The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy) (24 page)

She said curiously, “Earlier, when I asked you what Tignelli wanted, you said, ‘On the face of it, separatism.’ Why ‘on the face of it’?”

Moretti spread his hands. “He must know perfectly well his referendum won’t happen. There has to be more to it than that.”

She thought for a moment. “What will happen if a referendum is proposed, and Rome vetoes it?”

“If people have their hopes raised and then dashed again, you mean? Some will argue that Rome is already in breach of Article One. Undoubtedly, tensions will run high.”

“A good moment, then, to unilaterally declare an independent republic? With Tignelli’s tame Freemasons ready to move into all the key positions?”

He considered. “Perhaps. But there would still be huge logistical challenges. For example, you’d have to persuade businesses to stop paying their taxes to Rome. And since the government can take the money directly from their bank accounts…”

“But what if you already owned a bank?” she persisted. “A nice, Venetian bank?” Another thought struck her. “I bet that’s why he got Cassandre to open all those accounts. He wants to be ready on day one – the moment he announces his independent republic of Veneto, or whatever it’s to be called, he’ll say that every business has a bank account waiting for them.”

“Even so… People have tried to break Italy apart before. Even at times of crisis, it isn’t an easy matter. And this isn’t a time of crisis, is it?”

“Unless he means somehow to create one.” The waiter took away their empty plates and she drank a mouthful of the white wine. It was delicious: cool and rich and savoury. “The dead Freemason, Cassandre, was reading up on the internet about the Golpe Bianco, the 1974 White Coup plot. The plan back then was to get the government to declare a state of emergency and use that as a pretext to seize power, wasn’t it? Perhaps he saw parallels between that and what he’d learnt of Tignelli’s plans.”

“That’s often how these things are done,” he agreed. “The instigator demands powers to tackle some pressing issue, then simply refuses to relinquish them once the crisis is over. Greece, Thailand, Pakistan, Peru… they all followed a similar pattern. Tignelli hero-worships Napoleon, you say?”

She nodded.

“Coup by consent was how Bonaparte came to power, in the putsch of 18 Brumaire. And the fall of the Venetian Republic was a coup in all but name.”

“That makes sense. He’s modelling this as closely as possible on what worked for Napoleon. He told me himself that he’d been studying him.”

“If this is true, it’s a very serious matter,” Moretti said thoughtfully. “Not just for the Veneto, but for Italy too. Without us, I should imagine the country will be bankrupt within a year.”

The full brilliance of Count Tignelli’s scheme only then dawned on her. “Of course – the deal with the bank. That’s part of it too.”

“What deal?”

“He bought the Banca Cattolica della Veneziana cheap, because its books are burdened with a huge pile of apparently worthless credit default swaps that have been unloaded onto it by the Vatican Bank,” she explained. “But they’re not actually as worthless as they look. As you just said, if the Veneto becomes independent, the chances of Italy defaulting on its sovereign debts will go up, and the value of those swaps will go up with them. He’s not bankrolling independence for political reasons, or not alone. He’s set it up so that it’ll make him a fortune.”

“And the crisis you think he may intend to manufacture to make all this happen? Do you have any idea what that might be?”

“None whatsoever,” she confessed. “But whatever it is, I suspect it will be something dramatic. Tignelli isn’t a man to do things by halves.”

O
N
THE
WALL
of Holly’s apartment, the spidergram was spreading.

She decided to flip things round and take a look at Gilroy’s side of the operation. Not surprisingly, there were no references to him anywhere on the internet. It had been too long ago, and the spy had for obvious reasons kept a low profile during his professional career.

She did, however, come across the name Hannah Proost. Proost had been an administrative assistant in the CIA’s Milan Section – competent, hardworking, but certainly not what most people thought of when they used the word “spy”. She’d been doing her job for more than twenty years when, in 2003, she was asked to assist a visiting team from Langley.

The team were there to snatch a radical Muslim cleric called Abu Omar from the streets of Milan. After several weeks of planning, they intercepted him in a quiet street, bundled him into the back of a van and drove him to the US Air Force base at Aviano. He was then flown to Egypt, where he was tortured by the security services on the CIA’s behalf. It was just one among dozens, possibly hundreds, of similar renditions carried out in the post-9/11 years.

What made this one different was that a determined Italian prosecutor decided to charge the CIA officers involved with conspiracy to kidnap. Since most of the snatch squad had stayed in Italy only long enough to carry out the operation, and had in any case used false names, being convicted
in absentia
wasn’t any great hardship. For Proost – resident in Italy for over two decades, married to an Italian, and now forced to flee to the US, unable even to visit her sick mother in Holland – it was very different. The CIA refused to confirm or deny that the operation had taken place, thus preventing her from claiming diplomatic immunity, and also refused to confirm that her involvement had been limited to providing administrative and translation services. She resigned in order to issue her employers with a lawsuit; as a result, her government pension was withdrawn. Pretty soon her only occupation was giving interviews to journalists.

The Abu Omar story had been picked over by the world’s press until there was nothing left, but it seemed to Holly that a twenty-year CIA staffer might well know something useful about her quarry. She contacted a journalist who’d done a recent interview with Proost, asking him to pass on her details. To avoid scaring off either party, she used her private email.

Within hours she had Proost’s answer.
I’ll talk to you for a fee of $1,000 US.

She wired the money by PayPal.

Thank you. I don’t like taking money for this, but it’s my only source of income. Please understand though that I can’t and won’t discuss anything relating to operational security. Would you rather do this by Skype or Carnivia?

Skype
, Holly wrote. She still found something a little disconcerting about conversing with the masked denizens of Carnivia.

