The Sigma Protocol Read online

  Explosive praise for Robert Ludlum’s

  THE SIGMA PROTOCOL

  “Perfectly executed…Packed with all the classic Ludlum elements…thunders forward at breakneck pace.”

  —People

  “Vintage Ludlum.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Dazzling…a clean launch of the ’80s spy novel into a thrilling action/adventure web of intrigue meant for the 21st century.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] triumph…Harkens back to the roller coaster ride/thrill-a-minute Bourne Identity.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Ludlum at his best.”

  —Sullivan County Democrat

  “It’s amazing that ten pages before the end of the book, you still can’t figure out how he’s going to resolve the complex plot he’s presented. Yet he does, and pretty satisfactorily.”

  —Colorado Springs Gazette

  “[Ludlum] shows that…his storytelling skill was still at an all time high…provides no less suspense than his die-hard fans would expect.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  “An accomplished novel…classic Ludlum…moves at breakneck speed…with well-developed players and a fascinating stage, Ludlum has risen to some of his finest work in this clever and enjoyable novel.”

  —Chattanooga Times Free Press

  MORE…

  “Ludlum keeps things moving with plenty of gunplay and running about…quite good.”

  —Booklist

  “A superior piece of work.”

  —Roanoke Times

  “Gripping…compelling…hooks readers and keeps [them] on the edge of their seats.”

  —Charleston Post & Courier

  Also by Robert Ludlum

  The Bancroft Strategy

  The Ambler Warning

  The Tristan Betrayal

  The Janson Directive

  The Prometheus Deception

  The Matarese Countdown

  The Apocalypse Watch

  The Road to Omaha

  The Scorpio Illusion

  The Bourne Ultimatum

  The Icarus Agenda

  The Bourne Supremacy

  The Aquitaine Progression

  The Parsifal Mosaic

  The Bourne Identity

  The Matarese Circle

  The Gemini Contenders

  The Holcroft Covenant

  The Chancellor Manuscript

  The Road to Gandolfo

  The Rhinemann Exchange

  The Cry of Halidon

  Trevayne

  The Matlock Paper

  The Osterman Weekend

  The Scarlatti Inheritance

  The Sigma

  Protocol

  Robert Ludlum

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE SIGMA PROTOCOL

  Copyright © 2001 by Myn Pyn LLC.

  Excerpt from The Janson Directive copyright © 2002 by Myn Pyn LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  ISBN: 0-312-94358-X

  EAN: 978-0-312-94358-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / October 2001

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / October 2002

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Chapter One

  Zurich

  “May I get you something to drink while you wait?”

  The Hotelpage was a compact man who spoke English with only a trace of an accent. His brass name-plate gleamed against his loden-green uniform.

  “No, thank you,” Ben Hartman said, smiling wanly.

  “Are you sure? Perhaps some tea? Coffee? Mineral water?” The bellhop peered up at him with the bright-eyed eagerness of someone who has only a few minutes left to enhance his parting tip. “I’m terribly sorry your car is delayed.”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  Ben stood in the lobby of the Hotel St. Gotthard, an elegant nineteenth-century establishment that specialized in catering to the well-heeled international businessman—and, face it, that’s me, Ben thought sardonically. Now that he had checked out, he wondered idly whether he could tip the bellhop not to carry his bags, not to follow his every move a few feet behind, like a Bengali bride, not to offer unceasing apologies for the fact that the car that was to take Ben to the airport had not yet arrived. Luxury hotels the world over prided themselves on such coddling, but Ben, who traveled quite a bit, inevitably found it intrusive, deeply irritating. He’d spent so much time trying to break out of the cocoon, hadn’t he? But the cocoon—the stale rituals of privilege—had won out in the end. The Hotelpage had his number, all right: just another rich, spoiled American.

