The Abduction: A Novel

by Jonathan Holt

  “He’s an old rogue, for sure. But a good tipper. Turns up with two or three girls on his arm and asks for a table on the far side of the dance floor, one where you can see everything without being seen too much.”

  “When you say ‘girls’, I take it you mean hookers?”

  Giù shrugged. “Hookers, weather girls, veline… it’s a fine line these days, isn’t it? Anyway, when I thought we were just talking about a missing schoolgirl, there didn’t seem any point in bringing his name into it. Last night, when I heard about the kidnap, I realised I was going to have to tell you.”

  Or realised there was no point in tapping Moretti for a bung to keep his name quiet, she reflected cynically.

  The club’s CCTV camera was positioned just over the reception desk, so the images on Giù’s screen showed the patrons coming off the street. But, just as she’d expected, most had put their masks on before entering the club, making identification impossible.

  “There,” Giù said, freezing the tape. “That’s the one I was talking about. Dreadlock Guy.”

  Kat peered at the screen. The image was relatively high quality, but the wig, along with the mask, obscured the man’s features completely.

  “Who’s he with?” she wondered aloud. The woman behind him was also wearing a mask – a Volto, a full-face mask of white plaster decorated with elaborate Venetian gilding, together with an oversized tricorne hat that hid her own hair from the camera. Whoever these people were, Kat thought, either they were consistently lucky, or their planning was remarkable.

  Giù let the tape roll. Sure enough, the camera had taken one more image of the couple as they left the reception desk. Dreadlock Guy was almost out of shot, but the woman had been caught in profile.

  “What’s that?” She pointed.

  There was a tattoo on the woman’s arm, partly revealed by her sleeve as it rode up. Kat made out the bottom part of a skull with two wings emerging from either side, and under that, some writing – it looked like three words, a motto of some sort. “Can we print this?”

  “Sure.” Giù pressed a button.

  Mia and her date were on the tape a little later. It was hardly surprising that the club had accepted her ID at face value, Kat thought. While most of the clubbers were in their thirties – she recalled from her own brief experience on the scene that it mainly consisted of married couples battling domestic boredom – there were plenty of younger patrons too. With her feathered mask on, Mia didn’t stand out in the least.

  Again Kat thought how well planned it all was. Dreadlock Guy and Tattoo Woman were already inside when Mia arrived. Which meant there would probably have been another team on the outside, tracking them in.

  “Who’s that?” she asked, noticing a young man on the tape who wasn’t wearing a mask.

  “Him? That’s Roberto, the podium dancer.”

  “Do you have an address for him?”

  “Sure – he lives just behind the hospital. I could drive you there in ten minutes.”

  “Thanks, I’ll talk to him. Maybe he saw something no one else did.”

  Roberto was extremely pretty. He was also somewhat stupid, his inanely cheerful smile oddly robbing his face of the attractiveness a sulkier expression would have lent it.

  He was only doing the dancing, he explained, to support himself through his personal-trainer exams. But it was a good job – after all, if he wasn’t being paid he’d still be out dancing anyway. “This way I get into clubs for free!” he exclaimed. “And most of them charge forty euros for admission!”

  “Is Club Libero the sort of place you normally go?” Kat asked.

  Roberto shook his head. “I’ve got a steady girlfriend. But if you don’t go into the back rooms, it’s not much different from anywhere else. In fact, in some ways it’s better. At Libero, no one has to try too hard to get laid, so people aren’t bothered if you tell them you’re not interested.”

  “Did you see this girl on Saturday night?” Kat asked, showing a picture of Mia. “She may have been wearing this.” She added a picture of a feathered Columbina mask she’d printed out from the internet.

  He studied them, frowning. “Maybe… Yes, while I was doing my first shift. I remember because she was kind of flirting with me, you know? Copying my moves.”

  It was interesting, Kat thought, that Mia had flirted with the only unavailable young man in the whole club. It seemed to confirm Holly’s theory that she’d only gone there as a kind of dare. “Then what?”

  “I saw her with a guy with blond dreadlocks. They went outside, through the fire door.”

  “Could it have been a drug deal?”

  Roberto shook his head. “The usual dealers weren’t around on Saturday.”

  Kat’s ears pricked up. “What do you mean?”

  “There are a couple of dealers who are always there – they don’t give any trouble, but they make sure everyone’s got what they need, you know? On Saturday, I couldn’t—” He stopped short.

  “Don’t worry,” she assured him. “I don’t care if you’re in the habit of getting yourself a little pick-me-up from time to time. But I need to know if you’re sure – the usual guys had vanished?”

  He nodded.

  “Thanks, Roberto,” she said. “You’ve been very useful.”

  Back in the car, she turned to Giù. “You didn’t tell me you have an arrangement with the local Mafia as well.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he blustered, starting the engine.

  “Yes, you do. I thought it was crap, when you said dealers know better than to come to the club when you’re there. Which suggests to me that it’s you who lets them in. That’s why you search people so thoroughly, isn’t it? Not to keep drugs out, like Edoardo thinks. It’s to make sure no one else brings anything in, so your friends can maintain their monopoly.”

