The Absolution Read online

  That prompted even louder applause.

  “We are especially grateful to Count Tignelli for sharing with us some exhibits from his personal collection of the Emperor’s memorabilia,” the professor concluded, gesturing at the display cases ranged along the walls. “Please enjoy the evening.”

  As the chatter rose again, Kat drifted over to one of the displays. Tignelli’s collection consisted of a mixture of documents and curios: a lock of the Emperor’s hair, a handwritten letter to his wife, a military sash worn by him in a battle. There was even a death mask, to which a few of the dead man’s hairs still stuck. A little further on, a blue case containing something small and shrivelled caught her eye. A card informed her that it was Napoleon’s penis, removed by his doctor immediately after death. It resembled nothing so much as a piece of dried beef jerky.

  “You look fascinated, Capitano,” a voice said beside her.

  She turned. Count Tignelli was standing next to her. “With that?” She indicated the dried-out, twisted thing in the box. “Hardly. No wonder they called him the Little General.”

  “And yet he was also a legendary lover. Perhaps it just goes to show that stature isn’t everything.”

  You would say that, she thought: Tignelli barely came up to her shoulders. She gestured at the fresco-covered walls. “It all seems a bit like overkill for just one man, doesn’t it? Did he really deserve all this?”

  Tignelli considered. “He was not only the greatest military leader of all time, but one of the greatest political leaders. His particular genius was to understand that, by itself, power is worthless. Its only value lies in what it allows you to achieve. For those who, like him, wish to leave their mark on history, he makes a useful study.”

  “Yes? And what have you learnt from him, exactly?”

  Tignelli paused, as if to indicate that he knew this was nothing more than a game the two of them were playing, one he wanted to savour. “There’s a saying of his I particularly treasure: ‘In war, it is better to have one bad general than two good ones.’ In other words, it is not always necessary to be right. But it is always necessary to be bold. Does that answer your question, Capitano?”

  “Is that why you’ve bought the Banca Cattolica?” she asked, watching him closely. “Some people would consider that a bold move, given the state of its finances.”

  If Tignelli was surprised at how much she knew, he didn’t show it. He shrugged. “A business speculation – a somewhat sentimental one, actually. I hate to see a once-great Venetian institution in difficulties.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t lose any more senior partners, then.”

  He smiled. “You know, Captain, you’re wasted on these small investigations. Someone as notable as you should be taking a more prominent role in this city’s administration. Imagine what it would do for the role of women within the Carabinieri if you were its public face.”

  “That sounds like tokenism to me.”

  “Well, bear it in mind.” Tignelli seemed to assume that such a position was completely within his gift, she noted. “I must admit, I’m somewhat surprised to see you here. Pleasantly surprised, of course. But I understood that the investigation into the death of Signor Cassandre had been transferred to other departments.”

  “You’re very well informed.”

  He didn’t deny it. “And it occurs to me that, now you are no longer part of that investigation, there can be no obstacle to my taking you out to dinner.”

  She almost laughed at the brazenness of it. “I don’t think that would be very appropriate, do you?”

  “No,” he agreed. “It would be rather deliciously inappropriate.” He came closer. “I would like to hear your views, as a Carabinieri officer and a Venetian, on what we can do to clean up the open sewer that our city has become. But I confess that I would also enjoy your company as a woman.”

  Taken aback, all she managed by way of a comeback was, “I thought you Masons weren’t very keen on women.”

  “And as I told you, Captain, my interest in Freemasonry is purely academic. They’re useful sheep, nothing more.”

  If she’d hoped to put pressure on him by coming here tonight, she realised, she had clearly failed. A hand tapped Tignelli’s shoulder, eager for a word with the great man, and he turned away into the crowd without a backward glance.

  THIRTY-THREE

  AS NIGHT FELL, the hacker’s real work began.

  He knew there was no such thing as a completely secure internet connection. He had to trust that by the time he came to the attention of the world’s security services, he would have moved on, his tracks well covered.

  Even so, he took what precautions he could. At the technical college – which was always deserted at night – he first logged onto TOR, then onto a Virtual Private Network service offering anonymous IP addresses, and finally Carnivia. Only then did he access a search engine called Shodan.

  Shodan was unique in that instead of searching for websites, it allowed the user to search for devices connected to the internet. Its creator, a twenty-nine-year-old programmer called John Matherly, had said that his aim was to show how large and insecure the Internet of Things had become. His assumption was that if he revealed how lax most devices’ security was, manufacturers would be shamed into recalling their products.

  Instead, the manufacturers simply ignored Shodan, or at best issued new, more expensive upgrades.

  To date, pranksters – one could hardly call them hackers, since no actual hacking was necessary – had used Shodan to turn car washes on and off remotely, accessed a city’s traffic-control system, and shouted abuse at startled security guards through their own monitoring systems.

  It was something rather more than a prank the hacker had in mind now.

  Setting one of the parameters to “country: Italy” and another to “architecture: MIPSEL”, he searched until he found what he was looking for.

