“But we’re a long way from proving anything like that,” she added. “Best not to theorise ahead of the evidence. Did you keep a copy of your report?”
He nodded. “It’s buried outside, under the woodstack.”
She glanced out of the window. Night had long since fallen.
“If you want to sleep on the couch, I’ll get it in the morning,” he added. “The ground will be frozen solid now.”
“OK, thanks,” she said. She’d have liked to have had the report in her hands straight away, but she couldn’t very well ask him to take apart a woodstack and dig up frozen ground in the middle of the night. The morning would have to do.
She woke around four, too wired to get back to sleep. Bits of that spidergram kept swimming in front of her eyes. Carver. Elston. Project Exodus. Drugs… Mentally she added some new names. Karim Sayyaf. Skyhook…
Tantalisingly, more bits of the solution kept slipping into her mind, only to vanish and dissolve when she tried to analyse them. Elston had been silenced to prevent him from revealing the military’s support for Karim Sayyaf, that much was clear. But it was also clear that Elston himself didn’t have the whole picture. There was something more, there had to be.
Late though it was, she decided to phone Kat and talk it through.
When she dialled, it started to ring, then failed from lack of signal. They were in the mountains, after all. She wandered through into the room Joe used for his workouts, noting the gym equipment and weights ranged around the walls, holding her phone up to check the bars on the screen.
Joe’s own phone was on a low shelf, plugged into a charger. She glanced at it, to see how many bars he was getting.
Several, but he was with a different provider. She was about to move on when she noticed something else.
Nicholls’ phone was the sort that displayed unread messages. There was one now. It read simply:
Copy that.
“Copy that” – military shorthand for “message understood”.
She picked it up and clicked on the previous message, the one sent by Joe. That, too, consisted of just two words:
She’s here.
Oh, Joe Nicholls, you fucking fucker.
Loyalty to the army, she guessed, and fear of more reprisals, had trumped loyalty to Major Elston. But there was no time for thinking about that now. No time for anything. Swiftly she pulled on the rest of her clothes, then crossed to the window.
Below, in the main street, was a black van. Parked, no lights.
Watchers? Or a snatch squad?
As she watched, a light flashed inside the van, a phone screen coming to life.
They wouldn’t send a team all this way just to follow her, she realised. What was the betting Kat’s Dreadlock Guy was at the wheel right now?
She ran to the hall. Ski boots, a jacket. Skis. She weighed a third less than Joe, and the ski boots didn’t fit her feet too well, but at least they’d fit the skis.
“The prevailing wind’s into Switzerland,” he’d said. “So long as they haven’t brought their passports.”
As she opened the door, icy air blew in. Joe’s voice called sleepily from his bedroom, asking what she was doing. “Having a cigarette,” she called back. She doubted he’d believe her, but if it slowed him up by just a few seconds it would help.
The skyhook pack weighed almost as much as she did, and for a moment as she stamped into the skis she thought she’d topple over backwards. If she did, she knew she’d never get up again.
Crouched forwards to balance the pack’s load, she strained at the poles to get herself moving.
“What the fuck?” It was Joe, silhouetted against the door. “Boland, what the fuck are you playing at?”
She was moving now, desperately flailing at the ground with the poles, but it was agonisingly slow. If she could only get some momentum, the weight of the pack would become an asset rather than a drag.
She heard him curse as he ran barefoot after her into the snow. And then, with a final push of the poles, she was moving; enough to push off with her skis, left-right, gathering more speed as she crested the flat ground outside Joe’s house and swept down into the woods beyond. There was a path that led away from the village – she had no idea where, but she had no choice: downhill, and quickly, was the only option.
She was a strong skier, thanks to her father’s insistence that they had to make the most of their time in Italy by going every year. With her light frame, she’d been racing black runs since she was thirteen. But never with a weight like this on her back, and rarely at night. Luckily the snow bounced back what little light there was: she simply avoided any patches of ground that weren’t white, and trusted to her knees to deal with the bits that were.
As she passed below the village, she heard the sound of a van being driven at speed. Going up to the house, she guessed. Then they’d come after her. She hoped Joe didn’t have many spare skis.
After a few minutes she came to the edge of the woods. Below her a road zigzagged down into the valley. If she was really going to do this, it had to be here, before she left the shelter of the trees.
Taking off the skis, she dragged the skyhook pack off the path and examined the contents, using her phone as a light. The heaviest item was a large gas cylinder. Then there was a harness, with a coiled steel hawser attaching it to the balloon. The parachute was the ultra-light reserve type, weighing only a couple of pounds or so. She got into the harness, clipped the parachute to the front, and jerked open the ties around the hawser. She had no idea how the inflation mechanism worked, but trusted in the US Army’s propensity to keep things idiot-proof.
