The Absolution (16 page)

It was Jibran, once again, who had come closest. He passed some hacked fragments of Carnivia's shell code on to Tareq,
who marvelled at their beauty. Every line was written with a brilliant economy that resembled nothing so much as poetry.

Tareq started taking apart every piece of Daniele Barbo's code he could get his hands on. Mostly he did this because he wanted to learn from it. But he also put his knowledge to use. Just as a bomb-maker can learn from taking apart another bomb-maker's work, so Tareq was learning how to walk in Daniele's footsteps.

He used Carnivian encryption to cloak himself when he turned off the Fréjus Tunnel air turbines. That way, even if the authorities realised it was a deliberate attack rather than a freak accident, it could never be traced back to him, only to Carnivia.

As he evolved his plan, though, one thing still worried him. His weakness, as he perceived it, was that he and his fellow jihadist hackers were very few in number. If they attacked a dozen or so devices at a time, they could wreak havoc – but it wouldn't be irreparable. The West would immediately take steps to tighten up security on the millions of other devices he hadn't got around to.

The hacker's ambitions went far beyond mere havoc. He wanted Italy to implode – not just so that Italian voters would demand the removal of the US bases, as the commander had suggested, but because he blamed the country for what had happened to his family. And sometimes, in his wildest dreams, he saw himself achieving even more. He saw the chaos spreading beyond borders, right across the West. If that happened, he might bring about nothing less than an end to the West's reliance on technology. Once that was achieved, the jihadists and the armies of the West would fight each other on a level playing field. And in that war, he believed, the jihadists would win.

And so he changed his plan so that it would involve not just a few attacks but thousands, hundreds of thousands even, simultaneously. To do so required more funds – but whatever he asked for, the commander's invisible backers paid without demur.

Reaching Sicily, he was waved through Immigration with barely a glance. That didn't surprise him. Although Interpol had maintained a worldwide database of stolen passports since 2009, he knew that no government had ever consulted it. It was one of the many snippets of information he'd found online and squirrelled away for future reference.

He rented a room in a quiet suburb of Palermo, well away from the Muslim part of town. Once, Palermo had been the capital of an Arab kingdom. Then, in the twelfth century, the Christians arrived and turned the mosques into churches. But it was said that if you scratched a Sicilian, you still found a Saracen. Perhaps for that reason, there were many thousands of Arab-speaking immigrants there, principally in the poorer parts of the Borgo Vecchio, the old town.

The day after Tareq arrived, he went to a small, rather shabby building on the outskirts of Palermo. A sign proclaimed that this was Palermo Technical College.

He told the receptionist he was enrolled in the IT course that was beginning that same morning. He showed his false identity documents and thirty minutes later found himself in an airless classroom with fourteen other young men. The teacher, also a Muslim, was drawing a network diagram on the blackboard. As it happened, he made several errors, but the hacker kept his mouth shut and assumed an expression of dutiful interest.

He intended to be the second-best student the course had
ever had: not so brilliant as to arouse suspicion, but so far above the standard of the other students that the teacher would give him an impeccable reference.

He kept his other activities for the night time.

THEY MET IN
a small village up in the hills north of Verona, where the wild asparagus grew. A few elderly men were playing
bocce
in the shade of a plane tree. A ginger cat sunned itself sleepily on one of the metal tables outside the little café-cum-bar. Otherwise, the place was deserted.

Ian Gilroy always chose to meet somewhere he could see her face, Holly had noticed. Not for him a muttered conversation sitting side by side on a park bench, or strolling through a crowd. He'd once told her that, in his experience, assets lied to their handlers at least half the time. The handler's job was to work out which half, and why. That knowledge was often far more useful than whatever raw intelligence they thought they were bringing you.

She wondered if he ever thought of her as an asset, and if so, whether he ever assumed she lied to him.

“So, Holly. How was your trip?” he asked, when the bar owner had brought out their espressos.

