The Sigma Protocol

  Now she heard panicked noises, the gasping and lowing of the incapacitated gunshot victims.

  The man was a professional; he had determined to eliminate all impediments before turning back to his target—and she was his final impediment.

  But as he spun toward her, Anna had already aimed. She heard Hartman shout. Now it was her turn to focus single-mindedly, and she squeezed the trigger.

  Bull’s-eye!

  The hit man tumbled to the ground, his gun clattering off to one side.

  She’d dropped him.

  Was he dead?

  Everything was chaos. The suspect, Hartman, was tearing away down the street.

  But she knew the street was blockaded in both directions by the police. She ran toward the downed man, scooped up his gun, and continued running after Hartman.

  Amid the screams of the surviving gunshot victims, she heard shouts in German, but they meant nothing to her.

  “Er steht auf!”

  “Er lebt, er steht!”

  “Nein, nimm den Verdöchtigen!”

  Down the block, Hartman had run directly into the clustered team of surveillance experts, all of whom had their weapons out and aimed at him, and she heard more shouting—

  “Halt! Keinen Schritt weiter!”

  “Polizei! Sie sind verhaftet!”

  But a noise coming from behind her, from where the assassin lay, attracted her attention, and she turned around just in time to see the assassin stagger into his Peugeot and yank the door behind him.

  He was wounded, but he had survived, and now he was getting away!

  “Hey,” she shouted to anyone, everyone, “stop him! The Peugeot! Don’t let him escape!”

  They had Hartman; he was surrounded by five Polizei. For now she could safely ignore him. Instead, she lunged toward the Peugeot just as it roared to life and barreled straight toward her.

  On the few occasions when she’d permitted herself to replay in her mind her close encounter with the Lincoln Town Car in Halifax, she’d fantasized that she’d a gun in her hands and could fire at the driver. Now she did, and she squeezed off shot after shot at the man. But the windshield only pitted and spider-webbed in small areas, and the car kept bearing down on her. She threw herself to one side, out of the way, just as the Peugeot thundered by, tires squealing, down the block past two empty surveillance cars—their drivers and passengers all on the street now—and out of sight.

  He’d gotten away!

  “Shit!” she shouted, turning back to see Hartman with his hands up.

  Shaken, she ran down the block toward her newly apprehended suspect.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Patient Eighteen was slowly jogging on a treadmill.

  A snorkel-like device came out of his mouth, connected to two long hoses. His nose had been clamped shut.

  Taped to his crepey, concave bare chest were twelve wires that fed into an EKG monitor. Another wire sprouted from a small device clamped onto the end of a forefinger. He was sweating and looked pale.

  “How are you doing?” said the doctor, a tall gray-faced man.

  The patient could not talk, but he gave a trembling thumbs-up.

  “Remember, there’s a panic button right in front of you,” the doctor said. “Use it if you need to.”

  Patient Eighteen kept jogging.

  The doctor said to his short, rotund colleague, “I think we’re at maximal exercise capacity. He seems to have crossed the respiratory exchange ratio—he’s over one. No signs of ischemia. He’s strong, this one. All right, let’s give him the rest of the day off. Tomorrow he’ll begin the treatment.”

  For the first time all day, the gray-faced doctor allowed himself a smile.

  Princeton, New Jersey

  The grand old Princeton historian was working in his study at Dickinson Hall when the telephone rang.

  Everything in Professor John Barnes Godwin’s office dated from the forties or fifties, whether it was the black rotary-dial phone or the oak card-catalog drawers or the Royal manual typewriter (he had no use for computers). He liked it that way, liked the way the old things looked, the solidity of objects from the time they made things out of Bakelite and wood and steel and not plastic, plastic, and plastic.

  He was not, however, one of those old men who lived in the past. He loved the world today. Often he wished his darling Sarah, his wife of fifty-seven years, were here to share it with him. They had always planned to do a lot of traveling when he retired.

