The Abomination

by Jonathan Holt

  “My God,” Kat said, outraged. “This is appalling.”

  “The camps had innocuous, feminine names, like ‘Coffeehouse Sonja’, ‘Nymphs’ Tresses’ or ‘The Birds’ Nest’.”

  The new names gave them enough to do a more detailed search. What they found was even more horrifying. Even in the first three years of the Balkan war, when these things were still being counted, an estimated twenty thousand women were raped, many in special places of detention set up for just that purpose. Each side blamed the other for being the first to use such tactics.

  For an hour or more there was silence as the two women read through the official reports. As early as 1994, the United Nations had analysed “tens of thousands” of allegations of rape, concluding:

  Rape and sexual assault are reported to have been committed by all of the warring factions. Some of the reported rape and sexual assault cases are clearly the result of individual or small group conduct without evidence of command direction or an overall policy. However, many more cases seem to be part of an overall pattern. These patterns strongly suggest that a systematic rape and sexual assault policy exists . . .

  And yet little seemed to have been done about it at the time. Indeed, as the country spiralled deeper into violence, and UN observers were pulled out for their own safety, the issue was apparently almost forgotten in the general confusion.

  Kat felt her cheeks burning with anger. All this had been happening less than two hundred miles away, just across the Adriatic Sea, yet so accustomed had Europe become to thinking of the Communist Bloc as a separate entity that even today, people didn’t talk about what had happened. Unable to sit still any longer, she jumped to her feet and strode to the big, barley-twist windows for some air, just as Daniele said quietly, “Aha.”

  She turned. He was pointing at his screen.

  “This is who Barbara Holton was contacting in Carnivia.”

  They crowded round his computer. rcarlito@icty.org.

  “ICTY is the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,” Kat said. “Based in The Hague. Barbara Holton’s website mentioned that she’d done some work for them in the past.”

  Holly was typing the email address into a search engine. “And R. Carlito is Roberta Carlito,” she informed them. “Her official title is ‘legal analyst’. She reports directly to the chief prosecutor. Unofficially, I’d say she’s some kind of paralegal investigator.”

  “So maybe Barbara Holton was supplying her with evidence for Dragan Korovik’s trial.”

  “But what did that have to do with Findlater?”

  “Barbara Holton thought there had been American complicity in the conflict,” Holly said. “Operation William Baker confirms it. Maybe Findlater was tasked with making sure that evidence never reached the Hague.”

  “Deleting the vapour trail,” Daniele murmured from behind his computer.

  “That would explain why Findlater was looking for Barbara Holton and Jelena Babić,” Holly said. “But it doesn’t explain why they were all looking for Findlater’s daughter.”

  The same idea struck both women at the same time. They looked at each other, understanding flickering between them.

  “Barbara Holton wasn’t just looking for Melina Kovačević,” Kat said slowly. “She was looking for proof of a war crime.”

  “Because the two are one and the same thing,” Holly agreed.

  “I don’t get it,” Daniele objected. “How?”

  “That lock of hair Kat found in the women’s hotel room – if it came from Soraya Kovačević, it would contain DNA that, when compared with DNA from Findlater and DNA from Melina, would prove they were Melina’s biological parents.”

  “Piola always said that Hollywood story about finding his daughter so he could give her a college education was bullshit,” Kat exclaimed. “Holly’s right – Findlater wasn’t using Barbara and Jelena to find Melina. He was trying to find her before they did.”

  “But why?” Daniele repeated.

  “To kill her. To destroy the evidence. That’s what this is all about. It’s Melina herself who’s the smoking gun. Her DNA is living proof of a war crime.”

  Whichever way they looked at it, they kept coming back to the same hypothesis.

  Findlater had claimed he’d found Melina’s mother cowering in a cellar whilst on duty in Krajina as a UN peacekeeper, and that they’d fallen in love. “But if the truth was a bit different,” Kat said. “If, say, he was in Croatia as an MCI operative, one of those stirring up the conflict by any means possible, including sexual violence against women. . .”

  “‘Libidinal frenzy,’” Holly said. “Rape as a weapon of war. One of Paul Doherty’s precursors to genocide.”

  “ . . . then he might well have committed rape himself, on Soraya. Melina was the result.”

  “We need to get in touch with this Roberta Carlito.” Holly looked at Daniele. “Can we email her? Is that secure?”

  “Absolutely not. But you don’t have to email her. You can contact her the same way Barbara did, on Carnivia.”

  They logged onto Carnivia, sent Roberta Carlito an encrypted message, and waited. Within half an hour they got a message back asking them to meet her in Piazza San Marco.

  For Holly, this was her first experience of assuming a Carnivia identity. Strolling with Kat and Daniele’s avatars along a beautiful canalside pavement, the canals themselves mercifully free of tourists and stinking diesel-engined vaporetti, she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. “It’s so beautiful,” she kept saying, surprised.

  “Beautiful but rotten,” Kat said tersely. “Just like the real thing.”

  Daniele shrugged. “It’s a place. People live in it. Some are good, some are bad. Most are a mixture of the two.”

