The Absolution Page 9

  She opened a bottle of white wine, a Ribolla Gialla from the mountains to the north: its sharp acidity would cut through the richness of the meat. Then she sent a text.

  You’ve got twenty minutes. If you’re late, I’ll do to you what I just did to the eels.

  She knew, though, that Flavio would never be so rude as to show up late for food. Sure enough, almost immediately the answer came back.

  Better let me in then.

  Crossing to the window, she saw a car pull up outside. Flavio climbed out of the back and bent down to say something to the man at the wheel. It would only be going around the corner, she knew: the bodyguards were never more than a short sprint away.

  The water for the pasta was already boiling, while in another pan she’d prepared a simple sauce of anchovies, chopped parsley and onions softened in butter. She threw a couple of handfuls of buckwheat bigoli into the boiling water, and opened the door just before he knocked on it.

  It was good to be able to kiss him properly, so unlike their snatched moments in the Palace of Justice. Good, too, to be alone. She considered herself too thick-skinned to be put off by the bodyguards’ glances when she entered or left his office, but it was a welcome relief not to have them there all the same.

  As their kiss deepened, he ran his hand up her hip and cupped her buttock, pulling her body into his. “Uh-uh,” she said sternly, pulling away. “Eat.”

  “Eat first,” he corrected with a wolfish grin.

  “Eat first,” she agreed, her insides fluttering with anticipation.

  They sat at her tiny table, their legs companionably tangled, and ate the pasta while the apartment filled with the deep, almost medicinal aroma of the bay leaves. Not until the eel was on their plates did they discuss the case.

  “I stopped by the casino this evening,” she told him as they ate. “I’ve got a contact there, someone who’s given me bits of gossip in the past.”

  “And?”

  “Cassandre had been coming in for months, buying chips with cash, then placing a few small bets before taking the chips back to the cashier and asking for a cheque. Money laundering, in other words. The cashiers would get a couple of chips as a tip, so they weren’t going to call him on it. But recently, my contact said, he’d also been gambling for real. He’d spend twenty, thirty thousand euros a night on the tables. Losing it, mostly, but winning just often enough to make sure he kept coming back.”

  Flavio raised an eyebrow. “For a banker, that sounds remarkably stupid.”

  “Or desperate. Then, about a week ago, he stopped coming in.”

  “From which we deduce . . .?”

  “That either his luck had changed, and he wasn’t desperate any more. Or he’d realised he was drawing attention to himself.”

  Flavio got up and fetched the bottle. “Even if Cassandre was laundering money, that doesn’t mean Grimaldo’s story about using him in an intelligence operation isn’t true. Cassandre wouldn’t be the first white-collar criminal to do a deal with the security services.”

  “But what if the truth is the exact opposite of what Grimaldo is saying?” she persisted. “What if they’re actually part of it? And this is something AISI is trying to cover up, not investigate?”

  “This is beginning to sound like dietrologia,” he said, his smile robbing the words of any offence. To many Italians, there was always a hidden truth that lay dietro, or behind, the official explanation of events. Dietrologia was the faintly disparaging term for taking it too far. Although Flavio came across many bizarre conspiracies in his work, he always made a point of not jumping to fanciful conclusions without having explored the simpler alternatives first.

  “Father Calergi made the point that all Freemasons think their first loyalty is to their fellow Masons, not to the law. What if these people are all protecting each other?”

  “Then we’d need some evidence,” he said gently. “Investigations come to court because someone has assembled a cast-iron case, not because of hypothetical speculation.”

  She nodded. “I know. That’s why I asked Malli, our IT expert, to take another look at Cassandre’s computer.”

  Flavio looked startled. “I thought he’d handed the laptop over with all the other evidence?”

  “He did. But he’d previously made a copy, an ‘optical image’, as they call it. After they took the laptop, he asked me what he should do with the copy. I told him to go ahead and examine it.”

  “Which you had no right to do. Kat, anything you find will be inadmissible. It’ll have been completely compromised as evidence.”

  “We don’t have to tell anyone else what we find. But something about this smells, and I can’t think of any other way to find out what it is.”

  He was silent a moment. “And when will this Malli get back to you?”

  “He said he’d email me tonight.”

  Flavio threw up his hands. “You’d better find out what he’s said, then.”

  She crossed to the counter where her laptop was and opened her emails. Malli’s was at the top.

  Subject: Is this what you’re looking for?

  There’s a lot of stuff on here – I can’t be sure what’s important and what isn’t. A lot of it is technical: spreadsheets, lists of numbers, what look like banking details.

  But I’m sending the attached document as Cassandre had deleted it recently, or thought he had.

  The attachment was headed “Insurance”. She opened it.

  It was a list of names, running to several pages. She spotted the names of dozens of local politicians. Others were industrialists or businessmen. Many had titles – General, Archbishop, Prince, Deputy, Judge.

  “This doesn’t look like terrorism to me,” she said. “More like a list of his fellow Masons in the black lodge.”

