The Abomination Read online

  We should not persuade ourselves that it is ever permissible to ordain women under the present arrangement. Those who have been tempted to take this view are in error.

  That was interesting: it suggested there were indeed some who thought differently. Had those individuals perhaps gone one step further? Were there, even now, women who somehow considered themselves to be genuine Catholic priests?

  She opened up a new email message and wrote a short note to the blogger, explaining that she was trying to get in touch, in confidence, with people who supported female ordination.

  Having sent it, she scanned the rest of her inbox quickly. Her mother had sent a note to her and her brothers reminding them that they’d promised to come to lunch next Sunday. Her mother hadn’t copied the email to her sister Clara, she noticed. She’d known Clara wouldn’t need reminding.

  Kat didn’t reply to the email. It was almost 3 a.m. on Tuesday morning, and a lot could have happened by Sunday.

  Ten

  HOLLY BOLAND HIT her jet-lag with an early-morning run along Ederle’s apparently endless perimeter, followed by a light breakfast in the D-FAC, the on-post dining facility. As army chow halls went, it wasn’t too bad – someone had tried to brighten it up with a cheery-sounding name, “South of the Alps”, and there were brioches and Italian cakes on offer as well as the usual waffles and hash browns. Even so, she longed for the day when she would be living off-base, able to start her mornings with an espresso and a bite of freshly baked cornetti or bomboloni, instead of these stadium-sized cartons of frothy milk, flavoured with a shot of watery caffeine.

  After breakfast, she checked in with Mike Breedon. There still wasn’t much for her to do, so she decided to make a start on locating Barbara Holton’s papers – or more likely, she thought, establishing that no such papers existed.

  After numerous phone calls, she succeeded in tracking down the staff sergeant responsible for the base archives. He directed her first to a voluminous pile of authorisation forms to be written up in duplicate, and then to a small building at the edge of the administration block. As she got there, clutching her forms, she saw that a long line of soldiers was exiting the building. Each was carrying a stack of three cardboard boxes, like ants with crumbs.

  “What’s going on?” she asked one of them.

  He shrugged without stopping. “Guess they need the space, ma’am.”

  Inside the building an iron stairway, echoing with the stamp of standard-issue Belleville boots, spiralled down into the earth. Fighting her way against the tide of soldiery, she found herself in a long, low access tunnel lit with bare bulbs. Uniformed figures were bringing more boxes from either direction, humping them into piles by the exit.

  She found the NCO in charge and repeated her question. He too shrugged. “We’re shifting some of this, is all.”

  “Why?”

  His look told her clearly that he rarely searched for any rhyme or reason behind his orders. She tried a different tack. “Where’s it going to?”

  “Camp Darby is what I heard.”

  “Know where I’d find the files for 1995?”

  “As it happens, I do. Way along there, to the left.”

  Further down the tunnel the lightbulbs became more intermittent. Dimly lit alcoves contained trestles and pallets piled high with boxes. “Archive” was far too grand a term: this was clearly just a dumping place for papers no one was quite sure they were authorised to throw away. Still, someone had tried to make sense of it: laminated A4 sheets taped to each alcove indicated which year each stack related to. Some years contained bigger piles than others. Presumably those were when the larger military engagements had taken place.

  “1995” consisted of a truck-sized heap of boxes. The line of soldier-ants was already about twenty feet away, emptying the alcoves one by one. She had no more than twenty minutes, she estimated, before she would be politely asked to vacate the area so they could clear it.

  The first three boxes she opened contained standard stores requisition forms that could be of little interest to anyone. The next two held random collections of administrative memos. The sixth contained aerial reconnaissance photos. One of Barbara Holton’s questions had related to such images, she recalled, but how could she possibly know who these photographs had been provided to or what terrain they showed? She decided to move on.

