The Sigma Protocol

  Chapter Seventeen

  Washington, D.C.

  The zipper on Anna’s garment bag snagged on one of her dresses just as the taxi arrived and honked impatiently.

  “All right, all right,” she groaned. “Cool it.”

  She yanked at the zipper again, with no luck. Then the telephone rang. “Good God!”

  She was late, trying to get to Reagan National Airport to catch the evening flight to Zurich. No time to get the phone. She decided to let the voice mail answer it; then she changed her mind.

  “Agent Navarro, forgive me for calling you at home.” She recognized the high, hoarse voice at once, though she’d only spoken to him once before. “I got your home number from Sergeant Arsenault. It’s Denis Weese from the Chemistry Section of the Nova Scotia Forensic Laboratory.”

  He spoke excruciatingly slowly. “Yes,” she said impatiently, “the toxicologist. What’s up?”

  “Well, the ocular fluid you asked me to look at?”

  She finally worked the fabric of her dress loose from the zipper’s teeth. She tried not to think of how much the dress had cost. Damage had been done, but maybe it wouldn’t be too noticeable. “You find anything?”

  “It’s most interesting.” The taxi’s honking grew more insistent.

  “Can you hold on a second?” she said, then dropped the phone to the carpet and ran to the window. “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” she shouted.

  The driver yelled up, “Navarro? You called for a taxi?”

  “You can put the meter on. I’ll be down in a few.” She ran back to pick up the phone. “Sorry. The ocular fluid, you said.”

  “The band showed up on electrofluoresis,” the toxicologist went on. “It’s not a naturally occurring protein. It’s a peptide, a sort of folded chain of amino acids—”

  She dropped the garment bag to the floor. “Some synthetic compound, is that what you’re saying?” Not a naturally occurring protein. Something that was created in a laboratory. What could this mean?

  “One that selectively binds to neuroreceptors. That explains why we didn’t find any traces of it in the bloodstream. It can only be detected, in trace quantities, in the spinal and ocular fluid.”

  “Meaning it goes right to the brain, basically.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “What kind of compound are we talking here?”

  “It’s an exotic. I guess the closest thing to it found in nature is a venom peptide, like snake venom. But the molecule’s clearly synthetic.”

  “It’s a poison, then.”

  “An entirely new molecule, one of the new toxins that scientists are now able to synthesize. I’m guessing that what it does is induce cardiac arrest. It goes right to the brain, crossing the blood-brain barrier, but leaves no traces in the blood serum. Really quite something.”

  An entirely new molecule.

  “Let me ask you something. What do you think this toxin is intended to be used for? Biological warfare?”

  He laughed uneasily. “No, no, no, nothing of the sort. One does see such synthetic peptides created, sort of modeled, on naturally occurring poisons found in toads or snails or snakes or whatever, in basic biotech research. You see, the fact that they selectively bind to certain proteins makes them useful for tagging them. It’s the same property that makes them toxic, but that’s not why people concoct them.”

  “So this—this substance—might have been made by a biotechnology company.”

  “Or any company with a research arm in molecular biochemistry. Could be any of the big agricultural firms, too. Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, you name it. I don’t know where this was created, of course.”

  “I’m going to ask you a favor,” she said. “I’m going to ask you to fax whatever you got on this to this number, O.K.?” She gave him a fax number, thanked him, hung up, and called the ICU. If she missed the plane, so be it. Right now nothing was more important than this.

  “Can you patch me in to whoever has liaison with the U.S. Patent Office?” she said. When she’d been put through, she said, “Agent Stanley, this is Agent Anna Navarro. I need you to check something for me real quick and get back to me. In a couple of minutes you’re going to get a fax from the Nova Scotia Forensic Laboratory. It’s a description of a synthetic molecule. I need you to do a search for me at the U.S. Patent Office. I want to know if any company has filed a patent for this thing.”

  Find out who makes it, and you’ll find the killer. One will lead to the other.

