The Abduction: A Novel

by Jonathan Holt

  At home they’ll know I’m missing by now. But not why. Not how, or where from. They’ll have nothing to go on, until the kidnappers choose to make contact. The thought of home made her gulp back tears.

  And there was another kind of fear gnawing at her now as well: fear of the unknown. After he’d brought her the blanket, the kidnapper in the Harlequin mask had placed something on the floor and gestured for her to step on it. Looking down, she’d seen that he was pointing to a pair of scales.

  “The prisoner will be weighed,” he said in his rough English.

  The other man, the one in the Bauta mask, had lifted a hand-held video camera, the sort that plugged into a laptop’s USB port, ready to film her again.

  And immediately the terror had come flooding back, knotting her guts. Because in all the things she’d read about the Mafia, she’d never once heard of them weighing their hostages, let alone filming it.

  SEVEN

  THE YOUNG CLERIC looked up from his laptop and listened. From outside his office came the sound of applause, rippling around St Peter’s Square. He knew what it meant: the crowds had glimpsed the Pope, on his way to his first engagement of the day. There was no double glazing in the tiny office – the cleric had already discovered that it was freezing in winter; doubtless it would be roasting in the summer months too – but he didn’t resent the noise. In fact, he revelled in it.

  What did air conditioning matter, when your ceiling was decorated with a biblical scene painted by Raphael? Who cared about heating, when your office was situated within the Apostolic Palace, only a short distance below the private apartments of the Holy Father himself? The room might be small, and the infrastructure on which he depended for his work, such as the broadband connection, almost laughably antiquated, but the fact that he was sitting in it was proof of his own meteoric rise within the Curia, and the power he now wielded.

  A few months ago, at the age of just thirty-eight, the cleric – whose name was Martino Santini – had been plucked from his role running the press office of the archdiocese of Milan and appointed to the Papal Secretariat, a post that carried with it the automatic seniority of an archbishop. For years, he and other reformers had been arguing that the only way for the Church to overcome its recent troubles was by becoming more open and transparent. The new Pope had evidently agreed – or at least, had seen the sense in drawing a line under the scandals of the past by appointing some of the more vocal reformers to key positions. In Santini’s case, that meant being given responsibility for the Sala Stampa della Santa Sede, the Vatican Information Service. There could be no clearer signal that His Holiness wanted the Curia to abandon its centuries-old habits of secrecy.

  Some of Santini’s initiatives had been mocked at first – the Pope’s Facebook page, for example, and his Twitter feed; not to mention Santini’s own blog, updated daily. But they proved to be immediate hits with the faithful, just as Santini had predicted they would; particularly with the younger faithful, now seen as vital footsoldiers in the fight against secularism.

  Santini checked his own Facebook page as he got to his feet. It took an age to reload; he really would have to do something soon about the Apostolic Palace’s lack of bandwidth. But one battle at a time. Right now he had a meeting with Monsignor Verti, head archivist of the Archivio Segreto, the Pope’s confidential library. He could guess what it was about. Ever since Santini had ordered that the library’s entire contents be catalogued and listed online – again, giving a clear signal to the world that from now on, nothing was going to be concealed or kept hidden – the officials responsible for doing so had come up with reason after reason why it would be impractical. Needless to say, he was equally determined that they would do it.

  He made his way along the corridor to where a small lift was tucked into a stairwell. The lift’s interior was surprisingly modern, an airtight box of glass and steel that, once he’d put in his Vatican security card, sucked Santini down into the labyrinthine basements below the Apostolic Palace as smoothly and delicately as a component being pneumatically transported into a factory.

  Four levels below St Peter’s Square, the lift doors opened onto a long, low room that stretched away as far as the eye could see. Dim light, so cleansed of damaging ultraviolet it seemed almost colourless, seeped from concealed diodes in the walls. The hum of the air conditioning that kept the entire level almost as cold as a morgue, and the slight vibration underfoot from the dehumidification equipment, gave Santini the sense that he was in some sleek underwater vessel, moving purposefully but calmly through the depths of the ocean.

