The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy) (36 page)

“For once I don’t think he was lying,” Daniele said. “Chaos in Italy
did
suit both Washington and Moscow.”

She nodded. “He arranged for us to receive explosives, guns, information on possible targets… But I also started to notice how operations that we
hadn’t
carried out were being attributed to us as well. Sometimes because it turned out we were all using the same batch of explosive.”

“He was bolstering right-wing terrorists with one hand, and left-wing terrorists with the other. Infiltrating both sides – not to bring them to justice, but to coordinate the terror. And if people ever started to work out what was going on, he had a convenient screen to hide behind. Gladio. A NATO network gone rogue. Nothing to do with the CIA at all.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“But there’s one thing I still don’t understand. Why are you here? If you were such a precious asset… couldn’t you have bargained for your freedom?”

Tataro laughed hollowly. “Precious at the time, perhaps. But after the collapse of the Historic Compromise, I’d served my purpose. Besides, too many of my former colleagues were turning
pentito
. The last thing the American wanted was for me to disappear into a witness-protection scheme and start spilling the beans. In here, I can be given quiet reminders from time to time that they’re still watching me.”

“If they’re so dangerous,” he said, “why are you talking to me now?”

She looked him in the eye. “Because I always promised myself that if you ever turned up here, you were the one person who deserved to know the truth.”

F
ATHER
U
RIEL
USHERED
his patient out of the consulting room and began writing up his notes. He had twenty minutes before his next appointment: a rare gap in the middle of the day.

The patient, a Catholic priest from Belgium, had finally started to make progress. For over a month he’d talked about sin and repentance and forgiveness. He was a dissociative narcissist whose deeply held belief in his own spirituality had enabled the terrible abuse he had inflicted on a nine-year-old girl. “God brought her to me,” he would say, or “God sent her to comfort me.” After several weeks of therapy, that had changed to “God sent her to tempt me,” or “God wanted me to know the nature of sin.” Whenever a question was too tough, or reflected badly on him, he would simply start praying. Father Uriel had been treating him with an avatar therapy similar to the one he had used with Daniele. In the priest’s case, he allowed him to role-play the sexual encounter with the girl he had abused. When he’d made the priest perform the role play again, whilst at the same time playing an audio recording in which the victim described the scene from her point of view, the man had finally started to cry, the first tears he’d shed that weren’t self-pity.

At the end of the session the priest hadn’t prayed, as he usually did. That wasn’t uncommon after a breakthrough, either. Many of Father Uriel’s patients lost their belief at precisely the same point at which they acknowledged the evil within their own natures. Father Uriel didn’t worry overmuch about that. It always seemed to him better to save a man’s soul than to save his faith.

When he had finished his notes he stared through the window at the Institute’s grounds. Then, with a sigh, he lifted the phone.

“Some time ago we had a discussion,” he said when the other man answered. “About your ward.”

“Indeed. I remember it well.”

“You asked me if there was anything you could do to help his recovery… And you were kind enough to make a generous donation towards our work.”

“Which, as you know, I consider very valuable. I’ve since sent some other sponsors in your direction, incidentally.”

“I’m aware of that. I’m very grateful.”

“How
is
Daniele?”

“Improving, I think. That is, he has remembered some details about his kidnap.” Father Uriel hesitated. “Specifically, which one of his kidnappers mutilated him.”

There was a short silence. “Could it be a… confabulation, I think is the medical term? A made-up memory?”

“I don’t believe it could, no. But in any case he has gone to see the woman in prison, to confirm it. I thought, as his guardian, you would want to know. He may be disturbed or upset by what he’s discovered.”

“Thank you.”

“Perhaps it would be better if you didn’t tell him that we’ve spoken. Strictly speaking, as a patient…”

“Of course not. Go in God, my friend. And if you ever find yourself in need of anything for your work, anything at all, please be sure to let me know.”

“Thank you.”

There was a click, and the conversation was over.

