The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy)

by Jonathan Holt

  “For what?” His blue eyes regarded her fondly.

  “For not letting me turn into some crazy deranged conspiracy theorist.”

  “It’s the least I can do. Not just for an old friend and comrade. For a new friend, too.” He was silent. “What do you propose to do now?”

  She stared at the distant hills. “Report for duty, I guess. That base newsletter doesn’t write itself.”

  “You’ll manage,” he said quietly, and they both knew he wasn’t referring to whatever trivial tasks would be waiting on her desk.

  Holly drove down towards Verona. But her attention was only partly on the road. In her head, she was replaying fragments of the conversation with Ian Gilroy.

  …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…

  …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…

  As she came to the junction with the main road into Verona, she waited patiently for a gap in the traffic.

  …His blood pressure was off the scale – you said so yourself…

  “No, I didn’t,” she said out loud. “I never said anything about that.”

  She thought back. If she hadn’t actually said it, had she perhaps implied it? Had she perhaps mentioned it in some previous conversation? She didn’t think so. But why had Gilroy mentioned it so casually in passing?

  Suddenly, her mental landscape shifted, and what was previously white turned black.

  Could I have been looking at this all wrong?

  The report that had never been passed on to the Italians – was that really just inertia? Or had it been the exact opposite – had someone taken careful steps to ensure that as few people as possible knew of her father’s suspicions?

  Had it been the US, in particular, who didn’t want anyone looking too closely at the Masonic lodge her father had raised the alarm about?

  A horn sounded behind her, then another. When she didn’t respond, the driver pulled out onto the wrong side of the road to pass her, his hand reaching angrily up to his chin to make the brush-off gesture that was a favoured insult in this part of Italy. The next car did the same.

  She sat there, immobile, not caring.

  Could it have been Gilroy?

  26

  IN VENICE, DANIELE Barbo looked up as the silence of Ca’ Barbo was interrupted by a click.

  It was the sound of his TV coming off standby. He glanced at the screen. There, in big white letters, it said:

  TURN ON YOUR COMPUTER, ASSHOLE. I’VE BEEN TRYING TO REACH YOU FOR DAYS.

  Daniele frowned, then smiled as he realised who it was. Going to his computer, he booted it up and logged onto the Carnivia admin board.

  Pretty neat. How did you do that?

  Smart TV. So smart, it sends data on what programmes you watch back to LG headquarters in South Korea, so they can sell it to advertisers. Took me about five minutes to hack the connection. Why the fuck haven’t you been online?

  I decided that maybe being always connected wasn’t helping.

  He didn’t tell Max that he’d also been experimenting with a twenty-five-hour day, going slowly in and out of phase with the solar world, or that the walls of the room in which he was sitting were covered in patches of different colours to help him synaethesise the numbers they represented. There was good research to prove the efficacy of such methods when trying to solve complex mathematical problems, but he doubted Max would be interested.

  Instead he wrote, What’s up? I assume it must be important.

  Something you need to see. A video.

  Daniele clicked on the Mpeg Max had uploaded. He was looking at traffic flowing through a road tunnel. The film was grainy – not just because it was from a security camera, but because it was a copy of a copy. Over the image was some Arabic script, its quality already blurred.

  Abruptly, a car swerved into the path of an oncoming truck. There was no attempt on the driver’s part to brake, or take avoiding action. The truck did try to stop, but only succeeded in jack-knifing into the tunnel wall. Within seconds there was carnage as other vehicles piled into the wreckage.

  Where was this?

  Jesus, you really have been offline, haven’t you? The Fréjus road tunnel. It’s been all over the news.

  What do those titles at the beginning say?

  A jihadist slogan.

  And? Daniele knew Max must have some more specific reason for telling him about this.

  That’s the scary bit. In the video, you can see that the air turbines aren’t going round. So I located them online using Shodan. According to the return path history, they were accessed ten minutes before the crash by someone whose identity was masked by our own encryption software. In other words, it was someone inside Carnivia who did this.

