The Absolution Read online

  “Of course. I’ll make some enquiries.”

  “Good.” That was the advantage of dealing with priests, Gilroy reflected: to them, the Sabbath was just another working day.

  The two men spoke for several more minutes before leaving by separate exits. Outside, Gilroy took out his cell phone and dialled. There was another matter that could be dealt with today, for that matter.

  “Public Affairs,” a voice replied. “First Lieutenant Breedon speaking.”

  “Mike, it’s Ian Gilroy. From the Education Centre on base?”

  There was a brief pause while Holly’s boss placed him. “Yes, of course,” he said courteously. “How are you doing, sir?”

  “I’m well, thank you, very well . . . I’m actually calling about Second Lieutenant Boland. As you probably know, I check in with her from time to time, and I just wondered whether you think she’s really up to returning to her duties. She still seems in a somewhat fragile state to me.”

  There was a pause. “Sir, I haven’t had any contact with Second Lieutenant Boland,” Mike Breedon said. “And I wasn’t aware she was planning to return to work. Do you have a date for that? I should talk to the DHR, get things organised for her.”

  “Do you know what,” Gilroy said, “I probably misunderstood. Either that or she took my advice and decided not to rush things after all.”

  When he’d rung off he turned and looked up at the façade of St Mark’s. Despite its familiarity, it never ceased to amaze him. If the interior resembled a gilded mosque, the outside resembled a Moorish palace: Arab minarets atop fantastic Gothic tracery, the whole thing layered with many kinds of coloured stone; porphyry and malachite, amethyst and cornelian, like something from a fairytale.

  And His kingdom shall have no end, he thought wryly.

  He gave an abrupt nod, almost as if he were saying goodbye.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “AS-SALAMU ALAYKUM,” a voice said across the empty classroom.

  Tareq looked up. “Wa alaykumu as-salam,” he replied courteously to the figure who had just appeared in the doorway. Unobtrusively, he reached out and pressed the “CTRL” and “W” keys on his keyboard. A small window on his screen vanished, leaving only a larger window displaying a network-wiring diagram.

  “Working on a Sunday?” The teacher came and looked over his shoulder.

  “I observed al-Juma’ah on Friday. So now I’m catching up.”

  “Yes, I saw you at mosque.” The teacher attended Friday prayers at a moderate mosque near his apartment. Tareq had been careful to sit where he couldn’t help but be noticed.

  “We must all follow Allah’s laws,” he said piously.

  The teacher nodded. “You know, you are an exceptional student. My brother has a recruitment consultancy for IT professionals. I’ll speak to him, if you like. If your work continues at this standard, he’ll be able to get you a good job after the course is finished.”

  Tareq would like that very much indeed, since the teacher’s brother was the whole reason he’d come to Sicily in the first place. He’d come across two former students from the course talking about him in a chat room, and immediately seen how it might fit into his plans. “Thank you. That would be very kind.”

  “You don’t mind travelling?”

  “Not at all,” Tareq assured him.

  “Good.” The teacher put his hand on Tareq’s shoulder. “I’ll talk to him tonight.”

  When the teacher had left, Tareq waited a few minutes before bringing up the small window again. How many bots? he typed.

  The Ghostnet user he was in communication with replied, I’ll send u a shot.

  Moments later, Tareq received a screenshot showing that the user had control of a network comprising almost half a million home computers. In each case the computers would appear to their owners to be completely normal, if a little slow. In reality, they had become slaves doing whatever the botmaster required, be it sending out spam or orchestrating denial-of-service attacks on a particular website.

  How much? Tareq typed.

  $5,000 US a day.

  What if I want to buy?

  Why would u? It’s more cost-effective to rent.

  I have my reasons.

  I wouldn’t sell for less than $750,000. This is my livelihood we’re talking about.

  $500K. You can always infect more.

  That takes time. I don’t take shortcuts with my code.

  Which is why I’m buying it. Do we have a deal at $650K? Final offer.

