The Absolution (34 page)

BY MIDDAY, THE
search teams had gone through every one of the 1,650 cabins. They'd searched the Aqua Park, the Colonial Club, the virtual golf course, the three restaurants and the discotheque. They'd searched the Balinese Spa and the Raj-themed solarium, the Hawaiian Palm Court and the Latte-tudes Coffee Shop. They'd searched each of the passenger decks before descending to the clanging, echoing galleys below, the crew quarters and engine rooms.

Of the hacker, there was absolutely no sign.

Kat took personal charge when they searched his berth, looking for any clue. They found a battered Qur'an, two mobile phones, and three passports with the same photograph in all of them. The oldest passport was Libyan, in the name of Tareq Fakroun. He was twenty years old. She didn't recognise either the face or the name, but that was hardly surprising: there had been no matches on any of their databases to the fingerprint recovered from the tablet in Sicily.

Recalling the tablet prompted her to look for a computer. “No laptop,” she said. “That
must
be what he's using.” She turned to the captain. “If he wanted to access the computer network, where would be the best place?”

He shrugged and looked helplessly at the IT officer.

None of us really knows how all this stuff works
, Kat thought.
We think we control it because we can use it, but really it's a mystery to us.

“Probably the server room,” the officer said. “But it's already been searched.”

“Take me there anyway.”

The server room was another level down into the bowels of the ship, a hot, enclosed space full of equipment. Thick clusters of cables ran through ducts in the roof. Racks of computers flickered silently beneath them.

“Is there any way of turning off the parts he's using?” she asked.

“We've tried,” the IT officer said. “It doesn't seem to make any difference. If I had to guess, I'd say he's bypassed our network altogether, and written his own skeleton program to run the ship.”

She didn't know computers, but she did know ships. “He'll still need the GPS to lock onto his destination. If he wanted to hack into the satellite upstream of all the other electronics, where would he do it from?”

It was the captain who answered. “There's an antennae enclosure right on the top of the ship. You can only access it by climbing up the side of the radar tower.”

She took Panicucci and Bagnasco, hurrying up service stairways that led from deck to deck. Finally they were at the foot of the radar tower, and there was only one metal ladder left to climb.

As she climbed, rung after rung, the sun bounced off the painted metal into her eyes. Looking down, she saw that the sea was at least seventy metres below her.

The steps of the ladder disappeared through the floor of
what looked like a small observation deck, the highest point of the ship. Gingerly, she raised her head through the hole and looked around.

A dark-skinned youth was sitting cross-legged by the radar antenna, a laptop nestled between his knees. He was wearing what looked like a sleeveless padded jerkin. Then she saw the wires protruding from the seams. A suicide vest.

He met her eyes, and his hand went towards his pocket.

“Stop!” she called, her hand going to her gun.

He didn't. As he pulled out the detonator she shot him in the face. There was no time for thought; no time for anything as conscious as a decision. She realised, even as she did it, that she had always been intending to do this, ever since Piola had cautioned her not to hesitate. The boy's head exploded, blood spraying the side of the tower, the computer jerking out of his lap as his body first bucked, then slumped to one side, his dark hair smearing his own blood spatter as he fell. The recoil knocked her backwards too, so that she swung sideways on the ladder, her left hand clinging on for dear life as she fought desperately to regain her footing.

Then she was springing up onto the platform. He was still alive, still twitching, then suddenly he wasn't. She checked his airway and fastened her lips on the mangled jaw to give him the kiss of life, just as instinctively as, moments before, she'd pulled the trigger.

Panicucci and Bagnasco came to crouch silently beside her. It was only when she saw blood pooling around their boots that she realised it was hopeless.

“Get the laptop,” she said, standing up.

She looked in the direction they were heading. A shimmering sliver beckoned on the horizon; gilded domes, spires
and cupolas catching gold under the sun's blaze, the ship's prow pointing towards it as neatly as an arrow.

Venice.

They took the laptop back to the bridge for the specialists to examine.

“Every command is password-protected,” the IT officer said at last. “We can't even work out what it's doing.”

“Then turn it off,” Kat said. “At least that way we can make sure it's not controlling the ship any more.”

The IT officer turned the laptop over and sprung out the battery. As he did so, there was a groan in the depths of the ship, a hum that rose in pitch from the engines beneath their feet. She felt her body leaning backwards as the vast vessel surged forward.

“A dead man's handle,” the officer said quietly. “He must have rigged it so any disconnection would make the engines revert to full speed.”

“How long to Venice now?”

The first officer consulted a screen. “At this speed, less than thirty minutes.”

She grabbed her phone. “Daniele,” she said when he answered. “I need your help.”

