The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy) (34 page)

They’re blaming me
, she thought.

But, with a sudden shock, she realised they were right. Not only had Flavio bent his security protocols for her; their texts and conversations had been full of arrangements and locations.

Will you come back to Venice now?

I think so. The local Polizia can follow up the remaining leads.

And, even worse:

I’ll have the food on the table at ten past twelve, and not a minute later.

Then I’d better not be late, had I?

And finally, as his car turned into her street:
With you in two
.

I helped them kill him
, she thought.
I was as much a part of it as the people who planted that bomb.

“It seems unfortunate,” Marcello was saying, “that a man known to be at risk of assassination by ruthless organised criminals could allow himself to become so careless.” He let his eyes travel over her body. “But perhaps not inexplicable. A man grows tired of such constraints. Of being alone, perhaps. He allows himself to get caught up in unwise, even reckless, situations.”

Guilt turned to anger as she realised what else he was trying to do. “Wait a minute. ‘Criminals’? Are you trying to say he was killed by the Mafia?”

He looked surprised. “Of course. They’d been pursuing him for years. That was why he had bodyguards in the first place.” He looked at her questioningly. “Unless you have other evidence you wish the inquest to consider?”

This goes right to the heart of power, Kat. There are some very important people who had good reason to make sure Tignelli didn’t succeed.

And before that, when she’d called him from Sicily:

I’m not saying your friend is right and it’s all part of some massive fifty-year conspiracy. But it does seem like there are plenty of people who think they can just close ranks and refuse to talk to us.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“According to the established procedures, I am therefore transferring the investigation into Avvocato Li Fonti’s death to the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia,” he continued. “A prosecutor with appropriate security measures in place will now take over.”

“What about the investigation Flavio was working on when he died?”

“That will also be transferred to another prosecutor. But it seems in any case the trail has run cold. If there ever
was
a terror plot, it appears to have been averted. The excellent work you yourself did in Sicily, I understand, points to the conclusion that the suspect has left Italy by sea, no doubt hoping to evade the stricter border controls at the airports. The relevant international authorities have been alerted. But it is no longer Italy’s problem.”

This is how it works
, she thought.
If you kill enough people, eventually those who are left get the message.

Everything was being wrapped up and placed neatly into files. And there it would stay, alongside all the other unclosed files that detailed her country’s dark, hidden history.

Aloud she said, “He was never too scared to investigate.”

He nodded. “Of course. He was a brave and determined prosecutor who will be sorely missed by all those who worked with him.”

“Unlike you, I mean,” she said pleasantly. “You’re terrified, aren’t you? Underneath that fine suit you’re just a squirming, sweating ball of fear.” She stood up. “You know what Flavio said to me not long before he died, Avvocato? He said, ‘The law is all we have.’ But until people like you grow a pair of balls, we don’t even have that.”

T
HEY
SAT
IN
the music room at Ca’ Barbo. Kat, Daniele, Holly. Each of them, for different reasons, utterly defeated.

Holly recalled previous times when everything had seemed lost: how it was always Kat, with her energy and good-natured bossiness, who had pulled them out of despondency and assigned them tasks. But now she seemed quite broken.

It’s up to me now
, Holly thought.

She turned to Daniele. “Daniele, could I borrow a whiteboard?”

He waved his hand at the boards covered with mathematical formulae that lined the walls. “Be my guest.”

“I’m going to write down what we know,” she said as she wiped the boards clean. “One of us may spot something the others have missed. We’ll use red for Carnivia, blue for my father, and green for the terror plot. OK?”

It might have been her imagination, but she thought she heard a faint sigh escape Kat’s lips.

“I’ll go first,” she said, scribbling. “I believe my father was silenced by corrupt Freemasons who had previously been part of NATO’s Gladio network. According to Ian Gilroy, he’d asked my father to find out more. But according to Staff Sergeant Kassapian, my father ended up making copies of the US’s own secret cables to and from Washington. Why, I don’t yet know. And I can’t read them until the floppy-disk drive we’ve bought off eBay gets here. Kat?”

