The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy)

by Jonathan Holt

  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.”

  6

  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 th
e 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.

  7

  “IF WE WAIT until his wife’s made a formal identification, any useful evidence at his office will almost certainly have been whisked away,” Kat said patiently. “A warrant to search the place now is the only way we can be sure of getting whatever’s there.”

  The prosecutor, Flavio Li Fonti, turned to his number two, a lawyer called Melissa Romano. “I imagine you’ll have something to say about that, Avvocatessa?”

  “Indeed I do,” she said crisply. “As I understand it, Captain, you have no probable cause that any such evidence exists. It would be a fishing expedition, pure and simple.”

  “The man was a banker, and his death is linked to Freemasonry,” Kat argued. “Given his wounds, it’s highly unlikely to be a domestic dispute. Therefore, searching his office sooner rather than later is just a sensible precaution.”

  They were in Flavio Li Fonti’s office in the Cittadella della Giustizia, the Palace of Justice, one of Venice’s few strikingly modern buildings. Both prosecutors had already been in court and were wearing the formal black robes and white cravats of their profession. Kat and Bagnasco sat opposite them, on the other side of Li Fonti’s desk.

  “There’s no suggestion he was killed at his workplace. It would be more logical to search the nearest Freemason’s lodge,” Li Fonti said, crossing his legs.

  “He’s not listed as a member of the official Venetian lodge.”

  “Which makes the link to Freemasonry even more tenuous,” Melissa Romano interjected. “Your argument defeats itself, Captain.”

  Kat knew from experience that these objections, although couched in a tone that suggested she was wasting her time, actually meant nothing of the kind. Good prosecutors were no pushover, particularly when you were asking for something out of the ordinary. They would test your argument to destruction, and only then make a decision.

  And Flavio Li Fonti was a very good prosecutor. Proof of that could be glimpsed through the open door of his office, where two plain-clothes bodyguards sat in the vestibule, toying with their mobile phones. The long series of trials, lasting over eight years, which had cracked open a major ’Ndrangheta drugs network had been a spectacular success, with convicted mafiosi turning pentito one by one and incriminating others in return for a lighter sentence. But the ’Ndrangheta weren’t the type to forgive and forget. While the pentiti were able to disappear to new lives abroad, the price of Li Fonti’s success was that he now had to be guarded around the clock, never spending more than one night a week in the same place, never travelling by the same route to the courts or his office. It had cost him his marriage, his wife adopting a new identity and fleeing abroad just like the pentiti. It was said that he saw his children no more than half a dozen times each year. He couldn’t have been more than forty, but his face was deeply lined and his brown eyes had a permanent sadness in them.

  “Of course, it might be different if you were arguing that the killer could have contacted him via his office computer,” he said thoughtfully.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Kat said quickly, grateful for the steer. “As a banker, he would have worked long hours, and his personal and professional lives would certainly have overlapped. There could well be information on his computer that could help identify his killer.”

  “Tell me, Captain,” Melissa Romano said. “You appear to have discounted the most logical explanation for a man being killed in such a manner – that he had revealed Masonic secrets connected with their rites, and that his fellow Masons exacted the literal penalty. Why is that?”

  Kat thought. “I suppose I have trouble in taking all that mumbo-jumbo about ancient rites seriously myself, so I’m inclined to doubt that anyone else would care about them enough to murder for them. Besides, there have been Masonic scandals in Italy before, haven’t there? Banco Ambrosiano, P2, Roccella Ionica, Catanzaro… the list goes on and on. And in almost every case it’s turned out to have been about power, corruption and the bribery of public officials. I don’t doubt that Cassandre was killed as a warning to his fellow Masons. But whatever he betrayed, I suspect it was to do with influence and money, not some threadbare ancient ritual.”
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  Li Fonti came to a decision. “Very well. You can have a warrant to seize his computer and phone records. But nothing else. Come back in twenty minutes for the paperwork.”

  As the two carabinieri stood up, Li Fonti addressed Bagnasco directly. “You’re the new sottotenente, I take it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s my first posting in Venice.” She smiled at him, clearly grateful to have been noticed. The handsome prosecutor with the tragic life story was something of a heart-throb amongst the younger female officers.

  “Well, stick close to your captain,” he said, nodding at Kat. “You can learn a lot from her.”

  “I will,” Bagnasco said, although she sounded a little doubtful.

  When they were outside, Kat turned to her. “You recall our nudist saying he’d seen a cruise ship heading north? That means it was coming into Venice, not sailing away. So the chances are it’ll still be moored at the cruise terminal.” Like most Venetians, Kat disliked the way these massive floating skyscrapers were allowed to sail right through the heart of Venice, across the Bacino di San Marco and along the Canale della Giudecca, on their way to the terminal at Tronchetto. Many claimed that their thunderous moto ondoso, the wake from their mighty propellers, was damaging the city’s ancient buildings. Even at her own desk at Campo San Zaccaria, Kat could sometimes feel the vibrations as the behemoths passed by. A campaign to limit their size and number had been rumbling on for years, but the tourist dollars they brought in were simply too important for them to be banned.

  “Every ship over twelve feet that sails in or out of Venice is given an identifier, a LOCODE, by the port’s navigation system,” she continued. “If the other boat our witness saw really was a water taxi, it might have been picked up by the cruise ship’s radar. It’s a long shot, but I want you to ask the captains of all the cruise ships currently moored at the terminal for a copy of their radar logs.”