The Abomination (15 page)

Suddenly, that world shook. Most people would barely have noticed it, or would have assumed it was just some kind of software glitch. Daniele, who was familiar with every line of his world's code, knew better.

It didn't look like an attack. Fireballs weren't falling from the sky; walls didn't topple their stones into the streets; no blood was spilt into the canals. But the fifteenth-century walls of Santa Maria dei Miracoli shifted and slid in crumpled geodesic patterns, momentarily revealing the electronic wireframes within. The marble underfoot lost its pattern, and the sky was briefly visible through sections of the gilded roof. Daniele had the sense that he was a tiny doll in a doll's house that someone very powerful was picking up and shaking, trying to peer inside.

He waited. Carnivia settled again as the servers responded, taking the strain. The attack had been unsuccessful.

The woman got to her feet and crossed to a dark corner, where an old oak chest stood in the shadows. Daniele recognised it as a repository, one of dozens that he and his programmers had scattered around the city. Despite its medieval appearance, it was as secure a place to leave information as anywhere on the internet.

The woman unlocked the chest with a coded passkey and looked inside. Daniele looked too: it was empty. But he was intrigued to see that the interior had been customised with an unusual design, a kind of hieroglyphic pattern carved into the wooden lid. Although he had created the functionality that made such customisation possible, he had never seen anything exactly like it before.

The woman tossed a message into the chest, then locked it again and left. That message was also encrypted, but Daniele had a hunch that he knew exactly what it said.

I waited, but you never came. Where are you?

HOLLY LEFT IAN
Gilroy a message, standing him down from translating the documents she'd passed on. But to her surprise, when he called her back the old agent sounded hesitant.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Well, as it happens I already took a look at them.”

“And? Did you find something?”

“Besides, you promised me dinner,” he said, not quite answering her directly. “Are you by any chance free this evening?”

“Certainly.”

“I have to make an appearance at an art show that's opening in Venice. Would you accompany me? Then we'll eat after.”

“That sounds perfect.”

“Good.” He gave her directions, and they agreed to meet at eight.

She met him at the gallery, a converted warehouse near the Arsenale that was, he told her, often used for the Venice Biennale art fair.

“You have an interest in modern art?” she said, impressed, looking around. She hadn't taken him to be so cutting-edge in his tastes.

He chuckled. “No, not exactly. The man who set up the art foundation that owns this collection was a good friend of mine – Matteo Barbo, an aristocrat from one of the old Venetian families. Before he died, he asked me to take a non-executive seat on its board. So that's another of my little retirement jobs.”

“Barbo,” she said, thinking. “I know that name.”

“The son, Daniele, was kidnapped when he was a child.” Gilroy lowered his voice. “Between you and I, that was how I got to know Matteo. The Company was able to offer some unofficial help to the Italians over the kidnap. Unfortunately, and despite our best efforts, the boy lost his ears and part of his nose. He was an odd child even before that, but afterwards he became increasingly withdrawn. His father blamed himself for not paying the kidnappers what they wanted.”

“Will Daniele be here tonight?”

“I doubt it. He tries to have as little as possible to do with any of the Foundation's activities.” He glanced at her. “You look wonderful, by the way. I hope Ted knows what a beautiful woman his daughter's grown into.”

She blushed. “Thank you.”

It was true that she'd made an effort. Meeting Captain Tapo had reminded her how well ordinary Italian women dressed, and she'd decided that if she was going to swap her ACUs for civvies once in a while she really ought to do it properly. In the centre of Vicenza she had discovered several small but impeccable shops whose every item managed to made her look about a thousand times more glamorous than she actually was, and she'd spent the afternoon trying things on, becoming more and more unsure in the process which one to actually buy. A sympathetic assistant in Stefanel had eventually found her a simple cashmere dress, hooped with soft grey stripes. She'd fallen in love with it even before she tried it on, but in fact the seamless tube of wool felt unbelievably caressing against her skin. It was strange to look in the dressing-room mirror and see a woman rather than a soldier – the clinging material even gave her wiry body a hint of curves, although she'd have to eat a lot of pasta before she acquired anything resembling Captain Tapo's sensual hourglass figure. She'd also bought some heels, though she'd given up on those even before she left the base. After army boots, even sneakers felt as insubstantial as ballet shoes.

As they walked round, Gilroy explained that Matteo Barbo's particular obsession had been collecting works from an early twentieth century period known as Italian Futurism. They were colourful, vibrant even, but overly macho for Holly's taste and a little repetitive. Not that most of those present were paying much attention to the pictures, in any case. There was a lot of cheek-kissing going on, many glasses of
prosecco
being drunk and recharged. Acclimatised as she was to the graduated formalities of the military salute, it felt strange to be embraced intimately by so many strangers, both men and women, each time Gilroy introduced her. She must have explained who she was and why she spoke such fluent Italian a dozen times before he finally muttered, “Well, I think we've done our duty here.”

He took her to Fiaschetteria Toscana, near the Rialto, where the staff – waiters even older than he, in bow ties and black jackets – teased Gilroy about his new girlfriend's age, ostentatiously recommending various dishes to him for their stamina- and potency-giving properties.

“I hope you don't mind,” he said under his breath. “I've known these guys for years.”

“Not at all,” she said, and she didn't. The fuss they were making was so obviously affectionate that she felt flattered rather than embarrassed. Gilroy spoke Italian as fluently as she did, she noticed, although his banter with the waiters was liberally infused with Venexiàn, the impenetrable dialect of the city that was almost a separate language. Even other Italians were outsiders here.