She summarised the situation in a few sentences. “So what I need to know,” she concluded, “is whether you can hack the shipping company's satellite and reset the GPS coordinates.”

He considered. “Yes and no. I can probably knock out the satellite link. But the ship itself will still be locked onto the old coordinates. Unless you can find some way of making it change course, it will simply follow the old bearing until it either hits something or runs out of fuel. Is there no steering at all? No way of overriding the electronics?”

She looked over to where a group of officers were conferring. “They're working on it. But, Daniele, I don't think we should rely on them. The ship's simply too big and complex.”

“A boat's a boat. There must be some way of making it change course.”

An idea floated into her brain.

“You'll think this is crazy,” she told the captain. “But I've been around boats all my life. And I know that big boats behave just like small ones, when it comes down to it.”

He nodded cautiously.

She said, “What if we take the hacker's suicide vest and blow a hole in the port bow, just below the waterline? The ship will list, and the drag will pull it round.” She pointed at the chart. “We'll start sinking, obviously, but in the meantime we'll veer to port, away from the Bocca di Lido. And if we don't pass through the
bocca
into the lagoon, at least Venice will be safe. In the best-case scenario, perhaps the sand will bring us to a halt slowly enough that the fuel tanks don't explode.”

“How do you know the vest will blow a small hole rather than a big one?”

“I don't. But I don't think he'd have wasted his time building a bigger suicide vest than he needed. I'm betting that bomb contains just enough explosive to destroy him, his laptop and whoever came after him.”

“I pray to God you're right, Captain,” he said faintly. “Because I certainly don't have a better idea.”

They pored over a plan of the ship, debating exactly where to place the explosives. But she knew that, right or wrong, the time for thinking was almost over. They could see Venice's skyline quite clearly now, behind the long line of the Lido. She
could make out the tops of individual buildings: the terrace bar on the roof of the Stucky hotel; the glittering domes of St Mark's itself; the white cupola of Santa Maria della Salute.

She had a sudden memory of a dark January night:
aqua alta
flooding La Salute's steps; snow falling; a corpse washed in from the lagoon. Her first case with Aldo Piola. How long ago all that seemed now.

“I'll detonate it here,” she said, interrupting the discussion. She pointed to a spot halfway down the bow.

“Those are the crew quarters. I can take you there,” the first officer said immediately.

“Get the passengers assembled in their life jackets,” the captain said to one of his men. To Kat and the first officer he simply said, “Good luck.”

Another officer had rigged up a detonation line. As Kat carried the vest gingerly down the endless gangways, it seemed to her that rather than blowing a hole that was too big, the opposite was more likely. Could a few pocketfuls of explosive really punch a big enough hole in a hull as thick as
Serenity
's?

She was glad First Officer Valasco was with her: below the waterline it was easy to become disorientated in the identical corridors. The vibration of the vast engines seemed stronger down there, too: more than once she found herself bouncing off the metal walls, careful not to let the vest make contact as she did so.

Eventually he opened a door. “In here.”

There was little preamble. They laid the vest in a bunk to focus the blast outwards, then played out the detonation line and retreated into the corridor. While Kat crouched down and set the fuse, the first officer stood by, ready to help her away.

Kat was already running when the crack and boom of the explosion sounded behind her.
Too soon
, she thought.
It's
gone off too soon
. For a moment she was back in her apartment, frozen to the spot, watching through the window as Flavio was blown up. Instinctively she flinched and stumbled, but the first officer had her by the arm and was half pulling, half propelling her along the corridor. Crew members sealed bulkheads behind them as they retreated along the ship; behind her she heard a second, slower explosion as the sea, snarling and savage, charged in to reclaim the space that man had briefly usurped.

The passengers were lined up on deck now, silent in their life vests. On the bridge, she and Valasco found the other officers peering anxiously down at the bow.

“Anything?” she asked. One of the men shook his head.

Daniele called her back. “I've spoofed the satellite's telemetry and tracking.”

“Meaning?” she said impatiently.

“It's temporarily out of operation. What's happening your end?”

“I'm not sure.” But even as she said it, she felt the deck under her feet shifting, tilting infinitesimally to port. She held her breath.

