The Abduction: A Novel (28 page)

SIXTY-SEVEN

THEY’D BEEN PERMITTED
to share the live feed from the Americans’ drones and helmet cameras. In the crammed operations room, Kat watched along with the rest as the twelve-man Special Forces team flew low and fast in two helicopters up the quiet Alpine valleys.

When they were two kilometres away from the farmhouse, six men abseiled down from the first helicopter, like spiders dropping from their webs, and continued on foot.

After a brief reconnaissance, their leader gave a signal. Flash-bang grenades were hurled through the farmhouse windows, while men simultaneously entered from the roof, upper windows and doors. There was a brief, confused fire-fight, the bullets appearing like white blotches on the night-vision feeds. One by one, in the terse operational jargon of the Special Forces, it was confirmed that the hostiles were dead.

There had still been no word of Mia. In the operations room, it felt as if everyone was holding their breath.

Then a soldier approached a big wooden box and ripped the top off. Inside was a hooded, gloved figure. The hood was removed, and Mia’s face appeared on the screens, dazed from the stun grenades but alive, her eyes silvery as a cat’s in the green hue of the cameras.

Back in the operations room, an exultant cheer went up from dozens of throats at once. Kat hugged the nearest person, who happened to be Panicucci. Over his shoulder, she saw Aldo Piola sink his head into his hands with relief. General Saito punched the air, then got swept up in a big group of dancing officers, their arms around each other’s shoulders like Cossacks doing the
prisyadka
. All around the room, men openly wiped away tears.

SIXTY-EIGHT

“
GIOITE
!”
SCREAMED THE
Italian headlines. “REJOICE!” echoed the media around the world.

Mia, it was announced in a statement from Camp Ederle, was safe and well but would not be giving any interviews, at least not until she’d undergone a lengthy period of medical and psychological assessment.

Sitting between Colonel Carver and General Saito at a hastily convened press conference, Major and Nicole Elston gave a brief but emotional statement of thanks to the Italian nation; to its press, its people, and above all its security services, whose rescue of their daughter had been a textbook example of international cooperation in the war against terror. They now requested a period of privacy in which to be reunited as a family.

Saito, in a short but statesmanlike speech, emphasised that in the modern world terrorism was no longer a national but an international threat, and that to combat it, global alliances were more necessary than ever. He thanked the many agencies, from CNAIPIC to the US Special Forces, whose help in retrieving Mia unharmed had been invaluable.

Colonel Carver’s statement was even briefer, and was to the effect that America’s enemies should learn from this that there was nowhere to hide.

It was quickly discovered, by journalists with close links to the Vatican, that Caliari had left the Church some time ago because of “problems with spiritual discipline”; it was discovered, too, that he had been in Yemen, working for the International Red Crescent at the time of a controversial missile strike in 2012 that killed a thirty-five-year-old aid worker called Hussein Saleh.

It was equally quickly clarified by the Yemeni government that the missile in question had been fired not by the American RQ-4 Global Hawk drone that troublemakers claimed to have seen circling the target, but by an unspecified plane of the Yemeni Air Force.

In his blog, Raffaele Fallici took the opportunity to point out that,

Sources close to the investigation are saying that it was the CIA, not the Carabinieri, which located Mia; not least through electronic intercepts and surveillance. Once again the Italian security services have been found to be one step behind their American counterparts. This new, online world requires a new, online police force – and we are fortunate that we appear to have the necessary expertise amongst our allies, since our own government has been too incompetent to develop it on its own account.

    
I notice, too,

he wrote further on in what was quite a lengthy piece,

that Mia is said to have suffered no lasting damage from her ordeal. In part, this is undoubtedly due to her own extraordinary courage and resilience. But it also gives the lie to all those bleeding hearts who claimed that the processes she was subjected to amounted to torture. For, as we now all know – being, thanks to the media, experts in every aspect of the CIA’s position – “torture” means precisely to “cause to suffer lasting harm or trauma”. I, for one, am not ashamed to admit it: I was wrong. America should not allow the bleatings of its liberals to deflect it from its mission, on which not only its own domestic safety but the safety of the whole free world now depends. We should not forget: America is not the enemy. Radical Islam is the enemy, and it is one against which we must stand undivided.

