The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy) (10 page)

“Thank you,” she said, accepting the bag from Zuane. “Though personally I prefer my eel cooked
su l’ara,
with bay leaves. As for not letting it escape, you don’t have to tell a Venetian how to deal with an eel, however slippery.”

And as for how Tignelli had known her name, she reflected, when she hadn’t actually told him; or that she was a native Venetian; or why he’d been so unbothered by her questions, almost as if he’d known in advance she was coming – that, perhaps, was an even slipperier mystery.

H
OLLY
CAME
OUT
of the Customs Hall at Venice airport and turned right, towards the car-rental booths. The very last booth, discreetly tucked into a corner, bore a small sign: “Welcome, Vicenza Community”.

The first time she’d made this trip, the sign had said “SETAF Personnel Report Here”. But even the vague-sounding acronym of the Southern European Task Force was now deemed insufficiently bland for her employers’ purposes.

The desk was no longer manned, either. She followed the instructions taped to the wall and picked up the desk phone. When it was answered, she gave her name and ID number. “You just missed a shuttle, Second Lieutenant,” a voice on the other end said. “There’ll be an hour’s wait.”

At the coffee shop, she bought herself a
macchiato
and a copy of
Il Giornale
. America was on the front page again. Ever since Edward Snowden had revealed that the US was intercepting data from its biggest internet companies and using it to spy on the rest of the world – an intrusion that, if it had been directed at its own citizens, would have been in breach of the US Constitution – Europe had been smarting. To add insult to injury, as far as the Italian government was concerned, several of the “splitters” were actually located on Italian soil. Three of the internet’s busiest underwater cables – SeaMeWe3, SeaMeWe4 and Flag Europe-Asia – made landfall in Sicily, where there just happened to be a cluster of US signals installations. Over two billion intercepts, the newspaper said, had been forwarded to an Anglo-American facility on Cyprus for analysis.

“Excuse me?” a voice said.

She looked up. The man sitting next to her at the counter gestured at her uniform. “I can’t help noticing how many American soldiers there are round here.” His accent was British. A tourist, from the look of his wheeled hand luggage, en route for a weekend in Venice.

“There’s a few of us, sure,” she said neutrally.

“How many, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Here in the Veneto? Around five thousand. Ten thousand, if you count the families.”

He looked amazed. “Why so many?”

“Not so long ago, the Iron Curtain was just over there.” She nodded east, towards the lagoon. “If the Russians decided to invade, someone had to stop them.”

“OK. But the Cold War ended twenty years ago. How come you’re still here?”

She opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again. How come indeed? Answers flitted into her head, but they weren’t ones she could speak out loud.
Because we decided our foreign policies have to be imposed on the rest of the world through force. Because we exchanged the enemy beyond the Urals for the enemy beyond the Bosporus, with barely a beat in between. Because somewhere along the way, we stopped being the optimistic, youthful superpower of old and turned into the weary, paranoid giant we are today.

“There’s always bad guys somewhere,” she said lamely. “I guess it saves on gas if we’re already in the region.”

A woman came out of the baggage hall, putting away her iPhone. “All done,” she told the man. “Shall we go?”

As they left, he said to Holly politely, “Nice talking to you.”

When they’d gone she exhaled thoughtfully. It struck her that, for the first time in her life, her automatic response hadn’t been to spring to the defence of her country.

She was a soldier. More than that, she was an army brat. Growing up around Camp Darby, loyalty had never been a conscious decision so much as part of the air she breathed.

And yet it could only have been someone within the military who had decided to silence her father.

The more she thought about it – and on the plane she’d thought about little else – the more certain she’d become. Only an insider would have had access to his medical records. And only an insider would have had sight of that memorandum.

So her start point had to be whoever he’d given the memorandum to.

I have therefore passed the memorandum to a US intelligence officer of my acquaintance who, I knew, had previously been involved in the neutralisation of terrorist organisations such as the Red Brigades, in the hope that he will be able to distribute it to those best placed to take action.