  “A man’s got to live,” Giù said truculently. “I’ve got less than two years to go, and my Carabinieri pension won’t feed my family.”

  “Correction,” Kat said. “You’ve got less than two days to go. Just as long as it takes you to write out a letter of resignation, in fact. A moonlighting carabiniere’s one thing. Moonlighting for the Mafia’s something else.”

  “Everyone does it,” Giù said with a snarl. “You will too, one day.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Want some advice?” he said, pulling abruptly into the traffic.

  “Not really.”

  “Don’t chase this one too hard. You don’t know where it’ll lead you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the local spacciatori don’t turn up to Libero’s biggest night of the year, it’s for a good reason. Someone put the word out – someone who gets listened to.” He gave Kat a sideways glance. “That means someone who knows how to shut up nosy bitches like you, as well.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  PIOLA RAN THROUGH the stack of statements one more time. Together they occupied eight box files – nearly four hundred pages of evidence, gathered in record time.

  Not a single page of it contained any useful leads.

  All the members of Azione Dal Molin claimed to know nothing of any kidnap plan. Such tactics, several said vehemently, were completely abhorrent to them. Yes, some of them had been prepared to break the law to protest against the Americans’ presence; but that was a far cry from being prepared to adopt the same methods as those they protested against.

  Not that Piola had expected the interviews to provide a breakthrough; at any rate, not immediately. Azione Dal Molin was too well organised for that – as evidenced both by the remarkable efficiency of the break-in at the construction site, and the almost military precision of the kidnap itself. If the organisation followed the same model as, say, the militant animal rights groups he’d come across, they should be looking for one or two people who’d been involved in the wider anti-Dal Molin movement some time previously, but who’d appeared to move away from it just as frustration among the rank and file had led to
the formation of a smaller, more radical group. On the face of it, there’d be no connection between them. In reality, one or two members of the group would act as cut-outs, carrying messages to the hard-core activists in the kidnap cell.

  It meant that, unless they generated some more leads quickly, they could end up with a pool of over a hundred and fifty thousand suspects – every single person who had ever signed a petition against Dal Molin.

  He picked up Luca Marchesin’s statement. It was very similar to all the others. No, he would never dream of doing anything like that. He was a pacifist. He would have turned anyone who even thought about doing a real kidnap over to the police…

  “Sottotenente Panicucci?” he called.

  “Sir?”

  “Come with me. We’re going to go and speak to Luca Marchesin. I want to check something.”

  Luca lived with his parents in Padua, not far from the university. When his mother opened the door and saw the two Carabinieri officers, her face darkened.

  “I know he already spoke to my colleagues,” Piola said. “But I just want a quick word with Luca. Can we come in?”

  “It’s OK,” Luca told her, appearing at the door. “He’s the one I told you about, the one who got me out of the guardhouse.”

  Somewhat reluctantly, she let them in.

  “Luca,” Piola said. “There’s a girl about your own age who’s terrified right now that she’s going to be killed by her abductors. And there are people holding her – quite possibly well-intentioned, if misguided people – who could get killed themselves during the rescue operation. This whole thing is a tragedy waiting to happen.”

  “I know that. But I already told them – we never planned anything like this.”

  “I believe you. But what I want to know is, did anyone ever mention the idea of a kidnap? Even just as a suggestion, perhaps one that was immediately discounted?”

  Luca hesitated.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” Piola said. “In your statement, you talked about never having thought about doing a real kidnap. That suggests to me kidnapping did get mentioned, somehow.”

  “That’s what’s so crazy,” Luca said slowly. “Because it was nothing – not even an idea, just a throwaway remark.”

  “Such as?”

  “We were having a… I guess you’d call it a brainstorming. Trying to come up with some neat protests, stuff that would go viral. I was doing most of the talking – I’m good at all that; social media and so on. There were a few ideas I was really keen on. Like having a flash mob at Vicenza station, with guys in American military uniforms wearing Playboy bunny ears.”

  Piola frowned. “That would work?”

  Luca nodded confidently. “For sure. Anyway, I had this other idea too. That we should all dress up in orange jumpsuits and Guido masks and pretend to be American prisoners. Someone said it had been done already. So I said, so let’s just take one prisoner, then, and do a rendition on them. I wrote it on the board, but it was never mentioned again. It was just one idea in amongst lots of crazy stuff.”

  “But someone made it a reality?”

  He shrugged miserably. “I guess. Or maybe it’s just coincidence. I’d hate to think they got it from me.”

  “Who else was at this meeting?”

  “The whole group. It was when we first started.”

  “OK, Luca. Thank you for being honest with me about that.”

  “Will I get I into trouble?”

  Piola shook his head. “Having an idea doesn’t make you a criminal. It’s doing it that counts.”

  He was in a thoughtful mood as they went back to Venice. Despite what he’d said to Luca, recent legislation had blurred the lines between thought and action: conceiving and planning a terrorist action was now a crime in itself, and who was to say what counted as conceiving?

