The Abomination (32 page)

Knowing that senior executives would almost certainly have the latest smartphones, Daniele had taken the names and cross-referenced them against the records of the four largest American cell phone companies. Then he sent a text to each phone. It simply said:
Are you out of your meeting yet? I need to catch up
. When the owner of the phone opened the text, assuming it was from a colleague, it downloaded a tiny piece of software which immediately began running a password algorithm on the executive's remote access email account, also stored on the phone. In hacking terms, it was relatively simple – what was known as a “brute-force attack”. Chinese hackers used a similar technique when they hacked into Google in 2010.

Once he had access to the employees' email accounts, Daniele arranged for each of them to receive an internal email. In every company, he knew, there were dozens of banal messages flying around – emails to say that the air conditioning needed to be repaired, or that the company had won some obscure award, or announcing some baffling corporate restructuring. In many cases, the recipients would click on them anyway, to stop them appearing in their inboxes as “unread”.

In this case, Daniele simply created a flyer to say that another MCI employee was about to run a marathon in aid of a good cause, and was looking for sponsorship. When the recipients clicked on the flyer at their desk computers, it sent details of their system user names and passwords straight back to Daniele. Within a few hours he was inside the company network, trawling through the thousands of emails that flew back and forth every day.

MCI were pretty good – they used codenames as well as encryption for the most sensitive messages, and at other times they deliberately used elliptical language that mirrored the US Military's brevity codes. But he learnt enough to discover that Carnivia was “the target”, and that the overall objective was to “delete the vapour trail”. In plain English, it was a clean-up operation.

He could hack them all he liked, but without more pieces of the puzzle, he couldn't work out what it was they were trying to scrub themselves clean of. Not for the first time, he wondered how he could persuade Captain Tapo to give him Barbara Holton's hard drive. The answers were in that machine somewhere, he was certain of it, but every day that passed meant that the hard drive's platters would be rusting further from the salt water it had been immersed in.

Whenever Daniele was stressed or frustrated, he focused on a mathematical equation. It was a practice he had begun during the long, terrifying days of his kidnap, when he'd set himself simple exercises in mental arithmetic to take his mind off the things his kidnappers were saying they would do to him if his parents failed to pay the ransom. Gradually, the numbers in his head had taken on substance – the mathematical world revealing itself to him as a series of tangible patterns, so that he began to glimpse in the bare bricks of the room he was imprisoned in, or the arrangement of leaves on the tree outside the barred window, a reality far purer and more satisfying than that in which he was forced to spend the rest of his waking hours. He retreated even further into the world of mathematics after his mutilation, to escape the pain, and again after he'd watched in terror the brutal, botched assault on his captors by Italian Special Forces. Even as the outside world was celebrating his return home, he had been withdrawing deeper and deeper into that other reality, the reality where everything made perfect sense.

He stepped inside just such a world now. “Monstrous moonshine” was the name given by mathematicians to an extraordinary number pattern. In order to perceive it, you had to imagine a 24-dimensional torus generated by a Leech lattice, and apply it to a number progression known as M, the Monster module – a series not unlike pi, but rather harder to calculate. He gazed on it with awe, and felt some of his anxiety seep away.

If he was sent to prison, this world would, he knew, be his only retreat. But he doubted, frankly, whether it would be enough to keep him sane.

He had to find some way of turning the tables on MCI. But how, he currently had no idea.

HOLLY MET UP
with Ian Gilroy in Vicenza. As requested, she was sitting at a café table slightly off the main
piazza
when he dropped into a chair opposite her.

“I've been thinking about that package of yours,” he said without further preamble. “I think you should take it to my ward, Daniele Barbo.”

“A civilian?” she said, surprised. “I thought we wanted to deal with this in-house?”