She sat bolt upright. Pulling out her phone, she made a call. It went straight through to voicemail.

“Daniele, it’s Holly,” she said. “I need to speak to you. Call me back, will you?” Just to be sure, she sent a text as well.

She waited twenty minutes to see if he’d reply. Then she dialled another number. This time it was answered immediately.

“Holly,” an American voice said warmly, before switching to Italian. “
Come stai? Così sei tornata in Italia
?”

“Fine,” she said hesitantly. “I just got back. Look, could we meet?”

A few kilometres away, in the music room of Ca’ Barbo, Daniele looked at his phone as it displayed, first, Holly’s caller ID, then the voicemail alert, and finally the text.

Holly Boland.

Holly Boland voicemail.

Holly Boland message.

Glancing at the To-Do list still taped on the wall, his eye rested on the second item.

Finish with Holly.

He had slept with the wiry blonde American just once, but the experience had disturbed his dreams for weeks. Sometimes he found himself entertaining crazy fantasies of domesticity, in which they lived together like any other ordinary couple. Then he would catch sight of his face in a mirror – the horribly truncated nose, flat-tipped like a pig’s, the white rose buds of scar tissue where his ears had once been: the twin legacies of his childhood kidnap – and he loathed himself. Not for what he looked like, but for his weakness in not accepting that cosy domesticity would never be his lot. Whatever Holly’s motives for going to bed with him – and in his bleaker moments he believed she had been pushed into it by his guardian – he knew it hadn’t meant the same to her as it had to him.

Reaching for a pencil, he crossed the second item off. Then, abruptly, he pushed back his chair and stood up.

K
AT
CALLED
F
LAVIO
from the boat on her way back from La Grazia. “I may not have any leads, but I have got some eels. Can you come round tonight?”

There was a long silence at the other end.

“Or we could meet at a hotel,” she added, mentally kicking herself for her stupidity. As part of his security arrangements, Flavio wasn’t meant to spend more than one night a week in the same place, and he’d last been to her apartment just a few nights ago.

A couple of times recently he’d tried to warn her that she shouldn’t get too involved, that his life wasn’t one that anyone could share, but she didn’t care about that. If snatched encounters in hotel rooms or his office was the price of a relationship with him, it was one she was willing to pay.

But as it turned out, that wasn’t why he was hesitating.

“Captain, I think you should come and see me straight away,” he said formally. “There’s been an important development.”

By which she took him to mean, first, that he wasn’t alone, and second, that the investigation was about to get even murkier. Had Tignelli been stirring up trouble already?

She turned the Carabinieri boat hard to port, towards Santa Croce and the Palace of Justice.

As well as Flavio, there were two other men in his office. One was Benito Marcello, a prosecutor she’d worked with before. He was young, bright, impeccably dressed and, she knew, utterly craven, especially when it came to making any decision that wouldn’t directly further his own career. The other was a short, grey-haired man she didn’t know.

“This is Colonel Grimaldo,” Flavio said, introducing him. “Prosecutor Marcello you’ve already met. We thought it best to inform you straight away.”

“Of what?”

It was Grimaldo who answered. “Responsibility for the investigation you are currently working on is being transferred to AISI.”

“To the Intelligence Service!” she said, astounded. “Why?”

“It impacts on a parallel operation by the anti-terrorist division. That’s all I can say.”

Marcello tapped his pen self-importantly on the desk to gain her attention. “You will hand over any evidence you have gathered so far to Colonel Grimaldo and his team. That includes records, forensic reports, and physical evidence such as Signor Cassandre’s laptop. His body has already been moved to the hospital in Milan, where Grimaldo’s team will conduct the autopsy. General Saito has been informed.”

“An anti-terrorist operation?” she repeated slowly. “I don’t understand. All the information we have so far suggests that Cassandre was involved in financial crimes.”

“Then perhaps,” Marcello said smoothly, “the secret services have done their job, Captain, and managed to keep their involvement, and by extension the operation,
secret
.”

She got the implication. “So he was an informant?”