  But perhaps that kind of step was necessary, now that crimes didn’t have to take place in the real world either. It was something new and quite alien to him, this world in which a protest could take the form of a flash mob or a firebomb, or both.

  “I suppose you do all this stuff?” he said to Panicucci. “Facebook virals and so on?”

  Panicucci seemed surprised by the question. “Some of it, sir. I’m not a heavy user. Just Facebook and Twitter. And Instagram and Flickr. Oh, and Storify, Tumblr… maybe a few others.”

  “Carnivia?”

  Panicucci hesitated. “And Carnivia, yes. But that’s different. People don’t really talk about their Carnivia accounts. But everyone has one. It’s like a guilty pleasure.”

  A guilty pleasure that could be exploited by criminals, Piola thought. How did one police a city in which no one had a name or a face? How did one solve crimes that transcended the boundaries of the physical and the digital?

  Back at his desk, he reached for the stack of files and prepared to go through it one more time. As he did so, he was struck by another thought.

  Military precision – it was ironic, really, how that phrase had come into his mind earlier, given that the abductors ostensibly stood against everything that the US Army stood for.

  Ostensibly.

  Could it be anything more than that?

  Piola was professionally trained to scepticism. And so he found himself examining this most sceptical of thoughts from every angle, turning it over and over in his mind, before deciding that there was, at this stage, no reason to entertain it any further.

  Though not, perhaps, to dismiss it altogether.

  TWENTY-SIX

  HOLLY SAT AT her computer and swiped her CAC card through the reader. The Common Access Code software immediately compared her movements around the base that day with those she was authorised to make. Satisfied that she was who she claimed to be – a junior intelligence officer stationed at Camp Ederle in Italy – it granted her access to SIPRNet, the US Defense Department’s own version of the internet.

  She brought up a secure search engine, Intelliseek, and began entering each of the phrases that had accompanied the video of Mia. She’d expected this to be a lengthy process. But almost immediately, a plethora of hits came up on regular news sites, relating to the 2009 release of a number of CIA memos after a Freedom of Information action brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. One was a fax sent by someone at the CIA – in the published version, the sender’s name had been obliterated – to the Acting Head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Dan Levin. The cover note said simply, “Dan, a generic description of the process”.

  Holly exhaled. Daniele Barbo had assumed “Dan” meant him, but actually the sender had been talking about a different Dan altogether.

  She vaguely recalled some newspaper articles at the time about the “torture memos”, as they’d been dubbed, but she’d never actually read the originals. Now, on the Huffington Post website, she found an article with links to the documents. Written in the bland, reassuring language of bureaucrats, they detailed a series of over thirty techniques that made up the process known as “enhanced interrogation”.

  The Red Cross, the website pointed out, had carried out its own investigation into these techniques, and had described them as torture. During his election campaign Barack Obama had appeared to adopt a similar position, saying:

  “To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. This means ending the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.”

  Most people had interpreted this to mean that under his administration such practices would end. But other, more cynical, commentators had pointed out that by rolling several clauses together, he was effectively leaving himself some wiggle room. Thus, “ending the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries” might be said to have been achieved if those prisoners were ta
ken in the daytime, say, or if it wasn’t far-off countries they were shipped off to.

  In fact, the Huffington Post article said, the Obama administration had later quietly decided that while the old system of “extraordinary renditions” – that is, kidnapping a foreign national and flying them to another country such as Syria or Libya for interrogation – might be indefensible, “ordinary” renditions should continue. In other words, foreign nationals could still be seized and interrogated without trial or the protection of the law, so long as it was Americans who did the interrogating, rather than some foreign regime. And whilst Obama had said that the Army Field Manual should be used as the basis of future interrogations, he’d stopped short of actually declaring any of the old CIA techniques illegal. The article gave several examples from the Obama years of people who alleged that they’d been subjected to procedures identical to those summarised with clinical precision by the CIA’s lawyers in the torture memos.

  The slap is delivered with fingers slightly spread, which you have explained to us is designed to be less painful than a closed-hand slap. The slap is also delivered to the fleshy part of the face, further reducing any risk of physical damage…

  She saw what the kidnappers were doing now, and just how clever it was. They were simply going to do to their own captive everything the Americans did to theirs, from illegal detention onwards. People would be horrified – but they would also say the US had no right to cry foul. Together with the demand for a referendum, it gave the kidnappers a spurious figleaf of morality, whilst at the same time reminding their audience of all the reasons why they might not want the US Armed Forces in their country in the first place. It was a kidnap perfectly designed for the internet age; a kidnap in which page views and public opinion, not cash, was the currency being sought.

  Holly had never devoted much time to considering whether America’s rendition programme was ethical. As a soldier, you signed up to an honour code that, perhaps ironically, left such judgements to others. Even before that, as a military brat, she’d been steeped in a culture fixated on conduct, not conscience; valour, not compassion. Yet many generals, she knew, were quietly disparaging about intelligence gleaned from harsh interrogations. Some even went so far as to question whether, by using such techniques, America wasn’t betraying the very principles it claimed to be fighting for.