The Traitor (The Carnivia Trilogy)

by Jonathan Holt

  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.”

  “She likes numbers too. She teaches me. She’s better than the teachers at school.”

  “Is that confusing for you? That someone who kidnapped you is also an effective teacher?”

  “I don’t know. Thirty-five is a good number too. It’s the highest you can count on your fingers using base 6.”

  Father Uriel took him forward one day at a time, probing for anxieties. When he reached day thirty-six, Daniele fell silent.

  “Why are you quiet, Daniele?”

  “I’m thinking about the thirty-six officers problem. It’s a puzzle set by a man called Euler. He wanted to know how you could arrange six regiments of six officers in a grid so that no rank or regiment gets repeated. I’ve drawn it on my wall.”

  “It sounds very difficult.”

  “Euler thought it was impossible. But he wanted to prove why it was impossible. That’s interesting, isn’t it? Not just saying it can’t be done, but showing why numbers can’t work that way.”

  “What are the kidnappers doing while you’re thinking about your puzzle?”

  “They argued this morning. Then Claudio went out in a rage. Paolo went to sleep. I think Maria went out for a while too, but not for long. Then she comes into my room. She’s got a bottle of medicine.”

  “What kind of medicine?”

  “She says it will make me sleepy. But I don’t want to sleep. I want to think about the puzzle. She says I have to drink the medicine to please her. So I do. But I don’t get sleepy, not really. And then she comes back. She’s got a knife. It all happens so fast I don’t… don’t…”

  He screamed: the high, piercing scream of a child. His hand flew to his left ear. Then, moments later, his other hand went to his right, his eyes locked onto some unseen terror in front of him.

  “It’s her!” he shouted. “It’s her!”

  “Daniele, it’s all right. I’m going to take you to a safe place…”

  But the child kept on screaming.

  It took a good half hour, and all Father Uriel’s skills, to calm Daniele down.

  “Do you remember everything that just happened?” he asked when he’d brought him out of the trance.

  Daniele nodded numbly. “It was her. The woman I knew as Maria… Carole Tataro. The one I trusted. Who understood numbers like I do. No wonder I didn’t want to remember.”

  57

  WHILE HOLLY SCOURED the internet for anything that might explain her father’s interest in the Autodin transcripts, Kat dug out the copy of Cassandre’s hard drive that the Carabinieri technician, Malli, had made. She went through the files a second time, looking for anything that might give them a lead.

  After two hours her head was aching and her vision was starting to blur. “This is hopeless!” she exploded. “Let’s go out for a coffee.”

  “Give me a couple of minutes,” Holly murmured. “I’m right in the middle of some really technical stuff about troposcatter relays.”

  While she waited, Kat brought up Cassandre’s web history. She hadn’t looked at it since she’d found the Wikipedia articles about coup plots.

  On the page about the Golpe Bianco plot, she noticed a paragraph she’d skimmed last time.

  In his memoirs, the instigator of the coup, Edgardo Sogno, recalled that he visited the CIA station chief in Rome in July 1974 to inform him of his plans. “I told him that I was informing him as an ally in the struggle for the freedom of the West and asked him what the attitude of the American government would be. He answered what I already knew: that the United States would have supported any initiative tending to keep the communists out of government.”[5]

  Sogno maintained that he would have succeeded had he not been betrayed by his co-conspirators: “It is possible that too many people knew of our plans.”

  She clicked on another page Cassandre had visited, this time about the 1970 Golpe Borghese cou
p attempt.

  The military attaché at the US embassy was tightly connected with the Borghese coup organisers. US President Richard Nixon closely followed the preparations for the coup, of which he was personally informed by two CIA officers.[10] These facts were confirmed in 2004 through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

  However, the FOIA request also revealed that only a few marginalised sectors of the CIA were in favour of the coup, while the main response was to not allow major changes in the geopolitical balance in the Mediterranean.[11] The plot was eventually aborted after Borghese received a phone call, reportedly from the American Embassy.

