The Abomination (4 page)

“It won't be long now,” she ventured hesitantly.

He looked at her, as if a little surprised to find her there, but said nothing. He already knew what the judge would decide. He knew it because, for the last five weeks, someone had been altering his Wikipedia profile, adding a new final section:

Conviction and subsequent life

In 2013 Daniele Barbo was found guilty of seven charges of computer hacking; failing to curtail trafficking of pornography, including underage pornography and sexual violence; facilitating criminal enterprise including identity theft and money laundering; and refusing to allow the authorities access to requested information. He was found “Not Guilty” on an eighth charge: living off immoral earnings. He was sentenced to nine months in prison, despite his lawyer's pleas that her client was psychologically unfit for custody – a tactic that had worked at his previous trial.

Barbo committed suicide within a year of his release, drowning himself in the canal outside the Venetian palazzo his family had occupied since 1898. His family name died with him. The future of Carnivia, the website he created, remains uncertain.

The first time he was alerted – by an anonymous email – to the addition, Daniele simply erased it. Within seconds it was back. The same thing happened the next three times he wiped it. Someone had created a bot, a simple piece of software programmed to carry out this one task repetitively, rewriting Wikipedia's page every time he corrected it. It was, on one level, a tiny, malicious little torture, of no real consequence, but it showed the lengths that those who wanted to attack him were prepared to go to.

Or, he reflected, it showed how much they wanted him to think that: to believe there was nothing they wouldn't do to destroy him.

He could easily have written a more powerful program of his own, to erase the final paragraphs forever and lock the page, but he had no pressing reason for doing so. There were only three or four people in the world whose opinion mattered to him, and he had little interest in what the other 6.9 billion might think. His entire Wikipedia entry, which he had never troubled to read before, was in any case littered with half-truths and distortions.

Daniele Marcantonio Barbo
, b 1971, is an Italian mathematician and computer hacker. He is best known for founding
Carnivia
, a gossip- and information-sharing social network based in Venice, Italy, with over two million regular users.
^[1]

       
1  Early life and kidnap

       
2  Conviction for computer fraud

       
3  Creation of Carnivia

       
4  Growth of Carnivia

Early life and kidnap

Daniele Barbo was born into the aristocratic
Barbo dynasty
of Venice, whose business interests at the time included
Alfa-Romeo
cars. His father
Matteo
was a noted playboy before taking over the family investment trust. In later years Matteo devoted himself to establishing the art foundation which bears the family name.

Daniele Barbo's childhood coincided with the period of sociopolitical turmoil in Italy known as the
anni di piombo
or “Years of Lead”. Although his father reportedly favoured progressive industrial relations, the family's profile and wealth made them a target for far-left organisations such as the
Brigate Rosse
, or
Red Brigade
.

Daniele Barbo was kidnapped on June 27 1977, aged seven. It was widely reported at the time that his father was under pressure from the Italian government not to negotiate with the kidnappers,
^[2]
although it was later claimed that this was a smokescreen erected by the security forces to buy time while they located him.
^{[Citation needed]}
On August 4 1977 Matteo and his American wife Lucy received Daniele's ears and nose through the post.

In a subsequent operation led by Italian Special Forces, the boy was freed and all seven kidnappers killed or captured. The three surviving kidnappers refused to cooperate with the court on the grounds that it was part of the
para-capitalist hegemony
.
^[3]
They were sentenced to jail terms of between twenty and forty years each.
^[4]

Conviction for computer fraud

Little was heard of Barbo between the end of the trial and the early 1990s, although it is understood that he attended an institute for deaf children before going to Harvard to study mathematics. Whilst at Harvard he had the unusual distinction of having a term paper on cybernetics (specifically, on the application of
Kullback-Leibler divergence
to
complex dynamical systems)
published in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
^[5]

In 1994 he was one of those arrested for the
Comcast Hack
, in which a loose-knit group of computer activists took control of the cable giant's website, reportedly in revenge for poor customer service. The method they employed was both simple and effective, accessing the database of the company from whom Comcast had purchased the domain name Comcast.com and re-registering it as theirs. This enabled them to redirect Comcast's web traffic to a page containing an abusive message.
^[6]

Barbo's lawyer later confirmed that he was the hacker known as Defi@nt.
^[7]
At his trial it was claimed that he suffered from a number of medical conditions as a result of his childhood kidnap, including partial deafness, Social Avoidance Disorder and Autistic Spectrum Disorder, making a prison term unfeasible. The judge evidently agreed: Barbo was given a suspended sentence, although this may have been because the Italian government had no wish to see the murky circumstances of his kidnap and botched rescue rehashed in court.
^{[citation needed]}

Barbo/Defi@nt was rarely seen, either in public or online, in the years after his trial, although he may have used a number of other aliases including Syfer, 10THDAN and Joyride.
^[8]
In 1996, following the death of his father, he moved back to the family residence, Ca' Barbo in Venice, and took a non-executive seat on the board of the Barbo Foundation.
^[9]
A 2004 newspaper report described him as “an almost total recluse”, stating that he rarely leaves his home except during the Venetian Carnevale, when he wears a costume mask to disguise his facial disfigurements.
^[7]

Creation of Carnivia

In 2005 Barbo emerged as the programmer behind
Carnivia
, a 3D
mirror world
of his home city, Venice, notable for its obsessive attention to detail. It has been claimed, for example, that the real
St Mark's Square
and the version in Carnivia contain exactly the same number of paving stones. The
Doge's Palace
alone is reputed to have taken Barbo four years to programme.
^[9]

