The Abduction: A Novel

by Jonathan Holt

  “What’s that?”

  “SAP.”

  A Special Access Project – in other words, information about it was disseminated on a need-to-know basis.

  “Whatever it was, it was pretty sizeable,” he added. “Because it wasn’t just those prisoners. I went through Bagram on my way home that tour, and there was a Globemaster on the tarmac being loaded for take-off. I went to take a look because I assumed that was what me and the guys were hitching a ride home in.”

  She nodded. The Boeing C-17 Globemaster was one of the biggest troop transporters in the US air fleet.

  “But this flight was for people in orange overalls and restricted arm movement, if you take my meaning. About a hundred, hundred and fifty of them, all lined up on the tarmac on their knees, being guarded by a couple of our guys.”

  “Orange overalls,” she repeated, turning it over in her mind. “Like Mia.”

  “Yeah… There couldn’t be any connection, could there?”

  She thought. Assuming that what he’d seen was some kind of prisoner-movement programme, she still couldn’t see how it could have anything to do with Mia’s kidnap. “Where was the Globemaster headed?”

  “Aviano Air Base, just up the road. That’s why I’d assumed it was our ride.”

  “Then where?”

  He shrugged. “I saw it on the tarmac when we landed, with the doors open. Guess they must have already been transferred. Probably to some black site in Libya or somewhere. That’s what happens, right?”

  She had another beer and listened to some of Bill Coyne’s stories about Afghanistan. But with half her mind, she was processing what he’d said.

  If Major Elston had been involved, however tangentially, with some kind of rendition programme, could that be a reason to target his daughter for a simulated rendition too?

  There was a kind of logic to it. But the more she thought about it, the more she realised how little sense it made. First, the kidnappers had never made any allegation of a specific link between Mia and renditions. Second, it would be hard to find a Special Forces or intelligence unit that hadn’t been connected, in some way, to the taking or transporting of prisoners. That was how the Afghan insurgency had been fought – by capturing thousands of suspects, tens of thousands even, interrogating them for any evidence that they were linked to the Taliban, and building up a picture of the enemy, piece by careful piece. What Bill Coyne had described sounded more like the routine movement of detainees around the prison bureaucracy than any kind of abduction.

  It made far more sense to accept the kidnappers’ motives at face value – that Mia had been snatched simply because she was perfect casting for what they had in mind. She was photogenic, female, young but in military terms an adult: the perfect proxy for America itself. In thinking anything else, Holly was chasing after a will-o’-the-wisp.

  Even so, it gave her a pretext to go back to Carver. She could ask him directly about Exodus, and give him another chance to explain how it was that Mazzanti’s report had coincided with the kidnap.

  Thanking Coyne for the beers, she made her way over to Staff Command. As she’d expected, it was still busy. She was about to go inside when she saw Carver himself, strolling with another man outside the Command block. He was smoking a cigar. The other man, she realised, was Major Elston. Even better: she’d speak to the two of them together.

  “You should have one of these,” Carver was saying, pulling another cigar from his pocket. “To celebrate your daughter’s safe return.”

  She’d been found! “Sir – is she back?” Holly said eagerly, stepping forward.

  Carver turned, frowning when he saw her. “Is who back, Second Lieutenant?”

  “Mia. I thought you said—” Holly stopped, confused.

  “What you were eavesdropping on was a private conversation,” Carver said icily. “But just so that you are completely clear, I was offering Major Elston a cigar to celebrate with when his daughter is returned to him, safe and well. Which I have every confidence she will be.” He turned back to Major Elston. Holly heard him mutter “Dumb blonde” under his breath.

  “Sorry, sir,” she said, mortified at her mistake. “I misheard. I didn’t mean—” But he had already walked on, resuming his pep talk, his arm considerately draped around the major’s shoulders.

  DAY FIVE

  SIXTY

  MIA WAS AWAKE well before dawn, thinking about how to initiate her new strategy with Harlequin.

  He liked to preach, she knew. He disliked being challenged. So she’d take that on board, and stop challenging him.

  He’d said something to her before, to the effect that it wasn’t her he needed to convince. But what if he started to think he was convincing her? Would that, perhaps, create the bond between them she needed?

  She’d pretend that she bought his whole upside-down version of reality, and see where that took her.

  Eventually she heard the rattle as he unchained the door. Every morning he brought her Ensure and made her stand on the scales to be weighed. But today he’d brought a treat. A can of Coke, and a packet of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

  As she popped the Coke she said casually, “I really want to understand why you’re doing this. You personally, I mean.”

  “It’s not your concern.”

  “Well, it kind of is.” She gestured at the cell. “Since it’s led to me being here.”

  He hesitated. “Very well. I suppose you have a right to know. Two years ago I was working in the Middle East. It was after… There were some changes I had made in my personal life, and I wanted to work with the poor. But it was in a country where Al Qaeda was active, and the CIA were launching drone strikes against those they thought were terrorists.”

  She nodded. “Go on.”