  “I’m done,” Holly called from across the room. “Want to get that coffee now?”

  “Not right now. I think I may have found something interesting.”

  Senator Giovanni Pellegrino, in charge of a subsequent parliamentary inquiry, said, “Somebody in Italy claimed they had support overseas. But, once informed of what was going on, the relevant people immediately blocked Borghese and his people.”

  “Is it significant,” Kat said thoughtfully, “that after several of the failed coup attempts in Italy, someone’s pointed at the CIA as being the ones who stopped it?”

  “Well, of course they do. If they couldn’t blame the CIA, it would be aliens and flying saucers.”

  Kat glanced at her. “You said yourself you thought the CIA had infiltrated Gladio,” she reminded her. She gestured at the screen. “Besides, these people aren’t cranks. They’re senators, investigative journalists, even the heads of intelligence agencies.”

  Holly came to read over her shoulder. “Then let’s say it’s true. We believe in democracy. So?”

  “Cui bono,” Kat said slowly.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, who benefits? Look, I’ve been assuming that it’s the Italian government in Rome that doesn’t want to see the Veneto split away from Italy. But there’s another geopolitical player in this region, isn’t there? The US. Your government wouldn’t want Italy to break up any more than Rome would.”

  “Because?”

  “How many US military installations are there here in the Veneto? How many American nuclear weapons silos? How many listening posts? How many radar stations and runways and drone hangars? What would happen to those if the Veneto became independent? If the decision were up to local voters, they’d all be gone within a year. Far easier, perhaps, just to despatch Tignelli, and close his plans down that way.”

  Holly was silent. Kat tapped a name into Google Maps.

  “Aviano US Air Force base,” she said, pointing. “Seventy kilometres north of Venice. A helicopter could reach La Grazia in fifteen minutes, and if it dropped an assault team over the lagoon, no one would ever see. Camp Ederle in Vicenza is about the same distance, as is Camp Del Din. If the CIA wanted to stop Tignelli, they had no shortage of Special Forces stationed nearby to help them do it.”

  “We don’t operate like that,” Holly said. “Not in Italy, anyway.” But in her heart, she knew what Kat said was possible. Who could now deny, after the countless drone strikes around the world, that America wouldn’t stoop to assassination to achieve its aims? Who could claim, after the abduction of Abu Omar and others, that her country would respect the laws and institutions of its allies? Wasn’t this in effect what she herself had been saying to Kat all along – that America had been secretly influencing Italy’s affairs since her father’s time and beyond?

  “I think Tignelli, like Sogno and Borghese before him, was a former gladiator who got too big for his boots,” Kat said. “A gladiator who, along with many others, used Freemasonry as cover after Gladio was exposed. But instead of simply causing terror and chaos, Tignelli decided – whether from greed, political conviction, or a mixture of both – that he was the one to bring stability. I think Tignelli was cleverer than those earlier plotters, though. He didn’t commit the mistake of asking the CIA for their blessing. But, thanks to Cassandre, they found out anyway. And, just as they did with those earlier coup plots, the Americans decided to stop him.”

  “And your proof?” Holly said at last.

  “I don’t have any yet. But I’m absolutely certain of one thing. What you’ve been saying all along is right. What happened to your father, what happened to Daniele, what happened to Tignelli and Cassandre and Flavio, what will happen to all of us if Daniele doesn’t destroy Carnivia – it’s all connected.”

  There would be a time to mourn Flavio, and mourn him she would. But first she needed to ensure that he hadn’t died in vain.

  “There’s someone I have to talk to,” she said, standing up. “Someone I think can tell me more about what’s really been going on.”

  58

  DANIELE SAT PATIENTLY in the small room. He had gone straight there from Father Uriel’s treatment room, and the person he wanted to see was keeping him waiting.

  Automatically he calculated the number of bricks in the wall opposite. Two thousand one hundred and fifteen, if you assumed that the average mortar gap was ten millimetres.

