The Abomination (40 page)

“
You blackmailed them
?”

Uriel shook his head. “It was more in the nature of asking for what was rightfully owed. After all, the various groups involved in William Baker did very well out of that war. I was simply offering to help clear up some of the debris.”

“And the Companions of the Order of Melchizedek? Who are they, exactly?”

Father Uriel frowned. “A benevolent organisation through which the funds for the Institute are channelled, no more.”

“I'll need a list of names,” Daniele said. “All the details you can remember.”

The other man sighed again. “Ask yourself something, Daniele. What good can it possibly do to bring all this to light? That paper of mine . . . Once it's known about, you must see that others –
many
others – will find it, just as you did. The ideas it contains, the tools by which civil unrest is turned into genocide, will become everyday currency. People like you – the generation that grew up with the internet – like to believe that openness is always good; secrecy always evil. But the reverse can also be true. Sometimes, it's secrecy that prevents evil people from learning how to do more evil.”

“My secrecy may have a price.”

“Ah.” Father Uriel put the tips of his fingers together and looked at him thoughtfully. “You intend to negotiate with those who hold your future in their hands.”

“Perhaps. After all, you did.”

“Then let me make you a slightly different offer. I realise the reason you gave for coming here today was only a pretext. But as a matter of fact, I
do
believe I can help you. Treatments for your condition have come a long way in recent years.”

“I don't need treating.”

“Have you ever had a meaningful relationship with another human being?” Father Uriel asked quietly.

Daniele didn't reply.

“Daniele, you don't have to live the way you do, cut off from the rest of the world. You can learn to form connections, friendships . . . Perhaps, at first, you won't experience them in quite the same way others do. Becoming fully human takes practice. And guidance. Unless you allow someone to help you, you'll never begin.”

“If I want a shrink, I can look in the phone book.”

“Yes. But if you were going to do that, you'd have done it years ago. Besides, my success rate is well above the norm. I can show you the numbers, if you like.”

“Would you medicate me?”

Father Uriel shrugged. “Possibly. But the main work would be a course of cognitive behavioural therapy. Is there someone in particular you'd like to have an emotional relationship with?”

Daniele said nothing.

“Well, think about it.” The priest got to his feet.

“How do you know the other parties at the conference will agree?” Daniele asked.

“Oh, they'll agree. You'll understand better when you see the list of names.” Father Uriel wrote something down and showed it to him. “This is the person who organised the conference, Daniele. The former head of the CIA's Venice section. Your guardian, Ian Gilroy.”

IT WAS A
plan so risky that if there had been any alternative, any alternative at all, they would never even have considered it.

Under cover of darkness, the two women made their way back to the ridge, where the Birds' Nest sat amidst the silent woods. Satisfied there was still no guard, they crept to the shed where the girls were being kept.

As they'd anticipated, the door was unbolted. These women were being held by lies, not locks.

One by one they woke the sleeping girls, asking if they spoke Italian and getting those who could to translate for the others. Then they explained why they were there.

The girls stared at them with a mixture of disbelief and amazement as Kat and Holly told them that, far from being smuggled into Italy to work as nannies and maids, they were actually being trafficked into a life of prostitution. Only when Kat produced a photograph of Melina Kovačević did one of them finally say, “That's Melina. I know her. She went to Italy to work.”

Kat shook her head. “She was forced to become a prostitute. Most likely by the exact same people you're entrusting your lives to today.”

The girls went off into a huddle, whispering together and shooting occasional glances at Kat and Holly. Then a girl called Živka, who seemed to be the group's unofficial leader, spoke up. “Let's say you're telling the truth. What do you want us to do?”

Kat pointed at two of the girls, one blonde and one dark. “I want you and you to swap clothes, luggage and passports with my friend and I. Hide in the woods until we've been collected, then make your way back to your homes. The rest of you, just play along with it for now.”

They didn't have long to wait. Before noon, a van drew up and the door to the shed was thrown open. A burly figure, silhouetted against the light, called the women out.

Holly and Kat were gambling that the trafficker who took them on the next stage of the journey wouldn't know the girls individually, or bother checking their identities so long as the overall number was right. They were right – although the man studied the women as they climbed into the back of the windowless van, where a couple of old mattresses provided rudimentary seating, it was their figures he was paying attention to, not their faces. During the time when this building had been a cattle shed, Kat thought, he'd have looked at his animals with much the same expression as they went off to be sold at market.

Holly and Kat were the last to leave the shed. “
Čekaj
,” he called suddenly, just as Holly was about to get into the van. They might not speak the language, but the tone of his voice was clear.
Wait
.

They froze. Stepping forward, he lifted Holly's suitcase into the van and held out a hand to help her up. “
Hvala
,” she muttered, keeping her eyes down. He nodded, pleased to have been of help.

“Looks like you've got an admirer,” Kat whispered as the others made room for them. “So gentlemen
do
prefer blondes.”

“If he tries anything, that gentleman is dead.”

“Seriously, Holly, we need to be ready. At some point this is going to turn nasty.”

“Maybe not until we reach Italy, though. Remember that tape you told me about, the one with the smuggler forcing himself on the girl . . . That was filmed in Italy, wasn't it? I reckon there's a good reason for that. They won't want the girls to be scared of their captors until the last possible moment, in case they try to run away. I bet they're under orders not to touch the merchandise until they're safely over the border.”

“Let's hope you're right. But I don't think we should count on it.”

“We'll look out for anything we can improvise weapons from. Whatever happens, we should be ready.”

They were driven down quiet back roads towards the coast before turning north. Eventually they pulled into another remote farm. The farmer and his wife ignored the girls as they were ushered out of the van and into a barn. There were calves at one end, eyeing them curiously, but at least the animals kept the place warm, and the sheaves of straw were soft and dry.