  It was time-consuming work, and by the time she was halfway done the first soldiers were hovering at the alcove entrance. She called, “Do the one across the way first, will you? I’m almost through here,” knowing that a friendly smile would be more effective than trying to get their orders changed. She turned back to the boxes and pulled out another, thicker file. Some words in a Slavic language jumped out at her. Siječanj – Ožujak 1995 . . . Medački džep. Planirani unaprijed za glavne SIGINT USAREUR. She didn’t speak Serbo-Croat, but she spoke fluent military acronym, and she knew that SIGINT USAREUR meant Signals Intelligence originating from US Army Europe. She grabbed it. Another file immediately below bore the hand-scrawled title “66th INTERCEPTS BiH”. The 66th Brigade was the umbrella organisation for Military Intelligence in Europe, and BiH was presumably Bosnia – Herzegovina. Then there were a couple more that appeared to contain dates and times, all in the same distinctive Slavic language. She grabbed those too, put the files under her arm and called, “All yours, guys.”

  On an afterthought, she turned to one of the soldiers as they passed her. “These’ll need to be reunited with the others someday,” she said, holding up the files. “Any idea who I should send them to?”

  “Negative, ma’am. Request came in via Intel is all I heard.”

  She nodded her thanks and hurried away, the files securely under her arm. It meant nothing, she decided, that Barbara Holton’s Freedom of Information request had specifically mentioned some kind of three-way involvement between Military Intelligence, Camp Ederle and the Croatian Army. If you started treating such small coincidences as significant, pretty soon you ended up thinking like a loony conspiracy theorist yourself.

  Eleven

  DANIELE EMPTIED A can of Red Bull energy drink into a half-empty cup of coffee and stirred the mixture with the end of a pencil before downing it in three gulps. He tried not to think what it tasted like.

  They’d been up all night, crawling through electronic tunnels and backdoors within Carnivia that only this small band of people knew about, searching. Searching for something they might not even recognise when they saw it.

  The reason for his persecution by the authorities, he was certain, lay somewhere inside Carnivia. This wasn’t just some random attack on a channel of communication they couldn’t control. Someone was looking for something specific, some conversation thread or uploaded titbit of information, and they were prepared to destroy him to get to it.

  Which meant that, so far, they hadn’t found it.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what he’d do if he and his programmers found it first. It would almost certainly be encrypted and untraceable, like the majority of Carnivia’s traffic. But he hoped that from the size and shape of it, and the pattern of uploads, he might be able at least to figure out what kind of thing he was dealing with.

  You know, Max typed from halfway across the world, there’s always a possibility that we’re playing right into their hands.

  How so?

  They tried to hack into Carnivia themselves and failed, right? Looking for the exact same thing we’re looking for. And now here we are, doing it for them.

  Daniele ran his hands through his hair, exhausted. Then he typed, You’re right. Plan A sucks. If I had a Plan B, we’d probably go to it. But I don’t. So let’s keep looking.

  Twelve

  HOLLY TOOK THE files from the archive back to the Liaison Office and examined them more carefully. Three files, consisting of about twenty pages of loosely inserted material in all. She tried entering some of the Slavic words into Google Translate, but the inverted circumflexes and other unfamiliar accents easily defeated h
er US-layout keyboard.

  “Mike, do we have any Serbo-Croat translators on base?” she asked her boss.

  “NFI. But I could send an email or two if you like. This still your Open Government request?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “Frankly, I doubt you’ll find anyone. The Pentagon won’t have seen any point in training interpreters in those languages since Kosovo, and that must have been almost fifteen years ago. World’s moved on, right?”

  “Right,” she said with a sigh. Through a nearby window she could see a dozen soldiers spotting each other over the assault course. It looked fun – or at least, physical and challenging. For a moment, she regretted not fobbing Barbara Holton off with a form letter and some platitudes.

  “I do know one person you could try, though,” Mike was saying.

  She turned her attention back to him. “Yes?”

