The Abomination (14 page)

“An email from a woman priest,” she explained. It was curious, she reflected, that despite the wary tone of the first note, it could only have been that writer who'd forwarded her own email to “Karen”.

“So they do exist?”

She gestured at the email. “She claims they do. She mentions Carnivia, too. That's the second time that name's come up. I wonder why?”

Piola shrugged. “I'm too old to figure out all this internet stuff. I'm going to leave that part to you and Malli. Make it a priority, though, will you?” Giuseppe Malli occupied a windowless room high in the attic of the Carabinieri headquarters. Long ago, when the building was a nunnery, this had been one of the more austere novice's cells. Now it was crammed with bits of electronic equipment: hard drives, partially disassembled laptops, lengths of cabling and portable monitors.

“Ah, Capitano,” Malli greeted her. “I've just been examining your little mermaid.” He held up a laptop hard drive in a clear plastic bag. “It's no good, I'm afraid. The waters of Venice have taken everything she knew. Want me to throw her away?”

“Better not,” Kat said, taking the bag from him. “Useless or not, it's still evidence. Do you have the paperwork?”

Every item of evidence in the building was accompanied by its own chain-of-custody file. In theory, it should be possible to account for every minute it had spent since coming into the Carabinieri's possession.

Malli waved a hand at the mess on his workbench. “It's here somewhere. I'll send it on.”

“Thanks.” She found a place to perch. “I'd like to ask you something else, actually. What do you know about a website called Carnivia?”

“No more than anybody else, I suspect. Why?”

She explained about the two links the investigation had thrown up – first, from the victims' hotel room, and secondly in the email from the woman who claimed to be a priest.

Malli considered. “At a guess, they're using Carnivia as a kind of secure communications network. That's pretty clever, actually.” Seeing her look of incomprehension, he explained. “Carnivia uses encryption technology to keep its users anonymous. Daniele Barbo wrote the algorithm himself, and amongst hackers it's recognised as being about the best there is. So once you're inside Carnivia, your communications are safe. It's like having your own military-grade communications channel. Better, actually. The US Department of Defense's systems have been hacked in the past. Carnivia never has.”

“Didn't I read that Barbo's in some kind of trouble?”

He nodded. “Refusing to allow the government access to monitor website traffic is an offence now. His sentencing's in a few weeks' time. Most people think he'll go to prison rather than let the authorities into Carnivia.”

Her mind was working overtime. “So if he were to tell us whatever it was our victim was using Carnivia for before she was killed, it might help him with the judge?”

Malli laughed. “I see where you're going with this, Captain, but I wouldn't hold out much hope if I were you. No one's ever persuaded Daniele Barbo to do anything he didn't want to. And the one thing he really, really doesn't want to do is to give people like you and me access to his website.”

She replied to “Karen”, saying she'd meet her wherever and whenever was convenient. Then she set about opening a Carnivia account.

It was barely more complicated than registering with an online retailer. First, she had to choose a Carnival mask in the “mask shop”. As a Venetian, that took her no time at all: she always wore a Columbina, a smiling half-mask decorated with feathers and lace. Meanwhile, with her permission, the site was searching her computer for information.

After a minute or so, a message appeared.

G
OOD MORNING
, I
NSPECTOR
K
ATERINA
T
APO

C
URRENT LOCATION
: C
ARABINIERI
H
EADQUARTERS
, V
ENICE

I
S THE FOLLOWING CORRECT
?

There followed a long list of everything Carnivia had learnt about her. She read it, astonished. It had divined not only her job, rank and age but who she worked with, who her friends were, where she lived, what school and college she'd been to . . . the list went on and on.

It ended with the words:

D
ON
'
T WORRY, IN
C
ARNIVIA YOU WILL BE COMPLETELY ANONYMOUS
. Y
OUR NEW IDENTITY IS
C
OLUMBINA
7759.

W
HAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO
?

From the options, she selected “Enter Carnivia”.

