The Absolution (31 page)

HOLLY RECEIVED A
text from Daniele. It read simply:
It was Carole. Everything Gilroy told you was a lie
.

She hadn't wanted to believe it. Even as the evidence against Ian Gilroy mounted, she'd found herself hoping against hope that it was all a mistake.

The man she'd trusted. The man who had become, in so many ways, a substitute for her own father's presence in her life. A man who, it turned out, had so much blood on his hands all the water in Venice couldn't have washed it away.

Her father . . . Daniele . . . And those were just the two closest to her. How many other Major Bolands had there been? How many other Daniele Barbos? How many Boccardos and other innocent victims, ostensibly killed by terrorists claiming to represent this ideology or that, by gunmen or bomb-makers, in so-called traffic accidents or fake suicides, or who'd simply disappeared without trace?

Many hundreds, she guessed; possibly thousands. In the great scheme of America's global powerplays, it was a tiny, almost insignificant number. But each one had been a life, snatched away in a war they'd barely realised was being fought all around them.

Her whole identity, her sense of self, was based on a falsehood: the lie that America's presence in Italy was benign. That
you could simultaneously be Second Lieutenant Boland, US Intelligence Analyst, and Signorina Holly, from Pisa.

The reality she thought she knew dissolved, and in its place was the simple conviction Kat had voiced.

It's all connected.

She picked up her car keys.

CAROLE TATARO SAT
on her bed for a long time, thinking. Then she went to the door of her cell and banged on it until a guard came.

“What do you want?”

“I demand solitary confinement for my own protection.”

The guard eyed her contemptuously. “I'll pass the message on.”

“I need it now.”

The guard didn't bother to reply as he swung the hatch shut.

Later, at supper time, she found a piece of paper, folded in two, tucked under her plate. Inside a razor blade and the words:
You can do this the easy way or the hard way. You have until 10 p.m.

Going back to the door, she banged again. When the guard came she showed him the note. “Still think I'm making this up? I demand to see the governor now.”

He barely glanced at it. “The governor's gone home. You can make an appointment to see him in the morning.”

She went and sat down on the bed again. After a few minutes she noticed one of the women she shared with, Sophia, stand up and gesture to the other, Fatma.

Fatma was the larger of the two. It was she who held Carole Tataro down, while Sophia wielded the blade that had been provided with her own dinner tray.

HOLLY DROVE TO
the base. The throb of rock music echoed across the tarmac from the direction of Joe Dugan's, the biggest of the on-base bars. Returning troops, no doubt, celebrating the end of some overseas deployment.

“Have a good evening, ma'am,” the MP at the gate said, clearly assuming the bar was where she was headed too.

She went down Main Street, then took a left. The armoury was dark at this time of night. She let herself in with her CAC card, then walked through to the firing range at the rear. As an officer, she was entitled to practise her marksmanship at any time, day or night.

Going to a locker, she entered a code and took out an M4 carbine with M68 close-combat sight – the standard issue, shoulder-fired weapon of the US Army, with a telescoping stock and short barrel to aid close-quarter combat. Its rounds were so powerful, they were capable of piercing body armour.

She laid it carefully on the floor, then reached inside the locker again for the magazine and ammunition. Behind them, at the back, was a handgun in a worn leather holster, a Sig Sauer P229 from the seventies. The 19mm rounds were of the type named Parabellum, from the Latin motto “
Si vis pacem, para bellum
”: “If you seek peace, prepare for war.”

Holly Boland prepared for war.

Taking a laundry bag from her pocket, she unrolled it and
pushed the M4 inside, then strapped her father's Sig inside her fatigues where it wasn't visible.

Going back to the desk, she signed herself into the shooting range. Under “Reason for Visit” she wrote “Target practice”.

Then she turned and headed the other way, towards the exit.

DANIELE BARBO SAT
at his computer and logged into Carnivia.

He felt strange, but in a way that was not entirely unpleasant. Since his session with Father Uriel and the conversation with Carole Tataro, it was as if a fog had lifted from his mind.

He wandered the streets of his creation, looking at the buildings on either side, marvelling at their intricate design. But the person who had built them so obsessively, pixel by pixel, wasn't him. Somehow, the impetus to reimagine the world had dissipated along with his amnesia.

But he felt, even so, a great sadness that something so extraordinary, so bizarre, must now be destroyed.