  I accept bitcoins or Ven.

  Tareq emailed the funds immediately. The botnet he had just bought with the commander’s money wasn’t especially big. The Mariposa net, uncovered in 2009, had controlled over twelve million computers, while the Metulji net found in 2013 had infected about eighteen million. But while the code on which those botnets depended was amateur, the code behind this one was relatively well built. Amongst other things, it was polymorphic, which meant the virus would hide in a different place on each computer, making it extremely hard to detect.

  Tareq would have preferred to build his own botnet from scratch rather than buy one and customise it, but there was much to do in a short space of time. Nor was this the only network he would purchase. He and his fellow hackers might be few in number, but by the time the battle started, he intended to command the biggest army in history.

  THIRTY

  “THANK YOU FOR coming, Mr Speicher. May I offer you some coffee?”

  The chairman of Banca Cattolica della Veneziana shook his head. “No, thank you. May I ask whether I am being questioned as an indagato?”

  Flavio was wearing his lawyer’s robes, Kat her Carabinieri uniform, the whole interview designed to appear as formal as possible.

  Flavio shook his head. “You are not an official suspect at this stage, no.”

  “May I ask, then, what specific crime is being investigated here? In addition to the murder of my colleague, of course.”

  Hugo Speicher spoke calmly, his intelligent brown eyes turning from one to the other. As Kat had predicted to Flavio, this was not a man who would panic easily. But they had concluded he was one of the very few people who might actually give them some insights into Cassandre’s death.

  “He was courteous, urbane and bright,” she’d told Flavio. “But he also seemed to me to have a real distaste for Cassandre.”

  “And our leverage?”

  “The last thing any chairman wants is a scandal. And whatever Cassandre was up to, Speicher must know it could cause the mother of all stinks.”

  Now Flavio nodded at Speicher. “We can have the Guardia di Finanza take apart your bank with a fine-tooth comb if we need to. But we’re hoping that won’t be necessary.”

  The chairman considered. “And my cooperation, if I give it, will form part of the record?”

  “Yes, if you wish it to.”

  Speicher gave a long sigh and some of the stiffness went out of him. He looked suddenly, Kat thought, less like the figurehead of a financial institution and more like a very troubled man.

  “Very well. I should warn you, though, that it’s quite technical. Most banking is, these days.” He gave a rueful smile. “Perhaps that’s where it all started to go wrong. Banks don’t lend money any more – we conjure with it. We make it vanish and reappear, we transmute it from one currency to another; we send it through the ether in search of tax loopholes and safe havens. And we use it as collateral in ever more complex speculations.”

  Flavio reached for a legal pad to take notes. “Go on.”

  “You’re aware, no doubt, that one of our shareholders is the Istituto per le Opere di Religione?” Speicher said. “That is, the Vatican Bank.”

  Flavio nodded. “Yes.”

  “It’s a small stake – no more than three per cent. But that figure probably understates the close nature of the relationship. A relationship that until recently was managed at our end by Alessandro Cassandre. He was very proud of the association. It seduced him, perhaps, in
to making some unwise decisions.” He reflected. “Or perhaps it was the other way round. Perhaps he was always corrupt, and simply saw in the IOR’s lax regulatory structure an opportunity to commit financial crimes.”

  “What crimes, exactly?” Flavio asked quietly.

  Speicher held up a hand. “I’ll come to that, I promise, but it will only make sense if I give you some background. You’ve probably read in the papers that, under Pope Francis, the IOR has been under considerable pressure to clean up its act – in other words, to conform to international standards on financial transparency, money laundering and so on.”

  “I’ve read some of those reports,” Kat said. “It’s generally being seen as a big step forward.”

  “It is. The problem is, there are some past . . . enterprises, let us call them, that the IOR finds itself somewhat reluctant to be transparent about. Not least of which was its enthusiasm, until very recently, for a controversial financial instrument called a credit default swap.”

