The Abomination (42 page)

Gilroy shook his head. “Think it through. Instead of denying the crimes took place, he'll admit to them but lay the blame at the door of the hawks in Washington.”

“And that means,” Daniele said slowly, “there won't be any need for me to negotiate for Carnivia. Once the truth comes out, the people who have been trying to destroy it will be in the dock themselves.”

“Exactly. Daniele, I've spent years working towards this moment.” Gilroy fixed him with his steady blue eyes. “But I must know where Holly is. I need to find her before MCI does. They've already seen the sense in trying to kill Captain Tapo and her, despite my explicit instructions not to.”

“How much does Holly know about all this?”

The American shrugged. “Very little. Partly, that was to protect her. But she's also motivated by a very straightforward sense of loyalty. I was advised that she would work most effectively for me if I seemed to embody the simple, black and white values of her father.”

“Would that advice have come from Father Uriel, by any chance?” Daniele said drily.

“We meet up from time to time to discuss matters of mutual interest.”

“And I suppose it was Uriel who suggested that you get her to appear to take an interest in me?” Daniele said, avoiding the other man's eye.

“To do what?” Gilroy sat back, a look of amusement passing across his face. “Indeed not. In fact, it never even occurred to me to do so, although now that you mention it, I probably should have done. I had no idea you might be susceptible to that kind of thing.”

“Since I came here today prepared to barter her life for my website,” Daniele said coldly, “I can hardly be accused of sentiment.”

“Ah,” Gilroy said. “But you thought at the time that perhaps she was my
agent provocateur
. Where is she?”

“They landed south of Ravenna early this morning. Her CAC card was activated briefly, then went silent again. I took a look via a hacked weather satellite, and it appears there was an explosion – almost certainly, your friends at MCI having another go. Holly knew what would happen if the CAC card went live, so I'm hoping she must have planned it that way. Assuming they've got transport, they should be in Venice this afternoon.”

JUST SOUTH OF
Rimini Kat pulled off the road into the pine woods that blanketed the beach. In summer, these woods contained camping sites and nudist beaches. Now, in the depths of winter, they were utterly deserted.

Turning off the engine, she said, “Let's get this over with.”

Holly nodded. They went to the back of the van and pulled out the trussed driver. Blood still seeped from his head where Holly had knocked him out.

They slid him none too gently onto the ground and loosened the boat rope from his mouth.

“This is how it's going to be,” Kat said, squatting down beside him. “You're going to answer some questions. And if you don't, we're going to hurt you until you do.”

“Go fuck yourself, whore,” the man spat.

Kat sighed. “You think we won't do it? Because we're women, perhaps?” She brought her bag out and started showing him what was in it. “This paint scraper, for example, is the perfect size for scraping your pathetic cock and balls right off your body. This nail here, that'll go through your hand. The boathook, well, maybe we'll get that into your armpit and pull you about a bit. Oh, and if you think we're too weak and feeble to keep this up for very long, bear in mind we've also got the van. When we get tired, we'll just reverse back and forth over what's left of your legs. You know what? We might even turn the radio on, so we can listen to some nice girlie music instead of you screaming. And then, whether you've told us what we want to know or not, we'll leave an envelope on you with three hundred euros and a note of thanks, so that the scumbags you report to can spare us the hard work of finishing you off.” She brandished the paint scraper in his face. “Now, I'm going to ask this once and once only. We're looking for a Croatian girl called Melina Kovačević. She was smuggled over on the same supply route
we
came on, about a year ago. Where is she now?”

“Piss off, bitch,” the man said.

“Not good enough. Holly?”

Holly opened the man's trousers and, with a flicker of distaste crossing her face, pulled out his genitals. Kat placed the sharp edge of the paint scraper underneath his testicles.

“Pull it good and tight. . .” she said to Holly. “That's it. Ready? On three. One—”

“I heard they were going to move her,” the driver said quickly. “I don't know where to, I swear. But they never found her.”

“Why not?”

“She got away from her pimp, somewhere in Venice. They put a watch on the train station and the ferry but she never showed up. Word went out she was to be killed when she was found, to set an example to the other girls. But she just vanished.”

“I think I believe him, Kat,” Holly said carefully.

Kat put away the paint scraper. “Sadly, I think I do too.”

As they drove off, leaving the hapless driver still trussed in the woods, Holly glanced at her. “That was pretty convincing.”

“You think I'd actually have done it?”

“Back there, I wasn't sure.”

“Neither was I,” Kat admitted. “So, where does it leave us?”

“Three options. Either Melina's dead, or she somehow evaded the Mafia and got out of Venice undetected, or—”

“Or she's still there, and has been all along.”

“Wherever she is, she must be well hidden. Venice is a small place, but neither Findlater nor the Mafia could find her, and they must have been looking pretty hard.”

DANIELE TYPED IN
a URL address ending in .ru, the suffix denoting an internet site based in Russia. In fact, he knew very well that this particular site was owned and run by two MIT dropouts currently residing in London who had made a fortune from applying permutation theorems to online gambling. One of them, known by his internet handle of Snap, was like Daniele a member of the Knights of the Lambda Calculus, a loose-knit association of programmers and mathematicians who delighted in solving abstruse coding problems.

This fraternity, despite defining themselves as hackers, considered it bad manners to steal or make alterations to another person's code: such activities were for
crackers
, and thus by definition
lusers, lamers, script kiddies
and
leets
. Daniele was careful, therefore, to observe the appropriate courtesies when he visited Snap's bulletin board.

hello world
, he typed.

After a moment another board user replied.
hi2u2. long time, defi@nt
.

Snap about?
he wrote.

Last time I heard he was in deep hack
.

