The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy)

by Jonathan Holt

  The commander hadn’t even known that a Patriot battery was connected to the internet.

  “It’s not, in the conventional sense,” the kid had explained. “But the manufacturers built in an uplink so that it periodically sends maintenance data back to head office via satellite. With machines like this, it isn’t even a person the data goes back to – it’s machine talking to machine, via sensors and microcontrollers that communicate between themselves, using simple, low-cost networks.”

  His words meant almost nothing to the commander; he was just vastly relieved to have the Patriots out of action. “Come up with more ideas,” he said.

  The next thing the hacker did wasn’t even hacking. He devised a plan to get the local schoolchildren to mark the regime’s sniper positions on Google Earth using their mobile phones, thus enabling the rebels to target them more effectively. He also came up with a way to improve their mortars’ accuracy using videogame controllers.

  When the regime sent in tanks, the hacker built a simple GPS spoofer to fool the tanks’ satnavs into thinking they were in one part of the city when actually they were in another. It took the tank commanders an hour to realise what was happening, by which time their advance was in chaos.

  After the regime fell, many of the rebels formed Libya’s new administration. Others went into the army, or returned to their farms and villages. Some, though, went on to fight a different sort of war.

  The commander was among the latter. He wasn’t sure if he really believed in jihad, or if it was simply that, somewhere amongst the bombed-out ruins of Misrata and Sirte, he had found his vocation. He knew how to fight; but more importantly, he knew how to lead. Men trusted him.

  He sought out the hacker and asked him what he planned to do next.

  The hacker shrugged. He didn’t know.

  By now the older man knew something of what motivated the boy. “The tyrant who killed your father is dead,” he told him. “But the people who kept him in power for so long are still alive. We make jihad to glorify Allah. But we also fight to destroy the power of the West, so that Arab countries can at last be free from their interference.”

  “How can I help?” the hacker said.

  “I don’t know. Go away and think of a plan. But make it a big one. When the twin towers of New York fell, al-hamdulillah, it inspired a movement. But ever since, we have been biting them like fleas, when what we need is to roar at them like lions.”

  “Give me a target.”

  The commander had glanced at him, as if trying to decide how much to tell him. Then he pulled out a map of the Mediterranean.

  “A decade ago,” he said, “America had more bases in Germany than in Italy. Soon, it’ll be the other way round. Do you know why?”

  The hacker shook his head.

  “Because of us,” the commander said. His finger traced Italy’s coastline, where it jutted deep into the Mediterranean. “If they control the Italian peninsula, they control North Africa.” He pointed at Sigonella, on the west coast of Sicily. “This is where their new Alliance Ground Surveillance system will be based. Two billion dollars’ worth of high-altitude drones, capable of flying for days at a time, spying on the whole of Africa. They intend to expand it so that it eventually covers all of the Middle East as well.”

  “We want to attack the bases?”

  The commander shook his head. “We want to remove the bases. If we attack them, the Americans will simply make them stronger. But the bases have a weakness.”

  “What?”

  “They are actually owned by Italy.”

  He waited to see if the hacker understood the implications of this. The younger man was nodding thoughtfully.

  “In other words,” he continued, “if Italy were to demand the removal of the bases, then legally they would have to go. There would be no American drones spying on us any more. This would be a major breakthrough for our fighters on the ground.”

  “And Italy would insist on the bases going,” the hacker said, “if the price of being America’s ally was too high. If something happened – something as great as the Twin Towers, but on Italian soil.”

  The commander nodded. “Exactly. I am in contact with a group of our brothers in Italy. They have raised funds for such an attack. All that is needed is for someone to come up with the right plan.”

  The commander heard nothing for over a year. Then he received a request for money, so the hacker could travel abroad for some specialist training. He paid it immediately with funds from his backers.

  Six months after that, the hacker finally sent word that he had a plan. This evening was meant to be the night he explained it, by way – he had said – of a demonstration. But so far, all he had done was turn off some turbines in a road tunnel. The commander had hoped for something better.