  27

  “MORE TIRAMISU, FLAVIO?”

  “I couldn’t,” Flavio protested. Then, after a theatrical pause, “Oh, go on then. How can I resist? When it’s made properly like this, with savoiardi biscuits, and a little bit of salt…”

  Kat’s mother flushed with pride. “And no Marsala, of course.”

  “And no Marsala,” he agreed. It went without saying that only a barbarian would add a Sicilian fortified wine to a Venetian dish. “But did I detect just a splash of vermouth…?”

  There was a crash from the kitchen. Swiftly, Kat’s sister Clara handed baby Savina over to Kat and rushed off to see what her toddler, Gabriele, had broken now. Kat’s mother tried not to look disapproving. “What a ball of energy that little boy is,” she muttered, glancing in the direction of the kitchen.

  To Kat’s astonishment, lunch with her family had gone rather well. Flavio had talked politics to her father, praised her mother’s cooking to the skies, discussed football with her brother-in-law, flirted with her nonna, and done a magic trick for Gabriele that left the little boy so impressed he had to hide behind a chair. Now Flavio leant over to where Savina sat on Kat’s lap and offered the baby some of his tiramisu. Savina took the spoon in a pudgy fist, sucked it clean, and gave Flavio an adoring smile that made everyone laugh.

  Kat felt the sudden surge of an unfamiliar emotion. Lust for the man, the weight of the child in her lap, the laughter of a family… all combining into something new.

  My God, she thought. I want to have babies with him.

  The thought was so unexpected, and so shocking, that she froze.

  “What’s wrong?” Flavio asked, noticing.

  “Nothing,” she said quickly. “I was just thinking about the case, that’s all.”

  The case. If she had babies, there’d be no more cases. Not like the Cassandre investigation, anyway. You couldn’t run a murder inquiry and pick a child up from nursery the same afternoon. In the last few years she’d lost count of the number of dates she’d let down at the last minute, or family lunches like this one she’d pulled out of.

  But in Amsterdam, perhaps, she wouldn’t be investigating cases like this one anyway. The thought, which she’d been avoiding, suddenly didn’t fill her with quite so much dread.

  How strange, she thought wryly: all those male officers who’d called her an ambitious bitch and a ball-breaker behind her back; all that graffiti on her locker accusing her of trying to sleep her way to the top. For all the obstacles they’d put in her way, those people had never managed to derail her career or put her off doing what she enjoyed. But now love, that most traditionally feminine of traits, was going to do it for them.

  After lunch was over, the two of them walked to Stazione Santa Lucia for the short hop back to Mestre. The train was delayed by protestors from No Grandi Navi, “No Big Boats”, the organisation that demonstrated against giant cruise ships in Venice. About a hundred of them were blocking the bridge to the mainland with fishing nets. Kat snuggled into Flavio, too full and sleepy to mind, closing her eyes and basking in the warmth of the sun streaming through the
carriage window. The rest of the afternoon would be taken up with leisurely lovemaking, followed by a nap, and then perhaps a spritz or two in one of the bars on Piazza Ferretto. There was a time, not so long ago, when Sundays irritated her, because the operations room only ran with a skeleton staff and you had to wait a whole day before things got moving again. But not now. Being with Flavio was changing her.

  When they reached the mainland they strolled hand in hand to her apartment. Another thought struck her: he was the only man she’d ever held hands with in public like this. There’d been plenty of lovers, yes; some incredible sex; but it was this simple gesture – one she’d always dismissed in others as mawkish – that she’d reserved for the man she loved.

  As they reached her apartment she saw a wiry blonde figure sitting on the steps. In her loved-up state it took Kat a moment to realise who it was.

  “Holly!” she said, astonished. “I thought you were still in America.”

  Holly raised her head and saw them. She looked exhausted, Kat thought. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you sooner. Someone wanted my father dead, and now I think I know why.”

