The Abduction: A Novel (34 page)

EIGHTY-THREE

THEY SAT IN
the old music room at Ca’ Barbo, the lights from Carnivia’s newly upgraded servers pulsing softly behind them. Holly was wearing similar clothes to Daniele today: a hoodie, sneakers, jeans. She didn’t feel quite ready yet to put on the uniform of the US Army again, the uniform Carver had been wearing when he’d cut hers off.

Truth to tell, she wasn’t sure she ever would.

“I’m taking each day as it comes,” she told him. “No schedule, no plans. And I’m seeing Father Uriel. He’s helping a lot.”

“I’m glad,” Daniele said. He added, “I’ve stopped seeing him myself.”

“Why?”

His eyes had a curious, distant quality. “Now I’ve had a chance to think it through, I’m not sure I actually
want
to develop empathy. I think perhaps, during Mia’s kidnap, I did the wrong thing, compromising my principles for sentimental reasons. Once you start doing that, where does it end? Don’t you just end up like Caliari or Carver, believing that whatever you’re doing, it’s for the greater good? How do you ever decide who’s important enough to make an exception for, and who isn’t? How do you live in a world where everyone wants different things of you?”

The world he was talking about, she knew, wasn’t just the one in which they were sitting, but that other, newer creation inside his servers, for which he alone bore ultimate responsibility.

She said gently, “When people pray, they hope someone will answer. It doesn’t trouble them that if he does, God’s being inconsistent.”

“Perhaps.” Daniele was silent a moment. “Anyway, I’ve made another inconsistent decision. I’ve barred Ethereal from Carnivia.”

“Can you do that?”

“It required a major rewrite to the code. But even if the effect is largely symbolic, it will let people know that there are limits to what they’re allowed to do. And I’ve plugged the holes that allowed Mulciber to look as if he was hacking it. It turns out he’d built some administrator privileges into the coding when we collaborated on it. They won’t either of them be able to do anything similar again.”

“I’m pleased. But you know it won’t stop people wanting to control or destroy it, don’t you?”

“I know.” He glanced at her, then added, “There’s something I need to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“When you were missing, Kat said something. It made me wonder if… If perhaps your motives for sleeping with me were more complex than they appeared. If perhaps it was Ian Gilroy who had put the idea in your head.” His eyes were fixed on the server screens now, a long way from her gaze.

She sighed. “I did say to Ian that I was interested in you, yes. But the idea that he could tell me who to sleep with is pretty insulting, frankly.”

He said softly, “I know that you like and trust that man. And I know that you think I’m prejudiced against him because of his relationship with my father. But try looking at everything that happened in a different way. Gilroy inherited his CIA predecessor’s influence – his files on the members of the Order of Melchizedek, his access to the US Military, his seat on the Conterno board. Did he know what was going on with Mia from the start? Did he use you, and your links to the Carabinieri, to scupper a rival – Carver – whose ambitions were threatening his own power?”

She shook her head. “That’s paranoid.” It was true that Gilroy’s name had cropped up from time to time. But it would be crazy to try to read too much into it. The truth, as she understood it, was more like a series of Russian dolls, one inside another. Inside Azione Dal Molin was Carver, and drugs, and Elston, and Exodus. Inside the CIA was Bob Garland, and OSS, and the Order of Melchizedek. And inside them both, the very smallest doll, was The Enemy – once called communism, and now called terror, but the same all-consuming foe nevertheless.

And inside The Enemy was… Her mind briefly glimpsed something, the image of another doll, vanishingly tiny and insubstantial, but her brain refused to go there.

“That’s paranoid,” she repeated. “I trust him absolutely.” She hesitated. “But, Daniele, there’s another conversation we need to have right now.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “You don’t need to explain.”

Even so, she tried. “I need to deal with what happened to me. I can’t be trying to have a relationship as well.”

“Of course.” He hadn’t asked her exactly what had happened in the caves, and didn’t intend to. Just as he didn’t intend to ask whether what Kat had told him about Holly’s sexuality might also be a factor in her decision. “I understand, really.”

“You do?”

“I’ve felt like that all my life,” he said.

EIGHTY-FOUR

KAT WAS WAITING
for him outside the villa, in a Carabinieri car. “Well?” she said, as Piola climbed into the passenger seat. “Were all your questions answered?”

“Most of them. Of course, he may have been spinning me a pack of lies. He’s certainly capable of it. But whatever his motives, I can’t submit that report now.”

“I think that’s a good thing. Italy has enough problems in the present, without trying to set the past to rights as well.”

“Perhaps.” Remembering what else the old spy had said, and how perceptively he had framed the decision Piola had to make now, he shook his head and sighed.

“What?” she said, noticing.

“Nothing.” As she drove down the long, gravel drive, he turned to look at her profile. “Kat, you know I’m in love with you, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said after a moment’s pause.

