BASED ON YOUR RESEARCH INTO THE USE OF THESE METHODS… YOU DO NOT ANTICIPATE THAT ANY PROLONGED MENTAL HARM WOULD RESULT FROM THE USE OF THE WATER-BOARD. INDEED, YOU HAVE ADVISED US THAT THE RELIEF IS ALMOST IMMEDIATE WHEN THE CLOTH IS REMOVED FROM THE NOSE AND MOUTH.
IN THE ABSENCE OF PROLONGED MENTAL HARM, NO SEVERE MENTAL PAIN OR SUFFERING CAN BE SAID TO HAVE BEEN INFLICTED EITHER.
The image cut to Mia in her orange jumpsuit, strapped to the gurney. Her head was at the lower end, and her feet and wrists were securely fastened.
Later, commentators were to remark on the intensity with which she sought out and held the gaze of the man in the Harlequin mask, turning her head to follow him as he approached.
Some were also to remark on the apparent tenderness with which he placed a towel under her head to cushion it, then wrapped another tightly around her face so that she was forced to breathe through the coarse material. The shape of her open nose and mouth was clearly defined under the cloth.
What was not disputed was that Mia was visibly shaking, and that she clenched her fists in an effort to control her tremors. The kidnapper’s arms, too, appeared to be shaking as he lifted the watering can – although that might just have been because it was heavy.
The water flowed in a clear, thin stream over the towel. For a long moment nothing happened. Then, with a sudden gasp, Mia released the breath she’d been holding and inhaled the water. She choked violently, her limbs convulsing, her head shaking from side to side in a frantic attempt to deny the liquid – still barely more than a trickle – access to her mouth.
“Jesus,” Kat found herself muttering. “This is unbearable.”
But she kept watching, as did every other Carabinieri officer in the room. On and on Harlequin poured. There must have been some kind of stopwatch or monitor just out of shot, because he glanced across at it, as if to make sure he wasn’t going a second beyond the agreed time.
After exactly twenty seconds, he stopped. The watchers knew, from the pundits, what to expect next. Although the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center had in 2006 personally ordered the destruction of ninety-two videotapes of waterboarding sessions, enough witnesses and victims had described the process for it to have become general knowledge. When subjected to waterboarding, the human body generally responded in the same way: first came vomiting, followed by screaming, followed by sobbing, followed by yet more screaming as the towel was reapplied.
But Mia wasn’t vomiting. She was lying quite still, unconscious.
There was a moment of shock in the operations room as people realised what had happened. Harlequin realised it too. Reaching down, he placed his hands on Mia’s diaphragm and pumped desperately. Nothing happened.
He put his face to hers. But there was no way he could administer the kiss of life through the mask.
He went around to the high end of the bench, where her feet were, and tried to push the bench out of shot. It was heavy, and the wooden legs caught on the concrete floor. He seemed to be in a state of panic as he strained to get it to move.
Her feet remained just in shot as he disappeared towards her head.
“Go to the unzoomed image,” Kat said. The technician punched a button, and the image changed – from the one the world was watching, to the raw image from the source.
There, in the tiny strip of picture Harlequin didn’t know existed, they saw him rip off his mask to resuscitate Mia. They saw how he breathed for her; how he pumped her chest frantically; saw, too, how when she finally choked and vomited her way back to life, he cradled her head in his hands, weeping with relief, saying her name over and over again.
And they saw him reach to her forehead and make the sign of the cross over it with his thumbs – an unmistakeable gesture of benediction.
“My God,” Saito breathed. “He’s a priest.”
With exquisite timing, that was when Carnivia went dark, the image replaced abruptly by a message informing them that the page they were trying to reach was currently unavailable due to heavy traffic, and that they should please try again later.
They replayed the film on a loop. The man’s face was in profile, and they never got a clear look at him. It was, Malli told them, far too little to use image-matching software on either.
“Even so, get the best still you can and isolate it. We’ll circulate it round the other agencies,” Saito said. He looked around. “Who’s got the database of protestors?”
“I have.” Kat had already opened the full list of names from the anti-Dal Molin petitions. Within moments, she’d generated a list of everyone who’d given their title as “Don”, “Monsignor” or “Father”.
Out of one hundred and fifty thousand names, there were seventy that matched.
“Organise into teams,” Saito ordered. “Five officers to a team. Start working the list.”
“Sir,” Kat said. “Is it possible that he was a priest, but isn’t any more? It just seems unlikely that a working priest could take the time off to do something like this.”
“Possible, yes. Even likely. But in that case, how would we find him?”
Despite the lateness of the hour, she tried the Vatican. To her amazement, the phone was answered. She explained what she wanted, and was put through to someone in the Information Service who told her that, while they did indeed have a database of current priests, they didn’t keep a specific record of those who had left the Church.
She thought. “Do you have an older database from, say, ten years ago?”
“I’ll have a look,” the voice on the other end said. He came back after a minute. “It seems we do.”
“And a list of priests who have passed away? Obituaries, for example?”
“Certainly.”
