The Abomination (34 page)

“Correction,” Gilroy said. “The investigation may be closed. But the Carabinieri are still investigating.”

“Once the general's trial is under way, it will be too late to submit further evidence in any case,” the second man pointed out.

“Perhaps. But I for one would like to know exactly what evidence remains to be found.” Gilroy peered at the painting. “These are actually quite good, you know. The sense of movement . . . He really captures the way the viewer gets left behind, wondering what just happened.”

“Every event leaves traces,” the third voice said.

“But not every trace incriminates.” Gilroy bent to read the card next to the painting. On it were some excerpts from the Futurists' manifesto. “‘We will glorify war – the world's only hygiene,'” he read aloud. “‘Militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.'” He sighed. “They weren't the most appealing bunch, were they?”

“What do you have in mind?” The voice to his left was straining not to sound impatient.

“I have a terrier,” Gilroy said, stepping back again so that he could look at the painting properly. “Do you know about hunting with terriers? The little terrier goes bravely into the fox's earth, and even though it's much too small to kill the fox itself, it pins the fox down. And that gives the huntsman time to dig out the earth, and send in his hounds.”

“What happens to the terrier?”

“It depends. Sometimes the fox kills it. Sometimes the hounds get it, along with the fox. Sometimes it manages to limp back to its owner.”

“I have a feeling I might have met your terrier. Here, in fact, at the gala opening.”

“Possibly. But just to be clear – hands off. She's my property. Not to be targeted or killed in the excitement of the hunt.”

“Very well. If you really think she's worth it.”

“She discovered details about William Baker that even I hadn't known. Your hounds are two a penny, my friend. But a good terrier's hard to find.” He turned to the fourth man, the one wearing a clerical collar who had so far kept quiet. “And as for
your
lot, Father, I think it's time this was left to the professionals, don't you?”

DANIELE MIGHT HAVE
described the hard drive as “fixed”, but it soon became clear that didn't mean the information on it was now readily accessible. The data was so corrupted, he explained, that it had effectively been reduced to tiny, unconnected pieces. He would have to pick through thousands of fragments, trying to fit them together byte by byte.

After a day of work he had only succeeded in reconstructing a few isolated portions of the messages Barbara Holton had exchanged with her contacts on Carnivia.

. . . held in a camp known as the Birds' Nest in the Krajina region . . .

. . . testimony supports the allegations made by Jelena B . . .

. . . came up to the Birds' Nest every day, sometimes four or five truckloads of soldiers at a time . . .

“These look as if they relate to Operation Storm,” Holly said. “She must have been gathering reports of atrocities against civilians.”

While Daniele continued to work on the drive, Kat and Holly researched the words “Birds' Nest Camp”. Even translated into Croatian, there was nothing on the internet – or if there was, it was buried amongst a million photographs of songbirds rearing their chicks, and recipes for Chinese soup.

“We need to narrow the search terms,” Holly said. “Daniele, can you give us anything else?”

“A little.”

“We knew the rapes would begin when ‘MarÅ¡ na Drinu' was played over the loudspeaker of the mosque. While the song was playing, all the women had to strip and soldiers entered the homes, taking the ones they wanted. Frequently the soldiers would seek out mothers and daughters. Many of us were severely beaten during the rapes. . .”

“Several of Barbara Holton's questions related to ‘rape as a weapon of war',” Holly said quietly.

“
Marš na Drinu
is a Serbian drinking song,” Kat reported from her laptop. “From the reference to a mosque, I'd say this is testimony from a Bosniak girl about an attack by Serb soldiers.”

Daniele said, “There's this, too.”

“I was playing dead after a hand grenade was thrown into my front room. As I was lying there I heard foreign voices outside and an interpreter translating the words into Croatian. He was saying, ‘Nothing must remain, not even the cats, not even the children.'”

“So this one relates to a
Croat
offensive,” Kat said.