The words of the cook who’d watched the training exercise with her flashed into her mind. “They say it’s a hell of a buzz. Mind you, they say that when they’re safely back on the ground.”
There was still no sound of a pursuit, but she knew Nicholls, at least, would ski silently and fast. If she waited until she heard him, it would be too late.
She fitted the balloon to the canister and yanked the handle. Instantly the rubber bulged, the balloon’s creases vanishing as the rushing gas filled it. Within seconds it was straining upright, held down only by the canister’s weight. Then with a shriek it tore itself free and was soaring into the air. As the hawser unspooled she adopted the position she’d seen in the training exercise: braced for the jerk, arms folded tightly across her chest.
The tug winded her. And then she was flying, the woods dropping away, the balloon’s urge to climb balanced now by her own dead weight. From the trees below, sparkles of light showed where someone was firing at her. No, not at her, she realised as the hissing bullets went high over her head – at the balloon, an even easier target. She was so high already that the fall would kill her.
They must have realised it too, because she heard a shout and the firing stopped.
So they don’t want me dead. Or at least, not here. It was hardly reassuring.
She looked at the ground, now hundreds of feet below. How high should she allow herself to get? She knew reserve parachutes were designed to open at relatively low altitudes. But if she left it until the standard skydiving height of two thousand feet, she’d be too cold to open it at all. Already she could hardly breathe.
Too low, though, and the parachute would simply set her down a few yards from where she’d inflated the balloon.
Make a decision. In a crisis, the indecisive die first.
Swiftly followed, of course, by those who decide wrong.
She’d wait until a thousand.
Decision made, she mentally went through what she was going to have to do. Release the balloon, freefall, then deploy the parachute.
Then just steer myself over a border the precise location of which I don’t even know.
Holly Boland, you don’t make life easy for yourself, do you?
At one thousand feet she released the balloon. That was hard. It might be pulling her upwards to certain death, but every nerve and sinew of her b
ody shrank from unhooking and committing herself to gravity’s embrace.
She committed, and fell. This was the point at which her old instructor had told her to shout “Geronimo!”. On this occasion she dispensed with the shout, and pulled on the parachute ripcord. The plastic billowed around her, flapping in her face, thin and flimsy as a supermarket carrier bag, and for one heart-stopping moment she thought it was going to tangle or tear. Then it blossomed, just as it was meant to, into an oblong canopy over her head, cupping the air and slowing her fall.
She pulled on the front straps, and found her body angling obediently to the north. In the distance she could see the lights of another village.
Reasoning that it was almost certainly over the border, it seemed as good as any place to aim for.
She drifted down as slowly as she could, tacking to and fro, milking the breeze for every yard of distance. When she landed she was within a few hundred yards of her objective, the col just a black shape behind her.
As she unclipped the parachute, headlights clicked on, bathing her in light.
It seemed Joe Nicholls’ colleagues had brought their passports after all.
SEVENTY-FIVE
KAT WAS SHOWN into the Damasco Suite of the Hotel Metropole, where her host was waiting. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, slipping into the chair he indicated.
Vivaldo Moretti waved her apology away. “I’ve just spent a most enjoyable twenty minutes anticipating every moment of our evening. So in a sense, the pleasure has been mine already.”
“Anticipation will be all it is,” she warned.
Vivaldo Moretti smiled. “Then I’m fortunate that what I was imagining was so very wonderful.” He indicated the table in front of them. “I’ve taken the liberty of allowing the chef to choose the dishes. It is, apparently, ‘tra-contemporary’ cuisine. That is, each dish contains both traditional and modern elements.”
Kat inspected her plate doubtfully. It contained a cocktail glass of strawberry puree, next to a square of polenta topped with a mound of bean mush, and finally a fried courgette flower which had been stuffed with some kind of minced fish.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet me,” she said, picking up her fork. “I wanted to talk about a man I believe you may have worked with in the past. Sandro La Sala?”
“Indeed. I wouldn’t say we knew each other well, but I certainly observed him at close quarters often enough. What do you want to know about him?”
“General impressions, first of all.”
Moretti considered. “Politically speaking, a plodder. But an effective one. And, of course, he was fortunate in his friends. That generation of politicians – the ones who fought in the war – tended to sort out their differences quietly over dinner at Gino’s, not in the pages of the newspapers.”
“You say ‘his friends’ – I suppose you know he was a member of a so-called charitable organisation called the Order of Melchizedek?”
Moretti nodded. “As are many politicians.”
“But not you?”
Moretti said thoughtfully, “You know, there’s something very seductive about secrets. And even more beguiling is the notion that there’s a kind of brotherhood, an elite of the initiated, where powerful men will share their secrets freely. To be told that you could be amongst them – to get ‘the touch’, as they call it – that’s flattering; intoxicating, even. And of course, you’re always aware, or are made aware, of the other benefits such an association could bring. Election expenses, office costs, the services of bright young researchers, not to mention favourable coverage in the media. The power such networks gather to themselves is real enough. And when it really matters, they make sure the inner circle closes ranks.”
