The Abduction: A Novel (26 page)

SIXTY-TWO

SHE SAW THE
gurney and the watering can through the door of her cell when they brought her lunch, and knew immediately what it meant.

“It wasn’t my decision,” Harlequin said, following her gaze.

She wanted to shout,
Oh, take some responsibility.
But she was determined to follow through on her new strategy. “And you think this will help you make your case?”

“I’m sure of it. Otherwise I’d never go along with it.” He sighed. “We were certain that when ordinary Italians saw what your countrymen do to their prisoners, they would be so disgusted they would immediately demand a referendum. But it hasn’t happened that way yet. We’ve been hoping this wouldn’t be necessary. But we can’t hold back any longer.”

“Then do it,” she said. “If it needs to be done, just do it.”

“You mean that?”

Like I have a fucking choice.
“Yes. Just… look after me, will you? I know how dangerous it is.”

“I promise I won’t let you come to any harm.”

Really? How’s that going for you, then? Because it seems to me you’ve already agreed to half-drown me.
“Thank you. I trust you completely – I hope you know that.”

As he turned to leave she said, “Wait… Are you – were you – a priest?”

He stiffened, but didn’t reply.

“The reason I ask…” She took a breath. “I want you to hear my confession. Before you waterboard me. Just in case.”

He turned, the dark eyes behind the mask searching her face. “You know I can’t discuss who I am. Or say anything that might identify me afterwards.”

“Then don’t. But hear my confession. If you’re not really a priest, I don’t care. If you are, then that’s good.”

“And if I refuse?”

“But you can’t, can you? It’s canon law: ‘In urgent necessity, or in danger of death.’ And even if you’ve left the Church, that doesn’t let you off the hook. Not in a theological sense. I learned that at school – the sacraments you took are embedded in your soul. Even if you’ve lost your own faith, you’re still the conduit by which grace flows from God to me.”

“Clever as well as brave,” he murmured. “Your teachers must hate you.”

“Some do.”

“I won’t tell you if I was once a priest or not,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s private. But I will hear your confession.”

He sat on her mattress while she knelt beside it.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“Have you examined your conscience?”

“I have examined my conscience.”

“May God, who has enlightened every heart, help you to know your sins and trust in his mercy.”

“Amen.”

He reminded her of the passage from Luke in which Jesus defies the Pharisees and tells a sick man his sins are forgiven. “The scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, ‘Who is this man who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?’”

She knew why he’d chosen that particular passage: both because it described a scene in which Jesus had broken the law, and because it was as the son of man, not God, that he forgave.

“I confess to Almighty God that I have sinned, through my own fault, in my words and deeds,” she began quietly.

“Is something in particular troubling you?”

“Yes.” She told him about Club Libero, how she’d thought it would be exciting to go and see what people did there. “And now my dad must know about it. He’ll think I’m some kind of pervert.”

“But you’re not.”

She shook her head. “All I did was take a look. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I was only a kid when he made me take that stupid vow. I don’t consider myself bound by it.”

“Your father’s views on sex and marriage are also the views of the Church,” he reminded her.

“I know.” She shrugged. “I don’t care about that so much.”

“Is it God’s forgiveness you really want?” he asked gently. “Or your father’s?”

She thought. “My dad’s.”

“Then I can’t help you,” he said, a little sadly.

He led her through the Act of Contrition, then the Absolution. “The Lord has freed you from your sins,” he concluded. “Go in peace.”

But as they sat there, neither of them appeared to have achieved very much of that.

SIXTY-THREE

From Rai News24:

ANCHOR
: Tell me, Doctor, what is it about waterboarding that makes it so contentious?

DOCTOR
: First of all, it can cause a range of very serious injuries. These include lung damage, broken bones due to the violence with which victims struggle against their restraints, brain damage from oxygen depletion, pneumonia, hyponatraemia – that’s a rare but deadly condition caused by lack of sodium in the blood – right through to asphyxiation, choking on vomit, or dry drowning. But what makes it especially controversial is that, unlike other harsh interrogation techniques, it is specifically designed to take the subjects as close to death as possible.

ANCHOR
: We have here a copy of the American so-called

“torture memos” setting out in almost clinical detail how this practice works.

DOCTOR
: Indeed, and it makes for unpleasant reading.
[READS FROM MEMO] “After immobilising the detainee by strapping him down, interrogators tilt the gurney to a ten- to fifteen-degree downward angle, with the detainee’s head at the lower end. They put a cloth over his face and pour water, or saline solution, from a height of about six to eighteen inches. The slant of the gurney helps drive the water more directly into the prisoner’s nose and mouth.”

