The Abduction: A Novel (31 page)

They must have realised it too, because she heard a shout and the firing stopped.

So they don’t want me dead. Or at least, not here.
It was hardly reassuring.

She looked at the ground, now hundreds of feet below. How high should she allow herself to get? She knew reserve parachutes were designed to open at relatively low altitudes. But if she left it until the standard skydiving height of two thousand feet, she’d be too cold to open it at all. Already she could hardly breathe.

Too low, though, and the parachute would simply set her down a few yards from where she’d inflated the balloon.

Make a decision. In a crisis, the indecisive die first.

Swiftly followed, of course, by those who decide wrong.

She’d wait until a thousand.

Decision made, she mentally went through what she was going to have to do. Release the balloon, freefall, then deploy the parachute.

Then just steer myself over a border the precise location of which I don’t even know.

Holly Boland, you don’t make life easy for yourself, do you?

At one thousand feet she released the balloon. That was hard. It might be pulling her upwards to certain death, but every nerve and sinew of her body shrank from unhooking and committing herself to gravity’s embrace.

She committed, and fell. This was the point at which her old instructor had told her to shout “Geronimo!”. On this occasion she dispensed with the shout, and pulled on the parachute ripcord. The plastic billowed around her, flapping in her face, thin and flimsy as a supermarket carrier bag, and for one heart-stopping moment she thought it was going to tangle or tear. Then it blossomed, just as it was meant to, into an oblong canopy over her head, cupping the air and slowing her fall.

She pulled on the front straps, and found her body angling obediently to the north. In the distance she could see the lights of another village.

Reasoning that it was almost certainly over the border, it seemed as good as any place to aim for.

She drifted down as slowly as she could, tacking to and fro, milking the breeze for every yard of distance. When she landed she was within a few hundred yards of her objective, the col just a black shape behind her.

As she unclipped the parachute, headlights clicked on, bathing her in light.

It seemed Joe Nicholls’ colleagues had brought their passports after all.

SEVENTY-FIVE

KAT WAS SHOWN
into the Damasco Suite of the Hotel Metropole, where her host was waiting. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, slipping into the chair he indicated.

Vivaldo Moretti waved her apology away. “I’ve just spent a most enjoyable twenty minutes anticipating every moment of our evening. So in a sense, the pleasure has been mine already.”

“Anticipation will be all it is,” she warned.

Vivaldo Moretti smiled. “Then I’m fortunate that what I was imagining was so very wonderful.” He indicated the table in front of them. “I’ve taken the liberty of allowing the chef to choose the dishes. It is, apparently, ‘tra-contemporary’ cuisine. That is, each dish contains both traditional and modern elements.”

Kat inspected her plate doubtfully. It contained a cocktail glass of strawberry puree, next to a square of polenta topped with a mound of bean mush, and finally a fried courgette flower which had been stuffed with some kind of minced fish.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet me,” she said, picking up her fork. “I wanted to talk about a man I believe you may have worked with in the past. Sandro La Sala?”

“Indeed. I wouldn’t say we knew each other well, but I certainly observed him at close quarters often enough. What do you want to know about him?”

“General impressions, first of all.”

Moretti considered. “Politically speaking, a plodder. But an effective one. And, of course, he was fortunate in his friends. That generation of politicians – the ones who fought in the war – tended to sort out their differences quietly over dinner at Gino’s, not in the pages of the newspapers.”

“You say ‘his friends’ – I suppose you know he was a member of a so-called charitable organisation called the Order of Melchizedek?”

Moretti nodded. “As are many politicians.”

“But not you?”

Moretti said thoughtfully, “You know, there’s something very seductive about secrets. And even more beguiling is the notion that there’s a kind of brotherhood, an elite of the initiated, where powerful men will share their secrets freely. To be told that you could be amongst them – to get ‘the touch’, as they call it – that’s flattering; intoxicating, even. And of course, you’re always aware, or are made aware, of the other benefits such an association could bring. Election expenses, office costs, the services of bright young researchers, not to mention favourable coverage in the media. The power such networks gather to themselves is real enough. And when it really matters, they make sure the inner circle closes ranks.”

