The Abduction: A Novel

by Jonathan Holt

  Ordinary users, he’d heard, found entering Carnivia the first few times a bewildering, almost overwhelming experience, their exhilaration at being able to interact with others in complete anonymity tempered by fear at the realisation that others could act equally freely. But for him, a world in which the only laws were those of mathematics made perfect sense. He only wished the real world could be as straightforward.

  He checked his messages. Most were from his fellow administrators, concerning relatively mundane matters of housekeeping. There’d been a higher than usual number of attempted hacks on Carnivia in the last twenty-four hours, but that was no particular cause for alarm: there had been a higher than usual volume of traffic, too, as word about the Mia films had spread. Some of the attempts were so amateurish they made Daniele smile, the way an adult smiles at the bravado of a toddler.

  Just as he was about to navigate away, another message arrived.

  From: Mia Elston

  Subject: Help

  He opened it.

  Daniele, won’t you come find me? Unlike Casanova, I can’t escape.

  Daniele stared at the message. With a sinking feeling, he realised that, in one sense at least, he knew exactly where Mia was.

  Setting off from Ca’ Barbo, he crossed the Grand Canal by the Accademia bridge, its wooden boards shaking slightly under his feet. Looking down, he saw it was currently low tide: you could just make out a faint line of green weed along the sides of the palaces bordering the canal. As he continued on to Piazza San Marco, a light shower made the masegni, the stone tiles that paved the narrow thoroughfares, a little slippery.

  The route was almost as busy as it had been earlier, when he’d walked in the opposite direction, but it was an easy matter to slip through the crowds – not least because he was now invisible, and those around him were all avatars.

  Carnivia’s version of Piazza San Marco was filled with masked and hooded figures. Many were deep in conversation; others were just passing through. Beyond them rose the Byzantine grandeur of the Palazzo Ducale. Daniele knew it well: he’d built it himself, taking the measurements of the real palace room by room and obsessively coding the wireframe of its Carnivian equivalent, line by line.

  He was heading for the “leads” – the space under the lead roof that had once housed the Republic’s prison. The real palace had been built by Venice’s shipmakers, who constructed the roof as if it were an upside-down hull, leaving plenty of room in which to accommodate prisoners, though not in comfort. It was also where the Doge’s inquisitors once tortured on behalf of the state. The windows of the tiny, cramped cells looked inwards to the torture chamber, rather than outwards to the lagoon, in order to weaken the prisoners’ resistance even before it was their turn. It was from one such cell that Casanova had famously escaped.

  In the middle of the torture chamber stood a female avatar wearing a Columbina mask. She was bound, her shackled wrists pulled above her head by a rope that hung from the ceiling. As he took a step towards her, some words wrote themselves in fiery letters across the wall:

  According to America, this isn’t torture.

  A film started, embedded in the wall of the Doge’s Palace as if on a giant cinema screen.

  It began with Mia being violently grabbed by the lapels with both hands. A title appeared.

  ATTENTION GRASP: THE INTERROGATOR CLASPS THE INDIVIDUAL WITH BOTH HANDS, ONE HAND ON EACH SIDE OF THE COLLAR OPENING, IN A QUICK AND CONTROLLED MOTION. IN THE SAME MOTION, THE INDIVIDUAL IS DRAWN TOWARDS THE INTERROGATOR.

  Next the film showed the kidnapper grabbing her head, his palms over her ears and using it to pull her around and shake her.

  FACIAL HOLD: ONE OPEN PALM IS PLACED ON EITHER SIDE OF THE INDIVIDUAL’S FACE TO KEEP THE HEAD IMMOBILE. THIS IS DONE TO INTIMIDATE THE INDIVIDUAL.

  Then came the sudden, sickening violence of a slap, delivered as if he were driving a squash ball down a court. Its force spun Mia right around.

