The Absolution Page 31

  The captain looked a little amused. “But the passenger wireless network has no link to the systems that control the ship. All these machines uplink directly to the company’s own satellite.”

  “Then there’s your weakness, Captain. If hacking a satellite is what it takes to control your ship, then believe me, that’s what he’ll have done.”

  “But he doesn’t control my ship,” the captain pointed out. “I do. Here, let me show you.” He turned to the man holding the ship’s wheel. “Helmsman, bring her about three degrees.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The captain turned back to Kat. They waited. Kat saw the confidence in his eyes flicker, to be replaced by doubt and then alarm. He turned back to the officer. “What’s the problem?” he said sharply.

  “I don’t know, sir.” The helmsman pressed some buttons rapidly. “Everything’s working normally. But the ship isn’t responding.”

  Under their feet, Kat felt the slight increase in vibration as the engines picked up speed.

  “Well, it responded to the throttle,” the captain said reasonably.

  “Sir, I didn’t increase throttle.”

  There was a short silence. “Reduce speed to seven knots,” the captain said.

  “Aye aye, sir.” And then, “Engines are not responding, sir.”

  “Search the ship,” Kat repeated. “Every cabin. He’s hiding here somewhere with a laptop, controlling it all.”

  SEVENTY-THREE

  THEY ORGANISED THE Serenity’s crew into search teams. As they went down to the first deck, the lights went out.

  The emergency lighting immediately came on – dim LEDs in the floor and ceiling, designed to guide passengers in the event of a shipwreck. But suddenly the vessel looked less like a floating four-star hotel and more like a vast, fragile container crammed with humanity.

  Even from the bridge, Kat could hear the shouts of panic. “You may need to start thinking about evacuating the ship,” she said to the captain when no one else was listening. “We should get as many people off as we can.”

  He shook his head. “Unfortunately, that isn’t an option. Our lifeboats are designed to be launched when the ship’s stationary. Any more than five knots and they’d be dragged under by our wake.” He glanced at a screen. “At the moment, our speed is fourteen knots. And it’s increasing all the time.”

  The full horror of the situation was only just starting to dawn on her. “How long until we reach Venice?”

  “At this speed, around four and a half hours.”

  “And can we tell exactly where we’re headed?”

  “My navigator tells me that the GPS coordinates correspond to the Campanile di San Marco,” he said quietly.

  The campanile, the famous bell tower in the middle of Piazza San Marco. Almost equidistant between the Doge’s Palace and the basilica, and more than a hundred metres from the seafront.

  “It seems that he intends us to crash at full speed into the piazzetta,” the captain said. “What will happen then, we don’t know for certain. But with full fuel tanks, it seems likely the ship will explode.”

  “Can’t you empty your fuel into the sea?”

  He shook his head. “There’s no mechanism for doing that.”

  It’s a floating bomb, she thought. The ship was a huge, seaborne missile, aimed at the very heart of Venice. She thought of the pictures that would be on the front pages of tomorrow’s papers. The campanile would be toppled, the twin columns of San Marco and San Teodoro smashed to nothing, the stone lions on which children played and visitors posed for photographs lost forever. And the square where generations of her ancestors had gossiped and strolled and bought cold drinks from the wine sellers who lingered in the shade of the colonnades would have become a scene of destruction, reclaimed by the sea, a second Ground Zero.

  But it was more than that. The Doge’s Palace, famously, had a wooden roof: it had been constructed by the shipbuilders of the Arsenale as a kind of upended hull, using the same techniques that had made Venice’s fleet the envy of the world. The five golden domes of the basilica – designed in the thirteenth century so that the symbol of Venice’s power would be visible from far out to sea – were also made of wood. Fire had long been the threat which most exercised Venice’s authorities, to the extent that, even today, restaurants had to apply for a special licence to install pizza ovens. Fire could jump the narrow waterways in an instant, consuming cramped apartment buildings and grand palazzi alike. If Serenity exploded in Piazza San Marco, how far would the destruction spread? To the rest of the San Marco district; perhaps as far as Cannaregio and Castello . . . She felt a cold fury that she pushed to one side.

