The Absolution Page 5

  “Every ship over twelve feet that sails in or out of Venice is given an identifier, a LOCODE, by the port’s navigation system,” she continued. “If the other boat our witness saw really was a water taxi, it might have been picked up by the cruise ship’s radar. It’s a long shot, but I want you to ask the captains of all the cruise ships currently moored at the terminal for a copy of their radar logs.”

  Bagnasco nodded. “Of course.”

  When she was gone, Kat turned and re-entered the building. Going back up to Li Fonti’s office, she found the door closed. She knocked. The bodyguards gave her an incurious look, then went back to their phones.

  “Enter,” Li Fonti’s voice said.

  He looked up from his desk as she came in. “I thought it might be you.”

  She undid her jacket and took it off.

  “What are you doing, Captain Tapo?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  She unbuttoned her blouse. “Taking off my clothes.”

  “I realised that. But why?”

  “So that I can do what I promised I’d do if you got me a homicide of my own.”

  “I must admit, I wasn’t sure if that counted as a legally binding contract,” he said, watching her undress. “Since it was made in circumstances that might be construed as coercive.”

  “You mean, because you were fucking me at the time?”

  “I should also point out that there was no impropriety whatsoever about the decision to appoint you. General Saito was most insistent that you were the right woman for the job.”

  “Even so, the offer stands,” she assured him, stepping out of her skirt.

  He crossed to the door and locked it. “It looks like I’m in an urgent conference, then.”

  “You were right, by the way,” she said as she moved towards him. “What you said earlier. Once we start looking for evidence without reasonable cause, we’re on the way to becoming a police state.” She reached up and unpinned her hair, shaking it loose so that it fell over her shoulders, an unruly black mane. “But I had to try.”

  “And you were right to,” he said. “If you’d waited for a formal ID, that office would be clean by the time you got there.”

  “It may well be anyway.”

  “At least letting you seize his computer gets you in there. I imagine you’ll ask all the necessary follow-up questions at the same time? This case stinks worse than the water below that window.” He picked up her Carabinieri hat and placed it on her head. “I think you should keep this on, by the way.”

  “All right,” she said, pushing him back against his desk. “Now shut up, will you?”

  EIGHT

  IS IT TRUE?

  Daniele scanned the attachments Max had sent him. Which bit?

  Any of it. The stuff about P=NP. Or what they’re saying on the Huffington Post, that you’ve had some kind of breakdown.

  Not that I’m aware of, Daniele answered cautiously. On the side of the screen, three more avatars popped into the chat room, which was reserved for the exclusive use of wizards. These were Carnivia’s administrators: Eric, Anneka, Zara and Max.

  They were probably also his oldest friends. Zara had even helped him with some of the coding for Carnivia, back in the early days when it was still an open-source, collaborative project. He’d met her only once in the real world, and had discovered that she was profoundly deaf and almost mute, her speech an unintelligible mumble. Online, she was the most quick-witted and articulate of any of them. Max he had encountered a couple of times at conferences in the US: he had turned out to be obese and painfully shy, his gut straining at an ancient Nirvana T-shirt. Anneka and Eric he had still never met in the physical world. He sometimes wondered what hidden handicaps their confident online personas were concealing. He supposed he’d never find out, now.

  It was Max who normally acted as their spokesman. But today he seemed unusually incoherent.

  I just can’t believe it. I can’t fucking believe it.

  Believe what? Daniele replied.

  That you’ve fucking BETRAYED us like this.

  I don’t understand, Daniele wrote, mystified.

  I think what Max means, Zara interjected, is that we were all taken by surprise by your announcement. None of us had any idea it was coming.

  Of course. I hadn’t told any of you.

  DIDN’T YOU THINK YOU OWED US THAT FUCKING COURTESY AT LEAST? That was Max again.

  Daniele was confused. Why?

  If you’re going to give Carnivia to anyone, Eric wrote, did you consider even for one moment that it should have been to us?

  Daniele looked back and tried to recall. No, I didn’t.

  He’s not literally asking whether you did or didn’t give any thought to the question, Daniele, Zara explained. He’s saying that, in our opinion, you should have done.

  Because???

  BECAUSE WE DO YOUR SHIT FOR YOU, THAT’S WHY, Max thundered.

  Daniele, I’m not sure you realise just how much time being a Carnivia wizard takes up. Dealing with lost passwords. Resolving disputes. Remonstrating with trolls. Answering complaints—

  There are complaints? He hadn’t known.

  Of course there are complaints, Eric snapped.

  We also patch up holes in your coding, Max put in. You probably didn’t know that either, did you? Places where the great Daniele Barbo’s code is beautiful but just a tiny bit impractical. Like the functionality that was allowing users to send anonymous text messages to other people’s phones. A lovely, elegant piece of script. We disabled that after a teacher received rape threats from her entire class.

  If it was from the entire class, why didn’t she just punish them all? Daniele wondered.

  The point is, we clean up, Max said. Sometimes we don’t sleep for days. We’ve never asked for anything in return. But we always assumed that if Carnivia WERE to become commercial, we’d be given our due.