Nothing we build is permanent
, he reminded himself.
Everything must fall. Why should Carnivia be any different?

He wrote the code that would erase the website. It took only a few minutes. Even the functionality that would reach out to his users' computers and wipe those too was barely more than a footnote. Every user granted the site perpetual access to their data, in order to interact with contacts and friends anonymously and to read or post gossip about them. It was an option, but one that almost nobody refused.

He wondered how this action of his would be perceived after he'd done it. People would say he must have been
planning it all along, that Carnivia had been the most elaborate hack in the history of the internet.

How ironic that it was him, not the unknown cyber-terrorist, who would be seen by posterity as the villain.

He looked at the clock on his computer. There were still two hours until midnight, when the botnet worm would activate. Now that the wipe code was written, he might as well use the remaining time to try to find an alternative solution. Perhaps when he'd created Carnivia's encryption, all those years ago, there'd been something he'd overlooked, some tiny chink or weakness he could exploit to hack his own website instead.

KAT SURFED FROM
link to link, following winding trails through the back pages of the internet. Much of what she found was nonsense, the delusional ramblings of conspiracy theorists. Yet right alongside the nonsense she found articles by academics, investigative journalists, even former Gladio agents, all attesting to the same thing: for the past seventy-five years, ever since the beginning of the Cold War, the CIA had been intervening in Italy's affairs. To begin with the meddling had been political, certainly, aimed at keeping the country out of the hands of the communists, but as the decades went on, the corruption had gone far beyond that.

She found a statement under oath by one General Maletti, head of Italian Military Counter-Intelligence from 1971 to 1975, saying that the CIA had foreknowledge of right-wing terror attacks, and that on at least one occasion had supplied a Gladio cell in Venice with explosives.

She found that an American archbishop, head of the Vatican Bank for eighteen years, had used his Vatican passport to successfully fight off extradition proceedings in connection with CIA payments to terrorists.

She found articles offering evidence of the CIA working with the Mafia to break trade unions; of the CIA working with American corporations to take control of Italian markets; of
the CIA planting stories in the Italian media through corrupt journalists, or even buying those media outlets outright.

She found a quote by a former member of Propaganda Due, the black Masonic lodge in Rome, saying that becoming a member was “the only way to have a sort of cosmic clearance with Anglo-American institutions”.

She found that it was forged intelligence originating in Italy which had resulted in the false claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, subsequently used as a pretext by the US to initiate the second Iraq war.

She recalled her own previous cases: one in which she'd discovered that American military contractors had been secretly involved in the civil war in Bosnia and Croatia; another in which a US officer had used Italy as a staging post in the illegal rendition of prisoners from Afghanistan.

Most recently, she found allegations that Italy was being specifically targeted by the NSA as a base for cyber-surveillance, with more secret listening stations than any other European country. From Italy, the US could eavesdrop on internet traffic right across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

VIGILANCE, she read, the Virtual Intelligence Gathering Alliance, was America's answer to the Snowden revelations. Instead of spying covertly on friendly nations, America was now inviting them to opt in to a massive “Golden Shield” covering the whole of the Western world. So far, only Britain had joined up.

She saw, finally, what this cyber attack Tignelli had put in motion would do, and why America had been in no hurry to stop it.

Just as in the darkest days of the Cold War, terror in Italy would be a lesson delivered to the rest of the world: without
our protection, see what might happen. Violence that furthered America's political agenda would be quietly facilitated, not curtailed.

That was the reason Tignelli died when he did; why Flavio had been silenced; why the hacker had been forewarned. It was simple, cold-hearted
realpolitik
.

She called Daniele.

“Those attacks from within Carnivia,” she said. “I think it's possible that America wants you to be the one responsible. That it isn't just jihadists they mean to take the blame – it's sites like yours, along with the very nature of the free internet. From their point of view, it's a win-win situation: either you take down Carnivia yourself, or it's utterly discredited. Either way, they get what they want.”

There was a long silence. “I'm working on it,” he said at last. “Leave it with me.”

He rang off.

HOLLY WENT BACK
to her apartment and collected the other things she'd need. In particular, she took out a small carton from under the sink.

Then she called home. As she waited for her mother to pick up, she walked out onto her little balcony. The night was a warm one, but there was always a breeze up here, looking over the rooftops towards the hills south of Vicenza.

“Hey, Mom. What's up?”

“Hi, Holly.” Her mother's voice turned curious. “What time is it with you? Isn't it late over there?”

