The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy) (15 page)

“That’s horrible.”

“And that’s not all. It cropped up again when some gay tourists were beaten up in Mestre a couple of years ago. Someone had sprayed it on a wall, along with the words ‘
Morte ai culatoni
’. Death to queers.”

“Father Calergi told me it was banned because it was being used by right-wing extremists. But he said it was also the sign of an ancient Venetian confraternity.”

“Then perhaps that’s why they chose it,” he suggested. “Because of the overlap. Has it occurred to you that your Masons may not be Freemasons at all, at least not primarily – that their lodge may have been formed for some specific criminal purpose, and they’re simply using the rituals and structure of Freemasonry to disguise it? After all, what better cover for an illegal conspiracy than an organisation which already exists in the shadows, one where absolute loyalty to your fellow members is a given?”

It made sense, she realised. Like a partygoer at Carnevale, Cassandre had stepped onto the stage wearing a mask, and they had all obligingly looked at the mask, not the person. Even those like General Saito, who wanted this whole business hushed up because it might bring Freemasonry into disrepute, were thinking about the trappings rather than the crime.

“Father Calergi hinted at much the same thing,” she said, remembering. “He said that even today, no one really knew what P2’s political agenda had been.”

“What are Count Tignelli’s political leanings?”

“Also to the right, I think. He hero-worships Napoleon, of all people. Called him the ‘liberator of Venice’. He’s even sponsored the refurbishment of Napoleon’s Imperial Apartments.”

“Perhaps he sees himself as Napoleon’s political heir.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “He almost said as much, actually – that Venice today is mired in corruption and vice, just as it was in the last days of the Republic. He suggested that I, as a Carabinieri officer, would surely agree with that.”

“I’m sure many of our colleagues would.” Piola dusted his lips with a paper napkin and gestured to Viliberto, the owner, for the bill. As usual, Viliberto waved the suggestion away, indicating that it was on the house; and as usual Piola pulled out a five-euro note and dropped it on the counter – probably more, Kat reflected, than the bill would have been in the first place. Piola’s refusal to accept kickbacks, however small, was one of the things that had made her fall for him, back when they did their first investigation together.

“I’ll ask around,” she said. “Someone will know something.” Venice might be one of the world’s most popular holiday destinations, but it was also a village. Take away the tourists and you were left with just sixty thousand residents, many of whose families had been there for generations. She might not have come across Tignelli before, but he would almost certainly be known to some of her contacts.

“I take it you won’t be involving General Saito’s niece in these unofficial investigations?”

She stared at him. “Who?”

“Lieutenant Bagnasco. Saito’s niece.” He laughed at her horrified expression. “Didn’t you know? You should feel honoured – he could have assigned her to any investigation, but he chose yours.”

“He wanted to keep an eye on me,” Kat said slowly. “Even if he’s not involved in the black lodge himself, he doesn’t want any scandal that might discredit the Carabinieri.”

“Or perhaps he wanted to keep an eye on you because it looked like being a big case, and you’re still relatively inexperienced,” Piola said mildly. “Besides, Bagnasco has the makings of a very good officer.”

“You know her?” Kat said. It was her turn to be surprised: Bagnasco had said she’d only been in Venice a few weeks.

Piola nodded. “She’s asked me if I’ll mentor her. We’ve had a few chats, that’s all.”

“Chats? Over dinner, I suppose?”

“Over dinner, yes. Why not?”

Because she’s using you
, Kat thought sadly.
Because she knows you’re lonely, and she’s seen an opportunity to advance herself.
Bagnasco would never make the mistake she had, of sleeping with a more senior officer, but she might well let that officer think she wanted to.

She saw from the look Piola gave her that he thought she was jealous; saw, too, that he found the idea rather pleasing. “I’m not jealous,” she said angrily. “I just think she’s trying to run before she can walk.”

“Well,” he said, still amused, “you’d know all about that.”

As they left the bar she saw how he glanced automatically at his reflection in the mirror behind the counter. His hair was greying at the sides, and his face had a lived-in, crumpled quality that was part of its charm. There was no doubt: he was still a very good-looking man. And not just physically, either. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that he wore his principles proudly, like one of his Brioni suits; as if he knew how attractive they made him.

