The Abomination
Page 34
“In mathematics, when we think something is true but don’t know how to prove it, we call it a ‘conjecture’,” Daniele said. “It doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just that the best way to examine it is to imagine it’s true, and see where that takes you. And where this takes me is the conclusion that someone had to take the lead in planning William Baker. I don’t believe MCI could have done it alone – they’re mercenaries, not strategists. The Church, the Mafia, the ex-Gladio staff officers from NATO – none of them were big enough on their own to organise that coalition of vipers. It would have taken someone who really understood where all the levers of power in Italy were located, and how to pull them. Someone like you, in fact.”
“Fascinating, Daniele. Fascinating and, as you said yourself, quite without foundation.”
“Perhaps. But there might be one thing. Bob Findlater said it to Kat Tapo, before you shot him. He said, ‘There’s nothing sweeter than the power to do whatever you want to an entire country, like we’re doing to yours.’ Those were his exact words – ‘like we’re doing to yours’. Kat was very struck by that.”
“A slip of the tongue. He meant ‘like we were doing to Bosnia’.”
Daniele shook his head. “He can only have meant Italy. And that ‘we’ – I don’t see how it can have referred only to MCI.”
Gilroy threw up his hands. “And that’s it?” he demanded. “One ambiguous pronoun – and suddenly I’m not to be trusted?”
“I keep thinking about who we were up against here,” Daniele said. “All those vested interests, working together at William Baker, still working together today to cover it up. Who’s pulling the strings here, Gilroy? Why did googling ‘Companions of the Order of Melchizedek’ cause my computer to become infected with a tiny piece of spyware, one so quiet and well designed that even I almost didn’t notice it was there? What’s really going on in Italy?”
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” Ian Gilroy said with a sigh, shaking his head. “Or what it can possibly have to do with me.”
“As I said, I don’t know yet either. But believe me, I will find out.”
When Daniele had gone, Gilroy said, “I suppose you heard all that?”
Holly Boland stepped out from behind a painted screen. “Enough.”
Gilroy sighed. “He doesn’t trust me. I don’t blame him. He’s been dispossessed by his father’s Foundation, and I’m its representative. But what am I meant to do? The legal structures are quite unalterable.”
Holly touched his arm. “Just keep protecting him.”
“I can protect him from many things. But not, I fear, from the demons inside his own head.”
“Can I help?”
“Would you?” Gilroy said. “I’m getting too old for this, and he’s a responsibility I suspect I’ll never succeed in discharging.”
“What can I do?”
“Get close to him. Get inside Carnivia – that’s the key. If you can make sense of that website, I think you’ll begin to make sense of Daniele Barbo.”
“It’ll be a pleasure.”
“Thank you, Second Lieutenant.” He was silent a moment. “While we’re in confession mode, there’s something I should explain to you. Before you came to Italy, your predecessor, Carol Nathans, came to me with some correspondence relating to a Freedom of Information request she’d been asked to handle. I realised immediately what it meant, that the enquirer was somehow on the trail of Operation William Baker. Nathans said she wanted my advice, but it was clear she really just wanted to know how best to answer the letter so that she could get it off her desk before her transfer. The same day, a contact of mine at the Pentagon called to say you’d applied for an Italian posting. I encouraged him to grant the application. I guessed that, like me, you might feel a loyalty to this country as well as to our own, and be motivated to get involved with the investigation as a result.”
“Why didn’t you mention it when we first met?”
“I didn’t want you to feel under any obligation to help me. But I promise, next time something like this comes up, I’ll level with you.”
“Next time?”
“There’s always a next time in intelligence, Holly. You never beat the enemy, but if you’re lucky, you might hold him in check for a while.” He eyed her thoughtfully. “What about the Carabinieri captain? Will you keep in touch with her?”
“We’re going to live together. For a while, at any rate.”
Gilroy raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve been ticking off the days, waiting for my mandatory period on base to end,” Holly explained. “I mentioned to Kat I was going to be looking for accommodation, and she suggested I stay with her until I’m sorted. She mentioned three times that she was very broadminded, before I twigged she was telling me that she didn’t mind if I was gay. Something to do with my lack of lacy lingerie and kitten heels, apparently.”
