The Abomination (44 page)

Holly didn't reply.

“I want all three of you outside. Assume the captive position on the terrace. That means kneeling, hands behind your head. Don't look round, don't look at each other, don't talk, or I'll shoot you immediately. Go.”

They did as they were told. As she knelt on the cold stone, Kat felt her arms lifted from behind, something soft and rubbery looping itself over and around her wrists.

“We call these Guantanamo restraints,” Findlater's voice said conversationally in her ear. “Gitmos for short. No matter how much you struggle, they won't leave a mark.”

He moved along to Holly and did the same to her. Melina he left until last: Kat heard her gasp in pain.

“You don't get the gitmos, daughter dearest,” Findlater observed. “'Cause you don't need them. Plain old ratchet ties for you.”

He came back over to Kat and Holly. “You two, stand up and come with me.”

He made them walk at gunpoint through the bushes to the shore. Kat risked one glance back. Melina was lying on her side, her arms and legs immobilised.
Why separate us?
Kat thought.

Then, with a sudden chill of understanding, she realised why. It didn't matter whether Melina had bruises on her wrists or not because her body, with its incriminating DNA, was never going to be found. He'd kill her, take her out to the lagoon and dump her, properly weighted this time.

Why he wasn't planning the same for Holly and her, she had no idea.

She soon found out.

“Onto the jetty, you two,” he ordered. “Careful now. If you go through it you'll drown for sure. That's it. Now lie down on your sides.”

Kat felt him step onto the jetty, gingerly picking his way across the rotten boards. Then he yanked her bound wrists and fastened them with another tie to one of the sturdier posts that supported the structure.

“High water tonight,” he said conversationally. “Which, as we know, washes bodies from this location right into Venice. Including yours.” Standing over her, he put a boot on Kat's head and rolled it to and fro, thoughtfully, like a football. “The tide will reach about a foot higher than this, I reckon. I'll stick around, watch you both drown, then I'll just take off the gitmos and let you float back to town. Seawater in your lungs, and not a mark on you. Boating accident.” With his boot he rolled Kat's head some more, pressing down on her cheek until she was forced to look up at him. “Question is, how shall I amuse myself in the meantime? Shame I can't mark that pretty face. But perhaps there's another way of having some fun.”

The boot left her head and roughly sought out her crotch, pushing her thighs apart, making her hiss with pain as he leant his weight on her groin. “Indeed, I think there might be,” he said. “Good thing I bought a condom. We wouldn't want any pesky DNA to be found at your autopsy, would we?”

He reached into his shirt pocket. “So, which one's it to be? The brunette or the blonde? Or even my pretty little Bosnian daughter? Hmm, it's a tough one. Oh, what's this?”

Crouching down, he flashed something in front of her eyes. A small blue packet.

“Would you believe it?” he breathed. “Looks like I've bought a pack of three. Everyone gets lucky. But I think, just for novelty, my daughter gets it first.”

Kat felt him lean in close, scrutinising her face, looking for the fear and revulsion in her eyes. She shut them so that he wouldn't have the satisfaction. Felt his breath on her cheek. He chuckled.

“Now you know what it was like in Bosnia,” he whispered. “The strong or the weak. Life or death. Pleasure or pain. No rules. It's beautifully simple, really. There's no sweeter feeling than having the power to do whatever you want to another human being.” He tucked a lock of her hair, almost tenderly, back behind one ear. “Unless it's doing what you want to an entire country, like we're doing to yours. Once you've tasted that, it's kind of hard to go back.”

He stood up and sprang lightly onto the shore. “Maybe I'll bring my little girl over here so you can listen to us. How'd you like that, Captain? Like to listen to me screwing her as she dies?”

He turned, added “What the fuck?” in a belligerent voice. There was a single sharp crack, followed by another. It seemed like an eternity before there was any other sound: the splash of his body hitting the water.

BECAUSE OF THE
way she was lying, Kat couldn't see what was going on. Had Findlater stumbled on the jetty? Had that been the crack of a breaking board? Or had Melina somehow worked herself loose and come after him? Competing explanations tumbled through her mind, but none made any sense.

“What's happening, Kat?” Holly called.

