The Absolution Page 12

  “Nothing much?” she echoed. “So you did find something else besides that list?”

  He hesitated, then rummaged around on another desk until he found a printout. “He’d deleted his search history as well. But what people don’t realise is that a deleted browsing history isn’t erased – it’s stored in a system file called index.dat. Getting it back can be as simple as doing a System Restore.”

  “Have you taken a copy of this?” she asked, skimming the list quickly.

  He shook his head. “And if you’ve got any sense, you’ll put it straight in the shredder.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “That’s exactly what I should do.”

  He nodded, relieved, and she left him.

  But that doesn’t mean I will.

  TWENTY-TWO

  HOLLY SMILED AT the young woman behind Reception. “Hi, I have a reservation. Name of Boland?”

  “Of course,” the woman said, with the mechanical friendliness of her profession. She checked her computer. “One night, yes?”

  To anyone familiar with post-war US colonial architecture, the hotel on the tiny island of La Maddalena could only have been a former military base. The building was long, low and sleek, made mostly of glass and girders, and the floors were polished parquet. Whoever had supervised the conversion into a hotel had spared no expense, trying to soften the vast interior with dramatic chandeliers and murals, but to Holly the result felt like a cross between an airport terminal and a very tasteless nightclub.

  Not that the hotel’s current clientele would mind much, she suspected. Her journey from Sardinia had been an arduous one, involving a long drive, two ferries and a taxi. But the island’s marina was full of sleek superyachts, many with Russian names painted on their bows. And if the lack of conventional access wasn’t enough of a deterrent for ordinary mortals, the hotel’s astronomic prices would have been. She’d been startled to discover that the cheapest room cost more than three hundred euros a night.

  While the clerk checked her in, she turned and watched the lobby. A group of half a dozen men were strolling out of the main doors, dressed in the ubiquitous local uniform of Ralph Lauren polo shirts with sunglasses tucked into the neck, Bermuda shorts and sandals. All were muscular, with military crew-cuts. She recognised them: the soldiers from the airport. They must be remarkably well paid, if they could afford to vacation here.

  Turning back to the receptionist, she said idly, “Is there a golf course here?”

  The young woman looked apologetic. “I’m afraid the ground’s too rocky. But we can offer you some beautiful snorkelling.”

  At Alghero the men had been wheeling golf bags. Not very smart, to use a golf trip as cover when your destination didn’t even have a course.

  Abruptly leaving the desk, she followed the men outside. They were boarding one of the yachts, a shiny forty-footer bristling with antennae; expensive-looking even in that company. As soon as they were on board, it began moving towards the marina exit. Beyond the sea wall, the helmsman opened the throttle, and the yacht surged in a graceful arc to the south, its wash bubbling and sparkling in the sunlight.

  She went back to the desk. “Look after my case, will you?” she said to the startled receptionist as she grabbed her backpack. “I’ll go up to the room later.”

  Slinging the pack over her shoulders as she ran, she cut across the headland at a fast jog. It was almost twenty minutes before she came to a chain-link fence similar to the one at Capo Marrargiu. But where that one had been rusted through, this was clean and well maintained. It bore the same dire warnings against trespassing in a military zone.

  She tracked parallel to it and found a place where animals had burrowed beneath the wire. As she wriggled underneath she caught the sound of gunfire. A burst of around thirty shots, then silence, followed by more firing. Range practice, it sounded like. But as to who would need to come to a place as remote as this for range practice, she had no idea.

  She could see the yacht now, moored a little way out to sea, but the firing was coming from the beach, forty feet below her. Crouching down, she took her equipment out of her backpack: a chalk bag, which she fastened round her waist, and her bouldering shoes, tightly fitting slippers of thin rubber with a flat, flexible sole and no tread. The toe of each shoe had a stubby rubber point, for wedging into crevices. They hurt like hell to walk in, but on rocks they made her feel like Spiderwoman.

  She crawled towards the edge of the cliff and looked over. There were, she now saw, a total of three yachts moored offshore, and half a dozen rigid inflatables pulled up on the beach. Around forty men were being drilled in groups – some target-shooting, some engaged in unarmed combat, some crouched round an instructor who was demonstrating how to use a rocket launcher. No one was in uniform, but she noted that the soldiers she’d seen at the airport seemed to be the ones doing the instructing.

  She edged back, then re-approached the cliff fifty yards to the left, where a bend would mask her from view. Turning onto her stomach, she wriggled her feet down the rock face until she found her first foothold.

  In bouldering – climbing without ropes – going down required greater concentration than going up. Climbing up, her eyes and the handhold she was searching for would be in reasonably close proximity. Descending meant she was climbing blind, with gravity trying to make her go faster and further than she could safely control. She took it slowly, reaching into her bag frequently for chalk.

  She was about twenty feet into her descent when she heard, above her, the unmistakable squawk of a walkie-talkie. The end of a mountaineering rope skittered down the cliff face to her left, swiftly followed by another to her right.

  Shit.

  Whoever had been watching her before, at the derelict Gladio base, must have followed her here. She thought she’d been careful, but evidently not careful enough.