  It’s not becoming commercial.

  Oh, come on. Once it’s owned by its users, how long before they cash in? Already stockpickers are telling investors to get themselves an account. It costs nothing and it might just net you a fortune when Google buys you out. We’ve gained half a million users since your announcement.

  Then why don’t YOU stand for election? Daniele wrote. As an administrator, who better to run Carnivia than you? Then you could put safeguards in place to make sure it stays independent.

  So you’ll endorse me? I’ve got the official backing of Daniele Barbo?

  Daniele thought. I’m sorry, Max. I just don’t want to get involved in all that.

  Screw you.

  I’m sorry you feel that way.

  No, you’re not. It’s all right for you, sitting in your father’s Venetian palace. Your lifestyle’s pretty good, isn’t it? Whereas I look out of the window, I see a trailer park.

  I didn’t realise you cared so much about money, Daniele wrote sadly. I thought we all believed in the same things.

  Me too, Daniele Barbo. Me too.

  Daniele logged off. He knew he’d do no work for the rest of the day now. His brain was too clouded – not just by the row with the wizards, but also by what the MIT professor had written. The man knew what he was talking about, and his frank assessment of Daniele’s chances of solving P=NP had depressed him.

  Not that Daniele had been underestimating the task. Some of the finest minds in the world, men whose achievements dwarfed anything he had ever accomplished, had spent years puzzling at the P=NP conundrum. Most had concluded it was impossible. But he found himself inexorably drawn to it, all the same.

  It was also true, as the professor had written, that many mathematicians believed a world in which P equalled NP would be a world that had lost some of its wonder. It would be a world in which breakthroughs such as Einstein’s E=MC2 or Newton’s law of gravitational force would be generated not by once-in-a-generation flashes of inspiration but by computers, patiently scanning the furthest corners of mathematical notation, crunching numbers and sieving
the resultant torrent of integers like a probe trawling through deep space.

  But in such a world, Daniele believed, he would have a place. He knew that other people saw him as strange: his disfigured face, the legacy of his kidnap as a child, when the kidnappers had cut off his ears and nose in order to pressure his parents into paying the ransom, would have been reason enough for that. What few realised was that he saw them as equally incomprehensible. Perhaps in a world where P=NP, a world without ambiguity, the anxiety he felt whenever he tried to fathom out others would finally disappear.

  He sighed, and picked up a piece of paper that was lying next to the computer. It was a letter from his guardian, Ian Gilroy, requesting that Daniele vacate Palazzo Barbo in order for essential repairs to be carried out. The masonry in the lowest storey, the part that was regularly flooded by Venice’s rising tides, had been eroded further by a leaking septic tank. Daniele wasn’t surprised: it stank of fetid sewage and crumbling stone down there. You could see the damp slowly creeping up the walls, and many of the stone pillars which supported the higher storeys were soft to the touch.

  Following an engineer’s assessment, the letter said, it had been decided that the only solution was to slice the whole palace open at the waterline, hydraulically raise it by several metres, and create new foundations. It would cost millions and take years. During that time, the palazzo would be uninhabitable.

  If Daniele had sold Carnivia to the highest bidder, he could have paid for the repairs out of the small change. But he would still have had to move out while the work was done.

  He let the letter drop to the floor. He intended to go on ignoring its contents for as long as possible.

  NINE

  THE BANCA CATTOLICA della Veneziana was housed in the magnificent surroundings of Palazzo Dolfin-Manin, just east of the Rialto bridge. If they were a relatively small bank, as their website had implied, it certainly wasn’t apparent from the splendour of their surroundings. The vast entrance hall was decorated with extravagant eighteenth-century murals, and bust after bust of solemn Venetian nobles peered loftily down their noses from niches in the walls.

  Kat showed her warrant to a startled receptionist and asked to be taken directly to Alessandro Cassandre’s office.

  “He’s not in,” the receptionist said. “He doesn’t usually come in at this time of day. And it’ll be locked—”

  “Then call your security manager and open it,” Kat said equably. She pointed at the four-man team of carabinieri, one armed with a door-ram, that she’d brought along to show she meant business. “Please ask him to hurry, though. Those old doors of yours look rather valuable, and I’d rather not break one down unless it’s absolutely necessary. You’ve got five minutes.”

  Cassandre’s office, when it was unlocked for her exactly four minutes and thirty seconds later, turned out to be as elegantly appointed as you might expect an office on the first floor of a palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal to be. More to the point, there was a laptop open on the ornate old scrivania that served as a desk. She touched it to see if it had been left on standby and discovered that was as far as her luck went: it had been properly shut down.

  Amongst the framed photographs on the desk was one of Cassandre being presented with a medal by the previous Pope. She picked it up. A caption on the back read: Presentation of the Cross of Honour Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice to Sig. Alessandro Cassandre, September 1997. The picture had been placed further forward, and more centrally, than the photograph of the expensively dressed middle-aged woman who was presumably Cassandre’s wife.

