The Absolution (5 page)

Someone had decided to silence them both. And the reason for it was right there, in her hand.

“
WE WON
'
T BE
able to perform the autopsy until tomorrow at the earliest,” Dr Hapadi said apologetically as he led the two Carabinieri officers through the mortuary. “We had two deaths in the hospital last night and they'll have to take priority.”

“That's all right,” Kat said. “It was you we came to speak to, actually.”

“I thought it might be,” the pathologist said quietly. “Let's go in here.”

He took them to his office, off to one side of the morgue and almost as cold. Through the glass wall Kat could see Spatz, the technician, leaning over the corpse with a camera, taking photographs of the victim's face. The pictures, she knew, would be uploaded via a specialist program to Google Image Search in the hopes of finding a match. It wouldn't replace a formal identification, but it might give them a starting point.

Hapadi handed Kat a sheet of fax paper. “I spoke to our Worshipful Master earlier. Those are the names of every member of our lodge.”

“How long have you been a Mason?” Kat asked, scanning the list.

“Almost seven years. People have the wrong idea about us,
you know. Most of what we do is charitable. And since Anselmi, it isn't even secret.”

Kat nodded. The Anselmi law, introduced a decade earlier, required any club or group to produce a list of members on request. Effectively, it made secret societies illegal.

A name jumped out at her, then another. “My God,” she said. “I know him. And him.” There were at least half a dozen senior Carabinieri officers here. She turned the page. Listed under “S” was General Saito, her
generale di divisione
and the man who had assigned her to this case.

Hapadi nodded. “It was General Saito who proposed me. Major Flavigni was my seconder.”

Kat put the list away. “But you don't recognise our victim?”

The pathologist shook his head.

“Are there any other lodges in Venice besides yours?”

“Not that I know of.” He hesitated. “Not official ones.”

“‘Not official ones'? What does that mean?”

“The Anselmi law . . . It was very unpopular with some Freemasons. Sometimes you hear talk of ‘black' lodges – lodges outside of the Grand Orient, the official Masonic federation. Technically, they've no right to call themselves Masons, but they justify it by saying that they hold true to an earlier, more rigorous set of rites. That stuff about having your tongue torn out, for example – that hasn't been part of the official oath for decades.”

“So having that done to him might suggest that our victim was indeed a member of a black lodge?”

“I suppose it might, yes,” he said reluctantly.

“And how would I set about finding such a lodge, if there is one here in Venice?”

Dr Hapadi shook his head. “I don't know anyone who would have dealings with something like that.”

Just for a moment, she thought she saw a flash of fear in
his eyes. “But you might have heard gossip?” she pressed him. “Rumours? Anything would be useful at this stage.”

He seemed to come to a decision. “I don't know whether it's relevant. But there's a man, a wealthy man, who collects Masonic memorabilia. I've heard he can be quite . . . pushy.”

It seemed to Kat a fairly small transgression, but since she suspected Hapadi might have other reasons for mentioning this individual, ones he'd rather not divulge, she said only, “And his name?”

“Tignelli. Count Tignelli.”

Kat raised her eyebrows. “The one who bought La Grazia?”

Count Tignelli was a well-known figure in the Veneto. As the title suggested, his family were old money, the makers of a well-respected brand of
prosecco
. More recently, under his leadership, the once-staid family firm had through a series of daring expansions succeeded in turning itself from a mere wine label into a fashion brand to rival the likes of Armani or Benetton. These days you could buy Tignelli luggage, Tignelli sunglasses or Tignelli cologne; she herself owned a cashmere Tignelli scarf that she brought out every winter. The man behind all this, meanwhile, had gradually moved from the business sections of the newspapers to the front pages, his opinions sought on everything from the latest corruption scandal to the failings of the politicians in Rome – not least because those opinions, and his vociferous calls for reform, were rarely watered down for publication. Not long ago he'd bought the lagoon island of Santa Maria della Grazia from the cash-strapped city council; the sell-off of several islands being, it was rumoured, part of the deal struck over the endless government bailouts for the MOSE project.

“Thank you,” she said, mentally tucking the name away for future reference. There would be little point in going to
speak to Tignelli at this point. Interviewing someone with that kind of influence was hard enough even when you had some evidence. “And if I wanted to know more about Freemasonry in general? Who could I ask?”

“I'll give you the name of our archivist,” Hapadi said reluctantly.

“Captain?” It was Spatz, calling from the morgue.

They went through to the larger room. On Spatz's computer screen were half a dozen images from local newspapers. All showed the same middle-aged man in a variety of expensive-looking suits. She leant forward to read the captions: “Signor Alessandro Cassandre at the inauguration of the new Mestre arts centre . . .” “Alessandro Cassandre, Senior Partner of private bank BCdV, alongside donors to the Save Venice fund . . .” “Alessandro Cassandre hands a cheque for one million euros to the children's home . . .” “Alessandro Cassandre and his wife were among the honoured guests at the gala evening, which was sponsored by BCdV . . .”

“Alessandro Cassandre.” She glanced at Hapadi. “Still sure you don't know him?”

He shook his head. She pulled out the official list of Masons he'd given her and checked. No Cassandre there either.