  FACIAL OR “INSULT” SLAP: WITH THIS TECHNIQUE, THE INTERROGATOR SLAPS THE INDIVIDUAL’S FACE WITH FINGERS SLIGHTLY SPREAD. THE INSULT SLAP IS USED PRINCIPALLY TO DISPEL ANY NOTIONS IN THE CAPTIVE’S MIND THAT SHE WILL NOT BE STRUCK.

  But it still wasn’t over. As they dragged her to a chair, fastening her arms and legs to it with duct tape, Mia looked up in horror at something they were bringing towards her. A moment later, Harlequin pulled some electric clippers into shot.

  Sickened, Daniele couldn’t watch any more. Abruptly, he reached out and turned off his computer.

  Then he sat for a long time in front of the blank screen, his head bowed in what would have looked, in any other man, like prayer.

  THIRTY

  HOLLY DROVE OUT to the magnificent Palladian villa in the Veneto countryside where Ian Gilroy lived, his rent and all expenses covered by the Matteo Barbo Foundation. As she mounted the great cascade of oversized steps that led to the entrance she felt, as the architect had no doubt intended, almost insignificant – as if the ten-foot-high double doors might be thrown open at any moment to reveal some imposing high priest in his robes, instead of the amiable and slightly frail ex-spy who actually lived there.

  In the dining room, four men in dark suits got to their feet as she entered, not out of courtesy but to remove themselves and their satellite equipment from her view. She waited until they’d gone before turning to Gilroy. “Friends of ours, I assume?”

  He nodded. “Indeed. There are still a few of the old hands who remember me. I’m trying to be the voice of restraint.”

  “That may get harder.” She pointed at the TV behind him. It was tuned to a news channel with the sound down, but the titles scrolling across the screen told their own story. “It was just on the radio. They’ve released another film. From the sound of it, her treatment is getting worse.”

  Cursing softly, Gilroy picked up a remote and raised the volume. The film showed a series of quick shots of Mia being manhandled and struck, intercut with more titles.

  He watched what was being done to Mia without apparent emotion. Holly guessed that over the course of his long career he must have seen far worse than this – indeed, had probably been present at many such scenes himself.

  “What are they doing now?” he murmured, almost to himself, as Mia was led towards a chair. A moment later, a hand appeared, holding a pair of electric hair clippers.

  THE CAPTIVE’S HEAD AND FACE ARE SHAVED.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” Gilroy said. Brown hair fell in clumps into the lap of the orange jumpsuit as the kidnapper went to work. In less than a minute of screen time, Mia’s head had been completely shorn.

  THAT CONCLUDES THE PREPARATORY STAGES.

  The film ended on the by now familiar Azione Dal Molin logo. When the TV channel cut back to a studio interview with a “kidnap expert”, Gilroy turned it off. “What have you learned, Holly?”

  She handed him a dossier she’d prepared about the torture memos. “As yet, the pressure seems to be on Carnivia rather than the US,” she concluded. “Several bloggers besides Fallici are calling for it to be taken down, and the Italian news channels seem to be lining up the same way. It may be that the kidnappers won’t be able to release more films in any case.”

  “Hmm.” Gilroy sank into a chair and flipped through the dossier.

  While he read, she examined the room, pacing softly so as not to disturb him. The walls were divided by marble pillars into panels painted with trompe l’oeil fauns and nymphs cavorting in a mythological garden that, she realised, cleverly continued the actual views of the park outside.

  Then she noticed something else. The marble columns were not marble at all but painted wood and plaster. It was an illusion within an illusion.

  “Palladio’s genius was to realise that in Venice, everything is façade – even an interior,” Gilroy’s voice said behind her. “Do you know the story of the Villa of Dwarves?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, it’s a very Venetian anecdote. Not far from here, a nobleman
had a daughter who was a dwarf. To save her from the pain of realising how different she was from others, he built her a house in proportion to her small size, even hiring dwarf servants to wait on her. It worked so well that she grew to adulthood completely unaware of the deception that had been played on her. Until one day, she spied a handsome young nobleman in the woods, picnicking. Approaching him, she discovered the truth. And she felt, for the first time, her father’s disgust and horror at what she was.”

  “What happened?”