Within days, the encampment of reporters and anchormen at Dal Molin had delivered their final pieces to camera, many echoing similar sentiments, and the headlines were filled with a scandal involving the Spanish royal family instead.

“It’s perfect,” Piola said. “Absolutely perfect. An ex-priest, a little bit crazy, with a grudge against America. And a dropout who owed him everything.” The second kidnapper had been identified as Tiziano Capon, a former drug addict whom Caliari had befriended whilst working at a centre for the homeless in Verona. “As far as the general public are concerned, the security services are heroes. The American Secretary of State has even praised the Carabinieri’s professionalism, which is code for appreciating that we are somewhat sore at not having been allowed to lead the raid on the farmhouse. The desk clerk at the Stucky tells me they’ve taken more bookings in the past twelve hours than they did in the whole of the previous month. A poster girl is safe, and everyone is happy.”

“You think it’s a crock of shit too?” Kat said.

“Let’s just say, the questions I had during the investigation still remain.” He counted them off on his fingers. “Why such a sophisticated operation? Who was really behind it, and why? What about Dreadlock Guy and his tattooed girlfriend? And, most importantly of all, how did Caliari or Capon know about the formation of this radical Azione Dal Molin group they were apparently part of, if neither Ettore Mazzanti nor any of the other protestors told them about it?”

They were both silent for a moment, thinking.

“Of course, it’s not just Saito who’s a hero,” he added. “The word in the canteen is that if you hadn’t fought for the zoom idea, CNAIPIC would have killed it stone dead. There’s even a certain amount of respect for the way you handled that thing with your home computer. I heard one officer saying it couldn’t be you in the photograph, because that woman doesn’t have any balls, and you’ve got the biggest pair in the division.”

She allowed herself a smile at that.

“So all in all, things are almost back to normal,” he said. He didn’t add that “normal” meant he was still living in a hotel room, estranged from his wife; nor did he mention the pang of envy he’d felt when he’d seen Panicucci embracing her after the rescue. A handsome young man of her own age: why wouldn’t she end up with someone like that eventually? “The point is, no one will thank us for stirring up more trouble.”

“Let’s think this through,” she said. “Let’s say the world is being told a big fat lie, and Mia’s rescue is as bogus as everything else about this case. Where does that take us?”

“It means…” Piola took a breath. “It means this is even bigger than we thought. It means that they didn’t just arrange the kidnap of a teenager, they arranged the murder of her kidnappers too. It means the people who arranged the rescue are also responsible for the kidnap. It means the Americans are in this up to their necks.”

They stopped and thought.

“So just suppose the two of us were mad enough to take on the most powerful, technologically sophisticated army in the world, Capitano, how would we do it?” he asked.

She said, “We’d find a way to rattle them – to make them think we know more than we do. We’d come out fighting, and hope to provoke them into fighting back. It’s only when they start to panic that they’ll finally make a mistake.”

WEEK TWO

SIXTY-NINE

TWO DAYS AFTER
Mia Elston’s release, Holly Boland took the grey Stefanel dress out of her closet for the second time in a month.

At the Piazzale Roma pontoon an ancient launch was waiting, all mahogany and brass, its sides bearing an elaborate “B”. This, she knew, was the Barbo family boat, although the kid in the driving seat who’d been sent to pick her up looked more like one of Daniele’s hacker friends than an old family retainer.

The launch sped down the Grand Canal, weaving through the
vaporetti
and gondolas, before turning into a quiet, dusk-filled
rio
, chugging more slowly past crumbling, bricked-up doorways. She loved these sleepy backwaters of Venice, the sense they gave that the city was almost derelict; although that was, she knew, an illusion – the Venetians were simply masters at knowing which repairs could be safely put off.

