and over twelve dishes of Berthillon’s famous wild strawberry ice cream, they discussed how they might work together and make themselves rich. At this meeting, Scorpia was born.

Since then it had flourished. Scorpia was all over the world. It had brought down two governments and arranged for a third to be elected unfairly. It had destroyed dozens of businesses, corrupted politicians and civil servants, engineered several major ecological disasters, and killed anyone who got in its way. It was now responsible for one-tenth of the world’s terrorism, which it undertook on a contract basis. Scorpia liked to think of itself as the Microsoft of crime—but in fact, compared to Scorpia, Microsoft was strictly small-time.

There had once been twelve executives. Only nine were left. One had died of cancer. Two had been murdered. But that wasn’t a bad record after twenty years of violent crime. There had never been a single leader of Scorpia. All nine were equal partners, but one executive would be assigned to each new project, working in alphabetical order.

The project they were discussing this afternoon had been given a code name: Invisible Sword. Julia Rothman was in command.

“I would like to report to the committee that everything is progressing on schedule,” she began.

There was a trace of a Welsh accent in her voice. She had in fact been born in Aberystwyth, Wales. Her parents had been Welsh nationalists, burning down the cottages of English vacationers who had bought them as second homes. Unfortunately, they burned one of these cottages with the English family still inside it, and when Julia was six, she found herself in an institution while her parents began life sentences in jail. This was, in a way, the start of her own criminal career.

“It is now three months,” she went on, “since we were approached by our client, a gentleman in the Middle East. To call him rich would be an understatement. He is a multibillionaire. This man has looked at the world, at the balance of power, and he has decided that something has gone seriously wrong. He has asked us to remedy it.

“In a nutshell, our client believes that the West has become too powerful. He looks at Great Britain and the United States. It was the friendship between them that won the Second World War. And it is this same friendship that now allows the West to invade any country that it pleases and to take anything it wants. Our client has asked us to end the Anglo-American alliance once and for all.

“What can I tell you about our client?” Mrs. Rothman smiled sweetly. “Perhaps he is a visionary, interested only in world peace. Perhaps he is completely insane. Either way, it doesn’t make any difference to us. He has offered us an enormous sum of money—one hundred million dollars, to be exact—to do what he wants. To humble Britain and the United States and to ensure they cease to work together as a world power. And I am happy to be able to tell you that twenty million dollars, the first installment of that money, arrived in our Swiss bank yesterday. We are now ready to move into phase two.”

There was silence in the room. As the men waited for Mrs. Rothman to speak again, the faint hum of an air conditioner could be heard. But no sound came from outside.

“Phase two—the final phase—will take place three weeks from now. I can promise you that very soon the English and the Americans will be at each other’s throats. More than that: By the end of the month both countries will be on their knees. The US will be hated throughout the entire world. England will have witnessed a horror beyond anything they could ever have imagined. We will all be a great deal richer. And our client will consider his money well spent.”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Rothman. I have a question….”

Dr. Three bowed his head politely. His face seemed to be made of wax and his hair—jet-black—looked twenty years younger than the rest of him. It had to be dyed. He was very small and might have been a retired teacher. He might have been many things, but he was, in fact, the world expert on torture and pain. He had written several books on the subject.

“How many people do you intend to kill?” he asked politely.

Julia Rothman considered. “It’s still difficult to be precise, Dr. Three,” she replied. “But it will certainly be thousands. Many thousands.”

“And they will all be children?”

“Yes. They will mainly be twelve and thirteen years old.” She sighed. “It is, it goes without saying, very unfortunate. I adore children even though I’m glad I never had any of my own. But that’s the plan. And I have to say, the psychological effect of so many young people dying will, I think, be useful. Does it concern you?”

“Not at all, Mrs. Rothman.” Dr. Three shook his head.

“Does anyone else have any objections?”

Nobody spoke, but out of the corner of her eye, Mrs. Rothman noticed Max Grendel shift uncomfortably on his chair at the far end of the table. He was the oldest man in the room, seventy-three, with sagging skin and liver spots on his forehead. He suffered from an eye disease that made him weep constantly. He was dabbing at his eyes now with a tissue. It was hard to believe that he had been a commander in the German secret police and had once personally strangled a foreign spy during a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth. But it was not he who spoke.

“Are preparations complete in London?” the Australian asked.

“Construction in the church finished a week ago. The platform, the gas cylinders, and the rest of the machinery will be delivered later today.”

“Will Invisible Sword work?” asked another of the men.

It was typical of Levi Kroll to be blunt and to the point. He had joined Scorpia from Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and still thought of himself as a soldier. For twenty years he had slept with an FN 9mm pistol under his pillow. Then, one night, it had gone off. He was a large man with a beard that covered most of his face, concealing the worst of his injuries. A patch covered the empty socket where his left eye had once been.

“Of course it will work.” Mrs. Rothman was offended.

“It’s been tested?”

“We’re testing it right now. But I have to tell you that Professor Liebermann is something of a genius.

A boring little man if you have to spend time with him…and heaven knows I’ve had to do plenty of that. But he’s created a brand-new weapon and the beauty of it is that all the experts in the world won’t know what it is or how it operates. Of course, they’ll work it out in the end, and I’ve made plans for that eventuality. But by then it will be too late. The streets of London will be littered with corpses. It’ll be the worst thing to have happened to children in a city since the Pied Piper.”

“And what about Liebermann?” Dr. Three asked.