“Which involved foreigners,” Holly added. “Barbara appears to have been collecting evidence to show that both Serbs and Croats were committing similar atrocities.”

Without comment, Daniele brought them another fragment.

“Sometimes they would bring in a new recruit. He would be ordered to choose a girl, rape her and then kill her. Or, as a game, the girl would be offered a choice – submit to rape by the soldier, or be killed by him. It was a great joke for the other soldiers if she chose death, because the soldier was perceived to have been humiliated. So he would be ribbed and teased even as he tried to earn his manhood back by killing her in the most brutal way imaginable.”

“My God,” Kat said, outraged. “This is appalling.”

“The camps had innocuous, feminine names, like ‘Coffeehouse Sonja', ‘Nymphs' Tresses' or ‘The Birds' Nest'.”

The new names gave them enough to do a more detailed search. What they found was even more horrifying. Even in the first three years of the Balkan war, when these things were still being counted, an estimated twenty thousand women were raped, many in special places of detention set up for just that purpose. Each side blamed the other for being the first to use such tactics.

For an hour or more there was silence as the two women read through the official reports. As early as 1994, the United Nations had analysed “tens of thousands” of allegations of rape, concluding:

Rape and sexual assault are reported to have been committed by all of the warring factions. Some of the reported rape and sexual assault cases are clearly the result of individual or small group conduct without evidence of command direction or an overall policy. However, many more cases seem to be part of an overall pattern. These patterns strongly suggest that a systematic rape and sexual assault policy exists . . .

And yet little seemed to have been done about it at the time. Indeed, as the country spiralled deeper into violence, and UN observers were pulled out for their own safety, the issue was apparently almost forgotten in the general confusion.

Kat felt her cheeks burning with anger. All this had been happening less than two hundred miles away, just across the Adriatic Sea, yet so accustomed had Europe become to thinking of the Communist Bloc as a separate entity that even today, people didn't talk about what had happened. Unable to sit still any longer, she jumped to her feet and strode to the big, barley-twist windows for some air, just as Daniele said quietly, “Aha.”

She turned. He was pointing at his screen.

“This is who Barbara Holton was contacting in Carnivia.”

They crowded round his computer.
[email protected]
.

“ICTY is the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,” Kat said. “Based in The Hague. Barbara Holton's website mentioned that she'd done some work for them in the past.”

Holly was typing the email address into a search engine. “And R. Carlito is Roberta Carlito,” she informed them. “Her official title is ‘legal analyst'. She reports directly to the chief prosecutor. Unofficially, I'd say she's some kind of paralegal investigator.”

“So maybe Barbara Holton was supplying her with evidence for Dragan Korovik's trial.”

“But what did that have to do with Findlater?”

“Barbara Holton thought there had been American complicity in the conflict,” Holly said. “Operation William Baker confirms it. Maybe Findlater was tasked with making sure that evidence never reached the Hague.”

“Deleting the vapour trail,” Daniele murmured from behind his computer.

“That would explain why Findlater was looking for Barbara Holton and Jelena Babić,” Holly said. “But it doesn't explain why they were all looking for Findlater's daughter.”

The same idea struck both women at the same time. They looked at each other, understanding flickering between them.

“Barbara Holton wasn't just looking for Melina Kovačević,” Kat said slowly. “She was looking for proof of a war crime.”

“Because the two are one and the same thing,” Holly agreed.

“I don't get it,” Daniele objected. “How?”

“That lock of hair Kat found in the women's hotel room – if it came from Soraya Kovačević, it would contain DNA that, when compared with DNA from Findlater and DNA from Melina, would prove they were Melina's biological parents.”

“Piola always said that Hollywood story about finding his daughter so he could give her a college education was bullshit,” Kat exclaimed. “Holly's right – Findlater wasn't using Barbara and Jelena to find Melina. He was trying to find her before they did.”

“But why?” Daniele repeated.

“To kill her. To destroy the evidence. That's what this is all about. It's Melina herself who's the smoking gun. Her DNA is living proof of a war crime.”