K
AT
BUZZED
AT
the morgue door until Dr Hapadi came to open it. His green plastic apron, and the length of time it had taken him to answer, suggested that despite the lateness of the hour he was still working.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said. “It’s important.”

He showed no surprise. “You’d better come in.”

He led her into his office. Beyond, through the glass wall, she could see his assistant removing the liver and spleen from a corpse, weighing them on a pair of scales.

“There are things people haven’t been telling me,” she said, turning her attention back to the medical examiner. “Right from the start. And it seems to me that you were more involved than you’ve been letting on. You were the first Freemason on the scene, when you were called to Cassandre’s body. It had to be you who made the call to Saito.”

“I spoke to General Saito, yes,” he said quietly. “It was clear to me as soon as I saw the body that the death was connected to Freemasonry. Clear, too, that it must be Tignelli’s black lodge that was responsible. We all knew what he was up to – there was no way he could have declared a state of emergency without Carabinieri support. For months he’d been putting out feelers, sounding out which Freemasons might support his plans, offering bribes or positions of power in the new administration.”

“And Saito immediately called me.”

“He decided it had to be investigated by someone who didn’t know what had been going on – someone who wasn’t a Mason. But it also had to be an officer who wouldn’t find out too much.”

“Thanks a lot.”

He shrugged. “General Saito said you weren’t popular within the Carabinieri, that you’d put a lot of backs up and people would have no problem refusing to talk to you. He said there was no way you’d ever get to the bottom of it. For what it’s worth, I told him he was wrong. I’ve seen you at work. I thought trying to block your investigation would only make you more determined.”

“So Saito put his niece on it, to keep an eye on me. And he spoke to the other Freemasons working on the case and warned them, too. I’m guessing that included Guiseppe Malli, our IT technician.”

Hapadi nodded. “When Malli found that list on Cassandre’s computer, he removed all the names of serving Carabinieri officers before he sent it on to you. We hoped you’d have enough to stop Tignelli without dragging our own people into it.”

“And yet it was you who put me in touch with Father Calergi. And Father Calergi who gave me the idea that Tignelli’s plans were political.”

“Those of us who are loyal Catholics as well as Freemasons were always uneasy about Tignelli’s plans,” Hapadi said quietly. “Venetian independence might have been a good idea for the Veneto, but what would it have done to the rest of the country? And in particular, to the Vatican? If Italy fell apart, the Vatican could have been bankrupted. Tignelli didn’t care about that. He simply wanted power for himself.”

“That was Cassandre’s motive too, I’m guessing,” she said. “He had a photograph of himself with Pope Benedict on his desk… He wanted to save his own skin, for sure, but when he finally had to choose a side, he chose Rome over Tignelli. But who told the Americans about all this? Who was it that decided I couldn’t stop Tignelli on my own?”

His eyes gave nothing away. “What makes you think anyone did?”

“When Tignelli died, I didn’t think to ask myself how he came to be killed on the very night that Flavio and I had been discussing whether or not to issue a warrant for his arrest. Later, when I did think about it, I assumed it must have been a leak within AISI, particularly since Colonel Grimaldo told me they’d been tapping our phones. But Tignelli was already dead by the time Flavio called me to say he was issuing a warrant. So it couldn’t have been AISI. That only leaves the US. They must have been bugging my apartment. But why? Who told them we were getting close?”

“Father Calergi does have some longstanding contacts in that area, I believe,” Hapadi said reluctantly. “But it was inconceivable that the Americans wouldn’t find out sooner or later. They know everything that’s going on in this country. They always have. Every time you use your laptop, every time you do a search on Google, every time you make a call – it’s all accessible to them.”

“But if that’s the case, why didn’t they do a better job of it? How come they could stop Tignelli and his black lodge, but not the hacker?”

Hapadi shrugged. “There I can’t help you. Maybe he was just too clever for them.”

“No,” she said. “That hacker might be a technical genius, but he’s no political strategist. There’s something more going on here. Something I’m still not seeing.”