“Yes . . . but I don't think we have quite enough to go to the authorities with yet. When you pull up a weed, you need to get the roots – all of them, even the smallest, deepest tendrils, or else the damn thing just grows back even stronger. We need the names of everyone who knew about WB, chains of command, outcomes – all the detail. Plus we need to know what Barbara Holton had found out, and who she was sharing it with online. And the Doherty paper. If anyone can track down a document that's somehow been erased from the internet, it's Daniele.” He hesitated. “I should warn you, though, that he's not an easy individual to deal with. He may also be somewhat wary about my involvement. He blames me, along with the other trustees of the Barbo Foundation, for certain decisions his father made about his upbringing. The truth is that we tried to exert a positive influence behind the scenes, but his father only ever heeded advice that fitted with his own inclinations . . . A bit like Daniele, in fact. Extreme stubbornness runs in the family.”

“Would it be better if I didn't mention your name at all?”

“Perhaps say that I reluctantly provided an introduction, rather than that it was my idea. If I'm right, he'll see this as a possible solution to some pressing problems of his own.”

“Such as?”

“I think I'll let him tell you about that. The less you know before you meet him, the better. And one other thing, Holly. If you get the chance, encourage Daniele to involve the Italian police. That Carabinieri officer you mentioned, the one who came to see you about Barbara Holton . . . She and her superior officer have been forbidden from contacting you directly. I suspect they'll jump at the chance of doing it at second hand, through Daniele.”

“Doesn't giving our information to the police increase the risk of it becoming public?”

“A small risk, yes. But I think it's a manageable one. And at the end of the day the police can be prevailed upon to be discreet. That's the way it works in Italy.”

KAT SHUT THE
door to her apartment and leant against it, fighting the tears. She'd held it together all day. Now, finally, she was looking forward to a good cry.

The bedroom still bore traces of Aldo's presence. Only last night they'd made love here. He'd lain in her bed, showered in her bathroom. The bottle of grappa he'd drunk from sat on her kitchen table, half empty. The glasses they'd used were in the sink, unwashed.

Fuck you
, she thought angrily, and then:
I love you
.

But did she really, she wondered. Was love this overwhelming intensity of physical desire and yearning, or was it more like what Aldo and his wife must have – the long years of occupying the same space, children, the pain of betrayal, the possibility of forgiveness? That was the question she hadn't asked him that afternoon, she realised:
do you love her?
She hadn't needed to. She'd already known the answer from the look of desolation in his eyes when he saw the photographs.

Kat, you've been a fool. A marriage-wrecking fool
.

She poured herself a large tumbler of grappa and booted up her laptop. As if scratching an itch, her fingers wandered almost of their own accord towards the Carnivia log-on.

K
ATERINA
T
APO
–
TWENTY-ONE ENTRIES
.

. . . T
URNS OUT SHE ONLY GOT THE
B
LACK
M
AGIC
M
URDERS BECAUSE
P
IOLA HAD ALREADY TOLD
A
LLOCATION HE WANTED TO WORK WITH HER
. F
RANCESCO
L
OTTI TRIED TO MAKE HER THINK IT WAS HIM WHO
'
D SWUNG it
. P
OOR LOVESICK
L
OTTI
!

. . . I
HEARD
M
ADAM ISN
'
T HAPPY ABOUT THE WIFE FINDING OUT, AND NOW
P
IOLA
'
S GETTING IT IN THE NECK FROM BOTH SIDES
. . .

. . . T
HIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU BRING WOMEN INTO A MILITARY ORGANISATION
. Y
OU CAN
'
T BLAME THE MEN
. . .

“Oh, for God's sake,” she said wearily. She clicked the window closed, determined never to go near that damned website ever again.

It was ironic, therefore, that the very top email in her inbox bore the address
[email protected]
.

Dear Captain Tapo,

Can we meet? I have something for you.

Regards,

Daniele Barbo

PS You should bring that hard drive.

Muttering an expletive, she deleted it.

