The Sigma Protocol

  Ben Hartman knew his way around places like these. In the past, that fact had filled him with moral unease, his permanent, ineradicable air of privilege burning like the mark of Cain. Now it was merely a tactical advantage to be exploited. Twenty kilometers south of Vaduz was an airstrip where businessmen with private jets and helicopters sometimes disembarked. There he had a conversation with a gruff, older member of the ground maintenance crew, referring to his requirements in terms that were both vague and unmistakable. A man of few words, he looked Ben over and scrawled a phone number on the back of a manifest ledger. Ben tipped him generously for the recommendation, though when he called the number, he reached a groggy-sounding man who begged off, saying he had another job today. He did, however, have a friend, Gaspar… Another call. It was afternoon before he finally met with Gaspar, a dyspeptic middle-aged man, who sized Ben up quickly and spelled out his exorbitant terms. In truth, the pilot made a handsome living flying businessmen over the border into Switzerland without leaving a trace in the computers. There were times when certain drug lords or African potentates or Middle Eastern operators needed to do some banking in both countries without the authorities watching. The pilot, who seemed to wear a perpetual sneer, assumed that Ben was up to something similar. Half an hour later, preparing for their departure, Gaspar had learned of a storm over St. Gallen and wanted to cancel the flight, but several more hundred-dollar bills had persuaded him otherwise.

  As the light twin-engine propeller plane bounced through the turbulence over the eastern Alpine ranges, the taciturn pilot became almost voluble. “There’s a saying where I come from. Es ist besser reich zu leben, als reich zu sterben.” He chuckled. “It’s better to live rich than to die rich…”

  “Just fly,” Ben said dully.

  He wondered whether his precautions were overly elaborate, but the truth was that he had no idea what the reach was of the people who had murdered his brother, or who had assigned the man he’d known as Jimmy Cavanaugh to try to kill him in Zurich. And he did not intend to make things easy for them.

  In St. Gallen, Ben had hitched a ride with a farmer delivering vegetables to the markets and restaurants. The farmer surveyed him with bafflement; Ben explained that his car had broken down in the middle of nowhere. Later on, he rented a car and drove to the remote farming community of Mettlenberg. If the flight had been bumpy, the drive wasn’t much better. The rain poured down, sheeting the windshield of the rented car. The car’s wipers flicked back and forth quickly but uselessly, for the rain was too hard. It was late afternoon, and already it was dark. Ben could barely see a few feet in front of him. It was probably fortunate that the traffic in both directions on this small rural road was heavy, inching along.

  He was in a remote, sparsely populated area in the northeastern part of Switzerland, in the canton of St. Gallen, not far from Lake Constance. From time to time, when the rain momentarily abated, he was able to see the large working farms on either side of the road. Herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, acres of cultivated land. There were large primitive buildings containing stables and barns and evidently living quarters as well, all under one large double-thatched roof. Beneath the eaves were woodpiles stacked with geometric precision.

  As he drove he experienced a whole range of emotions, from fear to the deepest sadness to an almost violent anger. Now he was approaching a cluster of buildings in what had to be the village of Mettlenberg. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. Ben could see the ruins of a once fortified medieval town. There was an old granary and an early sixteenth-century church of St. Maria. There were picturesque, well-preserved stone houses with decorated timber faces, gables, and half-hipped red roofs. It was barely a village at all.

  Peter had said that Liesl, his lover, had applied for an opening at a small hospital here. He had checked; there was only one hospital for kilometers around: the Regionalspital Sankt Gallen Nord.

  A short distance past the “town center” was a relatively modern building of red brick, cheaply constructed, Ben guessed, in the 1960s. The regional hospital. He found a Migros gasoline station where he parked the car and made a call from the pay phone.

  When the hospital switchboard operator answered, Ben said slowly, in English, “I need to speak to the pediatrician. My child is ill.” There seemed little point in using his tourist German, since he wouldn’t be able to disguise his American accent, anyway, and a Swiss operator would know English.

  Peter had said that the hospital had hired Liesl because they “needed a pediatrician,” as if they had none other. Then again, maybe there were others, but Ben doubted it, not in a hospital as small as this one.

  “I will connect you with the, eh, the Notfallstation, sir. The emergency—”

  “No,” Ben interrupted quickly. “Not the emergency room. I need to speak directly with the pediatrician. Is there more than one on staff?”

  “Just one, sir, but the doctor is not in at this time.”

  Just one! Inwardly, Ben exulted; had he found her?

  “Yes, a woman named Liesl-something, right?”

  “No, sir. There is no Liesl on the staff here as far as I know. The pediatrician is Dr. Margarethe Hubli, but I tell you, she is not in the hospital. Let me connect—”

  “I must be mistaken. That was the name I was given. Was there a doctor by the name of Liesl who left recently?”

  “Not that I know of, sir.”

  Strike out.

  He had a thought. There was a chance that Dr. Hubli would know Liesl, know who she was, where she had gone. This had to be the hospital where Liesl had gotten a job.

  “Is there a number where I can reach Dr. Hubli?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t give out her home number, sir, but if you bring your child into the hospital—”

  “Can you page her for me?”