  They arrived in the Piazza San Marco and found a woman in a Domino mask waiting in front of the Doge’s Palace. Daniele supplied the encryption code from Barbara’s computer, and Kat typed:

  – Good afternoon, Ms Carlito. We’re friends of Barbara Holton. I believe you’ve been looking for her?

  – Is she all right?

  – I’m afraid not. She’s been murdered.

  There was a long silence. Then:

  – I was afraid it must be something like that.

  They walked along the Riva degli Schiavoni as Roberta Carlito explained how she first came across Barbara Holton.

  – Barbara was one of a dozen unpaid volunteers collecting evidence of crimes committed during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Specifically, crimes against women. Affidavits from victims, witness statements, timelines of events – without its own executive arm, the ICTY doesn’t have the resources to gather these things, and local police are often implicated in the original crimes themselves and have no wish to help us. So we rely on a network of pro-bono lawyers and activists.

  – Jelena Babić was another one of those, presumably.

  – No. Jelena was a witness – one of the first Barbara found. But they became friends, and Jelena used her contacts to introduce Barbara to other victims.

  – Victims of what, exactly?

  – Ah . . . How much do you know about places like Coffeehouse Sonja?

  – A little, now. They were rape camps, we understand.

  – Yes. The rapes served several purposes. They helped to demoralise and terrorise the population, of course. They brutalised the soldiers, making it easier for their commanders to order them to commit even more violent acts in the future. But there was another purpose too, in that the women would often become pregnant. The lack of birth control was quite deliberate. Effectively they were turned into breeding machines for their captors, to fill the area with children of the victors’ ethnic type – the mother’s ethnicity being seen as less important than the father’s. It was a way of making the issues of race and religion even more toxic than they already were.

  Kat wrote:

  – What if we told you these tactics were being planned even before the war in Bosnia? And that a smal
l number of NATO officers had a hand in it, along with a private military contractor with links to the US government?

  – I’d ask you for the proof. That’s what’s always held us back – actually proving there was more to this than the usual brutality of war. About a month ago Barbara thought she’d finally found a “golden thread”, as she called it. She had an affidavit from a Bosniak woman called Soraya Kovačević who’d been imprisoned in the Birds’ Nest camp. Soraya alleged that one of her rapists was an American military contractor attached to the Croatian forces as an advisor. Even after all this time, she could still identify him. It’s the perfect test case for us – if we can make it stand up, we’ll have linked every stage of a known atrocity, from planning through to commission, back to US proxies.

  – What do you need to make it stick?

  – An affidavit from Soraya Kovačević, together with valid chain-of-evidence documentation so that its authenticity is beyond question. Some maps and photographs of the area would be a bonus, too. But most of all, we need corroborating DNA proving that the American is the father of Soraya’s child.

  “In other words,” Holly said out loud, “we not only need to find the mother, we need to succeed where Barbara Holton and Jelena Babić failed, and find the daughter as well.”

  – Where do we begin?

  – Jelena’s evidence should help. She identified the Birds’ Nest camp as being in the Krajina region, near a town called Brezic. I should add that time isn’t on our side, though. Korovik’s trial begins in just under two weeks, and full disclosure requires that we submit any evidence to the defence in advance. Once the hearing starts it’ll be too late for any of this.

  Sensing that Daniele had had enough of their presence in Ca’ Barbo, the two women removed themselves to a nearby bacaro.

  “You know,” Holly said thoughtfully, once the two of them were sitting at a table in the back of the bar, with a couple of spritzes in front of them. “There are plenty of people who’d say stirring this stuff up now is a waste of time. History moves on, people forgive and forget. Croatia’s joining the European Union, it’s starting to have a tourist trade . . . What’s the point in raking up a crime that took place almost twenty years ago, in a war that most people couldn’t even find on a map?”

  “That’s right,” Kat agreed. “Most people would probably say that.”

  Holly gave her a sideways glance. “Not you?”

  Kat shook her head. “You?”

  “Nope,” Holly admitted.

  “A crime is a crime,” Kat said. “People should know about it. And crimes like these . . . Yes, they involved civilians. But many were directed specifically against women. I’m not sure that’s an area where we have moved on, not altogether. Women are still being trafficked, women are still being treated as second-class citizens. Things are better than they used to be. But that war isn’t over.”

  “As Jelena found out to her cost.”

  “Yes.” Kat sighed. “You ever meet any discrimination in the military?”

  “As a woman, you mean? I’ve no complaints.”

  Kat glanced at her. “Meaning, ‘some’?”

  “I guess. It’s like anything: in the army, respect has to be earned. Everyone has something about them that could be construed as a weakness. It’s up to you to make sure it isn’t what people define you by.”

  Not for the first time, Kat found herself wondering if Holly Boland might be gay. It wasn’t a question you could ask American soldiers, she knew. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell still ran deep.

  “When I first started in the Carabinieri,” she said, “women hadn’t been admitted as officers for long. There was still quite a bit of, shall we say, resistance to the idea. They used to put pictures from porn magazines in my locker. Once I found someone had masturbated over my uniform. Another time I went to put on my shoe and it was full of piss. Everyone said I should just ignore it.”

