The Abomination (10 page)

Kat was almost drunk with exhaustion. Her eyes felt dry and scratchy, as if they'd been sandblasted open. But she was also strangely elated. The last twenty-four hours had thrown more challenges her way than she'd faced in her entire career to date, and she knew that so far she was dealing with them pretty well.

“Father Cilosi called back,” she said, chewing on an olive and dropping the stone on the side of her plate. “He's given me the contact details for that expert in the occult he was talking about. A Father Uriel.”

Piola raised an eyebrow. “Another priest?”

“Sounds like it. Though the place he works at sounded more like a hospital of some kind. The Institute of Christina Mirabilis, over towards Verona – I've got an appointment with him first thing tomorrow morning.”

“So that should confirm whether we're really dealing with some kind of Satanic Mass. But even if we are, it may be tangential to the murders. Both our victims were shot, which doesn't sound like a ritual killing to me. Knives, strangulation, drowning perhaps, but I've never heard of a Satanist using a gun.” He drew a sheet of paper out of a file. “The autopsy on the first body – Jelena Babić, that is – has been completed. Seems you were right, Capitano. They found an American manufacturer's label in her robes. R. J. Toomey, just as you predicted. And something else. Ballistics have taken a first look at the bullet. It's a little misshapen from the entry into the skull but they're fairly sure it's a. . .” He glanced at the page, finding the place, and she noticed how he had to hold the paper away from him to focus on it. So he needed glasses but was too vain to get them, she thought. “A 6.8 millimetre Remington SPC.”

“American?”

“Yes. It says here it was developed for US Special Forces. Oh, and it was fired through a Remington silencer. Also developed for Special Forces.”

There was a silence as they both considered this information.

“Of course, these American connections may just be a coincidence,” he added. “We still believe in those, don't we?”

He poured them both more wine, a light Garganega bottled by the restaurant owner's brother. “What about the printout of internet traffic from the hotel? Anything useful there?”

“Malli wasn't sure.” She located the list in her folder. “The hotel doesn't distinguish between websites visited by one guest and another. Mostly they're porn sites, plus a few escort agencies and Google Maps, which is pretty much what you'd expect given the sort of hotel it is. But I think we can assume
this
was accessed from Room 73.” She showed him. “When I googled Barbara Holton, this website came up. Womenunderwar.com. And we can see whoever accessed that site went on to access this one, here.” She pointed again. “Carnivia.com. After that, nothing.”

“Carnivia? That's something to do with the Barbo kid, isn't it? The boy who got kidnapped by the Red Brigades?”

“Exactly. But I don't understand the connection. From what I've read in the papers, Carnivia's some kind of gossip site. You know, schoolkids saying who's got a crush on who, that kind of thing.”

There was another silence. Kat realised she was actually swaying with tiredness.

Piola noticed it too. “Time for you to go home, Captain. There'll be many more late nights over the coming weeks, and I don't need you exhausted.”

The owner chose that moment to come over with two glasses of grappa. “For me, definitely,” Piola said, taking one. “But she's going.”

Kat was too tired to argue, but she took the second grappa from the owner anyway. “Ten more minutes.”

It was another hour before she dragged herself away, and then another hour after that before she was back in her apartment. But despite her fatigue, she wasn't ready for sleep.

She felt the irresistible momentum of a big investigation, the thrill – there was no other word for it – of the pursuit. She'd heard senior officers say that the pressure of a homicide, the race to gather evidence while it was still fresh, was as addictive as crack cocaine, and just as destructive of family life, normality, sleep. She could understand that now. Exhaustion and excitement battled in her brain.

And something more, too: there was something nagging at her, something she'd forgotten.

As she took off her make-up, she mentally ran through her to-do list. Chase Malli to see if he could get anything from the soaked laptop. Ditto with Barbara Holton's cell phone. Try to follow the dead women's information trail into Carnivia. Check their names with Interpol and their respective embassies, to see if either of them had records and to start the task of contacting next-of-kin. See whether the bullet that killed Barbara Holton matched the one from Jelena Babić's autopsy. Go through the statements of the other hotel staff, in case any of them saw anything. Follow up those crossed-out prostitutes' adverts in the paper – what was
that
all about?

