The Sigma Protocol

  “Get out!” his father thundered. “Get out of this house!”

  Washington, D.C.

  The Air Canada flight from Nova Scotia arrived at Reagan National in the late afternoon. The taxi pulled up to Anna’s Adams-Morgan apartment building just before six. It was already dark.

  She loved coming home to her apartment. Her sanctuary. The only place where she felt utterly in charge. It was a small one-bedroom in a bad neighborhood, but it was her own perfectly realized world.

  Now, as she got out of the elevator on her floor, she met her neighbor, Tom Bertone, who was heading down. Tom and his wife, Danielle, were both lawyers, both a little effusive, a little too neighborly, but pleasant enough. “Hey, Anna, I met your kid brother today,” he said. “I guess he’d just gotten into town. Really nice guy.” And the elevator doors closed behind him.

  Brother?

  She had no brother.

  At the door to her apartment, she waited a long moment, trying to calm her racing heart. She fished out her gun, a government-issue 9 mm Sig-Sauer, holding it in one hand as she turned the key with the other. Her apartment was dark, and, recalling her early training, she went into standard E&S, evasion and search, tactics. That meant flattening yourself against a wall with a pistol drawn, then shifting to an orthogonal wall, and repeating the process. They drilled it into field agents with the training sets, but she never imagined she’d be doing it in her own apartment, her home, her sanctuary.

  She closed the door behind her. Silence.

  But there was something. A barely detectable odor of cigarettes, that was it. Too faint to be from an actual lighted cigarette; it had to be the residue from the clothing of someone who smoked.

  Someone who had been in her apartment.

  In the dim light provided by the streetlights outside, she could see something else: one of the drawers of her file cabinets was slightly ajar. She always kept them neatly shut. Someone had been searching through her belongings.

  Her blood ran cold.

  There was a draft from the bathroom: the window had been left open.

  And then she heard a sound, quiet but not quiet enough: the almost inaudible squeak of a rubber-soled shoe on the bathroom tile.

  The intruder was still there.

  She flipped on the main overhead light, wheeled around in a crouch, her 9 mm drawn, the weight of it balanced in her two hands. She was grateful that it was a Sig factory short trigger, which fit her hands better than the standard model. The intruder wasn’t visible, but the apartment was small and there weren’t many places he could be. She straightened up and, adhering to the perimeter rule—hug the walls, the E&S instructors liked to say—she made her way toward the bedroom.

  She felt the movement of air an instant before the gun was dislodged from her hands by a powerful kick from seemingly out of nowhere. Where had he come from? Behind the bureau? The filing cabinets? The gun clattered as it hit the sitting room floor. Retrieve it, whatever you do.

  Abruptly she was slammed backward by another kick, and she sprawled against the bedroom door, her back hitting it with a dull thud. She froze in place as the man took a few steps back.

  Except that he was hardly a man. He had the slender frame of an adolescent. As powerful as he was—sinewy muscles flexed under a tight black T-shirt—he looked no older than seventeen. It didn’t make sense.

  Slowly, carefully, she got to her feet and began moving, with feigned casualness, toward the oatmeal-colored sofa. The blue-gray butt of her Sig-Sauer protruded from under its plaited hem, just barely visible.

  “Burglary’s a real serious problem in this neighborhood, isn’t it?” the man-boy said in a tone of rich irony. His glossy, black hair was cut short, his skin looked as if he’d only recently started to shave, and his features were small and regular. “The statistics are shocking.” He scarcely sounded like the typical delinquents who haunted Southeast Washington. If she had to guess, she’d say he wasn’t a native of this country; she thought she detected a trace of an Irish brogue.

  “There’s nothing of value here.” Anna tried to sound calm. “You must know that by now. Neither of us wants any trouble.” She realized her hand was still numb from the blow. Keeping her gaze on him, she took another step toward the sofa. Trying for a light tone, she added, “Anyway, shouldn’t you be in school or something?”