  “I had a friend, Hussein Saleh. He worked for the same international charity I did. His wife was expecting their fifth child. Anyway, he was distributing food in a very poor region when he witnessed a drone strike on a house. He went to help the survivors.” He paused. “What he didn’t know was that the CIA had recently adopted a ‘second strike’ policy. A short time after the first missile, they fire another at exactly the same spot.”

  “Why would they do that?” she said, confused.

  “To make sure everyone’s dead. And to discourage others from helping the wounded. Hussein was killed instantly. The charity made an official complaint. Do you know how the Americans responded?”

  She shook her head.

  “They said, ‘We treat all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.’”

  “But that means—”

  “Exactly. By the time they’ve decided you’re innocent, it’s too late. And this was at a time, incidentally, when President Obama was denying a drone programme even existed.”

  “That’s terrible,” she said, and meant it.

  He nodded. “When I came back and found the US was building a new base outside Vicenza, I joined the protestors. But I soon realised they were deluded. They thought that if enough of them voted against it, the Americans would just pack up and go away. I knew different.”

  “So you decided to kidnap me instead.”

  “It wasn’t quite that simple. But I gradually came to the conclusion that when good men are paralysed by their principles, then those principles are a kind of moral trap, laid by the Devil to weaken his enemies.”

  She opened the Reese’s. “Want one of these?”

  He hesitated. “We give you so little food.”

  “No, go ahead.”

  “I’ve never tried a peanut butter cup before.” He unwrapped the candy and raised it to his mouth, but it wouldn’t fit through the mask’s mouthpiece.

  “I’ll look away.” She turned her head.

  When she turned back, he was chewing. “It’s quite good,” he said, surprised. Then, “I wish I didn’t have to wear the mask when I talk to you, Mia.”

  “It has i
ts advantages.”

  “I can’t think of any.”

  “Well, if you developed feelings for someone in a mask…” she said. “If you felt you had a real connection with them… It wouldn’t be because of what they looked like. It would be because of who they really were.”

  For a moment she thought she’d gone too far.

  But the masked head only nodded. “It says a lot about you, Mia, that you look for the positive, even in this situation.”

  “I’m always positive,” she said.

  Lima Syndrome.

  Later, thinking back over the conversation, there was much to occupy her. He’d lapped up all the hints she’d laid about how she was starting to come round to his point of view. But in part, that was because she was starting to appreciate it. He was wrong, of course, and utterly misguided, but that story he’d told about his friend at least explained why he was so angry with her country.

  She wondered what the “change in his personal life” that he’d referred to had been. Divorce? Somehow he’d made it sound more significant than that. And there had been that slightly odd reference to working with the poor.

  Then all the stuff about the Devil. Where had that come from?

  Suddenly she realised.

  He’s a priest.

  Or maybe an ex-priest – that might have been the change. Yes, it all made sense now: the theological references; the sexual awkwardness; the moral resolve; the occasional gentleness that seemed so incongruous for someone doing what he was.

  A priest. She wondered how best to use that information. Because it was, surely, significant.

  It was only much later, pacing up and down, that she realised she’d been so busy thinking about her new strategy she’d never thought to ask Harlequin what was so special about today, that it warranted the exceptional treat of Reese’s for breakfast.

  SIXTY-ONE

  KAT FORCED HERSELF to walk into the operations room as if nothing had happened. She was aware of the glances coming at her from left and right, and found she didn’t care.

  When you’d been ostracised as she had, you developed a pretty thick skin. The fact that all her colleagues had now seen a picture of her straddling a stranger wasn’t the end of the world.

  Or so she told herself.

  She busied herself with looking through the overnight evidence logs. There had been over a thousand phone calls now, all of which, in theory, had to be followed up.

  “Another film,” a voice called. The speaker sounded unsurprised. It was getting to be a routine now: the kidnappers releasing a trailer first thing in the morning, to build up anticipation ahead of their main feature later on.

  Then, “Oh, God.”

  Kat looked up, as did everyone else.

  The film this morning was not of Mia, but of an empty room – the larger cell, the one with the sheet-banner hanging at one end.

  The man in the Harlequin mask and his Bauta-wearing accomplice were carrying in some kind of bench or gurney. As they set it down, it became apparent that it had been modified so that one end was higher than the other. Straps, nailed to the wood, were clearly intended as restraints.

  The men placed two towels, neatly folded, on the bench, followed by a red plastic watering can.

  A title appeared.

  WATERBOARDING IS NOT TORTURE.

  AT 9 P.M. TONIGHT SHE WILL NOT BE TORTURED.

  There was a moment’s stunned silence, followed by a sound that came from the throats of every single person in the room – a kind of murmured gasp, a collective groan of despair that was also an acknowledgement that this had always been going to happen, if they failed to find her.

  And now they had failed, for it was upon them.

  As if to emphasise that this threat was of a different magnitude to anything that had gone before, the film ended not with a blank screen but a grinning Carnivia mask and a counter, ticking down the hours and minutes until the broadcast. Almost immediately, it became clear that the same counter had been plastered right across the internet – not least on the home pages of CNAIPIC, the Veneto parliament, and USAF Ederle, all of whose websites had been hacked.

  “Has anyone checked our own website?” Saito asked, bringing the pandemonium of the operations room to an abrupt halt.