But the voice that replied was American, male, and steady. “Findlater's dead. Are you girls all right? Don't try to move, that jetty's barely safe. I'm going to bring the boat round and cut you free.”

“Mr Gilroy?” Holly said.

“Indeed. Captain Tapo, it's good to meet you at last, although I'm sorry about the circumstances. It took me a little longer to get here than I'd have liked. Was Findlater alone?”

“We think so. Melina's over at the old hospital—”

“I know. I already checked on her, she's fine. We need to get you back there too, and quickly.”

“Why?”

There was an explosion out in the lagoon, half a mile away. Water pulsed into the air as if from a giant spout.

“Predator drones,” Gilroy said bluntly. “Still watching, though they've been fed the wrong coordinates by Daniele GPS spoofing, I believe it's called. Let's get under cover, then I'll make some calls.”

Kat felt a knife slide inside each of her restraints in turn. Painfully, she got to her feet. Gilroy was already cutting Holly free.

“And we'd better tow
that
back to Venice.” He nodded contemptuously at Findlater's corpse. “Get a line round his feet, will you? We'll work out what to do with him later.”

“Did you just use us as
bait
?” Kat said incredulously.

Gilroy turned his friendly blue eyes on her. “In a manner of speaking. But I assure you I had no choice. Let's get back to the hospital, and I'll explain.”

Once they reached the relative safety of the old hospital, Gilroy went off to another room to make a series of phone calls, each one in a different language.

She overheard him saying, “We have the whole thing on film. One of my people has been recording the feed from your UAVs.” There was a pause. “That's why I hold all the cards, and you none whatsoever. But listen, we're done now. It's quite straightforward—” Through the open door he saw Kat listening and moved away, lowering his voice as he did so.

A few minutes later he returned. “It's all taken care of,” he said bluntly. “Game over. We beat them, people. Let's go home.”

TEN DAYS LATER,
Daniele Barbo stood up in court to receive his sentence. To the surprise of many in the crowded courtroom, the judge gave a lengthy list of all the reasons why the convicted man should go to jail, but followed it by noting that he had received a report from the distinguished chief doctor of a respected psychiatric institution. This stated that the accused had now placed himself under the doctor's care, and that in view of the excellent possibilities for progress enumerated in his report, it would be entirely wrong to impose a custodial sentence. The sentence was therefore suspended for as long as the accused continued to receive medical treatment.

Daniele Barbo walked from court a free man.

But not an untroubled one.

Once he'd shaken off the pursuing journalists, he made the taxi take him not to Venice, but to Villa Barbo, the family's former summer residence near Treviso, now occupied by Ian Gilroy.

“I suppose you've heard the news from court,” he said when he was shown into the older man's presence.

Gilroy nodded. “Indeed. Many congratulations. Though it was not, of course, entirely unexpected.”

“Not the Italian court. I meant from The Hague.”

“What news is that? General Korovik's trial doesn't start for another three days.”

“There won't be any trial, now. He was found dead this morning.” Daniele lifted his phone and read from the screen. “‘General Korovik had recently claimed he was suffering from a heart condition, the severity of which made him unfit to stand trial. Preliminary reports suggest that he may have been trying to exacerbate his own symptoms with smuggled medication, but fatally misjudged the dose.'”

“How fast news travels nowadays,” Gilroy mused. “I'm constantly amazed how everyone seems to know almost everything, right as soon as it happens.”

“Except that in this case, no one really knows anything, do they?” Daniele said. “I suppose this makes your plan to impeach a former US president and his Secretary of Defense for war crimes a little impractical?”

Gilroy nodded thoughtfully. “Well, it's certainly a setback. I won't deny that.”

“You know, I almost believed you for a moment,” Daniele said. “I really thought you meant it.”

“Oh, you mustn't think. . .”

“You played me, Gilroy. Just like you play everyone. Working out what we most want to hear, then constructing a story that we want to believe in.”

“Daniele,” Gilroy said patiently, “I thought we'd finally put the suspicious-teenager phase of our relationship behind us.”

“You never intended to impeach anyone. Just like Carnivia was never going to be hacked, was it? You just made me think it might be. It was one of the first buttons you pressed, to make me do exactly what you wanted.”

