The Absolution Page 20

  Excitement prickled her skin. I may not have the evidence yet. But I’m building a picture.

  She sat back, thinking. Then she pulled a memory stick out of her pocket and downloaded everything.

  A message flashed up.

  SECURITY WARNING. Downloading classified material may only be carried out with the express permission of your Command. In no circumstances may such material be removed from NSA-approved facilities.

  She clicked “Continue”.

  Was it just the insubstantial weight of the memory stick in her pocket making her jumpy as she walked back to her car? Every shadow seemed to hide a figure, watching her; every surveillance camera seemed to swivel in her direction. She jumped when a horn blared behind her, but it was only a group of men heading out of the base at high speed and in high spirits for some late-night R&R.

  She took a right out of the camp and drove slowly along Viale della Pace, scrutinising her rear-view mirror. There was no one coming after her. But she found those words of her father’s favourite poem echoing in her head, all the same:

  This season’s Daffodil,

  She never hears,

  What change, what chance, what chill,

  Cut down last year’s;

  But with bold countenance,

  And knowledge small,

  Esteems her seven days’ continuance

  To be perpetual.

  Had it been a warning? A prophecy? Or just a statement of the obvious: with knowledge comes fear?

  Back in the centre of Vicenza, she parked her car in the usual place, an underground multi-storey. As she got out, she heard footsteps coming up behind her, rubber soles scuffing on rough concrete. She turned, panicking, her hand reaching automatically for the can of pepper spray that, ever since the events in the caves of Longare, she’d carried everywhere she went.

  “Hai qualche monetina?”

  It was just a young beggar, a junkie, asking for money. She shook her head. He started to push forward into her personal space, still muttering demands, then backed off rapidly when she showed him the spray. Even so, the adrenalin was pumping as she walked to her building.

  She let herself in. The hallway was quiet, but the door to the ground-floor apartment where Alberto, the handyman, lived was open. She heard voices. As she pressed the button for the tiny lift, Alberto hurried out, beaming. In his hand was a glass of grappa.

  “Ah, Signorina Boland! C’è qualcuno che aspetta di vederla.”

  She’d never had anyone wait to see her here, let alone at this time of night. She was about to tell Alberto he must be mistaken when a tall, lean figure stepped into the hallway behind him.

  “Good evening, Holly,” Ian Gilroy said. “I hope you don’t mind. It seemed like the easiest way to get hold of you.”

  Sharing the tiny lift as it lurched upwards to the fifth floor, she looked at the wall rather than meet his eye. She could feel him examining her thoughtfully, but he chose not to say anything until they were inside her apartment. She saw his eyes flick over to the spidergram, and his eyebrows raised briefly, but he turned to face her without comment.

  “Why are you here?” she said without preamble.

  “Holly,” he said gently, “I understand why you’re suspicious of me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been checking up on me. Perhaps you’re wondering if I had anything to do with what happened to your father.” His candid blue eyes met hers, unflinching. “Indeed, I can see why you might think I did.”

  He placed the bottle of grappa on the table. “It’s time I told you the truth, Holly. Hear me out, and then decide whether I’m the monster you think I am.”

  Eventually she consented to have a drink with him. They sat on her tiny terrace with its views over the Berici Hills, the lights of Vicenza twinkling in the foreground.

  “What I’m about to tell you is highly secret,” he began. “In 1968, I was sent to this country for the first time. My orders were simple: to stop the communists from getting into power. Langley felt that there were new challenges in Italy that required a new approach . . . I was told I would even have political cover to overrule the Section Head, Bob Garland, should it become necessary.”

  “You came in with orders to kick ass, in other words.”

  He nodded. “The strange thing, though, was that I didn’t have to. Instead, it was as if my arrival had galvanised Bob. He responded with a flurry of initiatives, new operations, special-access projects . . . I had my hands full just deterring him from the most extreme. Frankly, it would have taken very little for our work in Italy to go down the same path we had already taken in Greece and South America. Certainly there was no one back in Washington trying to rein us in.”