“Eventful.” She told him about the watchers, the paramilitary training, and the attempt to push her off the cliff. “But as for Capo Marrargiu, there's nothing there any more. Just the remains of some fires and a whole lot of broken glass.”

He nodded. “I thought that might be the case. As for your tail . . . it's possible that was unconnected. After all, you spotted
the master sergeants at the airport. If they spotted you in return, they may well have alerted someone to your presence. Say, for example, a wealthy oligarch had hired them to give his staff some freelance small-arms training. Not strictly legal, granted, but hardly a cause for alarm.”

“Or maybe your own questions stirred something up, just as you said they might,” she reminded him.

He shook his head. “I don't think so. I spoke to some old contacts, as I promised, and your father's report
was
passed up the line, it seems. But no action was ever taken. Once the Gladio network was no longer being run by NATO, it was felt that any activities undertaken by its former members were, strictly speaking, the concern of the Italians, not us. But it seems the report was never actually forwarded to the Italian intelligence services either.”

“We washed our hands of it, in other words?”

Gilroy shrugged. “It was a mixture of bureaucratic inertia, I'm guessing, and a feeling that this was a stone we didn't particularly want to turn over. But, Holly, think through the implications. It means your father definitely wasn't the victim of an attempt to silence him. Only a handful of low-level analysts ever saw what he wrote, and none of them could possibly have a reason to want him dead. Your father was a drinker—”

“No,” she interrupted. “He started drinking
after
. When he wasn't believed.”

“His blood pressure was off the scale,” he reminded her gently. “You said so yourself – that he had all the risk factors for a stroke. Far more likely than him being the victim of an attempted
assassination
is that he simply succumbed to his condition.”

He gave the word “assassination” a dramatic inflection, as if to indicate how far-fetched that notion was.

“As for what the Freemasons described in your father's report were doing, I think with the benefit of hindsight that's also fairly clear,” he continued. “It's no secret that the gladiators were recruited from amongst fervent anti-communists. After the network was rolled up, a number of neo-fascist groups formed from the remnants. Some of them may even have continued to carry out acts of violence. But by the end of that decade the Italians had cleaned up their act and the terror groups had all but disappeared.”

“So you're telling me not to rock the boat?”

He shook his head. “I'm telling you there's no boat to rock. Holly, Ted was a good man, and a loving father. Whenever I saw the two of you together, I bitterly regretted not having children of my own, I can tell you. But if he were sitting here today, what do you think he'd advise you to do?”

She sighed. “He'd tell me to drop it. ‘Pack up and push on.' That's what he always said.”

“Ted was a soldier.”

She thought for a minute. “Thank you.”

“For what?” His blue eyes regarded her fondly.

“For not letting me turn into some crazy deranged conspiracy theorist.”

“It's the least I can do. Not just for an old friend and comrade. For a new friend, too.” He was silent. “What do you propose to do now?”

She stared at the distant hills. “Report for duty, I guess. That base newsletter doesn't write itself.”

“You'll manage,” he said quietly, and they both knew he wasn't referring to whatever trivial tasks would be waiting on her desk.

Holly drove down towards Verona. But her attention was only partly on the road. In her head, she was replaying fragments of the conversation with Ian Gilroy.

. . . It was a mixture of bureaucratic inertia, I'm guessing, and a feeling that this was a stone we didn't particularly want to turn over . . .

. . . Only a handful of low-level analysts ever saw what he wrote, and none of them could possibly have a reason to want him dead . . .

As she came to the junction with the main road into Verona, she waited patiently for a gap in the traffic.

. . . His blood pressure was off the scale – you said so yourself . . .

“No, I didn't,” she said out loud. “I never said anything about that.”

She thought back. If she hadn't actually said it, had she perhaps implied it? Had she perhaps mentioned it in some previous conversation? She didn't think so. But why had Gilroy mentioned it so casually in passing?

Suddenly, her mental landscape shifted, and what was previously white turned black.

Could I have been looking at this all wrong?

The report that had never been passed on to the Italians – was that really just inertia? Or had it been the exact opposite – had someone taken careful steps to ensure that as few people as possible knew of her father's suspicions?