  He recalled the famous anecdote about the mathematician G. H. Hardy, when he went to visit his fellow mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. Hardy had remarked that he had come there in taxicab number 1729, which was a very dull number.

  “No,” Ramanujan replied, “it is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

  Such was the small talk of mathematicians.

  He was just considering what interesting properties 2115 might have when Carole Tataro was shown in.

  He didn’t stand up. Neither, for a few moments, did she sit down.

  “I don’t know whether to call you Carole or Maria,” he said at last.

  “You can call me 1853602 if you prefer,” she said, taking a seat opposite him. He noticed how she moved the chair as far away as the small room would allow.

  “Is it nice, to have a number of your own?”

  She gave him a sharp look, but saw that he wasn’t mocking her. “The novelty wears off.” She gestured at the walls. “I suppose you’ve counted them?”

  “A rough approximation. 2115.”

  “2187,” she corrected him. “The builders skimped on mortar, and the door is a non-standard size.”

  “That’s interesting,” he said. He meant the number, not the reason. “Three to the power of seven.”

  She said, curiously, “Do you remember something you once said to me? You said, ‘Every number is infinite.’ You meant every number is interesting, I suppose, but it was an unusual way of putting it.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve had amnesia about most of what happened during the kidnap. I’m only just remembering things now.”

  “Such as?” she said carefully.

  “I’ve remembered what you did to me,” he said quietly. “That it was you who cut off my ears and nose and sent them to my parents.”

  There was a long silence “Here’s another number,” she said at last. “Twenty-four. The number of years I’ve already spent in here for being the person I was then.”

  “I just want to know why you did it. I think I know why you tried to pin the blame on Paolo. To do what you did, and to a child… The Italian prison system isn’t kind to people like that.”

  “You think I’m a monster.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  She sighed. “Perhaps. But that wasn’t the reason I told everyone it was Paolo.”

  “Why, then?”

  “I was ordered to say that, if I was ever challenged.”

  “Ordered? By who?”

  “My… handler, I suppose you would say. I never knew his real name.”

  “Describe him for me,” Daniele said softly.

  “Tall. Blue eyes. Wide shouldered, in that rangy American way. His Italian was excellent, though he spoke with a strong Venetian accent he didn’t always seem aware of.”

  Daniele nodded. “His name is Ian Gilroy.”
r />   She shrugged. “If you say so.”

  “And how did he convince you to mutilate a small, frightened child who trusted you?”

  “He persuaded me that it was the only way to save your life.” She looked at him. “I know that must sound extraordinary. But he told me the Italian authorities were panicking. They were no closer to finding us, but at the same time they were insisting the parents didn’t pay a ransom. He was afraid Claudio or Paolo would panic and kill you to get rid of the evidence; or that the Italians would mount a hastily arranged raid as soon as they located us and we’d all be killed. He said the only way to save you was to do something to break the stalemate, something that would give your parents a reason to insist on paying the ransom.”

  “And meanwhile he was telling my parents not to pay, that everything would turn out for the best if they just stayed strong,” Daniele said bitterly. “That’s Gilroy, all right. Weaving his stories, so that everybody hears what they want to hear.”

  “I cared for you by then, Daniele. And I could see – or thought I could see – the truth of what he was telling me. Paolo and Claudio were at each other’s throats. That was partly my fault…”

  “It was Gilroy who’d encouraged you to sleep with both of them, presumably?”

  “He’d impressed on me how important it was to get close to each of them, to have some leverage, yes. And I suppose I was panicking too by then. I would have done anything to get you out of there alive, anything.”

  He only looked at her. The silence dragged on.

  “There isn’t a day when I haven’t thought about what I did. I still hear your screams in my sleep. But I told myself that it wasn’t your ears or your nose that made you who you were. It was your mind. You were so clever, so quick… I wanted to save that part of you.”

  “My mind was not unaffected too, as it turned out,” he said drily.