  He was silent for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “Quite early on, it became clear to me that the Red Brigades were going to be a particular problem. They were vicious, well organised and highly disciplined. I was determined to undermine their influence . . . and that was when an asset by the name of Mariano Cardillo fell into my lap.

  “Cardillo was a natural – he took to a life in the shadows like a duck to water: one might almost say he was addicted to it. He was also a dangerous right-wing extremist who worshipped power and violence – those were his only true gods, I think, although he liked to talk about restoring the honour and prestige of the Catholic Church as well. He had been recruited to Gladio in the usual way, by NATO, and given paramilitary training, but he was never going to have the patience to wait until the communists’ tanks were rolling across the Dolomites before he got involved in the action.

  “He had decided, in fact, to infiltrate the enemy, on his own initiative. When I came across him, it was in the guise of a low-level Red Brigades fellow-traveller, a part-time anarchist who helped them out with bomb-making, gun-running, that kind of thing. I thought I was turning him, but to my surprise, during that initial, wary conversation, it became clear that he was interested in using me.

  “Working entirely on his own, he had succeeded in gaining the trust of the Red Brigades’ leadership. Now he wanted my help in getting right to the heart of the organisation, from which position he could, he assured me, help me to destroy it completely.

  “It was almost too good to be true. For several months I remained suspicious, looking for a trap. But he proved himself again and again. He had acquired the nom de guerre of Paolo by then.” He looked at her to see if she had remembered that was the name of one of Daniele’s kidnappers. Satisfied, he continued, “And in that guise, with a little help from us, he rose rapidly through the terrorists’ ranks. The only difficulty was the perennial one with all double agents: to what extent do you use the information they give you, when doing so may blow their cover? It’s an irony of these situations that the more valuable the asset’s information, the less one is inclined to risk acting on it.”

  “So you did nothing?”

  “Oh, we did what we could. This isn’t some elaborate mea culpa for standing on the sidelines, Holly. But it was clear that we were going to have to be smart, if we wanted to both disrupt the Red Brigades and protect Paolo’s identity.

  “Above all, though, we had to stop Moro’s Historic Compromise, his plan to bring the communists into a coalition government.” He grimaced. “The strategy we hit on was a beautiful one, though I say so myself – beautiful but terrible. We realised that, if we could only persuade Moscow that the Historic Compromise would take the Italian Communist Party out of Moscow’s control and into that of the Christian Democrats, they themselves would order the Red Brigades to undermine it in any way they could. And in Paolo, we believed, we had the means to make that happen.

  “And so it proved. Paolo fed back certain titbits of information suggesting the Historic Compromise was all a plot on behalf of the moderates; some judicious leaks from within the Christian Democrats reinforced the illusion, and within a remarkably short space of time we were in the fortuitous position of having an agent at the heart of a terrorist orga
nisation which was now dedicated to exactly the same tactical objectives as ourselves.”

  “A terrorist organisation as your asset?” she said ironically. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  He nodded. “The problem, of course, was that there was now absolutely nothing restraining Paolo from pursuing his own right-wing agenda. Every action he carried out, no matter how barbaric, had the effect of impressing his supposed masters in Moscow with his brutality, his Red Brigades colleagues with his ideological purity, and Langley with his usefulness as a double agent. Effectively, Bob and I had lost control of the situation. Paolo did what he chose. The rest of us were just along for the ride.”

  “And Daniele’s kidnap?”

  “The first we knew of that was when we read about it in the press.”

  “So that’s why you feel guilty about Daniele. Without you, his mutilation would never have happened.”

  He inclined his head.

  “And how does this relate to my dad? Where does he come into the picture?”

