The Abduction: A Novel (6 page)

“What about her phone?”

“I can put in a request. But it will take eight weeks to get anything back.”

“Eight weeks!” Holly looked aghast.

“This is Italy. We may not be a superpower, but we do have certain checks and balances. I’ll have to apply for a warrant – that means getting a prosecutor appointed, then proving to their satisfaction that a crime has been committed, and that there’s a reasonable chance of convicting someone.”

“But how can you say who committed the crime if you haven’t been allowed to investigate it?” Not for the first time, Holly found herself wondering if the Italian legal system hadn’t been deliberately designed to obstruct criminal investigations, rather than facilitate them.

Kat, who had come to exactly that conclusion long ago, shrugged. “That’s the law.”

Holly hesitated. “What about Daniele Barbo? Could we ask him to help?”

“Are you joking?”

The founder of Carnivia might be an acquaintance of theirs, but he wasn’t someone you could just ask a favour of. Not that the illegality of accessing someone’s phone records would bother him – Daniele had his own, somewhat idiosyncratic, concept of morality – but the notion of doing another person a good turn would, Kat suspected, be completely alien to him.

“If it wasn’t for us, he’d be in prison,” Holly said. “I thought perhaps – in an unofficial capacity, of course…”

Kat considered. Saito had, after all, asked her to help in any way she could, and since there was no chance whatsoever that Daniele would say yes, it could do no harm to ask. But she thought it significant that Holly – normally a stickler for doing things through official channels – was worried enough to suggest something as desperate as this.

“Well, as a Carabinieri officer, I can’t ask him. But there’s nothing to stop you doing it – so long as I don’t know, of course.”

“I’ll send him an email,” Holly said. “Whatever he’s doing, he’s almost certainly doing it in front of a screen.”

As they left the bedroom Kat picked up the fake ID again. “You say teenagers in the US use these to buy booze?”

“That’s right. Why?”

“Major Elston said they’ve been in Italy for three years. Mia and her friends can buy alcohol here quite legally at sixteen. So what else was she doing, that she needed to lie about her age for?”

NINE

SHE HEARD THE
rattle of a chain at the door. The man in the Harlequin mask came in, carrying a tray. Behind him was Bauta, once again filming everything.

On the tray was a bottle of nutrition drink. She recognised the brand – Ensure. Some of the jocks at school used it as a supplement.

“The prisoner will eat,” Harlequin said flatly, setting the tray down. He stood back so that the other man could continue to film as she opened the plastic bottle. It was banana flavour, sweet and sickly. But she was hungry, so she drank it all.

It seemed strange to her that they were so interested in watching her do this. What was so special about the Ensure?

Unless it’s drugged.
A terrifying scenario flitted into her mind. She would now fall unconscious, then they’d undress her while she was out and do whatever they wanted to her. Perhaps they’d even film themselves. Maybe that was what this was really all about – making some kind of snuff movie. Or they could be traffickers, and this would be the first step in forcing her into prostitution.

She must have been staring at the bottle in horror, because Harlequin said quietly, “It’s not drugged.”

She looked at him, surprised that he’d been able to guess her thoughts. She realised that, whatever else he was, he was intelligent – too intelligent, surely, to be just some Mafia henchman. And his English, although he spoke it with a strong accent, was grammatically correct.

So: an educated man, then. She wasn’t sure if that made her situation more or less terrifying.

But at least he’d spoken to her, so she seized her chance. “I’m an American citizen. I demand to know who you are and why you’re keeping me here.” As soon as the words were out, she wished she’d said, “I respectfully ask” instead of, “I demand”.

But Harlequin only watched her thoughtfully. “It is because the prisoner is an American citizen that she is a prisoner.”

“Who are you? What do you want me for?”

“Our name is Azione Dal Molin – in English, ‘Action for Dal Molin’.” He glanced at his watch. “As for what we want you for, you’re about to find out.”

