The Sigma Protocol

  “Your efforts?”

  “Yes, and those of my foundation. It is not an insignificant part of the research that we sponsor.”

  “But what threat could the CIA pose?”

  “The CIA, I understand, did not exist until a few years after the war, but they inherited operational control of these agents. There are aspects of history that some old-guard types in the CIA prefer to have left undisturbed. Some of them will go to quite extraordinary lengths to ensure this.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t believe that. The CIA doesn’t go around killing people.”

  “No, not anymore,” Lenz conceded, a note of sarcasm in his voice. “Not since they killed Allende in Chile, Lumumba in the Belgian Congo, tried to assassinate Castro. No, they’re prohibited by law from doing such things. So now they ‘outsource,’ as you American businessmen like to say. They hire freelancers, mercenaries, through chains of front organizations, so the hit men can never be connected with the U.S. government.” He broke off. “The world is more complicated than you seem to think.”

  “But that’s all ancient, irrelevant history!”

  “Scarcely irrelevant if you’re one of the ancient men who may be implicated,” Lenz pressed on inexorably. “I speak of elder statesmen, retired diplomats, former dignitaries who did a stint with the Office of Strategic Services in their youth. As they putter around their libraries and write their memoirs, they cannot avoid a certain unease.” He gazed into the clear fluid in his glass as if seeing something there. “These are men accustomed to power, and deference. They would not look forward to revelations that would darken their golden years. Oh, of course, they’ll tell themselves that what they do is for the good of the country, sparing the good name of the United States. So much of the wickedness men do is in the name of the commonweal. This, Mr. Hartman, I know. Frail old dogs can be the most dangerous. Calls can be made, favors called in. Mentors drawing on the loyalty of protégés. Frightened old men determined to die with at least their good names intact. I wish I could discount this scenario. But I know what these men are like. I have seen too much of human nature.”

  Ilse reappeared, carrying a small leather-bound book; on its spine Ben made out the name Hölderlin, lettered in gilt. “I see you gentlemen are still at it,” she said.

  “You understand, don’t you, why we can be slightly on edge?” Lenz told Ben smoothly. “We have many enemies.”

  “There have been many threats against my husband,” Ilse said. “There are fanatics on the right who view him, somehow, as a turncoat, as the man who betrayed his father’s legacy.” She smiled without warmth and repaired to the adjoining room.

  “They worry me less, to be frank, than the self-interested, ostensibly rational souls who simply don’t understand why we can’t let sleeping dogs lie.” Lenz’s eyes were alert. “And whose friends, as I say, may be tempted to take rather extreme measures to ensure that their golden years remain golden. But I go on. You had certain questions about the postwar period, questions you hoped I might be able to answer.”

  Jürgen Lenz examined the photograph, gripping it in both hands. His face was tense. “That’s my father,” he said. “Yes.”

  “You look just like him,” Ben said.

  “Quite the legacy, hmm?” Lenz said ruefully. No longer was he the charming, affable host. Now he peered intently at the rest of the photograph. “Dear God, no. It can’t be.” He sank into his chair, his face ashen.

  “What can’t?” Ben was unrelenting. “Tell me what you know.”

  “Is this genuine?” The same reaction that Carl Mercandetti, the historian, had had.

  “Yes.” Ben took a deep breath, and replied with the utmost intensity. “Yes.” The lives of Peter, Liesl, and who knew how many others had been its guarantors of authenticity.

  “But Sigma was a myth! An old wives’ tale! We’d all satisfied ourselves that it was.”

  “Then you do know of it?”

  Lenz leaned forward. “You have to remember that in the tumult following the war, there were all sorts of wild tales. One of those was the legend of Sigma, vague and shrouded as it was. That some sort of alliance was forged among the major industrialists of the world.” He pointed at two faces. “That men like Sir Alford Kittredge and Wolfgang Siebing, one revered and one reviled, made common cause. That they met in secrecy, and forged a clandestine pact.”

  “And what was the nature of that pact?”

  Lenz shook his head hopelessly. “I wish I knew, Mr. Hartman—may I call you Ben? I’m sorry. I’d never taken the stories seriously until now.”

  “And your own father’s involvement?”

  Lenz shook his head slowly. “You’re exceeding my own knowledge. Perhaps Jakob Sonnenfeld would know of these things.”

  Sonnenfeld—Sonnenfeld was the most prominent Nazi hunter alive. “Would he help me?”

  “Speaking as a major benefactor of his institute,” Lenz replied, “I am certain he’ll do his best.” He poured himself a fortifying quantity of spirits. “We’ve been dancing around one issue, haven’t we? You still haven’t explained how you came to be involved in all of this.”

  “Do you recognize the man next to your father?”

  “No,” Lenz said. He squinted. “He looks a little like… but that’s not possible either.”

  “Yes. That’s my father next to yours.” Ben’s voice was flatly declarative.

  “That makes no sense,” Lenz protested. “Everyone in my world knows about your father. He’s a major philanthropist. A force for good. And a Holocaust survivor, of course. Yes, it looks like him—like you, in fact. But I repeat: that makes no sense.”

