The Abomination Page 6

  She sat upright, determined to adopt a more appropriate demeanour. “I’m sorry, sir. What were you saying?”

  She asked him about himself, but on that subject he was reticent – again, a refreshing change from most male officers of her acquaintance, particularly since in his case modesty was unwarranted. Amongst her generation of carabinieri, Aldo Piola was famous for his part in the so-called Relocation Trials. A few years before, the Italian government had adopted a policy of resettling known Mafia figures from the South in northern Italy, where, it was assumed, they would be cut off from their support systems. The policy had backfired, the resettled mafiosi simply setting up new operations in the North instead, using the same techniques of bribery and intimidation of witnesses that had been so effective in their hometowns. Piola had achieved three convictions in seven cases – not a huge number, but a record nevertheless. It was said that his bosses, many of whom had proved curiously less effective, were furious he’d made them look bad, and for this reason alone he was unlikely to rise higher than colonel – a relatively lowly rank in a country where the very slowest train is designated “Express” and the most commercial grade of olive oil “Extra-Virgin”.

  Emboldened by the wine, she asked him about that, and he laughed.

  “Why would I want promotion? You think Carabinieri generals have an easy life? They spend their whole time having meetings and being told off for other people’s mistakes.” He grew serious. “When I was very young, I thought I wanted to be a priest. But show me a priest who actually gets to make the difference that we do. If you do your job well, there’s no more satisfying conclusion than seeing someone who committed a crime go to jail, and know that it was you who put them there.” He sighed, suddenly sombre. “Of course, in Italy all too often they don’t – go to jail, I mean. And that’s the main reason some officers decide they can’t be bothered any more.”

  There was an instance of Piola’s unusual approach when he called for the bill. The owner immediately announced that he was always happy to give a free lunch to the Carabinieri, so grateful was he for their work in keeping the streets safe, so much more did he admire them than those lazy good-for-nothings the State Police, et cetera, et cetera. Piola didn’t argue. He simply waited patiently for the man to finish, then pulled out two twenty-euro notes and said politely, “I’ll need four change.” He must have been keeping a tally all along.

  And yet, when she’d tried to pay her share, he grunted that he earned more than she did, and besides, it had been his invitation. “When you ask me out, you can pay,” he said in a voice that brooked no argument.

  “All right. I’ll get the next one,” she said, and found she was already looking forward to it.

  Now, as they approached Poveglia, the boat slowed. There was a rickety old jetty, but it didn’t look as if it had been used for years. The driver edged towards an area of crumbling concrete on the shore instead.

  The island was tiny: a kilometre or so long, and half as wide, bisected at one end by a sea channel. Trees and vegetation grew wild, pierced only by an ugly brick tower. Presumably that indicated where the old hospital was. It wasn’t the only lagoon island to be abandoned, she knew. To the north, Santo Spirito was also deserted, while the octagonal fort to the south had been derelict for as long as she could remember. There was always talk about these smaller islands being turned into fancy hotels, but the plans inevitably foundered on the cost of transporting building materials across the lagoon; not to mention on Venice’s byzantine planning regulations, which defeated all but the best-connected.

  Piola hoisted himself onto dry land, turning to give her a hand up.

  “Someone’s been here recently,” she said, spotting something on the ground. She picked it up with an evidence bag and showed him. It was a cigarette end, fairly fresh from the look of it.

  “Jin Ling again,” he said, studying it. “Interesting. Do you believe in coincidences, Capitano?”

  “Yes,” she said, and he laughed.

  “Good answer.”

  They pushed through the undergrowth in the direction of the tower. “This place was run by nuns, originally,” he said conversationally. “I’m old enough to remember it. In fact, one of my first cases brought me here. A suicide, one of the doctors. Turned out he’d been giving himself the patients’ drugs. He threw himself off the tower. Of course, people said it was just another instance of the curse of Poveglia.”