“Not too late. How are you?”

They chatted for a while before she said, “Put Dad on, would you?”

“Sure. I'll put the phone by his ear so he can hear you, OK?”

“Hey, Dad.” She waited, as always, for him to answer before continuing. “Well, I found out who did this to you. Found those Autodin records as well, though I haven't been able to read them yet. I don't know exactly what you were planning to do with them. But you'd already written one report that had been buried, hadn't you? So I figure whatever it was, it was going to be something no one could ignore.”

Was it her imagination, or did the even pace of his
breathing quicken slightly? Could he even recognise who was speaking to him?

“You had all their top-secret cables, didn't you?” she said, her voice cracking. “Every dirty operation the CIA planned, every bribe they paid out, every debrief and update, they all passed through the Autodin on their way back to Washington. I think you were going to put it all out there, Dad. I think you were going to blow the whistle on the whole corrupt mess.”

She waited, listening. No: his breath was as regular, and as peaceful, as a sleeping child's.

“I'm going to finish it, Dad,” she whispered. “I'm going to see it through.”

Per il miglior papà del mondo.

HE TRIED ALL
the obvious things, the tools of the modern cryptographer – differential cryptanalysis, XSL, the sandwich attack, mod-
n
. But it was as he'd expected: nothing worked. He had made sure Carnivia was proofed against such methods when he created it.

The only way asymmetric encryption like Carnivia's could be penetrated was by a process known as complex integer factorisation – breaking down large numbers into many smaller, more workable divisors. But no one had ever devised a way to do that on a large scale. The only mathematician who'd come close was a man called Peter Shor, and his algorithm was so complex that it required imagining an entirely new kind of supercomputer, a quantum computer, to run it.

It came back to the old conundrum of P=NP: you could look at a solution and quickly tell if it was correct, but you couldn't do it backwards to create the solution.

Even so, Daniele tried. He scribbled formulae, put together theorems, tried variations on Shor, all to no avail. The problem lay within the very nature of numbers themselves.

A phrase drifted back into his mind. Something Carole Tataro had reminded him of.
You said, “Every number is infinite . . .”

It was true, in a way: every number not only represented a finite quantity, it had other properties too. There were prime numbers, Gaussian numbers, transcendental numbers, Fibonacci numbers, Pell numbers . . . the list went on and on. And, as Ramanujan had pointed out to Hardy, even those few numbers that were apparently without any interesting features were so rare that they became fascinating in themselves.

Suppose that instead of writing 1, 2, 3, 4, you wrote . . . what?

One is the only number that is both its own square and its own cube.

Two is the only even prime number.

Three is the only number which is both a Fermat and a Mersenne prime.

Four is the smallest squared prime.

And so on – every number unlocked, not by what it was, but by what was contained within it. It was like breaking an atom down into its neutrons, or a cell into its DNA.

DNA.

He thought about the spiral pattern within DNA. And he glanced at the wall.

Many years ago, his father had hung the walls of Ca' Barbo with modern paintings from his collection. Although the Barbo Foundation had put most into storage, a few still remained. It amused Daniele to cover them with Post-it notes bearing his favourite mathematical formulae. To him, the equations were just as beautiful, and far more expressive of genius, than the art underneath.

Near his computer was a portrait of a woman by the Italian modernist Modigliani. Its only merit, as far as Daniele was concerned, was that the artist had clearly understood that the
symmetry of a human face was determined by the laws of the Golden Section, or phi. So Daniele had stuck over the woman's face a note depicting the ratio that phi expressed.

And then, quite without warning, he saw it. It was so simple, obvious even, that he almost laughed out loud. Of course numbers had their own DNA, just as cells did. And of course they followed the same graceful, endlessly repeating pattern that characterised the whole universe, from the tiniest seeds to the mightiest galaxies.

P=NP was not a theorem, but a shape. It was phi.

It will be beautiful.

He allowed himself a brief moment to savour this triumph. He had solved a puzzle that had baffled the world's greatest mathematicians. Or perhaps, he admitted to himself, he hadn't so much solved it as hit upon a solution. Like Einstein's theory of relativity or Newton's gravitational constant, a single moment of creative insight had illuminated everything, and inspiration had tumbled unbidden into his head.

But there was no time to think about that now. He set to
work turning his discovery into an algorithm that would tear the masks from Carnivia's millions of users.