“So,” he said when they'd ordered – sardines followed by calves' liver for him, ravioli and swordfish for her. “I took a look at those documents you gave me. And I've also, I may say, been the recipient of one or two enquiries from my former colleagues. ‘Who's this Second Lieutenant Boland who's sending us emails about Open Government requests?' Do we know her?'” His eyes twinkled. “I was pleased to be able to reveal that I had the jump on them.”

“I was only following through—” she began, but he cut her off.

“Oh, don't apologise. Tweaking the tails of my former colleagues is one of the few pleasures I have left.” He grew serious. “Also, I'm never too happy at discovering that my own side may have been up to something – how shall I put this? –
inappropriate.
”

She stared at him. “Is that what the documents show?”

He made a very Italian gesture with his hand. It meant maybe, maybe not. “So far as I can tell, they're just records of meetings held at Camp Ederle between 1993 and 1995 – not minutes of what was actually said, you understand, more like schedules of discussions. But why were those meetings being held at Ederle in the first place? And why were the documents in Croatian?”

“Because someone who spoke only that language needed a record.”

“Exactly. And to me that suggests we can only be talking about senior Croatian military.”

“Dragan Korovik?”

“Possibly. But this is where I start to get a little antsy. If foreign military commanders were having meetings at a US Army base in my section, how come I knew nothing about it? According to protocol, the Agency should automatically be informed of any contact between our side and non-allies.”

“So what do you think was going on?”

“Ever hear of an organisation called Gladio?” he said, answering her question with another.

She shook her head. “Should I have done?”

“Well, it's an interesting story. In 1990 the Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, went before his parliament and made a rather remarkable confession. Turned out that ever since the end of World War II, with the full knowledge of successive Italian prime ministers, NATO had been running its own covert military network within Italy. Ostensibly, you understand, its members were ordinary Italian citizens – doctors, lawyers, politicians, priests. The one thing they had in common was that they were passionate anti-communists. NATO trained them, drilled them, supplied them with arms and paid them – all in secret. It was a guerrilla army in waiting. And no one knew a thing about it.”

“My God,” she said, amazed. “But . . . why?”

“After the war, when the Russians were tightening their grip on Eastern Europe, NATO thought they were eyeing Italy as well. And the democratic communists were having a surprising amount of success in the Italian polls. Originally, the idea was that if Russia invaded, or the communists got into power, Gladio would rise up, ready to become the official resistance.”

He paused to snap a
crostini
between his fingers. “But that wasn't all Prime Minister Andreotti had to confess. It seems that, as the years passed and the Russians stayed behind the Iron Curtain, some of the gladiators began using their expertise – and their NATO-supplied high explosives – to manipulate domestic Italian politics. Over a dozen assassinations, bombings and other atrocities were laid at Gladio's door. Even, it seems, the assassination of another prime minister, Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped, tortured and killed just days before he was due to announce a power-sharing deal with the communists.”

“The
anni di piombo
,” she said.

“Exactly.”

Every Italian knew the term for the political chaos of the seventies and eighties, dubbed the “Years of Lead” after all the bullets that had flown, when the police all but lost control of the streets and it was a brave lawyer who appeared for a prosecution.

“They called it a ‘strategy of tension',” Gilroy went on. “Basically, it was about provoking reprisals as much as eliminating opponents. But the point is, Gladio was NATO's responsibility. The CIA knew nothing about it. At least, not officially.”

“But unofficially?”

“Oh, we heard rumours. Speculation, little bits of information that didn't make sense; operations that seemed too well planned to be the work of amateurs. And of course the Iran – Contra scandal had shown us just what some of these guys were capable of. But that was all it was – rumour and speculation. So we dismissed it as the usual crackpot nonsense. Made us look pretty stupid when it all turned out to be true.”

Conspiracy theories that turned out not to be nonsense after all
. Shocked by the implications, she said, “What happened to the network?”

“When Andreotti made the announcement, he said Gladio had already been disbanded, on his orders. No one was to be arrested, no one charged.”

“Convenient.”

“Very.” Gilroy's eyes took on a far-away look. “And of course it already seemed like something that belonged to the past, because the communist regimes were toppling in any case. I guess you're too young to remember all that – the end of the Cold War.”

“I remember the Berlin Wall coming down,” she said. “I was at a neighbour's, and it came on TV . . . People were climbing on the Wall and cheering. Then my dad came home early. He said everyone at the base was celebrating. He said. . .” She paused, her voice catching. “He said, ‘Maybe we can all go home now.'”

Gilroy nodded. “That was what we all thought, back then. Communism defeated. NATO's job was done. Most of us really believed it was all over. And instead. . .”

“Instead?”

“Within a few years Yugoslavia had exploded into civil war. At first it was just a local conflict, but it soon turned brutal. Sarajevo, Bosnia, Kosovo . . . conflicts of such appalling barbarity, right on Europe's doorstep, that the whole world was clamouring for NATO to get involved. Which it did – not just with airstrikes, but with peacekeeping operations and protection forces. We're still in Kosovo to this day. Post-Cold War NATO's gotten bigger, not smaller.” He paused. “I always wondered exactly how that happened.”

It took her a moment to catch his meaning. “Wait a minute,” she said incredulously. “Are you suggesting that NATO may have deliberately stoked the war in Yugoslavia, in order to guarantee its own survival as an organisation?”