The Abomination Read online

  “What sort of relationship did it become?” Kat asked. “Were you married?”

  Bob Findlater looked rueful. “I was, at the time. But not to Soraya. I didn’t even know we’d had a child together until after I’d gone back home. A neighbour who knew I cared for Soraya wrote me to say she’d had a baby girl. I wrote back, but I never heard anything.”

  Eventually his marriage broke up. Childless, he then decided to try and track Soraya and Melina down.

  “Turned out Soraya had died towards the end of the war, and Melina was brought up in an orphanage. Well, of course that just made me even more determined to find her. She’d be almost eighteen by now – not too late to go to college. I thought I could offer to pay for that.” He took a breath. “Then I found out she came to Italy to work as a nanny.”

  Piola and Kat exchanged glances.

  Findlater nodded. “I realised fairly quickly that if you try to enter this country illegally, you pass through the hands of some pretty unpleasant characters. It’s my belief she was forced into prostitution instead.”

  “So you’re still looking for her?”

  “Not personally – my Italian’s patchy, as I said. No, I found some good people and paid them to do the job for me.”

  “That would be Barbara Holton and Jelena Babić?”

  “That’s right. Barbara ran a small organisation that had been doing good work in Croatia, reuniting victims of the war with their families. I found her online, did some background checks. She seemed very competent. I knew she’d be able to do a better job than I had, and it tied in with her own work on the long-term consequences of war.

  “She recruited a friend from Croatia to help – that was Jelena, of course. To begin with I tried to tag along, but I soon realised they were more effective on their own, so I went back to the US for the Christmas holidays and left them to it. It was only when I checked into their hotel yesterday that I heard the terrible news from the desk clerk.”

  Kat thought hard. It all made sense, but the first rule was to look for whatever could be corroborated or verified and double-check it. With both Barbara and Jelena dead, that might be difficult. “How did you pay them?”

  “In cash, initially. Two thousand dollars, plus a thousand for expenses, with another three thousand to come if they found her.”

  Kat saw Piola make a note. There hadn’t been any cash in the women’s hotel room, but then again, the killer might have stolen it.

  “Did she give you a receipt?”

  “Yes. But I’m sorry to say I haven’t kept it.”

  “How did you contact Barbara when you needed to speak to her?” The numbers retrieved from the woman’s European cell phone had mostly been of local shops and bars.

  “By email, mainly.”

  “Do you still have the emails?”

  “Some – the ones that are stored on my laptop.”

  “What about the letter from the neighbour saying you had a daughter? Do you have that?”

  “Sure, back home.”

  “And your UNPROFOR documentation?”

  “Likewise.”

  Piola said, “We found a lock of hair in the hotel room Jelena and Barbara were sharing. Do you know anything about that?”

  For the first time Bob Findlater looked puzzled. “I guess they must have taken hair from one of Melina’s relatives,” he said slowly. “To match the DNA, in case there was any doubt when they found her.”

  “They didn’t tell you?”

  Findlater shook his head. “As I said, I left that side of things to Barbara. Maybe that was naive of me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before I left, I saw how fearless the two of them were – questioning prostitutes and pimps, getting physically threatened but never taking no for an answer. I assume that’s why they were killed.”

  Neither Kat nor Piola responded.

  “Well?” he said. “That is the most likely explanation, isn’t it?”

  “It’s one possibility,” Kat said at last. “At the moment we’re not ruling anything out.”

  “Have you considered,” Piola said carefully, “that the child may not be yours? The UN peacekeeping mission was, as I recall, ultimately unsuccessful. The war escalated, and many of the Bosniaks were driven out of Krajina. Life for civilians was . . . difficult. Particularly for the women.”

  “You mean Soraya might have been raped?” Findlater shook his head. “From what I know of the timings, that doesn’t seem possible. But even if it turns out that Melina isn’t my natural daughter, she’s definitely Soraya’s. If I wasn’t there to protect Soraya, and the worst did happen, Melina’s doubly my responsibility.”

  “Melina’s fortunate that you’re wealthy enough to take on a dependent,” Kat said. “What do you do, incidentally?”

  “After I left the army, I went to work for a private contractor. We provide security and training packages to multi-national companies, that kind of thing. I do all right.”

  They ran over the interview one more time. Bob Findlater was completely consistent in his answers.

  “We’ll need you to stay in Venice for a week or so,” Kat said at last. “We may have some more questions.”

  “No problem. It’ll give me a chance to keep looking for Melina.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Don’t worry. I can take care of myself.”

  “I thought the same,” Piola said. “The one who got me had a gun.”

  Findlater stared at Piola, only now connecting the colonel’s ravaged face with his own situation. “Jeez. These guys mean business, huh?”

  “It appears so. You must assure us that you won’t continue looking for your daughter. It may not be safe.”

  Findlater nodded reluctantly. “I guess.”

  “The fact is,” Kat added, “we don’t even have any reason to believe she’s still in Venice. If events happened as you suggest, the traffickers would almost certainly have moved her on after they’d killed Barbara and Jelena.”

