The Abduction: A Novel

by Jonathan Holt

  “Tell me,” he said curiously. “Like you, I have a suspicion your friends were murdered to order. But do you have any specific reason to doubt the official account – that he killed her in a moment of passion, then turned the gun on himself?”

  She shrugged. “That simply wasn’t the kind of relationship they had. They were old friends – we were all part of the same group at university – who ended up sleeping together occasionally. But out of affection and friendship, not passion. A civilised arrangement. The idea that he would murder her because she broke it off is just ludicrous.”

  He nodded. The waiter, unbidden, brought them two small glasses of grappa.

  “Thank you for this evening, signora,” he said. “It’s been enjoyable as well as informative.”

  “Please, I’d much rather you called me Anna.” She hesitated. “And actually, it’s signorina.” She waved away his apologies. “It’s all right. Once you reach thirty, people just assume. It’s fine.”

  “Anna, then. And please, call me Aldo.”

  She picked up her glass and swirled the colourless liquid around thoughtfully. Her next remark was addressed to the drink. “Are we going to sleep together, Aldo?”

  He hadn’t seen it coming. That is, he knew he found her attractive, but their conversation had been much too serious for flirting, and he didn’t think he had allowed his feelings to become obvious. Certainly it hadn’t occurred to him that they might be reciprocated.

  “I’d welcome the company, to be honest,” she added.

  “A civilised arrangement?”

  “Exactly.”

  He hesitated, and she saw it.

  “Please, forget I asked,” she said quickly. She tried to make a joke of it. “Mrs Piola’s a lucky woman.”

  “She doesn’t think so,” he said.

  Some hint of his own pain must have crossed his eyes, because she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  She stood up, and he stood with her, regret at not taking her up on her offer already flooding through every fibre of his being. But it was nothing, he knew, compared to the regret he would have felt if he’d accepted.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  KAT TURNED OFF her laptop the instant Ethereal worked out who she was. For good measure she also shut the lid, flipped the machine upside down, and took out the battery. Then she paced warily around the computer where it lay on the bed, as if it were a magic box inside which some evil genie was trapped.

  Her phone buzzed with a text from Holly. Kat, what’s going on?

  She texted back. What do you mean?

  Think you’d better check Facebook.

  With a feeling of dread, she got her Facebook page up on her phone. According to her wall, she’d just organised an event.

  Kat Tapo has invited 198 people to a swingers’ party TODAY at Hilton Stucky, Room 696.

  There was a grainy thumbnail – the picture of her and Riccardo. Shit. She pressed “Recall”, then “Delete”.

  Kat Tapo just cancelled an event.

  Her phone rang, the number one she didn’t recognise. A slow, courteous voice said, “Good evening. This is Impresa Funebre Pavanello, in Cannaregio. May I offer my deepest condolences—”

  “About what?” she interrupted.

  “I understand your twin, Rita Tapo, has sadly passed away? We’ve been asked to make the necessary arrangements.”

  “It’s a stupid hoax,” she said, pressing “End Call”. Reloading Facebook, she found herself being redirected.

  RIP Kat Tapo…

  Somehow he’d turned her page into a memorial.

  Words cannot express the sadness we feel at losing one of Married and Discreet’s most active members. A serving captain in the Carabinieri, Kat loved to party, in or out of uniform. Share your memories of Kat Tapo here.

  The first comment was by Ethereal.

  Let’s kick this off. Captain Kat wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box. In fact, even amongst the Carabinieri, her stupidity was legendary. Her colleagues still remember the time she was found staring at a carton of orange juice. When asked why, she replied, “The instruction says ‘concentrate’.”

  Told by a junior there was no more space in the archive, she gave permission for him to get rid of all the old documents, so long as he made photocopies first.

  “Oh, great,” she muttered. But even while she’d been reading the feeble jokes, Ethereal had been busy again. Her phone buzzed with an automated text message from her bank.

  Because of suspected fraudulent activity, your account has been suspended.

