The Absolution Read online

  “It’s temporarily out of operation. What’s happening your end?”

  “I’m not sure.” But even as she said it, she felt the deck under her feet shifting, tilting infinitesimally to port. She held her breath.

  They were only a few hundred yards from shore, the ship’s prow pointing like a colossal battering ram at the gap in the Lido. As the deck listed to the left, the ship followed it round, like a skateboard with all the rider’s weight on one side. It wasn’t by much, but the prow was now definitely pointing away from the gap, and at the Lido instead. She could see the ornate façade of the Hôtel des Bains, and the rows of blue-and-white capanne where this had all begun. She could see the sunbathers, lined up behind the police tape that was keeping them away from the beach. And she could see the soft yellow sands waiting to embrace Serenity of the Seas; could feel them clawing already at the ship’s belly. Serenity slowed, lurched and swung over onto her starboard side all at once, more dramatically this time. Kat found herself charging in a group of officers towards one end of the bridge, now ten feet lower than the other; then she took a tumble, executing a perfect waltz step and cartwheel into Panicucci’s arms before they both crashed to the floor, which had taken on the angle of a children’s slide. With a sudden, spasming shudder, the great behemoth was beached and could go no further, towering at a crazy, drunken angle over the empty sunloungers, as if she would simply tip her passengers onto them and be done with it.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  DANIELE BARBO WAITED in a quiet corner of a bar near the Rialto. The barman, along with most of the customers, was masked. There were others, though, whose faces were bare. For many of those who had been part of the Unmasking, as it had become known, it was now seen as a badge of honour not to hide their identities. Daniele had therefore introduced a new functionality to the site: users could choose whether or not to go incognito.

  Hi, Daniele.

  The avatar who dropped into a seat next to him was one of those not wearing a mask, but Daniele would have known who he was in any case.

  Hello, Max. My congratulations.

  Yes, everything turned out all right in the end, didn’t it? In the aftermath of the Unmasking, entrusting the safety of Carnivia to an administrator – and not just any administrator, but the one who had helped Daniele Barbo to identify and neutralise the virus – had seemed like the only sensible choice. When the elections were reinstated, Max had won by a landslide.

  That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, actually. My decision to stand aside from the site . . . I’m reconsidering it.

  There was a long pause. Oh? Why?

  In part, because of your success, Daniele answered.

  I don’t understand.

  When I thought about what the hacker had done, there were a few things that still bothered me. Such as how he’d been able to achieve so much on his own. So, while Carnivia was unencrypted, I took a closer look at his history. It turns out there was someone who helped him . . . another hacker, who called himself Jibran on message boards. It was Jibran who suggested targeting the Internet of Things. And it was Jibran who suggested Carnivia as the way to do it.

  A smart guy, then, Max responded.

  Yes . . . Although, strangely, it was also Jibran who leaked the video of the Fréjus tunnel attack. Had you not drawn that to my attention, Tareq Fakroun might well have got away with it. Why did Jibran do that, do you suppose, if he was so smart?

  Perhaps he couldn’t resist the urge to show off.

  Perhaps. But I started to wonder if there could be more to it than that. So I took a closer look at Carnivia’s administrators too.

  And? What did you find?

  It all made sense, Daniele wrote sadly. If only there was a better way to express his feelings at that point than through some stupid emoticon. It was something else he would have to add; now that they could remove their masks, avatars should be able to laugh, or cry, or show anger, or look disappointed. The fact that you were so keen to become elected. The way Carnivia’s oldtimers and newbies were being set against each other. The security scares, to which the only possible answer would be ever-higher levels of scrutiny.

  I don’t know what you’re talking about.

  What are you, Max? Or should I call you Jibran? Are you part of USCYBERCOM? The Cryptologic Division? Tailored Access Operations? Or some other group deep within the NSA, something so secret we haven’t even heard about it yet? Maybe you’re not even a single person any more. Maybe the entity I’ve been calling “Max” is actually a team, working in shifts out of some anonymous building in Fort Meade or Palo Alto.

  This is crazy.

  When did they recruit you, Max? And how? Was it about money? Women? Or simply the chance to be someone important: the person who helped the US military get control of Carnivia?

  There was a long silence before Max responded. It’s you that became the monster, Barbo, not me. You refused to see where all this was going. That the internet isn’t just some cool game any more, where kids can prank each other without anyone knowing who they are. This is the real world now. And in the real world, there are bad guys who will stop at nothing to destroy everything that matters.

  Indeed there are, Max. And you know what? You’re one of them.

  Abruptly, Max’s avatar disappeared.

  Goodbye, my friend, Daniele typed into the empty air. I hope you thought it was worth it.

  He pushed back from the screen and turned to watch Holly. She was sitting at another computer, transferring the contents of the Autodin disks from the floppy drive to a memory stick. Once Daniele had nursed the data from the ancient disks, they’d given up their secrets without a struggle.