TEN

DANIELE BARBO HELD
up his hands, fingers spread, so that they were exactly opposite the hands of the young woman sitting across the table from him, his left palm facing her right and vice versa, with only a few millimetres separating his skin from hers.

“Begin,” a quiet voice said behind him. He heard the click of a stopwatch.

He looked directly at the woman, flinching minutely as they established eye contact. But he’d made good progress since the first time he’d done this exercise. Now he was able to meet her gaze without panic or distress, although he felt his breathing quicken.

Long seconds passed. Where their hands almost touched, his palms and fingers seemed to throb, as if his pulse was reaching out to hers. It was, he knew, an illusion, but the sensation was not unpleasant.

“Good,” the voice behind him said.

If he could manage it, the exercise required him to stare directly into her eyes for six whole minutes. Gradually he relaxed, and it became easier. She was, he supposed, attractive; her eyes especially so. Around the pupils, her irises were light grey, flecked here and there with variations of colour. Magnified by the curve of the cornea, he could make out intricate white lines within each one, like the pattern inside a Murano glass paperweight. Involuntarily, his skin prickled at her closeness, and blood thickened in his groin.

The eyes opposite him seemed to widen minutely, as if she knew. Or, he realised, as if something similar was happening to her. His hands twitched, ready to break away, but the fractional distance between their palms still held.

As their breathing deepened and synchronised, he became aware of the regular rise and fall of her chest. Now, somehow, he understood that it was her turn to feel self-conscious. He could feel her wanting to drop her gaze; the inner struggle as she told herself she couldn’t. It felt as if the two of them were having the most intimate conversation, but without speaking a word. He wondered if it was the same for her. Every fibre of his body told him that it was, that this intense bond was being reciprocated. But a small, rational part of his brain knew that, unlike him, she had probably done this many times before, and with other patients besides him.

He also knew that the exercise they were carrying out, apparently so simple, was the result of extensive research. In a 1989 study at Clark University, psychologist James Laird had established that mutual eye gazing for just two minutes could produce rapid increases in sexual empathy, even between strangers. The physical proximity of their hands was based on a similar discovery by Leon Festinger and Robert Zajonc at Stanford.

“Sabrina, make a gesture,” the voice behind him said.

Without taking her eyes off Daniele, the young woman moved one of her hands sideways, down towards the table. Immediately, Daniele copied her, so that their hands remained opposite each other. She did the same with her other hand, then turned her head from side to side. Each time he copied her, their eyes still locked together.

After two minutes of mirroring each other’s movements – again, based on research which demonstrated that it increased feelings of closeness – the voice behind him spoke again.

“Now truth,” Father Uriel said. “Daniele, you first.”

He thought. What secret did he want this woman to share with him? Under the rules of the exercise, she had to answer any question honestly, no matter how intimate or revealing.

“Sabrina, why are you here?” he asked.

The young woman reflected, picking her words carefully. “Father Uriel is my PhD supervisor. When he asked for volunteers to help with his clinical work, I thought it sounded interesting.”

“Are you being paid?”

“We get term credits for participation, in the same way any research assistant would. So, yes, you could say I’m getting paid.”

“Do you work with his other patients too?”

She frowned, and he guessed that if she hadn’t been obliged to keep her eyes locked on his, she’d have looked to Father Uriel for reassurance that this wasn’t off limits. “I don’t think I can talk about that.”

“I need the truth,” he reminded her. Father Uriel remained silent.

“I have done this with others, yes.”

“Did it feel like this?”

She shook her head minutely, her eyes still fixed on his. “Not exactly, no.”

Father Uriel’s voice said, “Sabrina, your turn.”

She looked at Daniele in a different way now, assessing him. “Today I felt you were attracted to me. Were you?”

“Yes,” he said honestly. He waited for her next question.

“Why are
you
here?” she said, and he sensed that she really wanted to know; sensed, too, that had the answer to the previous question been different, she wouldn’t have asked this one.