  Her heart sinking, she checked her emails. As she’d expected, he’d hacked those too. And he’d not only resurrected her account at Married and Discreet, he’d set all the profile settings to “Public”. Half a dozen men, and two women, had emailed her already, asking for a date.

  The last email in her inbox was a message from noreply@ethereal.com.

  Are we having fun yet?

  She thought. There was clearly no point in worrying about the laptop any more – he already had everything he wanted from it. Putting the battery back in, she booted it up and went straight to Carnivia. It took her only a few minutes to find the bar near the market, although she noticed that Carnivia’s usually smooth interface seemed jerky and sluggish.

  Going inside, she marched up to the avatar with the Pulcinella mask.

  What the fuck?

  Sorry, Pulcinella379 is sleeping. Back soon.

  I don’t believe you.

  Ha! The Pulcinella woke up and looked around. Oh, there you are. Something wrong?

  Leave me alone, she typed furiously. What was the convention? Oh yes – it was shouting if you used capitals. LEAVE ME ALONE, CREEP.

  Or what? the avatar asked. Going to put me in handcuffs?

  What you’re doing is a crime. Identity theft, misuse of data, harassment — The screen froze in mid-sentence, leaving her typing impotently into nothingness.

  Believe me, Captain, I’m wanted for more exciting things than that, he answered when it unfroze again. But sure, I’ll stop.

  You will?

  Yes. If you and me have a cyberdate. There’s a nice little video-chat function in the back room here. Clothing optional.

  You must be joking.

  Always. But one thing I’m very serious about. You tried to fool me. That really wasn’t clever.

  Suddenly, another voice appeared next to Ethereal’s. [Kat, it’s interesting that he says fool, not hack. That suggests he hasn’t realised Daniele’s put malware on his machine.]

  [Who is this?]

  [Zara. You didn’t log on as an admin, so you can’t see me. Neither can he, of course. The point is, I think maybe he’s been so busy punking you, he’s missed Daniele’s trojan. Inadvertently, you’ve created the perfect backdoor.]

  Well? Ethereal demanded. Do we have a deal? Ready for a little cyberparty, Kat Tapo?

  There was a whirring noise from her laptop. She looked down. The eject mechanism on the CD drive was making the disc tray go in and out suggestively.

  [Keep him talking. I’m going to access the trojan from this end, see if we’ve got a link to his hardware yet. It may take a few minutes – I’ve never known Carnivia this laggy.]

  Maybe, Kat typed, switching her attention back to Ethereal’s thread. If you start behaving like a gentleman.

  Hmm. Not sure I really know what that means.

  It’s rude not to let me see your face, for one thing. Since you can see mine.

  Two windows opened on the screen of her laptop. One showed Kat’s own face, as filmed by the webcam. The other showed a skinny youth of about seventeen with pale skin and short red hair. He wore heavy glasses and a T-shirt covered in a slogan in Cyrillic script.

  Better? he asked.

  Much, she lied.

  [Kat, this will take a few more minutes], Zara typed. [I’ve made the uplink, now I need to FTP his data files.]

  So how does this work, Ethereal? I’m a stranger to cyber-d
ating, quite frankly.

  Well, first you get a little more comfortable.

  You mean, like find a cushion?

  Hahaha. No, I mean lose the clothes.

  She kept her smile plastered to her face. You first.

  On the screen, Ethereal pulled off his T-shirt, revealing a thin, hairless chest. Your turn.

  As slowly as she could, she unbuttoned her blouse. Underneath she was wearing a black bra from Superboom.

  [Thirty seconds], Zara interjected.

  And the rest, he typed impatiently.

  Uh-uh. It’s your turn now, remember?

  On the screen, Ethereal stood up and shucked off his jeans.

  Hey, you sure know how to woo a lady, Ethereal.

  Your turn. Or do I have to come and get you?

  My screen keeps freezing. I think there’s something wrong with the connection.

  It’s this shitheap website. The word is, it lost another mirror site a couple of hours ago. Don’t worry, it won’t spoil our fun.