Whichever way they looked at it, they kept coming back to the same hypothesis.

Findlater had claimed he'd found Melina's mother cowering in a cellar whilst on duty in Krajina as a UN peacekeeper, and that they'd fallen in love. “But if the truth was a bit different,” Kat said. “If, say, he was in Croatia as an MCI operative, one of those stirring up the conflict by any means possible, including sexual violence against women. . .”

“‘Libidinal frenzy,'” Holly said. “Rape as a weapon of war. One of Paul Doherty's precursors to genocide.”

“ . . . then he might well have committed rape himself, on Soraya. Melina was the result.”

“We need to get in touch with this Roberta Carlito.” Holly looked at Daniele. “Can we email her? Is that secure?”

“Absolutely not. But you don't have to email her. You can contact her the same way Barbara did, on Carnivia.”

They logged onto Carnivia, sent Roberta Carlito an encrypted message, and waited. Within half an hour they got a message back asking them to meet her in Piazza San Marco.

For Holly, this was her first experience of assuming a Carnivia identity. Strolling with Kat and Daniele's avatars along a beautiful canalside pavement, the canals themselves mercifully free of tourists and stinking diesel-engined
vaporetti
, she couldn't see what all the fuss was about. “It's so beautiful,” she kept saying, surprised.

“Beautiful but rotten,” Kat said tersely. “Just like the real thing.”

Daniele shrugged. “It's a place. People live in it. Some are good, some are bad. Most are a mixture of the two.”

They arrived in the Piazza San Marco and found a woman in a Domino mask waiting in front of the Doge's Palace. Daniele supplied the encryption code from Barbara's computer, and Kat typed:

–
Good afternoon, Ms Carlito. We're friends of Barbara Holton. I believe you've been looking for her?

–
Is she all right?

–
I'm afraid not. She's been murdered
.

There was a long silence. Then:

–
I was afraid it must be something like that
.

They walked along the Riva degli Schiavoni as Roberta Carlito explained how she first came across Barbara Holton.

–
Barbara was one of a dozen unpaid volunteers collecting evidence of crimes committed during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Specifically, crimes against women. Affidavits from victims, witness statements, timelines of events – without its own executive arm, the ICTY doesn't have the resources to gather these things, and local police are often implicated in the original crimes themselves and have no wish to help us. So we rely on a network of pro-bono lawyers and activists
.

–
Jelena Babić was another one of those, presumably
.

–
No. Jelena was a witness – one of the first Barbara found. But they became friends, and Jelena used her contacts to introduce Barbara to other victims
.

–
Victims of what, exactly?

–
Ah . . . How much do you know about places like Coffeehouse Sonja?

–
A little, now. They were rape camps, we understand
.

–
Yes. The rapes served several purposes. They helped to demoralise and terrorise the population, of course. They brutalised the soldiers, making it easier for their commanders to order them to commit even more violent acts in the future. But there was another purpose too, in that the women would often become pregnant. The lack of birth control was quite deliberate. Effectively they were turned into breeding machines for their captors, to fill the area with children of the victors' ethnic type – the mother's ethnicity being seen as less important than the father's. It was a way of making the issues of race and religion even more toxic than they already were
.

Kat wrote:

–
What if we told you these tactics were being planned even before the war in Bosnia? And that a small number of NATO officers had a hand in it, along with a private military contractor with links to the US government?

–
I'd ask you for the proof. That's what's always held us back – actually proving there was more to this than the usual brutality of war. About a month ago Barbara thought she'd finally found a “golden thread”, as she called it. She had an affidavit from a Bosniak woman called Soraya Kovačević who'd been imprisoned in the Birds' Nest camp. Soraya alleged that one of her rapists was an American military contractor attached to the Croatian forces as an advisor. Even after all this time, she could still identify him. It's the perfect test case for us – if we can make it stand up, we'll have linked every stage of a known atrocity, from planning through to commission, back to US proxies
.