  Godwin was a historian of twentieth-century Europe, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize whose lectures had always been immensely popular on the Princeton campus. Many of his former students now occupied positions of great prominence in their fields. The chairman of the Federal Reserve had been one of his brightest, as were the chairman of WorldCom, both the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the United States ambassador to the UN, countless members of the Council on Economic Advisers, even the current chairman of the Republican National Committee.

  Professor Godwin cleared his throat before answering the phone. “Hello.”

  The voice was immediately familiar.

  “Oh yes, Mr. Holland, good to hear your voice. We’re still on, I hope?”

  He listened for a moment. “Of course I know him, he was a student of mine…Well, if you’re asking for my opinion, I remember him as charming if a bit strong-headed, very bright though not really an intellectual, or at least not interested in ideas for their own sake. A very strong sense of moral purpose, I always thought. But Ben Hartman always struck me as quite reasonable and levelheaded.”

  He listened again. “No, he’s not a crusader. He just doesn’t have that temperament. And he’s certainly no martyr. I think he can be reasoned with.”

  Another pause.

  “Well, none of us wants the project disrupted. But I do wish you’d give the fellow a chance. I’d really hate to see anything happen to him.”

  Vienna

  The interrogation room was cold and bare, with the standard furnishings of police interrogation rooms everywhere. I’m becoming an expert, Ben thought grimly. The one-way observation mirror, unsubtle, and as big as a bedroom window in a suburban house. The wire mesh over the window overlooking a bleak inner courtyard.

  The American woman sat across the small room, in a gray suit, coiled on the metal folding chair like a clock spring. She had identified herself as Special Agent Anna Navarro of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations, and flashed an ID card to prove it. She was also a serious beauty, a real stunner: wavy dark brown hair, eyes the color of caramel, olive skin; tall and slim and long-legged. Nicely dressed, too—a sense of style, which had to be rare in the Department of Justice. Yet she was all business, not a hint of a smile. No ring, which probably meant divorced, because women this gorgeous were usually snatched up early, no doubt by some gallant fellow government investigator with a square chin who’d wooed her with tales of his bravery in apprehending miscreants… until the stress of two highpowered government careers had taken its toll on the marriage…

  In the folding chair next to her sat a bruiser of a cop, a beefy guy who sat silent and brooding and chain-smoking Casablanca cigarettes. Ben had no idea whether the cop understood English. He’d only said his name: Sergeant Walter Heisler of the Sicherheitsbüro, the major-crimes squad of the Viennese police.

  Half an hour into the questioning, Ben became impatient. He’d tried being reasonable, tried to talk sense, but his interrogators were implacable. “Am I under arrest?” he asked finally.

  “Do you want to be?” Agent Navarro snapped back.

  Oh, good God, not this again.

  “Does she have the right to do this?” Ben asked of the hulking Viennese cop, who just smoked and stared at him bovinely.

  Silence.

  “Well?” Ben demanded. “Who’s in charge here?”

  “As long as you answer my questions, there’s no reason to arrest you,” Agent Navarro said. “Yet.?
??

  “So I’m free to go.”

  “You’re being held for questioning. Why were you visiting Jürgen Lenz? You still haven’t explained properly.”

  “As I said, it was a social visit.

  Ask Lenz.” “Are you in Vienna for business or pleasure?”

  “Both.”

  “You don’t have any business meetings lined up. Is that the way you normally travel on business?”

  “I like to be spontaneous.”

  “You were booked for five days at a ski resort in the Swiss Alps, but you never showed up there.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “Why do I doubt that?”

  “I have no idea. I felt like seeing Vienna.”

  “So you just showed up in Vienna with no hotel reservations.”

  “As I said, I like to be spontaneous.”

  “I see,” said Agent Navarro, clearly frustrated. “And your visit to Gaston Rossignol, in Zurich—was that business as well?”

  My God, so they knew about that, too! But how? He felt a wave of panic.

  “He was a friend of a friend.”