Colonel Grimaldo gave Marcello an annoyed glance. “
All
details of our involvement with Signor Cassandre remain subject to operational secrecy. Although I’d be interested to know, Captain, what makes you reach the conclusion that he was engaged in criminal activity.”

“We recovered a large amount of money in electronic form from his office. We also found a number of high-denomination casino chips.”

“Well, we will follow the leads you’ve developed to the very best of our ability,” Grimaldo said. “My thanks for all your efforts.” He stood up and addressed Marcello. “Avvocato, can we speak in your office?”

When they were alone, she turned to Flavio. “Terrorism?
Really?
”

He shrugged. “Cassandre was registered as an informant on the AISI database. Marcello showed me the entry.”

“But there has to be a financial angle,” she said, thinking aloud. “And what about Tignelli? I suspect he’s involved somehow, but there’s surely no way he can be part of some terrorist plot.” It was only just sinking in that she had been removed from her first homicide investigation as casually as a moth being brushed off a coat. Disbelief was rapidly giving way to anger. “I bet those fucking pricks at AISI have got this all wrong, as usual. Either that, or they’re part of the cover-up as well.”

“Why do you say that about Tignelli?” Flavio said, going straight to the point as usual.

She told him about her visit to La Grazia. “I’m sure he knew exactly why I was there,” she concluded. “There was all this fancy misdirection with the eels, but he’d clearly been pre-warned. Plus he’s the only person I’ve spoken to so far who hasn’t seemed frightened by what happened to Cassandre.”

“Those are the eels, I take it?” He pointed at the bag she’d left by the door. Every so often it gave a violent wriggle, as the eels tested the limits of their confinement.

She nodded. “Can you come round tonight?”

“I can’t ask the bodyguards to stay outside your apartment all night,” he said quietly. “Not again.”

“Just for an hour or two, then,” she said reluctantly.

He made a decision. “All right. I’ll be there at eight.”

As she turned to leave, he added, “And Kat? I’m sorry about this investigation. But there’ll be others. Grimaldo was impressed at how much you’d found out in a couple of days, I could see that.”

“Thanks,” she said. She didn’t bother to tell him that, in her opinion, Grimaldo hadn’t been so much impressed as alarmed.

“
T
HANKS
FOR
MEETING
me,” Holly said.

“Not at all – it’s good to see you. And, if I may say so, looking rather better than on the last occasion we met.” Ian Gilroy’s piercing blue eyes scrutinised her carefully. “Are you quite sure you’re up to returning to duty?”

Ian Gilroy was seventy-two and long retired from his job as chief of the CIA’s Venice Section. He kept his mind agile, as he put it, by teaching classes on military history at Camp Ederle, the US base near Vicenza where Holly was stationed. But the main reason he’d become her mentor and confidant was because he’d been a friend of her father’s. One of her earliest memories was of a barbecue at Camp Darby, when she was eight or nine years old. She’d stood on Gilroy’s feet, one foot on each shoe, and he’d marched her round the party like she was a general. All the officers had to salute her in turn, while she barked nonsensical orders that they’d pretended to carry out.

“You must think I’m stupid,” she said, shaking her head. “Me an intelligence analyst, and I never realised my dad was part of that world himself.”

They were sitting outside a café in the centre of Vicenza, in the cool shade afforded by Palladio’s grand basilica. Gilroy stretched his legs out and looked at her thoughtfully.

“I never think you’re stupid, Holly. Quite the reverse. It takes a special kind of detachment to question the assumptions we grew up with, and your father was too conscientious to tell his family the details of what he did. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve discovered?”

She told him about the memorandum, and the realisation that someone might have tried to kill her father because of it. Gilroy heard her out, nodding occasionally.

“And the document itself?” he said when she’d finished. “Where is it now?”

She indicated the backpack at her feet. “In there.”

“May I see it?”

She took it out and handed it to him. For a while he was silent as he read, occasionally flicking back to a previous page to check something. When he was done he placed it on the table and looked at her.