The Absolution (32 page)

HOLLY DROVE THROUGH
the dark Veneto countryside to the villa where Ian Gilroy lived. Once, it had been where the Barbo family spent their summers, away from the stink and humidity of Venice. But somehow, when Daniele's father had transferred his art collection to a charitable trust, the villa had been transferred along with it.

She wondered if that had been planned as well, or whether it was a happy accident. She doubted that much in Gilroy's life was accidental.

Leaving her car by the big wrought-iron gates, she slung the laundry bag over her shoulder and walked up the lawn towards the house. For the first time she pondered the apparent lack of security. Was it there, but hidden? Or was Gilroy simply the sort of spymaster who preferred crypsis and misdirection to tripwires and alarms?

She thought how appropriate it was that he had chosen Venice as his stamping ground. A place of mists and watery reflections, of shifting surfaces and deceptive, glittering façades. An ambiguous, impossible city, one that had dreamed itself into existence in defiance of all reason or logic.

It wasn't only Daniele Barbo who had created his own version of reality. Ian Gilroy had done it too.

Twenty yards from the house, she took out the M4, slotted
the magazine into place, and pulled the first round into the chamber. The handgun and holster she fastened around her waist.

She tried the front door. It wasn't locked.

He was sitting at the back of the grand entrance hall, in an antique wooden chair that looked as if it might once have been the throne of some doge or duke. Watching her, his eyes hooded. One hand cupped his chin. The other, his left, lay casually across his lap. On either side, on the painted panels that lined the walls,
trompe l'oeil
nymphs and mischievous fauns eyed her lasciviously.

She raised the carbine. “Show me your other hand.”

He raised his left hand and waved it ironically. Unarmed.

“You were expecting me, then.”

“Oh, Holly,” he said, his voice cracking with what sounded strangely like relief. “I've been waiting for this moment for many, many years.”

“
I THINK I
'
VE
done it,” Daniele said to Kat. “But there's a problem.”

He had written his algorithm and sent it into Carnivia. He'd watched, appalled, as the hacker's chosen targets spilled across his screen. Power plants, hospitals, hydroelectric dams, air-traffic-control systems . . . An elevator in Milan's tallest building that would have crashed to the ground, killing everyone inside it. A cooling fan in the electrical substation of a subway system that would have burst into flames. A vulnerability in the Italian stock exchange that would trigger automatic selling. The tram system in Rome. He'd been astonished to discover just how easy it had been for the hacker to line up so many simultaneous acts of destruction.

One by one, his own code extracted the botmaster's instructions from the infected computers, like pulling out a weed along with all its roots.

And he had seen, too, what kind of users Carnivia had. Stripped of their anonymity, he had glimpsed pornographers and the consumers of pornography; drug dealers and drug buyers; gossips and trolls and cyberbullies. But he had also seen a network of gay men in Saudi Arabia, using it to share information that would get them three years in jail and five hundred lashes if done openly; an underground democratic
movement in Egypt; an endangered Christian congregation in Iraq. He saw whistleblowers using it to denounce corruption and abuse of power around the world; celebrities using it to escape the pressures of fame; the shy using it to speak out and those who were burdened with secrets to confess.

“So you've beaten it?” Kat said.

“Not quite. I've been looking for the master computer, the source of the infection. And I think I've found it. But I can't access it.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Meaning it's probably the hacker's own computer. For some reason, this one target is so important that he's taken personal charge of it. That implies it's something highly complex that needs to be controlled moment by moment, rather than just by turning off a few switches.”

“Any idea what?”

“At first I thought it could be a plane – if he were on board, and had found a way to hack the on-board electronics, he could override any attempt by the captain to resolve the problem. But since 9/11, aeroplanes have had additional countermeasures to prevent that from happening.”

“What about a ship?” she said slowly.

“Why do you say that?”

“It's always bothered me that the hacker was enrolled at that technical college, when he quite clearly knew more about computers than all the other students put together. When he disappeared, we assumed he'd slipped out of Sicily by getting a job on board a cruise ship. But what if getting on board that ship was the whole point of going to Sicily in the first place?” She paused. “What if he's somehow found a way to hijack it?”

IT WAS PAST
three in the morning when Kat called Aldo Piola. She asked him to wake General Saito and Prosecutor Marcello and get them to come to Campo San Zaccaria.