  The hacker looked at the clock on the computer’s taskbar. Ten minutes had gone by. “Not long now,” he said quietly.

  On the screen, an articulated truck was thundering down the tunnel’s right-hand lane. Half a dozen cars followed in its slipstream, impatient to get back on the dual carriageway. As they watched, a car coming in the opposite direction veered sharply across both lanes and drove straight into the front of the truck. The truck jammed on its airbrakes, jack-knifing. Its cab scraped along the right-hand wall, trailing sparks, while its rear wheels swung outwards, towards the other lane. Just ahead was one of the emergency lay-bys – which, with its sharp concrete corner, brought the cab abruptly to a halt. The vehicle’s momentum caused the back end of the trailer to continue, skidding around the mangled cab’s axis, until it struck the tunnel’s opposite wall, crunching under the impact. A minibus coming the other way tried to brake but only succeeded in broadsiding it, while the cars directly behind the truck had no chance at all. The screen flared white as vehicles on both sides of the crash exploded. Moments later, the whole pile-up was engulfed in flame.

  “There are sprinklers? Alarms?” the commander asked.

  “There were,” the hacker said. “I turned those off too.”

  “And the one who started all this? The driver coming in the opposite direction – a brother seeking martyrdom? You had it all arranged?”

  The hacker shook his head, although his eyes remained fixed on what was unfolding on the screen. “Just a tired businessman seeking sleep. And finding a tunnel full of carbon monoxide instead of fresh air.”

  “You mean…” The commander was trying to get his head round this. “You did this? Just by turning off some switches on the internet?”

  “Exactly.” The hacker still spoke softly, but his voice throbbed with passion. “This is their weakness – their soft underbelly. Imagine a day when all their so-called technology suddenly rises up against them. Not just road tunnels, but air-traffic-control systems, electricity plants, sewers, oil refineries – all malfunctioning at the same moment, and in the most dangerous ways possible. Their computers turning into firebombs, their transportation networks into weapons of destruction. Their financial systems selling and buying at random, paralysing their economy. Their cash machines emptying, their plastic cards no longer working in their shopping malls and supermarkets. Their hospitals, their food-supply chains, all breaking down at once. And at the centre of it all, while they are preoccupied with everything else that is going on, a spectacular gesture of destruction, unmatched by anything since 9/11. It will be focused on Italy, just as you requested. But its effect will be felt far beyond Italy’s borders.” He gestured at the screen. “On that day, Insha’Allah, even a few burning cars will pale into insignificance.”

  “This is possible?” The commander’s voice was equally quiet. Allah, what have I done? he was thinking. What have I unleashed?

  The hacker nodded. “There are many details still to be arranged. And it will be expensive. But the capability, the framework – that is all in place.”

  The commander turned to the cleric, who hadn’t spoken since the pile-up had started. His eyes, too, were glued to the monitor. At t
he rear, behind the main collision, other cars were still screeching to a halt, the drivers struggling from their crumpled vehicles only to flail around, clutching at their throats, their mouths gaping in unheard screams.

  “The fire has consumed what little oxygen was left,” the hacker said. “The tunnel has become a vacuum.” At the back, fire engines were approaching, their flashing lights blossoming and fading on the monitor. There was no way for them to reach the centre of the conflagration: too many cars were already involved. A moment later, the camera failed too. The screen went blank.

  The cleric turned to face the other two men. His eyes shone with excitement.

  “Allah be praised,” he said. “What do you need?”

  19

  DANIELE BARBO WALKED along the Fondamenta Záttere, deep in thought. Across the Canale della Giudecca, the lights of San Giorgio Maggiore twinkled in the distance.

  It was only in the small hours that he wandered like this, when Venice’s narrow calli were deserted. Although the day had been scorching, a night breeze coming in off the lagoon had cooled the stones of the buildings, and the temperature was now almost comfortable.