  Close your eyes, then. And don’t open them until you’ve counted to ten.

  [Done], Zara typed.

  [Thank God for that. Do you have some wizardy way you can get us both out of here?]

  [Sure.]

  Bye, creep.

  A moment later, Kat was back in the virtual Palazzo Barbo, and Zara had materialised beside her.

  Within an hour, with Zara’s help, Kat had closed down her Facebook and Gmail accounts and sent a message to all her contacts explaining she’d been hacked. At Zara’s suggestion, she’d said that the hacker had circulated some Photoshopped images purporting to be of her and could the recipients please delete them immediately.

  It would, she knew, only increase the curiosity of those who hadn’t yet viewed them, but at least it gave her a tiny figleaf of deniability.

  Meanwhile, Zara had been working on the download she’d made from the hacker’s laptop.

  As we thought, she typed, he’s Russian. His skills aren’t bad, actually – he’s more of a script kiddie than a leet, but what he doesn’t know, he takes the trouble to parse rather than buying OTS.

  I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, Kat confessed.

  Basically, he’s not the master hacker he claims to be, just some bright kid who gets a kick out of using other people’s programs. I wonder…

  There was a long pause. When Zara eventually returned, she typed, Interesting. It looks like Ethereal wasn’t contacted directly by the kidnappers. There was an intermediary, another hacker. The name won’t mean anything to you, but it’s familiar to us: Mulciber.

  Who is he?

  A former associate of Daniele’s – that is, I don’t know if they ever actually met, but in the pre-Carnivia days they collaborated on several hacks. When Daniele lost interest in that scene and started working on Carnivia, Mulciber was one of the very few allowed to contribute to the coding. But they fell out – Mulciber and the other hackers wanted Carnivia to be a sort of secret hang-out for leets, Daniele just wanted to build it and see what happened. I guess Mulciber saw working for the kidnappers as a chance to mess up Carnivia, and he knew enough about Carnivia’s programming to make it look like he’d been able to hack the whole website.

  If it was to mess up Carnivia, it’s been pretty successful, Kat wrote. During her conversation with Zara, the screen had been freezing more and more frequently.

  Ethereal was right when he said we’re down to our last remaining server. If CNAIPIC find that one too, we’re offline. But it might not even take that – if the number of viewers increases any more, we could go under from the sheer volume of traffic.

  So now it’s a race between us and Inspector Pettinelli, Kat wrote, only half joking.

  I guess. Good luck.

  An impossible race – and with the added handicap, Kat reflected, that Inspector Pettinelli knew exactly what she was trying to achieve, misguided though that might be; while Kat and the rest of the Carabinieri were still clutching at straws.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  THE NIGHTS WERE very long and very cold. Although the kidnappers had given her a blanket, it wasn’t nearly enough to stop her from shivering.

  She’d tried asking Harlequin for more blankets. “You can have Gul Rahman’s, if you like,” he’d replied.

  “Great, thank you. Who’s Gul Rahman?”

  “He was a detainee in Afghanistan, in a CIA prison known as the ‘Salt Pit’. He froze to death after a CIA case officer ordered the guards to strip him naked, chain him to the concrete floor, and leave him there overnight.”

  “I take it that’s a ‘No’, then,” she’d muttered.

  She couldn’t make Harlequin out. Even when she was certain it really was him, and not the whistling man, he behaved towards her in ways that seemed inconsistent.

  She’d been trying to decide if he was gay. To begin with, it had seemed like an obvious explanation for why, unlike Bauta, he hadn’t tried to grope her. She reckoned she was pretty good at picking up on people’s sexual orientation – she’d guessed that Kevin Toomer was homosexual, for example, even though he’d successfully hidden it from his platoon. But there was something about Harlequin that was more complex, something she couldn’t quite fathom. When he made her undress, even just down to her underwear, it was almost as if he were forcing himself not to look at her. As if he were afraid of what looking might do to him.

  If he were younger, she might have wondered if he was a virgin. But it seemed unlikely that could be the case at his age.