“And that’s what the Order of Melchizedek is, in your opinion? The ‘inner circle’?”
He shrugged. “Melchizedek is one version of it. P2 was another. The Vatican is part of it, the intelligence services are riddled with it, certain exclusive clubs and dining societies overlap with it, and even one or two rather specialised brothels. It has no name, exactly – call it ‘influence’, call it ‘corruption’, or simply be blunt and call it ‘power’, because it is all those things and more.” He shook his head. “In answer to your previous question, no, I was never part of it.”
“How did you avoid it?”
“By being so disreputable that they thought I would disgrace them. And by being so shameless that I had no secrets to be blackmailed over.”
“Was La Sala blackmailed, do you think?”
“I don’t believe so. It was always whispered of him that he was a great patriot – a war hero of some unspecified kind. Who knows? Perhaps, as a communist who’d crossed to the mainstream, his paymasters simply chose to promote him in order to encourage others who might be tempted to follow the same path. In that world, nothing is ever quite what it seems.”
“When you say ‘paymasters’, you mean the CIA, don’t you? Or at least, people within the Italian intelligence services doing their bidding?”
A waiter entered and replaced their empty plates with two more, equally elaborate creations – pigeon with a lychee puree and chocolate shavings for her, braised beef with vegetable mousses for him.
“I will say this,” Moretti said when they were alone again. “I’ve noticed, over the course of a long and scandalous career, that no one prospers long in this country if they take a stand against the Americans. Oh, the odd grand gesture is acceptable, particularly if it makes a splash in the newspapers. But when it comes to matters of trade, or foreign policy, or security, it’s generally safer and more profitable to follow the same position as them. Plenty of Italian companies have ridden a long way on their coat tails. Conterno, for example.”
“Conterno? How?”
He lifted his hands. “Military contracts. Dozens, even hundreds over the years. It all started with rebuilding the factory in the caves at Longare, the one that made the aeroplane parts for the Nazis. Later came the bottling plants, the irrigation projects, and most recently, the reconstruction projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. La Sala had a seat on the Conterno board, by the way, so he raked it in that way too.” He looked at her quizzically. “Are you going to tell me why you want to know all this?”
“I’m trying to work out what it is that links the death of a communist partisan in the last months of the war with the American military bases around Vicenza.”
He nodded slowly.
“Do you have any suggestions?”
“Just this,” he said. “Obviously, all the American bases in Italy are important to them, in different ways. You’ve got the submarine base at Sigonella, the naval base at Livorno, the airfield at Aviano, the munitions and equipment stored at Camp Darby, to name just four. But of all of them, during the Cold War, the garrison at Vicenza was strategically the most important.”
“Why?”
“Because it was guarding their nuclear weapons,” he said simply. “From the 1950s onwards, the Soviets had a massive advantage in conventional weapons, particularly tanks. The thinking was that when Italy was finally ripe for the taking, the Red Army’s divisions would stream over the Eastern Alps, down into the flat plains of the Veneto.” He gestured to the floor. “This is where NATO would have held them back. And since NATO had far fewer tanks, it would have been necessary to do it with tactical nuclear weapons. In the fifties and sixties, that meant the kind of munitions that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki – huge, potentially unstable bombs that had to be dropped from planes. And other, even bigger armaments called nuclear mines, that were designed to be placed under the Alpine passes.”
“My God,” she said. “Venice would have been a wasteland – another Bikini Atoll.”
He nodded. “Indeed. But the reason the Americans needed Vicenza in particular is that, uniquely among the towns of northern Italy, it offered somewhere to store those weapons, out of range of any tactical air strikes by the Soviets.”
“I don’t understand. Where?”
“Is it still there?”
“I understood that it was decommissioned in the 1980s, after the end of the Cold War. But for decades before that ‘Site Pluto’, as it was called, was the jewel in the Americans’ nuclear crown. They would have gone to any lengths to protect it.”
She thought. “That’s interesting. It may even be a link to Ghimenti’s death – his body was found in a pile of rubble that Dr Iadanza said was spoil from a local quarry. But if Site Pluto was decommissioned, as you say, why would they still care about protecting it today? There must be dozens of old bunkers like that dotted around Europe.”
“I don’t know. But I’ve observed that in Italy, the secrets of the past have a way of becoming the secrets of the present.” He pushed his plate aside. “A grappa, perhaps, Captain Kat? I don’t know how you feel about this ridiculous food, but personally I’d rather eat no more of it. The Michelin inspectors may like all these mousses and foams and other forms of flavoured air, but one can’t help feeling that’s because it reminds them of what’s inside their favourite car tyres.”
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