The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy)

by Jonathan Holt

  Tareq bowed his head. “I understand.”

  Two weeks later they left from a fishing village near Misrata, the smugglers rowing their passengers out in small groups to escape detection. When Tareq saw the ship that was to transport them across the sea he gasped. It was tiny – no more than twenty feet long. A fishing boat. Already the deck was crowded with people.

  By the time they sailed, there were so many people crushed onto the deck that he and Faizah had to hold hands to prevent themselves from being separated. Already, some of the passengers were being sick as the vessel rocked in the swell.

  The plan was to land at Lampedusa, the most southerly of Italy’s islands, and claim asylum. So many people did this, his father had told him, that a military base on Lampedusa had been converted into a holding camp, where they would stay for a few weeks before being taken to the mainland. “It will be like a holiday,” he said. “A holiday by the sea.”

  What his father didn’t know, however, was that in the previous few weeks the political climate had changed. The West, having declared war on terror, had decided to make peace with strong Arab leaders like Gaddafi who they believed could act as a bulwark against the threat of radical Islam. President Mubarak in Egypt, President Assad in Syria and King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia were just some of the dictators now being favoured with aid and trade deals instead of sanctions and accusatory speeches in the UN.

  In Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi seized the opportunity to forge closer links with Libya. Libya had vast reserves of oil, not least because for decades it hadn’t been able to sell them to the West. Now pipelines could be laid across the Mediterranean directly to Italy. To smooth that deal, Berlusconi agreed to take care of some minor nuisances that were irritating the Libyan leader. Principal amongst these, it turned out, was the steady drip of Libyans claiming asylum in Italy, whose criticisms of Gaddafi’s human rights record were still deterring some – though by no means all – Western firms from investing in his country.

  Since Berlusconi didn’t want Libyans coming to his country any more than Gaddafi wanted them leaving his, the conversation was a short one. Then the two leaders got on to more important matters. It was Gaddafi, after all, who introduced Berlusconi to the phrase “bunga bunga”.

  When the wet and exhausted refugees finally reached Lampedusa, they were met by armed soldiers. All of them, Tareq’s father included, spoke the words that should have entitled them to asylum. But the soldiers simply separated them into two groups, one of Libyans and one of other nationalities. The Libyans were bussed to the military port, where a ship was waiting. A few men in the group tried to make a run for it. They were soon brought down by Italian soldiers using their rifle butts.

  When the ship reached Tripoli, the refugees were kept on board for several days while the Libyan police interrogated them. Every so often, the police came and took away small groups of people.

  “Whatever happens, we must stay together,” Tareq’s father told his family. But to Tareq he said quietly, when Faizah and Zafeera weren’t listening, “If anything happens to me, remember you are the man of the family now. Protect your mother and your sister.”

  His father was one of the last to be questioned. Almost immediately, he was taken away. Then the policemen came for the rest of the family. They drove them to a police station not far from the docks. “Perhaps they’re going to put us with Father,” Faizah whispered to Tareq. He nodded, trying to look hopeful, but inwardly he knew it was unlikely. “Keep your hair covered at all times,” he told her.

  The policemen took them to a room where the walls were stained with brown smears and the fluorescent light tubes overhead were in metal cages. There were two men in leather jackets waiting for them, as well as two uniformed policemen. One of the men in plain clothes asked Tareq why his father had tried to claim asylum.

  “Because he believed his life was in danger in Libya,” he replied, trying to sound calmer than he felt.

  “Why? Do we look dangerous to you?” the man demanded, smiling.

  Tareq knew it was a trick question, one with no right answer. But he also knew that whatever these people were going to do to him, they had probably already decided on it. “No?” he said tentatively.

  The man laughed. Approaching Tareq, he slapped him hard across the face, knocking him to the floor.

  When Tareq could hear again, the man was talking. He was offering him a choice.

  “You father has dishonoured your family. I have decided to punish him by dishonouring one of his women. Because he’s not here, you can decide which one.”

  Tareq’s head swam. He heard his father’s voice. Protect your mother and your sister.

  “I don’t want to choose,” he said. “Please…”

  “Fine. I’ll rape them both.” The man clapped his hands. “Bring them in.”

  “Wait,” Tareq said. He was desperately trying to think. Rape would be a terrible thing for either woman, but in Libya’s deeply conservative culture, it would destroy any chance his sister had of having a life. “My mother,” he said quickly. “If you have to punish one, punish my mother.”

  The door opened and his mother and sister were brought in.

  “Say that again,” the policeman said with a smirk. “You want me to screw your mother, is that right?”

  “Yes,” Tareq mumbled. He couldn’t look at her.

  “And you’re going to screw your sister, you filthy dog.”

  Tareq stared at him, appalled. “I never said that!”

  “I said you could choose which one I raped. I didn’t say the other one would get off.” He glanced at the other men, who were all laughing now. “But if you don’t want to do it, I guess we’ll just have to do your sister too.”

  The memory of what happened in that room would always be with him. He remembered their screams, the laughter of the men, the things they did to all three of them, not just with their bodies but with their guns and truncheons and boots. When at last they were done, the men dragged them to a car and drove them at high speed to a sports stadium. Even though it wasn’t yet dawn, a small crowd was gathering. Policemen were directing people to their seats.