  She hoped it would be that simple.

  The taxi driver was honking again, and she went to the window to tell him to cool his jets.

  Switzerland

  Virtually catatonic, Ben drove to Zurich. Back into the lion’s den, he thought ruefully to himself. Yes, he was persona non grata there, but it was a city of nearly four hundred thousand; he’d make out so long as he kept a low profile and avoided any tripwires. And where would those be? It was a risk, a definite, calculated risk, but there was no reason to believe that safe refuge lay elsewhere. Liesl had quoted Peter’s warning words: the question isn’t where they are, it’s where they aren’t.

  Oh, God. Liesl! The odor of wood smoke that permeated his clothes was a wrenching, steady reminder of her, of the once-comfortable cabin, of the explosion he had witnessed but could scarcely comprehend.

  The one thing he clung to, the one thing that allowed him to keep his sanity, was that Liesl had probably been dead when the cabin had burst into flames.

  Oh, Christ!

  By now he had put together how it had happened; it all made a chilling kind of sense. The squeaking he had heard in the middle of the night, which had incorporated itself into his terrible dream, had come from the valve of the propane tank being turned all the way open. The cabin had quickly filled with the odorless propane—he had already stepped outside by then—which was intended to overwhelm, put to sleep, then kill the occupants of the cabin. To cover up the evidence, a timed fuse had somehow gone off. Certainly it hadn’t taken much to ignite the highly flammable gas. The accident would be ascribed by the local authorities to a faulty propane tank, not an uncommon hazard in rural areas.

  And then whoever had done it had gotten into his truck and stolen away.

  By the time Ben returned to the Range Rover—a matter of seconds, really, after the explosion—the cabin was pretty much gone.

  She had not suffered. She had surely been either asleep or dead before her little cabin became an inferno.

  He couldn’t stand to think of it!

  For four years Liesl and Peter had lived there, lived their lives in hiding, surely always fearful, but fundamentally undisturbed. Probably they could have gone on living there for years.

  Until Ben had shown up in Zurich.

  And brought out these zealots, in effect luring Peter to his death.

  And led these faceless, anonymous zealots to Liesl, the woman who had once saved Peter’s life.

  Ben was beyond grief. He no longer felt the sharp stab of guilt, because he was numb. He felt nothing anymore. The shock had turned him into a cadaver, driving through the night, staring straight ahead, a machine without emotions.

  But as he approached the darkened city, he began to feel one single emotion: a slowly growing, burning anger. A fury at those who had targeted innocent and good people who’d done nothing wrong but come across a bit of information by accident.

  These killers, and those who directed them, remained faceless in his mind. He could not picture them, but he was determined to unmask them. They wanted him dead; they intended to frighten him into silence. But instead of running away, instead of hiding, he had made up his mind to run toward them, though from a direction they could not anticipate. They wanted to operate from the shadows; he would shine light on them. They wanted to conceal; he would expose.

  And if his father was one of them…

  He needed to dig into the past now, to excavate, to learn who these murderers were, and where they came from, and above
all what they were hiding. Ben knew the rational response was to be frightened, and though that he certainly was, his fear was now subordinate to his rage.

  He knew he had crossed some line into an obsession beyond any rationality.

  But who were these faceless attackers?

  Men who had been mobilized by the board of the corporation Max Hartman had helped set up. Madmen? Fanatics? Or simply mercenaries, hired by a corporation that had been founded, decades ago, by a group of prominent industrialists and high-ranking Nazis—among them his own father—who were now trying to conceal the unlawful origins of their original wealth? Cold-blooded mercenaries without any ideology except the profit motive, the almighty dollar, the Deutschmark, the Swiss franc…

  There were layers upon layers of interlocking possibilities.

  He needed cold hard information.

  Ben vaguely remembered being told that one of Switzerland’s great research libraries was at the University of Zurich, in the hills overlooking the city, and that was where he now headed, the logical place to begin digging up the past.