  The American sighed. “That’s what I figured. It’s just hard to give up, you know?”

  “We’ll take a DNA sample from you, just in case. That way if we do find her, we’ll be able to link her to you immediately.” Kat took a disposable swab kit out of the drawer and pulled on the gloves. “I’m sure you’re familiar with these. We just need to rub this bud round the inside of your mouth.”

  Findlater hesitated. “Will it really help? As you said, she may not even be my biological daughter.”

  “It’ll speed things up if she is, though.”

  He leant forward so that Kat could rub the swab around the inside of his mouth. As she did so, her face only inches from his, she became aware that his blue eyes were locked intently on hers. Disturbed, she forced herself to concentrate on what she was doing.

  As she put the bud into the paper sleeve and sealed it, he gave her the ghost of a smile. He fancies me, she thought.

  “Thanks,” she said, peeling off the gloves and extending her hand formally to shake his. “We’ll be in touch, Mr Findlater.”

  “Amazing,” Piola said when the American had gone.

  “Extraordinary,” she agreed.

  “After all this time, we finally have answers to almost every question we’ve been asking ourselves. It all fits. The photograph, the hair. . .”

  “What about the approach Barbara Holton made to the Americans at Caserma Ederle?” she objected.

  Piola shrugged. “As he said, finding Melina tied in with Barbara’s own work.”

  There was a long silence as both of them thought through the interview, looking for inconsistencies.

  “It can be hard, sometimes,” Piola said slowly, “when the correct answer finally presents itself, to acknowledge that it is the correct answer. Psychologically, I mean. When there have been so many false positives, it’s easy to treat a breakthrough as just another one.”

  She nodded.

  “On the other hand,” he added,
“we have to be sceptical. It’s our job.”

  She looked at him. “You don’t believe him either, do you?”

  “Something’s not right,” Piola said. He got to his feet, unable to sit still any longer. “I don’t know what it is. But somewhere in all that Disney-movie crap about his long-lost daughter and how he just wants to change her life, there’s a nasty little lie. I’m sure of it.”

  “It’s the lack of phone records that bothers me. If Barbara was working for him, why isn’t there some kind of evidence trail? The only thing that definitely links them is that we know some of the prostitutes reported an American man asking questions about a Croatian girl.”

  “We should show his picture to some of them. His passport photo will do – we can get that off the immigration guys at the Guardia di Finanza. And while we’re at it, let’s check he really left and entered the country when he said he did.”

  She nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Did you notice,” he said thoughtfully, “that he was a little strange about having his DNA taken?”

  She blushed.

  “Oh,” Piola said. “I see.” He rubbed his jaw. “Although I don’t, actually. I mean, certainly, a beautiful woman swabbing the inside of your mouth isn’t something that happens every day. But it started before that, when you first told him you’d need DNA. He seemed . . . angry, somehow.”

  “Why might that be?”

  “I don’t know. But there have been cases where a killer involves himself in a murder investigation, apparently just as a witness to help the police, only for his DNA to trip him up.”

  “We don’t have DNA from the crime scene, though.”

  “No,” Piola agreed. “But he may not know that.” He sighed. “You know, Avvocato Marcello is going to love this. Every last loose end tied neatly into a bow. It’ll all be handed over to Interpol and the organised crime team before the ink’s dry on our reports.”

  “OK,” she said. “Let’s hypothesise for a minute. Say Findlater isn’t telling the whole truth. Where does that take us?”

  “It means. . .” Piola said. He took a breath. “It means this is even bigger than we thought. It means that whatever or whoever we’re on the trail of, they’re the kind of people who can whistle up a plausible ex-military American with solutions to all our questions any time they want to.”

  “More than that,” she said. “It means they know what the questions are. They know where we’ve got to with the investigation.”

  “Marcello?”

  “Who else?”

  There was another long silence.

  “So,” he said at last. “Just suppose we were foolhardy enough to continue investigating in the face of possible corruption from our own side, Mafia death threats and American ex-soldiers bearing lies. What would we do next?”

  She said, “We’d take the fight to them. We’d tell Marcello we don’t believe a word of it. Then we’d go back to Findlater and tell him the same. Hell, maybe we even arrest him for the murders. We’d rattle their cages, and wait for them to panic.”

  Forty-one

  HOLLY INTERCEPTED GILROY on his next visit to the Education Centre, following him into his classroom. Shutting the door, she explained what she’d learnt.

  “This is remarkable, Holly,” he said when she’d finished. “Well done.”

  She flushed with pleasure.

  “There’s an old Venetian saying,” he added. “‘A fish stinks first from the head.’ And this stinks plenty. I think you may have just found those responsible for putting together Dragan Korovik’s military strategy.”

  “Not just his military strategy, either.” She handed him the abstract. “Read this.”

  Pulling his glasses out of his shirt pocket, Gilroy read the title aloud. “From ‘God on Our Side’ to Genocide: Libidinal Frenzy as a Precursor to Mass Psychosis. Sounds pretty dry.”

