The Abduction: A Novel (25 page)

DAY FIVE

SIXTY

MIA WAS AWAKE
well before dawn, thinking about how to initiate her new strategy with Harlequin.

He liked to preach, she knew. He disliked being challenged. So she’d take that on board, and stop challenging him.

He’d said something to her before, to the effect that it wasn’t her he needed to convince. But what if he started to think he
was
convincing her? Would that, perhaps, create the bond between them she needed?

She’d pretend that she bought his whole upside-down version of reality, and see where that took her.

Eventually she heard the rattle as he unchained the door. Every morning he brought her Ensure and made her stand on the scales to be weighed. But today he’d brought a treat. A can of Coke, and a packet of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

As she popped the Coke she said casually, “I really want to understand why you’re doing this. You personally, I mean.”

“It’s not your concern.”

“Well, it kind of is.” She gestured at the cell. “Since it’s led to me being here.”

He hesitated. “Very well. I suppose you have a right to know. Two years ago I was working in the Middle East. It was after… There were some changes I had made in my personal life, and I wanted to work with the poor. But it was in a country where Al Qaeda was active, and the CIA were launching drone strikes against those they thought were terrorists.”

She nodded. “Go on.”

“I had a friend, Hussein Saleh. He worked for the same international charity I did. His wife was expecting their fifth child. Anyway, he was distributing food in a very poor region when he witnessed a drone strike on a house. He went to help the survivors.” He paused. “What he didn’t know was that the CIA had recently adopted a ‘second strike’ policy. A short time after the first missile, they fire another at exactly the same spot.”

“Why would they do that?” she said, confused.

“To make sure everyone’s dead. And to discourage others from helping the wounded. Hussein was killed instantly. The charity made an official complaint. Do you know how the Americans responded?”

She shook her head.

“They said, ‘We treat all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.’”

“But that means—”

“Exactly. By the time they’ve decided you’re innocent, it’s too late. And this was at a time, incidentally, when President Obama was denying a drone programme even existed.”

“That’s terrible,” she said, and meant it.

He nodded. “When I came back and found the US was building a new base outside Vicenza, I joined the protestors. But I soon realised they were deluded. They thought that if enough of them voted against it, the Americans would just pack up and go away. I knew different.”

“So you decided to kidnap me instead.”

“It wasn’t quite that simple. But I gradually came to the conclusion that when good men are paralysed by their principles, then those principles are a kind of moral trap, laid by the Devil to weaken his enemies.”

She opened the Reese’s. “Want one of these?”

He hesitated. “We give you so little food.”

“No, go ahead.”

“I’ve never tried a peanut butter cup before.” He unwrapped the candy and raised it to his mouth, but it wouldn’t fit through the mask’s mouthpiece.

“I’ll look away.” She turned her head.

When she turned back, he was chewing. “It’s quite good,” he said, surprised. Then, “I wish I didn’t have to wear the mask when I talk to you, Mia.”

“It has its advantages.”

“I can’t think of any.”

“Well, if you developed feelings for someone in a mask…” she said. “If you felt you had a real connection with them… It wouldn’t be because of what they looked like. It would be because of who they really were.”

For a moment she thought she’d gone too far.

But the masked head only nodded. “It says a lot about you, Mia, that you look for the positive, even in this situation.”

“I’m always positive,” she said.

Lima Syndrome.

Later, thinking back over the conversation, there was much to occupy her. He’d lapped up all the hints she’d laid about how she was starting to come round to his point of view. But in part, that was because she
was
starting to appreciate it. He was wrong, of course, and utterly misguided, but that story he’d told about his friend at least explained why he was so angry with her country.

She wondered what the “change in his personal life” that he’d referred to had been. Divorce? Somehow he’d made it sound more significant than that. And there had been that slightly odd reference to working with the poor.

Then all the stuff about the Devil. Where had
that
come from?

Suddenly she realised.

He’s a priest.

Or maybe an ex-priest – that might have been the change. Yes, it all made sense now: the theological references; the sexual awkwardness; the moral resolve; the occasional gentleness that seemed so incongruous for someone doing what he was.

A priest. She wondered how best to use that information. Because it was, surely, significant.

It was only much later, pacing up and down, that she realised she’d been so busy thinking about her new strategy she’d never thought to ask Harlequin what was so special about today, that it warranted the exceptional treat of Reese’s for breakfast.

SIXTY-ONE

KAT FORCED HERSELF
to walk into the operations room as if nothing had happened. She was aware of the glances coming at her from left and right, and found she didn’t care.

When you’d been ostracised as she had, you developed a pretty thick skin. The fact that all her colleagues had now seen a picture of her straddling a stranger wasn’t the end of the world.

Or so she told herself.

She busied herself with looking through the overnight evidence logs. There had been over a thousand phone calls now, all of which, in theory, had to be followed up.

“Another film,” a voice called. The speaker sounded unsurprised. It was getting to be a routine now: the kidnappers releasing a trailer first thing in the morning, to build up anticipation ahead of their main feature later on.

Then, “Oh,
God
.”