  Washington, D.C.

  Anna watched queasily as the flight attendant demonstrated the flimsy thing you put over your nose and mouth to help you breathe if the plane goes down. She’d once read an article in one of those on-line magazines that said that nobody had ever survived an emergency water landing of an airplane. Never. She took a pharmacy bottle of Ativan from her purse. It was beyond the expiration date, but she didn’t particularly care. This was the only way she was going to make it across the Atlantic.

  She was startled to hear her ICU-issue StarTac trilling from deep in the recesses of her purse. Government-standard cryptotelephony, and hardly bulkier than the usual consumer model. She’d forgot to turn it off.

  She pulled it out. “Navarro.”

  “Please hold for Alan Bartlett,” she heard in a lightly accented Jamaican voice.

  She felt a tap on her shoulder. It was a flight attendant. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “You’re not allowed to have any cellular phones turned on during the flight.”

  “We’re not flying yet,” Anna pointed out.

  “Agent Navarro,” Bartlett said. “I’m glad I caught you.”

  “Ma’am,” the flight attendant persisted, “airline regulations forbid you from using cell phones once the aircraft has left the gate.”

  “Sorry, this’ll just be a minute.” To Bartlett she said, “What have you got for me? I’m on a plane to Zurich.”

  “Ma’am,” the flight attendant said loudly, exasperated.

  Without looking at him she took out her Justice Department ID with her free hand and flashed it at him.

  “We lost another one,” Bartlett said.

  Another one? So soon? The murders were accelerating.

  The flight attendant drew back. “My apologies, ma’am.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Anna groaned.

  “In Holland. A town called Tilburg, a couple of hours south of Amsterdam. You might want to change planes in Zurich and go there.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m going to Zurich. It’s a simple matter for me to have the FBI legat in Amsterdam request an immediate autopsy. This time at least we can tell them exactly what poisons to screen for.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I’m on my way to Zurich, Director. I’m going to catch myself a live one. Dead men don’t talk. Now, what was the name of the Tilburg victim?”

  Bartlett paused. “A certain Hendrik Korsgaard.”

  “Wait a minute!” Anna said sharply. “That name wasn’t on my list.”

  There was silence on the other end.

  “Talk to me, Bartlett, dammit!”

  “There are other lists, Agent Navarro,” Bartlett said slowly. “I was hoping they wouldn’t prove… relevant.”

  “Unless I’m greatly mistaken, this is a violation of our understanding, Director Bartlett,” Anna said quietly, her eyes darting around to verify that she wasn’t being overheard.

  “Not at all, Ms. Navarro. My office works like any other, by a division of labor. Information is edited accordingly. Your responsibility was to find the killers. We had reason to believe that the names on the list I gave you, from the clearance files, were being targeted. We had no reason to believe that…the others were in jeopardy as well.”

  “And did you know where the Tilburg victim resided?”

  “We didn’t even know he was still living. Certainly, all efforts to locate him were in vain.”

  “Then we can rule out the possibility that the killers have simply gained access to your files.”

  “It’s gone far beyond that,” Bartlett said crisply. “Whoever’s killing these old men, they’ve got better sources than we do.”

  It was not much past four in the morning by the time Ben located the Universitätsbibliothek on Zähringerplatz. The library wouldn’t open for another five hours.

  In New York, he calculated, it was ten at night. His father would probably still be awake—he usually went to bed late and arose early, always had—and even if he were asleep, Ben wasn’t much concerned about waking him. Not anymore.

  Wandering down the Universitätstrasse to stretch his legs, he made sure his cell phone was switched to the GSM standard used in Europe and placed a call to Bedford.

  The housekeeper, Mrs. Walsh, answered.

  Mrs. Walsh, an Irish version of Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca, Ben had always thought, had worked for the family for over twenty years, and Ben had never got past her haughty reserve.