“What else do you need?”

“About a dozen
carabinieri
. A major incident room. And a technical expert, someone who knows about ships and explosives. But the most urgent thing is a couple of bright young officers to help me identify which ship the hacker could be on.”

“Who would you like?”

“Panicucci and Bagnasco,” she answered without hesitation. There was silence at the other end when she mentioned the second name.

“I don't like her, but she's clever,” Kat explained. “And she's thorough. She won't panic.”

“All right. I'll speak to General Saito and Marcello.”

The explosives expert, Major Tasso, reached Campo San Zaccaria at the same time she did.

“Is what I'm suggesting feasible?” she asked him. “Could one man hijack a cruise ship?”

“It depends how technically sophisticated he is,” he replied cautiously. “But assuming he's found a way to evade the ship's own security systems, it's certainly possible, yes.”

“And then what? Could he threaten to sink it? Run it aground? Blow it up?”

“Again, it depends on a number of factors, such as what kind of fuel it uses. Some of the most modern cruise ships burn gas oil, which is more environmentally friendly than heavy fuel. The downside, though, is that it's much more explosive.”

“How explosive?”

“Think back to 9/11,” he said quietly, “and remember what around seventy tons of airplane fuel exploding inside a skyscraper looked like. Then consider that a fully laden cruise liner might be carrying over two thousand tons of gas oil, which is just as flammable. If that went up, it wouldn't be a question of fires or sinking. The ship itself – the hull, the sides, the plating – would be like the nails in a nail bomb. They'd add to the blast, not contain it.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, doing the maths. “Are you saying an explosion on a passenger ship could be
thirty times
bigger than the ones that brought down the Twin Towers?”

He nodded. “And if by some miracle a passenger did survive the blast, that kind of explosion creates a thermobaric vacuum – it's effectively a fuel-air bomb, one that would rupture the lungs of anyone within range. What that range would be, it's hard to say, but we're certainly talking hundreds of yards, even in the open sea.”

“
Porco Dio
.” She thought of the behemoths she saw daily chugging in and out of Venice. Campaigners worried about the environmental damage, but why had no one thought about the security risks?

Suddenly her blood ran cold. “And what would happen,” she said slowly, “if the explosion
weren't
in the open sea? What if it took place in a more confined space?” She gestured
in the direction of the waterfront, fifty yards away. “Somewhere like the Bacino di San Marco?”

He shrugged. “Let's just say, I doubt if any of us would still be standing here afterwards.”

She was following a simple train of logic, but even so, she couldn't quite believe where it was taking her. Grimaldo had told her that Tignelli's plans involved positioning himself as the saviour of Venice. And Tignelli had mentioned to her himself, the first time she went to La Grazia, just how much damage cruise ships had done to his eel farm. You could hardly find a more emotive subject for Venetians, or one that better symbolised the need for change.

Panicucci and Bagnasco arrived. She explained the situation in a few sentences. “I need you to find out if any of the cruise ships currently in the Adriatic run on gas oil. Look for references to ‘green' or ‘environmentally friendly' on their websites. And then look at their schedules, and see where they're headed. In particular, see if any of them have Venice as their next port of call.”

She turned back to Major Tasso. “You mentioned 9/11, Major. I think it's possible this man doesn't only want to hijack this ship, or even just to blow it up. I think . . .” She hesitated, reluctant even to put the thought into words. “I think he may mean to use it to attack Venice as well.”

“
WON
'
T YOU SIT
down, Holly?”

“I prefer to stand.” She kept the carbine trained on him.

“Are you going to tell me what I'm supposed to have done?”

“Really?” she said incredulously. “You can't remember? Or are you simply wondering which bits I know and which I don't?”

He regarded her calmly. “I'm not going to lie to you, Holly. I have taken some hard decisions in the service of my country. That was my job.”

“You ordered the mutilation of a child in order to grab newspaper headlines and demonise the Red Brigades. You had a former prime minister assassinated to stop him entering into a power-sharing coalition with the communist party. You summoned up atrocities like marketing executives book advertising campaigns. Even recently, you had Count Tignelli killed, and Kat's boyfriend blown to pieces in front of her when he got too close to finding out why.”