Details exchanged, she found herself looking at a dumpy middle-aged woman sitting on a suede La-Z-Boy settee. A cat was curled up next to her, on a cushion embroidered with the words “Dogs have owners, cats have staff”.

Holly introduced herself as a writer doing research for a book about the CIA in Italy.

Proost snorted. “Another one?”

“This is a slightly different angle,” Holly said. “I’m writing an appreciation of one of the Section’s most senior agents – Ian Gilroy. I imagine you must have known him?”

There was a pause. Skype lag? No: when she spoke, Proost’s voice was guarded. “Ian Gilroy. He’s still going, is he?”

“Well, he’s retired from the CIA, of course. He has a part-time role in education at Camp Ederle.” The other woman’s face was expressionless. “I’m just after some background. What kind of guy was he, what kind of operations he ran…”

“We didn’t overlap by much.”

“I know.” Holly glanced at her notes. “By my reckoning, Gilroy would have come to Italy towards the end of the 1960s. The Section Chief then was a man called Bob Garland. From what I can gather, Garland took Gilroy under his wing.”

Proost shook her head. “Whoever told you that got it wrong. The talk when I arrived was that Garland and Gilroy were rivals, not protégé and mentor.”

Holly frowned. Gilroy had always given the impression that, whilst he’d been alarmed by some of his predecessor’s methods, they had been close. “So Gilroy tried to clean things up, and Bob didn’t like it?”

“Wrong again. My understanding was that there’d been concern back at Langley about the way things were heading when Garland ran the show. There was an initiative from the Italian socialist party to share power with the communists—”

“I know about that. The Historic Compromise,” Holly interrupted. She wanted to focus Proost on the stuff she couldn’t find in the history books. “What was Langley’s response?”

“Well, panic, pretty much. From what people said to me later, the seventh floor decided Garland had been too soft. Gilroy was sent to sort things out.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

Proost shrugged. “I do know that there were hundreds of operations in those years. The cryptonyms went all the way from A to Z.”

“Could those operations have included infiltrating the Gladio network?”

A long pause. “Even if I knew that, I couldn’t discuss it with you.”

Holly mentally parked that response for later analysis. “Let’s assume for a moment that it did. What I still don’t understand is that the gladiators were generally seen as being on the right wing of Italian politics. Yet the only public record of Ian Gilroy’s career has him involved in an operation to penetrate the left wing, the Red Brigades. Why would one agent be involved in both operations?”

“Like I said, I don’t know any details. But I do know that after the collapse of the Historic Compromise, Gilroy was seen by Langley as the man who’d delivered the goods. That was when Bob was eased into retirement.”

So personal ambition, and America’s strategic objectives, had somehow coincided. Gilroy had achieved what his bosses wanted, and profited as a result. But what exactly had that been? And more to the point, by what methods had it been achieved?

“America was working for the collapse of the Historic Compromise, then,” Holly said. “And Gilroy was the man who made it happen. But why would that require the death of someone who found out about it?”

“Death?” Proost frowned. “Whose death?”

“Major Ted Boland, at Camp Darby. He and an Italian neighbour stumbled across evidence suggesting that part of Gladio was being run as a network of
agents provocateurs
—”

“Wait a minute.” Proost stared at her. “Boland is your name.”

“Major Boland is my dad.”

“Oh my God,” Proost said faintly. “You’re
that
Boland.”

“What Boland?” Holly said, suddenly alert. “What do you know about my father?”

“Nothing.” Proost shook her head emphatically.

“Did Gilroy try to have him killed to protect his operation? Was it the CIA who authorised it? If you know anything – anything at all—”

Proost leant forward to the screen. A message appeared.

Call ended
.

D
ANIELE
HAD
SPENT
many hours examining the worm he’d found in Domino9859. Because it was written in Carnivia’s site-specific programming language, any information that might have enabled him to trace its creator was encrypted. There was one part, though, that was in clear text. When he’d designed the encryption, Daniele had deliberately excluded numerals. In any code, numbers written as numerals were easy to crack, since there was no disguising that they continued to behave according to the immutable rules of mathematics. For that reason, most cryptographic systems required the sender to write out numbers as words: five, twenty-five and so on.

Deep within the Carnivia worm was the number 10-12-1437.

In some way, he believed, this had to be significant. The Stuxnet worm, for example, had contained the number 06-24-2012. It was part of an instruction to the virus to start deleting itself on the twenty-fourth of June, 2012.

It seemed likely to Daniele that 10-12-1437 was also part of an instruction – in this case, for the virus to activate. But even though it wasn’t encoded, the hacker had somehow managed to disguise it.

Unless…

Daniele turned to the internet and did a little research. The one thing he knew about the hacker was that he was a radicalised Muslim.

He soon discovered that whereas each new year in the Western calendar began on the solar anniversary of Christ’s birth, the Muslim calendar was a lunar one. In that calendar, the current year was 1437. And the current month was Dhu al-Hijjah, the twelfth month of the year. It was the most blessed and propitious time in the calendar, the time of
haj
. It also signalled the end of Dhu al-Qa’ada, the Month of Truce.

If the last six digits indicated the month and year, did “10” indicate the day?

The tenth day of Dhu al-Hijjah, he discovered, was an especially significant day in the Muslim calendar, because it marked the celebration of Eid al-Adha. The words meant “The Day of Sacrifice”.

This year, Eid fell on the eleventh of September. Or, written another way, 9/11, the anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centre.

That had to be the worm’s zero-date. Exactly seven days away. And, coincidentally, just a few hours before the elections within Carnivia were due to take place.