  She’d known by then roughly what to expect; even so, the sheer number of incriminating documents her father had amassed had taken her breath away. Gilroy had used euphemisms even when sending secure cables back to Washington – whether to protect himself or his superiors, she didn’t know. It was tempting to believe that he’d been a lone wolf, left to run his private fiefdom as he saw fit, but surely it beggared belief that the CIA’s high command could have been completely ignorant of the blood that was dripping from its most senior Italian agent’s hands. But euphemisms or not, by comparing the date of a cable to actual events it wasn’t difficult to work out which dark episodes in Italy’s history had actually been instigated by him. There were nearly two thousand files, and every one of them was damning.

  Daniele hadn’t asked her what condition Ian Gilroy was in when she left him, and as yet she hadn’t told him. But from her focused, hurried movements he guessed that for one reason or another she didn’t think she had much time.

  “That’s all of them,” she said at last. “Now what?”

  He showed her how, once inside Carnivia, it was possible to place a document in a locker that anyone could read but no one could delete.

  “Are you sure?” he said as she copied the files across. “This won’t be reversible, you know. Once they’re out there . . .”

  “I know what I’m doing.” She was very pale, however, and a vein throbbed just below her ear. She added, more quietly, “I know what they’ll do to me, too. I’m ready for it.”

  He nodded. “Press ‘Enter’ and it’s done.”

  She pressed without hesitation and he saw his happiness winging away into the ether, never to return.

  “Can I use your phone?” she asked. He passed it to her.

  “Kat,” she said when it was answered, “you need to send a scene-of-crime team to Ian Gilroy’s villa, and then come and pick me up at Ca’ Barbo.” She listened, then said, “No, I’m fine. But send a forensic examiner to the villa too. Gilroy’s dead.”

  They sat and waited for the Carabinieri. “Do you know what he said, before he died?” she said reflectively.

  Daniele shook his head.

  “He said, ‘I love you, Holly. I’ve loved you like you were my own, ever since the barbecue where we played that game, the one where you stood on my feet and I
walked you round the garden. Perhaps if I hadn’t loved you so much, I would have stopped them from trying to kill your father. But he had so much, and I had nothing.’”

  “A last, desperate lie to try and gain your sympathy.”

  “Perhaps. But I like to think there was a glimmer of humanity left in him, after all.”

  She found, though, that she couldn’t tell even Daniele about the very last words Ian Gilroy had spoken; his voice barely louder than a whisper as he closed his eyes and waited for the end.

  “Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis.”

  Had he been speaking to her, or to himself? Or had it been nothing more than the automatic reflex of a Catholic facing death?

  I grant you absolution for your sins.

  Whatever the reason, she felt a curious sense of peace, as if the two sides of her nature had finally been resolved. Perhaps even more curiously, she found herself hoping that in some way Gilroy had felt it too.

  She looked at Daniele. “Did you know he tried to get you away from Venice, when he heard there was to be an attack? He wrote to you, saying Ca’ Barbo was falling down and that you’d have to move out. Apparently you never replied.”

  Daniele grunted. “I wouldn’t read too much into that. He probably just wanted me out of the way.”

  She was silent for a moment, thinking. “What will you do with the algorithm? Keep it for yourself, or publish it?”

  “It’s already out there.” He gestured at the window. “Literally. I tore it up and dropped it in the rio.”

  “Why?”

  He said slowly, “It would have meant a world without secrets. A world where everything that is mysterious, or complex, or creative, could be replicated by a piece of software. I decided I didn’t want to live in a world like that after all.”

  “On the plus side,” she said, “it would have meant shorter queues at Disney World.”

  He smiled at that, then said, “How did you do it?”

  “Gilroy? I shot him with my father’s pistol. It seemed the most appropriate thing. A single bullet, for all the Years of Lead. He would never have stood trial for what he’s done. His paymasters would have seen to that.”

  He heard no remorse in her voice; only a terrible, steely determination. He nodded. “You did the right thing.”

  There was a sound below the window. Getting up, she crossed to it. “Kat’s here, with Colonel Piola. Have the files all uploaded?”

  Kat opened the door to the music room and saw her friends sitting there, their heads together, bent over the computer. For a moment she held back, watching them, before she stepped into the room.

  “Holly,” she said. “Oh, Holly . . .”

  Behind her, Piola said gently, “Let me do this.”

  Kat shook her head. “It should be me.” She took a breath. “Second Lieutenant Boland, I am arresting you on charges of murder, of espionage, of accessing classified information without authorisation . . .” The tears came then, flowing down her face and choking her throat; the first tears she had shed, she realised, since Flavio had died. She cried for her friend, and she cried for her lover; she cried because Venice was saved, and because it was doomed, and she cried because Italy would probably be no better off with Gilroy dead than it had been when he was alive. She cried for the youth whose life she had taken, and for Daniele, who was about to lose the one person who truly understood him; and she cried because she knew that the Americans, with their zealous hatred of whistleblowers, would leave no stone unturned in their quest to wreak revenge. But most of all she cried because it was true what Flavio had said, almost the last time they had spoken; and yet it was too tiny, too fragile a truth to ward off injustices like the one she was committing now.

  All we have is the law.