  “Never send a man to do a boy’s work,” he replied agreeably. Suddenly he unleashed another roundhouse kick and she reeled backward against her small wooden bureau. The blow had landed squarely on her stomach, and she found herself gasping for breath.

  “Did you know,” the young intruder continued, “that as often as not it’s the owners of handguns who are killed by them? Another statistic that bears thinking about. You really can’t be too careful.”

  He wasn’t a burglar, that much was obvious. He didn’t talk like one either. But what was he after? She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, mentally taking an inventory of her sparsely furnished apartment, her paltry belongings, the clothes, the lamps, the humidifier, the clothes… the M26. Must try to find the M26! No doubt he’d searched the place thoroughly, but this was an item whose function would not be obvious to those unfamiliar with it. “I’ll get you money,” she said loudly, and turned to the bureau, opening drawers. “I’ll get you money,” she repeated. Where had she kept the device? And would it still work? It had been at least two years. She found it in the large central drawer, next to several red cardboard boxes of checkbooks. “All right,” she said, “here it is.”

  When she turned around to face him, she had the M26 Tasertron firmly in her grasp, switched it on, a high-pitched whine indicating that the device was fully charged.

  “I want you to listen to me carefully,” she said. “This is an M26 Taser, the most powerful one they make. Move away from me now, or I will use it. I don’t care what kind of martial arts you know—twenty-five thousand volts will take the starch out of you.”

  The intruder’s expression was blank, but he began to walk away from her, backing into the bathroom.

  The instant the stun gun was activated, the cartridge would fire off the contactors, two fine conducting wires ending in quarter-inch needle points. The electricity discharged would be of a voltage sufficient to immobilize him for a spell, perhaps even knock him out.

  She followed him toward the bathroom. He was inexperienced; by backing up into the small room, he had allowed himself to be cornered. A bad move, an amateurish slip. She switched the Taser on maximum; there was no point in taking any risks at this point. The device in her hand hummed and crackled. A blue arc of electricity played between two visible electrodes. She would aim for his midriff.

  Suddenly she heard an unexpected sound, that of water running, the roar of the tap turned up full. What the hell was he up to? She lunged into the bathroom, aiming the Taser, and saw the man-child wheel around with something in his hands. Too late, she realized his gambit. It was the nozzle of her handheld shower, which propelled a drenching blast of water in her direction. Water that would ordinarily have been harmless. She dropped the primed M26 an instant too late. A bolt of electricity arced from it toward her drenched torso, a blue bolt of agony. As her major muscle groups spasmed, she collapsed to the floor, only the pain cutting through her dazed state.

  “It’s been a blast,” the young man said tonelessly. “But I’m already running late. Catch you later.” He winked, in a caricature of affection.

  She watched, helpless, as he clambered out the bathroom window and disappeared down the fire escape.

  By the time she was able to call the municipal police, she had verified that nothing was missing from the apartment. But that was the only question she’d been able to answer. The cops, when they arrived, asked the usual questions, debated whether to classify the incident as a home invasion or a burglary, and then seemed to run out of ideas. They’d do the crime-scene workup—they understood that she was some kind of fed, that she seemed to know what she was talking about.
But it would take several hours. And in the meantime?

  Anna glanced at her watch. Eight p.m. She called David Denneen’s home number. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, “but is that guest room of yours free? It seems my apartment has just turned into a crime scene.”

  “A crime… Jesus,” Denneen said. “What happened?”

  “I’ll explain later. Sorry to spring this on you.”

  “Have you eaten yet? Come on over now. We’ll set an extra place.”

  David and Ramon lived in a prewar apartment near Dupont Circle, a fifteen-minute cab ride away. It wasn’t grand, but it was nicely appointed, with high ceilings and leaded windows. From the savory aromas she inhaled when she came in—chile, anise, cumin—she guessed that Ramon was cooking one of his moles.