  Quickly she thought over her cover story. There was nothing incriminating on her, and back at the hotel she had receipts and maps to prove that she was only what she said she was – a US Army officer who preferred her own company when climbing.

  She clung to the rock face, conserving her strength, as two men dropped down towards her, one on either side. “Good spot, right?” she asked in Italian, trying to adopt the cheery tone of someone who didn’t know she was trespassing.

  “Sure,” the man on her right said, equally cheerily, swinging something at her.

  Just in time she saw that it was a small iron crowbar, the curve ending in a sharp claw. “Hey!” she shouted, pulling back.

  The man grunted and swung again, all pretence at friendliness abandoned.

  The climber on her left, meanwhile, was fiddling with his line, trying to swing close enough to grab her. It looked like they were simply going to throw her off the cliff. She glanced down. Below her were rocks. If they succeeded, she’d be messed up at best. At worst, she’d be dead.

  Instinctively, she went upwards. Men on ropes would always have the advantage going down, but up was a straight race, and she was unencumbered by the gear they carried. The man on her left lunged and succeeded in grabbing her foot as she passed. She went the only way she now could, towards him, jumping into his rope and kicking down at his head. But he was stronger than she was. He tugged and grabbed again, getting a better grip on her ankle.

  Looking up, she saw the crampon he was clipped to, just above her head.

  It was him or her, and she chose him. Grabbing the crampon’s release mechanism, she yanked it from the cliff, then gave one last kick. He fell with a surprised grunt, hitting the rocks below with a sickening thud.

  The other man, meanwhile, was using the curved end of the crowbar as a hook, trying to pull himself over to her. She grabbed the claw and twisted. He cursed, surprised, as it slipped from his grasp.

  Scurrying up to his belaying point, she levered the flat end of the crowbar into the crampon. It came out easily, and he fell after his colleague, his body thumping off two ledges on the way down. She paused just l
ong enough to see that he was moving, then resumed climbing until she reached the top.

  Cautiously, she raised her head over the edge. But there was no one there, just a white Land Rover parked twenty yards off. She ran to it and jumped in, her heart pounding with adrenalin. The keys were still in the ignition. Without pausing to look back, she gunned it back to the hotel to pick up her bags. The most important thing right now was to get off the island before anyone else tried to kill her. Working out who it had been, and why, would have to wait until later.

  TWENTY-THREE

  KAT SAT AT her desk and went through the websites Cassandre had visited. For the most part, they were a random assortment of newsfeeds, financial information sites and Wikipedia pages. He’d also visited a site called Eurotwinks. She clicked on it, then wished she hadn’t. Cute young men with short gelled haircuts and pale hairless chests, having things done to them by older men that made her wince. So perhaps that explained the wife’s curious detachment.

  Rather more incongruously, he’d also paid multiple visits to the online game World of Warcraft. He definitely wasn’t a gamer, that was for sure. She picked up the phone to Malli.

  “I know you don’t want to get involved,” she said. “But just answer one question, would you? Can you think of any reason why a fifty-four-year-old banker should play World of Warcraft?”

  Malli hesitated, then said reluctantly, “Do a search for Warcraft and Snowden.” He hung up.

  She did as he’d suggested, and found an article from the English newspaper that had broken the Edward Snowden story. Titled “NSA Infiltrates Online Worlds”, it revealed that the National Security Agency had become aware that in-game currencies were being used to transfer untraceable funds around the world.

  She did a quick check through the Wikipedia pages Cassandre had visited. One was headed “1964 Piano Solo”, another “1970 Golpe Borghese”, a third “1976 Killick Initiative”. She clicked on the last one.

  In the early 1970s, Christian Democrat party leader Aldo Moro came to the conclusion that the key to preventing outside interference in Italy’s affairs lay in persuading the Italian Communist Party to renounce its revolutionary goals and transform itself into a fully pro-West, democratic party. If that occurred, there could be no further pretext for subjecting Italy to Anglo-American intervention under the guise of “anti-communism”.[1] Moro therefore developed the strategy of a “Compromesso storico” or “Historic Compromise”, under which the Communists would join the Christian Democrats in a coalition government of the left.

  Far from being reassured, however, the outside powers that had kept a close watch on Italian politics for three decades reacted with alarm. On March 25, 1976, John Killick, the British ambassador to NATO, wrote in a memorandum that, “the presence of communist ministers in the Italian government would lead to an immediate security problem inside the Alliance”.[2] A subsequent briefing document added: “For a series of reasons, the idea of a bloodless and surgical coup to prevent the Italian Communist Party from coming into power is attractive. It could come from right-wing forces, with the support of the army and the police.”[3] This was similar to the way two previous coup attempts, the Golpe Borghese and Golpe Bianco, had been organised.

  The link to the Golpe Bianco page was coloured, showing that Cassandre had clicked on it. She did the same.

  The Golpe Bianco or “White Coup” plot was the brainchild of former partisan leader Edgardo Sogno. Sogno conceived the idea of using a combination of political unrest, mass insurrection, the ballot box and military power to force the president to declare a state of emergency, allowing Sogno to form an emergency government – a “white” or “legal” coup.