Had it been the US, in particular, who didn't want anyone looking too closely at the Masonic lodge her father had raised the alarm about?

A horn sounded behind her, then another. When she didn't respond, the driver pulled out onto the wrong side of the road to pass her, his hand reaching angrily up to his chin to make
the brush-off gesture that was a favoured insult in this part of Italy. The next car did the same.

She sat there, immobile, not caring.

Could it have been Gilroy?

IN VENICE, DANIELE
Barbo looked up as the silence of Ca' Barbo was interrupted by a click.

It was the sound of his TV coming off standby. He glanced at the screen. There, in big white letters, it said:

TURN ON YOUR COMPUTER, ASSHOLE. I'VE BEEN TRYING TO REACH YOU FOR DAYS.

Daniele frowned, then smiled as he realised who it was. Going to his computer, he booted it up and logged onto the Carnivia admin board.

Pretty neat. How did you do that?

Smart TV. So smart, it sends data on what programmes you watch back to LG headquarters in South Korea, so they can sell it to advertisers. Took me about five minutes to hack the connection. Why the fuck haven't you been online?

I decided that maybe being always connected wasn't helping.

He didn't tell Max that he'd also been experimenting with a twenty-five-hour day, going slowly in and out of phase with the solar world, or that the walls of the room in which he was sitting were covered in patches of different colours to help him synaethesise the numbers they represented. There was good research to prove the efficacy of such methods when trying to solve complex mathematical problems, but he doubted Max would be interested.

Instead he wrote,
What's up? I assume it must be important.

Something you need to see. A video.

Daniele clicked on the Mpeg Max had uploaded. He was looking at traffic flowing through a road tunnel. The film was grainy – not just because it was from a security camera, but because it was a copy of a copy. Over the image was some Arabic script, its quality already blurred.

Abruptly, a car swerved into the path of an oncoming truck. There was no attempt on the driver's part to brake, or take avoiding action. The truck did try to stop, but only succeeded in jack-knifing into the tunnel wall. Within seconds there was carnage as other vehicles piled into the wreckage.

Where was this?

Jesus, you really have been offline, haven't you? The Fréjus road tunnel. It's been all over the news.

What do those titles at the beginning say?

A jihadist slogan.

And?
Daniele knew Max must have some more specific reason for telling him about this.

That's the scary bit. In the video, you can see that the air turbines aren't going round. So I located them online using Shodan. According to the return path history, they were accessed ten minutes before the crash by someone whose identity was masked by our own encryption software. In other words, it was someone inside Carnivia who did this.

“
MORE TIRAMISU, FLAVIO
?”

“I couldn't,” Flavio protested. Then, after a theatrical pause, “Oh, go on then. How can I resist? When it's made properly like this, with
savoiardi
biscuits, and a little bit of salt . . .”

Kat's mother flushed with pride. “And no Marsala, of course.”

“And no Marsala,” he agreed. It went without saying that only a barbarian would add a Sicilian fortified wine to a Venetian dish. “But did I detect just a splash of vermouth . . .?”

There was a crash from the kitchen. Swiftly, Kat's sister Clara handed baby Savina over to Kat and rushed off to see what her toddler, Gabriele, had broken now. Kat's mother tried not to look disapproving. “What a ball of energy that little boy is,” she muttered, glancing in the direction of the kitchen.

To Kat's astonishment, lunch with her family had gone rather well. Flavio had talked politics to her father, praised her mother's cooking to the skies, discussed football with her brother-in-law, flirted with her
nonna
, and done a magic trick for Gabriele that left the little boy so impressed he had to hide behind a chair. Now Flavio leant over to where Savina sat on Kat's lap and offered the baby some of his tiramisu. Savina
took the spoon in a pudgy fist, sucked it clean, and gave Flavio an adoring smile that made everyone laugh.

Kat felt the sudden surge of an unfamiliar emotion. Lust for the man, the weight of the child in her lap, the laughter of a family . . . all combining into something new.