“And that’s what the Order of Melchizedek is, in your opinion? The ‘inner circle’?”

He shrugged. “Melchizedek is one version of it. P2 was another. The Vatican is part of it, the intelligence services are riddled with it, certain exclusive clubs and dining societies overlap with it, and even one or two rather specialised brothels. It has no name, exactly – call it ‘influence’, call it ‘corruption’, or simply be blunt and call it ‘power’, because it is all those things and more.” He shook his head. “In answer to your previous question, no, I was never part of it.”

“How did you avoid it?”

“By being so disreputable that they thought I would disgrace them. And by being so shameless that I had no secrets to be blackmailed over.”

“Was La Sala blackmailed, do you think?”

“I don’t believe so. It was always whispered of him that he was a great patriot – a war hero of some unspecified kind. Who knows? Perhaps, as a communist who’d crossed to the mainstream, his paymasters simply chose to promote him in order to encourage others who might be tempted to follow the same path. In that world, nothing is ever quite what it seems.”

“When you say ‘paymasters’, you mean the CIA, don’t you? Or at least, people within the Italian intelligence services doing their bidding?”

A waiter entered and replaced their empty plates with two more, equally elaborate creations – pigeon with a lychee puree and chocolate shavings for her, braised beef with vegetable mousses for him.

“I will say this,” Moretti said when they were alone again. “I’ve noticed, over the course of a long and scandalous career, that no one prospers long in this country if they take a stand against the Americans. Oh, the odd grand gesture is acceptable, particularly if it makes a splash in the newspapers. But when it comes to matters of trade, or foreign policy, or security, it’s generally safer and more profitable to follow the same position as them. Plenty of Italian companies have ridden a long way on their coat tails. Conterno, for example.”

“Conterno? How?”

He lifted his hands. “Military contracts. Dozens, even hundreds over the years. It all started with rebuilding the factory in the caves at Longare, the one that made the aeroplane parts for the Nazis. Later came the bottling plants, the irrigation projects, and most recently, the reconstruction projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. La Sala had a seat on the Conterno board, by the way, so he raked it in that way too.” He looked at her quizzically. “Are you going to tell me why you want to know all this?”

“I’m trying to work out what it is that links the death of a communist partisan in the last months of the war with the American military bases around Vicenza.”

He nodded slowly.

“Do you have any suggestions?”

“Just this,” he said. “Obviously, all the American bases in Italy are important to them, in different ways. You’ve got the submarine base at Sigonella, the naval base at Livorno, the airfield at Aviano, the munitions and equipment stored at Camp Darby, to name just four. But of all of them, during the Cold War, the garrison at Vicenza was strategically the most important.”

“Why?”

“Because it was guarding their nuclear weapons,” he said simply. “From the 1950s onwards, the Soviets had a massive advantage in conventional weapons, particularly tanks. The thinking was that when Italy was finally ripe for the taking, the Red Army’s divisions would stream over the Eastern Alps, down into the flat plains of the Veneto.” He gestured to the floor. “This is where NATO would have held them back. And since NATO had far fewer tanks, it would have been necessary to do it with tactical nuclear weapons. In the fifties and sixties, that meant the kind of munitions that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki – huge, potentially unstable bombs that had to be dropped from planes. And other, even bigger armaments called nuclear mines, that were designed to be placed under the Alpine passes.”

“My God,” she said. “Venice would have been a wasteland – another Bikini Atoll.”

He nodded. “Indeed. But the reason the Americans needed Vicenza in particular is that, uniquely among the towns of northern Italy, it offered somewhere to store those weapons, out of range of any tactical air strikes by the Soviets.”

“I don’t understand. Where?”