  Ben laughed bitterly. “I’m sorry. But things stopped making sense for me when my old college buddy tried to murder me on the Bahnhofstrasse.”

  Lenz’s eyes looked sorrowful. “Tell me how you found this.”

  Ben told Lenz about the events of the past several days, trying to stay as dispassionate as he could.

  “Then you, too, know danger,” Lenz said solemnly. “There are filaments, invisible filaments, that link this photograph to those deaths.”

  Frustration welled up in Ben as he struggled to make some sense of everything Lenz was telling him, tried to rearrange the pieces of information to make a coherent picture. Instead of becoming clearer, things were even more bewildering, more maddening.

  Ben was first conscious of Ilse’s return to the room from the scent of her perfume.

  “This young man brings danger,” she said to her husband, and her voice was like sandpaper. She turned to Ben. “Forgive me, but I cannot keep silent any longer. You bring death to this house. My husband has been menaced by extremists for so many years because of his fight for justice. I am sorry for what you have undergone. But you are careless, the way you Americans always are. You come to see my husband under false pretenses, pursuing some private vendetta of your own.”

  “Please, Ilse,” Lenz interjected.

  “And now you have brought death here with you, like an unannounced guest. I would be grateful to you if you would leave my house. My husband has done enough for the cause. Must he give his life for it, too?”

  “Ilse is upset,” Lenz said apologetically. “There are aspects of my life that she has never grown accustomed to.”

  “No,” Ben said. “She’s probably right. I’ve already put too many lives in jeopardy.” His voice was hollow.

  Ilse’s face was a mask, the muscles immobilized by fear. “Gute Nacht,” she said with quiet finality.

  Walking Ben to the foyer, Lenz spoke with murmured urgency. “If you want, I’ll be glad to help you. To do what I can. Pull strings where I am able to, provide contacts. But Ilse is right about one thing. You can’t know what you’re up against. I’d advise you to be cautious, my friend.” There was something familiar about the harrowed look on Lenz’s face, and after a moment Ben realized that it reminded him of what he’d seen on Peter’s. Within both men, it seemed, a passion for justice had been worn do
wn by vast forces, and yet it could be mistaken for nothing else.

  Ben left Lenz’s house, dazed. He was far over his head: why couldn’t he just admit that he was powerless, hopelessly unequipped for a task that had defeated his own brother? And the very facts he had already established now ground deeper into his psyche, like glass shards under his feet. Max Hartman, philanthropist, Holocaust survivor, humanitarian—was he, in fact, a man like Gerhard Lenz, a confederate in barbarity? It was sickening to contemplate. Might Max have been complicit in Peter’s murder? Was the man behind his own son’s death?

  Was this why he’d suddenly disappeared? So he wouldn’t have to face his own exposure? And what about the complicity of the CIA? How the hell did an Obersturmführer in Hitler’s SS come to emigrate and settle in the States, if not with help from the U.S. government? Were allies of his, very old friends indeed, behind the horrific events? Was there some chance they were doing it on his father’s behalf—to protect him and themselves as well—without the old man’s knowledge?

  You talk of things you cannot understand, his father had said, speaking past him as much as to him.

  Ben was seized with conflicting emotions. Part of him, the devoted, loyal son, wanted to believe that there was some other explanation, had wanted to since Peter’s revelations. Some reason to believe his own father was not a… a what? A monster. He heard his mother’s voice, whispering as she died, pleading with him to understand, to try to heal the breach, to get along. To love this complicated, difficult man who was Max Hartman.

  While another part of Ben felt a welcome clarity.

  I’ve worked hard to understand you, you bastard! Ben found himself shouting inwardly. I’ve tried to love you. But a deception like this, the ugliness of your real life—how can I feel anything but hatred?

  He had parked, once again, a good distance from Lenz’s house. He did not want his license plates to be traced back to him; at least, that had been his thinking before, when he had assumed Lenz was one of the conspirators.

  He walked down the path in front of Lenz’s house. Just before he reached the street, he saw, in his peripheral vision, a light come on.

  It was the interior dome light of a car, just a few yards away.

  Someone was getting out of the car and walking toward him.

  Trevor saw a light come on across the street and turned his head to look. The front door was open. The target was chatting with an older gentleman, whom he assumed was Lenz. Trevor waited until the two men had shaken hands and the target was strolling down the front path before he got out of the car.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “I want you to run the plates,” Heisler said on the police radio. He turned to Anna. “If is not you, and not us, then who is it? You must have some idea.”

  “Someone who’s also staking out the house,” she said. “I don’t like this.”

  She thought: Something else is going on here. Should I tell Heisler my suspicions about Hartman? Yet it was such a half-baked bit of speculation—after all, what if Hartman was there simply to get information out of Lenz, information about where some of his father’s old friends might be living—and not to kill him?

  Still… they had all the legal justification they needed to storm the villa. And what if it turned out that, while they were all sitting here watching the house, one of the city’s leading citizens was inside being murdered? The outcry would be enormous; it would be an international incident, and it would all be on her shoulders.

  Heisler interrupted her thoughts. “I want you to walk by that car and look at the man’s face,” he said. It seemed an order, not a request. “Make absolute certain you don’t recognize.”

