The Sigma Protocol Page 3

  Quickly he surveyed the room, spotted the ancient television, and turned it on. An old black-and-white movie was playing. Now he set about his task with the confidence of someone much older.

  He went back to the body, set it carefully on a shabby orange lounge chair, arranging the arms and head so that it looked as if the old man had fallen asleep in front of the TV.

  Pulling a roll of paper towels from inside his slicker, he swiftly mopped up the water that had pooled on the wide pine boards of the entrance hall. Then he returned to the front door, which was still open, glanced around outside, and when he was satisfied, stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind him.

  The Austrian Alps

  The silver Mercedes S430 wound up the steep mountain road until it arrived at the clinic gates. A security guard in the booth by the gate came out, saw who the passenger was, and said with great deference, “Welcome, sir.” He did not bother to ask for identification. The chief of the clinic was to be admitted with dispatch. The car turned onto the ring drive through a sloping campus where the vibrant green of well-tended grass and sculpted pines contrasted with drifting patches of powdery snow. Towering in the distance overhead were the magnificent white crags and planes of the Schneeberg peak. The car drove around a dense stand of tall yews, and over to a second, hidden security booth. The guard, who had already been alerted to the director’s arrival, pressed the button that raised the steel bar and, at the same time, touched the switch that lowered the steel spikes set into the pavement, which would ruin the tires of any vehicle that entered without being cleared through.

  The Mercedes drove up a long narrow road that led only to one place: an old clock factory, formerly a Schloss that had been built two centuries ago. A coded remote signal was sent, an electronic door opened, and the car pulled into the reserved parking space. The driver got out and opened the door for his passenger, who strode quickly into the entrance. There another security guard, this one behind bulletproof glass, nodded and smiled a welcome.

  The director entered the elevator, an anachronism in this ancient Alpine structure, inserted his digitally encoded identification card to unlock it, and made his way to the third, and top, floor. There he passed through three sets of doors, each unlocked by means of an electronic card reader, until he came to the conference room, where the others were already seated around the long burnished mahogany table. He took his place at the head of the table and looked around at the others.

  “Gentlemen,” he began, “only days remain before the fulfillment of our dream so long deferred. The long gestation period is nearly over. Which is to say, your patience is about to be rewarded, and beyond the wildest dreams of our founders.”

  The sounds of approval around the table were gratifying, and he waited for them to subside before continuing. “As for security, I have been assured that very few of the angeli rebelli remain. Soon there will be none. There is, however, one small problem.”

  Zurich

  Ben tried to stand, but his legs would not support him. He sank to the ground, on the verge of becoming violently ill, feeling at once cold and prickly-hot. Blood roared in his ears. An icicle of fear was lodged in his stomach.

  What had just happened? he asked himself. Why in the hell was Jimmy Cavanaugh trying to kill him? What kind of madness was this? Had the man’s mind snapped? Had Ben’s sudden reappearance after a decade and a half triggered something in a disturbed brain, a rush of twisted memory that for some reason had propelled him to murder?

  He could taste liquid, brackish and metallic, and he touched his lips. Blood was seeping from his nose. It must have happened in the struggle. He’d gotten a bloody nose, Jimmy Cavanaugh a bullet in the brain.

  The noise from the shopping arcade outside was subsiding. There were still shouts, the occasional anguished cry, but the chaos was diminishing. Steadying himself with his hands on the floor, he pushed himself up, managed to get to his feet. He felt dizzy, vertiginous, and knew it was not from any loss of blood; he was in shock.

  He forced himself to look at Cavanaugh’s body. By now he’d calmed down enough to think.

  Somebody I haven’t seen since the age of twenty-one turns up in Zurich, goes insane, and tries to kill me. And now he lies here dead, in a tacky medieval-themed restaurant. No explanation to offer. Maybe there’d never be an explanation.

  Carefully avoiding the pool of blood around the head, he went through Cavanaugh’s pockets, first the suit jacket, then the pants, then the pockets of the trench coat. There was absolutely nothing there. No ID cards, no credit cards. Bizarre. Cavanaugh seemed to have emptied his pockets, as if in preparation for what happened.