  “Yes, sir, I can do that.”

  “Thank you.” He gave the number of the pay phone and a false name.

  Five minutes later the phone rang.

  “Mr. Peters?” a woman’s voice asked in English.

  “Thank you for calling, Doctor. I’m an American staying with friends here, and I’m trying to reach a doctor who I believe was on the staff of the regional hospital. I’m wondering whether you might know her—a woman named Liesl?”

  There was a pause—too long a pause. “I don’t know any Liesl,” the pediatrician said.

  Was she lying to protect Liesl? Or was he simply imagining it?

  “Are you certain?” Ben persisted. “I was told there was a pediatrician named Liesl there, and it’s urgent that I reach her. It’s a family matter.”

  “What sort of ‘family matter’?”

  Bingo. She had to be protecting Liesl.

  “It concerns her…her brother, Peter.”

  “Her—brother?” The pediatrician seemed confused.

  “Tell her my name is Ben.”

  Another long silence passed.

  “Where are you?” the woman asked.

  Barely twenty minutes went by before a small red Renault pulled into the gas station.

  A petite woman enrobed in a large military-green rain poncho, wearing mud-caked jeans and boots, got out tentatively before slamming the car door shut. She spotted him and approached. She was a real beauty, Ben could see. Not what he had expected, for some reason. Under the poncho hood he could see her short glossy dark brown hair. She had luminous blue eyes and a milky-white complexion. But her face was drawn, pinched: she looked scared.

  “Thanks for coming,” he said. “You obviously know Liesl. I’m her husband’s twin brother.”

  She kept staring at him. “Good Lord,” she breathed, “you look just like him. It’s, it’s like seeing a ghost.” Her face, a mask of tension, suddenly crumpled. “Dear God,” she gasped, breaking out in sobs, “he was so careful! So…many years…”

  Ben looked at the doctor, confused.

  “He didn’t come back that night,” she went on in a panicked rush. “I stayed up late, worried, terrified
.” She covered her face with her hands. “And then Dieter came by and told me what had happened…”

  “Liesl,” Ben breathed.

  “Oh, God!” she wailed. “He was such a—such a good man. I loved him so much.”

  Ben wrapped his arms around her, sustaining her in a great hug of assurance, and he too felt his tears begin to flow.

  Asunción, Paraguay

  Anna was stopped at Customs by a fleshy-faced Paraguayan official in a short-sleeve blue shirt and tie. From his hair and complexion she could tell he was, like most Paraguayans, a mestizo, of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry.

  He sized her up, then tapped her carry-on bag, indicating that he wanted her to open it. He asked her a few questions in heavily accented English, then, glowering with apparent disappointment, waved her through.

  She felt furtive, like a criminal casing a joint. Normal federal regulations required a visiting agent to check in with the local embassy, but she would do no such thing. The risk of a leak was too great. If trouble resulted, she’d deal with the protocol breach later.

  She found a pay phone in the crowded airport lobby. It took her a minute or two to figure out how to use her calling card.

  A message from Arliss Dupree, demanding to know when she would be returning to the OSI unit. And a message from Sergeant Arsenault of the RCMP. The toxicology results were in. He didn’t say what they were.

  When she reached RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, she was put on hold for a solid five minutes while they chased down Ron Arsenault.

  “How’re you doin’ there, Anna?”

  She could tell from his voice. “Nothing, huh?”

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. “I guess you wasted your time here.”

  “I don’t think so.” She tried to mask her disappointment. “The injection mark is significant. You mind if I talk to the toxicologist?”

  He hesitated a moment. “I don’t see why not, but it’s not going to change anything.”

  “I’d just feel better about it.”

  “Hey, why not?” Arsenault gave her a Halifax number.

  The airport was loud and chaotic. It was hard to hear the voice on the phone.

  The toxicologist’s name was Denis Weese. His voice was high and hoarse and ageless—he could have been in his sixties or in his twenties.

  “We ran every single test you requested and then some,” he said defensively.

  She tried to imagine him: small and bald, she decided. “I’m grateful to you.”

  “They were extremely costly, you know.”

  “We’re paying for them. But let me ask you this: Aren’t there substances, toxins, that cross the blood-brain barrier, and then don’t cross back?” Arthur Hammond, her poison expert, had suggested such a scenario in passing.

  “I suppose there are.”

  “Which might be found only in the spinal fluid?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it, but it’s possible.” He was grudging: he didn’t appreciate her theories.

  She waited, and when he didn’t go on, she asked the obvious: “How about a spinal tap?”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, it’s just about impossible to do a spinal tap on a dead body. There’s no pressure. It won’t come out. For another, the body’s gone.”

  “Buried?” She bit her lower lip. Damn.

  “The funeral’s this afternoon, I think. The body’s been moved back to the funeral home. Burial’s tomorrow morning.”

  “But you could go there, couldn’t you?”

  “Theoretically, but what for?”

  “Isn’t the eye—the ocular fluid—the same as the spinal fluid?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can draw that, can’t you?”

  A pause. “But you didn’t order it.”

  “I just did,” she said.

  Mettlenberg, St. Gallen, Switzerland

  Now Liesl had fallen silent. The tears, which had coursed down her cheeks, dampening her denim workshirt, were beginning to dry.