  The abandoned hospital was in front of them now. A four-storey brick-built building about two hundred yards in length, it gave off a palpable sense of decay. At some point it had been partially covered in scaffolding and an attempt made to board up the lower floors, but it hadn’t been particularly effective, to judge by the doors hanging off their hinges, discarded window-boards and graffiti.

  “Kids,” Piola said. “I’ve heard they come out here as a kind of dare. Who can spend a whole night in the haunted asylum, that kind of thing.”

  The main door was wide open. Inside, debris littered the hall – lumps of plaster, torn-out electrical wiring, an old wheelchair missing its wheels. Something small and agile scurried into an adjoining room. Kat found herself hoping that Piola didn’t suggest they split up.

  “We should split up,” he said. “I’ll go this way.”

  She kept as close to the windows as she could. The rooms smelt of woodsmoke and burnt paper. A thump upstairs, echoing on bare floorboards, made her jump. Just a pigeon, hopefully. Everywhere there was more debris – almost, she thought, as if the place had been ransacked rather than merely abandoned. Glass crunched under her feet. Strange pieces of electrical equipment, built with the solidity of a different age from Bakelite and brass, lay abandoned in corners.

  Then she rounded a doorway, and her heart leapt into her mouth.

  Eight

  DANIELE BARBO TOOK a motoscafo, a water taxi, back to Venice from the mainland. He had said nothing to the small but persistent group of journalists and supporters who’d gathered to see him emerge from court. The verdict was “Guilty”, just as he’d expected. Sentencing had been deferred for five weeks, to allow the court to carry out a psychological assessment that would determine whether he was fit to be imprisoned. It was a stalling tactic on the part of his lawyer, no more. If he was deemed incapable of coping with a normal prison, he would be sent to a psychiatric institution instead, from which he would be released only after the doctors pronounced him fit to go to jail. It was a classic Catch 22, an administrative closed loop of the sort in which Italy’s legal system excelled. Once embroiled in it, he knew, he would find it all but impossible to extricate himself.

  A large fine was, on the face of it, a better option. To the outside world Daniele Barbo appeared to be fantastically wealthy, the sort of person who could pay a million-euro penalty without thinking about it. Few people realised – and none of the journalists who had written profiles on him had ever bothered to discover – that he was actually almost penniless. His father had invested all his money in modern art, then left the artworks to a charitable foundation set up in his name. The shares in the family business, meanwhile, had been diluted by re-issue after re-issue, none of them instigated by Daniele. He was allowed to live in Ca’ Barbo, the family palazzo, but only under strict conditions: the building itself was entailed to the Foundation. He was only at liberty now because the Foundation’s trustees, men he distrusted and loathed, had agreed to stand bail.

  That his father had believed this arrangement was for his son’s ultimate benefit, Daniele didn’t doubt. His troubled teens, and his involvement with the nascent computer hacking scene, had exacerbated the guilt his parents felt about his kidnap and mutilation, convincing them that he was too withdrawn from the world to manage his own affairs. But he also knew his father had been advised that this was the most effective way to ensure Daniele could never sell any of his art. When presented with what was, at heart, a choice between keeping his precious collection intact or passing it on to his son to do with as he wishe
d, Matteo Barbo had chosen the former.

  Now, of course, that son was known as an internet entrepreneur, something his parents could never have foreseen. The website Daniele had created, Carnivia.com, actually had considerably more than the number of users Wikipedia claimed. But to call it a business was a misnomer. Unlike Google or Facebook, its data was never used for marketing purposes or sold to big corporations. It downloaded no adware or cookies, surreptitiously, onto your computer, nor did it track which sites you went to when you left. Over the years numerous would-be investors had approached him with proposals for making money out of it. He had always refused.