  “It gets less so, believe me.”

  He put it on the arm of the chair and read.

  Abstract

  A number of psychological studies have explored the circumstances in which individuals can be induced to harm others. In Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974), Professor Stanley Milgram describes persuading volunteers to give electric shocks to strangers, merely by using verbal prompts such as “It is absolutely essential that you continue”, a process that has come to be known as “moral authorisation”.

  In the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), Professor Philip Zimbardo examined the behaviour of twelve students assigned the role of “guards” over twelve “prisoners”. The latter were deliberately “dehumanised” by being given numbers instead of names. This experiment was, notoriously, abandoned because of the increasingly sadistic behaviour of the “guards”.

  This paper looks at a number of twentieth-century conflicts in which extreme acts of violence have taken place. In addition to “moral authorisation” and “dehumanisation”, it identifies a number of other possible precursors to violence. These include “ethnic otherness”, “historical inevitability”, “blaming the victim” and “collective paranoia”.

  The author uses Freud’s concept of “libidinal frenzy” to describe how a combination of such factors may induce a kind of mass psychosis in which whole populations can only be satisfied by each other’s extermination.

  Keywords: collective psychosis, crimes against humanity, mass rape, religious hatred.

  “My God,” Gilroy breathed. “It’s like he’s describing a step-by-step guide to creating a genocide.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And the full paper?”

  “Even more curious. Usually you can get hold of academic papers pretty easily – that’s what the internet was originally built for, after all. But when you enter these details into a service such as PubMed, it comes back with ‘No results found’. Doherty’s article is never cited, never referred to by other psychiatrists, never linked to. . . Either it wasn’t published after all, or it was somehow redacted – erased from the collective memory of every search engine and website on the net.”

  Gilroy thought a moment. “So,” he said at last. “What do we do with this remarkable trove of information, Holly Boland?”

  “I was hoping you might have some ideas on that.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “No one.”

  “Let’s keep it that way for now. I need to think it through.”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Noticing, he said, “Yes, Holly?”

  “Is it possible this was all a perfectly legitimate psy-ops operation? After all, destabilising foreign countries is hardly new territory for the US. We did it in Nicaragua, in Panama, Iraq. . .”

  “Sure. But in those countries we were either legitimately at war, or had presidential approval. And anyone stoking a conflict in the Balkans was doing it in the face of a United Nations resolution that actively forbade other states from getting involved. No, it seems to me that when you put all this together, you’ve got a kind of ad-hoc coalition of vested interests – private military, arms manufacturers, rogue NATO officers, even the Mafia – all working together to make sure the powder keg ignited.”

  “The thing I still can’t get my head round,” she said, “is what those priests were doing there.”

  “Presumably their role was to provide the ‘moral authorisation’ Doherty talks about. Preaching ethnic hatred in their sermons, and so on.”

  “But they must have known, if they’d read Doherty’s paper, that they’d be helping to tip their country into the most appalling violence.”

  “Perhaps they thought it was a price worth paying. Or maybe they’d simply convinced themselves that they were doing God’s work. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time religion has got mixed up with war. Voltaire put it well, Holly: ‘To make a man commit atrocities, first make him believe absurdities.’”

  Forty-two

  “HEY,” TRENT WOLFE said. “Daniele, right? I’m Trent, the President of Roc
aville, and this is my VP in charge of Mergers and Acquisitions, Jim Khalifi.”

  Neither man was older than twenty-six, and both were wearing shorts, sandals and faded hoodies. Daniele shook their hands, then took a seat.

  They were meeting in the lobby of the Cipriani, one of Venice’s finest and grandest old hotels, where the Americans were staying. Daniele wondered whether the Cipriani would try to enforce its notoriously strict dress code – gentlemen eating in the restaurant were expected to wear a tie, even in the humid summer months – or whether the fact that Trent had taken the Palladio Suite, a ten-thousand-dollar-a-night glass box suspended over the lagoon with its own private entrance and launch, had persuaded them to make an exception.

  All three ordered Cokes. Trent leant forward. “Listen, Dan, I’m going to jump straight to it. We think what you’ve done with Carnivia is just great. It’s so rare in these asshole marketing-led times to find a site where someone actually cares about the coding, right? Most of the kids we see today are only starting dotcoms in the hope they’ll do an IPO by the time they’re in college and sell out to Google before they graduate.”

  He spoke like a veteran from another age – which, in a sense, he was. Back in 2005, Rocaville.com had passed its one-million-user mark in just three months. On the back of that success, Trent Wolfe had gone around the world buying up internet businesses with a keen eye for what would be successful, and an almost total disregard for stock market valuations.

  “I never thought of Carnivia as a dotcom, actually,” Daniele said. “More as a kind of experiment.”

  “Exactly.” Trent pointed the straw of his Coke at him. “Which is why it doesn’t make money. Carnivia has integrity. That’s why I flew over. The way I see it, this is your hour of need.”