  “Ian Gilroy. He was the local CIA section head before he retired – a real Cold War warrior from the old days. He comes on base once in a while to give lectures.” Mike made a face. “I went to one, a while back. Can’t say it was riveting. I suspect it just gives him an excuse to use the PX, get his car serviced and chew the fat with the other old-timers. You know how it is with these retirees.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Ian Gilroy. Thanks, I’ll try him.” A thought suddenly struck her. “Mike,” she said slowly, “this isn’t all some kind of elaborate snipe hunt, is it?”

  “Snipe hunt?” he said innocently.

  Postings abroad were notorious for snipe hunts. Newly arrived soldiers were sent to the armoury to ask for a crate of left-handed grenades. Airmen were sent to the stores for tins of camouflage paint. Seamen were ordered to help calibrate the radar by wrapping themselves in tinfoil. The variations were endlessly inventive, whether for duplicate Humvee keys, replacement spirit-level bubbles, copies of gun reports, or any of the hundred-and-one other practical jokes that kept combat-ready troops entertained in long foreign postings. Only now did it occur to Holly that a suspiciously articulate middle-aged American woman brandishing an obscure FOIA request might be something similar.

  Mike smiled at the thought. “Wish it was – it would be a pretty good one. But no, not so far as I know. You chose to do this, remember? Only yourself to blame.”

  The Camp Ederle Education Centre consisted of no fewer than three affiliated colleges: University of Maryland, Central Texas College and University of Phoenix. She looked up the lecture schedules on her computer. Between the three, she could study everything from Criminal Justice to Business, all heavily subsidised by the government. Even so, she knew, most soldiers preferred to spend their free time racking up internal army qualifications.

  Ian Gilroy taught two courses: Italian Military History and Roman Civilization. In total he gave only three classes a week, and they seemed not to lead to any particular major. It certainly read more like a retiree’s hobby than a serious academic pursuit.

  Seeing that his seminar on Italian Military History would be finishing within the next half hour, she caught a bus over to the Education Centre. The place was busy, mostly with women in civilian clothes. There were almost a thousand service spouses living near the base, she knew, and they had to keep busy somehow. Alongside them were a smaller number of older men, also in civvies. These would be the retirees: ex-soldiers or officers who had settled down nearby and were entitled to use the base facilities for as long as they lived. Her own father had talked about doing something similar at Camp Darby.

  She felt a sudden pang of heartsickness. Many of these men were about the same age as him. White hair combined with an upright, military bearing – dignified and frail at the same time – always got to her.

  She found the right classroom and peered inside. Two men of about seventy were sitting watching another man of a similar age. He was drawing a diagram on the whiteboard as he talked. She guessed that must be Gilroy, and stepped back into the corridor to wait.

  After about five minutes the door opened and the two other men came out. Gilroy was cleaning the board down, meticulously scrubbing it clean with methylated spirits.

  “Mr Gilroy, sir?”

  He turned. He was white haired, and his physique had the slenderness of age, but his firm blue eyes showed no sign of wateriness as they took in her meagre pips. “Yes, Second Lieutenant?”

  “I’m here to ask a favour, sir. I’m told you might speak Serbo-Croat – I have some documents I’m looking to translate.”

  Clearly pleased to be asked, he nodded. “I’ll certainly try. But I have to warn you, my skills in that direction are somewhat meagre. Back in the day, it was our Russian we tended to work on. Do you have the documents with you?”

  She gave him the papers, and he waved her to a seat. Pulling out a pair of reading glasses tucked discreetly into his shirt pocket, he scrutinised them.

  “These are mostly dates, and what appear to be meeting notes,” he said after a minute. “At a guess, I’d say they relate to Operation Storm.”

  “That tallies with my intel, sir. But why would the US Army have archive notes relating to Storm? My understanding is that there was no US involvement in that conflict.”

  He glanced over the reading glasses with a smile. “What’s your name, Second Lieutenant?”

  “Boland, sir. Holly Boland.”