Reluctantly, Kat took the green pen and stood up. “I started out investigating the murder of a banker who’d betrayed his fellow Masons’ plans for an independent Veneto. The Masons’ Grand Master, Count Tignelli, was financing a terror attack by a jihadist hacker, but that seems to have been averted.”

“Wait a minute,” Daniele said, looking up. “Did you say a jihadist hacker?”

She nodded. “That’s right. He was enrolled at a technical college in Palermo. Why, I have no idea, as his skills were clearly far in advance of the other students’. In any case, he seems to have slipped out of the country—”

“He’s the one who’s created the virus in Carnivia,” Daniele interrupted. “He must be. And it’s not true that the attack’s been averted. In just over twenty-four hours’ time, he intends to launch a coordinated attack on the Internet of Things, using a botnet of Carnivia users. It’ll be like a hundred thousand Fréjuses all happening at once.”

“Hang on,” Kat said, trying to get her head round all this. “I know there’s speculation that what happened at Fréjus might have been a hacker, but what’s this about a botnet?”

Daniele explained about the worm inside Carnivia, and the zero-hour that would be triggered at midnight the next day.

“Can you prevent it?” Kat said when he’d finished.

“I specifically designed Carnivia so that kind of intervention is impossible. The only way would be to create a virus of my own, and wipe Carnivia.”

“To temporarily shut it down, you mean?”

Daniele shook his head. “That wouldn’t be enough to disrupt the instructions the hacker has sent to each user’s computer. I need to write a piece of code that will wipe everything – my servers, our users’ identities, their own computers, the lot.” He smiled ruefully. “Websites that deliberately fry four million people’s hard drives aren’t too popular. There’ll be no coming back from that.”

“But you’ll do it?” Kat asked. “You’ll stop the attack?”

“Yes,” Daniele said. “It’s my site. My responsibility. Besides, I’ve been looking for a way to extricate myself from running it. Might as well go out with a bang.”

Holly wondered at the apparent lack of emotion with which Daniele spoke. She knew his relationship with his website was a complex one, but she guessed that, whatever he said, destroying the world he’d created would be no easy matter for him.

“And then Flavio died,” Kat said, turning back to her board. “I’ve got no absolute proof that it’s linked to the Tignelli investigation. But the last time we spoke, he said he’d found something – something significant. I think he must have tied Tignelli’s death back to a person or group, in Rome perhaps, with a vested interest in blocking Venetian independence.”

“Any idea who?” Holly asked.

Kat shook her head. “But I think that was why they killed him that night. Whatever it was he’d worked out, they didn’t want him repeating it to me.” Something else occurred to her. “Though the time
before
that, when I was in Sicily, he said something about you. How perhaps you weren’t as crazy as you seemed.”

“What could he have meant by that?”

Kat shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Could he have come across a connection between the two cases?”

“Well, I can hardly ask him now, can I?” Kat snapped. There was a long silence. “Sorry,” she muttered.

“No, I’m sorry,” Holly said with feeling. “This is a shit time for you.”

“For all of us,” Kat corrected. “You and your father. Daniele and Carnivia… It’s all shit. So what do we do now?”

“I think we have to go right back to the beginning,” Holly said. “In Daniele’s case, that means his kidnap. For me, why my father was so interested in those Autodin transcripts. And for you, perhaps, establishing who was powerful enough to kill not only Tignelli but Flavio too, and what it was he found out before he died.”

“
I
NEED
MORE
ECT,” Daniele told Father Uriel. “A higher current, a longer seizure – whatever it takes to shake my memories loose.”

Father Uriel regarded him over folded arms. “No,” he said quietly.

“If you don’t…”

“I don’t care what threats you make, Daniele. You wanted ECT, and we’ve tried it. We won’t be doing it again.” He paused. “However, that’s not to say I’m giving up.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a new therapeutic technique I’ve started using recently with some of my other patients. It’s unproven, but I think you in particular might find it effective.”