My God
, she thought.
I want to have babies with him.

The thought was so unexpected, and so shocking, that she froze.

“What's wrong?” Flavio asked, noticing.

“Nothing,” she said quickly. “I was just thinking about the case, that's all.”

The case
. If she had babies, there'd be no more cases. Not like the Cassandre investigation, anyway. You couldn't run a murder inquiry and pick a child up from nursery the same afternoon. In the last few years she'd lost count of the number of dates she'd let down at the last minute, or family lunches like this one she'd pulled out of.

But in Amsterdam, perhaps, she wouldn't be investigating cases like this one anyway. The thought, which she'd been avoiding, suddenly didn't fill her with quite so much dread.

How strange, she thought wryly: all those male officers who'd called her an ambitious bitch and a ball-breaker behind her back; all that graffiti on her locker accusing her of trying to sleep her way to the top. For all the obstacles they'd put in her way, those people had never managed to derail her career or put her off doing what she enjoyed. But now love, that most traditionally feminine of traits, was going to do it for them.

After lunch was over, the two of them walked to Stazione Santa Lucia for the short hop back to Mestre. The train was delayed by protestors from
No Grandi Navi
, “No Big Boats”, the organisation that demonstrated against giant cruise ships
in Venice. About a hundred of them were blocking the bridge to the mainland with fishing nets. Kat snuggled into Flavio, too full and sleepy to mind, closing her eyes and basking in the warmth of the sun streaming through the carriage window. The rest of the afternoon would be taken up with leisurely lovemaking, followed by a nap, and then perhaps a
spritz
or two in one of the bars on Piazza Ferretto. There was a time, not so long ago, when Sundays irritated her, because the operations room only ran with a skeleton staff and you had to wait a whole day before things got moving again. But not now. Being with Flavio was changing her.

When they reached the mainland they strolled hand in hand to her apartment. Another thought struck her: he was the only man she'd ever held hands with in public like this. There'd been plenty of lovers, yes; some incredible sex; but it was this simple gesture – one she'd always dismissed in others as mawkish – that she'd reserved for the man she loved.

As they reached her apartment she saw a wiry blonde figure sitting on the steps. In her loved-up state it took Kat a moment to realise who it was.

“Holly!” she said, astonished. “I thought you were still in America.”

Holly raised her head and saw them. She looked exhausted, Kat thought. “I'm sorry I didn't call you sooner. Someone wanted my father dead, and now I think I know why.”

She'd brought a spidergram, drawn in three colours and cross-referenced.

“The thing is,” she told them, “the CIA always denied any involvement in Operation Gladio. Whenever Ian Gilroy talks about it, he makes it sound as if it was a purely NATO-run operation – one the military worked hard to keep secret from
the real spies. But how realistic is it that the CIA had no idea NATO was training a guerrilla army of Italian civilians, right under their noses?”

Kat glanced at Flavio. He appeared to be listening attentively, even giving the occasional encouraging nod, but she knew that expression from their own meetings at the Palace of Justice. He was simply storing up his objections until Holly had finished, at which point he might very well tear her theories to shreds. Even to Kat's ears, they sounded far-fetched. And although it was good to see her friend again – the last time she'd seen her had been in the days immediately following her ordeal in the caves – Holly still seemed in a somewhat overwrought mental state. She was talking intensely and very fast, almost gabbling, as she tried to explain.

“What if NATO
thought
they were running Gladio – but actually it had been infiltrated by the CIA? In other words, what if there were effectively two networks: one trained by NATO to act as the resistance in the event of a communist invasion, and another, smaller, group inside that network, a cabal of extremists who carried out acts of politically-motivated violence under the CIA's direction? Then, after Gladio was rolled up, it makes sense that the CIA wouldn't want to lose their network as well. So they got them to regroup, under the guise of Freemasonry.”

“Freemasonry?” Kat echoed. She looked across at Flavio to see if he was as intrigued by this coincidence as she was, but he was still wearing the same expression of polite, attentive scepticism.

