The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy) (12 page)

“This doesn’t look like terrorism to me,” she said. “More like a list of his fellow Masons in the black lodge.”

“You don’t have any evidence for that,” Flavio said, reading over her shoulder. But she could tell by his tone that he was no longer quite so unconvinced.

“Father Calergi mentioned the P2 conspiracy. Remember how they called it the ‘government within the government’? What if this is something similar?”

“All right – so perhaps these
are
the members of an illegal society.” He gestured at the document. “That doesn’t mean they’re conspiring. No prosecutor could launch an investigation merely on the basis of a list of names.” Even so, he scrolled down the list, occasionally shaking his head when he recognised one.

“So what
do
we need? Whatever happens, I can’t do what Grimaldo’s asking and just forget that I was ever put on this case.”

“You know, Kat,” he said quietly, “if I’d realised, when I first began those Mafia trials, how much of my life it would take up, and at what cost, I would never have started.”

“But you did start. And you’re still doing it. You’re the most fearless prosecutor I know.”

“Not any more.” He turned to meet her eyes. “Until recently it seemed like I had no alternative. There was nothing in my life but my work. But things are different now.”

“What’s changed?” she said, although she’d already half-guessed the answer.

“You,” he said simply. “Lately I’ve found myself thinking… what if we went abroad? To Brussels, say. You could transfer to Interpol, I could be a prosecutor for the European Commission. It would be dry work – dull, even. But we could live together, stroll to a café every morning like normal people do, eat together every night… I’d be sharing my life with you, instead of with my bodyguards.” He gestured at the screen. “Kat, if there
is
a conspiracy here, and by some miracle we get to the bottom of it, you know we won’t touch the real problem. Corruption is just too endemic in this country. We’re like housewives trying to shovel snow off the front step while the blizzard’s still raging. Maybe the answer is just to go where there isn’t so much snow.”

Or so much water
. When he’d said the work might be dry, she had immediately thought that her surroundings would be, too. Like every Venetian, she hated the way tourists took over her city for ten months of the year; hated the way there was never enough money to stop the canals from stinking, the foundations from sinking, the bridges from crumbling. But there was lagoon water in her veins. Could she give that up for any man? Even a man like this?

As if reading her thoughts, he said, “Or Amsterdam. There are canals in Amsterdam, you know. They call it ‘the Venice of the north’. We could work at the Hague.”

“I bet Amsterdam’s canals don’t stink like Venice’s.”

He looked perplexed. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

She was torn. She’d never come across a man like him before – a man she was quite certain of, whom she both respected and lusted over; a man to whom she could say anything, or nothing; a man of fierce moral integrity who nevertheless seemed to disapprove of her, or try and make her into something she wasn’t.

“Mind you,” he added, “I never heard of anyone calling Venice ‘the Amsterdam of the south’. So perhaps they’re exaggerating a little.”

She kissed his jaw. She loved the rough sandpapery feel of his end-of-day stubble, the faint aroma of courtrooms and business that lingered on his collar. “Then let’s do it,” she said. “But let’s do both. Sort this case out, as best we can, and then run away to Amsterdam and pretend it’s just Venice on a cold day. And now for God’s sake take me to bed, before your bodyguards start hammering on the door.”

Much later, she crept to the window wrapped in the bedcovers and watched him climb into the car.
If he looks up, he loves me,
she told herself; then, a moment later,
Don’t be such a schoolgirl
.

He looked up and blew her a kiss. Her heart melted.

Amsterdam it is, my love.

H
ALFWAY
ACROSS
THE
world at JFK airport, the attendant at the Delta Airlines First Class lounge reception desk looked up as a man approached her. Although he was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, he looked somehow different from the other passengers in First – the suit too cheap and too grey, the briefcase boxy and made of plastic. Although she smiled automatically, there was just a touch of challenge about the way she said, “May I see your boarding card, sir?” It wouldn’t be the first time an Economy passenger had tried to slip in here.