“Send me all three lists. I’ll collate them myself.”
As the operations room emptied team by team, she stayed on, cross-referencing the data. By 3 a.m. she had the names of almost a thousand Italian priests who had left the Church in the last ten years.
The database the Vatican had sent contained a bonus she hadn’t thought to ask for: each name had a date of birth next to it. Harlequin looked fairly young – probably in his thirties or early forties: to be on the safe side, she only excluded those over fifty.
Then she ran the remaining names against the anti-Dal Molin petition. Just six names matched.
Algisa Belluci
Edilio Barese
Frediano Caliari
Livio Lorenso
Enrico Ferri
Learco Toscano
She dialled Holly’s number, knowing that she’d wake her up.
“Kat?” Holly answered on the second ring. “What is it?”
“We’ve got a list of seventy-six names that are of interest to us, of whom six to my mind are particularly high value. Can you run them against your lists, to see if any of them might have a grudge against America?”
“Sure. I’ll do it myself.” Kat could hear Holly pulling on clothes as she spoke.
“Thanks. I’ll email them across.”
“Kat?”
“Yes?”
“Do you think this might be it?” Holly said quietly.
“I’m not sure. But it’s the best lead yet.”
Holly went to her work computer and brought up SIPRNet. Then she took the names Kat had emailed and entered them one by one. As she was also connected to the regular internet, she could see immediately that many were coming up with “Don” or “Padre” attached to them.
But the two that gave her hits on SIPRNet had no such honorifics. She called Kat back.
“It looks like we had dealings with two of your names, Frediano Caliari and Livio Lorenso. Caliari was involved in protests against drone strikes in the Yemen, two years ago. And Lorenso is on a list of people who have downloaded films from a piracy website.”
Kat thought. “Is it possible to find out any more about them?”
“We can run them through PRISM. That’ll give you a shed-load of data. But there ar
e legal ramifications – not at our end, but you’ll probably need to get an anti-terrorism warrant. And I’ll need to inform Colonel Carver.”
“That’s fine,” Kat said. “I’ll get you the paperwork, if you can get me the information.”
Holly must have requested the search even before receiving the warrant, because by 6 a.m. Kat had PRISM reports on both Lorenso and Caliari. Despite being headed “Topline”, each ran to over fifty pages.
PRISM was simply data that travelled in and out of the US on its way to and from the USA’s biggest technology firms – Apple, Google, Microsoft, Skype, Facebook and others. By siphoning off the data direct from the main cross-Atlantic fibre-optic cables and copying it into huge “data tanks” at its $2 billion Utah Data Center, the National Security Agency could quite legally eavesdrop on foreign nationals all around the world without any kind of warrant. The only legal difficulty came if the NSA shared that data with other governments, since it broke many local privacy laws. And although the data was generally analysed at the pattern level – picking up those who were doing searches for both “bomb-making” and “airlines”, for example – it could also work the other way round: put in a name, address, and date of birth, or better still an email address, and PRISM’s computers could “ingest”, as the spooks put it, every detail about that person that could possibly be gleaned from the last few months’ internet traffic.
Both Livio Lorenso and Frediano Caliari used Google, Facebook and Skype. Lorenso also used Apple. He had searched for information about erectile dysfunction and bought a treatment for it over the internet. He regularly visited a number of pornographic websites but, until six weeks previously, had also used dating agencies. As he wasn’t computer-savvy enough to clear his cookies each time he used Google, Kat could see everything he’d searched for over the last six months – even which terms he’d mistyped. She could tell when he’d booked a flight and a hotel for two people but hadn’t completed the transaction, and when he’d searched for advice on how to propose. And since he used Gmail, which scanned emails to and from its users for keywords that would generate “contextual” advertising, she could also see that he’d emailed recently about a car, a holiday, a loan, bankruptcy, sexual fulfilment, marriage, honeymoons and a restaurant with good reviews in the centre of Milan. On Facebook he’d added six friends in the last month; his status had changed from single to “in a relationship” twice, and he had “liked” about a hundred posts, links and videos, including the anti-Dal Molin petition.
More usefully still, he shopped at Esselunga, Italy’s largest supermarket, and had a loyalty card, the data from which was stored on a Microsoft server in Texas. This allowed Kat to see, amongst other things, when he’d bought petrol. His fuel purchases had begun three months previously – roughly the time he’d been picking up ads for cheap auto loans and secondhand-car sites – and had been small and regular. His credit rating had recently gone down, owing to an increase in his loan repayments, and he had registered a new number plate to his address.
The clincher, though, was that Lorenso had an iPhone. He’d bought a number of apps that tracked his location, from one that alerted him whenever he was about to pass a speed camera, to a walking app that recorded how many calories he was burning. From the information that had flashed back and forth between his phone and Apple’s Location Services, Kat could see that he’d travelled from Milan to Turin twice in the last fortnight, but no further. If she’d wanted to, she could also have accessed the photos stored on his Facebook timeline with the tag “Turin”. She could even have checked out the book about relationships he’d recently bought on his e-reader, and seen what phrases in the text he’d underlined.
