The Sigma Protocol

  “Ah, Mr. Hartman,” Godwin replied. That was what he called Ben in those days. “How is your Latin? Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona.”

  Ben looked at the professor blankly.

  “‘For a good cause,’” Godwin translated with a slow, sly smile, “‘wrongdoing is virtuous.’ Publilius Syrus, who lived in Rome a century before Christ, and said a lot of smart things.”

  “I don’t think I agree,” Ben said, the morally indignant undergraduate. “To me that sounds like a rationalization for screwing people over. I hope I never catch myself saying that.”

  Godwin regarded him with what seemed to be puzzlement. “I suppose that’s why you refuse to join your father’s business,” he said pointedly. “You’d rather be pure.”

  “I’d rather teach.”

  “But why are you so sure you want to teach?” Godwin had asked, sipping tawny port.

  “Because I love it.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “No,” Ben admitted. “How can a twenty-year-old be certain of anything?”

  “Oh, I find that twenty-year-olds are certain of most things.”

  “But why should I go into something I have no interest in, working in a company my father built, to make even more money that I don’t need? I mean, what good does our money do for society? Why should I have great wealth while others have no food on the table?”

  Godwin closed his eyes. “It’s a luxury to thumb your nose at money. I’ve had some extremely rich students, even a Rockefeller, in my class. And they all struggle with this same dilemma—not to let the money rule your life or define you, but, instead, to do something meaningful with your life. Now, your father is one of our nation’s great philanthropists—”

  “Yeah, wasn’t it Reinhold Niebuhr who said that philanthropy is a form of paternalism? The privileged class tries to preserve its status by doling out funds to the needy?”

  Godwin glanced up, impressed. Ben tried not to smile. He’d just read this in his theology class, and the line had stuck in his mind.

  “A question, Ben. Is becoming a grade school teacher actually your way of rebelling against your father?”

  “Maybe so,” Ben said, unwilling to lie. He wanted to add that it was Godwin who had inspired him to teach, but that might sound too… something.

  He was surprised when Godwin replied, “Bully for you. That takes guts. And you’ll be a great teacher, I have no doubt of it.”

  Now, Ben said, “I’m sorry to be calling you so late—”

  “Not at all, Ben. Where are you? The connection—”

  “Switzerland. Listen, my father’s disappeared—”

  “What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”

  “He left home this morning, went somewhere, we don’t know where, and I was wondering because you called him this morning, just before that…”

  “I was returning his call, really. He wanted to talk about another gift to the center he was planning to make.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I’m afraid so. Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I can recall. But if he happens to call me again, is there a way I can get in touch with you?”

  Ben gave Godwin his digital number. “Another question. Do you know anyone on the faculty of the University of Zurich? Someone who does what you do—modern European history.”

  Godwin paused for a moment. “At the University of Zurich? You can’t do any better than Carl Mercandetti. A first-class researcher. Economic history’s his specialty, but he’s very wide-ranging in the best European tradition. The fellow also has an astounding collection of grappa, though I suppose that’s neither here nor there. Regardless, Mercandetti’s your man.”

  “I appreciate it,” Ben said, and he hung up.

  Then he put the car seat back and tried to doze for a few hours.

  He slept fitfully, his sleep disturbed by unceasing nightmares in which he was forced to see the cabin explode time and again.

  When he awoke at a few minutes after nine, he saw in the rearview mirror how unshaven and dirty he looked, saw the deep circles under his eyes, but he didn’t have what it took to find a place to shave and wash.

  There wasn’t any time in any case.

  It was time to begin excavating a past that was no longer the past.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Paris

  Only a small brass plaque marked the office of Groupe TransEuroTech SA, on the third floor of a limestone building on the avenue Marceau in the eighth arrondissement. The plaque, mounted on the stone to the left of the front door, was but one of seven brass plaques bearing the names of law firms and other small companies, and as such it attracted little attention.