  He clicked on the IP address, adjusted a setting, and went off to do something else. When he came back, the readings on the screen confirmed that he’d just managed to raise the temperature in a power plant in Lombardy by one degree.

  Immediately he reset the thermostat back the way it had been, before writing a small piece of executable script and adding it to his files. Then he closed the connection and moved on.

  Using Shodan, he wandered right across Italy, choosing his targets. A hospital in Friuli-Venezia. The subway system in Milan. A network of seven thousand police-linked burglar alarms in Lazio. A flood-control system in Abruzzo.

  At one point he came across a brand of wireless baby monitors that required no password or login. As he considered whether this could be of any use, he found himself looking at a sleeping baby on one of the company’s products.

  As he watched, the baby’s father came into the room, a young man in shorts with heavily tattooed arms. He crouched down beside the sleeping child and, tenderly, planted a kiss on its forehead.

  “Sleep well, little fella,” he whispered in English.

  The baby stirred, opened one eye, then began to yell.

  “Shit!” the father said heavily. Resignedly, he reached down into the cot to pick it up.

  Involuntarily, Tareq laughed. The young man froze, then stared incredulously at the baby monitor. Holding the baby to his shoulder, he went out of shot. Over the baby’s squalls, Tareq heard him calling to his wife.

  “Janey! Hey, come here!”

  When his wife came in, scolding him for waking the child, he pointed at the monitor. “That thing just laughed at me.”

  “Rufe, what are you talking about?”

  “The monitor. I just heard it laugh.”

  Janey was wearing very short boxer briefs and a tank top, no bra. As the two of them peered at the baby monitor, Tareq couldn’t resist saying, “Boo!”

  “Fucking A!” the man yelled, jumping back. The baby yelled even louder. His wife, with rather more presence of mind, reached round the back of the monitor and yanked out the lead. Tare
q’s screen went blank.

  Still laughing, he scrubbed the baby monitors from his list and moved on.

  It was as he was investigating the capabilities of Yale’s new internet-connected deadbolts that he thought again about that family. If he was successful in his plans, he would destroy a major part of the life they currently took for granted. He might even kill them. How did he feel about that?

  He had never killed someone at close quarters. But he felt no more remorse about destroying that baby, he realised, than he would about picking off an opponent in a video game. It only reinforced his resolve to unleash a wave of destruction that would annihilate technology itself.

  A level playing field.

  He moved on from the locks, and spent rather more time examining supermarket supply chains. These were more sophisticated than most networks. When a customer purchased, say, a pear, the scanner at the till sent the information back to the store’s own inventory system. If it looked as if the store might run out of pears in the next twelve hours – based on a complex algorithm factoring in variables such as the price of pears at rivals’ stores, the fact that shoppers tended to consume more fresh fruit at the weekend, any special offers on bananas coming up that might tempt people away from their usual fruit, and whether there was a surplus of melons in the back that needed to be got rid of – it would automatically order up more pears from one of the huge Central Distribution Centres, or CDCs, dotted around the country. If enough people bought enough pears, a stock-control program at the CDC would inform its opposite number at the grower’s, and inside a vast ripening warehouse a sprayer would adjust the mixture of nitrogen gas and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, speeding up the ripening process.

  As a distribution system it was both incredibly efficient and incredibly fragile. Effectively, it meant that tens of millions of people were never more than a week away from starvation.

  Most of Europe’s big supermarkets used encryption systems to move data around their networks. Unlike manufacturers of baby monitors, they had a powerful commercial interest in maintaining security: their sales information could be useful to their competitors. What they were unaware of, though, and the hacker knew full well, was that the world’s data encryption standards had been designed by a team of American software engineers that had been infiltrated by agents from the National Security Agency, as part of an operation called BULLRUN. The agents deliberately built weaknesses into the protocols, so that the NSA would be able to spy on companies without their knowledge.

  Tareq set to work finding a way into the supply chains, using an exploit left behind by BULLRUN. It was intricate, absorbing work, and he didn’t notice the time passing. He jumped as a voice at the door said, “Sabah el kheer.”

  Quickly minimising his working window, he looked up. Somehow, night had turned to day. “Good morning.”

  “You’re here early,” the teacher said, smiling. “Still keen, then?”

  “Of course.”

  “I spoke to my brother. It’s all arranged – I’ll forward you the details. Of course you’ll have to start at the bottom. But if you have the right attitude and work hard, it’s a good life.” The teacher came and leant in close. “Americans like to tip, he says. Even for the most stupid things. If you mend their wi-fi, or show them how to get their emails, they’ll shower you with dollars.”

  The teacher looked at the taskbar along the bottom of the screen, where Tareq’s window was minimised. “What’s this?” Before Tareq could answer, his hand had gone to the mouse and opened it.

  Tareq had hacked into the mainframe of Esselunga, Italy’s largest supermarket, and given himself root privileges to access the servers controlling stock levels. “It’s nothing,” he said quickly. “That is, I was just curious.”

  The teacher gave Tareq a startled look. “This is hacking, you realise that? There are laws about this. You could be arrested. We could all be arrested – they can trace it back to here.”