  Someone brought the Carabinieri site up on the screen. There, too, was the grinning mask and counter.

  According to the counter there were, by now, less than twelve hours to go.

  What we see here is not just the incompetence of the Carabinieri,

  thundered Raffaele Fallici in his blog.

  What we see here is a return to the dark days of the Years of Lead: an inability to understand and address the shame of our failure as a state. Italy has been tested, and Italy has been found wanting.

  And what is to be done? It is simple. Of course, our government cannot negotiate with terrorists; therefore, there can be no question of giving in to their demands. However, wiser, more flexible governments than ours have been known to initiate dialogue, in order to come to a peace process, which is a very different thing. After all, the Americans themselves have held talks with the Taliban: could not something similar be done here?

  “The number of people on Carnivia is at an all-time high,” Kat told Piola, now back from Rome. “This morning, just after the announcement, it actually crashed.” Instead of “Enter Carnivia”, users had been greeted by the words, “Due to exceptional volumes of traffic, the page you are trying to reach is unavailable.”

  “Are there any new leads?”

  “Not really. Saito’s got us collating no-fly lists with people who have extreme left-wing views, that kind of thing… Trawling expeditions, in other words.”

  “Do you have any better ideas, Capitano?”

  “Only one, and it’s pretty desperate. I’m going to try Daniele Barbo one last time.”

  She found Daniele in an even worse way than before. His eyes were so deeply ringed with exhaustion that at first Kat thought they must have been bruised in a fight, and he seemed to have acquired a number of other nervous tics and twitches in addition to his habitual blinking.

  “Daniele,” she said urgently, “you were right about the hacker. But unfortunately, that still hasn’t helped us find Mia. You have to give me something more to work with. Even if it means giving up confidential information.”

  He gazed down at a piece of paper in his hand. It was heavily creased from having been folded and refolded many times. Now, he unfolded it and spread it on the table.

  “What’s that? she asked.

  “An equation.”

  Written on the paper was the formula:

  K := { (i, x)

  “Holly gave it to me,” he added. “When we had a… When we met up. It’s the Turing Paradox. I’ve been thinking about it a lot in here.”

  “And?” she said, impatient to bring him back to the subject.

  “It’s to do with sets.” He saw her incomprehension. “There’s a famous example about a barber who shaves every man in the village who doesn’t shave himself. The question then arises: does the barber shave himself? Logically, he can’t, because that would mean that instead of being in the group of those he shaves, he’s in the other group, men who shave themselves. But if he doesn’t shave himself, then he has to, because now he’s in the group of people he ought to be shaving. And, unlike most problems of logic, turning it into mathematics doesn’t help. The equation just chases itself round and round: the set of all sets that don’t include themselves.”

  He held out his hand for a pen, and wrote:

  let R = {x | x ∉ x}, then R ∈ R ⇔ R ∉ R

  “It was Alan Turing who realised that this was going to be a big problem for his Turing machines – in other words, computers. If you tell a computer to perform any open-ended task, you’re effectively asking it to calculate infinity; it ends up devoting all its processing power to the impossible, and grinds to a halt. So all computer programs have to have a work-around built into them
to avoid what’s called the Halting Problem.

  “Effectively, it’s logical proof that logic is only a tool – a useful, but fallible, way of looking at the world, not some defining principle of the world itself. To go on using logic, in fact, even mathematicians have to find workarounds: logical disjunctions, fuzzy logic, or in binary code, bent functions.”

  He indicated the equation. “What Turing saw is that real life isn’t classical. It’s non-predicate, non-Boolean and non-Euclidean.” He paused. “In layman’s terms, it’s a beautiful fucked-up mess.”

  Kat didn’t understand the mathematics, but she did understand that he was wavering.

  “Daniele,” she said urgently. “Just think of a girl. Locked up – as you were once locked up. Think of her terror – the terror you must have felt, when the kidnappers held a knife to your ear. Think of what it turned you into. And don’t let that happen to her.”

  He dragged his gaze to hers. She could tell what an effort it took; could tell, too, that when he achieved it – when their eye lines met and locked – he was considering what she had said.

  For her part, she felt almost buffeted by the vulnerability and pain she saw there. So this is why he doesn’t let people look.

  He blinked. “It isn’t as easy as people seem to think. I can’t just hack into my own code: that would take weeks, possibly months, and Carnivia would simply fall apart when I was done. But there may be another way.”

  “Yes?”

  He reached for the pen. “It’s clear from the webcasts that the kidnappers are looking at the live feed on their laptop,” he said, sketching a diagram as he spoke. “In other words, they see what everyone else is seeing – the image as broadcast on Carnivia – then fine-tune the picture accordingly.”

  “Go on,” Kat said.

  “Obviously, if we interfered with that image in any major way, they’d spot it immediately. But if we were to take the feed and zoom in on it, very, very slowly – so slowly that they’re never aware we’re doing it…” He paused. “It wouldn’t be much. But after a while, if you compared it to the raw, un zoomed footage, there’d be a border all around the screen which the kidnappers would believe is out of shot, but which you could monitor.”