“Underground,” he said. “That munitions factory Conterno operated at Longare was one of the Nazi’s largest so-called ‘tunnel factories’. Even then, it occupied over thirty thousand square metres of caves and quarries, deep under the hills. After the war, Conterno enlarged it still further and remodelled it into an underground facility for nuclear storage. And not just nuclear storage; there were command centres down there, a hidden tank division, barracks for soldiers, water plants – an entire military garrison, quite self-contained, awaiting the day that nuclear war broke out.”

“Is it still there?”

“I understood that it was decommissioned in the 1980s, after the end of the Cold War. But for decades before that ‘Site Pluto’, as it was called, was the jewel in the Americans’ nuclear crown. They would have gone to any lengths to protect it.”

She thought. “That’s interesting. It may even be a link to Ghimenti’s death – his body was found in a pile of rubble that Dr Iadanza said was spoil from a local quarry. But if Site Pluto was decommissioned, as you say, why would they still care about protecting it today? There must be dozens of old bunkers like that dotted around Europe.”

“I don’t know. But I’ve observed that in Italy, the secrets of the past have a way of becoming the secrets of the present.” He pushed his plate aside. “A grappa, perhaps, Captain Kat? I don’t know how you feel about this ridiculous food, but personally I’d rather eat no more of it. The Michelin inspectors may like all these mousses and foams and other forms of flavoured air, but one can’t help feeling that’s because it reminds them of what’s inside their favourite car tyres.”

She laughed. “Or is it just because they’re French?”

“And what do the French know about food?” he agreed. “Or love, for that matter?” He looked at her fondly. “I like you, Captain Kat, and I should very much like to express my admiration by taking you to bed now. It would be, as it were, a pleasant and leisurely way to continue our conversation, and to delay the moment when the evening has to end.”

Rather to her surprise, she found herself tempted, at least for a microsecond. The man was old, physically ugly and utterly preposterous, but being bathed in his charm was like sunshine on bare skin. A little reluctantly, she shook her head. “Not tonight, Vivaldo. I have this case to wrap up, and I wouldn’t be relaxed enough to enjoy what you have in mind.”

“Perhaps on another occasion, then.”

“Perhaps,” she said, and was rewarded by the delight in his smile.

SEVENTY-SIX

“
TAKE THE HOOD
off,” a familiar voice said. “I want her to see me.”

The heavy felt hood was pulled from Holly’s head. Blinking in the bright light, it took her a moment to focus on his face, particularly as the ropes to which her wrists were shackled were fastened above and behind her, forcing her to arch her body backwards.

Carver.

He stepped forward so she could see him better. “Boland,” he said, rolling the name around his tongue like wine. “Bo-land.”

“What am I doing here, sir?” she croaked through dry lips. “Why am I restrained?”

He grinned. “Oh, very good. But it’s a little late to be playing the dumb blonde with me now. And much as I like hearing you call me ‘sir’, it’s no longer appropriate. As of this time you should not consider yourself a member of the United States Armed Forces.”

“But that’s exactly what I am, sir.”

He shook his head. “No. A
mystery
, Boland, is what you are. Absent without leave. Vanished without trace. Missing, but not in action. Or at least, that’s what you’ll be when someone bothers to report you gone. For the time being you’re just like every other Exodus.” He leaned forward, so that his face was very close to hers. “Mine.”

“Sir, what is Exodus?” she said, struggling to keep her voice calm.

“She wants to know about Exodus,” he said, turning to the other two men in the cell. Both were thickset, crewcut, in their early thirties. Both were wearing army fatigues. Under the rolled-up sleeves she could see the winged-death’s-head tattoos on their biceps. “Do we tell her?”

Neither man answered. The decision was his: they were simply the audience.

“Exodus is need-to-know,” he said, turning back to her. “In fact, that’s not quite true. There are quite a few people who really ought to know about it who don’t know jack shit. Including the President.” Pleased with his own answer, he reached out and twanged one of the ropes, testing it for tightness.