  A series of glass-walled pens along both sides of the room contained books and documents too precious, or too fragile, to be kept in the stacks. In some, bookbinders and restorers worked with powerful magnifiers to repair microscopic tears. Scholars padded to and fro – access was granted each year to a privileged few with impeccable credentials and an orthodox religious outlook, although there was currently a ban on requesting any document less than seventy-five years old. It was one of the many arcane regulations Santini was determined to stamp out.

  Everyone, whether staff or visitor, wore white cotton gloves. Santini pulled a pair from the dispenser in the airlock and tugged them on while he waited for the second door to open, the air in his lungs thinning with every breath he took. Even the atmosphere down here was different, constantly purged of any gases or humidity that might damage old documents. It was, Santini thought grimly, an appropriate metaphor for the place as a whole: they didn’t even breathe the same air as the rest of humanity.

  He strode into the glass meeting room, noting that despite the earliness of the hour the other attendees had clearly been there for some time; doubtless plotting how to outmanoeuvre him. As well as Verti there were two assistants, nervous-looking civil servants who avoided his gaze. And then there was the friar, Tonatelli. How old he was, it was hard to say – the baggy white robe and black mantle of the Dominican order concealed any stooping of his frame, while the blue eyes that looked at Santini from beneath frost-white eyebrows were fierce and steady. Quite how Tonatelli had come to be in charge of these archives, Santini had never been able to discover, but it was obvious from everything he’d heard that this lowly friar was the real power in this subterranean world.

  “Gentlemen,” Santini said, deliberately using a secular form of address to emphasise that this was to be a practical discussion. “You said there was a problem?”

  “Indeed.” Verti gestured to Tonatelli, as if they’d agreed that he would speak for them all. But the friar simply slid a flimsy sheet of paper across the table to Santini.

  Santini turned sideways to read it, hitching his cassock and crossing one leg nonchalantly over the other to indicate that he had better things to be doing. It was a copy, made on an old manual typewriter with carbon paper: the letters had the tell-tale blue smudging he recalled from his childhood, and for a moment he was too distracted by that recollection to concentrate on the letter’s contents. Then a name jumped out at him. He stopped, puzzled, and went back to the date at the top.

  5th October, 1944

  He started again, reading more carefully this time, feeling the blood draining from his face as he did so. He glanced around for water, but of course none was provided down here, lest it get spilled on their precious bits of paper.

  “Who else knows about this?” he managed to say.

  It was Tonatelli who replied. The friar’s voice, unlike Santini’s, betrayed no hint of dryness. “I should imagine,” he said calmly, “that the other parties involved have not forgotten.”

  Santini’s head was spinning with questions. But right now, he knew, he had to show firm leadership, focusing only on those facts which would help him lay down a clear plan of action.

  “In theory, we don’t need to make that letter public until 2019,” Verti added. “Although if we were to release the archive early, in accordance with your instructions—”

  “We won’t be releasing it early,” S
antini said. “Clearly. We won’t be releasing it at all. Is there anything else that points to the same, the same…” He struggled to find the right word. “Scandal”, “betrayal”, “catastrophe” – none of these was adequate. “The same conclusion,” he said euphemistically.

  Tonatelli shrugged. “There are eighty-five kilometres of shelving in the Archivio Segreto. We haven’t even counted the number of documents that relate to the war years yet. Almost certainly, that letter’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Then you must find the rest. Immediately.”

  “Destroying documents now, if that is what you are intending, will only give the impression later that we had something to hide,” the friar said mildly.

  But we do, Santini thought. “Do you have a better suggestion, Reverendissimo?”

  Tonatelli looked at him calmly. “I think your policy of openness is the right one – in fact, I think in the long term it is the only one. But we should adopt it in the knowledge that the conclusions people draw from our transparency will not necessarily be favourable.”