“What
did
I want, Daniele?” Gilroy asked, his pale eyes narrowing.

“The assassination of two men who knew too much. One – Bob Findlater – you killed yourself. The other – Dragan Korovik – was apparently out of your reach, in a prison cell in The Hague. And to make matters worse, he was about to talk, as a way of saving his own neck. But you knew that, given enough of an incentive, there were others who'd do your dirty work for you. Did Korovik know what was in those pills he was taking? His death has your signature all over it, Gilroy – persuading a man to willingly swallow poison, by making him think it's in his own best interests.”

“Daniele, this all sounds very ingenious. Worthy, almost, of one of your internet boards. Father Uriel did warn me that you might experience increased paranoia during the early stages of your treatment. I take it there isn't a scrap of evidence to back up these fantasies?”

“Not yet.”

“Not yet,” the older man echoed. Just for a moment, Daniele glimpsed relief in Gilroy's clear blue eyes.

“In mathematics, when we think something is true but don't know how to prove it, we call it a ‘conjecture',” Daniele said. “It doesn't mean it's wrong, just that the best way to examine it is to imagine it's true, and see where that takes you. And where this takes me is the conclusion that someone had to take the lead in planning William Baker. I don't believe MCI could have done it alone – they're mercenaries, not strategists. The Church, the Mafia, the ex-Gladio staff officers from NATO – none of them were big enough on their own to organise that coalition of vipers. It would have taken someone who really understood where all the levers of power in Italy were located, and how to pull them. Someone like you, in fact.”

“Fascinating, Daniele. Fascinating and, as you said yourself, quite without foundation.”

“Perhaps. But there might be one thing. Bob Findlater said it to Kat Tapo, before you shot him. He said, ‘There's nothing sweeter than the power to do whatever you want to an entire country, like we're doing to yours.' Those were his exact words – ‘like we're doing to yours'. Kat was very struck by that.”

“A slip of the tongue. He meant ‘like we were doing to Bosnia'.”

Daniele shook his head. “He can only have meant Italy. And that ‘we' – I don't see how it can have referred only to MCI.”

Gilroy threw up his hands. “And that's it?” he demanded. “One ambiguous pronoun – and suddenly I'm not to be trusted?”

“I keep thinking about who we were up against here,” Daniele said. “All those vested interests, working together at William Baker, still working together today to cover it up. Who's pulling the strings here, Gilroy? Why did googling ‘Companions of the Order of Melchizedek' cause my computer to become infected with a tiny piece of spyware, one so quiet and well designed that even I almost didn't notice it was there? What's really going on in Italy?”

“I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about,” Ian Gilroy said with a sigh, shaking his head. “Or what it can possibly have to do with me.”

“As I said, I don't know yet either. But believe me, I
will
find out.”

When Daniele had gone, Gilroy said, “I suppose you heard all that?”

Holly Boland stepped out from behind a painted screen. “Enough.”

Gilroy sighed. “He doesn't trust me. I don't blame him. He's been dispossessed by his father's Foundation, and I'm its representative. But what am I meant to do? The legal structures are quite unalterable.”

Holly touched his arm. “Just keep protecting him.”

“I can protect him from many things. But not, I fear, from the demons inside his own head.”

“Can I help?”

“Would you?” Gilroy said. “I'm getting too old for this, and he's a responsibility I suspect I'll never succeed in discharging.”

“What can I do?”

“Get close to him. Get inside Carnivia – that's the key. If you can make sense of that website, I think you'll begin to make sense of Daniele Barbo.”

“It'll be a pleasure.”

“Thank you, Second Lieutenant.” He was silent a moment. “While we're in confession mode, there's something I should explain to you. Before you came to Italy, your predecessor, Carol Nathans, came to me with some correspondence relating to a Freedom of Information request she'd been asked to handle. I realised immediately what it meant, that the enquirer was somehow on the trail of Operation William Baker. Nathans said she wanted my advice, but it was clear she really just wanted to know how best to answer the letter so that she could get it off her desk before her transfer. The same day, a contact of mine at the Pentagon called to say you'd applied for an Italian posting. I encouraged him to grant the application. I guessed that, like me, you might feel a loyalty to this country as well as to our own, and be motivated to get involved with the investigation as a result.”