  Not that he noticed the temperature. He was thinking about the nature of beauty.

  When James Watson and Francis Crick set out to unravel the structure of DNA, they were convinced that they would know it when they saw it because anything so important must surely be beautiful. And when they first blocked out the famous double-helix pattern, they realised immediately what it was.

  To Daniele’s mind, there was a similar beauty in perhaps half a dozen mathematical formulae, from the fundamental theorem of calculus to Newton’s constant of gravity. Yet the irony was that one could not arrive at such truths by deduction, only by intuition. Einstein formulated E=MC² long before he was able to prove it. Newton glimpsed gravity in the path of a falling apple before he worked out the mathematics it embodied. You couldn’t hope to calculate the algorithm that would prove P=NP; you could only hope to recognise it when it arrived.

  It would be simple, and it would be beautiful. That was all he knew.

  Half-closing his eyes, he tried to make himself see the world around him as if it were nothing but numbers. The movement of the waves against the sea wall – that was determined by the Navier–Stokes equations of fluid dynamics. The relationship between the moon and the tides – that was so mysterious, even Newton had failed to understand it fully. And the architecture of the church on his left, Spirito Santo, was all Euclidean geometry, the Gothic arches and rose-windows deliberately fashioned to express a beauty which, its builders believed, echoed the perfect mathematics of God. Its proportions were based on the Golden Section, the mathematical ratio found in everything from pine cones to snail shells, from the seed of a sunflower to the swirl of a galaxy.

  He turned the corner of Punta della Dogana, the old Custom House. Ahead of him, the curious octagonal structure of Santa Maria della Salute stood sentinel at the mouth of the Grand Canal, its huge dome resting on the skyline like a massive royal crown, given a rime of silver frost by the moonlight. There were some, he knew, who believed that its design had been inspired by mathematics of a different kind: the numerical mysticism of alchemy and ancient Hermeticism. It was said that alchemy sent Isaac Newton mad, so that he spent his last years filling notebooks with strange speculations about the transmutation of matter. Leonardo da Vinci became obsessed with the ancient conundrum of “squaring the circle” and even Galileo, the arch empiricist, had devoted much of his life to astrology and star charts.

  You’ll know it when you see it, Daniele promised himself. It will be beautiful. But it will be real, too.

  He had emptied his life. Now he must try to empty his mind as well.

  20

  AS THE PLANE banked over Sardinia, Holly saw through the window a long vista of grey, treeless mountains that looked hot even from up here, their rocky slopes plunging almost vertically into the Mediterranean. Below her, where the peaks ended, was a crescent of sand fringed with white hotels. That would be Alghero. A sleepy resort, tucked away in the island’s quietest corner. Even from this height, she could make out the scattering of black dots in the sea where tourists were paddling.

  She picked up Il Giornale from where it lay in her lap. The paper’s front page was dominated by the freak accident in the Fréjus road tunnel. Investigators were still unable to reach the wreckage: cars and trucks had fused into one solid mass, along with a section of tunnel roof that had melted in the heat. At least twenty people were unaccounted for, including twelve schoolchildren returning from a school trip in a minibus. It wasn’t the worst road tunnel disaster in history – the Gotthard crash in 2001 had caused one hundred and thirty-nine casualties, the 1999 Mont Blanc fire killed over forty, and twenty-eight died in the 2012 Sierre tunnel disaster – but it was already shaping up to be one of the most baffling. The Fréjus tunnel had a good safety record, and had been further upgraded after the Mont Blanc fire. There were no reports of any technical failures, although investigators were looking into allegations that the automatic sprinkler system had failed to come on. A spokesman for the tunnel authority said they weren’t ruling out any possibilities, including driver error.