  She’d brought a spidergram, drawn in three colours and cross-referenced.

  “The thing is,” she told them, “the CIA always denied any involvement in Operation Gladio. Whenever Ian Gilroy talks about it, he makes it sound as if it was a purely NATO-run operation – one the military worked hard to keep secret from the real spies. But how realistic is it that the CIA had no idea NATO was training a guerrilla army of Italian civilians, right under their noses?”

  Kat glanced at Flavio. He appeared to be listening attentively, even giving the occasional encouraging nod, but she knew that expression from their own meetings at the Palace of Justice. He was simply storing up his objections until Holly had finished, at which point he might very well tear her theories to shreds. Even to Kat’s ears, they sounded far-fetched. And although it was good to see her friend again – the last time she’d seen her had been in the days immediately following her ordeal in the caves – Holly still seemed in a somewhat overwrought mental state. She was talking intensely and very fast, almost gabbling, as she tried to explain.

  “What if NATO thought they were running Gladio – but actually it had been infiltrated by the CIA? In other words, what if there were effectively two networks: one trained by NATO to act as the resistance in the event of a communist invasion, and another, smaller, group inside that network, a cabal of extremists who carried out acts of politically-motivated violence under the CIA’s direction? Then, after Gladio was rolled up, it makes sense that the CIA wouldn’t want to lose their network as well. So they got them to regroup, under the guise of Freemasonry.”

  “Freemasonry?” Kat echoed. She looked across at Flavio to see if he was as intrigued by this coincidence as she was, but he was still wearing the same expression of polite, attentive scepticism.

  “Yes.” Holly explained about the ex-gladiators infiltrating her father’s lodge.

  “But not all the acts of violence you’ve described came from the right,” Flavio objected quietly. “The left carried out just as many atrocities. The kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, to take just one example.”

  Holly was nodding. “Yes, of course. But it’s strange, isn’t it, how it was an operation by the supposedly left-wing Red Brigades which stopped the Compromesso storico in its tracks, and effectively ended any chance the Communist Party had of sharing power.” She looked intently from Flavio to Kat. “Wouldn’t it make more sense if the Red Brigades were actually under the control of the same people who were running Gladio all along?”

  “A false-flag operation, you mean?” Kat said. She caught the look Flavio gave her. Don’t encourage her.

  “We know the Red Brigades were infiltrated by the CIA,” Holly said. “It’s mentioned in my father’s report – and Gilroy confirmed to me that he was the CIA agent in charge of that. But did it stop at infiltration? Could the CIA actually have been influencing the Red Brigades’ choice of targets? A year before the Moro kidnap, the Red Brigades kidnapped someone else.” She pointed to the spidergram. “A seven-year-old boy. They cut off his ears and nose when his parents didn’t pay up.”

  Now even Kat’s mouth dropped open. “You think Gilroy might have been behind Daniele’s kidnap?”

  “I don’t know,” Holly confessed. “But what better way to establish the Red Brigades as terrorist bogeymen? The CIA may even have hoped it would provoke so much revulsion that by association it would discredit the whole of the left wing.”

  “I thought you trusted Gilroy. You always said he was a friend of your father’s,” Kat said, bemused.

  “He was. At least, I thought he was. But, you know, I’ve only got Gilroy’s word for that as well. I mean, I remember him coming round a couple of times when I was a kid, but from what my father wrote in his report, they were more like professional acquaintances than friends. Maybe Gilroy decided to keep me close for a reason. Maybe he’s always been concerned that something like my dad’s report would turn up one day. I keep asking myself why, if Dad really trusted Gilroy, he made that extra copy and hid it away for safekeeping. Did he have reservations about him, even then?”

  “Where are the copies you made?” Flavio asked, cutting across Holly’s speculations.

