The Sigma Protocol Page 6

  Darnell lived on the second floor of a building with a ruined facade, a stairwell festooned with graffiti. The buzzer was broken, but the apartment door was unlocked, and so he traipsed up the stairs and knocked on 2B. After a long wait, Darnell’s mother appeared, visibly battered—her cheeks bruised, her lips swollen. He introduced himself and asked to come in. Joyce paused, then led him toward the small kitchen, with its deeply gouged countertops of beige Formica and yellow cotton drapes flapping in the breeze.

  Ben heard yelling in the background before the mother’s boyfriend strode over. “Who the fuck are you?” demanded Orlando, a tall, powerfully built man in a red tank top and loose jeans. Ben recognized a convict’s physique: an upper body so overdeveloped that the muscles looked draped over his chest and shoulders like a lifejacket.

  “He’s Darnell’s schoolteacher,” Darnell’s mother said, the words cottony from her bruised lips.

  “And you—are you Darnell’s guardian?” Ben asked Orlando.

  “Hell, you could say I’m his teacher now. Only, I’m teaching him shit he needs to know. Unlike you.”

  Now Ben saw Darnell, fear making him look even younger than his ten years, padding into the kitchen to join them. “Go away, Darnell,” his mother said in a half-whisper.

  “Darnell don’t need you filling his head with bull-shit. Darnell needs to learn how to move rocks.” Orlando smiled, revealing a gleaming gold front.

  Ben felt a jolt. Moving rocks: selling crack. “He’s a fifth-grader. He’s ten years old.”

  “That’s right. A juvenile. Cops know he ain’t worth arresting.” He laughed. “I gave him the choice, though: he could either peddle rocks or peddle his ass.”

  The words, the man’s casual brutality, sickened Ben, but he forced himself to speak calmly. “Darnell has more potential than anyone in his class. You have a duty to let him excel.”

  Orlando snorted. “He can make his living on the street, same as me.”

  Then he heard Darnell’s treble voice, shaky but resolute. “I don’t want to do it anymore,” he told Orlando. “Mr. Hartman knows what’s right.” Then, louder, bravely: “I don’t want to be like you.”

  Joyce Stuart’s features froze in a preemptive cringe: “Don’t, Darnell.”

  It was too late. Orlando lashed out, cracking the ten-year-old in the jaw, the blow propelling him out of the room. He turned to Ben: “Now get your ass out of here. In fact, let me help you.”

  Ben felt himself stiffen as rage coursed through his body. Orlando slammed his open hand against Ben’s chest, but instead of staggering backward, Ben lunged toward him, pounding a fist into the man’s temple, then another, pummeling his head like a speedbag. Stunned, Orlando froze for a crucial few moments, and then his powerful arms banged uselessly against Ben’s sides—Ben was too close for him to land a punch. And the frenzy of rage was an anaesthetic, anyway: Ben didn’t even feel the body blows until Orlando slid limply to the floor. He was down, not out.

  Orlando’s eyes flicked at him, the leering defiance replaced by fear. “You crazy,” he murmured.

  Was he? What had come over him? “If you ever touch Darnell again,” Ben said, with a deliberate calm he did not feel, “I will kill you.” He paused between each word for emphasis. “Do we understand each other?”

  Later, from his friend Carmen in social services, he’d find out that Orlando left Joyce and Darnell later that day, never to return. If Ben hadn’t been told, though, he soon would have guessed from the dramatic improvement in Darnell’s grades and general demeanor.

  “All right, man,” Orlando had said at the time, in a subdued tone, gazing up at him from the kitchen floor. “See, we just had a misunderstanding.” He coughed. “I ain’t looking for more trouble.” He coughed again and murmured, “You crazy. You crazy.”

  “Mr. Hartman, can you please put your right thumb here?” Schmid indicated a small white oblong marked IDENTIX TOUCHVIEW, on top of which a small oval glass panel glowed ruby red.

  Ben placed his right thumb on the glass oval, then did the same with his left. His prints appeared immediately, much enlarged, on a computer monitor angled partly toward him.

