The Sigma Protocol

  So what was she really after?

  Was it possible she was actually working for the CIA or some gray-haired contingent thereof, mopping up, helping cover up their involvement by shifting suspicion to him?

  And the fact remained: Gaston Rossignol, a founder of this mysterious corporation that might or might not have had CIA involvement, had just been murdered. As had Peter, whose single error, it seemed, was to have dug up a list of directors of this very same corporation. Had the same people killed both of them? It certainly seemed likely.

  But American killers? CIA?

  It was difficult to fathom. Jimmy Cavanaugh was an American…Yet couldn’t he have been working for foreigners?

  And then there was Max’s baffling disappearance.

  Why had he vanished? Godwin had shed no light on that mystery. Why had Max called Godwin just before leaving?

  Was his father dead now, too?

  It was time to place another call to Bedford.

  He walked down the long corridor, struggled with the room key for a moment, and then the door came open. He froze.

  The lights were off.

  Yet he had left all the lights in the room on when he’d left. Had someone turned them off?

  Oh, come on, he told himself. Surely the chambermaid had turned them off. The Austrians prided themselves on being environmentally conscientious.

  Was he overthinking this? Was he being ridiculously paranoid? Was this what the last few days had done to him?

  Still…

  Quietly, without entering, he closed the door, turned the key to lock it again, and went back down the hall in search of a porter or bell captain. None was anywhere to be seen. He circled back and took the stairs down to the third floor. There, at the end of another long hall, he spotted a porter coming out of a room.

  “Excuse me,” Ben said, accelerating his stride. “Can you help me?”

  The young porter turned. “Sir?”

  “Listen,” Ben said, “I locked myself out of my room. Can you let me in?” He palmed the porter a fifty-shilling note, about eight dollars, and added sheepishly, “This is the second time I’ve done it. I don’t want to have to go back to the concierge. It’s up one flight. Four-sixteen.”

  “Oh yes, certainly, sir. Ah, moment please.” He searched through a ring of keys on his belt. “Yes, sir, please.”

  They took the elevator up to the fourth floor. The porter opened the door to 416. Feeling a little foolish, Ben stood behind him and off to one side, so that he could see into the room at an oblique angle, without being seen.

  He noticed a shape, a silhouette! The figure of a man outlined against backlight from the open bathroom door. The man was crouching down, pointing a long-barreled gun toward the door!

  The man turned, and his face became visible. It was the assassin who’d tried to kill him a few hours ago in front of Jürgen Lenz’s villa! The assassin in the Swiss auberge.

  The man who killed his brother.

  The porter screamed, “No!” and ran away down the hall.

  For a moment the killer was confused—he’d expected Ben, not a uniformed hotel employee. The hesitation was long enough for Ben to take off. Behind him came a series of muted spits, then the much louder explosions of bullets pocking the walls. The porter’s screams became even louder, more frantic, and the gunfire came closer, and then came the racing footsteps of the gunman, and Ben put on a burst of speed. Straight ahead was the door to the stairway, and he quickly rejected it—he didn’t want to be a prisoner in a stairwell with an armed killer after him. Instead he whipped around the corridor to the right, saw an open room door, a housekeeping cart in front of it, and he leaped into the room, swinging the door shut behind him. His back pressed against the door, he gasped for breath, wondering whether the killer had seen him enter the room. He heard muffled footsteps racing by: the killer had passed. He heard the porter shout, calling someone; he didn’t sound as if he’d been wounded, which was a relief.

  A cry from inside the room! He saw a small, dark-skinned maid in a light blue uniform cowering in the corner of the room.

  “Quiet!” Ben hissed.

  “Who are you?” the maid gasped, terrified. She spoke in heavily accented English. “Please don’t hurt me!”

  “Quiet,” Ben repeated. “Get down. If you keep quiet, you won’t get hurt!”

  The maid flattened herself against the carpeting, whimpering in abject terror.

  “Matches!” Ben said. “I need matches!”

  “The ashtray! Please—the desk, next to the television!”

  Ben found them and located the smoke/heat detector mounted on the ceiling above him. He stood on a chair, lit a match, held it to the coil. In a few seconds he could hear the Klaxon of a fire alarm sounding in the room and in the corridor outside—a rasping metallic shriek caterwauling at regular, rapid intervals. The sound was everywhere! Shouts and screams came from the hall as hotel guests ran from their rooms. In another few seconds, water began spraying from the sprinkler system in the ceiling, drenching the carpet and bed. The maid screamed again as Ben turned and opened the door, quickly looking out in either direction. The hall was chaos: people running about, some huddled in bafflement, gesturing this way and that, yelling to one another as water spewed from the sprinklers all along the ceiling the length of the corridor. Ben ran out of the room, joining the frenzied crowd in a rush to the stairwell. He knew, from the height of the main staircase that led into the hotel’s front entrance, that the stairwell had to have its own exit onto the street or back alley.