“I haven’t quite decided yet. We’ll probably have to kill him too. He may have invented Invisible Sword, but he has no idea how we plan to use it. I expect he’ll object. So he’ll have to go.”

Mrs. Rothman looked around the room. “Is there anything else?” she asked.

“Yes.” Max Grendel spread his hands across the surface of the table. Mrs. Rothman wasn’t surprised that he had something to say. He was a father and a grandfather. Worse than that, in his old age he had become sentimental.

“I have been with Scorpia from the very beginning,” he said. “I remember still our first meeting in Paris. I have earned many millions of dollars working with you and I’ve enjoyed everything we’ve done. But this project…Invisible Sword. Are we really going to kill so many children? How will we be able to live with ourselves?”

“Rather more comfortably than before,” Mrs. Rothman muttered.

“No, no, Julia.” Grendel shook his head. A single tear trickled from one of his diseased eyes. “This will come as no surprise to you. We spoke of this the last time we met. But I have decided that enough is enough. I’m an old man. I want to retire to my castle in Vienna. Invisible Sword will be your greatest achievement, I am sure. But I no longer have a heart for it. It is time for me to retire. You must go ahead without me.”

“You can’t retire!” Levi Kroll snapped.

“Why did you not tell us about this earlier?” another of the men asked angrily. He was black but with Japanese eyes. There was a diamond the size of a pea embedded in one of his front teeth.

“I told Mrs. Rothman,” Max Grendel said reasonably. “She’s the project leader. I felt there was no need to inform the entire committee.”

“We really don’t need to argue about this, Mr. Mikato,” Julia Rothman said. “Max has been talking about retiring for a long time now and I think we should respect his wishes. It’s certainly a shame. But as my late husband used to say—all good things come to an end.”

Mrs. Rothman’s multimillionaire husband had fallen to his death from a seventeenth-story window. It had happened just two days after his marriage to her.

“It’s very sad, Max,” she went on. “But I’m sure you’re doing the right thing. It’s time for you to go.”

She went with him down to the jetty, taking the elevator to the ground floor. At last they stood in the bright sunlight with the sounds and smells of real life all around. Max Grendel glanced back at the palazzo—the four-story building from which he had just emerged. It was, he thought, as beautiful as its owner. For when Julia Rothman wasn’t at her apartment in New York or her villa at Turtle Bay on the island of Tobago, this was where she lived, right on the edge of the Grand Canal.

Grendel looked for his motorboat. It seemed to have already left, but a gondola was waiting to take him back down the canal. Mrs. Rothman took his arm. “I’ll miss you,” she said.

“Thank you, Julia.” Max Grendel patted her arm. “I’ll miss you too.”

“I don’t know how we’ll manage without you.”

“Invisible Sword cannot fail. Not with you at the head.”

She stopped suddenly. “I almost forgot,” she said. “I have something for you.” She snapped a finger and a servant ran forward carrying a large box wrapped in pink and blue paper, tied with a silver bow. “It’s a present for you,” she said.

“A retirement present?”

“Something to remember us by.”

Max Grendel had stopped beside the gondola. It was bobbing up and down on the choppy surface. A gondolier stood in the back, dressed in a traditional striped jersey, leaning on his pole. “Thank you, my dear,” he said. “And good luck.”

“Enjoy yourself, Max. And keep in touch.”

She kissed him, her lips lightly touching his withered cheek. Then she helped him into the gondola. He sat down awkwardly, the brightly colored box resting on his knees. At once the gondolier pulled away. Mrs. Rothman raised a hand. The little boat cut swiftly through the gray canal.

Mrs. Rothman turned and went back into the building.

Max Grendel watched her sadly. He knew that life wouldn’t be the same without Scorpia. For more than two decades he had devoted all his energies to the organization. It had kept him young, kept him alive. But now there were his grandchildren to consider. He thought of little Hans and Rudi—the twins. They too were twelve years old. The same age as Scorpia’s targets in London. He couldn’t be part of it. He had made the right decision.

He had almost forgotten the package resting on his thighs. That was typical of Julia. Perhaps it was because she was the only woman on the executive committee, but she had always been the one who was most emotional. He wondered what she had bought him. The parcel was heavy. On an impulse, he pulled the ribbon, then ripped off the paper.

It was an executive briefcase. It was obviously expensive. He could tell from the quality of the leather, the hand-stitching…and there was the label. It had been made by Gucci. His initials— MUG —had been engraved in gold just under the handle. With a smile he opened it.

And screamed as the contents spilled over him.

Scorpions. Dozens of them. They were at least four inches long, sand colored, with tiny pincers and fat, swollen bodies. As they tipped into his lap and began to climb his shirt, he recognized them for what they were: hairy thick-tail scorpions from the Parabuthus species, the most deadly in the world.

Max Grendel fell backward, shrieking, his eyes bulging, his arms and legs flailing as the hideous creatures found the folds in his clothes and crawled through his shirt into his armpits and down under the waistband of his trousers. The first one stung him on the side of his neck, the next on his chest. Then, suddenly, the scorpions were stinging him everywhere, over and over again, until his screams died unheard in his throat.

His heart gave out long before the neurotoxins killed him. As the gondola floated gently forward, being steered now toward the island cemetery of Venice, the tourists might have noticed him lying still with his hands spread out, gazing with sightless eyes at the bright Venetian sky. rk2+kR/6YS+NXc6P3Z71aUQFapoAk4SEciztLyKXFiWV6N+oXPtBNrTqfQZ48Rz8