“Yes,” he said simply. “Yes, I gave those orders. Sometimes not in so many words, but those were my wishes, and they were carried out.”

“And you arranged for my father to be given blood-thinning medication, in the hope that it would kill him.”

“No,” he said, raising his hand. “No, that's the irony in all this, Holly. I never ordered that. I took his report and told him I'd pass it on, that's all. We don't kill Americans.”

She saw then what he was going to do – admit everything she was certain of, but deny the one thing that would make her pull the trigger.

Words; always words. He used them as a musician used notes, or a magician a deck of cards. The one thing he would never do was tell her the truth.

As if reading her mind, he said, “There's no such thing as history, Holly. Only competing points of view. Why don't I give you my perspective on all this? And then, if you don't like it, you can go ahead and shoot me.”

More words. She feared them – feared his skill: that he would use them to dazzle or bewitch her. But it was ingrained in her nature to allow an accused man his say.

She gestured with the gun. “Go on.”

“As you know, back in the seventies we had a major job on our hands, stopping the communists from getting into power,” he began. “Even as a junior partner in a coalition government. Once voters elsewhere saw Italy making a success of eurocommunism, who knew where it might end? The Italian peninsula; a Russian satellite; the contagion spreading to Spain and France . . . So we pursued a two-pronged strategy. One: turn the people against the communists. Two: make sure that Italy
wasn't
a success.”

“Generating bloodshed on both sides, you mean. With Gladio as your instrument. But it wasn't the gladiators themselves who came up with those initiatives, was it? It was you. The puppet master. Pitting Punch against Judy, Judy against Punch.”

“That's overstating it a little,” he said mildly. “The truth is,
no one was in complete control of the situation. But yes, for a time I and my colleagues had the tiger by the tail, and we did a pretty good job of making sure it bit the other guy instead of us.” He shrugged. “It worked, I guess. After all, we won the Cold War.”

“But you didn't stop then. It would have been the logical time to call a halt. But by that time you were addicted to it.”

“Or, to put it less hysterically, we had a very efficient, expensive asset – an entire country at the heart of Europe that was set up to work as a client state of the US in all but name. Of course, we'd always been careful to maintain the outward appearance that Italy was still a functioning democracy. But effectively there was a whole parallel system of government, shielded from public view. We had our ruling council, our subcommittees and executive bodies, our central bank, our police, our civil servants and bureaucracy. The world knew them as charitable organisations, Mafia families, Masonic lodges and private financial institutions. But in reality, they were all extensions of our control. And, don't forget, we had filled that country from top to toe with military installations. Once it became clear that the end of the Cold War wasn't the beginning of some grand
pax Americana
, we still needed a base in the Mediterranean from which to project our military capability into Asia, into Africa . . . Into the rest of Europe too, should that need ever arise. Being the world's policeman means being ready to put boots on the ground, wherever that ground might be.”

“You're not the world's policeman,” she said bitterly. “Policemen uphold the law. Policemen carry out arrests, not assassinations. You're the world's vigilante, acting in no one's interests but your own.”

“Perhaps. But what's good for the US has generally been
pretty good for these little European countries too. Take Tignelli, for example.”

“Stopping him was your doing, I suppose?”

He nodded. “It's nothing we haven't done before. Every so often one of our gladiators gets drunk on his own success, starts believing he's the answer to the mess he's helped us create. In Tignelli's case, he had the resources to set up an entire black lodge to support his plans. But the last thing America wants is for Italy to break apart. That could be a real impediment to the free movement of our troops.”

It took her a moment to realise he wasn't joking.

“We soon realised, though, that disrupting Tignelli's ambitions gave us access to some very useful levers,” he continued. “There's only one player in Italy besides the US, and they've been misbehaving of late. This Pope has been rather critical of the war on terror. Seen in that context, that shady deal between the Vatican Bank and Cassandre to offload their toxic assets is gold dust. At the right time, a quiet word will be had in the right ear, and the Pope's policies will drift back in our direction. That's how it works.”

“And the attack Kat and Daniele have been trying to foil? Is that how it works as well?”

