The Abomination (39 page)

In the meantime, there was undoubtedly more to be found on Barbara Holton's laptop, and then there was Dr Doherty's paper to be tracked down – the full paper, not just the abstract. He had absolutely no intention of honouring his promise to Kat not to discover any information without sharing it with the other two. Daniele Barbo operated alone, and always had done.

IT WAS ALMOST
midnight. The two women lay huddled together under a single survival blanket from Holly's field pack, in a rudimentary concealment shelter constructed from branches.

Holly had taken charge, rightly assuming that enemy-territory evasion techniques lay outside Kat's field of expertise. As night fell, they lit small fires in different areas to confuse the Predator's thermal imaging cameras, moving on quickly before the fires took hold. Their shelter, by contrast, had no heat source at all. They were relying on the insulating layer of leaves, and the survival blanket, to mask their body heat from the air.

Plus, Kat reflected, the fact that they had almost no body heat left to detect. She was now wrapped around Holly as intimately as she'd ever been with a lover, every possible inch of their bodies pressed against each other to preserve what little warmth they had left. And she was still shivering.

Occasionally they heard distant shouts from the woods below them, the far-off growl of trucks labouring up and down the hill. Kat found herself repeating the words of the Hail Mary in her head, something she hadn't done for years. When she got to the end she instinctively reached to cross herself.

“Keep still,” Holly whispered. “We'll move just before dawn, when they're resting.”

They'd eaten nothing all night but a bar of chocolate Holly had found in her field pack. But despite her hunger, and the cold numbing her hip where it was pressed into the ground, Kat felt herself drifting off.

Suddenly the air erupted, lifting them both off the ground as casually as if they were being tossed in a blanket. Stones and earth rained down on them. Kat's ears rang. Within moments a second explosion followed, even closer this time.

“Run! Now!” Holly gasped.

They'd already agreed that if they had to make a run for it, the best direction to take would be directly uphill. That way they'd avoid going round in circles or losing their bearings. Now, grabbing her bag, Kat stumbled after Holly.

A third projectile whistled as it fell. Debris pattered on the leaves around them like hail. Kat waited for the shouts and the running boots that must surely follow. None came.
Are we running into a trap?
It certainly didn't seem that way, but she was so disorientated, she didn't trust her own ability to think straight.

Eventually Holly called a halt. Kat collapsed, her lungs heaving. She'd thought herself reasonably fit, but Holly was clearly in a different league.

The woods were once again eerily quiet.

“What's that?” Holly whispered, cocking her head.

On the night breeze Kat caught the sound of truck engines. But they seemed to be getting fainter, not louder. “Are they leaving?”

“I think so.” Holly sounded worried. “There's something I don't like about this. I think we should speak to Daniele.”

“Why him?”

“I suspect he'll know more about the technology they're using than I do. Those last explosions – I'm fairly sure they were mortars. But mortars shouldn't be that accurate, at least not without being zeroed in by a spotter.”

They turned on one of the pay-as-you-go cell phones and dialled. Daniele answered straight away. “What's up?”

Briefly, Holly explained.

“And you've had both phones turned off?”

“All the time.”

There was silence as Daniele thought about this. “Hold on,” he said. “I'm just going to check something online.”

After a minute he came back on. “Those mortars – were they 120 mm?”

“Sounds about right.”

“I think they were GPS-guided. The very latest models, only just on the market. It says here they have a CEP of ten metres. Does that mean anything to you?”

“CEP stands for Circular Error Probability – what used to be called the approximate area of impact,” Holly said. “A CEP of ten metres means fifty per cent of rounds fired will land within ten metres of the target, which is dramatically better than the traditional kind. But I still don't understand. How could they have our GPS coordinates?”

“Has anyone given you anything electronic? A calculator, alarm clock. . .?”

“Negative.” A thought struck her. “Oh, Jeez.”

“What is it?”

“My CAC – my military identity card. It contains a tracking device.”

“Holly,” Daniele said urgently, “you need to move.
Now
. If they're tracking you. . .”

“I know. I'd just worked that out too.” Clamping the phone to her ear, she picked up her field pack and began to run back downhill, gesticulating to Kat to follow her.

“What's going on?” Kat panted.

“Daniele, what do we do?” Holly said into the phone. “We need to come up with something fast.”

Above them, a projectile whistled through the trees, and a mortar buried itself in the soft earth just yards from where they had been standing a brief while before. The explosion reverberated from the woods like a struck gong. Moments later, another mortar exploded next to the first.

“Holly, stop running!” Daniele shouted into the phone.

“What?” she bellowed, unable to hear a thing.

“I SAID STOP! I have an idea.”

“As long as they see the CAC card tracker moving on their screens, they know we're alive,” Holly explained as she took the things she needed out of the field pack.

“OK, I get that. But how does chocolate help?”

“By itself, it doesn't. Although we could both use the energy.” She broke the bar in half and handed one piece to Kat. “What definitely helps, though, is silver foil.”

She pulled her CAC card out of her fleece by the lanyard round her neck. Unclipping it, she slipped it inside the foil wrapper from the chocolate bar, which she folded over it twice. “Pass me the survival blanket, will you?”

She wrapped the survival blanket around the chocolate foil as tightly as she could, then tied the whole package up with the lanyard. “That should do it. As far as the tracker's concerned, my GPS gave up the ghost a few minutes after the latest mortar strike.”

“In other words, consistent with a direct hit.”

Holly nodded. “Hopefully, they'll assume we're dead. We should take the batteries out of our phones, too, just in case.”

“OK,” Kat said, following Holly's lead and springing the battery from her phone. “So what's next?”