  Kat glanced at Flavio. They’d debated whether to have a financial specialist join them for this interview but had decided that until they knew exactly what they were dealing with, they’d try to keep this to themselves. Now she was wondering whether they’d miscalculated.

  “Go on,” Flavio said. “But please understand that we don’t have any technical knowledge in this area.”

  “I’ll try to keep it simple. Credit default swaps are essentially just an insurance policy against an institution or country being unable to pay its debts. For a tiny sovereign state like the Vatican, which is in the unusual position of having the euro as its currency but not actually being part of the eurozone, it wasn’t unreasonable to hold a certain number of euro swaps; particularly during the global recession, when it looked as if the Italian government might default on its debts, which would have caused the value of the euro to nosedive.

  “But the reason credit swaps are seen as controversial is that there’s no need to hold any of the actual debt you’re insuring against. It’s a bit like buying fire insurance on your neighbour’s house: when does it turn into a gamble that his house really will burn down? There was a point where holding a few swaps as insurance turned into something quite different – a massive bet that Italy would default and the euro would plummet. The IOR weren’t alone in thinking that, of course. Many of the world’s largest hedge funds were betting the same way. Behind closed doors, Berlusconi was saying that debt default hadn’t been so very terrible for the Greeks, given what they’d been able to screw out of the rest of Europe in return. If he’d stayed in power, the value of the Vatican’s swaps would almost certainly have continued to rise. Instead of which, he was convicted of paying an underage belly dancer for sex and driven from office.”

  Kat nodded. Few would forget the scenes during Berlusconi’s resignation, when jubilant crowds had sung the Hallelujah Chorus outside his office. An austerity package had been passed within a month.

  “So then the Vatican was left holding what bankers call a ‘toxic asset’,” Speicher continued. “Something listed on the books as massively valuable, but which in reality had become a huge, open-ended liability. Technically, they were probably bankrupt. In similar situations, of course, European governments have created so-called ‘bad banks’ to hold the assets, to keep them from dragging down the rest of the company. But that was hardly an option for the Vatican. So they did the next best thing – they looked for someone to offload the swaps onto.”

  “You?” Flavio said.

  Speicher nodded.

  “But why would your bank want these assets, if they’re so toxic?” Kat said, puzzled.

  “We wouldn’t,” Speicher said. “But we – I – knew nothing about it. Only Cassandre, the Vatican’s link man, knew what was going on. He formed a shell company, owned fifty-fifty by the IOR and ourselves, to which the IOR sold whatever swaps they couldn’t close. That company, which was based in Liechtenstein, then sold them to another shell company in a different tax haven, this time owned forty per cent by the IOR and sixty per cent by us. And so it went on . . . Multiple transactions later, the assets were wholly in our name, and off the IOR’s balance sheet.”

  “And in return?” Flavio asked, his pen moving at speed across his pad. “I assume there must have been something in it for Cassandre.”

  “In return, the IOR invested in another set of shell companies controlled by Cassandre personally. A payoff, in other words.”

  “Is the money still there?”

  Speicher shook his head. “Cassandre used the funds to make highly speculative investments. Unfortunately, he wasn’t nearly as good an investment manager as he was a crook. He lost the lot.”

  “How did you discover all this?” Kat asked.

  “As part of these manoeuvres, Cassandre opened thousands of proxy accounts within the bank.” Speicher frowned. “I still don’t know why, to be honest. Each account has been numbered and issued with overdraft facilities, chequebooks and so on. But they’ve not been used. Anyway, one of the assistants in our back office realised something irregular was happening and drew it to my attention. When I looked into it, it became clear that Cassandre had been bypassing the bank’s usual processes for years. When I had the evidence, I called him to my office and confronted him.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “He tried to bluster it out. Said the swaps were all part of some complicated financial strategy that would pay huge dividends to the bank very soon. I told him that was nonsense. Europe has turned the corner now. Only a very few cranks and doom-mongers are still betting the opposite way.” He sighed. “I knew I had to fire him. But I also knew that it would almost certainly mean the end of the bank. You can’t just sit on something like this – you’re required to tell the regulators, who would conduct an investigation. That in turn would spook our institutional depositors. Inevitably, we would end up being swallowed by some larger bank, one better able to accommodate the risk. It would be the end of everything I’ve worked for. That was what Cassandre was betting on, I think – that these assets were so toxic, I’d have no choice but to hush up their existence.”