She typed “BCdV private bank” into Google and clicked on the first result.

Welcome to Banca Cattolica della Veneziana.

Who we are. What we do. Meet the team.

She clicked on “Who we are.”

Banca Cattolica della Veneziana is the fourth oldest bank in Italy, one of only a handful of surviving private
banks. Originally a self-help organisation, lending money in ways compatible with religious principles, it now manages over thirty billion euros on behalf of a range of private clients and institutions.

In 1904 a minority stake in the bank was acquired by l'Istituto per le Opere di Religione, formalising an alliance dating back over two centuries.

“The IOR,” she said aloud. “The Vatican Bank. Our man had some serious connections.”

Clicking on “Meet the team” brought up photographs of the senior partners. Under each one was their name and a short description of their specialisms. Cassandre's was listed as “Wealth management and tax planning”.

She looked across at the corpse, comparing his face with the photograph on the screen. “What do you think?” she asked Bagnasco.

The second lieutenant had barely spoken a word since they'd been in the morgue – trying to make sure there was no repeat of that morning's mishap, Kat suspected. “I'm not certain,” she said hesitantly. “He looks different, somehow. Younger.”

“That's because he's dead. And he was lying in seawater. The skin starts to tighten within a few hours. Like a facelift, only more temporary. It's definitely him, although we'll need a formal identification from his wife.”

“So we go and speak to her now?”

Kat looked at the dead man again. Now that he was cleaned up and lying on his back, the likely cause of death was clear – not the gaping wound in the throat, but a small, neat puncture beside the left nipple. The blade had been perfectly
positioned above the heart. But then, she reflected, Cassandre would have been kneeling, bare-chested, blindfolded by those peculiar goggles. The killer would have been able to take his time, getting the spot exactly right.

Even so, there were no hesitation wounds; no second blow just to make sure, or to vent a killer's anger. This was a cold, precise death, inflicted by an expert.

So: a professional killer. A dead Freemason who was not a member of the official local lodge, left on display at Venice's most crowded beach. And now a Catholic bank . . . Already this case had all the hallmarks of one of those crimes that were never solved, the ones people talked about for years with shrugs and knowing looks; just one more instance of the spider's web of corruption and influence that still, after so many scandals and clean-ups, plagued her country.

And for some reason, she – the least experienced investigator in the Carabinieri – had been assigned to it, along with this joke of an assistant. For the first time she wondered if that could have been deliberate.

“No,” she said. “We go to the prosecutor and apply for a warrant.”

HOLLY SPENT THE
rest of the day on the internet, reminding herself about the strange episode in Italy's history codenamed Operation Gladio. Although she'd only been a child when it had first come to the public's attention, the main facts of the story were already familiar to her.

In 1990, pre-empting the efforts of a determined prosecutor, the Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, had made a statement to parliament revealing the existence of a secret army of Italian civilians, recruited, trained and equipped by NATO, which had been intended to act as a paramilitary resistance in the event of a communist invasion; or, for that matter, a communist victory at the ballot box. It seemed extraordinary now, but she knew that in the paranoia of the Cold War, when the Italian communist party routinely polled more than thirty-five per cent of the vote, such a scenario had been considered quite possible.

The outrage that greeted Andreotti's revelation had been compounded when it subsequently emerged that some of the “gladiators” – whose name derived from the “
gladio
”, or short sword, carried by Roman centurions for close-quarter combat – were very far from being the disciplined army-in-waiting the prime minister had described. Instead, they had used their training, and their NATO-supplied explosives, to intervene violently in Italian politics, part of a coordinated
“strategy of tension” that they hoped would lead to the public demanding tighter security measures from the government. Over the years, many atrocities of the turbulent seventies and eighties – the so-called
anni di piombo
, or “Years of Lead” – had been shown to be the work of gladiators; although even today, forty years later, actual convictions were still rare.

From what she could glean from his memorandum, it seemed her father's role in all this had only been incidental. Most of the gladiators' practical training, he wrote, had taken place at Capo Marrargiu, a remote corner of Sardinia, with NATO personnel at Camp Darby only contributing theoretical knowledge in such matters as secure communications and tactics. Even so, she thought she could discern, behind the bland, official tone of his report, a sense of unease at what he'd been ordered to take part in.

It was not for those of us at Camp Darby to question how the network was being disbanded, any more than it had been our place to express opinions about arming those whose ideology might be fervently anti-communist but whose practices, professionalism and sense of honour were sometimes demonstrably at odds with that of the US Army.

If she was to find any direct evidence linking the memorandum to his stroke, she realised, she wouldn't do so from her parents' house in Florida, five thousand miles away.

Despite what had happened to her when she was last in Italy, it was time to go back to the country she still thought of as home. She logged into the Delta Airlines page and booked herself a flight.