And something else, something that was still eluding her.

Piola. She'd told Piola she would do . . . something. She could see him now, nodding with that thoughtful, engaged expression he had. He wasn't like most senior policemen, abrupt, cynical and sneering. There was something academic about him, but also something a little debonair. Somehow they added up to a quality that made her want to earn his praise.

The pressure she felt, she realised, wasn't just the pressure to gather evidence. It was the pressure to retain Colonel Piola's respect.

Then it came to her. She'd told him she'd find someone who took a different theological position from Father Cilosi on women priests.

Going to her laptop, she typed “women priests” into Google and skimmed quickly through the resulting sites. Some seemed rather sad, filled with lengthy justifications of why the writers would reluctantly accept the Pope's position but continue to speak out against it “from a position of respectful conscience”. Some were angry, pointing out that the Bible was full of misogynistic references to the ritual uncleanness of women.

In Leviticus 15:19 – 30, it says, “When a woman has a discharge of blood, and blood flows from her body, the uncleanness of her monthly periods shall last for seven days . . . Anyone who touches her bed must wash his clothing and wash himself and will be unclean until evening.” That's the real reason they don't want us to be priests, and why priests have to be celibate. They hate and fear our genitals.

Others were wistful, citing examples of other faiths which had previously refused to countenance women priests but now accepted them. And through it all ran a recognition that the current Pope was never going to change his mind. A hardliner who had spoken out against the evils of liberalism, who wrote approvingly of the “traditionalism and vigour” of congregations in emerging countries, he quoted time and time again Canon Law 1024: “Only a baptised man validly receives sacred ordination.”

On one site she came across a blog post headed “Why illegal ordinations are wrong”. The argument was the by-now familiar one, that those who believed in the right of women to be ordained should try to change the Church from within. But the writer went on to add:

We should not persuade ourselves that it is ever permissible to ordain women under the present arrangement. Those who have been tempted to take this view are in error.

That was interesting: it suggested there were indeed some who thought differently. Had those individuals perhaps gone one step further? Were there, even now, women who somehow considered themselves to be genuine Catholic priests?

She opened up a new email message and wrote a short note to the blogger, explaining that she was trying to get in touch, in confidence, with people who supported female ordination.

Having sent it, she scanned the rest of her inbox quickly. Her mother had sent a note to her and her brothers reminding them that they'd promised to come to lunch next Sunday. Her mother hadn't copied the email to her sister Clara, she noticed. She'd known Clara wouldn't need reminding.

Kat didn't reply to the email. It was almost 3 a.m. on Tuesday morning, and a lot could have happened by Sunday.

HOLLY BOLAND HIT
her jet-lag with an early-morning run along Ederle's apparently endless perimeter, followed by a light breakfast in the D-FAC, the on-post dining facility. As army chow halls went, it wasn't too bad – someone had tried to brighten it up with a cheery-sounding name, “South of the Alps”, and there were brioches and Italian cakes on offer as well as the usual waffles and hash browns. Even so, she longed for the day when she would be living off-base, able to start her mornings with an espresso and a bite of freshly baked
cornetti
or
bomboloni
, instead of these stadium-sized cartons of frothy milk, flavoured with a shot of watery caffeine.

After breakfast, she checked in with Mike Breedon. There still wasn't much for her to do, so she decided to make a start on locating Barbara Holton's papers – or more likely, she thought, establishing that no such papers existed.

After numerous phone calls, she succeeded in tracking down the staff sergeant responsible for the base archives. He directed her first to a voluminous pile of authorisation forms to be written up in duplicate, and then to a small building at the edge of the administration block. As she got there, clutching her forms, she saw that a long line of soldiers was exiting the building. Each was carrying a stack of three cardboard boxes, like ants with crumbs.