He shrugged. “As you know, Europe's been squealing about the extent of our cyber-surveillance programmes. They need a gentle reminder of just how risky the world can be right now if you don't have US protection. After this, every government in Europe will be begging to be allowed to sign up to VIGILANCE.” He nodded thoughtfully. “It's a rather brilliant system, actually. Someone noticed that terrorist activity in Europe actually decreased after Snowden revealed the extent of our spying activities. At first we thought the bad guys had just learnt how to evade our scrutiny. But then we
realised: knowing you're being watched actually makes you behave better in the first place. It was a philosopher called Jeremy Bentham who discovered the principle, back in the eighteenth century. He used it to design a self-regulating prison in which every inmate believed himself secretly observed by the guards. He called it the Panopticon – the All-Seeing. VIGILANCE is our Panopticon, Holly. And pretty soon everyone in Europe is going to walk inside it of their own free will.”

“At what cost?” she said, appalled.

“Oh, well.” He considered. “Venice will burn, I imagine. But is that such a terrible thing? The place is sinking anyway. Don't worry, we'll help them rebuild it. Only this time it'll be six feet above the water level, there'll be proper sewers, fire exits, service roads . . . For the first time in ten centuries, it might actually
work
.”

“You'll turn it into Disney World,” she said. “Vegas-on-Sea.”

“Disney World is a damn well-run business. They could do a lot worse.” He sighed. “And yes, some people will die, in the panic and the fires. A few thousand, I estimate. If you look around the world right now – at Syria, at Lebanon, at almost any African country – that's an almost insignificant figure, although the fact that this conflagration will headline every news channel across the world will make it seem so much more important. I'm not defending it, Holly. The decision not to give the Italians more details of the attack was the wrong one, in my opinion. It's one of several things that's persuaded me it's time to retire –
really
retire, that is, as opposed to just leaving my official post.”

“You're Caesar, aren't you? The man on the ground who calls America's shots.”

He nodded. “A purely honorary title. My predecessor, Bob Garland, was the first Caesar, I was the second. Italy has had sixty-two official governments in seventy years, but only two real rulers. You'll be the third.”

“Me!” she said, astonished. “What makes you think
I
want anything to do with this?”

“What makes you think
I
did?” he retorted. “When I brought you over here, Holly, it was because of your father, just as I told you. But the more I've seen of you, the more I've realised that you're exactly what this place needs. There are some who think you might have been contaminated by your Italian upbringing. But I look at you and I see a brave, patriotic American, a logical thinker who puts her own country first, but who loves this ridiculous nation enough to want to save it from itself. Am I right?”

She didn't reply.

“The point is, all these difficult decisions will now be yours to make. Have we been too heavy-handed? Should we be allowing men like Flavio Li Fonti to unearth our secrets, if the price of that is worldwide revulsion against America and our policies? Which is more important, the lives of a few Italian troublemakers or the safety of US troops around the world?” He leant forward. “You want to do good, Holly? I'm offering you the power to do unlimited good. Be my conscience, my advisor, whatever you like to call it. And then, when I've shown you how it works, I'll step back and you'll take over.”

“Just like that,” she murmured.

He shrugged. “Or you can shoot me. I'm not sure I care any more. I certainly won't try to dissuade you, if that's what you choose.”

“And – just so I'm clear about the options – is there any other choice here?”

“Of course. If you decide not to kill me, but you don't want the position I'm offering, you can walk away with no hard feelings. I could probably even arrange for you to do good somewhere else. What would you like, Holly? Humanitarian work in Sierra Leone? Peacekeeping in Darfur? Preventing genocide in Iraq? If you really have no stomach for the harsher realities of American power, there's always the flipside – the positive work it allows us to do around the world. If that's more to your taste, you only have to say.”

“And then there's a fourth option,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Which is?”

She pulled the laundry bag from her shoulder and, without taking her eyes off him, reached inside for the objects she'd brought from her kitchen.

A carton of rat poison. And a sharp knife.

“The fourth option is that I make you swallow the contents of this carton. It's Warfarin – the same blood-thinning agent I believe was used on my father. And then I cut off your ears and nose, just like you had Carole Tataro do to Daniele. The shock might bring on a stroke like my father's, or it might not. But either way, the anti-coagulants should mean you bleed to death.”

She watched him carefully, but the pale blue eyes barely flinched.

“Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, that would be another option, wouldn't it? So, Holly, which is it to be?”