  “And that’s how you treat a friend of a friend—you kill him?”

  Oh, Christ. “He was dead when I got there!”

  “Really,” Navarro said, clearly unconvinced. “Was he expecting you?”

  “No. I just showed up.”

  “Because you like to be spontaneous.”

  “I wanted to surprise him.”

  “Instead he surprised you, huh?”

  “It was a shock, yes.”

  “How did you get to Rossignol? Who put you in touch with him?”

  Ben hesitated, a beat too long. “I’d rather not say.”

  She picked up on it. “Because he was no mutual acquaintance or anything like that, was he? What was Rossignol’s connection to your father?”

  What the hell did that mean? How much did she know? Ben looked at her sharply.

  “Let me tell you something,” Anna Navarro said dryly. “I know your type. Rich boy, always gets whatever he wants. Whenever you get yourself in deep doodoo, your daddy saves you, or maybe the family lawyer bails you out. You’re used to doing whatever the hell you want and you think you’ll never have to pay the bill. Well, not this time, my friend.”

  Ben smiled involuntarily, but he refused to give her the satisfaction of putting up an argument.

  “Your father is a Holocaust survivor, is that right?” she persisted.

  So she doesn’t know everything.

  Ben shrugged. “That’s what I’m told.” She certainly wasn’t entitled to the truth.

  “And Rossignol was a big-deal Swiss banker, right?” She was watching him closely now.

  What was she driving at? “That’s why you and all those Austrian cops were staked out in front of Lenz’s house,” he said. “You were there to arrest me.”

  “No, actually,” the American woman said coolly. “To talk to you.”

  “You could have just asked to talk to me. You didn’t need half the Vienna police force. I’ll bet you’d love to pin the Rossignol murder on me. Gets the CIA off the hook, right? Or do you Justice Department guys hate the CIA? I get confused.”

  Agent Navarro leaned forward, her soft brown eyes gone hard. “Why were you carrying a gun?”

  Ben hesitated, but just for a second or two. “For protection.”

  “Is that right.” A statement of skepticism, not a question. “Are you registered to carry a gun in Austria?”

  “I believe that’s a matter between me and the Austrian authorities.”

  “The Austrian authorities are sitting in this chair next to me. If he decides to prosecute you for illegally carrying a gun, I won’t stand in his way. The Austrians strongly disapprove of foreign visitors carrying unregistered weapons.”

  Ben shrugged. She had a point, of course. Though it seemed the least of his worries right now.

  “So let me tell you this, Mr. Hartman,” Agent Navarro said. “I find it a little hard to believe that you carried a gun to visit a ‘friend of a friend.’ Particularly when your fingerprints were found all over Rossignol’s house. Understand?”

  “No, not really. Are you accusing me of murdering him? If so, why don’t you come right out and say it?” He was finding it hard to breathe, his tension steadily rising.

  “The Swiss think your brother had a vendetta against the banking establishment. Maybe something in you got twisted when he died, something that made you take his pursuit of them to a more lethal level. It wouldn’t be hard to show motive. And then there are your fingerprints. I think a Swiss court would have no problem convicting you.”

  Did she genuinely believe he’d murdered Rossignol—and if so, why was this special investigator from the Department of Justice so interested? He had no idea how much power she really had here, what kind of trouble he was really in, and the uncertainty alone made him anxious. Don’t be defensive, he thought. Fight back.

  Ben sat back. “You have no authority here.”

  “Absolutely right. But I don’t need authority.”

  What the hell did she mean? “So what do you want from me?”

  “I want information. I want to know why you were really visiting Rossignol. Why you were really visiting Jürgen Lenz. What you’re really up to, Mr. Hartman.”

  “And if I don’t care to share?” He tried to project an image of confidence.

  She cocked her head. “Would you like to find out what’ll happen? Why don’t you spin the wheel and take a chance?”

  Jesus, she was good, Ben thought. He breathed deeply. The room’s walls seemed to be closing in. He kept his face blank, unreadable.