  The office of TransEuroTech never received un-scheduled visitors, but anyone who happened to pass by the third floor would see nothing out of the ordinary: a young male receptionist sitting behind a glass teller’s window made of a bullet-resistant polycarbonate material that looked like plain glass. Behind him, a small, bare room furnished with a few molded-plastic chairs, and a single door to the interior offices.

  No one would, of course, realize that the receptionist was actually an armed and experienced ex-commando, or see the concealed surveillance cameras, the passive infrared motion detectors, the balanced magnetic switches embedded in every door.

  The conference room deep inside the offices was actually a room within a room: a module separated from the surrounding concrete walls by foot-thick rubber blocks that kept all vibrations (specifically human speech) from transferring out. Immediately adjacent to the conference module was a permanent installation of antennae constantly searching for HF, UHF, VHF, and microwave transmissions—any attempt, that is, to listen in on the discussions held within the room. Attached to the antennae was a spectrum analyzer programmed to check across the spectrum for any anomalies.

  At one end of a coffin-shaped mahogany conference table sat two men. Their conversation was protected against interception by both white-noise generators and a “babble tape,” which sounded like the yammer of a crowded bar at happy hour. Anyone somehow able to bypass the elaborate security and listen in would be unable to separate the words of the two men at the table from the background noise.

  The older of the two was speaking on a sterile telephone, a flat black box of Swiss manufacture. He was a pasty-faced, worried-looking man in his mid-fifties with gold-framed glasses, a soft jowly face, oily skin, and receding hair dyed an unnatural russet. His name was Paul Marquand, and he was a vice president of security for the Corporation. Marquand had come to the Corporation by a route common to corporate-security directors of international businesses: he had spent time in the French infantry, was forced out for wild behavior and joined the French Foreign Legion, later moving to the U.S., where he’d worked as a strikebreaker for a mining company before he was hired to do corporate security for a multinational firm.

  Marquand spoke rapidly, quietly, and then hung up the phone.

  “Vienna Sector is disturbed,” Marquand told the man beside him, a dark-haired, olive-skinned Frenchman some twenty years younger named Jean-Luc Passard. “The American survived the propane accident in St. Gallen.” He added darkly, “There can be no more errors. Not after the Bahnhofplatz debacle.”

  “It was not your decision to assign the American soldier,” Jean-Luc said softly.

  “Of course not, but neither did I object. The logic was persuasive: he’d spent time in proximity to the subject and could pick the face out of a crowd in a matter of seconds. No matter how often a stranger is shown a photograph, he could never move as quickly or as reliably as someone who has known the target personally.”

  “We’ve now mobilized the very best,” Passard said. “With the Architect on the case, it will not be long before the mess is eliminated completely.”

  “His perfectionism leads to persistence,” Marquand observed. “Still the pampered American is not to be underestimated.”

  “The marvel is that he is still alive, the amateur,?
?? Passard agreed. “Being a fitness freak does not give one survival skills.” He snorted and spoke mockingly in heavily accented English: “He doesn’t know the jungle. He knows the jungle gym.”

  “All the same,” Marquand said, “there is such a thing as beginner’s luck.”

  “He is no longer a beginner,” Passard observed.

  Vienna

  The elderly, well-dressed American emerged from the gate, walking stiffly and slowly, clutching a carry-on bag. He searched the crowd until he saw a uniformed limousine driver holding up a little sign with his name on it.

  The old man gave a wave of acknowledgment, and the driver, accompanied by a woman in a white nurse’s uniform, hurried up to him. The driver took the American’s bag, and the nurse said, “How was your flight, sir?” She spoke in English with an Austrian-German accent.

  The man grumbled, “I despise traveling. I can’t tolerate it anymore.”

  The nurse escorted him through the crowds and to the street immediately outside, where a black Daimler limousine was parked. She helped him into the interior, which was equipped with the standard appurtenances—phone, TV, and bar. Tucked unobtrusively into one corner was an array of emergency medical equipment, including a small oxygen tank, hoses and face mask, defibrillator paddles, and IV tubes.