  She called Piola to update him. “Can you still get off?” he wanted to know.

  “I don’t think so. The pilot says the helicopter can’t take off at this speed. But in any case, I couldn’t leave the passengers.”

  He said quietly, “If you find him, and you have the option, shoot to kill. Promise me, Kat – don’t think twice.”

  “I will.” She hesitated. “Are they evacuating the city yet? In case we’re not successful?”

  “We’ve been discussing it all night.” He sighed. “Nobody in authority wants to be the one to take that decision. You know what the Ponte della Libertà’s like at the best of times. Even if we had the means to communicate a general evacuation, how could we possibly get three hundred thousand tourists across one small bridge in just a few hours? There would be panic.”

  “Even so, we have to try.”

  “I’ll keep working on it. But Kat, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. He must be somewhere on that ship. There’s still time to find him.”

  As night turned to day, Daniele finished disinfecting the last of his users’ computers. There had been a few he’d failed to get to in time. In cities up and down Italy traffic lights failed, and the morning rush hour was even more gridlocked than usual. Hundreds of internet-connected cars – those using Ford’s SYNC technology, BMW’s ConnectedDrive, Audi’s Connect, and Mercedes’ COMAND – had crashed, adding to the chaos, while some drivers’ garage doors simply refused to open. In several government buildings, water sprinklers came on for no reason, whilst the servers of Italy’s three biggest banks suddenly uploaded all their customers’ details onto the internet.

  So far as he could tell, though, none of the attacks had resulted in any loss of life. By 10 a.m. there was only the hacker’s own computer left.

  By half past ten, newsfeeds across Italy were reporting the situation. Some were already speculating that it could have been a cyber attack.

  Daniele thought for a moment, then posted a message on Carnivia’s login page.

  Dear Carnivians,

  Over the last few weeks, Carnivia has been compromised. A hacker succeeded in spreading a virus among the site’s users. His aim was to create terror by causing hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions, of internet-connected devices to malfunction simultaneously.

  The only way to prevent these attacks was for me to remove Carnivia’s encryption systems and disinfect the site. The encryption will be restored shortly, but in the meantime you should be aware that nothing you do or say on Carnivia will have the usual level of anonymity.

  In the circumstances, today’s elections have been suspended for twenty-four hours.

  Daniele Barbo

  He pressed “Publish” and sat back. He had no doubt there would be howls of protest; accusations, too, that he’d misled his users when he’d said the encryption couldn’t be broken even by him. Others would seize the opportunity to argue that he should never have allowed his users to be anonymous in the first place.

  But for the moment he had more pressing things to think about, and an important decision to make.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  BY MIDDAY, THE search teams had gone through every one of the 1,650 cabins. They’d searched the Aqua Park, the Colonial Club, the virtual golf course, the three restaurants and the discotheque. They’
d searched the Balinese Spa and the Raj-themed solarium, the Hawaiian Palm Court and the Latte-tudes Coffee Shop. They’d searched each of the passenger decks before descending to the clanging, echoing galleys below, the crew quarters and engine rooms.

  Of the hacker, there was absolutely no sign.

  Kat took personal charge when they searched his berth, looking for any clue. They found a battered Qur’an, two mobile phones, and three passports with the same photograph in all of them. The oldest passport was Libyan, in the name of Tareq Fakroun. He was twenty years old. She didn’t recognise either the face or the name, but that was hardly surprising: there had been no matches on any of their databases to the fingerprint recovered from the tablet in Sicily.

  Recalling the tablet prompted her to look for a computer. “No laptop,” she said. “That must be what he’s using.” She turned to the captain. “If he wanted to access the computer network, where would be the best place?”

