The Absolution Read online

  At the thought of the meal she would never now eat with him – at the thought of the hundreds, thousands of meals that would now go uncooked and unshared – she lifted her face to the ceiling and howled like a dog.

  The nurses let her cry, and when she was done, gently asked if she had anyone to be with.

  She didn’t.

  There’s someone waiting for you, they told her. A Carabinieri officer. He didn’t want to come in before, with the others.

  It was Aldo. She wrapped her arms around his big solid chest and howled out more tears, until as quickly as it had come, all her energy was gone and she collapsed again.

  “You can come with me, if you like,” he said gently.

  She shook her head. “No.” She felt obscurely that it wasn’t right. “Thank you. But I need to be alone.”

  FIFTY-THREE

  HOLLY DROVE DANIELE to the Institute of Christina Mirabilis. The nun at Reception directed them to a day ward, where Daniele was given a surgical robe and had a cannula inserted into the back of his hand. Only then did Father Uriel appear, his expression sombre.

  “As you know, I have serious doubts about this procedure. However, I’ve consulted with my ethics committee and they have decided that when a patient is threatening self-harm, then it is reasonable to provide it, so long as he fully understands the risks involved.”

  Holly gave Daniele a puzzled look. He hadn’t mentioned anything about self-harm to her. But he only nodded calmly.

  What those risks were, Father Uriel was now explaining. “You may have sore muscles from the seizure. You may suffer a dislocation of the jaw or shoulders. You may remain disorientated or confused for up to a week. More specifically, it is highly likely that you will suffer from some degree of amnesia. This could last for a few hours or a few days. In extreme cases, it could be months.” He paused. “There may be more significant side effects as well. First, the seizure might become permanent – what we call status epilepticus. If this happens, your risk of mortality is around twenty per cent. Secondly, it may affect your brain in some other, more unpredictable way. A small number of those receiving ECT develop cognitive problems—”

  “Wait a minute,” Holly said, alarmed. “By ‘cognitive problems’, you mean brain damage?”

  “He’s trying to scare us,” Daniele said calmly. “Don’t worry. I’ve researched the risks.” He reached for Father Uriel’s consent form.

  “And you’re quite certain you want to do this?” Holly said.

  “Whatever happened to me in that room, I need it to end.” He looked at her and attempted a smile. “There’s a part of me that’s still locked up, Holly. I want to be free.”

  They wheeled him away after that. Even though he’d told her it wasn’t like the movies any more, she couldn’t help picturing Daniele as if in an electric chair, a rubber bit between his teeth, his body jerking and spasming as the current sent his brain into overload.

  To take her mind off it, she went outside and switched her phone on. There were two messages from Aldo Piola. She frowned: she hadn’t spoken to Kat’s former lover for many months, since he’d led the team that rescued her from the caves at Longare.

  Please call me. It’s urgent.

  She dialled his number. “Aldo? What is it?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “What?” Fear twisted her guts. “Is Kat all right?”

  “She’s OK – she’s taken a blow to the head, but it’s only superficial. But Flavio’s dead. He was blown up outside her apartment. Kat saw the whole thing.”

  “Oh, my God . . . Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know. She needs to be with someone.”

  “I’ll find her,” she promised. Ringing off, she went back inside. “Is he in the recovery room yet?” she asked the nurse.

  The nun shook her head. “Not yet.”

  She was torn. Daniele would be expecting her to be there when he woke up. But Daniele had nurses and doctors to look after him, while Kat was walking the streets of Venice in turmoil, alone.

  “Can you give him a message for me when he wakes up?”

  Kat went back to her desk at Campo San Zaccaria. She saw the startled looks her colleagues gave her, but she ignored them.

  Sottotenente Panicucci came over. “Capitano . . . Are you sure you should be here?”

  “Where else should I be?” she snapped. “I want a full update. On everything.” She looked at her emails. To her surprise, there were only a handful: only a single night had passed since she’d last checked them. Such a short interval of time, yet it seemed forever. When I last checked my emails, she thought, he was alive.

  Suddenly it seemed impossible, quite impossible, that he was dead.

  “Fuck it!” she shouted out loud. “Fuck it! Fuck all of it!”

  Some concussed part of her brain was trying to make her continue her life as normal, but the simple truth was that she had no normal now. Nothing was ever going to be the same.

  “You’re right,” she said to Panicucci, defeated. “I shouldn’t be here.”

  Holly found her sitting on a bench on the riva, staring out at the lagoon. A hundred yards away, a giant cruise ship slid slowly towards the terminal at Tronchetto, towering over its pilot boats, its upper decks sparkling with camera flashes. Kat looked at it with unseeing eyes.

  “I was going to marry him,” she whispered as Holly sat down.

  “I know.” Holly reached for her hand. For a long time they sat there without speaking, in a place beyond the reach of words.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  IN THE PERIOD that followed, Holly divided her time between her two friends, trying to look after them as best she could. Daniele, dazed and withdrawn after his ECT, and Kat, who flipped between lethargy and mania as she struggled to process her lover’s death.