He was waiting for her on the wooden landing jetty. He hadn’t dressed up, although the hoodie was a clean one and the sneakers looked new.

“Welcome,” he said.

“Hi.”

“The kitchen’s just at the back.” Then, anxiously, “You don’t mind eating here?”

“Here’s perfect,” she assured him.

She followed him towards an old wooden door at the rear of the ground floor. Stepping through it, she found herself in a tiny, unexpected garden, each side lined with columns like a monk’s cloister. It was so small she could have crossed it in three strides.

Off to the left was a kitchen. A vaulted brick roof made it feel like a cellar, but windows that gave onto the canal filled the air with the quiet murmur of lapping water.

If the room was old, however, the equipment in it was not. Ranged along the counter were several items of what looked like laboratory apparatus, while a whiteboard propped against the wall bore a complex equation.

“You do experiments in here?” she asked, curious.

“Not exactly.”

He poured two glasses of
prosecco
, so fine and pale it looked almost like sparkling water. “Dinner will be in nineteen minutes.”

“Nineteen?” she repeated, a little amused by his exactitude. “Are you sure?”

“Certain.”

Daniele was looking better, she thought. The deep-set hollowness of his eyes, so pronounced when he’d first been released, was easing now, and his blinks and twitches, though still frequent, seemed more like punctuation to his thoughts than something which could overwhelm them at any moment.

He didn’t do small talk, but they discussed Carnivia. He was buying more servers, he said, with the Conterno reward money. “But this time I’ll hide the mirror sites better. One in Switzerland, in some quiet Zurich cellar. One in San Marino. Perhaps even one in Montenegro.”

A timer behind them chimed, and he got to his feet.

“What are we eating?” she asked.

“Duck pasta. Smoked eel. And calves’ liver.” They were all classic dishes of the Veneto. “And a 1961 Oddero from my father’s cellar.” He placed a dusty bottle on the table, then checked one of the machines, which whirred faintly as he opened it.

“And the art?” She indicated the whiteboard. “What’s that about?”

“That?” He looked at it and smiled. “That’s very useful. The correct way to boil an egg.”

The formula was intricate and, to her, quite incomprehensible.

“Our cook had all sorts of superstitions and customs. She always pricked one end of the egg, for example, before she put it in the pan,” he explained. “So I did some research to see if there was a more scientific way.”

“And was there?”

“Yes. Obviously, the most important factor is the circumference of the egg.” He pointed to the “c” in the formula. “Then the ambient temperature, “T”. But it turned out that heating the water to a hundred degrees is too much. You need to cook it at a much lower temperature, but for longer.”

“So the way to boil the perfect egg,” she said, “is
not
to boil it?”

He nodded. “That’s when I bought my first temperature bath.” He indicated one of the pieces of equipment behind her. “I’m using it for our dinner tonight, in fact.”

“Which course?”

“All of them.” He got up and went to the counter. “The pasta should be ready. It’s had four hours.”

She couldn’t see what he was doing until he put the food on the table. It wasn’t beautiful – there was nothing elegant or chef-like about Daniele’s presentation – but she could tell immediately that this was going to be like no dinner she had ever eaten. On her plate were four small tubes the thickness of fountain pens, anointed only with a small puddle of green olive oil.

She cut into one. Dark sauce gushed out, releasing an intense gamey aroma of duck.

“Neat,” she said. She put a forkful to her lips. “My God! That’s… that’s…”

He nodded. “I know.”

In some strange way she couldn’t quite get her head around, the pasta was inside out – the rich, strong sauce encased by the pasta, instead of the other way round.

He poured them both some wine. “It needs this. The amino acids in the duck match the Maillard reactions in the wine.”

“Daniele…” She struggled for words. “I’m just astonished to discover that you can cook.”

“Well, I only cook twelve recipes. But those, I’ve hacked and rehacked until they’re perfect.”