  She sighed. She recalled reading about Stockholm Syndrome, the process by which a hostage could come to identify with their captors. She must be careful, she thought, not to project her own feelings onto Harlequin’s impersonal mask. He really wasn’t worth expending so much energy on.

  It was only much later, as she finally drifted towards sleep, that a thought materialised in her brain and made her suddenly sit bolt upright.

  When she’d read about Stockholm Syndrome, she’d also read about its opposite: Lima Syndrome, in which a kidnapper developed a powerful bond with their victim. It was named after a siege in which the hostage-takers had come to empathise so strongly with their hostages that they’d released them, unharmed.

  Released them…

  She cast her mind back for more details. Lima Syndrome, she remembered, started with a lonely captor discovering that his captive shared the same world-view as him.

  She also recalled reading somewhere that the mask a person chose to wear for Carnevale, while it might conceal their identity, could also reveal something far more important: their personality. What did it say about Harlequin that he had chosen the persona of a crying clown? At times she sensed a kind of melancholy in him, but at others, he seemed implacable, quite resolute in his determination. If there was an inner division in him, what had caused it?

  Lima Syndrome. She rolled the words round and round in her mind, her excitement mounting.

  Could there be a way out of this after all?

  FIFTY-NINE

  HOLLY SAT AT the bar in the Ederle Inn nursing a spritz. She rarely drank alone, but that evening, on her return from the mountains, she’d been to see the Elstons. The stress was visibly taking its toll on both parents now. The major’s fatigues hung off his frame, his face was gaunt, and his hands were shaking as he poured water into a glass.

  “What can I do?” he’d said when she’d finished updating him. “How can I convince them not to do those things to her?”

  “Sir, there’s nothing,” Holly had said gently. “But we still have every confidence the Carabinieri will find her.”

  “You try to do the right thing,” he said. “Nobody’s listening.” He lifted up his eyes to the ceiling. “Not you. Not anyone.” It had taken Holly a moment to realise that he was speaking not to her but to God.

  “Sir,” she said, “I went to see Joe Nicholls today.”

  His eyes swivelled to her. “Nicholls. A good soldier. A good man.”

&n
bsp; “He said the last time you visited him, you seemed angry about something.”

  “Did I?” He shook his head, as if trying to shake the memory loose.

  “Can you tell me what it was?”

  He stared at her, and for a long time it seemed to her that he was in another place entirely. Then his eyes refocused, and he came back to her. “Oh. Budget cuts. Bureaucracy. The sort of stuff I used to care about. It all seems so trivial now.”

  “Is there anything…” Holly began, treading carefully. “That is, is there any reason you can think of why Mia might have been singled out? Why they might have taken her, instead of some other officer’s daughter?”

  He stared at her again, lost in his own private hell.

  “Sir?” she’d prompted gently.

  He’d only shrugged helplessly. “Ask him. The big man. God. He knows. Nobody else.”

  She finished her Aperol. It really wasn’t very strong. Perhaps she’d have one more.

  “Hey.”

  She looked round. It was the lieutenant she’d met up at Asiago, the one commanding the Skyhook unit. “Oh, hi there.”

  He was beaming, clearly pleased to have come across her again. “Bill Coyne. I was just about to get a beer. You want one?”

  “Sure,” she said with a sigh. “Why not?” And then, by way of explaining why she was sitting there alone, “I just went to see Major Elston.”

  “You find out anything? From the troop, I mean? Anything that helped?”

  She shook her head. “Zip.”

  He sat down next to her. “Hey, you know you were asking if we were ever mixed up in anything controversial?”

  “Yes?” she said, her interest quickening.

  “Well, it wasn’t controversial, which is why I didn’t think of it when you asked. But it was classified, if that helps.”

  “It might do,” she said cautiously. “What kind of classified?”

  “You remember I told you we were basically the Taliban Taxi, snatching the bad guys and shipping them back to base? There was word that some of those guys were earmarked for some kind of transportation programme. Project Exodus.”