  Three years ago, Denneen was a junior agent under her command. He was a fast learner, did good work, and was responsible for several breaks; he’d tailed a White House special assistant to the Qatar Embassy, a lead that resulted in a major corruption investigation. She’d filed glowing reports in his personnel file, but soon she learned that Arliss Dupree, as the unit director, had been appending “fitness” evaluations of his own. They were vague but damning in intent: Denneen “wasn’t government material.” He “lacked the fortitude” expected of an OSI investigator, was “soft,” “possibly unreliable,” “flighty.” His “attitude was problematic.” All of it was nonsense, the bureaucratic camouflage of a visceral hostility, a reflexive prejudice.

  Anna had become friends with both David and Ramon, had met them as a couple when she’d stopped in Kramerbooks, on Connecticut Avenue, and saw them shopping together. Ramon was a small, open-faced man with an easy smile, his white teeth dazzling against his dark complexion. He worked as an administrator for the local Meals on Wheels program. He and Anna warmed to each other immediately; Ramon insisted that she dine with them that evening, as a spur-of-the-moment thing, and she agreed. It was a magical occasion, partly because of the excellence of Ramon’s paella, partly because of the relaxed conversation and easy banter, none of which ever touched upon office matters; she envied them their easy intimacy and affection.

  David, with his square jaw and sandy hair, was a tall, ruggedly handsome man, and Ramon noticed the way she looked at him. “I know what you’re thinking,” he confided to her at one point, when David was across the room with his back to them, fixing drinks. “You’re thinking, ‘What a waste.’”

  Anna laughed. “It’s crossed my mind,” she said.

  “All the girls say that.” Ramon grinned. “Well, he ain’t wasted on me.”

  A few weeks later, Anna had lunch with David and explained to him why he hadn’t received a promotion from E-3 grade. On paper, he reported to Anna, but Anna reported to Dupree. “What would you like me to do?” Anna asked.

  Denneen responded quietly, with less outrage than Anna felt on his behalf. “I don’t want to make a big deal of this. I just want to do my work.” He looked at her. “Truth? I want to get the hell out of Dupree’s division. I happen to be interested in operations and strategy. I’m only E-3, so I can’t arrange it. But you might be able to.”

  Anna pulled a few strings. It meant doing an endrun around Dupree, which didn’t exactly endear her to OSI management. But it worked, and Denneen never forgot it.

  Now she filled in Denneen about what had happened at her apartment, and between Ramon’s chicken mole and a bottle of a velvety Rioja, she felt some of her tension ebb. Soon she found herself joking grimly about having been “trounced by a member of the Backstreet Boys.”

  “You could have been killed,” Denneen said solemnly, not for the first time.

  “But I wasn’t. Which proves that wasn’t what he was after.”

  “And what might that have been?”

  Anna just shook her head.

  “Listen, Anna. I know you probably can’t talk about it, but do you think there’s any chance it has to do with your new assignment at ICU? Old Alan Bartlett has kept so many secrets over the years, there’s no telling what he’s got you up against.”

  “El diablo sabe más por viejo que por diablo,” Ramon muttered. It was one of his mother’s proverbs: The devil knows more because he is old than because he is the devil.

  “Is it a coincidence?” Denneen persisted.

  Anna looked at her wineglass and shrugged, word-lessly. Were others interested in the death of the people in the Sigma files? She couldn’t think about this right now, and didn’t want to.

  “Have some more carnitas,” Ramon said helpfully.

  The following morning at the M Street building, Anna was summoned to Bartlett’s office the instant she arrived.

  “What did you learn in Nova Scotia?” Bartlett asked, not wasting any time on social niceties this time.

  She’d earlier decided against mentioning the intruder in her apartment; there was no reason to think it was related, and she worried, vaguely, that the episode would undermine his confidence in her. She told him about what was clearly relevant: the puncture mark in the old man’s hand.

  Bartlett nodded slowly. “What kind of poison did they use?”

  “Haven’t gotten the toxicology results back yet. It takes time. Always does. If they find something, they call you right away. If they don’t, they keep testing and testing.”

  “But you really believe Mailhot might have been poisoned.” Bartlett sounded nervous, as if uncertain whether this was good news or bad.