  The row over the taps on the undersea internet cables was petering out, relegated to the middle pages. The United States was now proposing that Italy reinstate them voluntarily, as part of a new information-gathering alliance called VIGILANCE. “VIGILANCE, short for Virtual Intelligence Gathering Alliance, will be the most effective anti-terrorism measure the West has, while taking into account legitimate concerns about privacy and data security,” a White House spokesman was quoted as saying. The Italian government had rejected that suggestion out of hand – which was hardly surprising, Holly thought. Surely no country, having discovered it had been spied on, would choose to submit to exactly the same scrutiny of its own volition.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we will shortly be landing at Alghero,” the stewardess said over the PA, her voice as mechanical as a recording. There followed the usual warnings about not getting out of your seat until the seatbelt sign had been switched off – warnings that, as usual, everyone ignored except for Holly. This too, she reflected, was the product of being an army brat. The instinct to obey authority to the letter had been ingrained in her since childhood.

  She’d read somewhere that army brats had rules where others had principles, which was why, when they did go off the rails, they often did so in spectacular fashion. She’d seen it with some of her own contemporaries. Daddy’s little princesses on base, once away at college they’d become the sluttiest, wildest girls on campus.

  Somehow, she’d gone the other way. Sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t just storing her rebellion up, waiting for a trigger.

  Was this the trigger? Supposing she did find something that proved her father had been deliberately silenced because of what he’d found out about Operation Gladio, what would she do with that knowledge?

  She sighed. Cross that bridge when you come to it, Boland.

  As she filed off the plane, she noticed a group of half a dozen men. They looked familiar – not the individuals, but the type. Burly, well built, with the broad chests and inflated biceps of those who spent too much time working out. They weren’t in uniform, but their buzz haircuts were a dead giveaway. Sure enough, as they walked towards the Arrivals hall, they unconsciously fell into step, their legs hitting a perfect parade-ground stride. You could take the man out of the base, she thought, but you couldn’t take the base out of the man.

  By the time they’d been through baggage reclaim, most of the group were toting golf bags. Master sergeants, she guessed, getting in some seaside R&R.

  She rented a car from Sixt and drove to a climbing shop she’d found on the internet. Everything was pre-booked, but she lingered for a chat with the heavily tattooed and dreadlocked young owner, knowing from experience she’d learn more from him than any guidebook. Sure enough, he spent a good half hour tel
ling her about the island’s best climbing areas. It confirmed what she’d hoped: her destination was well away from the spots usually favoured by recreational climbers.

  From there she drove south along the coast towards the small town of Bosa. The road, she knew, had been built only a decade or so ago; in the seventies and eighties, when the Gladio network used this area as a training ground, it had been accessible only by boat. Even now, it was one of the most spectacular drives she’d ever made. On one side craggy, jagged mountains soared vertically into the shimmering sky; on the other, they fell away into the sparkling sea. Her car felt tiny and insignificant, sandwiched between the immense masses of rock and water. There were no buildings, no farms or crops; no side roads to towns or villages even. A couple of coaches passed her, coming in the opposite direction, but otherwise the road was eerily quiet, her only companions a few mouflons, wild brown sheep with extravagant curly horns, nibbling the scrub on seemingly inaccessible ledges.

  She felt, deep down in her soul, a sharp tug of love for this sea, this sky. Did people back in America feel this way about the landscapes of the US? She imagined they must do. But a part of her was now as deeply Italian as it was possible for someone not actually born here to be.

  Eventually she saw a rusted chain-link fence next to a small turning, and pulled off the road. Even though she’d seen no one, she parked behind a rock, out of sight.

  Getting out, she discovered that it was very still and very hot. The turning was little more than a track, zig-zagging down the side of the mountain towards the sea, two hundred feet below. If there were any guards or surveillance devices, she couldn’t spot them.

  Fifty yards from the track, she hammered an iron peg into the ground, then clipped a rope to it. She’d brought a simple friction hitch to slow her descent, along with climbing shoes and kneepads. Although the US Army insisted on helmets and gloves when abseiling, Holly, like most real mountaineers, disliked them: the gloves because they increased the likelihood of getting your fingers caught in the friction hitch, and the helmet because it impaired upward vision.