If the pasta was unusual, it was nothing compared to the calves’ liver.
Fegato alla Veneziana
was the signature dish of the city. Holly had eaten it many times, and although every housewife and restaurant cooked it a little differently, the basic formula never varied: onions, simmered over a low heat until they became translucent; liver, cut into strips and dusted with flour, then quickly fried in a mixture of oil and butter; the two tossed together with a splash of white wine vinegar.

Daniele’s liver, however, had been cooked for twelve hours in the temperature bath, and was flavoured with star anise and lavender.

“Liver and lavender both contain the same sulphur molecule,” he explained. “Put the two together, and they amplify each other.”

“And the star anise?”

“Contains estragol, which brings out the natural caramel in the onions.”

It was delicious – as meltingly tender as fillet, but with incomparably more flavour. Her favourite course, though, was dessert. When he told her it was a combination of salted chocolate and smoked eel, she almost refused to try it, but in fact it was heavenly: a dark roll of paper-thin chocolate, lightly salted, on top of a mousse whose pungent smokiness and sweetness she would never have identified as eel. It was served with a tiny glass of Torcolato, a Venetian sweet wine that was almost brown in colour, its age belied by explosive, fresh aromas of mango and raisin.

As the meal progressed, Holly noticed how Daniele’s eyes made contact with hers more frequently. He asked about her father, and it felt quite natural to confide her guilt about not seeing much of him. Though he didn’t recognise her any more, she told Daniele, his strokes having robbed his brain of whatever it was that made him a person, she felt bad for her mother and siblings that she wasn’t closer to home.

“When I was a teenager,” he said slowly, “I thought I hated my father. But recently, I’ve come to understand how similar we are. The obsessiveness with which he collected his paintings, for example. If I had a son, and I thought he’d simply sell Carnivia after my death, would I let him? Possibly not.”

“Is that the kind of work you do with Father Uriel? Therapy about your father?”

“In part.” He hesitated. “And some other exercises too.”

“Like what?”

He looked at her. “I’ll show you, if you want.”

“OK,” she said doubtfully.

He cleared the plates from the table as he explained how the exercise was structured. “You can’t look away, though. No matter how intense it gets.”

She leaned forward, as instructed, and fixed her eyes on his. To begin with she felt mildly amused –
Well, this is a weird way to end the evening.
But even before the first minute was up, she recognised that the amusement was simply a form of self-consciousness. Beyond it, there was only an extraordinary sense that she was somehow opening herself up to him, and he to her, the tiny muscles of their eyes carrying on a non-verbal conversation of their own, in a language she couldn’t understand. More than once, whatever was being silently discussed made her want to drop her gaze, or blush, for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom; sometimes, too, she found herself thinking,
Wherever did
that
come from?

Or,
Hope he doesn’t realise I just thought about
that.

When they began mirroring each other’s movements, their eyes still locked together, she felt as if they were dancing in perfect synchronicity across a ballroom of the mind. Every tiny movement of her hand or neck, every stretch and tug of the cashmere dress against her skin, had the softness and intensity of a caress. The back of her neck flushed, and her earlobes burned.

Behind her a timer chimed. “Truth,” he said softly.

“You first.” She was suddenly shy.

He thought. “There are so many things I want to ask you. But the only one that matters, I don’t want to ask. In case the answer’s no.”

Lost in confusion, she didn’t respond.

“Is there anything you want to ask
me
?” he added.

“When you do this with your surrogates… is it the same?”

He shook his head. “No. It’s intense. But not like this.”

“And do you…” She stopped, unsure how to word this. “Where does it end?”

“You want to know whether I have sex with them?”

“I guess I do, yes,” she confessed.

“Father Uriel thinks it might be helpful. But I’ve not gone that far yet. Although there is one surrogate in particular I find very attractive.”

“I can never tell when you’re joking,” she murmured.

“That’s because I never do.” After a moment’s thought he added, “Why? Do you think I
should
go to bed with her?”

“No,” she said. “I think you should probably go to bed with me instead.”