  “You don’t have any evidence for that,” Flavio said, reading over her shoulder. But she could tell by his tone that he was no longer quite so unconvinced.

  “Father Calergi mentioned the P2 conspiracy. Remember how they called it the ‘government within the government’? What if this is something similar?”

  “All right – so perhaps these are the members of an illegal society.” He gestured at the document. “That doesn’t mean they’re conspiring. No prosecutor could launch an investigation merely on the basis of a list of names.” Even so, he scrolled down the list, occasionally shaking his head when he recognised one.

  “So what do we need? Whatever happens, I can’t do what Grimaldo’s asking and just forget that I was ever put on this case.”

  “You know, Kat,” he said quietly, “if I’d realised, when I first began those Mafia trials, how much of my life it would take up, and at what cost, I would never have started.”

  “But you did start. And you’re still doing it. You’re the most fearless prosecutor I know.”

  “Not any more.” He turned to meet her eyes. “Until recently it seemed like I had no alternative. There was nothing in my life but my work. But things are different now.”

  “What’s changed?” she said, although she’d already half-guessed the answer.

  “You,” he said simply. “Lately I’ve found myself thinking . . . what if we went abroad? To Brussels, say. You could transfer to Interpol, I could be a prosecutor for the European Commission. It would be dry work – dull, even. But we could live together, stroll to a café every morning like normal people do, eat together every night . . . I’d be sharing my life with you, instead of with my bodyguards.” He gestured at the screen. “Kat, if there is a conspiracy here, and by some miracle we get to the bottom of it, you know we won’t touch the real problem. Corruption is just too endemic in this country. We’re like housewives trying to shovel snow off the front step while the blizzard’s still raging. Maybe the answer is just to go where there isn’t so much snow.”

  Or so much water. When he’d said the work might be dry, she had immediately thought that her surroundings would be, too. Like every Venetian, she hated the way tourists took over
her city for ten months of the year; hated the way there was never enough money to stop the canals from stinking, the foundations from sinking, the bridges from crumbling. But there was lagoon water in her veins. Could she give that up for any man? Even a man like this?

  As if reading her thoughts, he said, “Or Amsterdam. There are canals in Amsterdam, you know. They call it ‘the Venice of the north’. We could work at the Hague.”

  “I bet Amsterdam’s canals don’t stink like Venice’s.”

  He looked perplexed. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  She was torn. She’d never come across a man like him before – a man she was quite certain of, whom she both respected and lusted over; a man to whom she could say anything, or nothing; a man of fierce moral integrity who nevertheless seemed to disapprove of her, or try and make her into something she wasn’t.

  “Mind you,” he added, “I never heard of anyone calling Venice ‘the Amsterdam of the south’. So perhaps they’re exaggerating a little.”

  She kissed his jaw. She loved the rough sandpapery feel of his end-of-day stubble, the faint aroma of courtrooms and business that lingered on his collar. “Then let’s do it,” she said. “But let’s do both. Sort this case out, as best we can, and then run away to Amsterdam and pretend it’s just Venice on a cold day. And now for God’s sake take me to bed, before your bodyguards start hammering on the door.”

  Much later, she crept to the window wrapped in the bedcovers and watched him climb into the car. If he looks up, he loves me, she told herself; then, a moment later, Don’t be such a schoolgirl.

  He looked up and blew her a kiss. Her heart melted.

  Amsterdam it is, my love.

  SEVENTEEN

  HALFWAY ACROSS THE world at JFK airport, the attendant at the Delta Airlines First Class lounge reception desk looked up as a man approached her. Although he was wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, he looked somehow different from the other passengers in First – the suit too cheap and too grey, the briefcase boxy and made of plastic. Although she smiled automatically, there was just a touch of challenge about the way she said, “May I see your boarding card, sir?” It wouldn’t be the first time an Economy passenger had tried to slip in here.

  Instead of a boarding card, though, it was an HP Business Services ID the man laid on the desk in front of her. She squinted at it. Steve Simmons. Network technician.

  “Photocopier’s reporting a fault,” he explained. “I’m booked in for a repair.”

  “Really?” she said, confused. “I wasn’t aware of a problem.”

  “It’s all automatic,” he assured her. “These new machines are so smart, they send us an email when they’re going to need fixing. Good thing it’s not smart enough to mend itself too, or I’d be out of a job.” He tapped the case, which she now realised contained his tools. “It’s a five-minuter, then I’ll be out of your hair.”

  She pointed. “The copier’s over there, in the business centre. Can I get you a coffee?”

  “I’m good, thank you, ma’am,” he said courteously.

  She watched from the desk as he carefully spread a dust sheet on the carpet next to the machine, to prevent any stray toner from staining it. Pretty soon he had the photocopier open and was delving around in its innards.

  The last repair man had explained to her, when she’d taken him a coffee, that modern copiers didn’t actually photocopy any more. They were now scanner-printers: every document placed on the glass was recorded as a digital image before being either printed, or – more frequently these days – emailed.

