The Abduction: A Novel

by Jonathan Holt

  And what if the connection wasn’t a brief one, and breaking it hurt something fundamental in you? What then?

  “You’re making good progress,” Father Uriel was saying. “I think you might soon be ready to move on to the next exercise. Perhaps even to some real-world socialising.”

  “A date, you mean?”

  “If you like. It would be a big step, I know.”

  Daniele indicated the door. “Will I see her again?”

  Father Uriel considered. “Usually I try to rotate the surrogates, to minimise the danger of my patients forming an emotional attachment to them. But in your case, that’s hardly likely. Why? Would you like to see her again?”

  “I don’t know. I want to see her. But I want to meet the other surrogates, too.”

  Father Uriel laughed, confusing Daniele. Had he said something funny? “Well, I don’t have that many research assistants. Not ones as pretty as Sabrina, anyway. So I imagine you may well see her again.” He consulted his computer screen. “The same time next Monday?”

  As he left the consulting room Daniele flicked his phone back on, attracting a curious glance from a passing monk. He barely noticed these days that he was almost the only person at Father Uriel’s Institute who wasn’t wearing a religious habit.

  Daniele didn’t believe in God, except as a principle of higher mathematics. But he did appreciate the way that the sex scandals currently enveloping the Church meant greater resources for doctors like Father Uriel who were quietly exploring new ways of treating sexual deviance as a form of dissocial personality disorder. It was Father Uriel who had suggested that the reverse might also be true – that the same behavioural techniques he used to reprogramme a priest’s sexual attraction to children, say, could also be used to develop empathy in people like himself. The treatment was highly experimental, but when Daniele had checked it out by hacking into the archives of a few peer-reviewed journals, he’d been reassured to discover that it was based on sound science.

  He scanned his messages. Most were automated alerts from the Carnivia servers, notifying him of surges in traffic or attempted security breaches. The others he deleted rapidly one by one without reading them.

  From: Holly Boland

  Subject: Can you help?

  He hesitated, then marked that one to read later.

  It was another message, a little further down, that he stopped at. It had been sent to a hidden message board that, in theory, was only accessible to Carnivia’s administrators. The sender was someone who until a few days ago he’d never heard of. The subject line read:

  Dan, a generic description of the process

  He opened it.

  On arrival at the detention site, the prisoner finds herself under the complete control of her captors. She is subjected to precise, quiet and almost clinical procedures designed to underscore the enormity and suddenness of the change in environment, her uncertainty about what may happen next, and her potential dread of captivity. The captive’s own clothes are removed and destroyed. Her physical condition is documented through photographs taken while she is nude.

  The captive is shackled and placed in solitary confinement. No toilet items, reading matter or religious materials are provided. No communication is permitted with the outside world. Guards are usually masked and do not communicate more than the bare minimum, including giving commands in the third person (“The prisoner will exit the cell” etc.).

  The captive is subjected to dietary manipulation. This involves substituting a bland, commercial liquid meal for a captive’s normal diet. Calorific intake will always be set at or above 1,000 kcal/day. The captive’s weight is monitored to ensure that she does not lose more than 10% of bodyweight.

  The threshold question is whether this behaviour is so egregious, so outrageous, that it may fairly be said to shock the contemporary conscience.

  It was the third email in a similar vein he’d received in forty-eight hours. Had it not reached him on that particular account, he’d have taken it for spam. But he was quite certain there was no way a Carnivia admin board could be spammed.

  As he stood there with the phone in his hand, considering, it rang. Holly Boland’s name was the caller ID. He hesitated, then pressed “Answer”.

  “Yes?”

  Holly didn’t waste time on small talk, knowing how much it both irritated and confused him. “Daniele, a teenager has gone missing. We believe her phone records may help to locate her.”

  “So?”

  “It needs to be done quickly, which rules out conventional channels.” There was a long silence. “Daniele?” she prompted. “Are you still there?”

  “I’ll help,” he said slowly. “But I want something in return.”

  “Such as?”

  This time the silence was even longer. “I want you to have dinner with me.”

  “Dinner?” she echoed. Now it was her turn to hesitate. “That would be great.”

  Next to her, Kat stifled a grin. It had been perfectly apparent to her when she’d last observed them together that Daniele fancied the blonde intelligence officer. It had also been apparent that Holly had been oblivious to it. Well, Kat had her own theory about why that might be.

  “I’ll text the girl’s details,” Holly said.

  “A name will be enough. And her phone provider, if you have it.”

  “It’s Elston. Mia Elston. She’s—”

  “I know that name already,” Daniele interrupted. “She has an account on Carnivia. An account that’s been hacked.”

  At the other end of the phone, Holly was confused. The one thing everybody knew about Carnivia was that it wasn’t possible to hack it. That was the site’s whole raison d’être – not for Daniele, perhaps, who preferred to see his creation as a kind of abstract mathematical model, but for the millions of ordinary users. On Carnivia, wrapped in the anonymity of its military-grade encryption, you could buy anything, from the secrets of your colleagues’ sex lives to a new identity; sell anything, from a stranger’s credit card details to your own body; gamble anything, from your wage packet to your life; and say anything, from a declaration of passion sent via an anonymous email that self-destructed after a few minutes, to a whistleblowing denunciation of a corrupt politician or government. Some people called it evil, others a force for good. Most, however, were coming to realise that it was neither, but rather that, like Twitter, Google or the internet itself, it was simply a new reality of the information age, one whose true impact would be gauged only in hindsight.