  The warrant, she had been pleased to find, authorised her to take away “computer equipment” rather than just a laptop, thus legitimately allowing her to search Cassandre’s office for anything fitting that description. In the first drawer of the desk she found eight identical memory sticks, which struck her as being unusual. There were more in an envelope, while another bag contained high-denomination chips from the Casino di Venezia. She put the memory sticks into an evidence bag but left the chips where she’d found them.

  The next drawer contained two boxes of business cards. One gave the address of the bank and Cassandre’s title of Senior Partner. The other set, which appeared to be newly printed, bore the words:

  Alessandro Cassandre

  3°

  Grand Lodge of the Venetian Order De la Fidelité

  Underneath was a symbol she vaguely recognised, a cross inside a circle, like a sniper’s sights.

  They looked like some kind of Masonic calling card: the first actual evidence she’d had that he really was a Mason. She slipped a few into the evidence bag as well.

  “May I ask what you’re looking for?”

  She looked up. The security guard who’d unlocked Cassandre’s door had gone off to locate a higher authority; the man hurrying towards her now, buttoning up his expensive suit as he did so, was presumably the result. Without stopping what she was doing, she said calmly, “Carrying out a search to locate and remove Signor Cassandre’s computer equipment.”

  “I’m Hugo Speicher, the bank’s chairman. Do you need any help?”

  Surprisingly, he didn’t get angry or bluster at her, as many people might have done on finding a senior partner’s office being searched by the Carabinieri. But then, she reflected, the bank’s chairman was presumably no fool. He’d know there was little point in arguing with a warrant. Better to give the appearance of cooperation and hope to find out what she was after that way.

  “When did you last see Signor Cassandre?” she asked, opening the next drawer and methodically going through its contents.

  “Three nights ago, just before our last board meeting. Why? Is he in trouble?”

  “A body answering his description was found this morning at the Lido,” she said, looking up to catch Speicher’s reaction.

  “My God.” His shock certainly seemed genuine. “And you think his death was connected to the bank?”

  “It’s too early to say. But tell me, what exactly was the nature of Signor Cassandre’s work here?”

  “Well, he was . . .” Speicher frowned. “It’s quite hard to explain to a layman, actually. Essentially, he dealt with sophisticated financial instruments for off-setting risk. Along with tax planning for high-net-worth individuals, charitable institutions and so on. But he was on the brink of retirement. Most of his day-to-day work had long since been taken over by younger staff.”

  “How old was he?” Kat asked, surprised. The man on the mortuary table hadn’t looked much over fifty.

  “Fifty-four, I believe. But he had other interests besides banking.” Was it her imagination, or did she detect the faintest hint of distaste in the chairman’s tone?

  “Your receptionist seemed to know his daily routine quite well,” she pointed out.

  “She’s got a very good memory,” Speicher said blandly. “I wouldn’t read too much into that, if I were you.”

  She recalled the name Dr Hapadi had given her as a possible member of the black Masonic lodge, and decided to do some fishing. “Did Signor Cassandre still deal with Count Tignelli’s accounts?”

  Speicher hesitated. “Unless your warrant specifically covers it, we can’t confirm any details of Signor Cassandre’s clients.”

  She noted that he hadn’t denied it. “I quite understand.”

  Back at Campo San Zaccaria, she took the bagged laptop and the memory sticks to Giuseppe Malli, the Carabinieri IT technician. Long ago, when the Carabinieri headquarters was a convent, this attic had been the novices’ dormitory. There was even a faded fresco depicting the Annunciation along one wall. Now the room was a mess of computer equipment. Leads and connectors dangled from pegs that had once held coifs and scapulars, while shelves built for vestments contained a jumble of hard drives.

  “In theory, we’re looking for anyone who might have had a reason to murder the man who owned these,” she told him. “In practice, I want to find out everything about him that I can. His chairman just did a very slick
job of distancing his bank from whatever it was he did for them, and I’d like to know why.”

  “Any idea where I should start?”

  “Apparently he worked for both charitable trusts and high-net-worth individuals in need of advice on tax planning, which strikes me as an odd combination.”

  He considered. “Well, I’m no expert, but that sounds like money laundering to me.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Charities collect donations in cash. That’s the first stage in cleaning dirty money – having a legitimate explanation for where it came from.”

  “Could money laundering also involve casinos?” she asked, remembering the chips.

  He nodded. “You take the cash to a casino, you buy some chips, then after a few bets you go back to the cashier to redeem them. But this time you ask for an electronic transfer instead of cash. It’ll look to anyone following the money trail as if you won it at the tables.”

  “And the memory sticks?”

  “Let’s take a look.” He took one of the USB sticks and plugged it into a reader attached to his computer. “I’m just making an optical image, so I don’t actually disturb the contents,” he explained. “Ah—”

  “What is it?” She watched his fingers fly over the keys.

  He turned the screen towards her. It contained a row of numbers. “It’s money. Electronic money. Easy to transfer, impossible to trace.”