  “It’s secure. I’m using TOR—”

  “TOR? Why?” The teacher stared at Tareq. “What else have you hacked?”

  “Nothing,” Tareq lied.

  “Listen,” the teacher said, more gently. “I did some stupid stuff myself, when I was your age. I understand the appeal. The feeling that you know more than they do, so why shouldn’t you go wherever you want? After all, if their security is so feeble, it’s their own fault, right?” He wagged his finger. “Wrong. There is private property on the internet, just as in the real world, and the penalties for going wherever you want are much, much greater. We’ll talk about this today, in class.”

  When the other students arrived, the teacher initiated a discussion about computer ethics. Tareq did his best to look like a shamefaced kid who’d been carried away by all the knowledge the teacher had imparted in his lessons.

  “What other damage can hacking do?” the teacher asked, towards the end of the talk.

  A student raised his hand. “Hacking can kill.”

  The teacher raised his eyebrows. “Would you like to give us an example?”

  “The Fréjus road tunnel.”

  Tareq stiffened. How did anyone know about that?

  “There’s film of the air turbines, just before the crash,” the student was saying. “They’re saying it was a hack.”

  While the others studied network protocols, Tareq surreptitiously did a search. The student was right: the film of the Fréjus demonstration had been posted online, along with some stupid slogan. So far it was only posted on a few jihadist websites. But those websites were exactly the kinds of places the West’s security services monitored.

  Which meant, in turn, that the NSA would pick up on it. Even without those splitters on the fibre-optic bearers, their eavesdropping capabilities were formidable. Electronic ears and eyes at listening stations in Cyprus, Bermuda, Great Britain, New Zealand and Gibraltar would even now be swivelling in his direction, trying to sniff him out, to isolate his digital footprints from all the other billions of computer users around the world. He was fairly sure they wouldn’t be able to trace him immediately, but it was a risk he couldn’t afford to take.

  At the back of the classroom, unseen by any of the other students, he logged onto an internet dating website. Going to an account he had set up months before, he wrote a message to the commander, then saved it as a draft.

  He logged out, then logged in again under a different name and sent a message to a Muslim girl in Morocco. The girl had never received any dates from the site, which was perhaps not surprising since her face was entirely covered by a hijab. The commander would get the message, realise there was a draft waiting for him, and log into the other account using the same credentials Tareq had used. Then he would reply the same way.

  As Tareq closed the window, he glanced up. Across the classroom, the teacher was looking at him with a troubled expression.

  While the class began an exercise, the teacher stayed at his own computer, clicking repeatedly. Every so often his eyes would stray towards Tareq, his expression ever more troubled.

  He’s checking up on me, Tareq thought. Following my trail.

  He wondered how quickly he would be able to finish what he had to do there. It looked as if he was going to have to accelerate his plans.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  DANIELE BARBO TAILED the cloaked female figure along the narrow canalside pavements of Carnivia, hanging back so that she was only just in sight. It was only a precaution: he had used his administrator privileges to become invisible, as had Max.

  That’s her, Max said, using a private mode of speech that only Daniele could see. Domino9859.

  Are you sure?

  Certain. Max’s administrator privileges also allowed him to search Carnivia users’ activity logs. This is who changed the settings on the Fréjus tunnel turbines. Who she is in RL, I have no idea, of course.

  Domino9859 was going into the area of San Polo just beyond the Rialto bridge. Centuries ago, the city fathers had designated this as a
place where prostitutes could walk around bare-breasted, to prove that they were genuinely female and not transvestites; almost seven hundred years later, the effects of that decree still shaped what happened here, both in the real Venice and its digital equivalent. For Carnivians seeking pleasure, this was Party Central.

  It was the first time Daniele had been in Carnivia since stepping down. The streets were more crowded than he remembered them. Election posters hung from balconies, and more were being towed up and down the canals on barges. They bore slogans that made no sense to him: “Carnivia Libre”; “Oldtimer Alliance”; “Taxback Now”.

  As they passed through the crowds, an avatar in the basic, uncustomised cloak and mask of a new user suddenly shrieked: LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! Ripping off his clothes, he stood there naked, writhing strangely. Daniele saw he was wearing a kind of sash. On it were the words: “I VOTE TO FLOAT”.

  What the . . .? Daniele muttered.

  Newb-hazing, Max explained. Oldtimers test for specs by offering them a float badge. If they accept, they find themselves running a prank script.

  “Specs”? “Oldtimers”? They were terms Daniele wasn’t familiar with.

  “Specs” are the speculators who’ve only joined Carnivia in the hope of cashing in on a stock flotation. Oldtimers think only pre-Abdication members like themselves should be eligible to vote. But the most successful party, according to all the opinion polls, are the Taxbacks. They’re offering a straight deal: five bitcoins per vote, to be paid for by taxes on the whole user base after the election. When you think about it, that’s a pretty neat formula. Nobody wants to be liable for the tax but not get the bribe.

  You warned me this would happen, Daniele said sadly. I didn’t listen.