  He stared at her. “Not Ted Boland’s daughter? Little Holly who used to make those Italian cookies for barbecues?”

  “Affirmative, sir,” she confessed.

  “Well, I’ll be. . .! Your father and I didn’t see each other often, of course – he was down at Pisa and I was up here in Venice, although I took my chain of command from Langley.” She nodded at the discreet acknowledgement that he’d been CIA. “But I certainly swung you round on my arms a few times – in the days when I was still capable of such things.” He smiled ruefully. “But you haven’t come here today to listen to an old man’s reminiscences.”

  “On the contrary, sir. I’d be honoured to hear your recollections of my father.”

  “Well, perhaps on another occasion.” He turned back to the documents. “May I ask exactly what it is you’re looking for?”

  “Well, that’s the thing – I’m not quite sure. A Freedom of Information request came in. Something to do with a man called Dragan Korovik.”

  “And who is he, when he’s at home?”

  “He is, or was, a Croat army general. And he’s certainly not at home, not at the present time. He’s awaiting trial for alleged war crimes relating to Operation Storm.”

  Gilroy raised his eyebrows. “Well, it’s certainly an intriguing mystery. And I have to confess, I’ve rather missed those since I retired. Mind if I take these and try to work it out?”

  “Please go ahead, sir.” As he folded the papers, she added, “That’s a copy.”

  “So not classified?”

  “Doesn’t appear to be.”

  “Good. And whether there’s anything useful in here or not. . .” He tapped the folded pages. “I’d like to borrow you for dinner sometime. Been into Venice much yet?”

  She shook her head. “I only got here yesterday.”

  “Then we’ll go to a proper Venetian restaurant and you can fill me in. My treat.” He paused, then added, “I do get some news, via friends back home. I’d heard that your father’s no better. I’m very sorry.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. For some reason, this old warrior’s calm sympathy was almost harder to bear than her own family’s regular updates. She swallowed away the sudden catch in her throat. “I’m sure he’d be glad to know so many people are thinking of him.”

  “Things like that, they put life into perspective, don’t they?” He tapped the papers she’d given him. “But in the meantime, I’d be pleased to help you with your puzzle, Second Lieutenant.”

  Thirteen

  STILL WEARY FROM her late night, Kat drove inland towards Verona for her 9 a.m. appointment with Father Uriel. She got lost several times in the Veneto count
ryside before she finally located the Institute of Christina Mirabilis, nestled on its own amongst rolling vineyards and quiet woods. To judge from the ancient stone of the buildings, and the stained glass in some of the windows, it had once been a monastery or convent. The area between Venice and Verona was liberally dotted with such places, most of them dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when La Serenissima, as Venice was known – The Most Peaceful One – provided a safe haven for those of every persecuted religious affiliation. In the modern age many had become hospitals or colleges, often still run by nuns or monks from the original order. Something along those lines was clearly the case here: as Kat parked she observed a number of nurses in grey nuns’ habits, hurrying busily from building to building.

  The receptionist, another nun, took her to Father Uriel’s office and knocked on the door for her.

  “Come in,” a voice called.

  A man in shirtsleeves sat at a desk, typing briskly into a small computer. Apart from the white collarino of his shirt, and the small metal cross pinned to his chest, he might have been any other busy medical man at work. A doctor’s couch, complete with a paper hygiene sheet, stood to one side.

  Breaking off from his work, he stood and greeted Kat with a handshake. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Father Uriel.” His Italian was excellent, but a hint of clipped vowels suggested that it wasn’t his first language.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Father.”

  “Not at all. I understand it relates to the abomination at Poveglia?”

  “To the murder, yes.”

  “It was not only the murder I was referring to,” Father Uriel said quietly. She must have looked at him questioningly, because he continued, “There are many different ways of allowing evil into our world, Captain.”

  “You’re talking about the occult?” she said cautiously.

  “Amongst other things.”