Back at Campo San Zaccaria, she went up to Malli’s attic. The usually ebullient technician gave her a sombre look and scooted his chair over to a table piled high with evidence bags. “Here,” he said, handing one to her. “I have a feeling I should never have looked at that.”

“I was hoping I could persuade you to look some more.”

He shook his head. “No, you can’t, and besides, there’s nothing much there.”

“Nothing much?” she echoed. “So you did find something else besides that list?”

He hesitated, then rummaged around on another desk until he found a printout. “He’d deleted his search history as well. But what people don’t realise is that a deleted browsing history isn’t erased – it’s stored in a system file called
index.dat
. Getting it back can be as simple as doing a System Restore.”

“Have you taken a copy of this?” she asked, skimming the list quickly.

He shook his head. “And if you’ve got any sense, you’ll put it straight in the shredder.”

“You’re right,” she said. “That’s exactly what I should do.”

He nodded, relieved, and she left him.

But that doesn’t mean I will.

H
OLLY
SMILED
AT
the young woman behind Reception. “Hi, I have a reservation. Name of Boland?”

“Of course,” the woman said, with the mechanical friendliness of her profession. She checked her computer. “One night, yes?”

To anyone familiar with post-war US colonial architecture, the hotel on the tiny island of La Maddalena could only have been a former military base. The building was long, low and sleek, made mostly of glass and girders, and the floors were polished parquet. Whoever had supervised the conversion into a hotel had spared no expense, trying to soften the vast interior with dramatic chandeliers and murals, but to Holly the result felt like a cross between an airport terminal and a very tasteless nightclub.

Not that the hotel’s current clientele would mind much, she suspected. Her journey from Sardinia had been an arduous one, involving a long drive, two ferries and a taxi. But the island’s marina was full of sleek superyachts, many with Russian names painted on their bows. And if the lack of conventional access wasn’t enough of a deterrent for ordinary mortals, the hotel’s astronomic prices would have been. She’d been startled to discover that the cheapest room cost more than three hundred euros a night.

While the clerk checked her in, she turned and watched the lobby. A group of half a dozen men were strolling out of the main doors, dressed in the ubiquitous local uniform of Ralph Lauren polo shirts with sunglasses tucked into the neck, Bermuda shorts and sandals. All were muscular, with military crew-cuts. She recognised them: the soldiers from the airport. They must be remarkably well paid, if they could afford to vacation here.

Turning back to the receptionist, she said idly, “Is there a golf course here?”

The young woman looked apologetic. “I’m afraid the ground’s too rocky. But we can offer you some beautiful snorkelling.”

At Alghero the men had been wheeling golf bags. Not very smart, to use a golf trip as cover when your destination didn’t even have a course.

Abruptly leaving the desk, she followed the men outside. They were boarding one of the yachts, a shiny forty-footer bristling with antennae; expensive-looking even in that company. As soon as they were on board, it began moving towards the marina exit. Beyond the sea wall, the helmsman opened the throttle, and the yacht surged in a graceful arc to the south, its wash bubbling and sparkling in the sunlight.

She went back to the desk. “Look after my case, will you?” she said to the startled receptionist as she grabbed her backpack. “I’ll go up to the room later.”

Slinging the pack over her shoulders as she ran, she cut across the headland at a fast jog. It was almost twenty minutes before she came to a chain-link fence similar to the one at Capo Marrargiu. But where that one had been rusted through, this was clean and well maintained. It bore the same dire warnings against trespassing in a military zone.

She tracked parallel to it and found a place where animals had burrowed beneath the wire. As she wriggled underneath she caught the sound of gunfire. A burst of around thirty shots, then silence, followed by more firing. Range practice, it sounded like. But as to who would need to come to a place as remote as this for range practice, she had no idea.

She could see the yacht now, moored a little way out to sea, but the firing was coming from the beach, forty feet below her. Crouching down, she took her equipment out of her backpack: a chalk bag, which she fastened round her waist, and her bouldering shoes, tightly fitting slippers of thin rubber with a flat, flexible sole and no tread. The toe of each shoe had a stubby rubber point, for wedging into crevices. They hurt like hell to walk in, but on rocks they made her feel like Spiderwoman.