  “After the Red Brigades assassinated Aldo Moro, it was clear to me that Paolo had to be stopped at any cost.” He shrugged. “A cynic might say that we had achieved our objective: with its principal architect dead, the Historic Compromise soon died as well. But I swear that if Paolo was ever given a direct order to do such a thing, it came from Moscow, not us. In any case, we made a concerted effort to round them up – all of them, even Paolo. But somehow he got wind of it and slipped back into the old Gladio network from which he’d come. There were plenty of right-wing Italian border officials, secret service officers and so on eager to help him. He was spirited away; first to Argentina, I believe, and later to Japan.

  “But he didn’t lie low for long – as I said, terror was a kind of addiction for him; and while both America and Russia might have been satisfied now the power-sharing proposal was dead, for Paolo and the other fascists that had only ever been a stepping stone. At some point he returned and resumed his former activities within Gladio. Only now he suited himself as to whether he claimed his atrocities in the name of the Brigate Rosse or some right-wing terror group.”

  “And then Andreotti revealed Gladio’s existence.”

  Gilroy nodded. “A setback for them. But, as your father discovered, not one that they intended to be derailed by. They quickly found ways to regroup, either by infiltrating existing Masonic fraternities or by setting up their own illegal ones. I was aware it was happening, even before your father wrote that memorandum – I’d been trying to track Paolo ever since he’d returned to Italy – but his report was the first time I realised that they were operating a lodge at Camp Darby.”

  “So when he came to you . . .”

  “What I told you – that I simply thanked him and passed the report up the line – was a lie, Holly,” he said quietly.

  “I knew it.”

  He held up a hand. “Wait. I think this is where you have perhaps jumped to a wrong conclusion. When you raised it, I thought – forgive me – that it would be better for all concerned if we were able to leave the past well alone. It was selfish of me – I was prioritising my own feelings of guilt over your right to know the truth.” He hesitated. “The fact is, I asked your father to see what else he could find out.”

  She stared at him. “You recruited him? You sent him back into that nest of vipers . . .?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said simply. “It was a misjudgement. You must understand – what he was describing had Paolo’s fingerprints all over it: exactly the same organisational structure as the Red Brigades, only with Masonic lodges instead of revolutionary cells. And there was no one else I could use.”

  She thought a moment. “What exactly did he do?”

  “The gladiators already believed that, as a NATO officer, your father must be sympathetic to their ideology. I thought that if he appeared sufficiently enthusiastic, he could get close to the ringleaders, along with whichever Italian or NATO officers were abetting them. Then we’d go in and roll them all up in one swoop – not just Paolo, but the entire network.”

  “He would have gone back to Mr Boccardo, the neighbour who first alerted him. He’d have asked him to get them both inside the group.”

  Gilroy nodded. “He was getting results – we spoke about it on the telephone, guardedly of course, but he sounded positive. He hinted that he’d been able to keep some kind of record – names, dates, details: all the small stuff that allows a case officer to piece together what’s really going on. Unfortunately, before he could deliver it to me, he suffered that stroke.”

  “In his report, he mentioned someone called Caesar.”

  “Yes. I’m guessing that was Paolo himself. Or an invention of Paolo’s, to make it seem as if he was in touch with some higher and even more powerful authority. If anyone questioned his orders, all he had to do was say that Caesar agreed.”

  She was silent, thinking it all through.

  “So you see,” he said gently, “it isn’t only Daniele I feel guilty about. It’s you. I admit it: when I saw an opportunity to support your application for a transfer to Italy, I seized it. I wanted to make amends, as well as to see what sort of person Ted’s daughter had become. I never imagined that we’d become friends as well.”

  If we are friends.

  What Gilroy had just told her had the ring of truth. No one, surely, could invent a story that fitted the facts so well, right down to the tiniest detail. And yet something made her hold back from saying that she believed him.

  “No doubt you want more proof, Holly,” he said, reading her mind. “And believe me, I’ve been asking round all my contacts from those days, trying to find something – anything – that might convince you. But it’s all too long ago. And I’m concerned that the more people I remind about activities they believed were safely hidden away a generation past, the more likely they are to decide that one or both of us would be better out of the picture.”