“You mean: am I a woman-hater, or a paedophile, or one of the other categories of offender Father Uriel usually works with?” he said slowly. “And the answer to that is ‘no’. But for various reasons, I’ve never found it possible to be close to other people.”

“Are you autistic?”

“I have been called that, and by some very eminent doctors. But Father Uriel believes my condition is acquired, not inherited.” He wondered if she realised how hard it was for him to talk about this; wondered, even, if the psychiatrist had put her up to it. “I was kidnapped as a child. They kept me locked up for several weeks.”

“Is that how you lost your ears? And your nose?”

He tensed involuntarily. “Yes. The kidnappers… They did it to put pressure on my parents.”

“Why didn’t you have cosmetic surgery? Afterwards, I mean?”

He took a deep breath. “I was offered it, of course. But I refused. I told my parents I wasn’t ready. But the truth was, my father loved beautiful things – artworks, his palace in Venice. I wanted him to look at me and see what he’d done. To remember that all his wealth had created something ugly.”

She nodded calmly. He felt the rush of mental connection that came from sharing a secret he had never divulged to anyone else. It both excited and terrified him.

“What made you seek help now?” she asked.

“I realised I was never going to form a relationship – to love someone – unless I did.”

“Are you in love with someone?”

It was getting to be too much now. Surely the six minutes were up? He shook his head. “No.”

“But there’s someone you’re interested in?”

The silence drew itself out. Behind him, he heard the click of the stopwatch. He no longer had to answer.

“There
is
someone, yes,” he said slowly. “Perhaps it’s not possible. But I think I’d like to find out.”

“Thank you, Daniele,” Father Uriel said quietly. “You too, Sabrina. That’s all for today.”

Sabrina stood, pulled on a woollen cardigan, smiled briefly at Daniele, and left. He watched her go, feeling how the consulting room suddenly seemed a little emptier, a little drabber, for her absence. He thought: is this what people feel? Is this what normality means? To make a brief connection with a fellow human being, only to experience the wrench as it was broken?

And what if the connection wasn’t a brief one, and breaking it hurt something fundamental in you? What then?

“You’re making good progress,” Father Uriel was saying. “I think you might soon be ready to move on to the next exercise. Perhaps even to some real-world socialising.”

“A date, you mean?”

“If you like. It would be a big step, I know.”

Daniele indicated the door. “Will I see her again?”

Father Uriel considered. “Usually I try to rotate the surrogates, to minimise the danger of my patients forming an emotional attachment to them. But in your case, that’s hardly likely. Why? Would you
like
to see her again?”

“I don’t know. I want to see her. But I want to meet the other surrogates, too.”

Father Uriel laughed, confusing Daniele. Had he said something funny? “Well, I don’t have that many research assistants. Not ones as pretty as Sabrina, anyway. So I imagine you may well see her again.” He consulted his computer screen. “The same time next Monday?”

As he left the consulting room Daniele flicked his phone back on, attracting a curious glance from a passing monk. He barely noticed these days that he was almost the only person at Father Uriel’s Institute who wasn’t wearing a religious habit.

Daniele didn’t believe in God, except as a principle of higher mathematics. But he did appreciate the way that the sex scandals currently enveloping the Church meant greater resources for doctors like Father Uriel who were quietly exploring new ways of treating sexual deviance as a form of dissocial personality disorder. It was Father Uriel who had suggested that the reverse might also be true – that the same behavioural techniques he used to reprogramme a priest’s sexual attraction to children, say, could also be used to develop empathy in people like himself. The treatment was highly experimental, but when Daniele had checked it out by hacking into the archives of a few peer-reviewed journals, he’d been reassured to discover that it was based on sound science.

He scanned his messages. Most were automated alerts from the Carnivia servers, notifying him of surges in traffic or attempted security breaches. The others he deleted rapidly one by one without reading them.

From: Holly Boland

Subject: Can you help?

He hesitated, then marked that one to read later.