She crawled towards the edge of the cliff and looked over. There were, she now saw, a total of three yachts moored offshore, and half a dozen rigid inflatables pulled up on the beach. Around forty men were being drilled in groups – some target-shooting, some engaged in unarmed combat, some crouched round an instructor who was demonstrating how to use a rocket launcher. No one was in uniform, but she noted that the soldiers she’d seen at the airport seemed to be the ones doing the instructing.

She edged back, then re-approached the cliff fifty yards to the left, where a bend would mask her from view. Turning onto her stomach, she wriggled her feet down the rock face until she found her first foothold.

In bouldering – climbing without ropes – going down required greater concentration than going up. Climbing up, her eyes and the handhold she was searching for would be in reasonably close proximity. Descending meant she was climbing blind, with gravity trying to make her go faster and further than she could safely control. She took it slowly, reaching into her bag frequently for chalk.

She was about twenty feet into her descent when she heard, above her, the unmistakable squawk of a walkie-talkie. The end of a mountaineering rope skittered down the cliff face to her left, swiftly followed by another to her right.

Shit
.

Whoever had been watching her before, at the derelict Gladio base, must have followed her here. She thought she’d been careful, but evidently not careful enough.

Quickly she thought over her cover story. There was nothing incriminating on her, and back at the hotel she had receipts and maps to prove that she was only what she said she was – a US Army officer who preferred her own company when climbing.

She clung to the rock face, conserving her strength, as two men dropped down towards her, one on either side. “Good spot, right?” she asked in Italian, trying to adopt the cheery tone of someone who didn’t know she was trespassing.

“Sure,” the man on her right said, equally cheerily, swinging something at her.

Just in time she saw that it was a small iron crowbar, the curve ending in a sharp claw. “Hey!” she shouted, pulling back.

The man grunted and swung again, all pretence at friendliness abandoned.

The climber on her left, meanwhile, was fiddling with his line, trying to swing close enough to grab her. It looked like they were simply going to throw her off the cliff. She glanced down. Below her were rocks. If they succeeded, she’d be messed up at best. At worst, she’d be dead.

Instinctively, she went upwards. Men on ropes would always have the advantage going down, but up was a straight race, and she was unencumbered by the gear they carried. The man on her left lunged and succeeded in grabbing her foot as she passed. She went the only way she now could, towards him, jumping into his rope and kicking down at his head. But he was stronger than she was. He tugged and grabbed again, getting a better grip on her ankle.

Looking up, she saw the crampon he was clipped to, just above her head.

It was him or her, and she chose him. Grabbing the crampon’s release mechanism, she yanked it from the cliff, then gave one last kick. He fell with a surprised grunt, hitting the rocks below with a sickening thud.

The other man, meanwhile, was using the curved end of the crowbar as a hook, trying to pull himself over to her. She grabbed the claw and twisted. He cursed, surprised, as it slipped from his grasp.

Scurrying up to his belaying point, she levered the flat end of the crowbar into the crampon. It came out easily, and he fell after his colleague, his body thumping off two ledges on the way down. She paused just long enough to see that he was moving, then resumed climbing until she reached the top.

Cautiously, she raised her head over the edge. But there was no one there, just a white Land Rover parked twenty yards off. She ran to it and jumped in, her heart pounding with adrenalin. The keys were still in the ignition. Without pausing to look back, she gunned it back to the hotel to pick up her bags. The most important thing right now was to get off the island before anyone else tried to kill her. Working out who it had been, and why, would have to wait until later.

K
AT
SAT
AT
her desk and went through the websites Cassandre had visited. For the most part, they were a random assortment of newsfeeds, financial information sites and Wikipedia pages. He’d also visited a site called Eurotwinks. She clicked on it, then wished she hadn’t. Cute young men with short gelled haircuts and pale hairless chests, having things done to them by older men that made her wince. So perhaps that explained the wife’s curious detachment.