They were only a few hundred yards from shore, the ship's prow pointing like a colossal battering ram at the gap in the Lido. As the deck listed to the left, the ship followed it round, like a skateboard with all the rider's weight on one side. It wasn't by much, but the prow was now definitely pointing away from the gap, and at the Lido instead. She could see the ornate façade of the Hôtel des Bains, and the rows of blue-and-white
capanne
where this had all begun. She could see the sunbathers, lined up behind the police tape that was keeping them away from the beach. And she could see the
soft yellow sands waiting to embrace
Serenity of the Seas
; could feel them clawing already at the ship's belly.
Serenity
slowed, lurched and swung over onto her starboard side all at once, more dramatically this time. Kat found herself charging in a group of officers towards one end of the bridge, now ten feet lower than the other; then she took a tumble, executing a perfect waltz step and cartwheel into Panicucci's arms before they both crashed to the floor, which had taken on the angle of a children's slide. With a sudden, spasming shudder, the great behemoth was beached and could go no further, towering at a crazy, drunken angle over the empty sunloungers, as if she would simply tip her passengers onto them and be done with it.

DANIELE BARBO WAITED
in a quiet corner of a bar near the Rialto. The barman, along with most of the customers, was masked. There were others, though, whose faces were bare. For many of those who had been part of the Unmasking, as it had become known, it was now seen as a badge of honour not to hide their identities. Daniele had therefore introduced a new functionality to the site: users could choose whether or not to go incognito.

Hi, Daniele.

The avatar who dropped into a seat next to him was one of those not wearing a mask, but Daniele would have known who he was in any case.

Hello, Max. My congratulations.

Yes, everything turned out all right in the end, didn't it?
In the aftermath of the Unmasking, entrusting the safety of Carnivia to an administrator – and not just any administrator, but the one who had helped Daniele Barbo to identify and neutralise the virus – had seemed like the only sensible choice. When the elections were reinstated, Max had won by a landslide.

That's what I wanted to talk to you about, actually. My decision to stand aside from the site . . . I'm reconsidering it.

There was a long pause
. Oh? Why
?

In part, because of your success
, Daniele answered.

I don't understand.

When I thought about what the hacker had done, there were a few things that still bothered me. Such as how he'd been able to achieve so much on his own. So, while Carnivia was unencrypted, I took a closer look at his history. It turns out there was someone who helped him . . . another hacker, who called himself Jibran on message boards. It was Jibran who suggested targeting the Internet of Things. And it was Jibran who suggested Carnivia as the way to do it.

A smart guy, then
, Max responded.

Yes . . . Although, strangely, it was also Jibran who leaked the video of the Fréjus tunnel attack. Had you not drawn that to my attention, Tareq Fakroun might well have got away with it. Why did Jibran do that, do you suppose, if he was so smart?

Perhaps he couldn't resist the urge to show off.

Perhaps. But I started to wonder if there could be more to it than that. So I took a closer look at Carnivia's administrators too.

And? What did you find?

It all made sense
, Daniele wrote sadly. If only there was a better way to express his feelings at that point than through some stupid emoticon. It was something else he would have to add; now that they could remove their masks, avatars should be able to laugh, or cry, or show anger, or look disappointed.
The fact that you were so keen to become elected. The way Carnivia's oldtimers and newbies were being set against each other. The security scares, to which the only possible answer would be ever-higher levels of scrutiny.

I don't know what you're talking about.

What are you, Max? Or should I call you Jibran? Are you part of USCYBERCOM? The Cryptologic Division? Tailored
Access Operations? Or some other group deep within the NSA, something so secret we haven't even heard about it yet? Maybe you're not even a single person any more. Maybe the entity I've been calling “Max” is actually a team, working in shifts out of some anonymous building in Fort Meade or Palo Alto.

This is crazy.

When did they recruit you, Max? And how? Was it about money? Women? Or simply the chance to be someone important: the person who helped the US military get control of Carnivia?

There was a long silence before Max responded.
It's you that became the monster, Barbo, not me. You refused to see where all this was going. That the internet isn't just some cool game any more, where kids can prank each other without anyone knowing who they are. This is the real world now. And in the real world, there are bad guys who will stop at nothing to destroy everything that matters.

Indeed there are, Max. And you know what? You're one of them.

Abruptly, Max's avatar disappeared.

Goodbye, my friend
, Daniele typed into the empty air.
I hope you thought it was worth it.

He pushed back from the screen and turned to watch Holly. She was sitting at another computer, transferring the contents of the Autodin disks from the floppy drive to a memory stick. Once Daniele had nursed the data from the ancient disks, they'd given up their secrets without a struggle.

She'd known by then roughly what to expect; even so, the sheer number of incriminating documents her father had amassed had taken her breath away. Gilroy had used euphemisms
even when sending secure cables back to Washington – whether to protect himself or his superiors, she didn't know. It was tempting to believe that he'd been a lone wolf, left to run his private fiefdom as he saw fit, but surely it beggared belief that the CIA's high command could have been completely ignorant of the blood that was dripping from its most senior Italian agent's hands. But euphemisms or not, by comparing the date of a cable to actual events it wasn't difficult to work out which dark episodes in Italy's history had actually been instigated by him. There were nearly two thousand files, and every one of them was damning.