  It had been premeditated. Planned.

  He noticed the blue-black Walther PPK still clutched in Cavanaugh’s hand and considered checking the magazine to see how many rounds were left. He pondered taking it, just slipping the slim pistol into his pocket. What if Cavanaugh wasn’t alone?

  What if there were others?

  He hesitated. This was a crime scene of sorts. Best not to alter it in any way, in case there was legal trouble down the line.

  Slowly, he got up and made his way, dazed, into the main hall. Now it was mostly deserted, apart from a few clusters of emergency medical technicians tending to the wounded. Someone was being carried on a stretcher.

  Ben had to find a policeman.

  The two cops, one clearly a rookie and one middle-aged, looked at him dubiously. He’d found them standing by the Bijoux Suisse kiosk, near the Marktplatz food court. They wore navy-blue sweaters with red shoulder patches that read Zürichpolizei; each had a walkie-talkie and a pistol holstered to the belt.

  “May I see your passport, please?” the young one asked after Ben had spoken for a few minutes. Evidently the older one either didn’t speak English or preferred not to.

  “For God’s sake,” Ben snapped in frustration, “people have been killed. A guy’s lying dead in a restaurant down there, a man who tried—”

  “Ihren Pass, bitte,” the rookie persisted sternly. “Do you have identification?”

  “Of course I do,” Ben said, reaching for his billfold. He pulled it out and handed it over.

  The rookie examined it suspiciously, then gave it to the senior man, who glanced at it without interest and thrust it back at Ben.

  “Where were you when this happened?” the rookie asked.

  “Waiting in front of the Hotel St. Gotthard. A car was supposed to take me to the airport.”

  The rookie took a step forward, uncomfortably close to him, and his neutral gaze became frankly mistrustful: “You are going to the airport?”

  “I was on my way to St. Moritz.”

  “And suddenly this man fired a gun at you?”

  “He’s an old friend. Was an old friend.”

  The rookie lifted an eyebrow.

  “I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years,” Ben continued. “He recognized me, sort of came toward me as if he was happy to see me, then suddenly he pulls out a gun.”

  “You had a quarrel?”

  “We didn’t exchange two words!”

  The younger cop’s eyes narrowed. “You had arranged to meet?”

  “No. It was pure coincidence.”

  “Yet he had a gun, a loaded gun.” The rookie looked at the older cop, then turned back to Ben. “And it was outfitted with a silencer, you say. He must have known you would be there.”

  Ben shook his head, exasperated. “I hadn’t talked to him in years! He couldn’t possibly have known I’d be here.”

  “Surely you must agree that people do not just carry around guns with silencers unless they mean to use them.”

  Ben hesitated. “I suppose that’s right.”

  The older policeman cleared his throat. “And what kind of gun did you have?” he asked in surprisingly fluent English.

  “What are you talking about?” Ben asked, his voice rising in indignation. “I didn’t have a gun.”

  “Then forgive me, I must be con
fused. You say your friend had a gun, and that you did not. In which case, why is he dead, and not you?”

  It was a good question. Ben just shook his head as he thought back to the moment when Jimmy Cavanaugh leveled the steel tube at him. Part of him—the rational part—had assumed it was a prank. But obviously part of him had not: he’d been primed to react swiftly. Why? He replayed in his mind Jimmy’s easy lope, his wide welcoming grin…and his cold eyes. Watchful eyes that didn’t quite match the grin. A small discordant element that his subconscious mind must have registered.

  “Come, let us go to see the body of this assassin,” the older policeman said, and he placed a hand on Ben’s shoulder in a way that was not at all affectionate but instead conveyed that Ben was no longer a free man.

  Ben led the way across the arcade, which now swarmed with policemen, reporters snapping pictures, and made his way down to the second level. The two Polizei followed close behind. At the KATZKELLER sign Ben entered the dining room, went to the alcove, and pointed.

