The Absolution (33 page)

THE CARABINIERI HELICOPTER
flew fast and low over the sea. Soon the coast of Italy was only a series of twinkling pinpricks behind them.

It had taken Bagnasco and Panicucci only a few minutes to identify the most likely ship. Not only was
Serenity of the Seas
a colossus of a vessel, carrying up to 3,750 passengers and 1,300 crew, but she was also gas oil powered, and Venice was the next destination on her itinerary. The clincher was the state-of-the-art technology she boasted, from free on-board wi-fi via the ship's own satellite, to the facial-recognition apps, location tracking and special RFID wristbands that replaced conventional security systems.

Prosecutor Marcello, though, had been unconvinced, particularly when Kat requested that Venice be closed to all shipping and a general evacuation organised immediately.

“Close Venice?” he echoed, appalled. “Do you have any idea, Capitano, how many cruise ships visit our city each day? And how many visitors those ships bring in?”

“Twenty thousand tourists a day, about a quarter of the total,” she said impatiently. “But the safety of the other three quarters, not to mention Venice's own citizens and its buildings, must be our priority now.”

“There has to be a reasonable balance between security
and letting people lead their normal lives. We can't be seen to be panicking at every fanciful suggestion.” Marcello had sat up a little straighter, clearly enjoying the unfamiliar sensation of casting himself as the champion of personal liberty. “Your request is refused.”

“Wait,” Saito said. “The ship in question is currently in international waters. So long as the ship's captain agrees, no Italian warrant is needed to board it. The request isn't yours to refuse or accept, Avvocato.” He looked at Kat. “I'm overruling the prosecutor. On my authority, you're to take two officers and search that ship. If you find anything, anything at all, we'll discuss further what to do.”

“Thank you, sir.” She'd been out of the door before he had a chance to change his mind.

Right now,
Serenity of the Seas
was sailing up the Croatian coast. By dawn, those lucky enough to have outside cabins on the starboard side would have a direct view of the scenic bays of Losinj, while even those on the inside could watch them slip by on their “virtual porthole”, a round television screen above their bed.

Around midday,
Serenity
would turn north-west and cross the Adriatic. With any luck, the late-afternoon sun would be bathing Venice in a magical glow as she sailed through the Bacino di San Marco and up the Giudecca Canal, towards the terminal at Tronchetto. Passengers could then plan to disembark for dinner, or join one of the walking tours laid on by the ship.

In practice, though, most would eat in Qsine,
Serenity
's own fine-dining option, or one of the other on-board restaurants. It was the approach itself, through the Bocca di Lido into the lagoon, that would have all 3,750 passengers
crowding the rails with their cameras as the ship towered over Piazza San Marco, the Doge's Palace and the basilica.

“There it is,” the helicopter pilot shouted over his shoulder, pointing. Kat looked down. There were three or four islands in view, their lights just visible in the darkness. One seemed especially built up. Then she realised it wasn't an island at all, but a ship.

She'd seen supertankers and had marvelled at the vast empty length of them, the crew quarters and bridge just a small structure on the endless deck.
Serenity
was nothing like that – although almost as long as a supertanker, its seven storeys towered above the deck, crowded with cabins, atriums, tennis courts, climbing walls, water slides . . . The bridge itself was a visor's eyepiece, a glass slit, tiny in proportion to the rest, that ran the whole width of the ship and even jutted out a little from each side.

That isn't a floating skyscraper
, she thought as the helicopter hovered carefully over the landing pad, matching its own speed to the ship's.
That's a floating city
.

She checked her handgun, and saw Bagnasco and Panicucci do the same.

Two officers were waiting to greet them and hurry them down to the bridge. It was bigger than it had appeared from the air, a double-height gallery forty metres wide. There was little in the way of what Kat, used to smaller boats, recognised as navigation equipment, only a cockpit like that of a jumbo jet situated dead centre, containing two seats surrounded by banked rows of screens and computer consoles. The ship's wheel the nearby helmsman was holding was no bigger than a motorboat's. It was extraordinary to think that such a monster could be controlled by something so tiny.

“I'm Captain Lozano and this is my First Officer, Daryl
Valasco,” the captain said, getting up from one of the cockpit seats. “How can I help you?”

“We're looking for a terrorist suspect we believe may be hiding amongst your IT crew,” Kat replied.

“I'll assemble them now.” The captain nodded to the first officer, who moved swiftly towards a phone. “Is my ship in any immediate danger?”

“I don't know,” she said truthfully. “Have you noticed anything strange since leaving Sicily? Particularly with your computer systems?”