  Kat frowned. Cassandre appeared to have been looking at attempted coups from Italy’s violent past. But while a coup might have been conceivable in the dark days of the Years of Lead, surely there was no way the Freemasons could be planning anything like that now?

  Her phone beeped. It was her mother, texting an invitation to Sunday lunch. On an impulse, Kat called her back.

  “Mamma, would it be all right if I brought someone?” she asked, after the usual pleasantries about her father, nonna, and her sister’s children.

  There was a startled silence at the other end. “You mean – a boyfriend?” For Kat to bring a man to meet her parents was almost unheard of.

  “Yes, a . . . My . . .” Now that she’d started, “boyfriend” seemed the wrong word for a highly distinguished forty-year-old prosecutor. “A man. Someone I’m seeing.”

  “Of course you can. What does he like to eat?”

  “He’s not fussy.”

  “He’s not Venetian?”

  Kat laughed, though she was aware her mother hadn’t meant it as a joke. “No, he’s from Bassano.” That Flavio was from the Veneto would, she knew, be a point in his favour.

  “And is he . . .?” Her mother left the question hanging delicately in the air.

  Kat felt herself getting angry. She couldn’t help it: no one could wind her up like her mother. She wished she could pretend she didn’t know what her mother was talking about – What, Mamma? Gay? Black? A Protestant? Muslim? – but instead, forcing herself to stay calm, she said mildly, “Married? No, this one’s single. Although he was married, a while back.”

  “Oh – divorced.” Her mother made it sound even worse than being married.

  “He’s a lawyer.” On the plus side, she meant. But her mother chose to misunderstand that too.

  “Well, I suppose it’s easier for them, isn’t it? To divorce. Since they know all the rules, they know how to get round them.”

  Kat sighed audibly.

  “Any children?” her mother added.

  “We haven’t decided yet.”

  “No, I meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” Kat interrupted. “He has two. A little boy, Julius, and a girl, Anna.”

  Her mother didn’t even have to voice her thoughts out loud for Kat to know what they were. If he’s got a family already, he won’t want one with you.

  “Though he doesn’t see much of them,” she added. “They live abroad.”

  Oh, the heartless philanderer’s a bad father as well, is he?

  She decided she’d better bring this one-sided internal conversation to an end before she said something she regretted. “So we’ll see you around midday, shall we?”

  “Of course. I’ll see if your sister can come too. You know how Nonna loves to see her great-grandchildren. And it’ll be nice for your . . . friend, won’t it? If he doesn’t get to see his own children much.”

  Oh, joy, Kat thought. She wondered if Flavio was going to be up to this.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE HACKER TRAVELLED to Sicily by ferry, on a stolen passport provided by the cleric. During the crossing he stood at the rail, thinking about the last time he’d made this journey.

  He’d been twelve years old when his family had fled Gaddafi’s Libya. His father was an educated man, with an American college degree, but when his US visa expired he’d made the mistake of applying to stay in the United States legally, instead of simply slipping underground like so many others. His application was refused. America wouldn’t send goods to Libya, because of UN sanctions, but it would send Libyans – unless, that is, they could specifically prove their lives would be in danger.

  Pointing out that every Libyan’s life was in danger from the mad, murderous dictator who ruled them didn’t count, apparently.

  By Libyan standards, Tareq’s father was reasonably well off. He could afford a laptop, for example – the same laptop that his son discovered when he was six years old. To Tareq, it was like coming across a magic lamp with a genie inside. All human knowledge was contained within it. He didn’t have to pester grown-ups with questions any more.

  A month or so later he stumbled across a document titled “The Hacker Manifesto”, written under the alias “The Mentor”.

  I am a hacker, enter my world . . .

  I�
�m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me.

  I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head.”

  – Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

  And then it happened. A door opened to a world. Rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought. A board is found.

  This is it. This is where I belong.

  I know everyone here. Even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again. I know you all.

  – Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike.

  So there were others like him: young people who existed more fully in the online world than in the physical one. He started to hang out on hacker boards, silently at first, then with growing confidence as he realised that no one knew or cared how young he was. But unlike Mentor, he didn’t hate school, or his parents. His father, recognising how gifted he was, had sent him to the best madrasa he could. Tareq studied the Qur’an, but he also learnt algebra and mathematics.

  Soon after Tareq’s twelfth birthday, his father made a decision.

  “Tareq is clever,” he told the family one evening after prayers. “He needs to go to a better school. And we need to go to a better country.” He looked at each of them in turn. “I’ve decided. We’re going to Italy.”

  There was silence as they all digested this. Neither Tareq’s mother, Zafeera, nor his sister, Faizah, dissented. They all knew Italy would mean a better life. In Libya secret policemen hung round every corner in their leather jackets and sunglasses, watching you. In Libya every neighbour was a potential informant. In Libya people disappeared in the night, never to be heard of again. The only question was whether it was possible to get out of Libya.

  Now his father sought Tareq’s gaze. “We will have to sell everything to pay for our passage. Everything we have,” he said gently.