  Schmid tapped in a few numbers and hit the return key, setting off the high-pitched screech of a modem. He turned toward Ben and said apologetically, “This goes right to Bern. We will know in five or ten minutes.”

  “Know what?”

  The detective rose and gestured for Ben to follow him back to the first room. “Whether there is already a warrant for your arrest in Switzerland.”

  “I think I might remember if there was one.”

  Schmid stared at him a long time before he started to speak. “I know your type, Mr. Hartman. For rich Americans like you, Switzerland is a country of chocolates, banks, cuckoo clocks, and ski resorts. You’d like to imagine that each of us is your Hausdiener, your manservant, yes? But you do know Switzerland. For centuries, every European power wished to make us its duchy. None ever succeeded. Now maybe your country, with its power and wealth, thinks it can do the same. But you are not—what is your expression—‘calling the shots’ here. There is no chocolate for you in this office. And it is not up to you to decide when, or whether, you are released.” He leaned back in his chair, smiling gravely. “Welcome to Switzerland, Herr Hartman.”

  Another man, tall and thin, in a heavily starched white lab coat, came into the room as if on cue. He wore rimless glasses and had a small bristle mustache. Without introducing himself, he pointed to a white-tiled section of the wall marked with metric gradations. “You will please to stand there,” he ordered.

  Trying not to show his exasperation, Ben stood with his back flat against the tiles. The technician measured his height, then led him to a white lab sink, where he turned a lever that extruded a white paste and instructed Ben to wash his hands. The soap was creamy yet gritty and smelled of lavender. At another station, the tech rolled sticky black ink onto a glass plate and had Ben place each hand flat onto it. With long, delicate, manicured fingers, he rolled each of Ben’s fingers first on blotter paper, then carefully onto separate squares on a form.

  While the technician worked, Schmid got up and went into the adjoining room, then returned a few moments later. “Well, Mr. Hartman, we did not get a hit. There is no warrant outstanding.”

  “What a surprise,” Ben muttered. He felt oddly relieved.

  “Still, there are questions. The ballistics will come back in a few days from the Wissenschaftlicher Dienst der Stadtpolizei Zürich—the ballistics lab—but we already know that the bullets recovered from the platform are.765 Browning.”

  “Is that a kind of bullet?” Ben asked innocently.

  “It is the sort of ammunition used in the gun that was found during the search of your luggage.”

  “Well, what do you know,” Ben said, forcing a smile, then tried another tack: bluntness. “Look, there’s no question the bullets were fired by the gun in question. Which was planted in my luggage. So why don’t you just do whatever that test is on my hands that tells you whether I fired a gun?”

  “The gunshot residue analysis. We’ve already done it.” Schmid mimed a swabbing motion.

  “And the results?”

  “We’ll have them soon. After you are photographed.”

  “You won’t find my fingerprints on the gun either.” Thank God I didn’t handle it, Ben thought.

  The detective shrugged theatrically. “Fingerprints can be removed.”

  “Well, the witnesses—”

  “The eyewitnesses describe a well-dressed man of about your age. There was much confusion. But five people are dead, seven seriously injured. Again, you tell us you killed the perpetrator. Yet when we look there is no body.”

  “I—I can’t explain that,” Ben admitted, aware of how bizarre his account sounded. “Obviously the body was removed and the area cleaned. That just tells me that Cavanaugh was working with others.”

  “To kill you.” Schmid regarded him with dark amusem
ent.

  “So it appears.”

  “But you offer no motive. You say there was no grudge between the two of you.”

  “You don’t seem to understand,” Ben said quietly. “I hadn’t seen the guy in fifteen years.”

  The phone on Schmid’s desk rang. He picked it up. “Schmid.” He listened. In English, he said, “Yes, one minute, please,” and handed the receiver to Ben.

  It was Howie. “Ben, old buddy,” he said, his voice now as clear as if he were calling from the next room. “You did say Jimmy Cavanaugh was from Homer, New York, right?”

  “Small town midway between Syracuse and Binghamton,” Ben said.

  “Right,” Howie said. “And he was in your class at Princeton?”

  “That’s the guy.”