  Santini picked up the sheet of paper again, staring at each brief paragraph as if somewhere in the wording he might find room for ambiguity or reinterpretation. Transparency was surely unthinkable now. “People will say that if it happened then, it could have gone on happening.” He glanced up, horrified. “It didn’t, did it?”

  No one replied.

  He looked again at the bottom of the letter, where the author had both signed and typed his name. The handwriting was familiar to him from a thousand documents and decrees, although he usually encountered it using a different name.

  Giovanni Battista Montini

  Protonotary Apostolic for Extraordinary Affairs

  5th October, 1944

  He was looking at the signature of the man who had gone on to become Pope Paul VI, attached to a document that, were it to become public, would surely blacken the name of his papacy for ever.

  EIGHT

  KAT HAD BEEN to the American base at Vicenza before, but not to the military housing area that lay to the south of it. Following the directions Holly had texted, she turned off the ring road on to Viale della Pace – “the Road of Peace”; was it already called that when the Americans came, she wondered, or had some town planner with a sense of irony renamed it since? – and came to a security barrier manned by an American MP. The sight of her gazzella, as the Carabinieri’s cars were universally known, wasn’t by itself enough to get the barrier raised. She had to show her ID and have the vehicle checked underneath with mirrors before she was allowed through.

  The place was vast. She drove past institutional-looking barracks, then street after street of apartment blocks, interspersed with a medical clinic, a veterinary centre and two schools. After that came individual houses, each one with a small square of lawn and a white-painted fence. These must be the officers’ homes. Some had garages as well as gardens, an almost unheard-of luxury in Italy. The American flag seemed to be everywhere.

  Struggling with Holly’s directions – It’s 611: that means the eleventh house after the Sixth Street intersection – she was relieved to come across another gazzella, parked outside a house that was otherwise indistinguishable from its neighbours. The bell was answered by a man of about forty-five. His buzz cut seemed a little too youthful for his face, but under his uniform she could tell that his lean body was granite-hard.

  “I’m Elston,” he said without preamble. “Come in.”

  He led the way into the kitchen – which was like no kitchen Kat had ever been in. A central island was surrounded by high stools, like a cocktail bar. Gleaming marble surfaces bore so many gadgets – a food processor, bread maker, juicer, some kind of coffee-making machine – that it resembled an industrial workshop. There was a fridge the size of a wardrobe, complete with an ice dispenser. There was, however, no sign of any food.

  The petite woman sitting at the island had to be Mrs Elston. There was no mistaking the haggard, red-eyed expression of a mother ricocheting between terror and despair, nor the way hope flooded into her face at the sight of Kat’s Carabinieri uniform, only to drain away again as she realised there was no news. Next to her sat a familiar figure – a wiry blonde woman in her early twenties, also wearing military fatigues. The front pocket had “Boland” written across it, while her shoulders carried the single pip of a second lieutenant. Her geeky face, devoid of any make-up, wore a sombre expression.

  “I’m Captain Tapo,” Kat said in English. “Second Lieutenant Boland’s…” She hesitated, stumbling over the word “friend”. “Her contact in the Carabinieri. I’m sorry to hear about your daughter’s disappearance.”

  “This is my wife, Nicole,” the major said. “Your colleagues are upstairs.”

  Kat drew up a stool. “I’ll talk to them in a minute. Tell me what happened first.”

  The major spoke for both of them. “We thought she was on a school trip, but it seems she… we may have been wrong about that. No one’s seen her since Saturday.”

  “Does she have a phone? Bank cards?”

  “Yes and yes. We’ve tried the phone, of course, many times, but it’s switched off.”

  “Has she taken any clothes?” Kat asked. “Luggage? A backpack?”

  Major Elston glanced at his wife. The woman stirred. “I don’t think so. It’s hard to be sure, what with laundry… She’s a teenager, she’s pretty independent…” Her voice tailed off.

  “And is there anyone you can think of who she might be with? I understand she doesn’t have a boyfriend at the moment.”

  Major Elston was on surer ground here. “No. And not just ‘at the moment’. She won’t be seventeen for two weeks. She—” At the implicit reference to his daughter’s future, he stopped short. A muscle twitched in his cheek.