“And?”

“I think you’ll get over it.” She added, almost apologetically, “Sir.”

They reached the road, and she paused, her hand on the indicator. “Where next?”

HISTORICAL NOTE

Although
The Abduction
is fiction, it draws heavily on several real conspiracies with origins in the Cold War.

The plots to annexe northern Italy for the communists at the end of the Second World War are now well known to historians, as are OSS’s efforts to prevent them – efforts that resulted in some American intelligence officers receiving papal honours after the war.

It’s also well established that many of the first National Security Council directives concerned Italy, and in particular the need, made explicit in directive NSC 4/A, to prevent the Communist Party from gaining electoral power. Amongst many other stratagems, this involved funding a centre-left alternative, the Christian Democrats. How successful this was may be judged from the fact that the party provided every single Italian prime minister for forty years. It survived numerous bribery and corruption scandals before finally falling apart in the 1990s – round about the same time as the Cold War ended.

Many readers will find especially fanciful the suggestion that Giovanni Montini, later Pope Paul VI, could have been a CIA asset. However, this too is based on fact. Under the code-name “Vessel” he is alleged to have passed information to OSS from about 1944 onwards. So plentiful, and so useful, was this intelligence that a new section, X-2, was created to process it. According to one account, X-2 produced almost five hundred reports in one six-month period.

The Order of Melchizedek is a composite, based on a number of similar organisations in post-war Italy. Some, like the Sovereign Military Order of Malta or the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, enjoy extraterritoriality and other privileges that have long proved useful to the intelligence services (OSS’s post-war “ratlines”, for example, were run using Order of Malta passports); others, such as the “Propaganda Due” Masonic lodge, were attempts to bring together the Mafia, the Italian intelligence services and other right-of-centre factions in an alliance against the left. Amongst P2’s members was listed the name of Silvio Berlusconi, many years before he became Italy’s prime minister.

America built its first permanent bases in Vicenza in 1955, under the terms of a treaty that remains classified to this day. They include “Site Pluto”, a cave network deep under the Berici hills, where nuclear mines and short-range nuclear war-heads were once stored (it has long been superseded by more modern nuclear bunkers at Ghedi and Aviano). In 2004 the US Army announced that Silvio Berlusconi’s government had approved plans for an additional base at a former Italian military airfield called Dal Molin. The plans prompted strong opposition from some local citizens, approximately one hundred and fifty thousand of whom came together to protest under the banner “No Dal Molin”. A small number did break into the construction site at one point, although my “Azione Dal Molin” group is fictional.

At an opening ceremony in 2012 – by which time the site’s name had been changed to “Del Din” – the US ambassador credited the speed of the building programme to “the strong support that the United States received from the highest levels of the Italian government”.

The quotations from CIA documents on enhanced interrogation are mostly taken from the so-called “torture memos” released to the American Civil Liberties Union in 2009 under Freedom of Information legislation. President Obama symbolically rescinded enhanced interrogation when he took office, although a number of the same techniques are believed to remain in use. Obama’s 2009 Executive Order also established an interagency task force to review interrogation policies and “the practices of transferring individuals to other nations”. Their report was issued later in 2009, but continues to be withheld from the public.

The same Executive Order announced the closure of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. However, the small print revealed that President Obama wasn’t intending to release or even charge the detainees, but simply to spread around the American prison system those he described as “too difficult to prosecute, but too dangerous to release”. Congress objected to having prisoners in American jails who were being denied trials, and at the time of writing Guantanamo remains open. Meanwhile, many of the other prisons where detainees have been sent in recent years – notably Parwan Detention Facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where approximately three thousand prisoners are currently held without charge – are scheduled to be handed over to local governments.

The references to CIA activities such as the “second strike” policy – which attempts to prevent first responders from going to the aid of drone strike victims – and US cybersurveillance programs such as PRISM are as accurate as I can make them.

Despite suggestions in 2009 that it would be ended, “rendition” – otherwise known as “abduction” – remains a legal tool of the US government.

For links to further reading, and information about the other books in the Carnivia trilogy, go to www.carnivia.com.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Once again, huge thanks to Laura Palmer, fiction publisher at Head of Zeus, for helping to shape the story. And to Anna Coscia and Lucy Ridout; the former for correcting my terrible Italian, the latter for correcting my terrible English.

The mathematics of boiling the perfect egg is based on research by Dr Charles D.H. Williams at Exeter University, which can be found at http://newton.ex.ac.uk/teaching/cdhw/egg/.

The quotation by Noam Chomsky on
chapter 65
is excerpted from a longer article at www.nodalmolin.it.

ALSO BY JONATHAN HOLT

The Abomination

COPYRIGHT

THE ABDUCTION
. Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Holt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd.

FIRST U.S. EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-226704-7

EPUB Edition JUNE 2014 ISBN 9780062267061

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