  “Well, here’s the thing. Your Jimmy Cavanaugh doesn’t exist.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Ben said. He’s dead as a doornail.

  “No, Ben, listen to me. I’m saying your Jimmy Cavanaugh never existed. I’m saying there is no Jimmy Cavanaugh. I checked with alumni records at Princeton. No Cavanaugh, first or middle initial J, ever enrolled in the school, at least not in the decade you attended. And there have never been any Cavanaughs in Homer. Not anywhere in that county. Not at Georgetown, either. Oh, and we checked with all sorts of hifalutin databases, too. If there were a James Cavanaugh that came close to matching your description, we’d have found him. Tried every spelling variant, too. You have no idea how powerful the databases are they’ve got these days. A person leaves tracks like a slug, we all do. Credit, Social Security, military, you name it. This guy’s totally off the grid. Weird, huh?”

  “There’s got to be some mistake. I know he was enrolled at Princeton.”

  “You think you know that. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”

  Ben felt sick to his stomach. “If this is true, it doesn’t help us.”

  “No,” Howie agreed. “But I’ll keep trying. Meantime, you got my cellular, right?”

  Ben replaced the receiver, stunned. Schmid continued: “Mr. Hartman, were you here on business or holiday?”

  He forced himself to focus, and spoke as civilly as he could. “Ski vacation, as I said. I had a couple of bank meetings, but only because I was passing through Zurich.” Jimmy Cavanaugh never existed.

  Schmid clasped his hands. “The last time you were in Switzerland was four years ago, yes? To claim the body of your brother?”

  Ben paused a moment, unable to stop the sudden flood of memories. The phone call in the middle of the night: never good news. He’d been asleep next to Karen, a fellow teacher, in his grubby apartment in East New York. He grumbled, rolled over to answer the call that changed everything.

  A small rented plane Peter was flying solo had crashed a few days earlier in a gorge near Lake Lucerne. Ben’s name was listed on the rental papers as next-of-kin. It had taken time to identify the deceased, but dental records made a definitive identification possible. The Swiss authorities were ruling it an accident. Ben flew to Lake Lucerne to claim the body and brought his brother home—what was left of him after the fuselage had exploded—in a little cardboard carton not much bigger than a cake box.

  The entire plane flight home he didn’t cry. That would only come later, when the numbness began to wear off. His father had collapsed, weeping, upon hearing the news; his mother, already confined to bed because of the cancer, had screamed with all of her strength.

  “Yes,” Ben said quietly. “That was the last time I was here.”

  “A striking fact. When you come to our country, death seems to accompany you.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Mr. Hartman,” Schmid said, in a more neutral tone of voice, “do you think there is any connection between your brother’s death and what happened today?”

  At the headquarters of the Swiss national police, the Stadtpolizei, in Bern, a plump middle-aged woman with heavy black horn-rimmed glasses glanced up at her computer screen and was surprised to see a line of text begin to flash. After staring at it for a few seconds, she remembered what she had long ago been instructed to do, and she jotted down the name and the long series of numbers after the name. Then she knocked at the glass-paned door of her immediate supervisor.

  “Sir,” she said. “A name on the RIPOL watch list was just activated.” RIPOL was an acronym for Recherche Informations Policier, the national criminal and police database that contained names, fingerprints, license plate numbers—a vast range of law-enforcement data used by the federal, canton, and local police.

  Her boss, a priggish man in his mid-forties who was known to be on the fast track at the Stadtpolizei, took the slip of paper, thanked his loyal secretary, and dismissed her. Once she had closed his office door, he picked up a secure phone that was not routed through the main switchboard, and dialed a number he rarely ever called.

  A battered old gray sedan of indeterminate make idled down the block from Kantonspolizei headquarters on Zeughausstrasse. Inside, two men smoked and said nothing, weary from the long wait. The sudden ringing of the cellular phone mounted on the center console startled them. The passenger picked it up, listened, said, “Ja, danke,” and hung up.

  “The American is leaving the building,” he said.

  A few minutes later they saw the American emerge from the side entrance and get into a taxi. When it was halfway down the block, the driver pulled the car into the early-evening traffic.