After another long night, and a rudimentary breakfast of cheese and bread, a different van came to pick them up. The driver took them another fifty miles or so before turning down towards a small harbour.

Again they waited, this time in a boat shed. For the rest of the day, nothing happened.

“It's deliberate,” Kat whispered to Holly. “They want the girls weak and tired before they finally start to break them.”

None of the girls spoke much. Even Holly was uncharacteristically quiet. Kat was concerned – Holly hadn't seemed to be someone who was easily frightened.

“Are you OK?” she asked when Holly had been staring at the same spot on the wall for thirty minutes.

“What?” Holly roused herself. “Yes. It's just . . . I keep thinking about my CAC card. The fact that they were tracking it.”

“What about it?”

“You can't pick up a signal from those things just by turning on your sat-nav. It was designed for rescuing soldiers from behind enemy lines, so you can imagine how powerful the encryption has to be. The only way my coordinates could have been inputted into those missiles and the mortars is if whoever did it had access to the Pentagon computer network.”

“Meaning that whoever's trying to kill us has some powerful connections.”

Holly said slowly, “I'm wondering if I've been too trusting.”

“In what way? Trusting of who?”

Holly didn't reply.

Leaving her friend to her thoughts, Kat made a fingertip search of the shed. As she'd hoped, it yielded a number of potential weapons: six rusty nails, two lengths of thin-bore steel plumbing pipe, and best of all, a paint scraper and roller. Once the paint-encrusted cylinder had been removed from the roller she had a sharp-ended hook, while the scraper, once sharpened, was almost as lethal as a knife. She distributed her finds amongst the girls, warning them to keep them hidden for the time being.

When she sat down again, Holly said in a low voice, “They won't fight, you know.”

“The girls? Why not, if it's for their freedom?”

“Violence doesn't come naturally to girls like that – to most women, for that matter, but particularly this lot. They're pretty and feminine and all their lives they've discovered that they can usually get what they want out of men by being nice to them.”

“Meaning?”

“We're going to have to do this on our own – just you and me. Any help from them will be a bonus.”

“Do you think that's possible?”

“Could be. There's a saying in the military: plan the fight, and fight the plan. We need to devise a strategy and stick to it.”

They talked for several hours, by which time it was still only early afternoon. The traffickers would move them at night, they guessed, when the chance of detection was lowest. They settled down to wait.

IAN GILROY ACCEPTED
the video call, nodding politely at the face that appeared on his screen. “Good morning, General,” he said, although it was late afternoon in Italy, and the face on the screen belonged to someone who was no longer a serving officer.

“That terrier of yours has been killed,” the other man said without delay. “The other bitch with her, too. I wanted to give you my apologies personally. I know you were fond of those dogs.”

Gilroy barely blinked. “May I ask what happened?”

“Both dogs were out in the field, hunting. Unfortunately there was a pack of hounds nearby.”

The room Gilroy was in, inside the sumptuous Villa Barbo, a Palladian villa near the town of Treviso, was full of priceless works of art. But his attention remained fixed on his screen.

“Has the terrier's body been recovered?” he asked.

Was it his imagination, or did the other man hesitate? “It was deep in the woods, at night. She may have crawled away to die. Little dogs do that, sometimes.”

“Indeed. And sometimes they just go off to lick their wounds.”

“Negative. We've had people searching the woods for days, looking for her. My condolences. But at least it solves the problem of all those bones she was so keen on digging up.”

Gilroy stared at the face on his screen. Even across thousands of miles of cyberspace, his fury was self-evident. “What you've failed to grasp, General, is that we needed those bones.”

The other man's confident tone faltered. “What do you mean?”

“They were the bait to catch a bear.”

“I don't follow you.”

“Of course you don't. Planning isn't your strong point, is it? But if by any remote chance you hear one of my dogs barking in the woods in future, you'd better make damn sure there are no more accidents.”

Before the other man could respond, Gilroy reached out and disconnected the link.

AS DUSK FELL
two more traffickers came to put the girls onto a speedboat. The speedboat took them a mile out to sea, where they were transferred to a fishing vessel. Still wet and freezing from the speedboat's spray, the women were made to climb down into the hold, where they crouched amongst boxes of wriggling mullet and mackerel. As the fish around them slowly expired, the boat chugged westwards, the smell of diesel, fish guts and engine fumes choking in the confined space.

The girls sat on their luggage or on discarded fishing nets, resting their heads against the shuddering hull, trying to doze as best they could. Every few hours the hatch opened and a crew member in blue waders and rubber overalls jumped down to unload another catch, using a short-handled boathook to steer the nets over the storage crates, before emptying them in a slithering, silvery torrent of fish. He gave the girls a curious glance or two, no more. He showed far more interest when the nets revealed an octopus caught up with the fish. Deftly he flipped it inside out so he could rip away the beak, brain and stomach, tossing them into a box which he took back on deck to empty over the side.

He left his boathook behind.

With a sharp point as well as that lethal hook, it was their best weapon so far. Kat slipped it into her bag, then scoured the hold looking for anything else they could use.

When dawn was still just a faint glimmer over the sea behind them, the girls were taken on deck to transfer to another speedboat. The new boat, an inflatable rib, turned away from the fishing vessel and headed for the darkness ahead at full throttle, reaching land after about twenty minutes. From the shape of the coastline Kat thought they must be landing in Le Marche, south of Ancona, an area almost deserted at this time of year.

This, clearly, was the part of the journey that should pose the greatest danger to the smugglers. Any passing coastguard or plane would spot them straight away. The boat headed into a rocky cove, driving right up onto the shingle, the driver exuding the confident air of someone who knew that all the necessary arrangements had been made and he wouldn't be getting any trouble.