  “Well?” demanded the rookie angrily.

  Astonished, Ben stared, wide-eyed, at the spot where Cavanaugh’s body had been. He felt light-headed, his mind frozen in shock. There was nothing there.

  No pool of blood. No body, no gun. The lantern arm had been replaced in its fixture as if it had never been removed. The floor was clean and bare.

  It was as if nothing had ever happened there.

  “My God,” Ben breathed. Had he snapped, lost touch with reality? But he could feel the solidity of the floor, the bar, the tables. If this was some elaborate stunt… but it wasn’t. He had somehow stumbled into something intricate and terrifying.

  The policemen stared at him with rekindled suspicion.

  “Listen,” Ben said, his voice reduced to a hoarse whisper, “I can’t explain this. I was here. He was here.”

  The older policeman spoke rapidly on the walkie-talkie, and soon they were joined by another officer, stolid and barrel-chested. “Perhaps I am easily confused, so let me try to understand. You race through a busy street, and then through the underground shopping arcade. All around you, people are shot. You claim that you are being chased by a maniac. You promise to show us this man, this American. And yet there is no maniac. There is only you. A strange American spinning fairy tales.”

  “Goddammit, I’ve told you the truth!”

  “You say a madman from your past was responsible for the bloodshed,” the rookie said in a quiet, steely voice. “I see only one madman here.”

  The older policeman conferred in Schweitzerdeutsch with his barrel-chested colleague. “You were staying at the Hotel St. Gotthard, yes?” he finally asked Ben. “Why don’t you take us there?”

  Accompanied by three policemen—the barrel-chested one walking behind him, the rookie ahead of him, and the older policeman close by his side—Ben made his way through the underground arcade, up the escalator, and down the Bahnhofstrasse toward his hotel. Though he was not yet cuffed, he knew that this was merely a formality.

  In front of the hotel, a policewoman, whom the others had clearly sent ahead, was keeping a custodial watch over his luggage. Her brown hair was short, almost mannish, and her expression was stony.

  Through the lobby windows, Ben caught a glimpse of the unctuous Hotelpage who’d attended to him earlier. Their eyes met, and the man turned away with stricken look, as if he’d just learned he’d toted bags for Lee Harvey Oswald.

  “Your luggage, yes?” the rookie asked Ben.

  “Yes, yes,” Ben said. “What of it?” Now what? What more could there be?

  The policewoman opened the tan leather hand luggage. The others looked inside, then turned to face Ben. “This is yours?” the rookie asked.

  “I already said it was,” Ben replied.

  The middle-aged cop took a handkerchief from his pants pocket and used it to lift an object out of the satchel. It was Cavanaugh’s Walther PPK pistol.

  Chapter Three

  Washington, D.C.

  A serious-looking young woman strode briskly down the long central corridor of the fifth floor of the United States Department of Justice Building, the mammoth Classical Revival structure that occupied the entire block between Ninth and Tenth Streets. She had glossy dark brown hair, caramel-brown eyes, a sharp nose. At first glance she looked part-Asian, or perhaps Hispanic. She wore a tan trench coat, carried a leather briefcase, and might have been taken for a lawyer, a lobbyist, maybe a government official on the fast track.

  Her name was Anna Navarro. She was thirty-three and worked in the Office of Special Investigations, a little-known unit of the Justice Department.

  When she arrived at the stuffy conference room, she realized that the weekly unit meeting was already well under way. Arliss Dupree, standing by a whiteboard on an easel, turned as she entered and stopped in mid-sentence. She felt the stares, couldn’t help blushing a little, which was no doubt what Dupree wanted. She took the first empty seat. A shaft of sunlight blinded her.

  “There she is. Nice of you to join us,” Dupree said. Even his insults were predictable. She merely nodded, determined not to let him provoke her. He’d told her the meeting would be at eight-fifteen. Obviously it had been scheduled to start at eight, and he would deny ever having told her otherwise. A petty, bureaucratic way of giving her a hard time. They both knew why she was late, even if nobody else here did.