  She thought. “You say my father kept some kind of record.”

  “That’s right, I believe he did.”

  She said softly, “You want me to look for it, don’t you? It isn’t just to convince me. Even after all this time, you still want to know what happened.”

  “I do, yes.”

  She nodded slowly. “And I will. If those notes can be found, I’ll find them. And then we’ll know the truth.”

  FORTY

  IN SICILY, TAREQ was woken by the sound of his phone ringing. He reached for it immediately. Only a handful of people had this number, and none of them would use it except in an emergency.

  When he glanced at the screen, he expected to see a caller ID starting with 00 218, the dialling code for Libya. But, oddly, there was no number on the screen. It didn’t say “Blocked”, or “Unknown”: it was simply blank.

  “Hello?” he answered hesitantly.

  The voice that replied was also speaking English, but in a strangely mechanical monotone.

  “You - need - to - move - immediately.”

  It was a text-to-speech converter, he realised. The caller wasn’t speaking, he was typing. “Who is this?”

  “A - friend. You - have - been - betrayed.”

  “The teacher? Was it him?”

  There was a long pause. Tareq could hear the clicking of a keyboard. Then the voice said, “Those - who - recruited - you - are - in - the - pay - of - infidels. Do - you - have - an - escape - plan?”

  Tareq’s mind was racing with questions. The commander a traitor? Could it be true? But he knew that in this shadow war they were fighting, men could be turned by many means, fair or foul. So he only said, “Yes. I have a plan.”

  “Do - it.” There was a click, and the voice was gone.

  FORTY-ONE

  SLEEP WAS IMPOSSIBLE.

  After several hours, Holly abandoned the attempt and got back in her car. In the pre-dawn darkness the Ponte della Libertà was deserted. The lights of Venice glowed through a faint sea-mist, a haze like tracing paper, through which she co
uld just make out the skyline of Cannaregio.

  She left the car at Tronchetto for the ten-minute walk to Calle Barbo. Venice at this hour was like an Escher labyrinth, eerily deserted: more than once she found her way blocked by a canal that had somehow turned a corner in front of her.

  She pulled on the brass bell handle next to the lion’s-head postbox. To her surprise the door opened almost immediately. Daniele was wearing his normal daytime garb: T-shirt, sneakers, jeans. In his hand was a fork.

  “What do you want?” he said. “I was just having lunch.”

  “Daniele, it’s four o’clock in the morning.”

  “Not in São Paulo,” he said reasonably.

  “What does São Paulo have to do with it?”

  “Nothing. I’m just illustrating that time is a man-made construct. I suppose you want to talk to me?”

  “Well, I certainly haven’t come all this way to listen to you talk about man-made constructs.”

  “There’s nothing to discuss, Holly. We’re not together any more.”

  “I know,” she said impatiently. “That doesn’t mean we never speak to each other again.”

  He hesitated. “You’d better come in, then.”

  He took her to the vaulted old kitchen at the rear of Ca’ Barbo. Although she knew that he was an excellent cook, capable of following complex recipes to the letter, today he was eating the simple cold pasta dish Venetians call salsa aurora: a sweet-and-sour mix of fried peppers, tomatoes, courgettes and slices of peach.

  Watching him eat, she discovered she was hungry too, and reached for a fork. “I know you’ve always thought I was crazy to trust Ian Gilroy,” she told him between mouthfuls. “And if you’d asked me six hours ago, I’d have said you were probably right. But now I’m not so sure.”

  She related her earlier conversation, and his face darkened.

  “But this is what he does,” he said. “Gilroy’s genius, I realised many years ago, is that he tells stories. Brilliant, shiny stories that somehow seem to offer you whatever it is that you most want in the world. In your case, he knows you want to believe him, because the alternative is just so unthinkable.”