She laughed. “Or is it just because they’re French?”
“And what do the French know about food?” he agreed. “Or love, for that matter?” He looked at her fondly. “I like you, Captain Kat, and I should very much like to express my admiration by taking you to bed now. It would be, as it were, a pleasant and leisurely way to continue our conversation, and to delay the moment when the evening has to end.”
Rather to her surprise, she found herself tempted, at least for a microsecond. The man was old, physically ugly and utterly preposterous, but being bathed in his charm was like sunshine on bare skin. A little reluctantly, she shook her head. “Not tonight, Vivaldo. I have this case to wrap up, and I wouldn’t be relaxed enough to enjoy what you have in mind.”
“Perhaps on another occasion, then.”
“Perhaps,” she said, and was rewarded by the delight in his smile.
SEVENTY-SIX
“TAKE THE HOOD off,” a familiar voice said. “I want her to see me.”
The heavy felt hood was pulled from Holly’s head. Blinking in the bright light, it took her a moment to focus on his face, particularly as the ropes to which her wrists were shackled were fastened above and behind her, forcing her to arch her body backwards.
Carver.
He stepped forward so she could see him better. “Boland,” he said, rolling the name around his tongue like wine. “Bo-land.”
“What am I doing here, sir?” she croaked through dry lips. “Why am I restrained?”
He grinned. “Oh, very good. But it’s a little late to be playing the dumb blonde with me now. And much as I like hearing you call me ‘sir’, it’s no longer appropriate. As of this time you should not consider yourself a member of the United States Armed Forces.”
“But that’s exactly what I am, sir.”
He shook his head. “No. A mystery, Boland, is what you are. Absent without leave. Vanished without trace. Missing, but not in action. Or at least, that’s what you’ll be when someone bothers to report you gone. For the time being you’re just like every other Exodus.” He leaned forward, so that his face was very close to hers. “Mine.”
“Sir, what is Exodus?” she said, struggling to keep her voice calm.
“She wants to know about Exodus,” he said, turning to the other two men in the cell. Both were thickset, crewcut, in their early thirties. Both were wearing army fatigues. Under the rolled-up sleeves she could see the winged-death’s-head tattoos on their biceps. “Do we tell her?”
Neither man answered. The decision was his: they were simply the audience.
“Exodus is need-to-know,” he said, turning back to her. “In fact, that’s not quite true. There are quite a few people who really ought to know about it who don’t know jack shit. Including the President.” Pleased with his own answer, he reached out and twanged one of the ropes, testing it for tightness.
Surreptitiously, she tried to examine her surroundings. A small cell, one wall made of steel bars. The walls on either side were breezeblock, the one at the rear bare rock. Beyond it, through the bars, she could just make out more cells, all identical, stretching away as far as the eye could see. In some of them she could see bright orange blobs. There were no windows, and the walls overhead arched into the rock. It was cold, about twelve or fourteen degrees.
She was in a tunnel, somewhere deep underground.
One of the orange blobs moved. In a distant cell a dark face lifted, caught her eye, then quickly looked away again.
There was no surprise in those eyes, no recognition; no emotion of any kind except dull fear.
Prisoners. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them.
“Exodus is a solution,” Carver said. “See, our great President leaves office in 2016. He’s thinking about his legacy. And right now, he’ll go down in history as the man who said he’d close Guantanamo but didn’t. So he’s got one hundred and sixty-four detainees sitting in Guantanamo he doesn’t know what to do with, and the clock’s counting down.” He stuck out a finger, then a second. “That’s problem one, Boland, but it’s chickenfeed compared with problem two: Afghanistan. Ever since Guantanamo became a tourist trap for every liberal blogger and do-good journalist in America, we’ve been sticking our detainees elsewhere. Places like the detention facility at Bagram Air Base – that’s three thousand of the suckers, right there. But guess what? Now we’re pulling out of Afghanistan, we’ve got to hand the jails back. And some of those detainees… well, let’s just say a few might have stories to tell about their time as our guests that we’d rather not see splashed all over Al Jazeera. So that’s another clock ticking. Then there’s Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, the occasional troublemaker like yourself, a couple of guys off the construction site who had to be quietly vanished…” He stuck out a third finger, then a fourth, all the way onto his other hand. “Plus all the people we used to ship off to our friends in Libya, Egypt and Syria. You get the picture. Tens of thousands of detainees, and nowhere to put them.”