  Ben Hartman was thirty-six, but today he felt much older. It wasn’t just the jet lag, though he had arrived from New York yesterday and still felt that sense of dislocation. It was something about being in Switzerland again: in happier days, he’d spent a lot of time here, skiing too fast, driving too fast, feeling like a wild spirit among its stone-faced, rule-bound burghers. He wished he could regain that spirit, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t been to Switzerland since his brother, Peter—his identical twin, his closest friend in all the world—had been killed here four years ago. Ben had expected the trip to stir up memories, but nothing like this. Now he realized what a mistake he’d made coming back here. From the moment he’d arrived at Kloten Airport, he’d been distracted, swollen with emotion—anger, grief, loneliness.

  But he knew better than to let it show. He’d done a little business yesterday afternoon, and this morning had a cordial meeting with Dr. Rolf Grendelmeier of the Union Bank of Switzerland. Pointless, of course, but you had to keep the clients happy; glad-handing was part of the job. If he was honest with himself, it was the job, and Ben sometimes felt a pang at how easily he slipped into the role, that of the legendary Max Hart-man’s only surviving son, the heir presumptive to the family fortune, and to the CEO’s office at Hartman Capital Management, the multibillion-dollar firm founded by his father.

  Now Ben possessed the whole trick bag of international finance—the closet full of Brioni and Kiton suits, the easy smile, the firm handshake, and, most of all, the gaze: steady, level, concerned. It was a gaze that conveyed responsibility, dependability, and sagacity, and that, often as not, concealed desperate boredom.

  Still, he hadn’t really come to Switzerland to do business. At Kloten, a small plane would take him to St. Moritz for a ski vacation with an extremely wealthy, elderly client, the old man’s wife, and his allegedly beautiful granddaughter. The client’s arm-twisting was jovial but persistent. Ben was being fixed up, and he knew it. This was one of the hazards of being a presentable, well-off, “eligible” single man in Manhattan: his clients were forever trying to set him up with their daughters, their nieces, their cousins. It was hard to say no politely. And once in a while he actually met a woman whose company he enjoyed. You never knew. Anyway, Max wanted grandchildren.

  Max Hartman, the philanthropist and holy terror, the founder of Hartman Capital Management. The self-made immigrant who’d arrived in America, a refugee from Nazi Germany, with the proverbial ten bucks in his pocket, had founded an investment c
ompany right after the war, and relentlessly built it up into the multibillion-dollar firm it was now. Old Max, in his eighties and living in solitary splendor in Bedford, New York, still ran the company and made sure no one ever forgot it.

  It wasn’t easy working for your father, but it was even harder when you had precious little interest in investment banking, in “asset allocation” and “risk management,” and in all the other mind-numbing buzzwords.

  Or when you had just about zero interest in money. Which was, he realized, a luxury enjoyed mainly by those who had too much of it. Like the Hartmans, with their trust funds and private schools and the immense Westchester County estate. Not to mention the twenty-thousand-acre spread near the Greenbrier, and all the rest of it.

  Until Peter’s plane fell out of the sky, Ben had been able to do what he really loved: teaching, especially teaching kids whom most people had given up on. He’d taught fifth grade in a tough school in an area of Brooklyn known as East New York. A lot of the kids were trouble, and yes, there were gangs and sullen ten-year-olds as well armed as Colombian drug lords. But they needed a teacher who actually gave a damn about them. Ben did give a damn, and every once in a while he actually made a difference to somebody’s life.

  When Peter died, however, Ben had been all but forced to join the family business. He’d told friends it was a deathbed promise exacted by his mother, and he supposed it was. But cancer or no cancer, he could never refuse her anyway. He remembered her drawn face, the skin ashen from another bout of chemotherapy, the reddish smudges beneath her eyes like bruises. She’d been almost twenty years younger than Dad, and he had never imagined that she might be the first to go. Work, for the night cometh, she’d said, smiling bravely. Most of the rest she left unspoken. Max had survived Dachau only to lose a son, and now he was about to lose his wife. How much could any man, however powerful, stand?

