He typed into a lookup database: .

Marco sat on a worn leather stool in his Genoa workshop, the smell of aged gun oil and espresso thick in the air. In his hands rested a Beretta 92SB, cold and heavy. It wasn't his. It had belonged to his grandfather, who had brought it back from a peacekeeping mission in Lebanon in the 1980s. The pistol was flawless, but the story was a ghost — until Marco learned to read the steel.

To the untrained eye, it was just a serial number. To Marco, it was a locked diary. Marco opened his laptop. He knew Beretta, founded in 1526, had been making firearms longer than most countries had existed. Their serial numbers weren't random — they were breadcrumbs.