  “Well, sir,” the nurse said once he was settled in the deeply cushioned leather seat, “the ride is not long at all, sir.”

  The old man grunted, reclined the seat back, and closed his eyes.

  “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to make you more comfortable,” the nurse said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Zurich

  Anna was met at her hotel by a liaison officer from the office of the Public Prosecutor of the canton of Zurich. He was Bernard Kesting, a small, powerfully built, dark-haired young man with a heavy beard and eyebrows that joined in the middle. Kesting was unsmiling, all business, very professional: the quintessential Swiss bureaucrat.

  After a few minutes of stilted introductory chat, Kesting led her to his car, a BMW 728, parked in the semicircular drive in front of the hotel.

  “Rossignol is of course well known to us,” Kesting said, holding the car door open for her. “A revered figure in the banking community, for many, many years. Certainly my office has never had reason to question him.” She got into the car, but he stood there with the car door still open. “I’m afraid the nature of your inquiry was not made clear to us. The gentleman has never been accused of any crime, you know.”

  “I understand.” She reached for the handle and closed the door herself. He made her nervous.

  Behind the wheel, Kesting continued as he pulled out of the drive and headed down Steinwiesstrasse, a quiet residential street near the Kunsthaus. “He was, or is, a brilliant financier.”

  “I can’t disclose the nature of our investigation,” Anna said, “but I can tell you that he’s not the target of it.”

  He was silent for a while, then said with some embarrassment, “You asked about protective surveillance. As you know, we haven’t been able to locate him precisely.”

  “And this is customary for prominent Swiss bankers? To simply… disappear?”

  “Customary? No. But then he is retired, after all. He is entitled to his eccentricities.”

  “And how are his official communications handled?”

  “Received by a trust, domestic representatives of an offshore entity that remains, even to them, completely opaque.”

  “Transparency not being a notable Swiss value.”

  Kesting glanced at her quickly, apparently unsure whether she was being snide. “It seems that at some point in the past year or so, he decided he wanted to, well, keep a lower profile. Perhaps he had the delusion that he was being stalked, pursued—he’s in his early nineties, after all, and mental deterioration can sometimes lead to paranoid fantasies.”

  “And perhaps it wasn’t a delusion.”

  Kesting gave her a sharp look but said nothing.

  Herr Professor Doktor Carl Mercandetti had warmed immeasurably when Ben mentioned that he was a friend of Professor John Barnes Godwin. “There is no inconvenience, and nothing to apologize for. I have an office in the library. Why don’t you meet me there mid-morning? I’ll be there anyway. I hope Godwin didn’t tell you—I’m supposed to be publishing a monograph as part of a Cambridge University Press series that he’s editing, and already I’m two years late with it! He tells me my sense of timing is a touch Mediterranean.” Mercandetti’s laugh was booming even over the phone line.

  Ben had been vague about what he’d wanted from Mercandetti, and Mercandetti, judging from his high jollity, had probably assumed it was as much by way of a social call as anything.

  Ben spent the first part of the morning searching through every directory of corporations in Switzerland he could find, even running a computer search of all telephone listings. But he could find no record of such a corporation as Sigma AG. So far as he could see, there was no public record that it ever did exist.

  Carl Mercandetti was more austere-looking in person than Ben had imagined when they spoke on the telephone. He was around fifty, slight, with a gray crew cut and oval wire-rimmed glasses. When Ben introduced himself, however, the eyes became lively, and his handclasp was welcoming.

  “Any friend of God’s…” Mercandetti said.

  “And I thought it was only Princeton undergraduates who called him that.”