It was another message, a little further down, that he stopped at. It had been sent to a hidden message board that, in theory, was only accessible to Carnivia’s administrators. The sender was someone who until a few days ago he’d never heard of. The subject line read:

Dan, a generic description of the process

He opened it.

On arrival at the detention site, the prisoner finds herself under the complete control of her captors. She is subjected to precise, quiet and almost clinical procedures designed to underscore the enormity and suddenness of the change in environment, her uncertainty about what may happen next, and her potential dread of captivity. The captive’s own clothes are removed and destroyed. Her physical condition is documented through photographs taken while she is nude.

The captive is shackled and placed in solitary confinement. No toilet items, reading matter or religious materials are provided. No communication is permitted with the outside world. Guards are usually masked and do not communicate more than the bare minimum, including giving commands in the third person (“The prisoner will exit the cell” etc.).

The captive is subjected to dietary manipulation. This involves substituting a bland, commercial liquid meal for a captive’s normal diet. Calorific intake will always be set at or above 1,000 kcal/day. The captive’s weight is monitored to ensure that she does not lose more than 10% of bodyweight.

The threshold question is whether this behaviour is so egregious, so outrageous, that it may fairly be said to shock the contemporary conscience.

It was the third email in a similar vein he’d received in forty-eight hours. Had it not reached him on that particular account, he’d have taken it for spam. But he was quite certain there was no way a Carnivia admin board could be spammed.

As he stood there with the phone in his hand, considering, it rang. Holly Boland’s name was the caller ID. He hesitated, then pressed “Answer”.

“Yes?”

Holly didn’t waste time on small talk, knowing how much it both irritated and confused him. “Daniele, a teenager has gone missing. We believe her phone records may help to locate her.”

“So?”

“It needs to be done quickly, which rules out conventional channels.” There was a long silence. “Daniele?” she prompted. “Are you still there?”

“I’ll help,” he said slowly. “But I want something in return.”

“Such as?”

This time the silence was even longer. “I want you to have dinner with me.”

“Dinner?” she echoed. Now it was her turn to hesitate. “That would be great.”

Next to her, Kat stifled a grin. It had been perfectly apparent to her when she’d last observed them together that Daniele fancied the blonde intelligence officer. It had also been apparent that Holly had been oblivious to it. Well, Kat had her own theory about why that might be.

“I’ll text the girl’s details,” Holly said.

“A name will be enough. And her phone provider, if you have it.”

“It’s Elston. Mia Elston. She’s—”

“I know that name already,” Daniele interrupted. “She has an account on Carnivia. An account that’s been hacked.”

At the other end of the phone, Holly was confused. The one thing everybody knew about Carnivia was that it wasn’t possible to hack it. That was the site’s whole
raison d’être
– not for Daniele, perhaps, who preferred to see his creation as a kind of abstract mathematical model, but for the millions of ordinary users. On Carnivia, wrapped in the anonymity of its military-grade encryption, you could buy anything, from the secrets of your colleagues’ sex lives to a new identity; sell anything, from a stranger’s credit card details to your own body; gamble anything, from your wage packet to your life; and say anything, from a declaration of passion sent via an anonymous email that self-destructed after a few minutes, to a whistleblowing denunciation of a corrupt politician or government. Some people called it evil, others a force for good. Most, however, were coming to realise that it was neither, but rather that, like Twitter, Google or the internet itself, it was simply a new reality of the information age, one whose true impact would be gauged only in hindsight.

Assuming, of course, that it survived, instead of disappearing like so many other internet sensations before it. Carnivia’s success was inextricably linked to its ability to remain secure. The implications of it not being so were enormous.

“Hacked?” she repeated. “How?”

“I don’t know. Someone’s sending fake messages from Mia Elston’s account to an administrator’s board. Whoever it is has a working knowledge of scripting tools – the source code has been rewritten in Python to ensure I can’t trace it back to the IP. But that’s relatively simple. Getting into Carnivia itself would mean learning the domain-specific programming language—”