  “Which also means,” he’d added, “that modern machines keep everything. You’d be amazed how many people don’t realise that when they photocopy their naked ass at the office party and email it to their boyfriend, that image and address is stored on the copier until we delete it.” She hadn’t known that either, and from then on she’d never quite trusted photocopiers the same way.

  In a remarkably short time Steve Simmons was finished. Again, she was impressed by the efficiency with which he cleaned up after himself. He’d been wearing disposable gloves, but even so he produced a polishing cloth and meticulously wiped down the copier’s glass and sides after putting it all back together.

  “Many thanks, ma’am,” he said cheerily as he left.

  Half an hour later, when she was on her break, she saw him again, queuing for a domestic flight to Washington Dulles. She thought what an expensive business it must be, flying a repairman all the way from Washington just to fix a copier. But the people who decided these things must know what they were doing.

  By the time she came back from her break, she couldn’t even have told you what he looked like.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE HACKER WAITED patiently in the internet café. He had planned tonight’s demonstration down to the last detail. It was now two in the morning in Misrata, Libya’s third-largest city, and the streets were deserted, but even so the café had been closed all day as a precaution. No one would see the commander or the cleric arrive.

  He was waiting for the sound of a car, but when they came it was on foot, opening the back door and silently slipping inside. The hacker, whose name was Tareq, saw the commander glance uneasily over to where Hassan, the café owner, was standing.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Hassan will make tea, then leave us.”

  The commander nodded. He was wearing an old camouflage jacket and a turban that had been washed so many times its colour was indeterminate – the same one he had been wearing ever since 2011 and the War of Liberation. The cleric, by contrast, was wearing a black woollen chechia, a Tunisian imam’s hat, although, so far as the hacker knew, he wasn’t from that country. He spoke Arabic with a strong Egyptian accent.

  They waited in silence while Hassan made thick, syrupy black tea, pouring it repeatedly from one glass to another to produce the regwhet, or foam, that proved how clean the utensils and water were. Then, with a respectful “Ma as-salama”, he left them.

  The hacker turned back to the computer in front of him. The other two men came to stand behind him, looking over his shoulder as they sipped their tea. The screen showed what appeared to be a security camera’s view of a road tunnel. Traffic was relatively light: mostly big commercial trucks, each one with a tail of three or four cars, unable to pass them on the single-lane carriageway.

  “Of course, this is just a demonstration,” the hacker said quietly. “If it were a real operation, it would be done when the traffic was heavy.”

  “What are we looking at?” the commander asked. “What country?”

  “The Fréjus road tunnel,” the hacker said. “It runs under the mountains between France and Italy. Thirteen kilometres long – not the longest, by any means, but enough.”

  He typed in an IP address and a crude menu appeared, asking him for a user name and password. He typed again and the menu was replaced by a list of numbers. To the commander, whose technical knowledge was limited, it looked like the menu of an internet router.

  The hacker turned some nodes from “On” to “Off”. Then, typing a second IP address, he accessed another menu and checked “Disable”.

  “Now we wait,” he said, almost to himself.

  “How long?” It was the cleric who had spoken.

  “Ten minutes. Perhaps twenty.”

  “Time for a second glass, then.”

  The commander poured them all more tea, and brought over the bowl of almonds Hassan had left.

  “By the end of this year,” the hacker said in his soft, precise voice, “there will be more things connected to the internet than computers. By 2020 the world will have more ‘smart devices’, as they are called, than people: over twenty billion of them. Security cameras, traffic lights, ovens, baby monitors . . . not to mention automated stock-trading networks, power stations and defence systems.” He tapped the screen. “Or in this case, air turbines.”

  The commander and the cleric listened respectfully. The hacker might be t
hirty years younger than either of them, but they had travelled a long way to hear what he had to say this evening.

  “These days computers have relatively sophisticated security systems,” the hacker continued. “Firewalls and anti-virus software that are constantly updated as new vulnerabilities are discovered. But the Internet of Things generally runs on the simplest, cheapest software each manufacturer can find. In many cases the devices don’t even require passwords, or they’re set to one of a few factory defaults.” He gestured at the screen. “The air turbines in that tunnel, for example, were set to require the username ‘admin’ and the password ‘password’. But even if the engineers who installed them had thought to change the passwords, it would have been a relatively simple process to bypass them.”

  “So that’s what you did?” the cleric asked. “You turned the turbines off?”

  The hacker nodded.

  “And that’s it?” The commander couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his voice.

  He had already recounted to the cleric the story of how, during Libya’s War of Liberation, Colonel Gaddafi’s troops had shut down the national cell-phone network to deny the rebels a means of communicating. Someone had brought this skinny kid to see him. He claimed he could hack into the network and restore their communications. It had seemed worth a try, so he’d told the kid to go ahead.

  Within a day, they not only had a phone network but the kid had also somehow fixed it that they didn’t have to pay billing charges.

  He had the kid brought back to him. The young hacker looked at him as if he was expecting thanks, but the commander had something else in mind.