“Why me in particular?”

“Because it involves your own website,” Father Uriel said. “Tell me: you built Carnivia – could you build a replica of the room in which you were imprisoned by your kidnappers?”

He built the four hundred and seventeen uprights in the bricks along one wall, the two hundred and four along the other. He built it eight paces by eleven, and then remembered that he had to go back and adjust for the fact that, at seven years old, his strides had been a lot smaller.

It was many years since he’d created Carnivia, but the language in which it was coded was as familiar to him as his mother tongue. Even so, constructing the room took him several hours, building up every tiny detail, pixel by pixel.

When he had finished he showed Father Uriel.

“Good. Now I want you to create an avatar for each of the principal kidnappers.”

That was easier. He made avatars for Claudio, Paolo and Maria. To each of them he gave a mask. It meant he didn’t have to spend time getting their faces right, but he dressed them in the clothes he remembered each one wearing – Paolo’s denims, Claudio’s beret, Maria’s leather jacket.

“And I want you to make an avatar for yourself, as you were at the time you were kidnapped,” Father Uriel said.

Daniele made himself very small, and placed himself in the room.

He was more used than most to living his life through the medium of a screen. But even he was surprised at how quickly the real world seemed to melt away as he manipulated the avatar. With a part of his brain he was back there again, a kidnapped child. “You say you’ve done this before?” he asked.

“A little,” Father Uriel said. “It was after I first started working with you, in fact, that I began to wonder about the possibility of using virtual worlds in psychotherapy. I soon discovered I wasn’t the only one exploring that area – there are psychiatrists treating victims of sexual abuse, for example, using avatars to help them re-enact what happened in a non-threatening environment. I simply flipped that process on its head. So I might get sex offenders to re-enact their assaults, while simultaneously asking them how they could have done things differently. Because they’re in a more controllable version of the world, they don’t feel the same pressure they would if it were real.”

Daniele frowned. “You think that could be why I built Carnivia? Because I needed a more controllable version of the world?”

“It’s crossed my mind. If you think about it, it’s a remarkable feat of dissociation. Some people use alcohol or medication to block out trauma. You just went ahead and rebuilt the universe the way you wanted it to be.”

When Daniele was ready, Father Uriel put him into a light trance. After a few minutes he felt himself drifting into the same state of mental focus and physical lethargy he’d experienced in previous sessions.

“It’s the final week of your kidnap,” Father Uriel’s voice said from a long way away. “You’ve been here a long time now – thirty-three days. What’s going on?”

“They’re arguing.” Daniele indicated the avatars. “Always arguing. And they’re scared. We’re all scared.”

“What are you scared of, Daniele?”

“Of them killing me.”

“Why will they kill you?”

“Because my mummy and daddy still haven’t paid the ransom.”

“Why haven’t they?”

“Because they don’t love me,” he whispered. “Because I’m strange.”

“Who says so?”

“Paolo.”

“Are you scared of Paolo?”

Daniele nodded, his eyes wide.

“I want you to be Paolo now, Daniele. Control his avatar for me. Make him say the things he says to you.”

As Daniele slipped into the persona of his kidnapper, Father Uriel saw how he became stronger and more assertive. When he took him back into Daniele’s childhood avatar again, his hands no longer shook.

He made Daniele role-play each kidnapper in turn, then moved on a day.

“What day is it today, Daniele?”

“Day thirty-four.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m scared but I’m excited.”

“Why are you excited?”

“Because these are the best numbers. Thirty-four is a Fibonacci number and a semiprime and a heptagon. If you make a four-by-four magic square, the numbers always add up to thirty-four.”

Uriel raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know that.”

“Maria showed me. Maria isn’t her real name, but I’m not allowed to know what her real name is. It’s like she’s wearing a mask.” He paused. “That’s cool, isn’t it? For people never to know who you really are.”

“Indeed.” Father Uriel mentally tucked Daniele’s comment away for future discussion. “It sounds as though you quite like Maria.”