ANCHOR
: How long would this go on for?

DOCTOR
: The flow of water onto a detainee’s face is not supposed to exceed forty seconds during each pour. Interrogators could perform six separate pours during each session.

ANCHOR
: And each time the interrogators just pour the water over the cloth?

DOCTOR
: Exactly. According to the memos, it “closely replicates” the sensation of drowning.

ANCHOR
: So the subject isn’t actually in any danger?

DOCTOR
: The language is misleading – the subject
is
drowning, just not underwater. Interrogators are instructed to pour the water when a detainee has just exhaled, so that he’s forced to ingest water directly into the lungs. That’s drowning, by any medical definition. Interrogators are also allowed to force the water down a detainee’s throat using their hands. [READS FROM MEMO] “The interrogator may cup his hands around the detainee’s nose and mouth to dam the runoff, in which case it would not be possible for the detainee to breathe during the application of the water.” And here, a little later: [READS] “We understand that water may enter – and accumulate in – the detainee’s mouth and nasal cavity, preventing him from breathing.”

ANCHOR
: So there is a very real risk of death?

DOCTOR
: Inevitably, the margin of error is a very slim one.
[READS FROM MEMO] “If the detainee is not breathing freely after the cloth is removed from his face, he is immediately moved to a vertical position in order to clear the water from his mouth, nose and nasopharynx. The gurney used for administering this technique is specially designed so that this can be accomplished very quickly.” And here’s one from the CIA’s Office of Medical Services: [READS] “An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately. The interrogator should then deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water.”

ANCHOR
: Essentially, the Heimlich manoeuvre.

DOCTOR
: Yes. And where
that
doesn’t work – and we know it sometimes doesn’t, because the memo specifically refers to “spasms of the larynx” that keep a prisoner from breathing “even when the application of water is stopped and the detainee is returned to an upright position” – a medic would perform a tracheotomy.

ANCHOR
: The medics are there to save the detainee’s life, then?

DOCTOR
: In part, but also to monitor their respiratory state and make a judgement on whether it’s safe to go further. Effectively, the medic is helping the interrogator to push the prisoner even closer to the edge. This is calibration of harm by medical professionals – which in any country is against the Hippocratic oath.

ANCHOR
: Do we know if anyone has actually died from a CIA waterboarding?

DOCTOR
: The implication in the memos is that several have. One memo specifically speaks of “death due to psychological resignation”. In other words, rather than fighting the water, there have been subjects who have effectively used the water-boarding itself as a means to commit suicide. And at the end of another memo there’s what basically amounts to an appeal for more information, to help refine the process. [READS FROM MEMO] “In order to best inform future medical judgements and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application lasted, how much water was used in the process – realising that much splashes off – how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”

ANCHOR
: One imagines they didn’t look all that well. Doctor, thank you. We should point out that in 2009 President Obama declared the use of the waterboard “a mistake”, implying that it is no longer in widespread use by American intelligence agencies.

From MTV Italia:

PRESENTER
: Your ninety-second news this afternoon. Journalist and comedian Giancarlo Casamonti today volunteered to undergo waterboarding, in an attempt to prove that it wasn’t as bad as it was being painted. He was given two weights to hold, and told to drop them when the procedure became unbearable. He lasted twelve seconds.

From Canale 5:

NEWSREADER
: In an opinion poll conducted for Canale 5 by MORI today, people were asked how they would vote if there was a referendum over the future of the Dal Molin military base. An overwhelming majority said that they would vote against the kidnappers’ proposals, including many who had previously signed petitions protesting the American presence…

By 4 p.m., when the ubiquitous web counters showed just five hours to go, the torrent of second-hand information and chatter had abated. Now there were only the newspapers’ posters of Mia that had been appearing on railings and church doors all across Italy, often accompanied by votive candles and bunches of flowers – shrines that had the unfortunate effect of making it look to the rest of the world as if many Italians considered Mia already dead.

At 5 p.m., a voice shouted across the operations room, “The American President’s about to make a statement.”

In the hush that followed, the American leader was seen in the White House press room, reading out a surprising announcement: a public apology for the “excess of zeal” of the previous administration, which had allowed the CIA to “mistreat, abuse, and even torture those who should not have been detained in the first place”. He re-pledged his own administration’s commitment to “a fairer, more rigorous approach to the nation’s security”, declaring that the use of the waterboard “and certain other harsh techniques” was “a grave error”. Finally, he called for Mia’s release.