Daniele hadn't asked her what condition Ian Gilroy was in when she left him, and as yet she hadn't told him. But from her focused, hurried movements he guessed that for one reason or another she didn't think she had much time.

“That's all of them,” she said at last. “Now what?”

He showed her how, once inside Carnivia, it was possible to place a document in a locker that anyone could read but no one could delete.

“Are you sure?” he said as she copied the files across. “This won't be reversible, you know. Once they're out there . . .”

“I know what I'm doing.” She was very pale, however, and a vein throbbed just below her ear. She added, more quietly, “I know what they'll do to me, too. I'm ready for it.”

He nodded. “Press ‘Enter' and it's done.”

She pressed without hesitation and he saw his happiness winging away into the ether, never to return.

“Can I use your phone?” she asked. He passed it to her.

“Kat,” she said when it was answered, “you need to send a scene-of-crime team to Ian Gilroy's villa, and then come and pick me up at Ca' Barbo.” She listened, then said, “No, I'm fine. But send a forensic examiner to the villa too. Gilroy's dead.”

They sat and waited for the Carabinieri. “Do you know what he said, before he died?” she said reflectively.

Daniele shook his head.

“He said, ‘I love you, Holly. I've loved you like you were my own, ever since the barbecue where we played that game, the one where you stood on my feet and I walked you round the garden. Perhaps if I hadn't loved you so much, I would have stopped them from trying to kill your father. But he had so much, and I had nothing.'”

“A last, desperate lie to try and gain your sympathy.”

“Perhaps. But I like to think there was a glimmer of humanity left in him, after all.”

She found, though, that she couldn't tell even Daniele about the very last words Ian Gilroy had spoken; his voice barely louder than a whisper as he closed his eyes and waited for the end.

“
Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis.
”

Had he been speaking to her, or to himself? Or had it been nothing more than the automatic reflex of a Catholic facing death?

I grant you absolution for your sins.

Whatever the reason, she felt a curious sense of peace, as if the two sides of her nature had finally been resolved. Perhaps even more curiously, she found herself hoping that in some way Gilroy had felt it too.

She looked at Daniele. “Did you know he tried to get you away from Venice, when he heard there was to be an attack? He wrote to you, saying Ca' Barbo was falling down and that you'd have to move out. Apparently you never replied.”

Daniele grunted. “I wouldn't read too much into that. He probably just wanted me out of the way.”

She was silent for a moment, thinking. “What will you do with the algorithm? Keep it for yourself, or publish it?”

“It's already out there.” He gestured at the window. “Literally. I tore it up and dropped it in the
rio
.”

“Why?”

He said slowly, “It would have meant a world without secrets. A world where everything that is mysterious, or complex, or creative, could be replicated by a piece of software. I decided I didn't want to live in a world like that after all.”

“On the plus side,” she said, “it would have meant shorter queues at Disney World.”

He smiled at that, then said, “How did you do it?”

“Gilroy? I shot him with my father's pistol. It seemed the most appropriate thing. A single bullet, for all the Years of Lead. He would never have stood trial for what he's done. His paymasters would have seen to that.”

He heard no remorse in her voice; only a terrible, steely determination. He nodded. “You did the right thing.”

There was a sound below the window. Getting up, she crossed to it. “Kat's here, with Colonel Piola. Have the files all uploaded?”

Kat opened the door to the music room and saw her friends sitting there, their heads together, bent over the computer. For a moment she held back, watching them, before she stepped into the room.

“Holly,” she said. “Oh, Holly . . .”

Behind her, Piola said gently, “Let me do this.”

Kat shook her head. “It should be me.” She took a breath. “Second Lieutenant Boland, I am arresting you on charges of murder, of espionage, of accessing classified information without authorisation . . .” The tears came then, flowing down
her face and choking her throat; the first tears she had shed, she realised, since Flavio had died. She cried for her friend, and she cried for her lover; she cried because Venice was saved, and because it was doomed, and she cried because Italy would probably be no better off with Gilroy dead than it had been when he was alive. She cried for the youth whose life she had taken, and for Daniele, who was about to lose the one person who truly understood him; and she cried because she knew that the Americans, with their zealous hatred of whistleblowers, would leave no stone unturned in their quest to wreak revenge. But most of all she cried because it was true what Flavio had said, almost the last time they had spoken; and yet it was too tiny, too fragile a truth to ward off injustices like the one she was committing now.

All we have is the law.

And so she spoke the formal words of the arrest as carefully as a prayer through her tears: a prayer for the safety, and the soul, of Holly Boland.