  Chapter Five

  Halifax, Nova Scotia

  When the Air Canada pilot announced they were about to land, Anna Navarro removed her files from the tray table, lifted it closed, and tried to focus her mind on the case ahead of her. Flying terrified her, and the only thing worse than landing was taking off. Her stomach flip-flopped. As usual she fought an irrational conviction that the plane would crash and she would end her life in a fiery inferno.

  Her favorite uncle, Manuel, had been killed when the clattering old cropduster he worked in dropped an engine and plummeted. But that was so long ago, she’d been ten or eleven, and a deathtrap cropduster had no resemblance to the sleek 747 she was in now.

  She’d never told any of her OSI colleagues about her anxiety, on the general principle that you should never let them see your vulnerabilities. But she was convinced that somehow Arliss Dupree knew, the way a dog smells fear. In the last six months he’d forced her to practically live on planes, flying from one lousy assignment to another.

  The only thing that allowed her to keep her composure was to spend the flight immersed in her case files. They always absorbed her, fascinated her. The dry-as-dust autopsy and pathology reports beckoned to her to solve their mysteries.

  As a child she’d loved doing the intricate five-hundred-piece puzzles her mother brought home, the gifts from a woman whose house her mother cleaned and whose kids had no patience for puzzles. Far more than seeing the glossy image emerge, she loved the sound and feel of the puzzle pieces snapping into place. Often the old puzzles were missing pieces, lost by their careless original owners, and that had always irritated her. Even as a kid she’d been a perfectionist.

  On some level, this case was a thousand-piece puzzle spilled on the carpet before her.

  During this Washington-Halifax flight she had pored over a folder of documents faxed from the RCMP in Ottawa. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s equivalent of the FBI, was, despite its archaic name, a top-notch investigative agency. The working relationship between DOJ and RCMP was good.

  Who are you? she wondered, staring at a photograph of the old man. Robert Mailhot of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the kindly retiree, devout member of the Church of Our Lady of Mercy. Not the sort of person you’d expect to have a CIA clearance file, deep-storage or no.

  What could have connected him to the vaporous machinations of long-dead spymasters and businessmen that Bartlett had stumbled on? She was certain that Bartlett had a file on him, but had chosen not to give her access to it. She was certain, too, that
he wanted her to find out the relevant details for herself.

  A provincial judge in Nova Scotia agreed to issue a search warrant. The documents she wanted—telephone and credit-card records—had been faxed to her in D.C. in a matter of hours. She was OSI; nobody thought to question her vague cover story about an ongoing investigation into fraudulent international transfer of funds.

  Still, the file told her nothing. The cause of death, recorded on the certificate in the crabbed and almost illegible handwriting of a physician, presumably the old man’s doctor, was “natural causes,” with “coronary thrombosis” added in brackets. And maybe it was only that.

  The deceased had made no unusual purchases; his only long-distance calls were to Newfoundland and Toronto. So far, no traction. Maybe she’d find the answer in Halifax.

  Or maybe not.

  She was intoxicated by the same strange brew of hope and despair she always felt at the beginning of a case. One minute she knew for sure she’d crack it, the next it seemed impossible. This much she knew for sure: the first homicide in a series she investigated was always the most important. It was the benchmark. Only if you were thorough, if you turned over every rock, did you have any hope of making connections. You’d never connect the dots unless you saw where all the dots were.

  Anna was wearing her travel suit, a navy-blue Donna Karan (though the cheaper line), and a white Ralph Lauren blouse (not couture, of course). She was known around the office for dressing impeccably. On her salary she could scarcely afford designer labels, but she bought them anyway, living in a dark one-bedroom apartment in a lousy part of Washington, taking no vacations, because all her money went to clothes.

  Everyone assumed she dressed so nicely to make herself attractive to men, because that was what young single women did. They were wrong. Her clothes were body armor. The finer the outfits, the safer and more secure she felt. She used designer cosmetics and wore designer clothes because then she was no longer the daughter of the dirt-poor Mexican immigrants who cleaned the houses and tended the yards of rich people. Then she could be anyone. She was self-aware enough to know how ridiculous this was in rational terms. But she did it anyway.