  Assuming, of course, that it survived, instead of disappearing like so many other internet sensations before it. Carnivia’s success was inextricably linked to its ability to remain secure. The implications of it not being so were enormous.

  “Hacked?” she repeated. “How?”

  “I don’t know. Someone’s sending fake messages from Mia Elston’s account to an administrator’s board. Whoever it is has a working knowledge of scripting tools – the source code has been rewritten in Python to ensure I can’t trace it back to the IP. But that’s relatively simple. Getting into Carnivia itself would mean learning the domain-specific programming language—”

  “Daniele,” she interrupted, “you lost me after Python.”

  “Sorry. The point is, just because someone appears to have hacked a website, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve broken the coding. It’s far more likely to be social engineering – in other words, stealing someone’s password.” He hesitated. “These messages I’ve been getting. They make no sense to me. But they sound like some kind of threat.”

  ELEVEN

  “DO YOU KNOW where you are, Mia?”

  She shook her head. No.

  “Louder, please. Do you know what might happen to you here?”

  No.

  A hand smashed the table in front of her, making her jump. “Don’t lie to me, Mia. Think about your answers. Can you imagine the kind of things that might happen to you here? I’m sure you don’t like to think about them. Bu
t I’m sure you can. Correct?”

  After an hour or so in her cell, she’d been taken back to the bigger room. A bed sheet had been draped across the end wall, like a banner. It had some kind of symbol painted on it, a big black circle with an A inside, similar to the anarchist symbol but with a smaller D and M just below the A. In front of it they’d placed a table with a chair on either side.

  The man wearing the Bauta stood somewhere in the shadows, filming it all.

  “Yes,” she said in a small voice.

  “List them.”

  “You might… hurt me.”

  “Go on.”

  “Kill me. Beat me.” A pause. “Rape me.”

  “And if we did any of those things, what would you be able to do about it?”

  Nothing.

  Had she said that out loud, or just in her head? But the man opposite, the one in the Harlequin mask, repeated it, so she must have said it aloud.

  “Nothing. That’s right. You can do nothing. But I have some good news for you, Mia. Do you want to know what it is?”

  Another nod. Then, remembering his instructions, “Yes.”

  “The good news is that none of those things will happen if our demands are met. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now stand up and take off your clothes.”

  She hesitated, but only for a moment. As she removed the clothes she’d been wearing at the nightclub, he took a pair of scissors and cut each one into small pieces. When she was down to her underwear, he placed something else on the table. Looking down, she saw a pair of overalls and a roll of grey duct tape. Relieved, she reached for the overalls, but he put his hand on them to stop her.

  “Uh-uh. In here, Mia, you have to earn the right to wear clothes.” He picked up the duct tape. “And that means first, you have to help us make a little movie.”

  TWELVE

  “I’M AFRAID I can’t possibly discuss Mia Elston with you,” the student counsellor said, accompanying his words with a self-important frown. “My conversations with the students are privileged. They have to know that they can speak to me about anything, without fear of it getting back to their parents.”

  “We quite understand,” Holly said.

  The counsellor, Mr McConnell, was the last on their list of people to talk to at the American High School. So far, they hadn’t made much progress. Everyone had painted the same picture: Mia was hard-working, sporty and bright, although Kat thought it interesting that several of her friends had also implied she could be reckless. “You can dare her to do anything and she’ll do it,” one girl told them. “She’s braver than any of the boys round here, no question.”

  “Actually,” Kat said now, “it’s you who doesn’t understand, Mr McConnell. ‘Privilege’ is a legal term which, in this country, can properly apply only to a lawyer, doctor, or state-licensed psychologist. I’m assuming you don’t fall into any of those categories.”

  “I am a fully certified—”

  “You can have all the certificates in the world,” she interrupted. “The law takes precedence. That means you’re required to comply with any criminal investigation ordered by the Italian courts, or be in contempt of those proceedings and suffer the consequences – up to eight years in prison.” She deliberately used somewhat formal language, in the hope he wouldn’t challenge whether or not the courts had ordered any such thing. “So tell me, counsellor, what is it that Mia Elston confided in you?”

  McConnell blinked. “It’s, er, nothing specific, as it happens.”

  “Then be non-specific.”

  “Sometimes… how can I put this?” He looked up at the ceiling awkwardly. “It’s not unknown, actually. But not exactly common. She… taunts me, is the only word I can use.”

  “In what way?”

  “Students know I can’t repeat what they say. Sometimes that gives them a sense of power – they get a thrill out of trying to shock me. In Mia’s case, she tried to tell me about which male teachers she has a crush on.” McConnell made a gesture. “Oh, it was all under the guise of saying that she’s been having trouble concentrating, you understand. But she went into a little too much detail, if you take my meaning. And then, when I was trying to get her to open up a little, she tried to tell me she’d developed a crush on me. I don’t believe for one moment it was true. She simply wanted to see what my reaction would be.”