“Yes.” Holly explained about the ex-gladiators infiltrating her father's lodge.

“But not all the acts of violence you've described came from the right,” Flavio objected quietly. “The left carried out
just as many atrocities. The kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, to take just one example.”

Holly was nodding. “Yes, of course. But it's strange, isn't it, how it was an operation by the supposedly left-wing Red Brigades which stopped the
Compromesso storico
in its tracks
,
and effectively ended any chance the Communist Party had of sharing power.” She looked intently from Flavio to Kat. “Wouldn't it make more sense if the Red Brigades were actually under the control of the same people who were running Gladio all along?”

“A false-flag operation, you mean?” Kat said. She caught the look Flavio gave her.
Don't encourage her.

“We know the Red Brigades were infiltrated by the CIA,” Holly said. “It's mentioned in my father's report – and Gilroy confirmed to me that he was the CIA agent in charge of that. But did it stop at infiltration? Could the CIA actually have been influencing the Red Brigades' choice of targets? A year before the Moro kidnap, the Red Brigades kidnapped someone else.” She pointed to the spidergram. “A seven-year-old boy. They cut off his ears and nose when his parents didn't pay up.”

Now even Kat's mouth dropped open. “You think
Gilroy
might have been behind Daniele's kidnap?”

“I don't know,” Holly confessed. “But what better way to establish the Red Brigades as terrorist bogeymen? The CIA may even have hoped it would provoke so much revulsion that by association it would discredit the whole of the left wing.”

“I thought you trusted Gilroy. You always said he was a friend of your father's,” Kat said, bemused.

“He was. At least, I thought he was. But, you know, I've only got Gilroy's word for that as well. I mean, I remember him coming round a couple of times when I was a kid, but
from what my father wrote in his report, they were more like professional acquaintances than friends. Maybe Gilroy decided to keep me close for a reason. Maybe he's always been concerned that something like my dad's report would turn up one day. I keep asking myself why, if Dad really trusted Gilroy, he made that extra copy and hid it away for safekeeping. Did he have reservations about him, even then?”

“Where are the copies
you
made?” Flavio asked, cutting across Holly's speculations.

“One I gave to Gilroy, and one I emailed to myself from a photocopier at the airport. But when I tried to open it just now, the file was corrupted. I think somehow they must have traced it from the other end and destroyed it.”

Flavio raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

“Which is another indication the CIA could be involved,” Holly continued. “Who else would have access to that kind of technology?”

“But why?” Flavio said patiently. “Why would anybody care about a CIA operation from over thirty years ago – even assuming such an operation actually existed?”

“Because it's still going on,” Holly said. “I don't understand the how or why, but when I went to Sardinia, I saw soldiers training civilians in the use of firearms and explosives. I think in one form or another, Gladio must still be active. I think after they were exposed, they quietly regrouped under the banner of various Masonic lodges, and they've been carrying out assassinations and corrupting people ever since.”

“And no one knows about it?” Flavio said sceptically. “A massive, organised attempt by a foreign power to control Italian politics through violence, dating back over twenty-five years, linked to one of the biggest scandals in Italian political history, and
nobody knows
?”

“Cassandre was researching that period on his computer,” Kat pointed out. “Doesn't that seem strange to you?”

Flavio made a small sound, an involuntary
pfff
of disbelief.

Kat fixed him with a look, willing him to understand.
This matters to Holly. And if it matters to Holly, it matters to me.

“All right then,” Flavio said with a sigh. “A conspiracy stretching back to the 1990s and beyond. The
dietrologia
to end all
dietrologie
. Assuming there could be a grain of truth in it, what are you going to do next?”

“I'm going to see what I can dig up on Gilroy's time in the CIA,” Holly said. “I'll start with what happened to Daniele. One of the Red Brigades gang that kidnapped him is still in prison. She may talk to me. If not, I'll find someone else. And then, when I've got some evidence, I'm going to bring it to you, so that you can open a formal investigation into the attempt to kill my father.”