The Abomination (28 page)

She kissed him and he started to move, rocking her gently.

Suddenly she knew that she didn't care about the other affairs. She didn't care about the wife. She'd rather have a small part of Aldo Piola than all of some shallow ambitious boy her own age.

“I love you,” she said. It felt like jumping off a cliff, like the first time they kissed. “Aldo, I love you.”

“I love you,
sir
,” he joked. And then, “Kat, I love you too.”

HOLLY SAT IN
a quiet corner of the Ederle Inn bar, nursing a glass of Californian chardonnay. Despite the fact that Camp Ederle was surrounded by vineyards – the Veneto being one of the biggest wine-producing areas of Italy – even the beverages were imported from the US.

Since her encounter with Second Lieutenant Jonny Wright, she'd avoided the busier bars on base. Not that she was avoiding Wright himself, not exactly. She'd checked: his unit would be shipping back to Pendleton within a couple of weeks. In the meantime, she had plenty of other stuff to think about.

Like how she was going to find any proof of the theory that between the 1st and the 4th of July 1993, a group of renegade NATO officers had met with a Croatian general at Camp Ederle, to plan exactly how to draw NATO into a brutal new conflict.

More than anything else, she needed names. It was frustrating that Ederle's guardhouse records had been destroyed in a warehouse fire. Once, she would have scoffed at any suggestion that the fire and Dragan Korovik's trial were somehow connected. Now, she couldn't help wondering if the moment Korovik was arrested, someone had given orders that any evidence linking his activities to the US should be found and erased. She had a horrible feeling that if so, the clean-up had been all too successful, and she and Gilroy were just a few weeks too late.

“Can I buy you another one of those?”

She looked up warily. The speaker was a young captain with a staff officer's insignia on his lapel. He seemed innocuous enough, but even so she hesitated.

“I'm still on US time, and I fly straight back tomorrow,” he added. “Don't think I'm going to get much in the way of sleep tonight.” He extended his hand. “Tom Haslam.”

“Pleased to meet you, Tom. I was just going, but. . .”

“Maybe one more?”

He seemed pleasant and a little lonely, so she nodded. “Why not?”

He tapped the edge of his credit card on the bar to get the Italian barman's attention. “
Due bicchieri di vino bianco, per favore.
” His Italian was terrible, but she liked that he'd bothered to try. It was a rare courtesy here.

“Room number?” the barman asked in English.

“Seventeen.”

The barman, whose name was Christofero, checked his computer. “You don't have a tab yet. I'll need your passport or military ID, please.”

Haslam frowned, patting his pockets. “I left my ID in my room.”

“Let me get these,” she offered.

“No, I'll go get it. Jeez, the hoops they make you jump through just to get a drink,” he grumbled, turning towards the door. “It's not like they don't know who I am – I practically had to send them my life history just to get a room.”

She wasn't listening. She was staring at the bartender, struck by a sudden thought.

“Christofero, when was the Ederle Inn constructed?”

He shrugged. “About twenty years ago, I guess. I've been here ten years, and Massimo was here before I was.”

“Do you always ask for ID before you set up a room tab?”

“Of course. That's the system.”

“Why?”

He shrugged again. His job was to put out pretzels and pour beers, not to question military bureaucracy.

“And can you search the bar bills by date?”

“
Si
, I guess so. But why would I want to?”

She got up and went round the bar to inspect the till. It was ancient, like the till computers you saw in bookshops or opticians. If she wasn't mistaken, that wasn't even Windows she was looking at, but old-fashioned keyboard-based DOS.

“Type in a date for me, would you?” she said. She watched his fingers lift over the grimy old keys, waiting.

“Type in July 1st, 1993,” she said.

If a group of people were travelling to Camp Ederle for a three-day meeting in the summer of 1993, they'd need accommodation. The Ederle Inn Hotel was the only short-term accommodation on base. And thanks to military bureaucracy, the names and addresses of every person who stayed that night had been meticulously logged against their bar bills.