Kat joined in the spontaneous applause. All around her she felt a surge of optimism, even expectation, that this unprecedented gesture would be enough for the kidnappers to claim a moral victory and let Mia go.

But, once the effect of the President’s soaring oratory had worn off, she was forced to admit that he had promised nothing specific, or even new.

Soon after six, a dense fog crept in from the sea. On the seven o’clock Rai bulletin, the anchor noted that there was no
passeggiata
anywhere in the towns of the Veneto that evening. Traffic was lighter than usual, and restaurants and bars were empty.

It was, he said, as if the country were battening itself down for some terrible storm.

SIXTY-FOUR

AT CAMPO SAN ZACCARIA
, they’d made what preparations they could. The zooming software, it was calculated, would allow their technicians to see an extra ribbon of screen around the webcast equivalent, after three minutes of broadcast, to about one twentieth of the total picture.

There were few who thought it would be enough, but they had equipment set up anyway that would allow them to toggle between the two images at a moment’s notice.

The webcast was late starting, prompting a flurry of speculation that it wouldn’t happen after all. Then the familiar crude titles appeared.

AS WE UNDERSTAND IT, WHEN THE WATERBOARD IS USED, THE SUBJECT’S BODY RESPONDS AS IF THE SUBJECT WERE DROWNING. YOU HAVE INFORMED US THAT THIS PROCEDURE DOES NOT INFLICT ACTUAL PHYSICAL HARM. THUS, ALTHOUGH THE SUBJECT MAY EXPERIENCE THE FEAR OR PANIC ASSOCIATED WITH THE FEELING OF DROWNING, THE WATERBOARD DOES NOT INFLICT PHYSICAL PAIN.

THE WATERBOARD, WHICH INFLICTS NO PAIN OR ACTUAL HARM WHATSOEVER, DOES NOT IN OUR VIEW INFLICT “SEVERE PAIN OR SUFFERING”. IT IS A CONTROLLED ACUTE EPISODE, LACKING THE CONNOTATION OF A PROTRACTED PERIOD OF TIME GENERALLY GIVEN TO “SUFFERING”.

As if the extraordinary assertion contained in these words were not enough – that if waterboarding didn’t cause “physical harm”, it didn’t cause pain; that if it didn’t last long, it didn’t inflict “suffering” – there then came a second series of titles.

BASED ON YOUR RESEARCH INTO THE USE OF THESE METHODS… YOU DO NOT ANTICIPATE THAT ANY PROLONGED MENTAL HARM WOULD RESULT FROM THE USE OF THE WATER-BOARD. INDEED, YOU HAVE ADVISED US THAT THE RELIEF IS ALMOST IMMEDIATE WHEN THE CLOTH IS REMOVED FROM THE NOSE AND MOUTH.

IN THE ABSENCE OF PROLONGED MENTAL HARM, NO SEVERE MENTAL PAIN OR SUFFERING CAN BE SAID TO HAVE BEEN INFLICTED EITHER.

The image cut to Mia in her orange jumpsuit, strapped to the gurney. Her head was at the lower end, and her feet and wrists were securely fastened.

Later, commentators were to remark on the intensity with which she sought out and held the gaze of the man in the Harlequin mask, turning her head to follow him as he approached.

Some were also to remark on the apparent tenderness with which he placed a towel under her head to cushion it, then wrapped another tightly around her face so that she was forced to breathe through the coarse material. The shape of her open nose and mouth was clearly defined under the cloth.

What was not disputed was that Mia was visibly shaking, and that she clenched her fists in an effort to control her tremors. The kidnapper’s arms, too, appeared to be shaking as he lifted the watering can – although that might just have been because it was heavy.

The water flowed in a clear, thin stream over the towel. For a long moment nothing happened. Then, with a sudden gasp, Mia released the breath she’d been holding and inhaled the water. She choked violently, her limbs convulsing, her head shaking from side to side in a frantic attempt to deny the liquid – still barely more than a trickle – access to her mouth.

“Jesus,” Kat found herself muttering. “This is unbearable.”

But she kept watching, as did every other Carabinieri officer in the room. On and on Harlequin poured. There must have been some kind of stopwatch or monitor just out of shot, because he glanced across at it, as if to make sure he wasn’t going a second beyond the agreed time.