Kat looked up, as did everyone else.

The film this morning was not of Mia, but of an empty room – the larger cell, the one with the sheet-banner hanging at one end.

The man in the Harlequin mask and his Bauta-wearing accomplice were carrying in some kind of bench or gurney. As they set it down, it became apparent that it had been modified so that one end was higher than the other. Straps, nailed to the wood, were clearly intended as restraints.

The men placed two towels, neatly folded, on the bench, followed by a red plastic watering can.

A title appeared.

WATERBOARDING IS NOT TORTURE.

AT 9 P.M. TONIGHT SHE WILL NOT BE TORTURED.

There was a moment’s stunned silence, followed by a sound that came from the throats of every single person in the room – a kind of murmured gasp, a collective groan of despair that was also an acknowledgement that this had always been going to happen, if they failed to find her.

And now they had failed, for it was upon them.

As if to emphasise that this threat was of a different magnitude to anything that had gone before, the film ended not with a blank screen but a grinning Carnivia mask and a counter, ticking down the hours and minutes until the broadcast. Almost immediately, it became clear that the same counter had been plastered right across the internet – not least on the home pages of CNAIPIC, the Veneto parliament, and USAF Ederle, all of whose websites had been hacked.

“Has anyone checked our own website?” Saito asked, bringing the pandemonium of the operations room to an abrupt halt.

Someone brought the Carabinieri site up on the screen. There, too, was the grinning mask and counter.

According to the counter there were, by now, less than twelve hours to go.

What we see here is not just the incompetence of the Carabinieri,

thundered Raffaele Fallici in his blog.

What we see here is a return to the dark days of the Years of Lead: an inability to understand and address the shame of our failure as a state. Italy has been tested, and Italy has been found wanting.

    
And what is to be done? It is simple. Of course, our government cannot negotiate with terrorists; therefore, there can be no question of giving in to their demands. However, wiser, more flexible governments than ours have been known to initiate dialogue, in order to come to a peace process, which is a very different thing. After all, the Americans themselves have held talks with the Taliban: could not something similar be done here?

“The number of people on Carnivia is at an all-time high,” Kat told Piola, now back from Rome. “This morning, just after the announcement, it actually crashed.” Instead of “Enter Carnivia”, users had been greeted by the words, “Due to exceptional volumes of traffic, the page you are trying to reach is unavailable.”

“Are there any new leads?”

“Not really. Saito’s got us collating no-fly lists with people who have extreme left-wing views, that kind of thing… Trawling expeditions, in other words.”

“Do you have any better ideas, Capitano?”

“Only one, and it’s pretty desperate. I’m going to try Daniele Barbo one last time.”

She found Daniele in an even worse way than before. His eyes were so deeply ringed with exhaustion that at first Kat thought they must have been bruised in a fight, and he seemed to have acquired a number of other nervous tics and twitches in addition to his habitual blinking.

“Daniele,” she said urgently, “you were right about the hacker. But unfortunately, that still hasn’t helped us find Mia. You
have
to give me something more to work with. Even if it means giving up confidential information.”

He gazed down at a piece of paper in his hand. It was heavily creased from having been folded and refolded many times. Now, he unfolded it and spread it on the table.

“What’s that? she asked.

“An equation.”

Written on the paper was the formula:

K := { (i, x)

“Holly gave it to me,” he added. “When we had a… When we met up. It’s the Turing Paradox. I’ve been thinking about it a lot in here.”

“And?” she said, impatient to bring him back to the subject.

“It’s to do with sets.” He saw her incomprehension. “There’s a famous example about a barber who shaves every man in the village who doesn’t shave himself. The question then arises: does the barber shave himself? Logically, he can’t, because that would mean that instead of being in the group of those he shaves, he’s in the other group, men who shave themselves. But if he doesn’t shave himself, then he has to, because now he’s in the group of people he ought to be shaving. And, unlike most problems of logic, turning it into mathematics doesn’t help. The equation just chases itself round and round: the set of all sets that don’t include themselves.”

He held out his hand for a pen, and wrote:

let
R
= {
x
|
x
∉
x
}, then
R
∈
R
⇔
R
∉
R

“It was Alan Turing who realised that this was going to be a big problem for his Turing machines – in other words, computers. If you tell a computer to perform any open-ended task, you’re effectively asking it to calculate infinity; it ends up devoting all its processing power to the impossible, and grinds to a halt. So all computer programs have to have a work-around built into them to avoid what’s called the Halting Problem.

“Effectively, it’s logical proof that logic is only a tool – a useful, but fallible, way of looking at the world, not some defining principle of the world itself. To go on using logic, in fact, even mathematicians have to find workarounds: logical disjunctions, fuzzy logic, or in binary code, bent functions.”

He indicated the equation. “What Turing saw is that real life isn’t classical. It’s non-predicate, non-Boolean and non-Euclidean.” He paused. “In layman’s terms, it’s a beautiful fucked-up mess.”

Kat didn’t understand the mathematics, but she did understand that he was wavering.