  Mercandetti shook his head, smiling. “In the years I’ve known him, I’d say he’s only grown into his nickname. I’m quite terrified he’ll be there at the pearly gates, saying, ‘Now, a small query about footnote forty-three in your last article…’”

  After a few minutes, Ben mentioned his efforts to track down a corporation named Sigma AG, one founded in Zurich toward the end of the Second World War. He didn’t explain further: the scholar would doubtless assume it was the sort of thing that an international banker might well pursue, perhaps in the course of corporate due diligence. In any case, Ben knew he would not be ill-served by reticence.

  When he learned of Ben’s immediate concerns, Mercandetti was polite but unengaged. The name Sigma clearly meant little to him.

  “You say it was established in 1945?” the historian asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “A magnificent year for Bordeaux, did you know that?” He shrugged. “Of course, we’re talking well over half a century ago. Many companies that were founded during the war, or right after, failed. Our economy was not so good as it is now.”

  “I have reason to believe it still exists,” Ben said.

  Mercandetti cocked his head good-naturedly. “What sort of information do you have?”

  “It’s not solid information, really. It’s more along the lines of—of, well, people talking. People in a position to know.”

  Mercandetti seemed amused and skeptical. “Do these people have any more information? The name could easily have been changed.”

  “But isn’t there some record somewhere of corporate name changes?”

  The historian’s eyes scanned the vaulted ceiling of the library. “There’s a place you might check. It’s called the Handelsregisteramt des Kantons Zürich—the registry of all corporations founded in Zurich. All companies established here must file papers with the registry.”

  “All right. And let me ask you something else. This list here.” He slid the list of directors of Sigma AG, which he had recopied in his own hand, across the sturdy oak table. “Do you recognize any of these names?”

  Mercandetti put on a pair of reading glasses. “Most of these names—they are names of well-known industrialists, you know. Prosperi, here, is a sort of underworld figure—I think he just died, just recently. In Brazil or Paraguay, I forget which. These men are mostly dead or very ancient by now. Oh, and Gaston Rossignol, the banker—he must live in Zurich.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “I haven’t heard otherwise. But if he’
s alive he must be in his eighties or nineties.”

  “Is there a way to find out?”

  “Have you tried the telephone book?” An amused look.

  “There were a handful of Rossignols. None of them with the right first initial.”

  Mercandetti shrugged. “Rossignol was a major financier. Helped restore the solidity of our banking system after the Second World War. He had many friends here. But perhaps has retired to the Cap d’Antibes, and is slathering coconut oil on his liver-spotted shoulders even as we speak. Or perhaps he now seeks to avoid any sort of attention, for some reason of his own. With the recent controversies over Swiss gold and the Second World War, there have been agitators, some of them vigilantes. Even a Swiss banker cannot live in a vault, of course. So one takes precautions.”

  One takes precautions. “Thanks,” he said. “This is extremely helpful.” Now he pulled out the black-and-white photograph he’d taken from the Handelsbank and handed it to the academic. “Do any of these men look familiar?”

  “I don’t know if you are a banker, at heart, or a history buff,” Mercandetti said merrily. “Or a dealer in old photographs—quite a trade these days. Collectors pay fortunes for nineteenth-century tintypes. Not my sort of thing at all. Give me color any day.”

  “This isn’t exactly a vacation snap,” Ben said mildly.

  Mercandetti smiled and picked up the photo. “That must be Cyrus Weston—yes, with his trademark hat,” he said. He pointed with a stubby finger. “That looks like Avery Henderson, dead many years. This is Émil Ménard, who built Trianon, really the first modern conglomerate. This may be Rossignol, but I’m not sure. One always imagines him with his great bald dome, not this thatch of dark hair, but he was a much younger man here. And over here…” A minute passed in silence before Mercandetti dropped the photo. His smile had vanished. “What sort of prank is this?” he asked Ben, looking at him over his reading glasses. A bemused expression crossed his face.

  “How do you mean?”

  “This must be some sort of montage, something involving trick photography.” The academic spoke with a trace of annoyance.