“What's going on?” she asked one of them.

He shrugged without stopping. “Guess they need the space, ma'am.”

Inside the building an iron stairway, echoing with the stamp of standard-issue Belleville boots, spiralled down into the earth. Fighting her way against the tide of soldiery, she found herself in a long, low access tunnel lit with bare bulbs. Uniformed figures were bringing more boxes from either direction, humping them into piles by the exit.

She found the NCO in charge and repeated her question. He too shrugged. “We're shifting some of this, is all.”

“Why?”

His look told her clearly that he rarely searched for any rhyme or reason behind his orders. She tried a different tack. “Where's it going to?”

“Camp Darby is what I heard.”

“Know where I'd find the files for 1995?”

“As it happens, I do. Way along there, to the left.”

Further down the tunnel the lightbulbs became more intermittent. Dimly lit alcoves contained trestles and pallets piled high with boxes. “Archive” was far too grand a term: this was clearly just a dumping place for papers no one was quite sure they were authorised to throw away. Still, someone had tried to make sense of it: laminated A4 sheets taped to each alcove indicated which year each stack related to. Some years contained bigger piles than others. Presumably those were when the larger military engagements had taken place.

“1995” consisted of a truck-sized heap of boxes. The line of soldier-ants was already about twenty feet away, emptying the alcoves one by one. She had no more than twenty minutes, she estimated, before she would be politely asked to vacate the area so they could clear it.

The first three boxes she opened contained standard stores requisition forms that could be of little interest to anyone. The next two held random collections of administrative memos. The sixth contained aerial reconnaissance photos. One of Barbara Holton's questions had related to such images, she recalled, but how could she possibly know who these photographs had been provided to or what terrain they showed? She decided to move on.

It was time-consuming work, and by the time she was halfway done the first soldiers were hovering at the alcove entrance. She called, “Do the one across the way first, will you? I'm almost through here,” knowing that a friendly smile would be more effective than trying to get their orders changed. She turned back to the boxes and pulled out another, thicker file. Some words in a Slavic language jumped out at her.
Siječanj – Ožujak 1995 . . . Medački džep. Planirani unaprijed za glavne SIGINT USAREUR
. She didn't speak Serbo-Croat, but she spoke fluent military acronym, and she knew that SIGINT USAREUR meant Signals Intelligence originating from US Army Europe. She grabbed it. Another file immediately below bore the hand-scrawled title “66th INTERCEPTS BiH”. The 66th Brigade was the umbrella organisation for Military Intelligence in Europe, and BiH was presumably Bosnia – Herzegovina. Then there were a couple more that appeared to contain dates and times, all in the same distinctive Slavic language. She grabbed those too, put the files under her arm and called, “All yours, guys.”

On an afterthought, she turned to one of the soldiers as they passed her. “These'll need to be reunited with the others someday,” she said, holding up the files. “Any idea who I should send them to?”

“Negative, ma'am. Request came in via Intel is all I heard.”

She nodded her thanks and hurried away, the files securely under her arm. It meant nothing, she decided, that Barbara Holton's Freedom of Information request had specifically mentioned some kind of three-way involvement between Military Intelligence, Camp Ederle and the Croatian Army. If you started treating such small coincidences as significant, pretty soon you ended up thinking like a loony conspiracy theorist yourself.

DANIELE EMPTIED A
can of Red Bull energy drink into a half-empty cup of coffee and stirred the mixture with the end of a pencil before downing it in three gulps. He tried not to think what it tasted like.

They'd been up all night, crawling through electronic tunnels and backdoors within Carnivia that only this small band of people knew about, searching. Searching for something they might not even recognise when they saw it.

The reason for his persecution by the authorities, he was certain, lay somewhere inside Carnivia. This wasn't just some random attack on a channel of communication they couldn't control. Someone was looking for something specific, some conversation thread or uploaded titbit of information, and they were prepared to destroy him to get to it.