“Daniele,” she said urgently. “Just think of a girl. Locked up – as
you
were once locked up. Think of her terror – the terror
you
must have felt, when the kidnappers held a knife to your ear. Think of what it turned you into. And don’t let that happen to her.”

He dragged his gaze to hers. She could tell what an effort it took; could tell, too, that when he achieved it – when their eye lines met and locked – he was considering what she had said.

For her part, she felt almost buffeted by the vulnerability and pain she saw there.
So this is why he doesn’t let people look
.

He blinked. “It isn’t as easy as people seem to think. I can’t just hack into my own code: that would take weeks, possibly months, and Carnivia would simply fall apart when I was done. But there may be another way.”

“Yes?”

He reached for the pen. “It’s clear from the webcasts that the kidnappers are looking at the live feed on their laptop,” he said, sketching a diagram as he spoke. “In other words, they see what everyone else is seeing – the image as broadcast on Carnivia – then fine-tune the picture accordingly.”

“Go on,” Kat said.

“Obviously, if we interfered with that image in any major way, they’d spot it immediately. But if we were to take the feed and zoom in on it, very, very slowly – so slowly that they’re never aware we’re doing it…” He paused. “It wouldn’t be much. But after a while, if you compared it to the raw, un zoomed footage, there’d be a border all around the screen which the kidnappers would believe is out of shot, but which you could monitor.”

She stood up. “How do I make it happen?”

“I can write a simple piece of code on your phone to add to the feed. It’ll make the zoom happen automatically, in increments too small for the naked eye to spot.”

In three minutes he’d composed a page of what looked to her like gibberish but which was actually, she guessed, the language he himself had invented; a language in which only a handful of people in the world were conversant – the unique, impenetrable code from which Carnivia was built.

“There,” he said, handing the phone back to her.

“That’ll do it?”

He nodded, exhausted.

“Daniele, thank you. You won’t regret this.”

She went straight to Saito and told him what Daniele was proposing. She left nothing out, although she glossed over several sections – the fact that her laptop had been infected by Ethereal’s RAT, for example; and the strange gift from Holly that had somehow convinced Daniele to cooperate.

When she’d finished, Saito said, “I have absolutely no idea if what you’ve just done is criminally reckless or a breakthrough. Or possibly both.” He lifted his phone and dialled a number. “Can you see how quickly Inspector Pettinelli can get here?”

It took her half an hour, during which time Kat was made to sit outside the general’s office like a naughty schoolgirl. Then Inspector Pettinelli swept in, and Kat explained everything for a second time.

“Well?” Saito demanded. “Will it work?”

Inspector Pettinelli considered. “I doubt it.”

“Why not?”

“This small ribbon of border we’ll be able to see –
if
Daniele Barbo is telling the truth about that – won’t actually show us anything new. The kidnappers wear masks at all times. And the camera’s in a closed cell.” She shook her head. “In my opinion, this is Barbo throwing us an insignificant bone in a last-ditch attempt to save his website.”

“Which suggests that CNAIPIC’s hunt for the servers is forcing him to play ball,” Saito suggested. “If he’s been prepared to offer the captain here this small concession, he may yet offer more.”

“Perhaps. But I don’t believe we need his cooperation now in any case. Yesterday we found a Carnivia server hidden on an industrial estate near Milan. Our feeling is he’s probably got only one more, and that it’s somewhere in this country. If we can find it, we can take him offline altogether.”

“And what will the kidnappers do then?” Kat interrupted. “Kill Mia? Cut off her ears and nose like Daniele’s, to show us how angry they are? It’s the most horrific gamble.”

Pettinelli looked at her calmly. “We can’t know what they’ll do. But whatever it is, it will be their responsibility, not ours. Whereas leaving Carnivia up when we have the means to block it would be abetting them in their criminal activity. CNAIPIC’s position is clear: broadcasting these films is itself a crime and should be prevented by any means possible.”

Inspector Pettinelli’s world was almost as black-and-white as Daniele’s, Kat reflected.

Saito looked from the inspector to Kat, his eyes hooded. “Very well,” he said at last. “We’ll pursue both avenues. The zoom can do no harm, assuming that it’s technically possible, so we’ll set up a small team to monitor it. Meanwhile, Barbo stays in preventative detention, and CNAIPIC will continue their efforts to find his servers. Thank you, Inspector.” As the two women turned to go, he added, “Captain, a word.”

When the inspector had left them, Saito shut the door. “I thought you were assigned to family liaison with the Elstons. Not to negotiations with a man detained under anti-terrorism legislation.”

“I saw the opportunity, sir. It seemed sensible to explore it.”

“Did it indeed?” He fixed her with a withering look. “Let me explain what CNAIPIC are doing, Captain. They’re making sure that everything they do is by the book, so that if this case has a tragic ending – which, let’s face it, is looking more and more likely – no one is going to be able to say they were the ones who messed it up. In that situation, the very worst thing would be for the Carabinieri to seem as if we were charging around the place without any clear strategy or lines of authorisation. From now on, stick to your remit, Captain. Is that understood?”