  “I do,” she said. “Then there’s the money question. Four months ago the guy got a wire transfer of a million bucks.”

  Bartlett knit his brows. “From?”

  “No idea. An account in the Cayman Islands. Then the trail disappears. Laundered.”

  Bartlett listened in perplexed silence.

  She went on. “So I got the bank records going back ten years, and there it is, regular as clockwork. Every year Mailhot got a chunk of money, wired into his account. Steadily increasing amounts.”

  “A business partnership, perhaps?”

  “According to his wife, these were payouts from a grateful employer.”

  “A very generous employer.”

  “A very rich one. And a very dead one. The old man spent most of his life working as a personal assistant to a wealthy press baron. A bodyguard, a factotum, a lifelong gofer, best I can figure it.”

  “To whom?”

  “Charles Highsmith.” Anna watched Bartlett’s reaction carefully. He nodded briskly; he’d already known this.

  “The question, of course, is why the offshore payments,” he said. “Why not a straightforward transfer from Highsmith’s estate?”

  Anna shrugged. “That’s just one of many questions. I suppose one way to answer it is to trace the funds, see if they really did originate with Charles Highsmith’s estate. I’ve done work before on laundered drug money. But I can’t be optimistic.”

  Bartlett nodded. “What about the widow…?”

  “No help. She may be covering something up, but as far as I can tell, she didn’t know much about her husband’s business. Seemed to think he was in the grip of paranoia. Apparently, he was one of those who thought Highsmith’s death might not have been an accident.”

  “Is that right?” Bartlett said, with a tincture of irony.

  “And you’re another one, aren’t you? Obviously you knew about Highsmith’s connection to Mailhot. Was there a Sigma file on him, too?”

  “That’s immaterial.”

  “Forgive me, but you’ll have to let me be the judge of that. I have a sense that not much I’m reporting comes as news to you.”

  Bartlett nodded. “Highsmith was Sigma, yes. Both master and servant were, in this case. Highsmith seems to have placed great trust in Mailhot.”

  “And now the two are inseparable,” Anna said grimly.

  “You did superb work in Halifax,” Bartlett said. “I hope you know that. I also hope you didn’t unpack. It appears that we’ve got a fresh one.”

  “Wh
ere?”

  “Paraguay. Asunción.”

  A fresh one. The words were, she had to admit, intriguing as well as chilling. At the same time, the Ghost’s high-handed way with information filled her with frustration and a deep sense of unease. She studied the man’s face, half-admiring its complete opacity. What precisely did he know? What wasn’t he telling her?

  And why?

  Chapter Eleven

  St. Gallen, Switzerland

  Ben Hartman had spent the last two days traveling. From New York to Paris. From Paris to Strasbourg. At Strasbourg he had taken a short commuter flight to Mulhouse, France, near the borders of Germany and Switzerland. There he had hired a car to drive him to the regional Aéroport Basel-Mulhouse, very close to Basel.

  But instead of crossing into Switzerland, which was the logical point of entry, he instead chartered a small plane to take him to Liechtenstein. Neither the charter operator nor the pilot had asked him any questions. Why would an apparently prosperous-looking international businessman be seeking to enter the duchy of Liechtenstein, one of the world’s centers of money-laundering, in a manner that was undetectable, and frankly irregular, avoiding official border crossings? The code among them was understood: don’t ask.

  By the time he had arrived in Liechtenstein, it was almost one in the morning. He spent the night in a small pension outside Vaduz, and then set off in the morning to find a pilot who would be willing to cross the Swiss border, in such a way that his name would appear on no manifests or passenger lists.

  In Liechtenstein, the plumage of an international businessman—the Kiton double-breasted suit, the Hermès tie, and the Charvet shirt—was protective coloration, nothing more. The duchy distinguished sharply among insiders and outsiders, among those who had something of value to offer and those who had not, among those who belonged and those who did not. It was emblematic of its clannishness that foreigners who sought to become citizens had to be approved by both the parliament and the prince.