  Kat thought it curious that he would link not being seventeen to not having a boyfriend, but chose not to pursue that for the moment. “What about other male friends? Anyone who’d recently come on to the scene you weren’t sure about?”

  Again Elston shook his head. “She has a soldier friend, Specialist Toomer, who escorts her to social events. I trust him completely. I’d also trust him to tell me if she was mixing with the wrong crowd.”

  “Could she have simply got lost?”

  “I doubt it. We’ve been here three years now. She knows her way around.”

  “Any problems at home? Arguments, rebellions?”

  “We don’t have arguments,” he said flatly. “Mia accepts that in any family, civilian or military, there has to be discipline. We’ve brought her up to respect the boundaries of the house, and that includes not speaking back to us.”

  “May I talk to her teachers?”

  “If you really think it will help,” the major said. The muscle in his cheek twitched again. “What are you going to do?” he exploded, slamming his hand down on the marble counter. “People should be out looking for her, not asking questions.”

  Kat waited a moment. “Does she have any brothers or sisters?”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry. You’ll appreciate this is difficult for us. One brother, Michael. He’s in ninth grade. He’s at a friend’s, getting ready for school. We thought it best he stick to as normal a schedule as possible until she’s… until Mia’s back.”

  “Is there a recent picture of her I can take?”

  The major handed her a framed photograph. It showed a pretty, smiling girl in a mortarboard and gown, holding some kind of school diploma.

  “I have these,” Holly said quietly, before Kat could say anything about the usefulness or otherwise of the major’s photograph on the streets of Vicenza. From a folder neatly labelled “Mia Elston” she produced a shot of the same girl surrounded by friends in a pizza restaurant. She was dressed up and wearing a little discreet eyeliner. Kat was struck by how much older she looked than in the other picture.

  “Will you circulate that?” the major said. “I mean, immediately, to all the police forces? And trace her phone
and so on?”

  Kat said carefully, “I’ll do what I can. The difficulty is that there’s no evidence yet of any crime.”

  He looked puzzled. “We don’t know where she is. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Until seventy-two hours have gone by, she isn’t officially a missing person. And checking her phone records at this stage would breach data privacy laws.”

  “She’s a child, for Christ’s sake. How can her privacy be more important than her safety?” he demanded.

  Kat asked a few more questions, jotting down the names of some friends she could speak to. It was certainly curious. With most reports of missing teenagers, there was a back-story that instantly explained things – a boy the parents didn’t approve of, a group who were a bad influence. Neither seemed to be the case here.

  Her eye was caught by a chart pinned up next to the cooker. It was headed “KP Duty” and listed various household chores – cleaning, laundry, garbage. Along the top were the children’s names, Mia and Michael. Each box contained a silver or gold star to show what had been done. In the case of Mia, she noticed, the stars were all gold.

  Major Elston followed her gaze. “She’s a good kid,” he said simply.

  Holly got to her feet. “I’ll show you her room.”

  The two women went upstairs in silence. Somehow the moment had passed to say hello to each other.

  “Thanks for coming,” Holly said at last. She spoke Italian, as she’d always done with Kat when they were alone. Having grown up on an army base near Pisa herself, she was as fluent as any native.

  “It’s no problem. My bosses were fine with it in the end. Anything for our friends the Americans, in fact.”

  “I’d hoped we’d see each other under different circumstances—”

  “But we didn’t,” Kat interrupted brusquely. “Is this her bedroom?”

  Holly sighed. “Yes.”

  Kat had been expecting a typical princess’s boudoir, filled with posters of teenage heart-throbs. But Mia’s bedroom was nothing like that. A bookcase, meticulously organised, held a row of framed photographs, mostly of Mia doing various sports. There were a couple of posters, but they’d been properly framed and hung on the wall. The only clutter was on the bed, on to which two drawers of underwear had been emptied. A young carabiniere sat going through them. Another stood by the window, his back to the room, gesticulating angrily.