  She continued: “Do you know that there’s a warrant for your arrest in Zurich?”

  Ben shrugged. “That’s a laugh.” He decided that it was time for him to be aggressive, aggrieved, undefensive—as a wrongfully arrested American would be. “Maybe I know the ways of the Swiss a little better than you do. For one thing, they’ll swear out a warrant if you spit out your gum on the sidewalk. For another, there’s no god-damn possibility of extradition.” He’d established this much from his conversations with Howie. “The canton of Zurich has a hard enough time getting cooperation from the Polizei of the other Swiss cantons. And the fact that the Swiss have made a name for themselves in harboring tax fugitives means that other countries ignore Swiss extradition requests as a matter of policy.” These were Howie’s words, and he recited them stolidly, facing her down. She might as well know that she couldn’t game him. “The Zurich bulls claim they want me for ‘questioning.’ They don’t even pretend to have a case. So why don’t we cut the crap here?”

  She leaned closer. “It’s a matter of public record that your brother had been trying to build a case against the Swiss banking establishment. Gaston Rossignol was a preeminent Swiss banker. You visit him, and he turns up dead. Let’s get back to that. Then suddenly you’re in Vienna meeting with the son of an infamous Nazi. And your father was in a concentration camp. It looks an awful lot like some kind of vengeance trip you’re on.”

  So that was it. Maybe it would look like that to someone who didn’t know the truth. But I can’t tell her the truth!

  “That’s preposterous,” Ben snapped. “I don’t even want to dignify your fantasies about vendettas and violence. You talk about Swiss bankers. I do deals with these people, Agent Navarro. It’s my job. International finance doesn’t really lend itself to murderous rampages, O.K.? In my world, the main injuries you inflict are paper cuts.”

  “Then explain what happened on the Bahnhofplatz.”

  “I can’t. I’ve been through that with the Swiss bulls over and over again.”

  “And explain how you tracked down Rossignol.”

  Ben shook his head.

  “And the others. Come on. I want to know where you got their names and their whereabouts.”

  Ben just looked at her.

  “Where were you on Wednesday?”

 
“I don’t recall.”

  “Nova Scotia, by any chance?”

  “Come to think of it, I was being arrested in Zurich,” he shot back. “You can check with your friends at the Zurich police. See, I like to get arrested in every country I visit. It’s really the best way to appreciate the local customs.”

  She ignored his barb. “Tell me what got you arrested.”

  “You know as well as I do.”

  Navarro turned to her brooding sidekick, who exhaled a plume of smoke, then looked back at Ben. “Several times in the last couple of days you yourself were almost killed. Including today—”

  In his dull, dazed anxiety, he was surprised to feel a warm rush of gratitude. “You saved my life. I guess I should thank you.”

  “Damn right you should,” she replied. “Now tell me, why do you think someone was trying to kill you? Who might have known what you were up to?”

  Nice try, lady. “I have no idea.”

  “I’ll bet you have some idea.”

  “Sorry. Maybe you can ask your friends over at the CIA what they’re trying to cover up. Or is your office involved in the cover-up, too?”

  “Mr. Hartman, your twin brother was killed in Switzerland, in a suspicious plane crash. More recently, you’ve had some unexplained connection to shootings in that country. Death seems to follow you around like a cheap cologne. What am I supposed to think?”

  “Think whatever you like. I didn’t commit any crime.”

  “I’m going to ask you this one more time: Where did you get their names and addresses?”

  “Whose?”

  “Rossignol and Lenz.”

  “I told you, mutual acquaintances.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Believe what you like.”

  “What are you hiding? Why don’t you level with me, Mr. Hartman?”

  “Sorry. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Agent Navarro folded, then unfolded, her long shapely legs. “Mr. Hartman,” she said with utmost exasperation. “I’m going to offer you a deal. You cooperate with me, and I’ll do my best to get the Swiss and the Austrians to back off.”