  “One I gave to Gilroy, and one I emailed to myself from a photocopier at the airport. But when I tried to open it just now, the file was corrupted. I think somehow they must have traced it from the other end and destroyed it.”

  Flavio raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

  “Which is another indication the CIA could be involved,” Holly continued. “Who else would have access to that kind of technology?”

  “But why?” Flavio said patiently. “Why would anybody care about a CIA operation from over thirty years ago – even assuming such an operation actually existed?”

  “Because it’s still going on,” Holly said. “I don’t understand the how or why, but when I went to Sardinia, I saw soldiers training civilians in the use of firearms and explosives. I think in one form or another, Gladio must still be active. I think after they were exposed, they quietly regrouped under the banner of various Masonic lodges, and they’ve been carrying out assassinations and corrupting people ever since.”

  “And no one knows about it?” Flavio said sceptically. “A massive, organised attempt by a foreign power to control Italian politics through violence, dating back over twenty-five years, linked to one of the biggest scandals in Italian political history, and nobody knows?”

  “Cassandre was researching that period on his computer,” Kat pointed out. “Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

  Flavio made a small sound, an involuntary pfff of disbelief.

  Kat fixed him with a look, willing him to understand. This matters to Holly. And if it matters to Holly, it matters to me.

  “All right then,” Flavio said with a sigh. “A conspiracy stretching back to the 1990s and beyond. The dietrologia to end all dietrologie. Assuming there could be a grain of truth in it, what are you going to do next?”

  “I’m going to see what I can dig up on Gilroy’s time in the CIA,” Holly said. “I’ll start with what happened to Daniele. One of the Red Brigades gang that kidnapped him is still in prison. She may talk to me. If not, I’ll find someone else. And then, when I’ve got some evidence, I’m going to bring it to you, so that you can open a formal investigation into the attempt to kill my father.”

  28

  “LA MESSA È finita: andate in pace,” the priest intoned.

  “Rendiamo grazie a Dio,” the congregation murmured in response. As the choir’s voices soared into the “Panis angelicus”, Ian Gilroy bowed his head. He rarely knelt these days. His knees were getting too fragile for that. But he genuflected in unison with those on either side of him as the priests and choir filed out.

  Unlike the other worshippers, though, he remained seated as the basilica emptied. These moments after Sunday Mass,
when St Mark’s was closed to tourists, were one of the few times when the great building was almost peaceful. He looked up, drinking in the Romanesque beauty of the great arches. Above his head, gilded mosaics lined the interiors of the five great cupolas, more Islamic than Roman, that surmounted the roof. The Arabic influences were no coincidence: the Venetians had always been acutely conscious of their city’s strategic importance as a bridge between East and West.

  A few minutes after the congregation had departed, he saw the man he was waiting for.

  “Monsignor,” he murmured.

  “I hope I haven’t inconvenienced you.” Father Calergi sat down next to him.

  “Not at all. You have some news from our Masonic friends?”

  Father Calergi nodded. “The Carabinieri are still investigating Cassandre’s death, despite AISI’s involvement. They suspect it must be connected to Count Tignelli and his plans. A view I have done nothing to disabuse them of, incidentally.”

  “Do I take it that the Curia is becoming concerned?”

  “Those of us with Rome’s interests at heart certainly have no wish to see Count Tignelli succeed, let me put it that way.”

  Gilroy gave him a sideways glance. “And yet you only come to me now, after the Vatican itself is safely out of the picture and the banker silenced. A cynic might question your timing.”

  The priest let that pass. “Can we take it that America shares our concerns?”

  Gilroy thought. “Tell your people… that America is keeping a close watch on the situation. And that we will take a view on events as they unfold.”

  Father Calergi turned his head to look at him. “What terrible game are you playing?” he said quietly.

  “No game, Father. But things are complicated just now. Timing will be everything. I need to know exactly what the Carabinieri have discovered, and what they intend to do about it. Can you find that out for me?”

  “Of course. I’ll make some enquiries.”