  He shrugged and looked helplessly at the IT officer.

  None of us really knows how all this stuff works, Kat thought. We think we control it because we can use it, but really it’s a mystery to us.

  “Probably the server room,” the officer said. “But it’s already been searched.”

  “Take me there anyway.”

  The server room was another level down into the bowels of the ship, a hot, enclosed space full of equipment. Thick clusters of cables ran through ducts in the roof. Racks of computers flickered silently beneath them.

  “Is there any way of turning off the parts he’s using?” she asked.

  “We’ve tried,” the IT officer said. “It doesn’t seem to make any difference. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s bypassed our network altogether, and written his own skeleton program to run the ship.”

  She didn’t know computers, but she did know ships. “He’ll still need the GPS to lock onto his destination. If he wanted to hack into the satellite upstream of all the other electronics, where would he do it from?”

  It was the captain who answered. “There’s an antennae enclosure right on the top of the ship. You can only access it by climbing up the side of the radar tower.”

  She took Panicucci and Bagnasco, hurrying up service stairways that led from deck to deck. Finally they were at the foot of the radar tower, and there was only one metal ladder left to climb.

  As she climbed, rung after rung, the sun bounced off the painted metal into her eyes. Looking down, she saw that the sea was at least seventy metres below her.

  The steps of the ladder disappeared through the floor of what looked like a small observation deck, the highest point of the ship. Gingerly, she raised her head through the hole and looked around.

  A dark-skinned youth was sitting cross-legged by the radar antenna, a laptop nestled between his knees. He was wearing what looked like a sleeveless padded jerkin. Then she saw the wires protruding from the seams. A suicide vest.

  He met her eyes, and his hand went towards his pocket.

  “Stop!” she called, her hand going to her gun.

  He didn’t. As he pulled out the detonator she shot him in the face. There was no time for thought; no time for anything as conscious as a decision. She realised, even as she did it, that she had always been intending to do this, ever since Piola had cautioned her not to hesitate. The boy’s head exploded, blood spraying the side of the tower, the computer jerking out of his lap as his body first bucked, then slumped to one side, his dark hair smearing his own blood spatter as he fell. The recoil knocked her backwards too, so that she swung sideways on the ladder, her left hand clinging on for dear life as she fought desperately to regain her footing.

  Then she was springing up onto the platform. He was still alive, still twitching, then suddenly he wasn’t. She checked his airway and fastened her lips on the mangled jaw to give him the kiss of life, just as instinctively as, moments before, she’d pulled the trigger.

  Panicucci and Bagnasco came to crouch silently beside her. It was only when she saw blood pooling around their boots that she realised it was hopeless.

  “Get the laptop,” she said, standing up.

  She looked in the direction they were heading. A shimmering sliver beckoned on the horizon; gilded domes, spires and cupolas catching gold under the sun’s blaze, the ship’s prow pointing towards it as neatly as an arrow.

  Venice.

  They took the laptop back to the bridge for the specialists to examine.

  “Every command is password-protected,” the IT officer said at last. “We can’t even work out what it’s doing.”

  “Then turn it off,” Kat said. “At least that way we can make sure it’s not controlling the ship any more.”

  The IT officer turned the laptop over and sprung out the battery. As he did so, there was a groan in the depths of the ship, a hum that rose in pitch from the engines beneath their feet. She felt her body leaning backwards as the vast vessel surged forward.

  “A dead man’s handle,” the officer said quietly. “He must have rigged it so any disconnection would make the engines revert to full speed.”

  “How long to Venice now?”

  The first officer consulted a screen. “At this speed, less than thirty minutes.”

  She grabbed her phone. “Daniele,” she said when he answered. “I need your help.”

  She summarised the situation in a few sentences. “So what I need to know,” she concluded, “is whether you can hack the shipping company’s satellite and reset the GPS coordinates.”