He shook his head. “Absolutely nothing. It's been a very smooth voyage.”

“Well, as a precaution, I suggest you disable any equipment accessing the internet.”

The captain frowned. “It's not quite as simple as that. Our passenger-biometric-recognition systems all use the same network. But I'll have someone run some checks.”

While they waited for the men to be brought up, Kat found herself looking at Bagnasco and remembered that the
sottotenente
suffered from seasickness. “How are you feeling?” she asked quietly.

“Oh.” Bagnasco looked surprised. “I'm fine. I've got used to it, I guess.” Well, that was something, Kat thought.

Soon eight men were led into the bridge, still rubbing the sleep from their eyes.

“Is this all of you?” the captain demanded.

One of the men glanced down the line. “All except Mustaqim. He's on night duty.”

“Where is he?”

The man went to a computer screen mounted by the door and typed something. A map of the ship appeared. A small blue dot was flashing on Deck 3. Looking around, Kat noticed that
each crew member was wearing a coloured bracelet. Those must be the trackers she'd read about on Bagnasco's computer.

“He's in the gaming centre,” the man reported.

“First Officer Valasco, would you be so kind as to go and get him?”

“I'll go too,” Kat said. “Keep the rest here, would you? My officers can start checking their identities.”

She accompanied the first officer into a glass lift. It descended into an atrium three floors high, lined with shops.

“Follow me.” Valasco led the way across the floor and through a fire door. A sign announced that this was Casino Royale, the largest on-board gaming facility in European waters. On every side lights flashed and machines beeped. Even though it was the middle of the night, it was crowded with people.

He opened another fire door and they entered another windowless, beeping space. Only this time the machines were video games and the clientele mainly teenagers.

He pulled out a tablet and consulted the map again. The flashing dot was only a few feet away now. “Over here,” he said, leading the way towards a dance mat.

The teenager gyrating on the mat barely glanced at them, all her concentration fixed on the screen.

“Get me a picture of this Mustaqim,” Kat said. “As quickly as possible, please. And I need to speak to the captain again.”

“We have to search the ship,” she said.

“Very well. But we can't disturb the passengers. They'll be sleeping.”

“Wake them all, and search every cabin,” Kat said forcefully. “This man is dangerous.”

The captain frowned. “Forgive me, Capitano, but what
exactly
is
the intelligence that leads you to that conclusion? This is just one man. The engine room is securely guarded. He has achieved nothing so far, nor has he shown any signs of attempting anything criminal. Isn't it possible that he's simply used his technical skills to conceal the fact that he's gone off for a sleep when he should be on duty?”

“That's just the point. He's a hacker. And this is a ship controlled by computers.” Kat gestured at the technology on the bridge. “He could be planning anything at all.”

The captain looked a little amused. “But the passenger wireless network has no link to the systems that control the ship. All these machines uplink directly to the company's own satellite.”

“Then there's your weakness, Captain. If hacking a satellite is what it takes to control your ship, then believe me, that's what he'll have done.”

“But he doesn't control my ship,” the captain pointed out. “I do. Here, let me show you.” He turned to the man holding the ship's wheel. “Helmsman, bring her about three degrees.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The captain turned back to Kat. They waited. Kat saw the confidence in his eyes flicker, to be replaced by doubt and then alarm. He turned back to the officer. “What's the problem?” he said sharply.

“I don't know, sir.” The helmsman pressed some buttons rapidly. “Everything's working normally. But the ship isn't responding.”

Under their feet, Kat felt the slight increase in vibration as the engines picked up speed.

“Well, it responded to the throttle,” the captain said reasonably.

“Sir, I didn't increase throttle.”

There was a short silence. “Reduce speed to seven knots,” the captain said.

“Aye aye, sir.” And then, “Engines are not responding, sir.”

“Search the ship,” Kat repeated. “Every cabin. He's hiding here somewhere with a laptop, controlling it all.”

THEY ORGANISED THE
Serenity
's crew into search teams. As they went down to the first deck, the lights went out.

The emergency lighting immediately came on – dim LEDs in the floor and ceiling, designed to guide passengers in the event of a shipwreck. But suddenly the vessel looked less like a floating four-star hotel and more like a vast, fragile container crammed with humanity.

Even from the bridge, Kat could hear the shouts of panic. “You may need to start thinking about evacuating the ship,” she said to the captain when no one else was listening. “We should get as many people off as we can.”

He shook his head. “Unfortunately, that isn't an option. Our lifeboats are designed to be launched when the ship's stationary. Any more than five knots and they'd be dragged under by our wake.” He glanced at a screen. “At the moment, our speed is fourteen knots. And it's increasing all the time.”

