The Abomination (30 page)

In the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), Professor Philip Zimbardo examined the behaviour of twelve students assigned the role of “guards” over twelve “prisoners”. The latter were deliberately “dehumanised” by being given numbers instead of names. This experiment was, notoriously, abandoned because of the increasingly sadistic behaviour of the “guards”.

This paper looks at a number of twentieth-century conflicts in which extreme acts of violence have taken place. In addition to “moral authorisation” and “dehumanisation”, it identifies a number of other possible precursors to violence. These include “ethnic otherness”, “historical inevitability”, “blaming the victim” and “collective paranoia”.

The author uses Freud's concept of “libidinal frenzy” to describe how a combination of such factors may induce a kind of mass psychosis in which whole populations can only be satisfied by each other's extermination.

Keywords: collective psychosis, crimes against humanity, mass rape, religious hatred.

“My God,” Gilroy breathed. “It's like he's describing a step-by-step guide to creating a genocide.”

“Exactly.”

“And the full paper?”

“Even more curious. Usually you can get hold of academic papers pretty easily – that's what the internet was originally built for, after all. But when you enter these details into a service such as PubMed, it comes back with ‘No results found'. Doherty's article is never cited, never referred to by other psychiatrists, never linked to. . . Either it wasn't published after all, or it was somehow redacted – erased from the collective memory of every search engine and website on the net.”

Gilroy thought a moment. “So,” he said at last. “What do we do with this remarkable trove of information, Holly Boland?”

“I was hoping you might have some ideas on that.”

“Who else knows about this?”

“No one.”

“Let's keep it that way for now. I need to think it through.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Noticing, he said, “Yes, Holly?”

“Is it possible this was all a perfectly legitimate psy-ops operation? After all, destabilising foreign countries is hardly new territory for the US. We did it in Nicaragua, in Panama, Iraq. . .”

“Sure. But in those countries we were either legitimately at war, or had presidential approval. And anyone stoking a conflict in the Balkans was doing it in the face of a United Nations resolution that actively forbade other states from getting involved. No, it seems to me that when you put all this together, you've got a kind of ad-hoc coalition of vested interests – private military, arms manufacturers, rogue NATO officers, even the Mafia – all working together to make sure the powder keg ignited.”

“The thing I still can't get my head round,” she said, “is what those priests were doing there.”

“Presumably their role was to provide the ‘moral authorisation' Doherty talks about. Preaching ethnic hatred in their sermons, and so on.”

“But they must have known, if they'd read Doherty's paper, that they'd be helping to tip their country into the most appalling violence.”

“Perhaps they thought it was a price worth paying. Or maybe they'd simply convinced themselves that they were doing God's work. If so, it wouldn't be the first time religion has got mixed up with war. Voltaire put it well, Holly: ‘To make a man commit atrocities, first make him believe absurdities.'”

“HEY,” TRENT WOLFE
said. “Daniele, right? I'm Trent, the President of Rocaville, and this is my VP in charge of Mergers and Acquisitions, Jim Khalifi.”

Neither man was older than twenty-six, and both were wearing shorts, sandals and faded hoodies. Daniele shook their hands, then took a seat.

They were meeting in the lobby of the Cipriani, one of Venice's finest and grandest old hotels, where the Americans were staying. Daniele wondered whether the Cipriani would try to enforce its notoriously strict dress code – gentlemen eating in the restaurant were expected to wear a tie, even in the humid summer months – or whether the fact that Trent had taken the Palladio Suite, a ten-thousand-dollar-a-night glass box suspended over the lagoon with its own private entrance and launch, had persuaded them to make an exception.

All three ordered Cokes. Trent leant forward. “Listen, Dan, I'm going to jump straight to it. We think what you've done with Carnivia is just great. It's so rare in these asshole marketing-led times to find a site where someone actually cares about the coding, right? Most of the kids we see today are only starting dotcoms in the hope they'll do an IPO by the time they're in college and sell out to Google before they graduate.”

He spoke like a veteran from another age – which, in a sense, he was. Back in 2005, Rocaville.com had passed its one-million-user mark in just three months. On the back of that success, Trent Wolfe had gone around the world buying up internet businesses with a keen eye for what would be successful, and an almost total disregard for stock market valuations.

“I never thought of Carnivia as a dotcom, actually,” Daniele said. “More as a kind of experiment.”

“Exactly.” Trent pointed the straw of his Coke at him. “Which is why it doesn't make money. Carnivia has
integrity
. That's why I flew over. The way I see it, this is your hour of need.”

Daniele nodded.

“The bottom line is, we'll give you help in whatever form you want it. We'll invest in Carnivia outright or a chunk of it – minority or majority share, that's your call. Or we'll put you on the payroll and pay your legal bills.”

“That's very generous,” Daniele said.

Trent smiled. “I just think us 2.0 guys should stick together. One day you'll do the same for me.”

“To be frank,” Daniele added, “I've been expecting this.”

“You have?” Trent shot his VP an amazed look. “We didn't even discuss this ourselves until last weekend. We were having a hackathon and someone said, ‘What about Carnivia? We need to reach out to those guys.'”

“I meant,” Daniele explained, “that I'd been expecting
someone
to make an offer for Carnivia. After all, what's the use of putting pressure on me personally if it doesn't net the site itself? So I assumed that at some point before my sentencing, someone would come along and try to buy it, on terms apparently so generous that I'd be a fool not to accept.”

“Not buy.
Invest
,” Jim Khalifi murmured. His boss shot him a warning look.

“And because I knew that those making the offer would somehow be linked to those who engineered the false charges against me, I've taken the trouble to investigate your company more thoroughly than perhaps you thought possible,” Daniele added.

Trent blinked. “Hey. Everyone knows me. I blog, I tweet . . . My life's an open book, right?”