Clearly, since leaving the priesthood, Lorenso had been making up for lost time with the opposite sex. She very much doubted he was their man.
Caliari was another matter. His internet usage was sparse and functional. He visited religious sites, left-wing blogs, and bulletin boards about international affairs, particularly the anti-globalisation movement.
He cleared his Google cookies every time he used his computer, suggesting a basic understanding of the need for caution. The content of his emails had triggered ads for nothing more exciting than charities and privacy software. And although he had registered a Skype username and password, he seemed never to have used it. His most recent Facebook “like” was a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in Vicenza.
What was more, about three weeks previously he’d bought a new laptop computer, a USB video camera and a pay-as-yougo wireless broadband dongle from an online computer shop. His very last activity had been to search for shops near to him in Verona selling Carnevale masks. After that, his internet use abruptly stopped.
It was him. It had to be.
Had she had more time to reflect, she might have been uneasy at discovering just how much data was held about her countrymen by the US. She’d had a vague idea that when you ticked a privacy setting it meant no one could see your information, not even the government. But like most people, when she was presented with a four-page “Terms and Conditions” she simply clicked “Agree”, trusting the global brand whose product she was using to keep her safe. And she’d always assumed that, if something was too invasive for the US government to do to its own citizens, they wouldn’t do it to citizens of other countries either.
Clearly, that wasn’t actually the case. She began to understand now why Daniele was so reluctant to open up Carnivia’s servers.
Going to Saito, she explained what she’d learned about Caliari.
“Good. Take two officers and a search team and go to his home. If he’s not there, break down the door. I’ll fax you a search warrant.”
DAY SIX
SIXTY-FIVE
IT WAS 7.30 a.m. by the time they smashed in the front door of Caliari’s apartment in Verona. The place looked barely lived in, Kat thought as she strode from room to room. A mattress on the floor; crockery and pans still in boxes; a hi-fi system that hadn’t even been wired up. The only things he’d unpacked properly were his books. Most, she noticed, were academic tomes on theology – particularly liberation theology – and ethics, but there were also some on anti-globalisation and modern culture: Naomi Klein’s No Logo, Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival and Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. All were in English, she noticed, suggesting that he was fluent in that language. A poster in the kitchen bore a quote by Mahatma Gandhi: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed”.
On the table were some printouts. She picked them up and leafed through them. They all appeared to be from the web. On the top one, a paragraph had been carefully underlined:
During World War II, US planners developed a strategy of global control, intended to displace the European imperial powers and go far beyond, but in new ways. They had learned the effectiveness of airpower, and intended to cover as much of the world as possible with military bases that could be quickly expanded when necessary, and used to guarantee control over resources, suppress indigenous movements that threatened US domination, and install and protect client regimes. Massive intervention in subverting Italian democracy from the late 1940s is just one of many examples, benign by comparison with others that reached as far as near-genocidal slaughter.
Noam Chomsky.
As the search team got to work, she collected the post from the box outside and looked through it. There was a letter from the Carabinieri, asking Caliari to get in touch – evidently, he’d been on enough lists to get his name flagged up, but not so many as to cause alarm when he hadn’t responded. There was a credit card bill, which showed no new transactions. But in the recycling bin, the searchers found a receipt from a hardware shop for timber, rope and metal hooks, bought with cash.
And then they brought her something that made her blood run cold. A receipt from the Co-op for twenty-four bottles of nutrition drink and a carton of sanitary towels. He’d paid cash fo
r those, too.
They had their man.
Panicucci came in from talking to the neighbours. “No one’s seen him for weeks. Even before that, he generally kept himself to himself. But he told the woman downstairs he was going away on a spiritual retreat. He’d done that before occasionally, so she wasn’t surprised.”
Kat went and spoke to the technician leading the search team. “Bring me anything that particularly relates to travelling around Italy. Maps, itineraries, camping sites… anything at all. We need to find an address.”
“Will do.”
She concentrated on finding his official documents. Everyone, she reasoned, no matter how disorganised, has a file or a folder somewhere that contains the really important stuff: financial papers, passport, birth certificate.
Eventually she found it – a fat cardboard file, unceremoniously stuffed into a carrier bag. In it were a number of out-of-date travel permits and visas relating to a period of employment by the Red Crescent in Yemen, and an even older letter from the diocese of Verona headed “Grant of Dispensation”, accepting his resignation “with great reluctance” and alluding to the “difficulties you have been having with spiritual discipline”. Then came some old Telecom Italia Mobile bills, all relating to the same account. A vaccination certificate. A guarantee card for a flat-screen television.
Frediano, where have you taken her?
Struck by a thought, she went back to the vaccination certificate. It dated back twenty years and bore the address of a hospital in Trentino-Alto Adige, the mountainous German-speaking area far to the north.
She got on the phone to Saito.
“I think he grew up in the Alto Adige,” she told him. “Can you have someone search the residency records for anyone by that name? There may be a family house he’s using.”
The Abduction: A Novel Page 28
