The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy) (2 page)

Death in Venice
… As if on cue, Kat spotted a white tent, only slightly larger than the
capanne
, placed incongruously on the shoreline. Blue tape cordoned off a large area around it, from one breakwater to the next. As she watched, a figure in a white bodysuit, complete with mask and hood, stood up and stretched, then crouched down again.

“That’s the forensic team,” Kat said. She turned the motorboat towards a nearby jetty, slowing to a crawl as she did so. Dr Hapadi, she knew, wouldn’t appreciate having his delicate handiwork ruined by her wash.

It was less than thirty minutes since General Saito had called her at her desk. “How busy are you, Captain?” he’d asked without preamble.

“Colonel Piola and I are wrapping up the paperwork on the Murano investigation,” she’d said cautiously. “Another two or three days’ work, we estimate.” Tedious work, and probably pointless too. For months now, cheap coloured glass from China had been turning up in the tourist shops on the traditional glass-making island of Murano, labelled with fake “Made in Venice” stickers that quadrupled its value. A Carabinieri raid on a warehouse in Mestre had netted over fifty thousand pieces, along with half a million stickers waiting to be fixed to future consignments. Needless to say, the glass-making families who had been selling these imports were blaming an “administrative error”.

“That’s all right. I’ve spoken to Colonel Piola and he’s happy to finish up without you. It was the prosecutor who suggested your name, actually. But the colonel and I both agree you’re ready to run a major investigation on your own.”

“May I ask what it concerns, sir?” she’d asked, trying not to let her excitement show.

“It’s a homicide,” Saito said tersely. That in itself was surprising – in the early stages of an investigation, such terms were usually prefaced with the words “possible” or “alleged”. “We’ll discuss budgets and manpower later, but it’s clearly going to be a large and complex case. In the meantime, I’m assigning Sottotenente Bagnasco as your assistant. She comes highly recommended, but given that she’s new to the team, let me know how she gets on, would you?”

“Of course, sir.” Kat wondered if it would sound inappropriate to say thank you. “And thank you. I’m grateful for the opportunity.”

There was a moment’s pause. “I doubt you’ll be grateful for this one, Capitano,” Saito said darkly. He rang off before she could ask him any more.

She edged the boat up to the jetty and cut the engine. Most junior officers would have jumped out to help by securing a line, but Bagnasco still appeared to be too seasick, although she recovered a little once she was on dry land.

It seemed as if every sunbather on the beach raised themselves up on one elbow to watch the two women as they walked towards the blue tape. Kat was used to being stared at – female officers of the Carabinieri were a rarity even now – but it felt odd to be fully dressed, and in uniform at that, amongst so much bare flesh. Sun
and
murder: it was hardly surprising nobody was bothering with their paperbacks this morning.

At the tapes they paused to put on the microfibre suits, gloves and masks that would prevent any of their hairs or DNA from contaminating the scene. The tapes were being manned by three regular
carabinieri
on crowd control. Kat recognised one of them, a
maresciallo
from the station on the lagoon side of the Lido at Riviera San Nicolò. Nodding a greeting to him, she ducked under the tape and walked across the sand to the forensic tent.

Inside, it was incredibly hot. The combination of the blazing sun, the tent’s plastic roof, the humidity and the overalls instantly made her long for the slight breeze that had been coming off the sea. She felt sweat prickle down her spine and forced herself to concentrate.

Noticing her, the medical examiner, Dr Hapadi, got up from where he was squatting so she could see. The corpse was lying on its back, half in and half out of the water, just where the waves ran into the sand. It was a male, middle-aged, dressed in bloodstained cotton trousers that were rolled up above the knees, as if he’d been wading. His chest was bare and a length of rope was wound over one shoulder. His throat had been sliced open, all the way from one clavicle to the other – the head rolled sideways at an angle, resting on one ear, so that the wound gaped obscenely wide: she could see the severed white tube of the oesophagus, ridged like a vacuum-cleaner hose, already half-filled with sand from the receding tide. But shocking though that was, it was what covered the man’s face that drew her gaze. Beneath the sodden, greying hair, he was wearing a curious-looking mask of leather and cloth, like pre-war motorcycle goggles but with solid metal cups where the eyepieces should have been.