“Is it, though?” Daniele said. “For example, everyone knows, or thinks they know, that Rocaville are a bunch of fresh-faced Silicon Valley techies who are currently giving Facebook a run for its money. But how many people know that your three biggest investors are actually defence contractors?”

Trent looked puzzled. “Our seed capital came from gaming companies. . .”

“Which, if you follow the ownership trail far enough back, turn out to be controlled by arms manufacturers. The US government is the biggest purchaser of high-end 3D graphics systems in the world. Only they call them Visual and Sensor Simulation Training systems. And the defence industry is currently the single biggest investor in high-tech R&D in the US. That cool, funky software company which took a thirty per cent stake in you at start-up, for example, had itself recently been acquired by General Dynamics, the government's biggest cyber warfare contractor. You're a front man for military interests, Trent.”

Trent's smile barely slipped. “That's like saying I'm bankrolled by the Kremlin just because some Russian dude's got his pension invested in our stock.”

“Without your three biggest investors, you'd be nothing,” Daniele said calmly. “I'm betting that a few days ago, you got a call from one of them, setting up a meeting. There probably weren't any last names, just some mumbo-jumbo about national security and how they were giving you a chance to prove that, despite the tattoo and the sandals, you're a loyal American. Am I right?”

There was a long silence.

“If you're so paranoid,” Jim Khalifi said suddenly, “why did you agree to meet with us?”

“I want to know who's behind the attacks on me, and why. I don't flatter myself it's for my coding – I may have created the algorithms, but anyone reasonably smart could copy those. I think it's much more likely your friends want access to Carnivia so they can bypass the encryption – in other words, they want to be able to eavesdrop on someone who currently thinks Carnivia is secure. But who?”

“If we're who you say we are, we'd hardly tell you,” Trent Wolfe said.

“Perhaps. But my bet is, you're thinking back to your meeting with those guys and wondering if
they
were really who they said they were. There's a big difference between being asked to help your country and betraying your principles for a bunch of arms manufacturers, right?”

There was another long silence.

“Look at MCI,” Trent Wolfe said suddenly. “That's all I'm saying. Jesus, Dan, that's all I'm saying and it's way too much.”

“Who are MCI?”

“Military Capabilities International. Private armies, government contracts – you name it, they provide it.”

“And who's paying them?”

Trent shook his head. “I don't know, I swear, and if I did I wouldn't tell you. These fuckers don't fuck around. As far as they're concerned, this conversation never took place, OK?”

KAT MADE HER
way unobtrusively to the front desk of the Hotel Europa. She waited until there were no guests around, then flipped her ID under the clerk's nose. “Remember me?”

Startled, the young man nodded.

“I've got a warrant to look at one of your rooms,” she lied calmly. “Only I've left the paperwork back at the station. I'm going to have to examine the room first, and fax the documents to you later.”

He frowned. “This would be the room where the murder happened?”

“No. It's the room belonging to a guest. Mr Findlater.”

“I need to check with my—”

“No, you don't. I don't care what your company policy is, and I don't have time to deal with your head office. I just need ten minutes in his room, then I'll be out of your hair.”

She could see corporate caution battling with the ingrained desire to say yes to a confident-sounding officer of the Carabinieri. After a moment's hesitation, he opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of key cards. A swipe through the machine, some typing on his computer keyboard, and he handed her a card. “Room 244. He's not there.”

As she walked to the lift she checked she had phone signal. Piola would text if she needed to get out quickly, although she was confident that wasn't likely. Findlater had been asked back to Campo San Zaccaria with the emails between him and Barbara Holton he'd referred to. Piola would keep him busy for at least forty minutes.

They'd debated the merits of this excursion late into the night. Obviously, any evidence Kat found without a search warrant would be inadmissible. Even if she found something, and somehow managed to get a warrant after the event, it was a high-risk strategy – if it became known she'd already been into the room, it would discredit not only the evidence, but potentially the whole investigation.

So this was purely a fishing expedition, to see if their hunch was correct; a prelude to announcing to Prosecutor Marcello that they didn't believe Findlater's story.

The maid hadn't cleaned Room 244 yet – there was a breakfast tray outside, waiting to be collected, and a “Do Not Disturb” card over the door handle. That was curious, Kat thought, since Findlater wasn't inside. Just in case, she knocked. No answer.

She pushed the card into the lock and waited for the light to go green. Checking the corridor one last time to make sure no one was watching, she slipped inside.

The bed was already neatly made. The reflexes of a career in the military, no doubt – that part of his story had undoubtedly been true. Beside the bed, a canvas holdall sat on a trestle. Inside were some casual but expensive clothes: T-shirts, polo shirts and chinos, all neatly folded.

In the bathroom were a few toiletries. By the bed, a bottle of water. There were no books, she noticed: no personal items of any sort, only an empty laptop sleeve and an ID card from a company called Military Capabilities International in the name of Robert Findlater. Dirty laundry was already stowed neatly in a hotel laundry bag. The room was so bare, it was almost as if it hadn't been occupied at all.

Or, she thought, as if it had been carefully tidied in readiness for just such an inspection.

Under the window was a small desk. Its surface was also bare, except for a sheaf of paper slips weighed down by another water bottle. She moved the bottle and examined them. They were his receipts – simple meals in cafés, a
panino
at the airport, room service dockets, an ATM slip for five hundred euros. Since landing at Marco Polo two days before, Bob Findlater appeared to have done nothing more untoward than have the occasional beer.

Accepting that she'd drawn a blank, she headed for the door. As she reached it, she heard voices in the corridor beyond – a male guest wishing the maid a cheery “
Arrivederci
” as he departed.

She drew back, waiting. The man's footsteps, and the squeak of his luggage wheels, passed down the corridor. She heard a “ping” as the lift arrived.