  “Has he lost you, too?” she had whispered. At the time, Ben was living a few blocks from the school, in a sixth-floor walk-up in a decrepit tenement building where the corridors stank of cat urine and the linoleum curled up from the floors. As a matter of principle, he refused to accept any money from his parents.

  “Do you hear what I’m asking you, Ben?”

  “My kids,” Ben had said, though there was already defeat in his voice. “They need me.”

  “He needs you,” she’d replied, very quietly, and that was the end of the discussion.

  So now he took the big private clients out to lunch, made them feel important and well cared for and flattered to be cosseted by the founder’s son. A little furtive volunteer work at a center for “troubled kids” who made his fifth-graders look like altar boys. And as much time as he could grab traveling, skiing, parasailing, snowboarding, or rock-climbing, and going out with a series of women while fastidiously avoiding settling down with any of them.

  Old Max would have to wait.

  Suddenly the St. Gotthard lobby, all rose damask and heavy dark Viennese furniture, felt oppressive. “You know, I think I’d prefer to wait outside,” Ben told the Hotelpage. The man in the loden-green uniform simpered, “Of course, sir, whatever you prefer.”

  Ben stepped blinking into the bright noontime sun, and took in the pedestrian traffic on the Bahnhofstrasse, the stately avenue lined with linden trees, expensive shops, and cafés, and a procession of financial institutions housed in small limestone mansions. The bellhop scurried behind him with his baggage, hovering until Ben disbursed a fifty-franc note and gestured for him to leave.

  “Ah, thank you so much, sir,” the Hotelpage exclaimed with feigned surprise.

  The doormen would let him know when his car appeared in the cobbled drive to the left of the hotel, but Ben was in no hurry. The breeze from Lake Zurich was refreshing, after time spent in stuffy, overheated rooms where the air was always suffused with the smell of coffee and, fainter but unmistakable, cigar smoke.

  Ben propped his brand-new skis, Volant Ti Supers, against one of the hotel’s Corinthian pillars, near his other bags, and watched the busy street scene, the spectacle of anonymous passersby. An obnoxious young businessman braying into a cell phone. An obese woman in a red parka pushing a baby carriage. A crowd of Japanese tourists chattering excitedly. A tall middle-aged man in a business suit with his graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. A deliveryman with a box of lilies, attired in the distinctive orange and black uniform of Blümchengallerie, the upscale flower chain. And a striking, expensively dressed young blonde, clutching a Festiner’s shopping bag, who glanced generally in Ben’s direction, and then glanced at him again—quickly, but with a flicker of interest before averting her eyes. Had we but world enough and time, thought Ben. His gaze wandered again. The sounds of traffic were continuous but muted, drifting in from the Löwenstrasse, a few hundred feet away. Somewhere nearby a high-strung dog was yip-ping. A middle-aged man wearing a blazer with an odd purple hue, a tad too stylish for Zurich. And then he saw a man about his age, walking with a purposeful stride past the Koss Konditerei. He looked vaguely familiar—

  Very familiar.

  Ben did a double-take, peered more closely. Was that—could that really be—his old college buddy Jimmy Cavanaugh? A quizzical smile spread over Ben’s face.

  Jimmy Cavanaugh, whom he’d known since his sophomore year at Princeton. Jimmy, who’d glamorously lived off-campus, smoked unfiltered cigarettes that would have choked an ordinary mortal, and could drink anybody under the table, even Ben, who had something of a reputation in that regard. Jimmy had come from a small town in western upstate New York called Homer, which supplied him with a storehouse of tales. One night, after he taught Ben the finer points of downing Tequila shots with beer chasers, Jimmy had him gasping for breath with his stories about the town sport of “cow tipping.” Jimmy was rangy, sly, and worldly, had an immense repertory of pranks, a quick wit, and the gift of gab. Most of all, he just seemed more alive than most of the kids Ben knew: the clammy-palmed preprofessionals trading tips about the entrance exams for law school or B-school, the pretentious French majors with their clove cigarettes and black scarves, the sullen burn-out cases for whom rebellion was found in a bottle of green hair dye. Jimmy seemed to stand apart from all that, and Ben, envying him his simple ease with himself, was pleased, even flattered by the friendship. As so often happens, they’d lost touch after college; Jimmy had gone off to do something at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and Ben had stayed in New York. Neither of them was big on college nostalgia, and then distance and time had done their usual job. Still, Ben reflected, Jimmy Cavanaugh was probably one of the few people he actually felt like talking to just now.