AN HOUR LATER
, Kat finally logged out. She was aware that her cheeks were burning. Her head was spinning.

Whatever she'd been expecting, it hadn't been this.

To begin with, she'd just walked around, delighting in the fact that the 3D world of Carnivia was an exact replica of the city she knew and loved. Every detail was perfect, right down to the sleepy ginger cats sunning themselves on the windowsills, and the way the water in the canals glittered in the late afternoon sun, rising and falling slowly with the tides. But this was a Venice without grime and without tourists – unless you counted the masked figures who walked the pavements, slipping into doorways and gondolas on business of their own.

Unsure what to do next, she'd followed a stream of people into the Doge's Palace, where they seemed to be consulting huge ledgers laid out on tables. Going over, she saw that each book contained a list of names. As she opened the ledger nearest to her, the names changed. Now they were all of people she knew – names the website had gleaned from her hard drive. Against some were brief notations.

D
ELFIO
C
REMONESI
–
FOUR ENTRIES
.

F
RANCESCO
L
OTTI
–
TWO ENTRIES
.

A
LIDA PADOVESI
–
SIX ENTRIES
.

Alida Padovesi had been in her year at the Carabinieri training academy. They'd lost touch, although Kat kept meaning to Facebook her. She clicked on the name. Pages riffled.

A
LIDA
P
ADOVESI
. B
ODY
6/10,
FACE
5/10. N
OT GREAT IN BED
–
STRANGE SINCE SHE
'
S HAD SO MUCH PRACTICE
. I
KNOW SHE
'
S BEEN WITH AT LEAST TEN OTHER MEN SINCE SHE TRANSFERRED TO
M
ILAN
. . .

A
LIDA
P
ADOVESI
. T
HE OTHER NIGHT WE WERE ALL AT A RESTAURANT AND SHE TOLD ME SHE WANTED TO GO TO BED WITH A WOMAN
. I
THINK SHE WAS HITTING ON ME
. . .

A
LIDA
P
ADOVESI
. W
HY IS SHE SLEEPING WITH
B
RUNO
C
ORSTI
? C
OULD IT BE SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE
A
MERICAN
E
XPRESS GOLD CARD HE'S GIVEN HER
?

It was horrible – but Kat couldn't tear herself away. She understood now why Carnivia and its creator aroused such strong passions. She hated the fact that she was reading this tittle-tattle, but to stop was almost impossible. Every time she resolved to walk away, she spotted another name she knew, another entry that begged to be read. A part of her simply wanted the names to disappear, so she wouldn't have to summon the willpower to stop reading of her own volition.

Then, in a sudden moment of horror, it occurred to her that there might well be gossip like this about herself as well.

She checked.

K
ATERINA
T
APO
–
EIGHT ENTRIES
.

When she clicked on her name, though, the website brought up a message.

A
RE YOU SURE
?

She hesitated, then clicked “Cancel”.

DANIELE BARBO LOGGED
onto Carnivia, just as he'd done a thousand times before. At the log-on screen, with its picture of a grinning Carnival mask, he typed an administrator password. Nothing changed on the screen, except for a two-line option for administrators only that appeared below the log-on:

D
O YOU WISH TO BE
:

A
)
VISIBLE

B
)
INVISIBLE
?

He clicked “b”, then “Enter”.

He was inside a gorgeously marbled Venetian
palazzo
– the exact same
palazzo
, in fact, in which he was sitting in the real world. The main entrance to Carnivia was modelled on Ca' Barbo, although the modernist sculptures and paintings installed by his father had been expunged from the online version. A few pundits had had a field day with that particular detail. In fact, as he'd patiently tried to explain at the time, it was simply easier to model the three-dimensional parts of Carnivia on a place he was familiar with, and removing the Giacomettis and Picassos avoided problems with the Foundation, which owned the copyrights.

It was a good explanation, but even so, he'd secretly known the pundits had a point.