  “Benjamin,” she said. Her tone was strange.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Walsh,” Ben said wearily. “I need to talk to my father.” He readied himself to do battle with his father’s gatekeeper.

  “Benjamin, your father’s gone.”

  He went cold. “Gone where?”

  “Well, that’s just it, I don’t know.”

  “Who does?”

  “No one. A car came for Mr. Hartman this morning, and he wouldn’t say where he was going. Not a word. He said it would be ‘a while.’”

  “A car? Was it Gianni?” Gianni was his father’s regular driver, a happy-go-lucky sort whom the old man regarded with a certain distanced affection.

  “Not Gianni. Not a company car. He’s just gone. No explanation.”

  “I don’t understand. He’s never done that before, has he?”

  “Never. I know he packed his passport, because it’s gone.”

  “His passport? Well, that tells us something, doesn’t it?”

  “But I called his office, talked to his secretary, and she knew nothing about any international trip. I was hoping he might have said something to you.”

  “Not a word. Did he get any phone calls…?”

  “No, I don’t… Let me look at the message book.” She came back to the phone a minute later. “Just a Mr. Godwin.”

  “Godwin?”

  “Well, actually, it says Professor Godwin.”

  The name took him by surprise. That had to be Ben’s college mentor, the Princeton historian John Barnes Godwin. Then again, he realized, it wasn’t particularly bizarre for Godwin to be calling Max: a few years ago, impressed by what Ben had told him about the famous historian, Max had given money to Princeton to set up a Center for the Study of Human Values, of which Godwin became the director. Yet his father hadn’t mentioned Godwin. Why were the two of them talking on the morning before Max disappeared?

  “Let me have the number,” he said.

  He thanked her and clicked off.

  Strange, he thought. For a brief moment he imagined that his father was fleeing somewhere, because he knew his past had been uncovered or was about to be uncovered. But that made no sense—fleeing what? Fleeing where?

  Ben was exhausted and emotionally depleted, and he knew he was not thinking clearly. He badly needed sleep. He was making connections now that weren’t quite logical.

  He thought: Peter knew things, things about their father’s past, about a
company Max had helped set up, and then Peter was killed.

  And then…

  And then I found a photograph of the founders of this corporation, my father among them. And I followed to Liesl and Peter’s cabin, and I found a page from the incorporation document setting this company up. And then they’d tried to kill both me and Liesl and cover up the evidence by blowing up the cabin.

  So is it possible that they… again, the faceless, anonymous They… had gotten to my father, informed him that the secret was out, the secret of his past, or maybe the secret of this strange corporation? Or both?

  Yes, of course it was possible. Since They seem to be trying to eliminate anyone who knows about this company…

  Why else had Max disappeared so suddenly, so mysteriously?

  Might he have been compelled to go somewhere, to meet with certain people…

  There was only one thing Ben felt sure of: that his father’s sudden disappearance was in some way connected with the murders of Peter and Liesl, and with the uncovering of this document.

  He returned to the Range Rover, noticed in the light of the rising sun the deep scratches that defaced its sides, and drove back to Zähringerplatz.

  Then he settled back in the Rover and placed a call to Princeton, New Jersey.

  “Professor Godwin?”

  The old professor sounded as if he’d been asleep.

  “It’s Ben Hartman.”

  John Barnes Godwin, historian of Europe in the twentieth century and once Princeton’s most popular lecturer, had been retired for years. He was eighty-two but still came into his office every day to work.

  An image of Godwin came into Ben’s mind—tall and gaunt, white-haired, the deeply wrinkled face.

  Godwin had been not just Ben’s faculty adviser but a sort of father figure as well. Ben remembered once sitting in Godwin’s book-choked office in Dickinson Hall. The amber light, the vanilla-mildew smell of old books.

  They’d been talking about how FDR managed to maneuver the isolationist United States into the Second World War. Ben was writing his senior thesis about FDR and had told Godwin that he was offended by Roosevelt’s trickery.