  The boat pulled up at Ca’ Barbo’s private jetty. As Daniele stepped onto the damp wooden boards he couldn’t help glancing upwards at the four floors of Gothic and arabesque splendour soaring above him. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin had called Ca’ Barbo “the most extraordinary small palace in Venice”. Now, over a century later, the whole of the lowest floor was unusable because of the threat from rising seawater. The recent acqua alta had swept inside as casually as an incoming tide breaks into a child’s sandcastle. The building was principally stone and marble, so nothing important would rot, but the invasion had left scum marks halfway up the walls and a sour, fetid aroma.

  Going upstairs, he went immediately to the palace’s old music room. These days it housed four massive NovaScale servers, computers so powerful that even in the depths of winter the room needed to be cooled with portable air-conditioning units. In contrast to the inlaid armoires and velvet curtains that adorned some of the other rooms in Ca’ Barbo, this room was furnished with his own choice of furniture – plain desks from Ikea, cheap melamine workstations and wheeled office chairs. Only the technical equipment was the very best and most expensive – massive screens, sleek stylus-and-pen tablets, keyboards that glowed softly in the perpetual dimness. Bar displays that rose and fell in real time, like waves on the lagoon, showed in pulsing backlit increments how many hundreds of thousands of users were crammed into each of the NovaScales’ chipsets at any precise moment. You could set your watch by their ebb and flow, just as much as by Venice’s tides: the soft surge as the east coast of America woke up, the leap as schoolchildren in California came home from school, the flickering quiescence as Europe went to sleep.

  Pulling himself towards a screen, he logged on. They were already waiting for him online. Eric, Anneka, Zara and Max. Technically, he supposed, they were his employees, but he doubted they thought of themselves that way. They were the Deep Wizards of Carnivia: the programmers who cleaned and disinfected its streets, policed its alleyways and settled its disputes. They were also, he supposed, his friends, although he had still never actually met two of them in person, and had no particular desire to do so.

  They didn’t need to ask him how it had gone today, having followed the trial via Twitter feeds and blogs.

  Bummer, Max wrote.

  We’ll survive, Daniele replied. It’s a tactic, nothing more. Has anything happened?

  One more attack, Anneka wrote. Her avatar was a Chinese dog, but he knew that she was actually a shaven-headed young Dutch woman, both eyebrows studded with piercings. She’d first come to his notice as the leader of a gang who’d devised a brilliant way of stealing credit card details using fake Windows Security Updates. Not a particularly sophisticated one. Just your regular zombie Denial-of-Service.

  How many?

  Half a million. They ping-flooded the servers, then tried sockstress. Carnivia saw them off easily enough. But the interesting thing is the time they chose.

  Which was?

  1.04 pm.

  ?????

  The exact same time you were found guilty.

  It was another demonstration that whoever was behind this was targeting him personally. Half a million home computers, infected without their owners’ knowledge by a tiny piece of dormant software, had suddenly come to life and tried to access Carnivia. Had the people in this forum not been on their guard, the cumulative effect of such a spike in demand could have overwhelmed the servers, the flood of information seeking out weaknesses in their programming like a great wave battering a seawall.

  Carnivia’s robust, Max observed. It’s you they think is the weak link.

  Thnx. I’d worked that out too.

  Yes, but think it through. They’re not trying to get to Carnivia to get at you. They’re trying to get at you to get to Carnivia. It may seem personal, but it isn’t. They’ve simply decided that you’re the most unstable element. It’s kind of a compliment to your coding, actually.

  Daniele nodded. He had come to that conclusion too, sitting in the cell below the courtroom, but it was good to hear it from someone else.

  Zara wrote, There’s something I need to show you.

  You would never have known from her posts that Zara was profoundly deaf. Like him, she was a mathematician by training, and they sometimes collaborated on some of the more arcane projects and puzzles that Carnivia threw up.

  She was bringing up his Wikipedia page. I’ve seen this, Daniele wrote.

  Sec.

  She switched to a view that showed the raw HTML, the code in which the actual content of the page was written. The final section of his profile had been changed yet again, he saw. Now it read:

  Barbo is awaiting sentencing.

  Carnivia, his website, remains offline.