Instead of a boarding card, though, it was an HP Business Services ID the man laid on the desk in front of her. She squinted at it.
Steve Simmons. Network technician
.

“Photocopier’s reporting a fault,” he explained. “I’m booked in for a repair.”

“Really?” she said, confused. “I wasn’t aware of a problem.”

“It’s all automatic,” he assured her. “These new machines are so smart, they send us an email when they’re going to need fixing. Good thing it’s not smart enough to mend itself too, or I’d be out of a job.” He tapped the case, which she now realised contained his tools. “It’s a five-minuter, then I’ll be out of your hair.”

She pointed. “The copier’s over there, in the business centre. Can I get you a coffee?”

“I’m good, thank you, ma’am,” he said courteously.

She watched from the desk as he carefully spread a dust sheet on the carpet next to the machine, to prevent any stray toner from staining it. Pretty soon he had the photocopier open and was delving around in its innards.

The last repair man had explained to her, when she’d taken him a coffee, that modern copiers didn’t actually photocopy any more. They were now scanner-printers: every document placed on the glass was recorded as a digital image before being either printed, or – more frequently these days – emailed.

“Which also means,” he’d added, “that modern machines keep everything. You’d be amazed how many people don’t realise that when they photocopy their naked ass at the office party and email it to their boyfriend, that image and address is stored on the copier until we delete it.” She hadn’t known that either, and from then on she’d never quite trusted photocopiers the same way.

In a remarkably short time Steve Simmons was finished. Again, she was impressed by the efficiency with which he cleaned up after himself. He’d been wearing disposable gloves, but even so he produced a polishing cloth and meticulously wiped down the copier’s glass and sides after putting it all back together.

“Many thanks, ma’am,” he said cheerily as he left.

Half an hour later, when she was on her break, she saw him again, queuing for a domestic flight to Washington Dulles. She thought what an expensive business it must be, flying a repairman all the way from Washington just to fix a copier. But the people who decided these things must know what they were doing.

By the time she came back from her break, she couldn’t even have told you what he looked like.

T
HE
HACKER
WAITED
patiently in the internet café. He had planned tonight’s demonstration down to the last detail. It was now two in the morning in Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city, and the streets were deserted, but even so the café had been closed all day as a precaution. No one would see the commander or the cleric arrive.

He was waiting for the sound of a car, but when they came it was on foot, opening the back door and silently slipping inside. The hacker, whose name was Tareq, saw the commander glance uneasily over to where Hassan, the café owner, was standing.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Hassan will make tea, then leave us.”

The commander nodded. He was wearing an old camouflage jacket and a turban that had been washed so many times its colour was indeterminate – the same one he had been wearing ever since 2011 and the War of Liberation. The cleric, by contrast, was wearing a black woollen
chechia
, a Tunisian imam’s hat, although, so far as the hacker knew, he wasn’t from that country. He spoke Arabic with a strong Egyptian accent.

They waited in silence while Hassan made thick, syrupy black tea, pouring it repeatedly from one glass to another to produce the
regwhet
, or foam, that proved how clean the utensils and water were. Then, with a respectful “
Ma as-salama
”, he left them.

The hacker turned back to the computer in front of him. The other two men came to stand behind him, looking over his shoulder as they sipped their tea. The screen showed what appeared to be a security camera’s view of a road tunnel. Traffic was relatively light: mostly big commercial trucks, each one with a tail of three or four cars, unable to pass them on the single-lane carriageway.

“Of course, this is just a demonstration,” the hacker said quietly. “If it were a real operation, it would be done when the traffic was heavy.”

“What are we looking at?” the commander asked. “What country?”

“The Fréjus road tunnel,” the hacker said. “It runs under the mountains between France and Italy. Thirteen kilometres long – not the longest, by any means, but enough.”

He typed in an IP address and a crude menu appeared, asking him for a user name and password. He typed again and the menu was replaced by a list of numbers. To the commander, whose technical knowledge was limited, it looked like the menu of an internet router.