Surreptitiously, she tried to examine her surroundings. A small cell, one wall made of steel bars. The walls on either side were breezeblock, the one at the rear bare rock. Beyond it, through the bars, she could just make out more cells, all identical, stretching away as far as the eye could see. In some of them she could see bright orange blobs. There were no windows, and the walls overhead arched into the rock. It was cold, about twelve or fourteen degrees.

She was in a tunnel, somewhere deep underground.

One of the orange blobs moved. In a distant cell a dark face lifted, caught her eye, then quickly looked away again.

There was no surprise in those eyes, no recognition; no emotion of any kind except dull fear.

Prisoners. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them.

“Exodus is a
solution
,” Carver said. “See, our great President leaves office in 2016. He’s thinking about his legacy. And right now, he’ll go down in history as the man who said he’d close Guantanamo but didn’t. So he’s got one hundred and sixty-four detainees sitting in Guantanamo he doesn’t know what to do with, and the clock’s counting down.” He stuck out a finger, then a second. “That’s problem one, Boland, but it’s chickenfeed compared with problem two: Afghanistan. Ever since Guantanamo became a tourist trap for every liberal blogger and do-good journalist in America, we’ve been sticking our detainees elsewhere. Places like the detention facility at Bagram Air Base – that’s three thousand of the suckers, right there. But guess what? Now we’re pulling out of Afghanistan, we’ve got to hand the jails back. And some of those detainees… well, let’s just say a few might have stories to tell about their time as our guests that we’d rather not see splashed all over Al Jazeera. So that’s another clock ticking. Then there’s Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, the occasional troublemaker like yourself, a couple of guys off the construction site who had to be quietly vanished…” He stuck out a third finger, then a fourth, all the way onto his other hand. “Plus all the people we used to ship off to our friends in Libya, Egypt and Syria. You get the picture. Tens of thousands of detainees, and nowhere to put them.”

“This is a detention facility,” she said.

He considered. “Kind of. But not exactly, not in the usual sense of the term. What this place is, is a grey area. An administrative black hole. An overflow pipe. Or as I like to think of it, a human trash can. No one ordered it, exactly; no one discussed it, but a need arose, and
voilà
.” He gestured at the ceiling of rock above them. “This is what under the carpet looks like, Boland. A long, long way under the carpet.” He turned to his men again, inviting them to chuckle.

The implications of what she was hearing were only just sinking in. “How many?” she said, appalled. “How many human beings will you keep down here without rights? What will happen to them?”

“Here?” He looked around. “This place could hold a couple of thousand, if we pack ’em in tight. Most of what we’ve got here already are what we call husks – they’ve been through the process, not much fight left in them. Not much of anything, really. Get a system set up, it only takes a few dozen men to take care of somewhere this size. But Exodus isn’t just this place. There are container ships criss-crossing international waters, a couple of so-called research stations in the Antarctic, a desert oilfield that doesn’t produce any oil… Exodus is a
franchise
, and a pretty damn successful one at that.” He ran his palm over his head. “As for what will happen to them, the answer’s nothing. We’ve got an exercise facility in the quarry, our own water supply – no sunlight, of course, but a vitamin D shot once a year takes care of that. You’re looking at a nice, quiet retirement home for jihadists. The only way they’ll leave here is in an urn.”

She suddenly realised she was handling this all wrong. The less he told her, the more she’d preserve the slim possibility that he might let her go. Otherwise, she’d face the same fate as all the other human debris that had been tossed down here.

As if reading her mind, he said, “Truth is, most of the time it gets pretty dull for the guys running this place. Particularly after what they were used to doing, before America lost its balls. So I’m not at all displeased to have you as our guest here, Boland. You’ll be a nice addition to the facilities.” He leaned in very close. “Our very own R&R.”

He stood back to enjoy the expression in her eyes. “But first,” he added, “we’d like to know everything you know, where it came from, and who you’ve told. Franklyn here will take care of that.”

The burlier of the two men stepped forward, whistling under his breath.