“This is a detention facility,” she said.
He considered. “Kind of. But not exactly, not in the usual sense of the term. What this place is, is a grey area. An administrative black hole. An overflow pipe. Or as I like to think of it, a human trash can. No one ordered it, exactly; no one discussed it, but a need arose, and voilà.” He gestured at the ceiling of rock above them. “This is what under the carpet looks like, Boland. A long, long way under the carpet.” He turned to his men again, inviting them to chuckle.
The implications of what she was hearing were only just sinking in. “How many?” she said, appalled. “How many human beings will you keep down here without rights? What will happen to them?”
“Here?” He looked around. “This place could hold a couple of thousand, if we pack ’em in tight. Most of what we’ve got here already are what we call husks – they’ve been through the process, not much fight left in them. Not much of anything, really. Get a system set up, it only takes a few dozen men to take care of somewhere this size. But Exodus isn’t just this place. There are container ships criss-crossing international waters, a couple of so-called research stations in the Antarctic, a desert oilfield that doesn’t produce any oil… Exodus is a franchise, and a pretty damn successful one at that.” He ran his palm over his head. “As for what will happen to them, the answer’s nothing. We’ve got an exercise facility in the quarry, our own water supply – no sunlight, of course, but a vitamin D shot once a year takes care of that. You’re looking at a nice, quiet retirement home for jihadists. The only way they’ll leave here is in an urn.”
She suddenly realised she was handling this all wrong. The less he told her, the more she’d preserve the slim possibility that he might let her go. Otherwise, she’d face the same fate as all the other human debris that had been tossed down here.
As if reading her mind, he said, “Truth is, most of the time it gets pretty dull for the guys running this place. Particularly after what they were used to doing, before America lost its balls. So I’m not at all displeased to have you as our guest here, Boland. You’ll be a nice addition to the facilities.” He leaned in very close. “Our very own R&R.”
He stood back to enjoy the expression in her eyes. “But first,” he added, “we’d like to know everything you know, where it came from, and who you’ve told. Franklyn here will take care of that.”
The burlier of the two men stepped forward, whistling under his breath.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
“KAT? IT’S DANIELE BARBO.”
“What can I do for you, Daniele?” Kat knew it must be something out of the ordinary for Daniele to have called her.
“I’m worried about Holly,” he said abruptly. “She hasn’t been in touch for days.”
Kat was surprised to hear that Daniele and Holly were even in contact, let alone that he expected her to call regularly. “She’s not returned any of my messages recently, either. But I imagine they’re pretty busy over there. Either that, or she’s finally having wild sex with a
lapdancer.”
There was a long silence. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that when she does finally come out of the closet, it’s going to be a pretty momentous event,” Kat explained patiently. “But I’m sure she’ll be in touch soon. What was it you wanted to say to her? If you tell me, I’ll pass the message on.”
She was answered by a click.
She sent Holly a quick email saying that she should get in touch and added a jokey PS. Your admirer’s getting keen…
As she pressed “Send” her eye was caught by the previous message, the last one Holly had sent to her.
Kat, I spoke to Mia today. There seem to be some discrep $ particular, Mia talks about a “whistling man” who wore the same mask as another kidnapper. This one never spoke, but whistled Springsteen under his breath. Does that ring any bells your end?
She’d replied, but heard nothing back. And then there’d been that failed call at 4 a.m. An odd time to phone, unless it was something important.
She phoned the base and asked to talk to Holly’s ranking officer in Civilian Liaison. Holly had mentioned First Lieutenant Mike Breedon on several occasions: Kat knew she liked and trusted him.