Around him, figures in seventeenth-century costumes and masks hurried to and fro. In Carnivia, Ca' Barbo was a convenient place to pick up post or catch a gondola to other parts of the city. You could even use a virtual computer here, which meant that when you went on Facebook, for example, your real identity was shrouded behind your Carnivia mask.

The little app that informed a Facebook user “You've got a secret admirer”, accompanied by the gift of a virtual rose that gradually shed its petals over the course of the next few days, had been one of the first things to bring Carnivia worldwide attention. Millions of anonymous messages had been sent, particularly after a feature was added that allowed the admired to strike up a private, anonymous dialogue with their admirer.

It hadn't been long, of course, before someone had copied the source code to produce “Someone thinks you suck”. In the furore that followed, Facebook had tried to ban all Carnivia applications – only to find that it was powerless to block the coding, so carefully had it been built. It was part of Carnivia lore that it had taken a personal appeal from Mark Zuckerberg to Daniele Barbo before the latter agreed to reveal how it was done.

That controversy, however, was nothing compared to what happened when Daniele allowed Carnivia to scour real-world data from your computer – to “scrape” it, in geek-speak – and use it to build up a picture of who you knew: your colleagues, your family, neighbours, friends, even which celebrities you followed. It was, its detractors said, an inducement to participate in the worst sort of mob behaviour – and yet the numbers visiting Carnivia had quadrupled overnight.

Daniele never answered his critics. He had no great interest in what people used his website for, nor did he see why he should be held responsible for what they posted. Venetians had been wearing masks for almost five centuries – in fact, when they were first introduced, a person was punishable by law if they
didn't
wear a mask when engaging in scandalous behaviour, the intention being that a merchant who lost a fortune on the gambling tables of the
casinò
, or whose wife took a lover, should be able to carry on trading with no loss of confidence in his ability to manage his affairs. Rumour and scandal were as much a part of Venetian life as dance and debauchery. There was even a word,
chiacchiere
, which meant both “to slander” and “to pass the time pleasurably”. In his city these were old debates, settled long ago.

Now, invisible amongst the anonymous figures, Daniele took a seat and waited patiently for twelve o'clock.

He had no idea who he was waiting for, or why. He only knew that, in his painstaking trawling of Carnivia's data, he'd spotted one or two tiny anomalies, individual patterns of behaviour he couldn't quite explain. He was here to follow up one of them.

At exactly twelve o'clock each day someone accessed Carnivia, took the same brief walk, posted the same brief encrypted message, then left. And at exactly twelve o'clock the same force or forces that were trying to overwhelm Carnivia's servers threw their weight against its defences. Were the two things connected? He was certain they must be. But whether the visitor was an accomplice of the would-be intruders, or their intended victim, he had no idea.

At midday a figure materialised in front of him. It was a woman – not that gender had quite the same meaning in Carnivia, being a matter of personal choice rather than of biology. She was wearing a Domino, the carnival mask so called because it was derived from the hoods of priests or “domini”, black on the outside and white within.

The woman turned, examining those around her carefully, as if searching for someone. Then she spoke to the whole community – a relatively uncommon thing to do there. Even so, the message was encrypted: only the intended recipient would be able to decipher it.

“
Wrdlyght? Dth reht jerish
?”

There was no reply. After a moment the woman turned and went to the jetty. Stepping over the gondolas, she headed into the city. Daniele followed her. After a hundred yards or so, she turned and slipped into a tiny neighbourhood church, a simulacrum of Santa Maria dei Miracoli.

Once again she called out, “
Wrdlyght? Dth reht jerish
?” Once again, no one answered.

The woman knelt in front of the altar in an attitude of prayer. This, too, was unusual for Carnivia, where people tended to indulge in more profane pleasures. Coming up invisibly beside her, Daniele studied her. The mask and costume were both standard ones, displaying none of the elaborate customisations hard-core Carnivians sometimes indulged in. It could have been the avatar of any one of the hundreds of thousands of users who had, at that moment, chosen to enter the world he'd created.