Gilroy laughed. “That’s the very definition of a broadminded Italian. Happy to accept you as lesbian, but unable to believe that you’re not one unless you put on a bella figura.”
“I guess we’ll figure it out. And she’s told me I can borrow some heels, to practise in.”
“So you’ll all three stay close.” He nodded. “Good. And what about Kat’s unfortunate boyfriend, the Colonel? Where does he fit into the picture?”
Holly hesitated. “I believe she’s seeing him this evening to discuss that very question, sir.”
Seventy-six
AS NIGHT FELL, the tide rose. They said it could be the last acqua alta of the season. Venice’s canals and squares slowly filled with silt-brown water, like a blocked drain spilling over a bathroom floor.
Kat waded across the flooded Campo San Zaccaria to the osteria near the Carabinieri headquarters, where she found Aldo Piola sitting alone, eating a bowl of bigoli con le sarde. A low wall of sandbags across the door protected the restaurant from the worst of the water’s ingress, although the floor was damp from a trickle that had somehow managed to penetrate its defences.
She pulled up a chair; saw the complex mixture of emotions that flashed across his eyes. Surprise, delight, wariness, guilt.
“Will you join me?” He indicated the pasta. “It’s good. Freshwater sardines from Lake Garda, with zibibbo raisins and a little ricotta cheese.”
She shook her head. “But I’ll have some wine.”
He gestured to the owner, who came over with another glass. “The girls are safe,” Piola said, filling it for her. “I found them all places at a rehabilitation project in the countryside, twenty miles away.”
“Thank you. And Findlater?”
“His body, curiously enough, was found washed up at almost exactly the same spot Jelena Babić’s was, right by Santa Maria della Salute. That’s the sea for you, I guess. Prosecutor Marcello is inclined to treat it as a case of suicide.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Weren’t there two bullets?”
“Apparently there’s some doubt as to whether the first was sufficient to kill him. And if that isn’t enough, his employers in America have provided medical evidence showing that he was on long-term leave of absence because of depression. It was a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, the company doctor said, probably related to his time serving in the US Special Forces.”
“And you? What do you believe?”
“I believe that Prosecutor Marcello has shown his customary brilliance in finding a theory that fits all the known facts, before ordering us not to look for any more.” Piola looked at her. “And since by some miracle you’re still alive, I have absolutely no intention of trying to find out anything else.”
“Thank you.”
“Forget it. Tomorrow morning. . .” He waved a bigoli-laden fork at the water lapping at the door, “all this will have gone, and Venice will be clean again. Let the sea wash away its secrets.”
“Clean? Venice?”
“Well, back to its usual filth, at any rate.”
“Aldo. . .” she said
.
“I can’t stay long, by the way.” His eyes were on his bowl as he chased the last strands of pasta around the sauce. “I promised I’d read to the kids.”
“There’s something I need to ask you.”
“Go ahead.”
“I want to go on working with you. Like we would have done if we’d never slept together. Not pretending that it never happened: accepting that it did, and that it was wrong, and putting it behind us so that we can do our jobs.”
Piola placed his fork in his empty bowl, then pushed the bowl aside. “I’d like that too, Kat,” he said slowly. “I’d like nothing better. But I’d like it for the wrong reasons.”
“You’re saying no?”
“I’m sorry. I just can’t do it.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say, but I wanted to be absolutely sure. You see, I’ve got a decision to make.”
“Oh?”
“There’s a vacancy that’s come up in the Milan division. It’s been suggested to me that I apply. Strongly suggested, in fact.”
“Ah,” he said. He looked at her. “And you’re going to take it?”
“Did you know?” she asked, not answering him directly. “About the suggesting, I mean?”
He shook his head. “What have you decided?”
“That’s why I’ve come to see you.” She took a deep breath. “I wanted to tell you to your face that I’m going to enter an official complaint of sexual misconduct against you. I want you to understand why. It isn’t because you slept with a junior officer. It’s because you wouldn’t work with her afterwards.”
He stared at her, aghast. “You’d do that?”
“The letter’s already written.”