To one side, on a sheet of plastic, was a sandy object the size of a tennis ball. It was this Hapadi had been examining with the dental probe in his gloved hand.

“What kind of mask is that?” Kat’s voice was muffled by her own mask.

“It’s called a hoodwink,” Hapadi said. Normally immune to the sights and smells of death, today he seemed almost dazed, though whether by the stifling heat or the condition of the body she couldn’t have said. “A kind of blindfold. Here.”

Reaching down, he pressed a small lever above the eyepieces, which flipped open. Behind her, Bagnasco jumped as the dead man’s eyes, piercingly grey, stared up at them.

“Who found him?”

“The younger of those two men, I believe.” Hapadi nodded to where, behind the tapes, a good-looking man in his twenties was talking to one of the local
carabinieri
. He, too, looked very pale. An older man stood next to him, one hand protectively on the younger one’s shoulder. There was a small lapdog, some kind of dachshund, tucked under his other arm. They looked like a couple, Kat thought. That was no great surprise: the Lido had long been one of Venice’s most gay-friendly areas. “He was walking his dog. The animal found this and took it back to his owner.” Hapadi indicated the sandy object.

She still couldn’t work out what the object was. “What is it?”

Hapadi crouched down and unrolled it with the tip of the dental probe. “The victim’s tongue,” he said quietly. “It’s been pulled out, probably with pliers.”

Kat heard a choking sound behind her. She turned to see liquid spilling from the sides of Bagnasco’s forensic mask. Yanking the mask from her face, the second lieutenant bent down, retching. Vomit tumbled into the sea.

“You’ll need to give Dr Hapadi a DNA sample,” Kat said when Bagnasco had finished. “For elimination purposes.”

“That’s all right,” Hapadi said resignedly. He indicated where some of Bagnasco’s breakfast had splashed onto the damp sand. “I’ll take a swab from this, while it’s fresh.”

“Sorry,” Bagnasco whispered. “I just…”

“It’s hot in here. Go and get some air,” Kat ordered.

When Bagnasco had gone, she turned back to the medical examiner. “Sorry about that. I think it’s her first.” She gestured at the body. “So the implication is that he was killed elsewhere and brought here by boat? And that the tongue was deliberately placed next to the body?” That would explain why the trousers were bloodstained but the sand wasn’t. “But if you’ve got him in a boat, why not just throw him over the side in deep water and get rid of the evidence? Why bring him all the way to the beach, where you might easily be seen?”

“Because of the oath,” Hapadi said quietly.

“Oath?”

The medical examiner wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “I do most solemnly promise and swear,” he recited heavily, “without the least equivocation, mental reservation, or self-evasion of mind whatsoever, binding myself under no less penalty than to have my throat cut across, my tongue torn out by the roots, and my body buried in the rough sands of the sea at low watermark, where the tide ebbs and flows twice in twenty-four hours, never to divulge the secrets I shall learn amongst this brotherhood.” He looked at Kat, and she saw that his gaze was troubled. “I don’t know who this man is, Capitano, but I’d lay good odds that he was a Freemason.”

D
ANIELE
B
ARBO
STEPPED
onto the balcony of the Doge’s Palace. Below, in Piazza San Marco, a thousand masked faces looked back up at him expectantly. Many more, he knew, would be watching on computers and tablets all around the world. Never before in the history of Carnivia had its founder made a public appearance, let alone a speech: for the last two days, ever since he had announced his intention to address the website’s users directly, the blogosphere had been awash with speculation about the reason.

Many believed Daniele was going to announce that Carnivia was finally being sold. Both Google and Facebook had made no secret of their desire to acquire it. Analysts were talking about a potential price in the region of half a billion dollars, pointing out that although Carnivia currently carried no advertising, the lack of a revenue stream was more the result of its founder’s idiosyncrasies than any inherent lack of commercial viability. Alternatively, the encryption algorithms it employed would be worth a small fortune to the defence industry.