After exactly twenty seconds, he stopped. The watchers knew, from the pundits, what to expect next. Although the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center had in 2006 personally ordered the destruction of ninety-two videotapes of waterboarding sessions, enough witnesses and victims had described the process for it to have become general knowledge. When subjected to waterboarding, the human body generally responded in the same way: first came vomiting, followed by screaming, followed by sobbing, followed by yet more screaming as the towel was reapplied.

But Mia wasn’t vomiting. She was lying quite still, unconscious.

There was a moment of shock in the operations room as people realised what had happened. Harlequin realised it too. Reaching down, he placed his hands on Mia’s diaphragm and pumped desperately. Nothing happened.

He put his face to hers. But there was no way he could administer the kiss of life through the mask.

He went around to the high end of the bench, where her feet were, and tried to push the bench out of shot. It was heavy, and the wooden legs caught on the concrete floor. He seemed to be in a state of panic as he strained to get it to move.

Her feet remained just in shot as he disappeared towards her head.

“Go to the unzoomed image,” Kat said. The technician punched a button, and the image changed – from the one the world was watching, to the raw image from the source.

There, in the tiny strip of picture Harlequin didn’t know existed, they saw him rip off his mask to resuscitate Mia. They saw how he breathed for her; how he pumped her chest frantically; saw, too, how when she finally choked and vomited her way back to life, he cradled her head in his hands, weeping with relief, saying her name over and over again.

And they saw him reach to her forehead and make the sign of the cross over it with his thumbs – an unmistakeable gesture of benediction.

“My God,” Saito breathed. “He’s a
priest
.”

With exquisite timing, that was when Carnivia went dark, the image replaced abruptly by a message informing them that the page they were trying to reach was currently unavailable due to heavy traffic, and that they should please try again later.

They replayed the film on a loop. The man’s face was in profile, and they never got a clear look at him. It was, Malli told them, far too little to use image-matching software on either.

“Even so, get the best still you can and isolate it. We’ll circulate it round the other agencies,” Saito said. He looked around. “Who’s got the database of protestors?”

“I have.” Kat had already opened the full list of names from the anti-Dal Molin petitions. Within moments, she’d generated a list of everyone who’d given their title as “Don”, “Monsignor” or “Father”.

Out of one hundred and fifty thousand names, there were seventy that matched.

“Organise into teams,” Saito ordered. “Five officers to a team. Start working the list.”

“Sir,” Kat said. “Is it possible that he
was
a priest, but isn’t any more? It just seems unlikely that a working priest could take the time off to do something like this.”

“Possible, yes. Even likely. But in that case, how would we find him?”

Despite the lateness of the hour, she tried the Vatican. To her amazement, the phone was answered. She explained what she wanted, and was put through to someone in the Information Service who told her that, while they did indeed have a database of current priests, they didn’t keep a specific record of those who had left the Church.

She thought. “Do you have an older database from, say, ten years ago?”

“I’ll have a look,” the voice on the other end said. He came back after a minute. “It seems we do.”

“And a list of priests who have passed away? Obituaries, for example?”

“Certainly.”

“Send me all three lists. I’ll collate them myself.”

As the operations room emptied team by team, she stayed on, cross-referencing the data. By 3 a.m. she had the names of almost a thousand Italian priests who had left the Church in the last ten years.

The database the Vatican had sent contained a bonus she hadn’t thought to ask for: each name had a date of birth next to it. Harlequin looked fairly young – probably in his thirties or early forties: to be on the safe side, she only excluded those over fifty.

Then she ran the remaining names against the anti-Dal Molin petition. Just six names matched.

Algisa Belluci

Edilio Barese

Frediano Caliari

Livio Lorenso

Enrico Ferri

Learco Toscano

She dialled Holly’s number, knowing that she’d wake her up.

“Kat?” Holly answered on the second ring. “What is it?”

“We’ve got a list of seventy-six names that are of interest to us, of whom six to my mind are particularly high value. Can you run them against
your
lists, to see if any of them might have a grudge against America?”

“Sure. I’ll do it myself.” Kat could hear Holly pulling on clothes as she spoke.

“Thanks. I’ll email them across.”

“Kat?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think this might be it?” Holly said quietly.

“I’m not sure. But it’s the best lead yet.”

Holly went to her work computer and brought up SIPRNet. Then she took the names Kat had emailed and entered them one by one. As she was also connected to the regular internet, she could see immediately that many were coming up with “Don” or “Padre” attached to them.