  He considered. “Yes and no. I can probably knock out the satellite link. But the ship itself will still be locked onto the old coordinates. Unless you can find some way of making it change course, it will simply follow the old bearing until it either hits something or runs out of fuel. Is there no steering at all? No way of overriding the electronics?”

  She looked over to where a group of officers were conferring. “They’re working on it. But, Daniele, I don’t think we should rely on them. The ship’s simply too big and complex.”

  “A boat’s a boat. There must be some way of making it change course.”

  An idea floated into her brain.

  “You’ll think this is crazy,” she told the captain. “But I’ve been around boats all my life. And I know that big boats behave just like small ones, when it comes down to it.”

  He nodded cautiously.

  She said, “What if we take the hacker’s suicide vest and blow a hole in the port bow, just below the waterline? The ship will list, and the drag will pull it round.” She pointed at the chart. “We’ll start sinking, obviously, but in the meantime we’ll veer to port, away from the Bocca di Lido. And if we don’t pass through the bocca into the lagoon, at least Venice will be safe. In the best-case scenario, perhaps the sand will bring us to a halt slowly enough that the fuel tanks don’t explode.”

  “How do you know the vest will blow a small hole rather than a big one?”

  “I don’t. But I don’t think he’d have wasted his time building a bigger suicide vest than he needed. I’m betting that bomb contains just enough explosive to destroy him, his laptop and whoever came after him.”

  “I pray to God you’re right, Captain,” he said faintly. “Because I certainly don’t have a better idea.”

  They pored over a plan of the ship, debating exactly where to place the explosives. But she knew that, right or wrong, the time for thinking was almost over. They could see Venice’s skyline quite clearly now, behind the long line of the Lido. She could make out the tops of individual buildings: the terrace bar on the roof of the Stucky hotel; the glittering domes of St Mark’s itself; the white cupola of Santa Maria della Salute.

  She had a sudden memory of a dark January night: aqua alta flooding La Salute’s steps; snow falling; a corpse washed in from the lagoon. Her first case with Aldo Piola. How long ago all that seemed now.

  “I’ll detonate it here,” she said, interrupting the discussion. She pointed to a spot halfway down the bow.


  “Those are the crew quarters. I can take you there,” the first officer said immediately.

  “Get the passengers assembled in their life jackets,” the captain said to one of his men. To Kat and the first officer he simply said, “Good luck.”

  Another officer had rigged up a detonation line. As Kat carried the vest gingerly down the endless gangways, it seemed to her that rather than blowing a hole that was too big, the opposite was more likely. Could a few pocketfuls of explosive really punch a big enough hole in a hull as thick as Serenity’s?

  She was glad First Officer Valasco was with her: below the waterline it was easy to become disorientated in the identical corridors. The vibration of the vast engines seemed stronger down there, too: more than once she found herself bouncing off the metal walls, careful not to let the vest make contact as she did so.

  Eventually he opened a door. “In here.”

  There was little preamble. They laid the vest in a bunk to focus the blast outwards, then played out the detonation line and retreated into the corridor. While Kat crouched down and set the fuse, the first officer stood by, ready to help her away.

  Kat was already running when the crack and boom of the explosion sounded behind her. Too soon, she thought. It’s gone off too soon. For a moment she was back in her apartment, frozen to the spot, watching through the window as Flavio was blown up. Instinctively she flinched and stumbled, but the first officer had her by the arm and was half pulling, half propelling her along the corridor. Crew members sealed bulkheads behind them as they retreated along the ship; behind her she heard a second, slower explosion as the sea, snarling and savage, charged in to reclaim the space that man had briefly usurped.

  The passengers were lined up on deck now, silent in their life vests. On the bridge, she and Valasco found the other officers peering anxiously down at the bow.

  “Anything?” she asked. One of the men shook his head.

  Daniele called her back. “I’ve spoofed the satellite’s telemetry and tracking.”

  “Meaning?” she said impatiently.