Others believed Daniele was going to announce curbs on the very thing that made Carnivia what it was: its anonymity. Each of the masked figures in the square below him was an avatar, the online representation of an individual user, their real identity and location hidden from everyone but themselves. Uniquely, though, the anonymity only went one way – Carnivia itself could access all the data in your contacts list, allowing you to interact with your Facebook friends, your neighbours, classmates or colleagues without them knowing who you were. Not surprisingly, it was often controversial. In one recent case, a fourteen-year-old girl had killed herself after being taunted by a gang of anonymous cyberbullies. In similar situations, most websites gave law-enforcement agencies the perpetrators’ details. Only Carnivia consistently maintained that even the site owner – Daniele Barbo – simply did not have access to that information.

As he looked down from the balcony – which was an exact simulation of the balcony on the real Doge’s Palace, right down to the tiniest detail of crumbling stone – Daniele hesitated. He had planned the substance of what he was about to say, but had neglected to consider how he might begin. He was aware, of course, that it was customary to preface a speech with some kind of greeting. But what? “My fellow Carnivians” seemed like the wrong tone. “Hi”, on the other hand, sounded too casual.

It was exactly the kind of difficulty that led many, he knew, to label him socially dysfunctional.

The silence dragged on.

Hello world
, he said at last.

A ripple of amusement went around his audience, transmitted via tweets, emoticons and murmurs, as Carnivia’s own internal communications were called. For those in the know, Daniele Barbo had just made a brilliant joke. A “hello world” program was a hacker’s way of demonstrating proof of concept on a piece of coding. By using those words, Daniele was not only reminding his listeners that everything around them was his creation, but also acknowledging that they were sophisticated enough to appreciate such references.

Up on the balcony, Daniele glimpsed some of the responses as they fluttered past. He sighed. He had meant no such thing, of course. But at least he had started now. The most difficult part was over.

As many of you are aware, this website started as a mathematical model to help me understand certain aspects of computational complexity. But over the years, it has grown into something I never anticipated
, he said.

Technically, he was at a computer screen, typing rather than speaking, but one of the many strange things about Carnivia was that such distinctions soon ceased to matter. The murmuring fell quiet as his listeners concentrated on his words.

That is, Carnivia has become a community.

Ten years ago, when he’d built the site, few had seen the point of its elaborate encryption. After all, wasn’t the internet anonymous enough already? More recently, though, rising concerns about data privacy and online surveillance had meant that Carnivia was no longer just a haven for hackers, cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists. The site now had more than three million regular users, and that number was growing all the time.

Keeping that community free, peaceful, and safe from the interference of governments and regulators has taken up a great deal of my time
, he continued.
Too much time, in fact. I have done no useful work for over a decade.

As a result, I have decided that the burden of running Carnivia should be devolved to you, its users. You will decide, for example, what the correct balance should be between your privacy and your public responsibilities. You will decide what
constitutes acceptable behaviour, and what should happen to users who infringe those rules. You will decide whether there should be investment in the site, and if so, how it must be generated. You will decide
– your most pressing task – how these decisions themselves are to be made, choosing your own system of government by whatever process you collectively see fit.

As of today, I will take no further part in those discussions.

He looked down at the multitude.

Does anyone have questions?

Several hundred did, it seemed. From the clamour he selected one.
Yes?

But you as owner will always have the final say, right?

No. The ownership of the site, along with its servers, will be transferred to whatever body you, Carnivia’s users, decide on. I will no longer have any legal claim to it.

Why? What are YOU going to do?

There was a pause as Daniele struggled to articulate his answer. Eventually he said,
I have recently become interested in writing a piece of software to simplify seating plans for weddings.

Again there was a ripple of amusement, although it was rather smaller this time. Daniele’s joke was barely funny.