The rickety old inkjet printer chattered and stuttered as it disgorged them, line by line, from somewhere deep within the depths of the geriatric computer's memory.

Excusing herself from the drink with Tom Haslam – slightly guiltily: she felt she owed him better – Holly took the printout back to her room. There were five Croatian names. Three had military rank – a general, a colonel and a major.

The general was Dragan Korovik. The two Croats without ranks had “Fra” in front of their names.

A quick search of the internet confirmed what she'd immediately suspected: “Fra” meant “Father” in Croatian.

Even so, she stared at her laptop in disbelief.
This wasn't just the military. Somehow, the Church was involved as well
.

Then came a couple of American names without ranks: John R. Jones and Kevin B. Killick. They sounded obviously fake to Holly. Sure enough, their Washington addresses turned out to be non-existent too.

They had to be spooks of some kind
.

Colonel Robin Millar, Staff Officer, NATO Supreme Headquarters, Casteau, hadn't troubled to take any such precautions. An apparently gregarious man, he'd stood several large rounds in the bar, and charged them to his room tab.

Could he represent the Gladio network Gilroy had talked about?

She started methodically checking out the other names in the group. Bruce Gould, Senior Vice President, MCI, Virginia. Another quick search revealed that this was a company called Military Capabilities International. According to their website they provided “leadership resources, personnel and executive expertise for communities, companies and nations around the world”. The home page was decorated with pictures of smiling ethnic children clustered around armed Americans wearing military fatigues, aviator sunglasses and bad moustaches.

She typed “Croatia” into the site's own search box, and a new page appeared. “MCI provides time-sensitive strategic security services to emerging democracies. Our on-site teams have played vital roles in Kuwait, Nigeria, Iraq and Bosnia/ Croatia.” No explanation of what that actually meant, but she was pretty sure MCI were a quasi-corporate private army, one of several that hoovered up trained servicemen and put them to work in the private sector.

Thomas Hudson from General Atomics Aeronautical in California – she soon established that their main interest was the manufacture of Predator drones. Stewart Portas, from Portas Public Relations in New York. Antonino Giuffrè, no address given. Intellipedia had nothing on him, but according to Wikipedia, someone of that name was currently serving a ten-year prison sentence in Italy for organised crime.

The Church, NATO, arms manufacturers . . . and now the mob
.

Dr Paul Doherty, whose address was listed as Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.

They even had a psychiatrist on board
.

She went over to the Liaison Office and raided the stationery cupboard for supplies – Post-it notes, marker pens in three different colours, a flipchart pad. Lugging them up to her room, she took down the bland print of the Grand Canyon that hung on one wall and started constructing a spider chart, mapping the connections between the various institutions with arrows and dotted lines.

She had thirteen names, but Robin Millar had stood drinks for sixteen people. That meant there were at least three attendees who hadn't needed to book accommodation. Either they were already on base, or they lived near enough not to have to stay the night. She took three Post-its, put question marks on each of them for now, and stuck them to one side.

Next to each person she had a name for she added details of what that person was doing now. Several had become senior executives of their companies. Robin Millar, she discovered, was currently working for MCI. Dragan Korovik, of course, was in a prison cell in The Hague, but the other Croatians appeared to have important positions in the new government, or, in the case of the priests, the diocese – one was credited with having organised the Pope's visit in 2011.

A link man between the Croatian Catholic Church and the Vatican
.

According to newspaper articles she found on the internet, when the Communists first took control of Croatia, the Croatian Church managed to get all its gold and cash reserves out of the country and into the Vatican bank, where the money had stayed, accumulating interest, for over fifty years. The Vatican had never made any secret of the fact that it regarded those funds as earmarked for re-establishing Croatia as a Catholic nation.

Under the Post-it marked “Vatican” she added “The money?”.