“We'll put a click or so between us and here, in case they come looking. Then we'll get some rest and wait for daybreak. After that, I don't know.” She hesitated. “Kat, if they were tracking us through my CAC, that means they could have been following my movements ever since I checked in at Ederle. Camp Darby, Ca' Barbo, Brezic . . . They've simply been biding their time. What's more, they'll be able to spot us as soon as we resurface. If we're to get out of this, we're going to have to find a way of getting back to Italy that doesn't require a car, a credit card or going through Passport Control.”

DANIELE CAUGHT A
train out of Venice, then took a taxi. He had never learnt to drive, partly because as a Venetian he rarely needed to, and partly because his brain struggled to process the thousands upon thousands of tiny unstated conventions and interactions that constituted normal behaviour on the road. He understood the rules – but the fact that some rules were habitually broken, while others were not, produced in him a deep sense of perplexity.

Luckily, he wasn't going far – only to the Institute of Christina Mirabilis. The nun on reception checked her appointment screen. “Ah yes. Nine o'clock, to see Father Uriel. I'll tell him you're here.”

A few minutes later he was shown into the psychiatrist's office. “Pleased to meet you, Daniele,” Father Uriel said, shaking his hand with a friendly smile. “I understand you want me to carry out a review of your medical condition for the courts. I'd be glad to, but I should tell you that it's a little outside my usual field.”

“I came across a paper you published, a few years back,” Daniele explained. “As I recall, you drew a link between treating those with Social Avoidance Syndrome and certain kinds of psychopathology.”

Father Uriel nodded. “Yes, I remember it. I must say, I'm surprised you came across it. The journal it was published in had a very limited circulation.”

“You used a phrase that caught my attention,” Daniele said. “Or rather, the attention of the search engine I was using. ‘Libidinal frenzy.'”

“Yes?” Father Uriel shrugged. “Well, I may have done. It's a development of Freud's thinking on group psychology and the ego—”

“I know what it refers to, Father Uriel. Or should I say, Dr Doherty. Dr
Paul
Doherty.”

Father Uriel didn't reply, but his eyes narrowed fractionally.

“I was scouring old internet caches for that exact phrase,” Daniele said. “After all, it's an unusual combination of words . . . There was the original paper by Dr Doherty, the one that was comprehensively redacted from the web over a decade ago. And then one brief reference in the paper authored by Father Uriel, five years later. You put the letters MRCPsych after your name, indicating a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Britain. I checked – the College had no record of a Father Uriel. But they did have records of a Dr Paul Doherty.

“I remembered that priests, when they're ordained, sometimes take a new name – something personal to them, the name of a saint or biblical figure who inspired them. Such as Uriel. I looked him up, too. He used to be known as the patron saint of repentance. But he's better known as the archangel who stands guardian at the Gate of Eden with a fiery sword.”

“‘He who watches over thunder and terror,'” the priest quoted quietly.

“I haven't come here for an assessment, Father. I've come here for an
explanation
. I want to know about this conference that was held at Camp Ederle. Operation William Baker.”

“For many years I've lived in fear of someone asking me that question,” Father Uriel said quietly. “I must admit, after all this time, I was starting to let myself believe that perhaps it would never happen.” He sighed. “I had no prior knowledge of what they were planning, you understand. It was soon after I published that paper you referred to, the one about genocide. You must understand: I meant it only as a
warning
. An analysis of the psychological factors that had led apparently stable societies to erupt suddenly into the most appalling violence. Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Kurdistan, East Timor . . . So many tragedies, and yet almost no one had tried to look at them dispassionately and work out what had happened, and why.”

He crossed to the window and looked out. “I realised there were certain factors all those situations had in common – the danger signs, if you like. My belief was that, just as an experienced psychiatrist should be able to spot psychosis in a patient before they get to the point of harming someone, so you should be able to diagnose and prevent psychosis in a population. Though I say it myself, it was ground-breaking work.

“I thought the conference would be a chance to disseminate my ideas – after all, why else had they invited me? It was only on about the third day I realised they weren't using my paper to prevent a war. They were using it as a blueprint, to plan one.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, I protested, of course. But they were very clever. They said, we only want to make sure it doesn't escalate. Now we understand how civil conflict works, we'll be able to control it – move populations around, ease the tensions before they turn into genocide . . .

“Someone used the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing'. The man from the PR company, I think. It all sounded so reasonable, so
pragmatic
. And I thought, well, the ideas were already there, in my paper. What good would walking out have achieved? By staying I could at least influence the outcome. To try to make sure that this war, which they assured me was inevitable, was as swift and clean as it possibly could be.”

“Instead of which, it turned into one of the most barbaric conflicts of the twentieth century.”

Father Uriel nodded. “Blood on my hands. So much blood. It destroyed Paul Doherty – utterly destroyed him. For years he was a patient in one of the same psychiatric institutions he'd previously trained in. And then, at last, he found a cure. Or rather, it found him.”

“What was that?”

“God,” the priest said simply. “God called me. He told me I had a purpose – a divine purpose – and explained how I was to fulfil it by serving others. Those who had committed acts so terrible that none but God could forgive them – they would be my flock.

“It started with some who'd fought in the very war I'd helped to create – people who had done things so evil they couldn't bring themselves to speak of them even in the confessional. Amongst them there were even priests – men of God – who had incited the very worst, the most appalling acts . . . I began to focus on them. It grew from there.”

“And this place?”

“By then I was well on the way to taking Holy Orders myself. But I knew that my calling was to continue my psychiatric work amongst the fallen. I was certain that many of those involved in Operation William Baker hadn't realised their seed would bear such poisonous fruit . . . I suggested they might like to fund a facility for those who, like them, had looked into their own souls and discovered there only the most terrible evil.”