The full horror of the situation was only just starting to dawn on her. “How long until we reach Venice?”

“At this speed, around four and a half hours.”

“And can we tell exactly where we're headed?”

“My navigator tells me that the GPS coordinates correspond to the Campanile di San Marco,” he said quietly.

The
campanile
, the famous bell tower in the middle of
Piazza San Marco. Almost equidistant between the Doge's Palace and the basilica, and more than a hundred metres from the seafront.

“It seems that he intends us to crash at full speed into the
piazzetta
,” the captain said. “What will happen then, we don't know for certain. But with full fuel tanks, it seems likely the ship will explode.”

“Can't you empty your fuel into the sea?”

He shook his head. “There's no mechanism for doing that.”

It's a floating bomb
, she thought. The ship was a huge, seaborne missile, aimed at the very heart of Venice. She thought of the pictures that would be on the front pages of tomorrow's papers. The
campanile
would be toppled, the twin columns of San Marco and San Teodoro smashed to nothing, the stone lions on which children played and visitors posed for photographs lost forever. And the square where generations of her ancestors had gossiped and strolled and bought cold drinks from the wine sellers who lingered in the shade of the colonnades would have become a scene of destruction, reclaimed by the sea, a second Ground Zero.

But it was more than that. The Doge's Palace, famously, had a wooden roof: it had been constructed by the shipbuilders of the Arsenale as a kind of upended hull, using the same techniques that had made Venice's fleet the envy of the world. The five golden domes of the basilica – designed in the thirteenth century so that the symbol of Venice's power would be visible from far out to sea – were also made of wood. Fire had long been the threat which most exercised Venice's authorities, to the extent that, even today, restaurants had to apply for a special licence to install pizza ovens. Fire could jump the narrow waterways in an instant, consuming cramped apartment buildings and grand
palazzi
alike. If
Serenity
exploded
in Piazza San Marco, how far would the destruction spread? To the rest of the San Marco district; perhaps as far as Cannaregio and Castello . . . She felt a cold fury that she pushed to one side.

She called Piola to update him. “Can
you
still get off?” he wanted to know.

“I don't think so. The pilot says the helicopter can't take off at this speed. But in any case, I couldn't leave the passengers.”

He said quietly, “If you find him, and you have the option, shoot to kill. Promise me, Kat – don't think twice.”

“I will.” She hesitated. “Are they evacuating the city yet? In case we're not successful?”

“We've been discussing it all night.” He sighed. “Nobody in authority wants to be the one to take that decision. You know what the Ponte della Libertà's like at the best of times. Even if we had the means to communicate a general evacuation, how could we possibly get three hundred thousand tourists across one small bridge in just a few hours? There would be panic.”

“Even so, we have to try.”

“I'll keep working on it. But Kat, let's hope it doesn't come to that. He must be somewhere on that ship. There's still time to find him.”

As night turned to day, Daniele finished disinfecting the last of his users' computers. There had been a few he'd failed to get to in time. In cities up and down Italy traffic lights failed, and the morning rush hour was even more gridlocked than usual. Hundreds of internet-connected cars – those using Ford's SYNC technology, BMW's ConnectedDrive, Audi's Connect, and Mercedes' COMAND – had crashed, adding to the chaos, while some drivers' garage doors simply refused
to open. In several government buildings, water sprinklers came on for no reason, whilst the servers of Italy's three biggest banks suddenly uploaded all their customers' details onto the internet.

So far as he could tell, though, none of the attacks had resulted in any loss of life. By 10 a.m. there was only the hacker's own computer left.

By half past ten, newsfeeds across Italy were reporting the situation. Some were already speculating that it could have been a cyber attack.

Daniele thought for a moment, then posted a message on Carnivia's login page.

Dear Carnivians,

Over the last few weeks, Carnivia has been compromised. A hacker succeeded in spreading a virus among the site's users. His aim was to create terror by causing hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions, of internet-connected devices to malfunction simultaneously.

The only way to prevent these attacks was for me to remove Carnivia's encryption systems and disinfect the site. The encryption will be restored shortly, but in the meantime you should be aware that nothing you do or say on Carnivia will have the usual level of anonymity.

In the circumstances, today's elections have been suspended for twenty-four hours.

Daniele Barbo

He pressed “Publish” and sat back. He had no doubt there would be howls of protest; accusations, too, that he'd misled his users when he'd said the encryption couldn't be broken even by him. Others would seize the opportunity to argue that he should never have allowed his users to be anonymous in the first place.

But for the moment he had more pressing things to think about, and an important decision to make.