  “She climbed to the top of the villa and threw herself off.”

  Ian Gilroy’s career, she knew, had been in counter-intelligence: the endless game of mirrors played between great powers – moles and counter-moles, double- and triple-agents. But the story he had just told was a parable of the futility of deception. She wondered if that was why he’d told it.

  “Carnivia is interesting,” he said, and she knew from his tone that he was no longer making idle conversation. “What do you know about the underweb?”

  “‘The underweb’?” she repeated. “It’s not a term I’ve come across.”

  “Many people haven’t. But what we think of as the ‘world wide web’ is, despite its name, only a very small part of the internet. Like an ocean on which our ships cross only the surface, the internet has huge depths, inaccessible to most, where strange, misshapen creatures dwell, far from scrutiny. Some call it the dark web, some the invisible internet. Others know it as the underweb.”

  He got to his feet and began to pace, his liver-spotted hands clasped donnishly behind his back. “Paywalls, servers without IP addresses located in countries run by corrupt regimes, virtual computers hidden within virtual proxies – there are many ways of hiding online, if that is your goal. And yet, increasingly, the inhabitants of the underweb want access to the vast resources and population of the regular web as well. And so, cautiously, they seek out the places where the two overlap.”

  Not for the first time, Holly wondered just how retired Ian Gilroy actually was. For a man of his age, he seemed remarkably well informed about these arcane developments.

  “Which brings us to Carnivia,” he continued. “Daniele Barbo has built a city out of code – code, that is, in both the new and the old meanings of the word; an encryption algorithm so sophisticated, no one has been able to penetrate it. Carnivia is like Lisbon in the Second World War, or Berlin during the Cold War: a city between frontiers. Such places are highly attractive to a certain kind of person. Amongst other things, it’s a city where those with secrets and those who wish to acquire them can meet on equal terms.” He looked at her to see if she understood what he was saying.

  “The US has spies in Carnivia!” she said, realisation dawning. “Of course!”

  He nodded. “There are currently more analysts and what one might loosely call field operatives assigned to Carnivia than there are to any physical country, with the sole exception of China.”

  “If Carnivia’s closed down, they’ll be shut out.”

  “And we’ll lose an important portal to the underweb. It’s in America’s interests that the Italian authorities find some other way of rescuing Mia.”

  “That’s why you watch over Daniele,” she said softly. “It’s because he is Carnivia.”

  Gilroy nodded. “Of course, I could never have known, when I promised his father I’d keep an eye on him, that he would one day create Carnivia. Matteo believed Daniele wasn’t capable of functioning in the real world.” He shrugged. “In many ways, he still isn’t. He’s paranoid, obstinate, reclusive, obsessive… Yet somehow those same qualities which make him a flawed human being, when translated into code, become the wonder that is Carnivia.”

  “I find him fascinating,” she said.

  “That’s good,” he said, glancing at her. And although she knew that he would never dream of making a direct suggestion on such a matter, she could tell that with those words he was giving her his blessing to take that thought and pursue it to its logical conclusion. “The very best outcome, I think, would be if Daniele were to voluntarily, and privately, relinquish the kidnappers’ data, whilst publicly maintaining that he refuses to work with the Carabinieri. That way, the criminals and spies will continue to believe in Carnivia’s independence, and we would have consolidated a useful toehold in his world.”

  “I think…” She hesitated. “I think, from our past interactions, that I have some kind of rapport with him. In as much as any person can, of course.”

  “Really?”

  She blushed. “He’s asked me on a date. With everything that’s going on, I was going to cancel. But maybe it would be a chance to see if he’ll help us.”

  “Good,” he said again, drawing out the word until it almost became two syllables. “But, as ever, don’t mention my name. For some reason, he’s never trusted me. If he knows we’ve been talking, he may become suspicious.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  SHE PACED HER cell. Two strides one way, three the other. But this wasn’t like the agonised, hand-wringing pacing of the morning.

  Mia was thinking.