  She agreed, wanting to see for herself.

  “I need a weapon,” she said.

  Heisler handed her his gun. “You took this from floor of car. I must have left it. I did not give it to you.”

  She got out of the car and started walking toward Lenz’s villa.

  The front door of Lenz’s house came open.

  Two men were standing there, talking. One older, one younger.

  Lenz and Hartman.

  Lenz was alive, she saw with relief.

  The two men shook hands cordially. Then Hartman started down the path toward the street.

  And suddenly a light inside the Peugeot went on, and the man got out of the driver’s seat, a trench coat draped over his right arm.

  That was when she saw the man’s face for the first time.

  The face!

  She knew the face. She had seen it before.

  But where?

  The man with the trench coat over his arm closed his car door as Hartman reached the street, not five yards away.

  Just for an instant she saw the man in profile.

  It stirred an old memory.

  A profile shot. She had seen a profile shot of this man. Front and side views. The association was unpleasant, one of danger.

  Mug shots. At work. Fairly poor-quality photos of this man, front and profile. A bad guy.

  Yes, she had seen the photos once or twice in the Weekly Intelligence Briefing.

  But they weren’t mug shots, strictly speaking; they had been surveillance photographs taken at a distance, magnified to the point of graininess.

  Yes.

  Not an ordinary criminal, of course.

  An assassin.

  The man was an international assassin, and an extraordinarily accomplished one. Little was known about him—only fragmentary bits of evidence had ever been gathered; as to his employers, assuming he wasn’t a freelancer, they had nothing at all. But the evidence they had suggested someone of uncommon resourcefulness and range. She flashed on another photograph: the body of a labor leader in Barcelona, whom he was believed to have slain. The image had lodged in her memory, perhaps because of the way blood ran down the victim’s shirtfront like a neck tie. Another image: a popular political candidate in southern Italy, a man who had been leading a national reform movement. His death was originally attributed to the Mafia, but had been reclassified after snippets of information implicated a man they knew only as the Architect. The candidate, already under threats from organized crime, had been well protected, she recalled. And the assassination had been brilliantly engineered, from the perspective not merely of ballistics but of politics as well. The politician was shot dead while in a brothel staffed by illegal immigrants from Somalia, and the awkward circumstances ensured that his supporters could not transfigure his death into martyrdom.

  The Architect. An international assassin of the first order.

  Targeting Hartman.

  She tried to make sense of it: Hartman’s on a vendetta, she thought. And the other man?

  Oh, my God. Now what do I do? Try to apprehend the killer?

  She held the transmitter to her lips, depressed the Talk button.

  “I know this guy,” she told Heisler. “He’s a professional assassin. I’m going to try to take him out. You cover Hartman.”

  “Pardon me,” the man called out to Ben, striding quickly toward him.

  Something seems wrong with this guy, Ben thought. Something’s off.

  The coat folded over his right arm.

  The rapid pace at which he was approaching.

  The face—a face he had seen before. A face he would never forget.

  Ben slipped his right hand under his left jacket lapel, reached for the cold hard steel of the gun and was afraid.

  She needed Hartman alive; Hartman dead did her no good.

  The assassin was about to take out Hartman, she was certain. Everything was suddenly one complex calculation. As far as she was concerned, it was better for Hartman, her suspect, to flee than to be killed. In any case, she’d have to leave the pursuit of Hartman to the others.

  She raised Heisler’s Glock.

  The assassin seemed unaware of her. He was focused only on Hartman. She knew from her training that he had fallen victim to the professional’s greatest weakness: target fixation
. He’d lost a sense of situational awareness. Big cats are most vulnerable to hunters precisely when they’re tensing to pounce.

  Maybe that would give her the advantage she needed.

  Now she had to suddenly break his concentration, distract his attention.

  “Freeze!” she shouted. “Halt, goddammit!”

  She saw Hartman turn and look at her.

  The assassin jerked his head slightly to the left but didn’t turn to see where the shout had come from, didn’t shift his catlike gaze away from Hartman.

  Anna aimed directly at the middle of the assassin’s chest, at the center of his mass. It was a reflexive gesture for her; she had been trained to shoot to kill, not to wound.

  But what was he doing now? The hit man had turned back toward Hartman, who, she suddenly saw, had his own gun out.

  The Architect had his target in his sights; he assumed that whoever had just shouted wasn’t an immediate threat, but in any case he had made his own calculation. To turn around and engage her—whoever she was—was to lose his target, and he was unwilling to do that.

  Suddenly the assassin began to turn—

  She’d figured him wrong.

  His movements were as preternaturally smooth as a ballet dancer’s. Pivoting on the balls of his feet, he turned one hundred and eighty degrees, his gun extended and firing all the while, in precise intervals of a fraction of a second. The gun scarcely bucked in his powerful grip. Only when she turned to look did she realize what he had accomplished. Good God! A moment before, there were four armed Vienna policemen who had drawn a bead on him. Every one of them had now been shot! Each one of his shots had hit its target. The four policemen were down!

  It was a breathtaking execution, displaying a level of skill she had never encountered in her life. She was filled with sheer terror.