  And so she spoke the formal words of the arrest as carefully as a prayer through her tears: a prayer for the safety, and the soul, of Holly Boland.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  The Absolution, like the rest of the Carnivia trilogy, is fiction. But it draws on a number of historical events.

  Many of the facts about Operation Gladio, for example, are now well established. Prime minister Giulio Andreotti did indeed reveal to the Italian parliament in 1990 that NATO, for the previous forty years, had been training, resourcing and running a secret paramilitary network of civilians, drawn from the far right of the political spectrum, which was intended to form an armed resistance in case of a communist invasion. It wasn’t long before evidence began to surface that some gladiators had, in addition, used their training and their NATO-supplied explosives to commit atrocities and assassinations, part of a coordinated “strategy of tension” that, they believed, would make the public demand tougher security measures from the government. A small number of gladiators were subsequently convicted of these crimes by the Italian courts.

  Many commentators believed that these attacks had been carried out with the tacit approval of, if not at the actual behest of, the CIA. To take just one example: General Gianadelio Maletti, former head of Italian Military Counter-Intelligence, testified under oath that “the Americans had gone beyond the infiltration and monitoring of extremist groups to instigating acts of violence” – a claim that was dismissed by the CIA as “ludicrous”.

  It is also well established that NATO, and in particular the British and American security services, did all they could to prevent Christian Democrat party leader Aldo Moro from brokering a “historic compromise” with the Communist Party, even going so far as to contemplate orchestrating a “bloodless coup” should the coalition take place. Moro himself, his widow recalls, was warned by Henry Kissinger when on a visit to Washington that there would be dire consequences for him personally if he did not abandon the plan.

  The deal with the communists was eventually scuppered when the ultra-left wing Red Brigades first kidnapped Moro, then murdered him. When a subsequent Italian parliamentary enquiry asked the US about possible CIA infiltration of the Red Brigades, the request came back with the comment that the CIA could “neither confirm nor deny the existence of documentation relating to your enquiry”. Readers wishing to learn more about the murky politics of the time should see NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe by Daniele Ganser.

  More recently, the story of the CIA operation to kidnap a Muslim cleric, Abu Omar, from the streets of Milan, and the efforts of a determined Italian prosecutor to bring the agents responsible to justice, has been told in A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial by Steve Hendricks.

  Propaganda Due, as Kat Tapo mentions in The Absolution, was a “black” or unaffiliated Masonic lodge that existed in Rome from about 1950 to 1980. It has been called “the government within the government” of Italy. The Grand Master, Licio Gelli, fled abroad to escape arrest and was later convicted in absentia of conspiracy against the state. Another member was Roberto Calvi, known as “God’s Banker”, who was found hanged underneath Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982. Since then there have been several other instances of Masonic lodges in Italy being used as cover for criminal and political conspiracies.

  References to US government cyber-surveillance programs such as BULLRUN, PRISM, MUSCULAR, TURBINE and so on are as accurate as I can make them. However, VIGILANCE is fictional – my attempt to bundle all these separate capabilities into one package. My accounts of the vulnerabilities inherent in the Internet of Things are also, I believe, correct at the time of writing, although I have no evidence that such vulnerabilities could extend to the systems on cruise ships.

  Ian Gilroy is a composite figure, inspired by – amongst others – Hung Fendwich, ostensibly an engineer at the Selenia Aerospace and Defence Company during the seventies and eighties, but actually one of America’s most senior Italian analysts; and Captain David Carrett of the US Navy, subsequently indicted by a Milan court on terrorism charges.

  The independence movement in the Veneto has the support of the majority of the local population: in a 2014 poll in which two million people vot
ed, almost ninety per cent were in favour of breaking away from the rest of Italy. The Regional Council of the Veneto has since voted to instigate a binding referendum. There has been no official response from the national government in Rome.

  There have been many proposals to ban large cruise ships from Venice, some of which have been voted into law only to be overturned on appeal. At the time of writing, the issue remains unsettled, and the biggest cruise ships continue to pass within a few hundred feet of Piazza San Marco.

  For links to further reading, and information about the other books in the Carnivia trilogy, go to www.carnivia.com.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Special thanks to Philip Baillieu for explaining the intricacies of credit default swaps, and to Anna Coscia for correcting my Italian. Any errors that remain are of course my own.

  My thanks too to Laura Palmer, my editor and publisher, for maintaining her enthusiasm from the very first page of book one to the very last page of book three, and to Lucy Ridout for a mammoth feat of fact-checking and copy-editing.

  I’m especially grateful to all those in Venice, Vicenza and Verona, from a full colonel of the Carabinieri to numerous peace campaigners, who made me welcome and helped with my research, and whose generosity of spirit right across the political spectrum reminded me why I love Italy so much.

  And finally to my family, who for the last four years have lived with all these crazy conspiracy theories.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN HOLT

  The Abduction

  The Abomination

  CREDITS

  Cover design by Kid–Ethic

  Cover photographs © photononstop / Superstock (statue); © Corbis / Image Source (Venice)

  COPYRIGHT

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.