  Jimmy Cavanaugh—it was definitely Jimmy—was now near enough that Ben could see that he was wearing an expensive-looking suit, under a tan trench coat, and smoking a cigarette. His build had changed: he was broader-shouldered now. But it was Cavanaugh for sure.

  “Jesus,” Ben said aloud. He started down the Bahnhofstrasse toward Jimmy, then remembered his Volants, which he didn’t want to leave unattended, doormen or no doormen. He picked the skis up, hefted them over one shoulder, and walked toward Cavanaugh. The red hair had faded and receded a bit, the once-freckled face was a little lined, he was wearing a two-thousand-dollar Armani suit, and what the hell was he doing in Zurich of all places? Suddenly they made eye contact.

  Jimmy broke out in a wide grin, and he strode toward Ben, an arm outstretched, the other in the pocket of his trench coat.

  “Hartman, you old dog,” Jimmy crowed from a few yards away. “Hey, pal, great to see you!”

  “My God, it really is you!” Ben exclaimed. At the same time, Ben was puzzled to see a metal tube protruding from his old friend’s trench coat, a silencer, he now realized, the muzzle pointing directly up at him from waist level.

  It had to be some bizarre prank, good old Jimmy was always doing that kind of thing. Yet just as Ben jokingly threw his hands up in the air and dodged an imaginary bullet, he saw Jimmy Cavanaugh shift his right han
d ever so slightly, the unmistakable motions of someone squeezing a trigger.

  What happened next took a fraction of a second, yet time seemed to telescope, slowing almost to a halt. Reflexively, abruptly, Ben swung his skis down from his right shoulder in a sharp arc, trying to scuttle the weapon but in the process slamming his old friend hard in the neck.

  An instant later—or was it the same instant?—he heard the explosion, felt a sharp spray on the back of his neck as a very real bullet shattered a glass store-front just a few feet away.

  This couldn’t be happening!

  Caught by surprise, Jimmy lost his balance and bellowed in pain. As he stumbled to the ground, he flung out a hand to grab the skis. One hand. The left. Ben felt as if he’d swallowed ice. The instinct to brace yourself when you stumble is strong: you reach out with both hands, and you drop your suitcase, your pen, your newspaper. There were few things you wouldn’t drop—few things you’d still clutch as you fell.

  The gun was real.

  Ben heard the skis clatter to the sidewalk, saw a thin streak of blood on the side of Jimmy’s face, saw Jimmy scrambling to regain his orientation. Then Ben lurched forward and, in a great burst of speed, took off down the street.

  The gun was real. And Jimmy had fired it at him.

  Ben’s path was obstructed by crowds of shoppers and businessmen hurrying to lunch appointments, and as he wove through the crowd he collided with several people, who shouted protests. Still he vaulted ahead, running as he’d never run before, zigzagging, hoping that the irregular pattern would make him an elusive target.

  What the hell was going on? This was madness, absolute madness!

  He made the mistake of glancing behind him as he ran, inadvertently slowing his pace, his face now a flashing beacon to a once-friend who for some unfathomable reason seemed bent on killing him. Suddenly, barely two feet away, a young woman’s forehead exploded in a mist of red.

  Ben gasped in terror.

  Jesus Christ!

  No, it couldn’t be happening, this wasn’t reality, this was some bizarre nightmare—