H
OLLY
RECEIVED
A
text from Daniele. It read simply:
It was Carole. Everything Gilroy told you was a lie
.

She hadn’t wanted to believe it. Even as the evidence against Ian Gilroy mounted, she’d found herself hoping against hope that it was all a mistake.

The man she’d trusted. The man who had become, in so many ways, a substitute for her own father’s presence in her life. A man who, it turned out, had so much blood on his hands all the water in Venice couldn’t have washed it away.

Her father… Daniele… And those were just the two closest to her. How many other Major Bolands had there been? How many other Daniele Barbos? How many Boccardos and other innocent victims, ostensibly killed by terrorists claiming to represent this ideology or that, by gunmen or bomb-makers, in so-called traffic accidents or fake suicides, or who’d simply disappeared without trace?

Many hundreds, she guessed; possibly thousands. In the great scheme of America’s global powerplays, it was a tiny, almost insignificant number. But each one had been a life, snatched away in a war they’d barely realised was being fought all around them.

Her whole identity, her sense of self, was based on a falsehood: the lie that America’s presence in Italy was benign. That you could simultaneously be Second Lieutenant Boland, US Intelligence Analyst, and Signorina Holly, from Pisa.

The reality she thought she knew dissolved, and in its place was the simple conviction Kat had voiced.

It’s all connected.

She picked up her car keys.

C
AROLE
T
ATARO
SAT
on her bed for a long time, thinking. Then she went to the door of her cell and banged on it until a guard came.

“What do you want?”

“I demand solitary confinement for my own protection.”

The guard eyed her contemptuously. “I’ll pass the message on.”

“I need it now.”

The guard didn’t bother to reply as he swung the hatch shut.

Later, at supper time, she found a piece of paper, folded in two, tucked under her plate. Inside a razor blade and the words:
You can do this the easy way or the hard way. You have until 10 p.m.

Going back to the door, she banged again. When the guard came she showed him the note. “Still think I’m making this up? I demand to see the governor now.”

He barely glanced at it. “The governor’s gone home. You can make an appointment to see him in the morning.”

She went and sat down on the bed again. After a few minutes she noticed one of the women she shared with, Sophia, stand up and gesture to the other, Fatma.

Fatma was the larger of the two. It was she who held Carole Tataro down, while Sophia wielded the blade that had been provided with her own dinner tray.

H
OLLY
DROVE
TO
the base. The throb of rock music echoed across the tarmac from the direction of Joe Dugan’s, the biggest of the on-base bars. Returning troops, no doubt, celebrating the end of some overseas deployment.

“Have a good evening, ma’am,” the MP at the gate said, clearly assuming the bar was where she was headed too.

She went down Main Street, then took a left. The armoury was dark at this time of night. She let herself in with her CAC card, then walked through to the firing range at the rear. As an officer, she was entitled to practise her marksmanship at any time, day or night.

Going to a locker, she entered a code and took out an M4 carbine with M68 close-combat sight – the standard issue, shoulder-fired weapon of the US Army, with a telescoping stock and short barrel to aid close-quarter combat. Its rounds were so powerful, they were capable of piercing body armour.

She laid it carefully on the floor, then reached inside the locker again for the magazine and ammunition. Behind them, at the back, was a handgun in a worn leather holster, a Sig Sauer P229 from the seventies. The 19mm rounds were of the type named Parabellum, from the Latin motto “
Si vis pacem, para bellum”
: “If you seek peace, prepare for war.”

Holly Boland prepared for war.

Taking a laundry bag from her pocket, she unrolled it and pushed the M4 inside, then strapped her father’s Sig inside her fatigues where it wasn’t visible.

Going back to the desk, she signed herself into the shooting range. Under “Reason for Visit” she wrote “Target practice”.

Then she turned and headed the other way, towards the exit.

D
ANIELE
B
ARBO
SAT
at his computer and logged into Carnivia.