The mellow Virginian voice that came on the line sounded anxious. “She’s not been at her desk for twenty-four hours. Usually I kind of let her get on with things, but she’s always careful to let me know what her schedule is.” He paused. “Usually in fifteen-minute segments, colour coded, and with a note reminding me what my own schedule is too.”
“Something’s wrong,” Kat said. “It must be.”
“Could the Carabinieri maybe send someone to check her apartment?”
“I’ll go myself,” Kat said. “Text me the address, will you?”
It turned out Holly was renting an apartment on the top floor of a building right in the historic centre of Vicenza. As was usual in these places, there was a concierge-cum-handyman who held duplicate keys.
Inside, it was even tidier than Kat had expected. In the kitchen were four separate chopping boards of different colours, carefully labelled “Meat”, “Fish”, “Chicken” and “Vegetables”. Cookery books – Kat had never read a cookery book in her life, let alone bought one, since she’d picked up all the recipes she needed from her mother and grandmother – were ranged on a shelf in alphabetical order. In the bedroom, the bed was made with military neatness, and even the clothes in the dirty laundry basket had been carefully folded.
Kat thought back to the incident that had precipitated her rift with Holly. Although both of them now chose to pretend that it had been over a frying pan, the truth was a little more complex than that. Soon after Holly had come to stay with her, after the end of the Bosnian case, they’d gone out to Kat’s favourite Venetian bacaro, where, towards the end of the evening, they’d found themselves being chatted up by two good-looking young men, Philippo and Andreas. Since Kat had got on well with Andreas, and since Philippo and Holly seemed to be in a similar situation, Kat had naturally suggested when the bar closed that they all go back to her apartment. After a bottle of wine had been opened and consumed, however, it became clear that there was a small problem, in that there was only one bedroom; which was to say, Kat’s.
Kat had taken the opportunity to murmur to Holly, when getting another bottle, that she would presently slip off with Andreas, leaving the sitting room to Holly and Philippo.
Holly had stared at her. “I’m not planning on sleeping with him, Kat.”
“Oh.” Kat considered. “Well, that’s awkward. You’d better send him home, then.”
However, it hadn’t quite worked out that way, and somehow Kat had ended up in the bedroom with both Andreas and Philippo. And somehow they’d made a bit more noise than was strictly necessary – which was nothing at all to do with making a point to the repressed American who was trying to sleep on the couch just the other side of the wall; but might, she later reflected, have been taken that way.
Next day, Kat had gone straight to work. While she was out, it transpired, Holly had decided to give the place a much-needed clean – which, in turn, had absolutely nothing to do with feeling that the whole apartment was now morally tainted by the previous night’s excesses. With her usual methodical efficiency, she’d sorted, scrubbed and scoured everything in sight. Unfortunately, that had included Kat’s cast-iron frying pan, a family heirloom given to her by her grandmother, Nonna Renata. Kat was extremely proud of the ancient, blackened patina that enabled the pan to perform its function with nothing more than an occasional wipe and a drizzle of good Garda olive oil, and her fury when she returned that evening to discover that her house guest had not only imposed her anal American neuroses on the clutter of Kat’s lovely kitchen, but had ruined her grandmother’s pan in the process, had been terrible to behold.
Kat had been on a short fuse in any case since discovering just how difficult her complaint against Piola was going to make her life, and that evening all of her pent-up anger had erupted in one long but satisfying tirade. Things were said that could never be unsaid, some of them even postulating a link between Holly’s fondness for cleaning products and her lack of sexual interest in men. Stung, Holly had offered to move out. Kat had told her it would be better if she was gone within the hour. And, somewhat to Kat’s surprise, she had been. It was a relief in many ways – the tiny apartment had never been going to accommodate two such different personalities – but a faint suspicion in Kat’s mind that she might herself have been in the wrong had, not for the first time in her life, turned into a fierce determination that if so, she didn’t give a fuck.