  In the middle of the stadium was a crane. Thirty minutes later, a group of hooded men stumbled out of the changing rooms, barely able to walk. Their hands were bound and they were prodded along by policemen with truncheons. Tareq couldn’t even tell which one was his father until the hoods were taken off.

  They hanged them three at a time, their wrists still bound, their jerking bodies swinging into each other as the crane hoisted them up, their feet kicking at each other’s shins.

  When it was over, a policeman standing near the family turned to them. “Now get out. And tell everyone you meet what happens to those who criticise Gaddafi.”

  But their troubles weren’t over. They were tainted now, and who knew if the regime was still displeased with them? The madrassa wouldn’t give Tareq his place back. His mother couldn’t get a job. They lived off tiny handouts from relatives.

  After a month of staring numbly into space, Tareq woke up. He went to an internet café he knew. The owner was a good businessman, but he had almost no technical understanding. Tareq offered to take care of any IT issues that arose. He would do it at night, he said, when there was no one around to see him.

  The café owner thought, then agreed. He named a wage that was ridiculously low. But at least it was a wage.

  Late at night, when there were no customers, Tareq went online himself. It was a different kind of message board he frequented now. Not just those places in the Deep Web where the most sophisticated hackers lurked, but the even more hidden websites frequented by anti-Gaddafi activists.

  After Gaddafi’s fall, and the commander’s instruction to come up with a plan, Tareq made contact with those hackers again. Some had moved on. But others, he discovered, had made the same journey he had, and were now radicalised. None used their real names, of course, or gave out any details about themselves. But
by pooling information, they were soon operating at a whole new level of technical knowledge.

  The people he consorted with now taught him how to cover his tracks from the world’s security services. Because many had needed to evade Gaddafi’s Western-built internet-surveillance system, they already had a working knowledge of how to escape attention. Accordingly, they knew about PRISM, TEMPORA and other Western surveillance programs long before Edward Snowden leaked details of them to the media.

  The Snowden affair gave them a unique opportunity, however. Suddenly, the rest of the world was waking up to what the NSA and GCHQ were doing. Countries like Italy were seeking out and removing the wiretaps on their fibre-optic cables.

  Tareq reckoned something like the US’s proposed opt-in system, VIGILANCE, was probably inevitable in the end. But in this brief surveillance-free window lay his best chance to strike.

  It was another hacker called Jibran who gave Tareq his big idea. They’d been on a secure message board discussing the Stuxnet worm, the virus engineered by American and Israeli cyberwarfare specialists to undermine Iran’s nuclear programme. In ordinary computers, the worm was almost undetectable. But when it was introduced to a new network, it was programmed to seek out certain centrifuges made by Siemens that were used in the preparation of nuclear material. If it found them, it made them spin at high speed until they broke.

  The hackers got hold of Stuxnet and took it apart line by line, looking for what it might tell them about the NSA’s cyber capabilities. In fact, the technology inside the worm wasn’t particularly new or complex. It was the idea itself that was revolutionary.

  A virus that attacks devices instead of computers, Jibran observed. If you think about it, that’s pretty neat. But they should be careful. Once the rest of the world gets into that game, they’re the ones with most to lose.

  A lightbulb went on in Tareq’s head. He hadn’t forgotten the commander’s instruction. But only now did he have his first inkling of what his plan might be.

  He began researching the Internet of Things.

  By now he was regularly using Carnivia to communicate with his fellow hackers. They had all, at some time or another, tried to hack the website’s source code. None of them had been able to. And if they couldn’t break Carnivia, they reasoned, neither could the authorities.

  It was Jibran, once again, who had come closest. He passed some hacked fragments of Carnivia’s shell code on to Tareq, who marvelled at their beauty. Every line was written with a brilliant economy that resembled nothing so much as poetry.

  Tareq started taking apart every piece of Daniele Barbo’s code he could get his hands on. Mostly he did this because he wanted to learn from it. But he also put his knowledge to use. Just as a bomb-maker can learn from taking apart another bomb-maker’s work, so Tareq was learning how to walk in Daniele’s footsteps.

  He used Carnivian encryption to cloak himself when he turned off the Fréjus Tunnel air turbines. That way, even if the authorities realised it was a deliberate attack rather than a freak accident, it could never be traced back to him, only to Carnivia.

  As he evolved his plan, though, one thing still worried him. His weakness, as he perceived it, was that he and his fellow jihadist hackers were very few in number. If they attacked a dozen or so devices at a time, they could wreak havoc – but it wouldn’t be irreparable. The West would immediately take steps to tighten up security on the millions of other devices he hadn’t got around to.

  The hacker’s ambitions went far beyond mere havoc. He wanted Italy to implode – not just so that Italian voters would demand the removal of the US bases, as the commander had suggested, but because he blamed the country for what had happened to his family. And sometimes, in his wildest dreams, he saw himself achieving even more. He saw the chaos spreading beyond borders, right across the West. If that happened, he might bring about nothing less than an end to the West’s reliance on technology. Once that was achieved, the jihadists and the armies of the West would fight each other on a level playing field. And in that war, he believed, the jihadists would win.