  “And?” Flavio said. “Did you?”

  Speicher shook his head. “I told Cassandre he was suspended, and called an emergency board meeting.”

  “That was the board meeting you mentioned to me,” Kat recalled. “The last time you saw Cassandre alive.”

  The banker nodded. “But not actually the last time I spoke to him. I phoned him next morning to tell him the board’s decision – that he had to go immediately. By that time he was in a state of high panic. He told me he had a plan. That he now had protection on both sides, whatever that meant; that whatever happened, the bank was safe. He wanted more time, just a few more weeks, and then it would all come good. I told him he was raving and terminated the conversation. Frankly, the man disgusted me. He didn’t even have the decency to face up to what he’d done.”

  Kat looked back through her notes, trying to get her head round all this. “So your shareholders – the board – must have been furious. Will they lose money, if the bank goes under?” She glanced at Flavio. “That could give one of them a motive to have Cassandre killed, couldn’t it?”

  “The bank isn’t going under,” Speicher said.

  Kat frowned. “I thought you said . . .”

  “I said it would almost certainly bring down the bank. I didn’t say it was a foregone conclusion. The reason I called the board meeting was in the hope that one of our existing shareholders might offer us a rescue package.”

  “And that’s what happened?” Flavio asked. “You have a white knight?”

  Speicher nodded. “One of our shareholders, Count Tignelli, has agreed to inject over half a billion euros – enough to cover all our liabilities, should the worst happen. In effect, he’s buying us up.”

  So Tignelli was involved with Cassandre and the bank after all. She’d been certain of it, but at this confirmation she’d been right, Kat felt
a familiar throb of excitement. “You didn’t mention this when I asked you about him before,” she said accusingly.

  Speicher looked shamefaced. “Forgive me, Captain, but I was put on the spot and I wasn’t sure how much I should tell you. Tignelli had made a verbal agreement to put up the necessary capital, but it seemed to me that the deal could easily be derailed by a scandal and a police investigation.”

  “You called him,” Kat realised. “That’s how he knew I was coming to La Grazia. Because you’d warned him.”

  “I had to tell him Cassandre was dead. Naturally I also told him that the Carabinieri were treating it as murder.”

  “How did he react?” Flavio asked.

  Speicher frowned. “I was phoning to reassure him, you see. I thought I could break the news about Cassandre in such a way that it would seem like a problem that had fortuitously been solved, rather than one that was being created.”

  “And?”

  Speicher said slowly, “Tignelli’s reply was, ‘Well, that’s one less loose end to be dealt with, isn’t it?’ Almost as if he were the one reassuring me.”

  Flavio and Kat exchanged glances.

  “Is there a possibility that this was a scheme cooked up by Cassandre and Tignelli between them?” Kat asked. “We’re almost certain they were members of the same illegal Masonic lodge. Could Cassandre have deliberately lowered the value of the bank, so that Tignelli could buy it up cheap? And that Cassandre was disposed of, when he’d outlived his usefulness?”

  “It’s crossed my mind,” Speicher said. “But the obvious objection to that is, Tignelli hasn’t got it cheap. He’s pouring a huge amount of money into an institution burdened with worthless liabilities. Why on earth would he do that, if he didn’t have to?”

  “An honourable man,” Flavio said when Speicher had left them.

  Kat nodded. “It’s easy to forget, isn’t it, that not all money men are crooks. For every Cassandre there are probably a dozen Speichers.”