Only later did she discover that she actually cared very much indeed. She had been thanking her lucky stars, ever since Mia’s kidnap, that Holly had taken the initiative to reignite their friendship. They might be chalk and cheese, but something about their relationship made their differences irrelevant.
Kat went through to the living room. Beyond a glass door was a tiny little terrace, with fresh herbs growing in pots, and a table with one chair, angled south over the terracotta rooftops towards the Berici hills. She pictured Holly sitting there, drinking her single cup of coffee every morning, perfectly content, and felt a sudden stab of anxiety.
It was when she turned around, though, that she stopped short. The pictures had been taken down from one wall and replaced with the neatest, most organised spidergram Kat had ever seen.
Carver. Elston. Drugs…
She scanned it carefully. There were connections she herself had made, as well as some that were unfamiliar. She raised her eyebrows at the stick drawing of the Club Libero swingers – that, at least, was surely out of character.
Two more stick figures caught her eye, male and female, marked “Daniele” and “Holly”. It occurred to her to wonder if she’d said something rather tactless to Daniele earlier. Oh well: there’d be plenty of time to rectify that later. The important thing now was to find Holly.
I’ve just spoken to Mia, Holly had said in her email.
She punched a number into her phone. “Mike,” she said when Holly’s boss answered, “Can you find out for me where Mia and her father are now?”
They were at Vicenza High School, came the word back. At a social function, not to be disturbed.
Kat went right ahead and disturbed them.
As she drove into the parking lot she saw a banner tied over the gate. “Ninth Annual Purity Prom!” And, in smaller letters, “Special Homecoming Gala Invitees: Mia and Major R. Elston”.
A military band was playing at the base of a raised stage, and a number of pre-teen girls in full prom gowns were trying their hardest to look like Scarlett O’Hara. Some even sported Bo-Peep hats and elbow-length gloves, while their fathers were resplendent in ceremonial dress. Retirees and veterans marched stiffly to and fro, medals pinned to puffed-out chests. Posters tied to the trees and railings exhorted the guests to “Pledge Purity!” and, more incongruously, “Once You Pop You Can’t Stop”.
She pushed through
the crowds, looking for Major Elston. A huge cheer and a round of applause went up, and she saw Mia stepping onto the stage. She edged closer to listen.
“Hey, everyone,” Mia began a little awkwardly. “In a minute, some of you guys will make your purity vows. Just like I did a few years back.” She paused. “You know, my dad and I have been talking about this, and we’ve agreed I made the decision to do that before I was really old enough to understand what it meant. Before I realised that the only person you can make a promise like that to is yourself.
“So, if you want to pledge not to do the big S-word thing until your wedding night, then go right ahead – I honour and salute you, and I wish you every success. But equally, if those ideals aren’t right for you, don’t feel bad.” She stopped, blushed in confusion, and added, “I guess that’s all I’ve got to say. Except that I’ve got the best dad in the world.”
The teen princesses applauded her a little doubtfully, glancing up at their own fathers for some indication that these sentiments were acceptable. If their fathers thought they were not, they gave no sign of it.
As the first father–daughter pair was called to the stage, Kat made her way to the side, where Major Elston stood with his arm around Mia’s shoulders.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, sir. It’s about Second Lieutenant Boland.”
He glanced at her. “This is not an appropriate time, Captain. I’m with my family.”
“I understand that. But it’s an emergency. She’s missing.”
“You told me once that runaways generally turn up, as I recall.”
She swallowed. “I was wrong. Major… Please. You have your daughter back. Help me to rescue my friend.”
“Dad…” Mia said pleadingly.
He grimaced. “Very well. Walk with me, Captain.”
He took her to one side and listened, his face darkening, while she explained.
“I can see why you’re concerned,” he said quietly. “Believe me, I think she’s in very great danger. But I’m afraid I really can’t help. I simply have no knowledge of where they might have taken her.”
The Abduction: A Novel Page 34