  Disappointingly, Daniele had recalled nothing further from his kidnap. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten why he’d undergone the treatment in the first place, or any of the conversations the two of them had had in the days preceding it.

  And if he remembered sleeping with her that night, or the long, whispered conversation that had followed, he showed no sign of that either.

  An inquest was opened into Flavio’s death and immediately adjourned. His wife flew back from London, where she’d been living with their children. In a newspaper interview she spoke of moving back to Italy permanently. Kat felt no desire to meet her.

  She was summoned to a meeting with the other prosecutor, Benito Marcello. He started by saying that he was sorry for her loss. Then he asked her to sign a written version of the statement she’d given to the investigators in the hours after the bombing.

  She took it and read it. The statement, and the accompanying report, made it clear that Avvocato Li Fonti had visited her apartment more often, and more regularly, than security protocols permitted. One of his bodyguards had apparently remonstrated with the other, only days before the explosion, saying that they should report the situation to their superiors. He was the one who had died alongside Flavio.

  According to the report, the explosion had been traced to a plastic recycling bin in her street, where traces of C4 explosive had been found. A row of those bins had made a kind of lay-by among the parked cars: a natural place to pull up when dropping someone off.

  They’re blaming me, she thought.

  But, with a sudden shock, she realised they were right. Not only had Flavio bent his security protocols for her; their texts and conversations had been full of arrangements and locations.

  Will you come back to Venice now?

  I think so. The local Polizia can follow up the remaining leads.

  And, even worse:

  I’ll have the food on the table at ten past twelve, and not a minute later.

  Then I’d better not be late, had I?

  And finally, as his car turned into her street: With you in two.

  I helped them kill him, she thought. I was as much a part of it as the people who planted th
at bomb.

  “It seems unfortunate,” Marcello was saying, “that a man known to be at risk of assassination by ruthless organised criminals could allow himself to become so careless.” He let his eyes travel over her body. “But perhaps not inexplicable. A man grows tired of such constraints. Of being alone, perhaps. He allows himself to get caught up in unwise, even reckless, situations.”

  Guilt turned to anger as she realised what else he was trying to do. “Wait a minute. ‘Criminals’? Are you trying to say he was killed by the Mafia?”

  He looked surprised. “Of course. They’d been pursuing him for years. That was why he had bodyguards in the first place.” He looked at her questioningly. “Unless you have other evidence you wish the inquest to consider?”

  This goes right to the heart of power, Kat. There are some very important people who had good reason to make sure Tignelli didn’t succeed.

  And before that, when she’d called him from Sicily:

  I’m not saying your friend is right and it’s all part of some massive fifty-year conspiracy. But it does seem like there are plenty of people who think they can just close ranks and refuse to talk to us.

  She shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “According to the established procedures, I am therefore transferring the investigation into Avvocato Li Fonti’s death to the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia,” he continued. “A prosecutor with appropriate security measures in place will now take over.”

  “What about the investigation Flavio was working on when he died?”

  “That will also be transferred to another prosecutor. But it seems in any case the trail has run cold. If there ever was a terror plot, it appears to have been averted. The excellent work you yourself did in Sicily, I understand, points to the conclusion that the suspect has left Italy by sea, no doubt hoping to evade the stricter border controls at the airports. The relevant international authorities have been alerted. But it is no longer Italy’s problem.”

  This is how it works, she thought. If you kill enough people, eventually those who are left get the message.

  Everything was being wrapped up and placed neatly into files. And there it would stay, alongside all the other unclosed files that detailed her country’s dark, hidden history.

  Aloud she said, “He was never too scared to investigate.”

  He nodded. “Of course. He was a brave and determined prosecutor who will be sorely missed by all those who worked with him.”

  “Unlike you, I mean,” she said pleasantly. “You’re terrified, aren’t you? Underneath that fine suit you’re just a squirming, sweating ball of fear.” She stood up. “You know what Flavio said to me not long before he died, Avvocato? He said, ‘The law is all we have.’ But until people like you grow a pair of balls, we don’t even have that.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  THEY SAT IN the music room at Ca’ Barbo. Kat, Daniele, Holly. Each of them, for different reasons, utterly defeated.

  Holly recalled previous times when everything had seemed lost: how it was always Kat, with her energy and good-natured bossiness, who had pulled them out of despondency and assigned them tasks. But now she seemed quite broken.

  It’s up to me now, Holly thought.

  She turned to Daniele. “Daniele, could I borrow a whiteboard?”

  He waved his hand at the boards covered with mathematical formulae that lined the walls. “Be my guest.”

  “I’m going to write down what we know,” she said as she wiped the boards clean. “One of us may spot something the others have missed. We’ll use red for Carnivia, blue for my father, and green for the terror plot. OK?”

  It might have been her imagination, but she thought she heard a faint sigh escape Kat’s lips.

  “I’ll go first,” she said, scribbling. “I believe my father was silenced by corrupt Freemasons who had previously been part of NATO’s Gladio network. According to Ian Gilroy, he’d asked my father to find out more. But according to Staff Sergeant Kassapian, my father ended up making copies of the US’s own secret cables to and from Washington. Why, I don’t yet know. And I can’t read them until the floppy-disk drive we’ve bought off eBay gets here. Kat?”