  Before Dupree was brought in to head the Office of Special Investigations, meetings were a rarity. Now he held them weekly, as a chance to parade his authority. Dupree was short and wide, mid-forties, the body of a weight lifter in a too-tight light gray suit, one of three shopping-mall suits he rotated. Even across the room she could smell his drugstore aftershave. He had a ruddy moon face the texture of lumpy porridge.

  There was a time when she actually cared what men like Arliss Dupree thought about her and tried to win them over. Now she didn’t give a damn. She had her friends, and Dupree was simply not among them. Across the table, David Denneen, a square-jawed, sandy-haired man, gave her a sympathetic glance.

  “As some of you may have heard, Internal Compliance has asked for our colleague here to be temporarily assigned to them.” Dupree turned to her, his eyes hard. “Given the amount of unfinished work you’ve got here, I’d consider it less than responsible, Agent Navarro, if you accepted an assignment from another division. Is this something you’ve been angling for? You can tell us, you know.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” she told him truthfully.

  “That right? Well, maybe I’ve been leaping to conclusions here,” he said, his tone softening a bit.

  “Quite possibly,” she replied, dryly.

  “I was making the assumption that you were wanted for an assignment. Maybe you are the assignment.”

  “Come again?”

  “Maybe you’re the one under investigation,” Dupree said in a mellower tone, evidently pleased by the idea.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. You’re a deep one, Agent Navarro.” There were laughs from some of his drinking buddies.

  She shifted her chair to get the light out of her eyes.

  Ever since Detroit, when the two of them were staying on the same floor of the Westin and she turned down (politely, she thought) Dupree’s drunken, highly explicit proposal, he’d been leaving condescending little remarks, like rat droppings, in her performance evaluation folder:… as best she can given her obviously limited interest…errors a result of inattention, not incompetence…

  He described her to a male colleague, she’d heard, as “a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen.” He tarred her with the most vicious insult you can give someone in the Bureau: not a team player. Not a team player meant she didn’t go out drinking with the boys, including Dupree, kept her social life separate. He also made a point of papering her files with mentions of mistakes she’d made—a few minor procedural omissions, nothing at all serious. Once, on the trail of a rogue DEA agent who’d been turned by a drug lord and
was implicated in several homicides, she’d neglected to submit an FD-460 within the required seven days.

  The best agents make mistakes. She was convinced that the best ones in fact made more minor gaffes than average, because they were focused more on following the trail than on following every single procedure in the manual of rules and regs. You could slavishly observe every last ridiculous procedural requirement and never crack a case.

  She felt his stare on her. She looked up, and their eyes locked.

  “We’ve got an unusually heavy caseload to deal with,” Dupree went on. “When somebody doesn’t do their share, it means more work for everyone else. We’ve got a midlevel IRS manager suspected of organizing some pretty complicated tax scams. We’ve got a rogue FBI guy who seems to be using his shield to pursue a personal vendetta. We’ve got some ATF shit-heel selling munitions from the evidence vaults.” That was a typical array of cases for the OSI: investigating (“auditing” was the term of art) misconduct involving members of other government agencies—in essence, the federal version of internal affairs.

  “Maybe the workload here is a little much for you,” Dupree said, pressing. “Is that it?”

  She pretended to jot down a note and didn’t reply. Her face was prickly warm. She inhaled slowly, struggling to tamp down her anger. She refused to give in to his baiting. Finally she spoke. “Look, if it’s inconvenient, why don’t you refuse the request for interdepartmental transfer?” Anna asked it in a reasonable tone of voice, but it wasn’t an innocent question: Dupree lacked the authority to challenge the highly secretive, all-powerful Internal Compliance Unit, and any reference to the limits of his authority was bound to infuriate him.

  Dupree’s little ears reddened. “I’m expecting a brief consult. If the spook hunters at ICU knew as much as they pretend, they might realize that you aren’t exactly cut out for that line of work.”

  His eyes shone with what she imagined was contempt.