  Of course it was she. How could he not have known?

  They were sitting in the front seat of her car. Standing on the asphalt island of the gas station was too exposed, she said, after she’d regained her composure. Ben remembered sitting in the front seat of Peter’s truck.

  She looked ahead, through the windshield. There was only the sound of the occasional car roaring by, a truck’s deep-throated horn.

  At last she spoke. “It is not safe for you to be here.”

  “I took precautions.”

  “If anyone sees you with me—”

  “They’ll think it’s Peter, your husband—”

  “But if the people who killed him, who know he is dead, have somehow tracked me down—”

  “If they’d tracked you down, you wouldn’t be here,” Ben said. “You’d be dead.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then: “How did you get here?”

  He told her in detail about the private planes and cars, his circuitous route. He knew she would find his caution reassuring. She nodded appreciatively.

  “I imagine those kinds of security precautions became second nature to you and Peter,” he said. “Peter told me it was you who devised his fake death. That was brilliant.”

  “If it was so brilliant,” she said mordantly, “they’d never have found him again.”

  “No. I blame myself for that. I should never have come to Switzerland, brought them out of the woodwork.”

  “But how could you have known? You didn’t think Peter was alive!” She turned to face him.

  Her skin was pale, almost translucent, her hair chestnut with golden highlights. She was slender, with perfect smallish breasts under a simple white blouse. She was extravagantly beautiful.

  No wonder Peter had been willing to give up everything else in his life to spend it with her. Ben felt a powerful attraction, but he knew he would never act on it.

  “You don’t go by your real name,” he said.

  “Of course not. All of my friends here know me by another name. It’s legally changed. Margarethe Hubli was the name of a great-aunt, actually. All they knew about Peter was that he was a boyfriend, a Canadian writer I was supporting. They knew him under a different name, too…”

  Her words trailed off, and she fell silent, once again staring out the window. “He kept up some of his contacts, though, the ones he trusted. He called them his ‘early warning system.’ And then a few days ago, when he got a call telling him about the bloodbath at the Bahnhofstrasse…He understood what had happened. I begged him not to do anything. But no, he insisted on it! He said he had no choice.” Her face had twisted into an expression of contempt, her voice a wail. Ben’s heart was squeezed.

  She went on in a small, choked voice, “He had to protect you. Persuade you to get out of the country. He had to save your life even if it meant putting his own in danger. Oh, God, I warned him not to go. I begged, pleaded with him.”

  Ben took her hand. “I’m so sorry.” What could he say, really? That he was anguished beyond words that Peter had to die instead of himself? That he wished it was the other way around? That he had loved Peter for far longer than she had?

  She said softly, “I can’t even claim his body, can I?”

  “No. Neither of us can.”

  She swallowed. “Peter loved you so much, you know.”

  It was painful to hear. He winced. “We fought a lot. I guess it’s like that law of physics, about how every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

  “You two didn’t just look alike, you were alike.”

  “Not really.”

  “Only a twin would say that.”

  “You don’t know me. Temperamentally, emotionally, we were totally different.”

  “Maybe in the way that two snowflakes are different. They’re still snowflakes.”

  Ben smiled appreciatively. “I’m not sure I’d call the two of us snowflakes. We were always too much trou
ble.”

  Something in that set her off again. Now she was weeping, her agony heartbreaking. “Oh, God, why did they have to kill him? For what? To what end? He would never talk, he was no fool!”

  Ben waited patiently until she found some composure. “Peter told me he found a document, a list of names. Twenty-three names of high-ranking statesmen and industrialists. ‘Companies you’ve heard of,’ he said. He said it was an incorporation document, setting up some organization in Switzerland.”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw the document.”

  “I did.”

  “It seemed genuine to you?”

  “From what I could tell, yes. All the markings, even the typewriting, looked like papers I’ve seen from the 1940s.”

  “Where is it now?”

  She pursed her lips. “Just before we left Zurich for good, he opened a bank account. He said it was mostly for the vault the bank would rent him. He wanted to keep papers in it. I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess he must have put it there.”

  “Is it possible he hid it at home, in your cabin?”

  “No,” she said quickly, “there is nothing hidden in our cabin.”

  Ben made a mental note of her reaction. “Did he leave a key to this vault?”

  “No.”

  “If the account was in his name, wouldn’t these, these bad guys have ways of learning about its existence?”

  “That is why he didn’t open it in his name. It’s in the name of an attorney.”

  “Do you remember who?”

  “Of course. My cousin, Dr. Matthias Deschner. Actually, he’s my second cousin. A distant relative, distant enough that no one would connect him with us—with me. But he’s a good man, a trustworthy man. His office is in Zurich, on St. Annagasse.”

  “You trust him.”

  “Totally. I trusted him with our lives, after all. He never betrayed us; he never would.”

  “If people today, people with influence and power and far-reaching contacts, are so desperate to get this document, it must be extremely important.” Ben’s mind abruptly filled with a horrific image of Peter’s crumpled body gouting blood. His chest was so tight he couldn’t breathe. He thought: Peter was in the way, and they killed him.