That done, she noticed a story in her newsfeed: “Carnivia Creator Steps Back”. Reading the article prompted mixed feelings in her. She was one of the few people who could claim to know Daniele Barbo well, having had a brief affair with him that she'd only ended after her ordeal in the underground cave complex at Longare. She doubted they'd ever resume that relationship now. She found him fascinating, but he was both too difficult and too vulnerable for someone who was still damaged herself. And whilst like everyone else she marvelled at the obsessiveness that had enabled him to create an exact 3D digital replica of Venice, she'd always found Carnivia itself somewhat creepy. She knew her Venetian friend, Kat Tapo, disagreed, considering that Daniele's much-vaunted encryption technology was simply the modern-day equivalent of the masks her ancestors had worn to gamble, gossip, or conduct liaisons. But Holly was made of more puritan stock.

She was curious, though, as to what had prompted Daniele's announcement. She clicked on a few links and found no shortage of speculation. Many were calling it the most spectacular abdication since Dong Nyugen had taken his game Flappy Bird offline after receiving hostile comments about the gameplay, even though at the time it was the most popular game in the world. The general consensus was that Barbo must have suffered some kind of breakdown.

The suggestion that he had genuinely become interested in wedding seating plans was, of course, dismissed by most as a rather strange joke.

Holly knew better: Daniele didn't do jokes. She kept digging. Eventually she came across a post written by a young mathematics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, headed:

Holy c**p – Daniele Barbo thinks he can solve P=NP

P=NP, the professor explained, was one of the most important mathematical problems of the computer age, as well as one of the six remaining unsolved Millennium Prize problems. Put simply, it asked whether there was an algorithm that would allow a computer to find answers to complex mathematical problems as quickly as it could check them.

Aware that even a simple statement like that might go over the heads of some of his readers, he gave a real-world example.

Suppose you want to go to Disney World, and you know there are long queues for the most popular rides. So you try to work out a route that will cut your waiting time to a minimum. There are 21 attractions on the One-Day Touring Plan – that's 51,090,942,171,709,440,000 possible itineraries, six times as many as the estimated number of grains of sand in the world.

But here's the thing. If you generate two itineraries, and you know the estimated wait at each ride, you can very quickly see which one is better. In other words, the solution is easy to check. Why can't we devise a computer program that can work out the best itinerary just as easily? At the moment we can only generate solutions one by one and then compare them – what's sometimes called a “brute force” program, a fancy name for trial-and-error. When the number of possible solutions is as big as 21 factorial, as it is in the Magic Kingdom example above, that would take longer than a human lifetime, even for a computer.

A seating plan is just another version of the same problem. Let's say you have fifty couples coming to your wedding, and each table seats ten people. How do you break those couples up so everyone's sitting next to someone who isn't their partner? And – let's complicate it – how do you simultaneously make sure that every couple from the groom's side sits on a table with at least one couple from the bride's side? Then let's say the groom has invited all fifteen members of his rugby team, who tend to get drunk and sing rude songs if they're placed on the same tables . . . People usually figure out an acceptable solution to these kinds of problems, because it's pretty easy to see when you've got it right. But why isn't it possible to write an algorithm that will do it for you?

An algorithm isn't magic – it's just a set of instructions for carrying out a calculation. You used an algorithm every time you did long multiplication at school. But in the examples above, no one has ever found an algorithm that would allow a computer to generate an answer in what mathematicians call polynomial time, or P – that is, an amount of time that isn't ridiculously long.

The point is, if such an algorithm did exist, it would revolutionise the kinds of tasks we ask computers to carry out. We could use machines to solve every remaining mystery of our existence, from why a wave breaks where it does to how a jet vapour trail over New York affects the chances of rain in London. It
would mean that computers could scan every detail of our personalities and find the one person in the world most likely to be our soulmate. It would mean that instead of needing an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters to come up with the works of Shakespeare, a computer could generate plays that were Shakespearean in every respect other than the actual authorship. It would even mean, in theory, that Amazon could write books specially for you, based on your favourite passages and characters in other authors' works. Or, on a more altruistic level, it would mean that if you had fifty kidney donors and fifty people on dialysis, you could find the most efficient match between them in seconds.

And it would mean – perhaps ironically – that encrypted websites like Carnivia or PayPal would be in real trouble, since hackers would quickly be able to generate the private keys on which such sites depend.

Many people, it has to be said, think that a world in which P equals NP would be a more sterile, less interesting place; one where creative leaps, intuition and instinct have almost no role. For that very reason, many also believe that P can never equal NP – that we've effectively reached the limits of what mathematics, and therefore computers, can do for us.

Daniele Barbo isn't a well-known figure in the mathematical world – he's no Perelman or Yau. But his early work on Kullback–Leibler divergence was startlingly original. Perhaps it will take someone who
thinks more like a computer than a human being to help computers move one step closer to thinking.

Then again, that paper of his was published almost twenty years ago, and he's done nothing of any real note since. It was 357 years before Andrew Wiles found a proof for Fermat's Last Theorem, and over a hundred before Perelman solved the Poincaré Conjecture. The P=NP problem was only formulated in 1971 – just articulating it earned Steve Cook a Fields Medal. I wouldn't be placing any bets on Daniele Barbo claiming that Millennium Prize just yet.

There were fourteen comments, all agreeing with the writer. Holly was tempted to add one as well, before deciding to keep her thoughts to herself. The MIT professor might know about mathematics, but he didn't know Daniele Barbo.