IRQ?
Daniele typed, meaning:
is he interruptible?

Snap here
, the board owner typed, joining the thread.
Just parsing some joe code. My box is crunching, so I'm in laser chicken state. Whassup?

Meaning:
while my computer processes a rewrite of some over-complicated code, I'm eating a Chinese takeaway and catching up on the news
.

I'm after some deep wizardry
, Daniele wrote.

Last time I looked you had pretty good privileges yourself, Def
.

Thnx, but I need a specific kluge and I don't have time to lift the bonnet
.

What's the frob?

A Pr3D47OR Dron3
, Daniele wrote, using leet substitutions to avoid alerting any roving search engines.

Hmm. I for one welcome our new insect overlords
. Meaning:
messing with government shit is not to be undertaken lightly
.

Daniele waited. There was every possibility that his friend would refuse to help – not because he was afraid to hack into a Predator, or because it was illegal, or too difficult, but because of the ethical complexities involved. Tampering with matters of national defence was Bad Manners. He was hoping that Snap trusted him enough to help anyway.

Do you need knobs?
Snap asked at last.

Nil. Just visuals
.

Sec
.

There was a pause of about three minutes before Snap returned.

My friend, your quest is almost done. Have satellite/p?

Certainly
.

There's a kluge called Skygrabber. I'll hop over to foovax and FTP it. There shouldn't be any ice. HTH
.

Indeed, it helps a lot. Thnx
.

According to
Newsweek,
the Taliban have been hacking drones for years. Some of them even claim they can spoof the GPS. YMMV
.

W00t. Thnx again
.

Daniele logged off from the board and downloaded the software Snap had directed him to. If the hacker was right, all he had to do was install it, point his satellite dish at the sky and scan the airwaves for the Predator's video feed, just as if it were any other signal bouncing around the ether. According to Snap there wouldn't even be any Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics.

While he was waiting for the program to install he did a quick search. His friend was right: astounding though it seemed,
Newsweek
had indeed reported that feeds from Predator drones had no encryption whatsoever. Apparently, captured Taliban laptops had been found to contain, in some cases, hundreds of hours of intercepted surveillance footage. The Pentagon claimed that the problem was devising an encryption system that could be shared with allies on the battlefield. Daniele suspected the real reason was much simpler: whoever had designed the drones' software systems had made the mistake of assuming that their enemies were unintelligent, and that just because they didn't have running water they were incapable of writing computer code.

Twenty minutes later he had a menu on his screen that offered him a choice between twenty Italian satellite porn channels and the feeds from three Predator drones.

He opened a voice link and spoke to Gilroy. “I'm in.”

“Can you see them yet?”

Daniele was flicking between the Predator's video feeds as the other man spoke. From the look of it, two of the drones were locking onto a small van heading northeast from Padua. “I think so.”

“Good. Let me know if anything changes.”

AS THEY CAME
over the Ponte della Libertà, Holly looked across at Kat. “Now what?”

“We'd better drop off our passengers, I guess.”

“If we leave them wandering the streets, the Mafia will scoop them up.”

“I know. And if we hand them over to the police, they'll be deported back to Croatia, and the gangs will get them at that end.”

“Any thoughts?”

“It's not ideal. But there's someone I can trust to do the right thing.” Turning on her phone for the first time since she'd reached Italy, she dialled a familiar number.

“Aldo Piola,” came the answer.

“Colonel, it's Kat Tapo.”

There was a moment's stunned silence. “Where are you?”

“In Venice.”

“I was told two days ago that you'd been killed in an explosion in Croatia.”

“As you may have gathered, those reports were exaggerated. But it might be a good idea not to correct them just yet,” Kat said. “I'll explain later. In the meantime, I have an immediate problem I need your help with.”

This time the silence was more nuanced. “Kat, I've given my word. . .”

“I'm with a group of young women who have been trafficked into Italy from Croatia. The Mafia wants them as prostitutes. If they're sent back home, they're probably dead. They need a knight in shining armour, Colonel.”

Another pause. “Where are you?”

“We'll be at the Tronchetto car park in about fifteen minutes. I'll pull up as close as possible to your car.” She rang off before he could ask any more questions, then called another number. It was answered immediately.

“Daniele?” she said. “We're back in Venice.”

“So I gathered. In fact, I'm watching you on my screen right now, courtesy of our friends at MCI.”

“There are Predators on us?”

“Three of them.”

“We need to lose them.”

“Indeed. I suspect the only reason they haven't killed you already is that they're waiting for you to lead them to Melina.”

“But we don't know where she is either. Only that she's somewhere in Venice.”

“Yes, but maybe they aren't aware of that. Either way, I'd suggest you've only got one shot at finding her. Once they realise you're as much in the dark as they are, they'll have no reason not to strike.”

“Then we definitely need to get rid of the drones.”

“Kat. . .” Daniele paused.

“What?”

“How much do you trust Holly Boland?”

Kat resisted the instinct to glance sideways at the American. “As much as I trust anyone,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. “Which is to say, quite a lot but not completely. Why?”

“It's just that I've been speaking to Ian Gilroy. He's clearly been running her. And although he's got an explanation for everything, it's all a bit
too
neat. I'm still not sure I trust him. And that means I don't trust his agent, either.”

“I'll bear that in mind. Now, can you help us deal with the Predators?”

“I can certainly try. Where are you headed now?”

“Into the Tronchetto car park. We're meeting Colonel Piola there. He's taking the girls.”

“That's perfect. A little risky for Piola, but perfect.”

Fifteen minutes later, when Piola reached the Tronchetto, he found the van waiting by his Fiat.

“Here,” Kat said, giving him the keys. “You're taking the van to Vicenza. We'll take your car.”