“But this is crazy, Kat. I’m not going to cause you any problems.”
“You already have, by depriving me of the chance of working with the Carabinieri’s best investigator.”
“But . . . why? I know you’re ambitious, but do you really think trampling over—” He stopped. “Sorry. That was unforgiveable of me. I just don’t understand what’s making you do this.”
She said slowly, “It’s not you, Aldo. It’s the system – the way it assumes that it’s me, rather than you, who’s got to be shunted off sideways. And it’s Jelena Babić, and Barbara Holton. And Martina Duvnjak, and Soraya, and Melina Kovačević, and my own grandmother, who fought alongside male partisans in the war but was made to go back afterwards to baking cakes and having babies. It’s the women who aren’t allowed to be priests, because the Church looks at a two-thousand-year-old tradition of misogyny and calls it Holy Law. It’s the women raped in the Birds’ Nest camp during the Bosnian conflict, and the girls who are still being trafficked to Italy today. Not one of them wanted to be a victim. But they were.” She stood up. “You asked me once, ‘Why Italy?’ Well, maybe this is part of the answer. Maybe it’s only after we’ve changed things like this that we’ll be able to start dealing with the things that really matter.”
He didn’t try to negotiate with her, or say he’d changed his mind, and for that she was grateful. She’d have hated to despise him now.
“I’m sorry,” she added.
He didn’t reply. There was nothing more to say.
She put a five-euro note on the table. “For my share of the wine,” she said, and was pleased to see that he almost smiled. Then, going to the door, she stepped carefully over the sandbags into the icy waters.
Daniele and Holly were waiting in the Barbo launch at the edge of the Riva degli Schiavoni, where the spilling waters concealed the course of the canal. Kat stepped in. The engine spluttered into life. None of them spoke as Daniele opened up the throttle, turning a wide circle through the darkness before setting the prow back towards Ca’ Barbo.
Historical note
Although The Abomination is fiction, much of the background is based on fact – even if, as you might expect, many of those facts are still disputed. For example, there now seems to be a reasonable weight of evidence that elements within the US intelligence services were covertly helping the Croatian side in the war in the former Yugoslavia, despite a UN arms embargo. In turn, this led to the NATO airstrikes on Kosovo, widely heralded as NATO’s first “humanitarian” war, and to a subsequent expansion of NATO’s sphere of operations. The expansion of US Military bases in northern Italy, such as the doubling in size of Camp Ederle near Venice, remains on-going. In all, there are over one hundred US Military installations in the country, established under terms that remain classified to this day.
References in The Abomination to events such as NATO’s Gladio conspiracy are, in general, as accurate as I could make them. Additional background material can be accessed via the series website, www.carnivia.com, along with information about further books in the trilogy.
Acknowledgements
A number of people helped The Abomination to be born. In particular, I want to thank Laura Palmer, fiction publisher at Head of Zeus in the UK, not just for her spot-on editorial advice but also – along with CEO Anthony Cheetham – for their immediate enthusiasm on first receiving the manuscript, and for communicating that excitement to other publishers around the world.
My thanks, too, to Lucy Ridout for her thorough and unobtrusive copyediting, and to Anna Coscia for correcting my often-terrible Italian. I am especially indebted to Sara Cossiga in Venice, and to Colonello Giovanni Occhioni of the Venice Carabinieri for showing me round their headquarters at Campo San Zaccaria. But my greatest debt is to my agent, Caradoc King, who along with his associate Louise Lamont saw something in the idea when it was nothing more than a few scribbles on a page and a conversation in a restaurant. Grateful as I am for his generous counsel and unflagging support, I’ll always particularly treasure the email he sent me from Goa, after he read the finished manuscript whilst on holiday. Here’s hoping the prediction he made then comes true.
About the Author
JONATHAN HOLT studied English literature at Oxford, and is now the creative director of an advertising agency. He lives in London.
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Copyright
THE ABOMINATION. Copyright © 2013 by Jonathan Holt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by Head of Zeus Ltd.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Map © Jeff Edwards.
ISBN: 978-0-06-226433-6
EPub Edition June 2013 ISBN 9780062267023
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