Standing back, she realised there was one name that still had no details attached to it. She'd established that Dr Paul Doherty had left Stanford in 1995, aged twenty-seven; after that, she could find absolutely nothing about him. Which was odd – a young academic, if he was regularly publishing his work, should be easy enough to track down.

Wondering if he could have been whisked off into some obscure Pentagon research department, she tried Intellipedia and the even more restricted SIPRNet. Still nothing.

Going back to the regular internet, she switched from Google to a number of other, less well-known search engines – Bing, Blekko, Slikk and Sphider. Lastly, she tried a program called Resurrection, which trawled through the internet's “dark pages” – cached material from long-defunct search engines such as Lycos and Magellan that no longer corresponded to any existing sites.

Gotcha
.

The material she found was dated from 1992, and appeared to come from an obscure academic journal,
The Journal of Behavioral Science
. When a journal like that published a paper, she knew, it first put out a short précis or abstract so people could decide if they wanted to read the whole thing. She had found the abstract for the only paper Paul Doherty had ever published.

Of the article itself there was still no sign, but what she read in the abstract was enough to have her reaching for a memory stick.

It was time to share what she'd learnt with Ian Gilroy.

THEY FOLLOWED THEIR
orders. They went out amongst the prostitutes and the drug addicts of Santa Lucia and showed them the photographs. Barbara, Jelena, and the unnamed young woman who looked Croatian. They even showed a picture of Ricci Castiglione, in the days before the crabs had feasted on his eyes.

Because even with his damaged face Aldo looked like a policeman, it was Kat who went into the seediest bars, the taxi-cab offices and the backstreet poker games where Italian was rarely heard. Sometimes she dressed like a whore, to get past the owners. Sometimes she arrested the pimps before bringing their girls in for a quiet chat.

She always told the women there was a way out, an outreach programme or a refuge where they'd be safe. She'd said it so often, and been disbelieved so many times, that now she barely believed it herself.

Piola had been right when he'd said that crime had taken over Venice. It was like a parasite, the sort that feeds on its host and weakens it without ever quite killing it. It slid its tentacles under doors and through windows, along canals and beneath the grand palaces. It was a sea monster wrapped around the city, sharing its life blood, feeding off its nutrients. Most of the time it was invisible, but if you knew how to see it, it was there. It was there in the way the girls and their pimps were never more than a hundred yards from a hotel where they could take their punters, no questions asked. It was there in the nods between the boatmen, the weary smiles of waiters thanking diners for a tip they'd never get to keep.

Marcello's three-day deadline came and went, and still the two of them immersed themselves in the filth of Venice, in the dark fetid waters that had been getting slowly darker and more fetid for centuries.

And, finally, they found Bob Findlater.

Or, strictly speaking, Bob Findlater found them. A courteous phone call to Campo San Zaccaria, asking for an appointment “as soon as was practicable”. There were some difficulties because he spoke very little Italian. Piola's English wasn't great, but Kat was fairly fluent. They had a translator on standby, just in case.

He came in with no lawyer, just his passport and an apologetic smile.

“My name is Robert Findlater,” he began. “Though people call me Bob. I'm an American citizen, and I believe I can explain why Barbara Holton and Jelena Babić were killed.”

He was a tall man, quite broad, in his early forties, crew-cut. When he took off his jacket, his biceps bulged against an expensive T-shirt.

He placed an A4 photograph on the table. It showed a dark-haired girl of about seventeen or eighteen. It was the same photograph Kat had been touting round the bars of Santa Lucia.

“This is my daughter,” he said. “Melina Kovačević. She's missing.”

“Go on,” Kat said.

He hesitated. “It's quite a lengthy story.”

“That's OK. Just tell us in your own words.”

That was the way it worked with questioning: the first time you let them get it all out, without interrupting. The second time, you took them back over it, asking for more details, probing and challenging. Then you went through it one more time, making sure you'd understood, that there was nothing else the interviewee could add.