Carnivia is unusual in that users encounter almost no instructions telling them what it is for or how it should be used. It was initially assumed that it was intended as a social network for Venetians. It soon became apparent, however, that the site granted its users an unusually high degree of anonymity, and it quickly gained a reputation amongst those who preferred to conceal their real identities. It has been described as “a Facebook for hackers . . . an unregulated, unlicensed marketplace, not unlike its real-life counterpart once was, where anything from wild rumours to stolen financial details can be bought or sold for a price.”
^[7]

Barbo himself claimed in a rare Usenet post that the creation of Carnivia was not driven by any particular purpose. “Galileo said, ‘Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe.' I thought it would be interesting to program a virtual world from pure mathematical principles. What people do with that world is really up to them.”
^[8]

Growth of Carnivia

In a move considered ground-breaking at the time, Carnivia incorporated full cross-functionality with other technologies including Facebook, Google Mail, Twitter and Google Earth. This allows the user to leave anonymous messages on other sites, a process implicated in internet stalking.
^[10]
Users can also “tag” social networks with untraceable information, such as rumours, or send encrypted messages.

Anti-pornography campaigners have highlighted the sexual nature of much Carnivia traffic.
^[13]
In 2011 Barbo refused to allow the Italian authorities access to Carnivia's servers to check for illegal material, in breach of national and international laws.

It was subtly done. Almost every individual fact or reference was genuine, but the whole was cleverly constructed to suggest more than was actually stated. The juxtaposition of the pornography accusation, for example – failing to mention that it came in an article that also named MySpace, YouTube and a multitude of other websites – and the judicial application by the authorities to open up his servers for scrutiny – again, an application that had been made to many internet businesses – gave the impression that it was specifically pornography they were looking for, when the real issue was whether a government had the right to pry into what its citizens were doing online. The suggestion of psychological flaws, too, was mostly between the lines. It was true that he rarely went out, but when you loathed crowds, living in the most-visited city on earth made doing so an unrewarding, even distasteful experience. As for the implication that he had created Carnivia as a kind of refuge from the real world – well, that had more merit, though probably not in the way the writer had intended.

His reverie was interrupted by the lawyer, gesturing to get his attention.

“The judge is back.”

He nodded, stepping back from the door as the guards came towards him with the handcuffs. The prosecution had requested that, like some captured beast, Daniele Barbo must be chained in court, and the judge had agreed. It was yet more confirmation that the sentence would be “Guilty”. That Italy's justice system was infinitely corruptible didn't surprise him; that someone was bothering to spend so much time and money using it to destroy him did.

They must be desperate
, he found himself thinking.
Why?

The courtroom would be full of people, and even when he left it there would be journalists, cameras . . . For a moment he found himself wishing he could stay down there, in the relative calm of the cell. But even as he was being led up the stairs his mind was already planning ahead, analysing and probing, rewriting the future as if it were a piece of software that had to be debugged and re-engineered before it would function as he wished.

AS INSTRUCTED, KAT
went back to her tiny apartment near the seafront in Mestre, fell into bed, and caught a couple of hours' sleep. A shot of espresso from her beaten-up stovetop Bialetti got her going again, followed by a quick shower that was even hotter than the coffee.

Her uniform was still hanging on the front of her wardrobe where she'd left it the previous evening. The Valentino-designed skirt and jacket, with its elaborately silvered collar and red-piped epaulettes, had been her second skin since she'd left the Carabinieri training academy three years earlier. Now, for the first time, she wouldn't need it: homicide investigators wore plain clothes. She reached inside the wardrobe to where a navy blue pleated skirt and a crisp tailored jacket from Fabio Gatto in Calle della Mandorla had been hanging for months, waiting for just such an occasion. Though unshowy, the fabric was impeccably tailored and had cost almost a month's wages. She wondered, briefly, if Piola might consider her a little overdressed for a captain, then dismissed the thought. Even a captain needed to make a good impression.

Hurrying from her apartment, she took a train across the Ponte della Libertà, followed by a
vaporetto
to Campo San Zaccaria, the ancient square near Piazza San Marco where the Carabinieri's headquarters were housed in a former nunnery. Francesco Lotti, the friend who'd swung her assignment onto the case, had already established an operations room on the second floor. It was buzzing with activity.

Colonel Piola was standing in a small glassed-off office, deep in conversation with another man. Despite having told her to go home and rest, he looked as if he hadn't yet done the same. As the man with him turned, Kat saw a grey clerical shirt and white
collarino
under his dark suit. A priest.

Seeing her, Piola gestured for her to join them.

“This is Father Cilosi, from the bishop's office,” he said by way of introduction. “He's kindly offered to tell us all about priests' garments.”

Father Cilosi nodded. “Not that I can be of much help, I'm afraid. The robes seem authentic, from the photographs.” He pointed to the pictures from the mortuary that were scattered across the desk. “This outer garment is a chasuble. All priests are required to wear one when they take Mass. And underneath that, the usual tunic and alb.”

“When you say ‘take Mass', Father, I assume you mean as a celebrant?” Piola asked.

“Correct. A priest attending Mass as a visitor would wear a surplice – a plain white robe.”

“And the fact that the chasuble is black – could you remind us what that means?”

“The colour of the chasuble reflects the nature of the Mass. During this season, for example, we usually wear a white chasuble, to commemorate Christ's birth. Black is only ever worn for the most sombre rites, such as an exorcism or a Mass for the dead.”

“So there's no possibility,” Piola asked thoughtfully, “that this could be some other kind of robe, worn legitimately by a woman in a non-ordained role? An altar girl, say, or some kind of lay reader?”

Father Cilosi shook his head. “Every vestment a priest wears has a very precise symbolism. These red ribbons, for example, symbolise Christ's wounds. This long strip of silk is the stole, worn in remembrance of His bonds. Even the fringes on the ends of the stole are based in scripture. Numbers 15:38, if I recall correctly: “Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments. . . . that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord.”