  As she walked, she lifted her hand and ran it over her scalp. The soft, shorn bristles felt cold and unfamiliar. It reminded her of kissing her father’s cheek, the rough rasp of his stubble.

  When Harlequin had brought her back to her cell, she’d caught sight of the laptop screen. On it was her own dazed face, frozen in close-up. Without the familiar mane of long brown hair her head looked tiny, her eyes strangely huge. But that, too, had reminded her of something.

  When young recruits arrived at Camp Ederle, their high and tight buzz cuts were hardly any more generous than this.

  Some words were running through her mind. A conduct code – not that crap about being a lady her father had framed and given her two Christmases ago; she’d only hung that on her bedroom wall to please him. No, what was going through her head now were some phrases from the Soldier’s Creed.

  I am an American soldier.

  I am a warrior and a member of a team.

  I am trained and proficient, physically and mentally tough.

  I will never accept defeat.

  Normally her father was reticent about his work, but when her brother was little he’d tried to answer his questions, however dumb or bloodthirsty, because like most officers he hoped his son would follow him into the forces. And Michael had asked once what the duty of a serving soldier was if he were captured: try to escape, in order to tie up enemy resources, or accept his fate, and that way save the US from risking more lives coming to get him?

  Her father had said without hesitation, “The duty of a captured soldier in any of my units is to survive, period. He knows we’ll get to him in the end, no matter how long it takes or how high the cost. So his sole job is still to be there when we do.”

  Remembering that moment, courage came to her, flowing into her veins from some hidden reservoir. It had always been there, she knew, waiting for an occasion such as this. From an early age she’d been aware that she was far braver than Michael. When it came to jumping off a high board or standing up to a bully, she was the one who never hesitated. Yet in families like hers, it was the boys who were encouraged to call their fathers “sir”, to have their hair cut at the soldier’s barber-shop on base, to take part in the zip-wire exercises and parachute jumps the military laid on every summer.

  They’ll get to me in the end.

  My sole job is still to be here when they do.

  She heard the rattle of the chain as the door was unlocked. But this time, instead of cowering, she stood up and turned towards the sound, ready to face her captors.

  I am a warrior and a member of a team. I will never accept defeat.

  THIRTY-TWO

  KAT WENT UP to the second-floor attic room where Malli, the Carabinieri’s lead IT technician, had his office. As usual, every surface was a jumble of disassembled computers and tangled leads, although a space had been cleared amidst the mess for Mia’s laptop.

 
“Let me show you something,” Malli said, propelling his chair from one desk to another with a practised flick of his foot. “This isn’t Mia’s actual hard drive – I made an exact copy, just in case it had any self-destruct codes built in. And look.”

  He clicked something on his own computer and Mia’s desktop appeared, complete with files marked “Homework”, “Music”, and “Cool Stuff”.

  “So this all seems pretty normal,” Kat said, unsure what it was that Malli was showing her.

  “Exactly. On the face of it, just your regular Windows laptop. But now take a look at the operating system.” His fingers flew across the keys and the screen filled with flickering characters. “As you probably know, the different versions of Windows are really just a skin – a nice-looking interface between you and MS-DOS, the operating system that does the real work.” The flickering froze. “Notice anything odd?”

  Kat looked closely. “Is that Russian?”

  Malli nodded. “It’s an OS called DEMOS. The Russians didn’t have access to MS-DOS, so they developed their own alternative.”

  “But why would Mia Elston have a Russian computer?”

  “She doesn’t. At some point, her machine has been wiped clean of MS-DOS and replaced with DEMOS, whilst all the time appearing as if nothing has changed.”

  “What would be the point of that?”

  “It’s just a guess, but these days Russia breeds some pretty nasty hackers. And just as American nerds grow up fluent in MS-DOS, so a Russian hacker might have cut his teeth on DEMOS.”

  Something clicked in Kat’s brain. “What about the father’s computer?”

  “The same. Why?”

  “Elston said he installed parental spy software on Mia’s laptop. It sent him regular reports on what she was seeing on the internet. But the strange thing is, the reports don’t appear to have reflected the reality.”