The hacker turned some nodes from “On” to “Off”. Then, typing a second IP address, he accessed another menu and checked “Disable”.

“Now we wait,” he said, almost to himself.

“How long?” It was the cleric who had spoken.

“Ten minutes. Perhaps twenty.”

“Time for a second glass, then.”

The commander poured them all more tea, and brought over the bowl of almonds Hassan had left.

“By the end of this year,” the hacker said in his soft, precise voice, “there will be more
things
connected to the internet than computers. By 2020 the world will have more ‘smart devices’, as they are called, than people: over twenty billion of them. Security cameras, traffic lights, ovens, baby monitors… not to mention automated stock-trading networks, power stations and defence systems.” He tapped the screen. “Or in this case, air turbines.”

The commander and the cleric listened respectfully. The hacker might be thirty years younger than either of them, but they had travelled a long way to hear what he had to say this evening.

“These days computers have relatively sophisticated security systems,” the hacker continued. “Firewalls and anti-virus software that are constantly updated as new vulnerabilities are discovered. But the Internet of Things generally runs on the simplest, cheapest software each manufacturer can find. In many cases the devices don’t even require passwords, or they’re set to one of a few factory defaults.” He gestured at the screen. “The air turbines in that tunnel, for example, were set to require the username ‘admin’ and the password ‘password’. But even if the engineers who installed them had thought to change the passwords, it would have been a relatively simple process to bypass them.”

“So that’s what you did?” the cleric asked. “You turned the turbines off?”

The hacker nodded.

“And that’s it?” The commander couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his voice.

He had already recounted to the cleric the story of how, during Libya’s War of Liberation, Colonel Gaddafi’s troops had shut down the national cell-phone network to deny the rebels a means of communicating. Someone had brought this skinny kid to see him. He claimed he could hack into the network and restore their communications. It had seemed worth a try, so he’d told the kid to go ahead.

Within a day, they not only had a phone network but the kid had also somehow fixed it that they didn’t have to pay billing charges.

He had the kid brought back to him. The young hacker looked at him as if he was expecting thanks, but the commander had something else in mind.

“What else can you do?” he’d asked.

A week after that, Gaddafi’s troops had towed two trailer-mounted batteries of Patriot missiles up to their forward positions and prepared to fire them at the rebels. Within an hour, one of the batteries had loosed off a rogue missile that exploded on top of the other battery instead of its designated target. The skinny kid had hacked into the missiles’ electronic firing systems, changed the coordinates around, and then activated the firing protocol.

The commander hadn’t even known that a Patriot battery was connected to the internet.

“It’s not, in the conventional sense,” the kid had explained. “But the manufacturers built in an uplink so that it periodically sends maintenance data back to head office via satellite. With machines like this, it isn’t even a person the data goes back to – it’s machine talking to machine, via sensors and microcontrollers that communicate between themselves, using simple, low-cost networks.”

His words meant almost nothing to the commander; he was just vastly relieved to have the Patriots out of action. “Come up with more ideas,” he said.

The next thing the hacker did wasn’t even hacking. He devised a plan to get the local schoolchildren to mark the regime’s sniper positions on Google Earth using their mobile phones, thus enabling the rebels to target them more effectively. He also came up with a way to improve their mortars’ accuracy using videogame controllers.

When the regime sent in tanks, the hacker built a simple GPS spoofer to fool the tanks’ satnavs into thinking they were in one part of the city when actually they were in another. It took the tank commanders an hour to realise what was happening, by which time their advance was in chaos.

After the regime fell, many of the rebels formed Libya’s new administration. Others went into the army, or returned to their farms and villages. Some, though, went on to fight a different sort of war.

The commander was among the latter. He wasn’t sure if he really believed in jihad, or if it was simply that, somewhere amongst the bombed-out ruins of Misrata and Sirte, he had found his vocation. He knew how to fight; but more importantly, he knew how to lead. Men trusted him.