But the two that gave her hits on SIPRNet had no such honorifics. She called Kat back.

“It looks like we had dealings with two of your names, Frediano Caliari and Livio Lorenso. Caliari was involved in protests against drone strikes in the Yemen, two years ago. And Lorenso is on a list of people who have downloaded films from a piracy website.”

Kat thought. “Is it possible to find out any more about them?”

“We can run them through PRISM. That’ll give you a shed-load of data. But there are legal ramifications – not at our end, but you’ll probably need to get an anti-terrorism warrant. And I’ll need to inform Colonel Carver.”

“That’s fine,” Kat said. “I’ll get you the paperwork, if you can get me the information.”

Holly must have requested the search even before receiving the warrant, because by 6 a.m. Kat had PRISM reports on both Lorenso and Caliari. Despite being headed “Topline”, each ran to over fifty pages.

PRISM was simply data that travelled in and out of the US on its way to and from the USA’s biggest technology firms – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Skype, Facebook and others. By siphoning off the data direct from the main cross-Atlantic fibre-optic cables and copying it into huge “data tanks” at its $2 billion Utah Data Center, the National Security Agency could quite legally eavesdrop on foreign nationals all around the world without any kind of warrant. The only legal difficulty came if the NSA shared that data with other governments, since it broke many local privacy laws. And although the data was generally analysed at the pattern level – picking up those who were doing searches for both “bomb-making” and “airlines”, for example – it could also work the other way round: put in a name, address, and date of birth, or better still an email address, and PRISM’s computers could “ingest”, as the spooks put it, every detail about that person that could possibly be gleaned from the last few months’ internet traffic.

Both Livio Lorenso and Frediano Caliari used Google, Facebook and Skype. Lorenso also used Apple. He had searched for information about erectile dysfunction and bought a treatment for it over the internet. He regularly visited a number of pornographic websites but, until six weeks previously, had also used dating agencies. As he wasn’t computer-savvy enough to clear his cookies each time he used Google, Kat could see everything he’d searched for over the last six months – even which terms he’d mistyped. She could tell when he’d booked a flight and a hotel for two people but hadn’t completed the transaction, and when he’d searched for advice on how to propose. And since he used Gmail, which scanned emails to and from its users for keywords that would generate “contextual” advertising, she could also see that he’d emailed recently about a car, a holiday, a loan, bankruptcy, sexual fulfilment, marriage, honeymoons and a restaurant with good reviews in the centre of Milan. On Facebook he’d added six friends in the last month; his status had changed from single to “in a relationship” twice, and he had “liked” about a hundred posts, links and videos, including the anti-Dal Molin petition.

More usefully still, he shopped at Esselunga, Italy’s largest supermarket, and had a loyalty card, the data from which was stored on a Microsoft server in Texas. This allowed Kat to see, amongst other things, when he’d bought petrol. His fuel purchases had begun three months previously – roughly the time he’d been picking up ads for cheap auto loans and secondhand-car sites – and had been small and regular. His credit rating had recently gone down, owing to an increase in his loan repayments, and he had registered a new number plate to his address.

The clincher, though, was that Lorenso had an iPhone. He’d bought a number of apps that tracked his location, from one that alerted him whenever he was about to pass a speed camera, to a walking app that recorded how many calories he was burning. From the information that had flashed back and forth between his phone and Apple’s Location Services, Kat could see that he’d travelled from Milan to Turin twice in the last fortnight, but no further. If she’d wanted to, she could also have accessed the photos stored on his Facebook timeline with the tag “Turin”. She could even have checked out the book about relationships he’d recently bought on his e-reader, and seen what phrases in the text he’d underlined.

Clearly, since leaving the priesthood, Lorenso had been making up for lost time with the opposite sex. She very much doubted he was their man.

Caliari was another matter. His internet usage was sparse and functional. He visited religious sites, left-wing blogs, and bulletin boards about international affairs, particularly the anti-globalisation movement.

He cleared his Google cookies every time he used his computer, suggesting a basic understanding of the need for caution. The content of his emails had triggered ads for nothing more exciting than charities and privacy software. And although he had registered a Skype username and password, he seemed never to have used it. His most recent Facebook “like” was a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in Vicenza.

What was more, about three weeks previously he’d bought a new laptop computer, a USB video camera and a pay-as-yougo wireless broadband dongle from an online computer shop. His very last activity had been to search for shops near to him in Verona selling Carnevale masks. After that, his internet use abruptly stopped.