  Automatically, his eyes flickered towards the servers. The second sentence, at least, was untrue. But Zara was underlining the IP address which indicated the source of the information, an eleven-digit number which identified the computer it had come from as accurately as a licence plate identified a car or a cell number a phone.

  The number on the screen was his own IP.

  That’s neat, Eric wrote admiringly. Really neat. How did they do that?

  Inside job, Max suggested, adding a wry smile to show that he was joking.

  Maybe they want you to think it’s an inside job. That was Anneka. More messing with your mind.

  It’s a distraction, Daniele typed. Max is right: to work out how to stop them, we need to look at their objective. These people don’t want me. They want to get inside Carnivia.

  Because. . .? Eric challenged.

  Because they hate the idea that there are two million people having conversations they can’t spy on, Max wrote.

  Or perhaps it’s more specific than that, Daniele responded. We have five weeks before I’m sentenced. It isn’t long, but we can use it to find out what’s happening here. We’ll learn something from looking for whoever it is who’s doing this. But I have a feeling we’ll learn even more if we go looking inside Carnivia itself.

  Nine

  “GET THESE MEASURED as well as photographed,” Piola instructed.

  The room went white as Hapadi’s camera captured the scene, fixing Piola, Kat and the hastily-assembled forensic team against the crumbling walls of the old hospital room. All of them were wearing white paper overalls now, and the camera’s flash made it seem as if they momentarily disappeared and then reappeared again, like ghosts.

  The subjects of the photographs were the symbols daubed on the dilapidated plaster: simple line drawings, sprayed hastily across every blank space, even the broken windows. Some appeared to be similar to the markings on the victim’s arm.

  A table had been pushed into the centre of the room: on it, a chalice and an upturned cross showed all too clearly what its intended use had been. But even that was nothing compared to the spray of rusty red that burst like a giant ink-blot against the far wall, or the long smear that showed where the body had been dragged towards some French windows that gave directly onto the lagoon.

  “As far as publicity goes, this could be another Beasts of Satan,” Piola said quietly.

  Kat nodded. The revelation in 2004 that the ritualistic murder of two sixteen-year-olds had been orchestrated by a heavy metal group called the Beasts of Satan had provoked a massive public outcry – the so-called “Satanic Panic”. The Vat
ican had introduced new exorcisms; tarot readers and fortune tellers had been banned from daytime TV; there had even been calls for heavy metal music to be outlawed. She’d been a teenager herself at the time, but she remembered all too well how the media had hysterically blamed the police services for failing to “root out” the “canker of evil” in the first place.

  “Which is why we keep this development to ourselves for now,” Piola added. “But equally, we’ll need to step up the investigation. I’m going to ask for a team of twenty officers. Double shifts, overtime, all the bells and whistles. And I want every single person warned not to speak to the press, or they’ll have me to answer to. Would you see to it?”

  “Of course.” She hesitated. “Does that mean you want me to run the operations room?”

  “No,” he said thoughtfully. “I think I want you to stick with me.”

  Once again she hoped he didn’t notice how pleased she was. “I’ll speak to Allocation.”

  “Colonel?”

  They turned. One of the forensic team was holding up a small leather case. “I think you’ll want to see this, sir.”

  Even though he was already wearing gloves, Piola took the case from the technician by the edges, opening it carefully to avoid disturbing any prints. Inside, in separate compartments clearly designed for the purpose, were wafers and three phials of liquid. The liquid in one phial was red, in the next clear, and in the third golden-green.

  “Wine, water, and holy oil,” Piola said.

  “I believe that’s what they do. For a black Mass . . . they use a consecrated host.” Kat couldn’t help being shocked. “To defile it.”

  Piola gazed thoughtfully at the symbols scrawled on the walls. “It certainly looks that way.”

  “There’s this too, sir,” the technician added. She held up a credit-card-sized piece of plastic, encased in another evidence bag.

  “A hotel room key,” Piola said. “Well, well. I think we may be about to find out who our mysterious priestess is, Capitano.”