The mask cost eleven soldi from a stall on the Rialto and fit well enough to pass without adjustment, which Trent appreciated because the alternative was buying one that didn't fit and spending the evening aware of it. He'd learned this about operational equipment in Florence: discomfort compounds over time until it becomes the thing you're thinking about instead of the work.
The Barbarigo palazzo was three canals from the Rialto. During Carnivale it was open — not publicly, but with the selective openness of a man who wanted a specific kind of audience to know his wealth. Merchants, council members, guild representatives. The Doge's people, positioned at strategic tables like decorations that moved when spoken to. Emilio circulated through all of it with the ease of a man in his own house, which was exactly what this was.
The ceiling was painted. Allegorical figures — triumph, commerce, God's favor distributed in approximate proportion to the subject's purchasing power. The kind of commission that cost what a working family earned in a generation and was intended to make that fact visible. Trent moved through the crowd beneath it with the specific invisibility of someone who looked like he belonged and was moderately interesting rather than very interesting, which was the Carnivale social sweet spot.
[SOCIAL INFILTRATION — ENHANCED. DETECTION RISK: REDUCED 40%. CARNIVALE PERIOD: 6 DAYS REMAINING.]
He counted entrances: three visible, one servants', one canal-side that he could place from the building's exterior geometry. Emilio's position in the room: near the eastern gallery, holding court with two men Trent recognized from the Doge's council briefing. The guards: less visible than at the opera house, distributed into the crowd in civilian dress, but the stillness was the same tell and he'd found four of them in the first twenty minutes.
A woman in a silver mask passed across the far end of the room. The posture caught him — the particular way she held herself, upright but with the forward lean of someone actively paying attention rather than performing attention.
Cristina, some part of him said, before the rest of him caught up with geography: Cristina was in Florence, two hundred miles south, keeping accounts in columns she didn't show Claudia. The woman in the silver mask was a stranger with similar bone structure and the quality of presence that Cristina had developed over the course of becoming something more than what she'd been in January.
The ache was specific and unwelcome. He noted it, categorized it, moved on.
Rosa was not what he'd expected from Antonio's description.
He'd said quick, brutal, and ambitious in that order, and the order was accurate but the emphasis was wrong — Rosa was primarily observant, the quickness and brutality and ambition all in service of watching, and the watching was the most dangerous thing about her. She materialized beside him at the refreshments table with the specific approach of someone who'd confirmed he was who she was looking for before committing to the contact.
"You've mapped four exits," she said. In Venetian dialect, which she was doing to identify whether he could follow it. He could. "The guards are in pairs. The fifth entrance is behind the painting on the north wall — servants' access, door frame hidden by the frame. They use it for wine delivery."
"Five entrances, then."
"Five." She assessed him with the professional efficiency of someone who billed time by the hour and understood that social pleasantries cost the same as operational intelligence. "Antonio says you can work. Grimaldi was clean."
"Grimaldi was clean," he agreed.
"Emilio is not Grimaldi." She took a cup from the table without looking at it. "He's been walking his garden every morning since he was forty years old. Same route. Same guards. Same time. He's done it through three assassination attempts — not against him, against his competitors — and it hasn't occurred to him that routines are targets."
"Because none of the attempts were against him directly."
"Because he's never had reason to think anyone would dare." She looked across the room toward Emilio's position at the eastern gallery. Not pointed — the glance of someone who'd been tracking the same target for long enough to do it without emphasis. "The garden is accessible from the canal side. There's a stone balustrade that runs the exterior, overhung by the garden wall. The guards watch the gate, not the wall. Carnivale ends in six days. Before then, the masks provide cover for movement near the palazzo. After, that changes."
"What time does he walk?"
"First light. Alone except for the two garden guards. He carries coffee — personal habit, hates the palazzo cook's version, brings his own from a merchant three streets over. The guards consider it eccentric." A pause. "They're not wrong."
Six days. Emilio Barbarigo, twenty years of accumulated Templar infrastructure, morning coffee, and a garden wall that he'd never needed to think of as a vulnerability.
Factor it in, Trent thought. All of it.
Federico found him on the canal steps during the intermission that Carnivale parties created by virtue of everyone deciding simultaneously to take the air. He'd been circulating the exterior — guard positions, approach angles, the sight lines from the garden wall to the gate — and he had the expression of a man who'd formed a view and was choosing the moment to express it.
"The celebration itself," Federico said. Not a question.
"Rosa's proposal is better."
"Four hundred people in that room. Three brothers — Emilio's the only one who attends functions like this because Marco doesn't trust crowds and Carlo hasn't been sober since the opera." He kept his voice level, the quality he'd developed for arguments he knew the outcome of but felt obligated to make. "One strike, tonight, and we're done with the eldest. No approach, no wait, no route."
"One strike tonight and the Doge investigates an assassination at a noble celebration he probably attended." Trent watched a gondola navigate the canal turn. "That's not a political situation the Medici can manage. And it's not a situation that reads as Venetian internal crime." He looked at Federico. "It reads as exactly what it is."
"The garden reads as what it is too. Eventually."
"Eventually is three months from now when they've stopped looking inward and started looking outward. Tonight is tomorrow."
Antonio's approach behind them both was quiet enough that a lesser version of Federico would have startled. He didn't — he'd developed the specific awareness of a man who'd learned that things that came at him from behind in Venice were usually allies, which was its own kind of adaptation.
"The public approach gets the Doge's investigation," Antonio said. "I have seven members of my network who don't need that attention." He stood beside them and watched the same canal. "The garden is achievable. I've confirmed Rosa's route twice with my own people." A pause that had the quality of a man making a decision he'd already made and was announcing for form. "Do the garden."
Federico looked at the canal. His jaw did its thing — the settle rather than the clench, the one that had developed to mean I've heard the argument and I am accepting it even though the other part of me won't fully agree for several hours.
"The garden," he said.
"The garden," Trent confirmed.
Rosa, materializing from the far side of the steps with the timing of someone who'd been listening without appearing to, said: "First light, day after tomorrow. The second-to-last day of Carnivale. The guards will have been on extended rotation for five days by then."
Tired guards. The specific vulnerability of people who'd been maintaining heightened alertness through a festival week and were approaching the point where habit replaced attention.
Factor it in.
"Day after tomorrow," Trent said.
Six days of masks had become two.
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