The next email was from the Guardia di Finanza, the police department with responsibility for Italy's borders. Earlier, when she'd been doing her paperwork, she'd followed up on Piola's request to get hold of the scan of Findlater's passport, together with the dates he'd entered and left the country. According to the email, the dates corroborated Findlater's story. Wearily, she clicked on the attachment. Findlater's smiling face, ten years younger, filled her screen. It was as if the smug bastard was jeering at her.

She peered forward. In his passport photo Findlater was wearing a sports jacket and an open-neck shirt. There was something in the lapel – some kind of tiepin.

It was hard to be sure, because the resolution of the image wasn't great, but it looked to her like a cross. The downpiece of the cross widened, then narrowed to a point. Like the blade of a short, stubby sword.

If she wasn't mistaken, it was identical to the tiepin she'd seen Father Uriel wearing. And to the logo on the home page of the Companions of the Order of Melchizedek.

She went into her “Deleted Items” folder, moved Daniele Barbo's message back to her inbox, and re-read it.

She did still have the hard drive. And Malli, predictably, had never got round to dealing with the chain-of-custody paperwork. If by some miracle anyone ever followed the paper trail, it would indicate that the drive was still sitting somewhere amongst all the other clutter on his workbench.

Kat Tapo never did cry that night. She came close – there was sleeplessness, regret and a sickening, unaccustomed feeling in the pit of her stomach caused by the knowledge that she'd done wrong; but mostly what she felt was a hardening, icy sensation that she recognised as resolve.

THEY MET IN
the drawing room at Ca' Barbo, with its eclectic mixture of Renaissance frescoes, modern paintings and cheap dorm-room seating. Daniele Barbo, Holly Boland and Kat Tapo.

The room, Kat thought as she looked around, reflected the oddities of its owner. Occasionally you could see the Venetian aristocrat in him, politely offering them
spritz
– the classic Venetian drink of Campari, white wine and sparkling water – in exquisite eighteenth-century goblets. Then, abruptly, he'd start talking about TCP protocols and packet-switching logarithms, the aperitif forgotten as he whisked through incomprehensible explanations, absent-mindedly pulling open a can of Diet Coke as he did so.

Most of the time, however, he seemed almost disinterested in the two women's presence, his eyes drifting towards the whiteboards covered with mathematical notations that lined the walls.

Kat looked across at Holly Boland. She had to concede that she might have misjudged the American a little. She'd written Holly off as a desk-bound bureaucrat with zero imagination and no balls, but the woman exuded an air of calm confidence as she explained why she'd brought them together. Of course, Kat thought, as a soldier Second Lieutenant Boland was more used to taking orders than taking the initiative. But her account of how she'd tracked down the names of those attending the Ederle conference, if true, showed impressive investigative skills.

If true
. Kat was all too aware that in addition to the sin of sleeping with a senior officer, she was now contemplating handing over evidence to a convicted criminal and revealing details of a Carabinieri investigation to a foreign intelligence operative. If found out, she'd be court-martialled at the very least. For that reason, even Piola didn't know she was here yet.

“We're none of us here by choice,” Holly was saying. “And it wouldn't suit any of us if other people got to hear about it. The reason we're meeting is that all of us, separately, have been investigating evidence trails that now appear to be linked. My proposal is that we pool what we've learnt and see where the overlaps are. Agreed?”

Kat nodded. Daniele examined his nails.

“I'll go first,” Holly said with a sigh. “Daniele, may I use one of these whiteboards?”

He shrugged. “If you wish.”

“So,” she said, getting up and uncapping a marker pen. She had worn civilian clothes for this meeting, presumably to avoid drawing attention to herself in Venice, but to Kat's way of thinking the clothes she'd chosen – a hoodie, jeans and trainers – simply made her look like a teenage boy. “I have a conference in 1993 at Camp Ederle involving General Dragan Korovik, the Italian Mafia, a private security company called MCI, a psychologist, the Church. . .” One by one she listed the known protagonists at William Baker, then laid down her marker. “Kat, what do you have?”