  “What was your reaction?” Holly asked.

  “I told her she’d have to see a different counsellor – which, since I’m the only one here, would mean my junior school colleague, Mrs Morales. Mia backtracked pretty quick after that, I can tell you. Came back next day and told me she’d decided it was just psychodynamic transference, if you please. She must have read it up on the internet – she knew all the jargon.”

  “So she prickteased you a little,” Kat said. “It doesn’t explain why she might go missing.”

  “Indeed. And your language, Captain… I don’t mean to suggest that her behaviour was anything more than a young woman starting to realise how attractive she is, and testing the limits of that. But I was struck by the way that she seemed able to inhabit both versions of herself simultaneously, if you like: the demure honours student on the one hand, and the girl who’s growing up fast on the other. Mia can flip between the two in a heartbeat.”

  “Have there been any boyfriends?”

  He shook his head. “Not that I’m aware of, although I’m sure she could have her pick.”

  “Major Elston mentioned a soldier who takes her to parties.”

  “Oh, yes. Specialist Kevin Toomer. Her father’s ‘guard poodle’, Mia called him. I got the impression she wasn’t very keen on him.”

  The two women exchanged glances. Getting to her feet, Kat said, “We’ll talk to him. Thank you for your time, counsellor.”

  “You were right. She was too good to be true,” Holly said as they left the school for the base.

  Kat made a face. “Winding up that lecherous creep hardly makes her a devil child. I’ll bet it was se non è zuppa è pan bagnato – six of one and half a dozen of the other. Did you see the way he was looking at my legs? I think she riled him by calling his bluff.”

  “You’re thinking maybe this soldier felt something similar?”

  “Could be. It can’t have been easy, being the father’s hand-picked bodyguard-cum-boyfriend substitute. Maybe he’d had enough.”

  Specialist Toomer was waiting for them in an interview room. Kat was struck by how young he looked. It turned out he was nineteen, a couple of years older than Mia.

  He wasn’t an easy interviewee. Every answer was replete with military jargon and delivered in a depersonalised monotone, as if Kat and Holly were sergeant majors on parade. Yes, ma’am, he sometimes accompanied Mia Elston to barbecues and movies. It was an honour to do so, ma’am. He had never personally served under Major Elston but it was his ambition to apply for Recon training just as soon as he had achieved sufficient seniority. Recon Red, the major’s troop, was known to be one of the tightest units in the 173rd.

  “What did you and Mia talk about?” Kat asked.

  Toomer looked blank. “Army stuff, mostly.”

  “Were you romantically involved?”

  The boy seemed shocked. “No, ma’am.”

  “What about sexually?”

  Toomer looked as if he might explode. “Major Elston entrusted me with his daughter’s honour. And Major Elston is, like, a legend.”

  “But you do find her attractive?”

  The soldier hesitated.

  “You’re gay, aren’t you, Kevin?” Kat said. Next to her, she sensed Holly stiffen. Toomer only stared at her, speechless.

  “I know it’s not something you usually talk about in the army,” she continued. “But you see, I need to understand the relationship between you and Mia. From what I’ve heard, she was pretty good at picking up on things like that.”

  After a moment Toomer nodded. “Yes, ma’am, she was.”

  “S
o you two were just friends?”

  “Kind of,” he said warily.

  “Meaning?”

  “Once Mia had worked it out…” Toomer hesitated. “Mostly she was fine. But occasionally she’d go off on one. You know, ‘Why couldn’t my dad find a straight guy to take me out?’ Kind of like a joke, but not a joke. And she’d say stupid stuff.”

  “Like?”

  “Like, maybe she’d give me a blow job to find out if I really am gay,” he mumbled.

  “So she is sexually active?”

  Toomer squirmed uncomfortably. “Maybe. I know she’s told her dad she’s going to stay a virgin. But she’s into some sexual stuff, for sure. She’ll talk about things she’s seen on the net, y’know? Like, ‘Oh, I saw this hot gay clip, you should check it out.’” He made a face. “It’s to shock me, mainly. But I don’t think she’s making it up. She told me one time about a message board on Carnivia where you can post pictures of yourself and people rate them. Like, semi-nude, but you don’t show your face so people don’t know who you are. That gave her a thrill, I think.”

  “What about drugs?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” he muttered.

  “Yes, you do. Or do you want me to tell your platoon buddies about you?” Kat felt, rather than heard, Holly’s involuntary indrawn breath.

  Toomer bit his lip. “I know she’s tried a couple of things. I’ve never talked to her about it. I hate drugs. Her father does too. He told Mia he’d thrash her if she so much as touches them. I don’t think that’s stopped her, though.”

  “Why did you go on taking her out, if you’re so different?” Kat asked curiously.

  He shrugged. “Her dad, I guess.”

  “What about last weekend? Did she tell you what she had planned?”

  “I knew she had something on – she said she needed to give her dad the slip. I told her I couldn’t help. She kind of laughed and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not something you’d want to go to.’”