  And so he changed his plan so that it would involve not just a few attacks but thousands, hundreds of thousands even, simultaneously. To do so required more funds – but whatever he asked for, the commander’s invisible backers paid without demur.

  Reaching Sicily, he was waved through Immigration with barely a glance. That didn’t surprise him. Although Interpol had maintained a worldwide database of stolen passports since 2009, he knew that no government had ever consulted it. It was one of the many snippets of information he’d found online and squirrelled away for future reference.

  He rented a room in a quiet suburb of Palermo, well away from the Muslim part of town. Once, Palermo had been the capital of an Arab kingdom. Then, in the twelfth century, the Christians arrived and turned the mosques into churches. But it was said that if you scratched a Sicilian, you still found a Saracen. Perhaps for that reason, there were many thousands of Arab-speaking immigrants there, principally in the poorer parts of the Borgo Vecchio, the old town.

  The day after Tareq arrived, he went to a small, rather shabby building on the outskirts of Palermo. A sign proclaimed that this was Palermo Technical College.

  He told the receptionist he was enrolled in the IT course that was beginning that same morning. He showed his false identity documents and thirty minutes later found himself in an airless classroom with fourteen other young men. The teacher, also a Muslim, was drawing a network diagram on the blackboard. As it happened, he made several errors, but the hacker kept his mouth shut and assumed an expression of dutiful interest.

  He intended to be the second-best student the course had ever had: not so brilliant as to arouse suspicion, but so far above the standard of the other students that the teacher would give him an impeccable reference.

  He kept his other activities for the night time.

  25

  THEY MET IN a small village up in the hills north of Verona, where the wild asparagus grew. A few elderly men were playing bocce in the shade of a plane tree. A ginger cat sunned itself sleepily on one of the metal tables outside the little café-cum-bar. Otherwise, the place was deserted.

  Ian Gilroy always chose to meet somewhere he could see her face, Holly had noticed. Not for him a muttered conversation sitting side by side on a park bench, or strolling through a crowd. He’d once told her that, in his experience, assets lied to their handlers at least half the time. The handler’s job was to work out which half, and why. That knowledge was often far more useful than whatever raw intelligence they thought they were bringing you.

  She wondered if he ever thought of her as an asset, and if so, whether he ever assumed she lied to him.

  “So, Holly. How was your trip?” he asked, when the bar owner had brought out their espressos.

  “Eventful.” She told him about the watchers, the paramilitary training, and the attempt to push her off the cliff. “But as for Capo Marrargiu, there’s nothing there any more. Just the remains of some fires and a whole lot of broken glass.”

  He nodded. “I thought that might be the case. As for your tail… it’s possible that was unconnected. After all, you spotted the master sergeants at the airport. If they spotted you in return, they may well have alerted someone to your presence. Say, for example, a wealthy oligarch had hired them to give his staff some freelance small-arms training. Not strictly legal, granted, but hardly a cause for alarm.”

  “Or maybe your own questions stirred something up, just as you said they might,” she reminded him.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I spoke to some old contacts, as I promised, and your father’s report was passed up the line, it seems. But no action was ever taken. Once the Gladio network was no longer being run by NATO, it was felt that any activities undertaken by its former members were, strictly speaking, the concern of the Italians, not us. But it seems the report was never actually forwarded to the Italian intelligence services either.”

/>   “We washed our hands of it, in other words?”

  Gilroy shrugged. “It was a mixture of bureaucratic inertia, I’m guessing, and a feeling that this was a stone we didn’t particularly want to turn over. But, Holly, think through the implications. It means your father definitely wasn’t the victim of an attempt to silence him. Only a handful of low-level analysts ever saw what he wrote, and none of them could possibly have a reason to want him dead. Your father was a drinker—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “He started drinking after. When he wasn’t believed.”

  “His blood pressure was off the scale,” he reminded her gently. “You said so yourself – that he had all the risk factors for a stroke. Far more likely than him being the victim of an attempted assassination is that he simply succumbed to his condition.”

  He gave the word “assassination” a dramatic inflection, as if to indicate how far-fetched that notion was.

  “As for what the Freemasons described in your father’s report were doing, I think with the benefit of hindsight that’s also fairly clear,” he continued. “It’s no secret that the gladiators were recruited from amongst fervent anti-communists. After the network was rolled up, a number of neo-fascist groups formed from the remnants. Some of them may even have continued to carry out acts of violence. But by the end of that decade the Italians had cleaned up their act and the terror groups had all but disappeared.”

  “So you’re telling me not to rock the boat?”

  He shook his head. “I’m telling you there’s no boat to rock. Holly, Ted was a good man, and a loving father. Whenever I saw the two of you together, I bitterly regretted not having children of my own, I can tell you. But if he were sitting here today, what do you think he’d advise you to do?”

  She sighed. “He’d tell me to drop it. ‘Pack up and push on.’ That’s what he always said.”

  “Ted was a soldier.”

  She thought for a minute. “Thank you.”