  Reluctantly, Kat took the green pen and stood up. “I started out investigating the murder of a banker who’d betrayed his fellow Masons’ plans for an independent Veneto. The Masons’ Grand Master, Count Tignelli, was financing a terror attack by a jihadist hacker, but that seems to have been averted.”

  “Wait a minute,” Daniele said, looking up. “Did you say a jihadist hacker?”

  She nodded. “That’s right. He was enrolled at a technical college in Palermo. Why, I have no idea, as his skills were clearly far in advance of the other students’. In any case, he seems to have slipped out of the country—”

  “He’s the one who’s created the virus in Carnivia,” Daniele interrupted. “He must be. And it’s not true that the attack’s been averted. In just over twenty-four hours’ time, he intends to launch a coordinated attack on the Internet of Things, using a botnet of Carnivia users. It’ll be like a hundred thousand Fréjuses all happening at once.”

  “Hang on,” Kat said, trying to get her head round all this. “I know there’s speculation that what happened at Fréjus might have been a hacker, but what’s this about a botnet?”

  Daniele explained about the worm inside Carnivia, and the zero-hour that would be triggered at midnight the next day.

  “Can you prevent it?” Kat said when he’d finished.

  “I specifically designed Carnivia so that kind of intervention is impossible. The only way would be to create a virus of my own, and wipe Carnivia.”

  “To temporarily shut it down, you mean?”

  Daniele shook his head. “That wouldn’t be enough to disrupt the instructions the hacker has sent to each user’s computer. I need to write a piece of code that will wipe everything – my servers, our users’ identities, their own computers, the lot.” He smiled ruefully. “Websites that deliberately fry four million people’s hard drives aren’t too popular. There’ll be no coming back from that.”

  “But you’ll do it?” Kat asked. “You’ll stop the attack?”

  “Yes,” Daniele said. “It’s my site. My responsibility. Besides, I’ve been looking for a way to extricate myself from running it. Might as well go out with a bang.”

  Holly wondered at the apparent lack of emotion with which Daniele spoke. She knew his relationship with his website was a complex one, but she guessed that, whatever he said, destroying the world he’d created would be no easy matter for him.

  “And then Flavio died,” Kat said, turning back to her board. “I’ve got no absolute proof that it’s linked to the Tignelli investigation. But the last time we spoke, he said he’d found something – something significant. I think he must have tied Tignelli’s death back to a person or group, in Rome perhaps, with a vested interest in blocking Venetian independence.”

  “Any idea who?” Holly asked.

  Kat shook her head. “But I think that was why they killed him that night. Whatever it was he’d worked out, they didn’t want him repeating it to me.” Something else occurred to her. “Though the time before that, when I was in Sicily, he said something about you. How perhaps you weren’t as crazy as you seemed.”

  “What could he have meant by that?”

  Kat shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “Could he have come across a connection between the two cases?”

  “Well, I can hardly ask him now, can I?” Kat snapped. There was a long silence. “Sorry,” she muttered.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Holly said with feeling. “This is a shit time for you.”

  “For all of us,” Kat corrected. “You and your father. Daniele and Carnivia . . . It’s all shit. So what do we do now?”

  “I think we have to go right back to the beginning,” Holly said. “In Daniele’s case, that means his kidnap. For me, why my father was so interested in those Autodin transcripts. And for you, perha
ps, establishing who was powerful enough to kill not only Tignelli but Flavio too, and what it was he found out before he died.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  “I NEED MORE ECT,” Daniele told Father Uriel. “A higher current, a longer seizure – whatever it takes to shake my memories loose.”

  Father Uriel regarded him over folded arms. “No,” he said quietly.

  “If you don’t . . .”

  “I don’t care what threats you make, Daniele. You wanted ECT, and we’ve tried it. We won’t be doing it again.” He paused. “However, that’s not to say I’m giving up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a new therapeutic technique I’ve started using recently with some of my other patients. It’s unproven, but I think you in particular might find it effective.”

  “Why me in particular?”

  “Because it involves your own website,” Father Uriel said. “Tell me: you built Carnivia – could you build a replica of the room in which you were imprisoned by your kidnappers?”

  He built the four hundred and seventeen uprights in the bricks along one wall, the two hundred and four along the other. He built it eight paces by eleven, and then remembered that he had to go back and adjust for the fact that, at seven years old, his strides had been a lot smaller.

  It was many years since he’d created Carnivia, but the language in which it was coded was as familiar to him as his mother tongue. Even so, constructing the room took him several hours, building up every tiny detail, pixel by pixel.

  When he had finished he showed Father Uriel.

  “Good. Now I want you to create an avatar for each of the principal kidnappers.”

  That was easier. He made avatars for Claudio, Paolo and Maria. To each of them he gave a mask. It meant he didn’t have to spend time getting their faces right, but he dressed them in the clothes he remembered each one wearing – Paolo’s denims, Claudio’s beret, Maria’s leather jacket.

  “And I want you to make an avatar for yourself, as you were at the time you were kidnapped,” Father Uriel said.