  “And did you?”

  “Kind of. That is, I went and pissed in the shoes of the men I thought were doing it, when they weren’t around. How about you?”

  “Nothing in that league,” Holly said, slightly in awe of the matter-of-fact way Kat had just delivered that last sentence. “Although I did have someone try to force me into giving him oral sex recently.”

  “You deal with it?”

  “I guess so. I head-butted him in the groin.”

  Kat nodded, equally impressed. “But for just that reason,” Holly added, “it makes me angry to think there were people prepared to drag the US Military into the Bosnian war for their own ends. We serve with honour. That means we fight according to the rules of war, and we seek out and punish those who break the rules.”

  “So we do this?” Kat said.

  Holly nodded. “We do this.”

  As they left the bar, Kat noticed a couple from a nearby table, a man and a woman, get up to pay their bill.

  “That’s odd,” she said quietly.

  “What is?”

  “See those two? The woman in the grey coat and the man in brown? They came in soon after us.”

  Holly glanced over. “That’s not so surprising, is it? There must be a dozen people in here who did the same.”

  “Sure.”

  But when they reached the corner she hung back, watching.

  “Something else about those two,” she said as she and Holly walked back towards Ca’ Barbo. “They’re carrying a guidebook. In Italian. But they’re speaking to each other in American.”

  Fifty-two

  BACK AT CA’ BARBO, they discussed the possibility that the couple in the bar had been following them. Here in Venice it wasn’t so much of a problem, but if they were to go to Croatia it would be better to travel undetected.

  “I’ve had some basic anti-surveillance training,” Holly said. “There’s not much we can do at airports, obviously, but after that we may be able to give them the slip.”

  “I’m thinking you should avoid airports altogether,” Daniele said. “It’s only four or five hours to drive to eastern Croatia from here. But no hire car – the records are all computerised. And you’ll need to leave your phones.”

  “Why?” Kat asked. “Croatia uses the same system, doesn’t it?”

  “Daniele means that our phones can be used to trace us, through the transmitter masts,” Holly explained. “We’ll buy pay-as-you-go phones, and turn them off when we’re not using them.”

  “Your credit cards too,” Daniele added. “They’ll be tracing those for certain.”

  “We’ll take cash. If we’re careful, we won’t leave an electronic trail at all.”

  While Holly researched their route to Brezic, Kat went back to Campo San Zaccaria. She found Piola alone in the deserted operations room, typing up his report.

  “You might want to add that Findlater was lying,” she told him. “He was never in love with Soraya Kovačević. He raped her, and now, almost twenty years later, he’s trying to get rid of the evidence.”

  Piola looked at her stonily. “How do you know?”

  “I took the hard drive to Daniele Barbo. I’ve been working with the American, too – the officer from Caserma Ederle. Findlater wasn’t just doing this on his own. There was a whole group of them plotting how to make the war in Bosnia so terrible that NATO would have to get involved.”

  A sigh escaped his lips, as if he couldn’t believe how foolhardy she had been. He rubbed his face in his hands. He hadn’t shaved, she noticed, and his stubble was flecked with grey. There was an open packet of cigarettes next to his keyboard.

  “Have I taught you nothing?” he demanded quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s suppose you succeed in gathering some proof of these . . . these allegations. Then what? Don’t you see – you’re already fatally compromised, because of all the rules you’ve broken to get to this point. Any Italian court would take one look at the case and throw it out.”

  “What if it isn’t an Italian court we take it to?
We’ve been in touch with the ICTY.”

  “The ICTY are trying Dragan Korovik, not Bob Findlater,” he said wearily. “What about justice for the murders of Jelena Babić and Barbara Holton? What about the principle of making sure that crimes committed in Italy are brought to trial in Italy? Anyway, it’s not going to happen. I’m standing you down.”

  “Now you sound like Marcello.”

  “Perhaps. But as your superior officer, this is my decision to make, not yours. You’re not to take this any further. That’s an order.”

  “Then it’s an order I’m going to ignore.” She hesitated. “You might as well know that I’m going to Croatia with the American officer, to find Melina’s mother.”

  “Kat,” he groaned, “Kat . . . Just think what you’re doing. Listen to yourself. This is the Carabinieri. We don’t work like this.”

  “From what I’ve seen, we barely work at all,” she exclaimed. “Don’t you see? This is my chance to get something done.”

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you that the reason I’m ordering you not to pursue this is that I’m thinking of you?” he said quietly.

  “What do you mean?”

  He pointed to the bruises on his face. “Why do you think they gave me these?”

  “To shut you up.”

  “And what makes you think they’re not going to shut you up? Don’t you see – if what you’re saying is true, then Barbara Holton, Jelena Babić and Ricci Castiglione all died because they knew too much. And each of them knew a lot less than you do.”

  “We know what Findlater looks like. We’ll be on our guard.”

  “Findlater had help – a lot of help.” He was silent a moment. “There was something Mareta Castiglione mentioned . . . I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Ricci went to confession shortly before he was killed.”

  “You think that was why they killed him? Because they thought he might be spilling his secrets to a priest?”