  The stairwell door opened onto a dark corridor, illuminated only by a flickering, buzzing fluorescent ceiling fixture, but it was enough light to make out the double doors of the hotel kitchen. He raced toward it, pushed the doors open without stopping, and saw the inevitable service entrance. He reached the door, felt the flow of cold air from the outside, slid open the heavy steel bolt, and pulled the massive door open. A ramp led down into a narrow alley crowded with trash-cans. He propelled himself down, and, with fire engine sirens sounding in the distance, disappeared into the dark alley.

  Twenty minutes later he came to the tall modern building overlooking the Danube canal, on the far side of the Stadtpark, a characterless American hotel that was part of an international chain. He strode purposefully through the lobby to the elevators, a hotel guest who obviously belonged.

  He knocked on the door of Room 1423.

  Special Agent Anna Navarro cracked open the door. She was in a flannel nightgown, her makeup was off, and yet she was luminous.

  “I think I’m ready to cooperate,” Ben said.

  Anna Navarro fixed Hartman a drink from the honor bar: a toy bottle of Scotch, a little green bottle of mineral water, a few miniature cubes of ice from the tiny freezer. She was, if possible, even more businesslike than she’d been at the police station. Over her flannel nightgown she’d cinched a white terry-cloth robe. Probably it didn’t help, Ben reflected, having a strange man in the close quarters of her hotel room when she was dressed for bed.

  Ben took the drink gratefully. It was watery. She was not a drinker. But shaken as he was, he needed a drink badly, and it did the job.

  Despite the sofa on which he sat, the room was not set up for visitors. She started to sit facing him, on the edge of the bed, then rejected it in favor of a big wing chair, which she pulled out at an angle to the sofa.

  The plate-glass window was a black pointillist canvas. From up here, Vienna was neon-lit, its lights twinkling under the starry sky.

  Navarro leaned forward, crossed her legs. She was barefoot, her feet slender and high-arched, delicate, the toenails painted.

  “It was the same guy, you think?” Her abrasive edge was gone.

  Ben took another sip. “Definitely. I’ll never forget his face.”

  She sighed. “And I thought at least I’d seriously wounded him. From everything I’ve heard, this guy’s incredibly dangerous. And what he did to those four policemen—astonishing.
Like an execution machine. You were lucky. Or maybe I should say you were smart—sensing something wasn’t right, using the porter to confuse him, putting our friend off balance, buying yourself time to escape. Well done.”

  He shrugged in self-deprecation, secretly pleased by the unexpected compliment. “You know something about this guy?”

  “I’ve read a dossier, but it’s incomplete. He’s believed to live in England, probably London.”

  “He’s British?”

  “Formerly East German intelligence—Stasi. Their field agents were among the most highly trained. Certainly some of the most ruthless. Seems to have left the organization a long time ago.”

  “What’s he doing living in England?”

  “Who knows? Maybe avoiding the German authorities, like most of his ex-colleagues. What we don’t know is whether he’s an assassin for hire, or whether he’s in the employ of some organization with diverse interests.”

  “His name?”

  “Vogler, I think. Hans Vogler. Obviously here on some sort of job.”

  Some sort of job. I am next. Ben felt numb.

  “You said he might be in some organization’s employ.”

  “That’s what we say when we haven’t figured out the pattern yet.” She pursed her lips. “You might be in some organization’s employ, and I don’t mean Hartman Capital Management.”

  “You still don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Well, who are you? What are you really up to?”

  “Oh, come on,” he said heatedly. “Don’t tell me you guys don’t have a goddamned file on me!”

  She glared. “All I know about you are isolated facts without a logical explanation tying them all together. You say you were in Zurich when suddenly someone from your past pops up and tries to kill you and instead gets killed himself. And then his body disappears. Next thing I know, you’ve entered Switzerland illegally. Then your fingerprints turn up all over the house of a banker named Rossignol, who you claim was dead when you got there. You carry a gun, though where you got it—and why—you won’t say.”

  Ben listened in silence, letting her go on.

  “Why were you meeting with this Lenz, this son of a famous Nazi?”

  Ben blinked, unsure how much to divulge. But before he could formulate a reply, she spoke again. “Here’s what I want to know. What does Lenz have in common with Rossignol?”

  Ben drained his Scotch. “My brother…” he began.

  “The one who died four years ago.”

  “So I thought. He turned out to be hiding from some dangerous people. He didn’t know who they were, exactly; I still don’t know. Some conclave of industrialists, or their descendants, or maybe CIA hirelings, maybe something else entirely—who knows? But apparently he’d uncovered a list of names—”

  Agent Navarro’s caramel eyes grew wide. “What kind of list?”

  “A very old one.”

  Her face flushed. “Where did he get this list?”

  “He came across it in the archives of a Swiss bank.”

  “A Swiss bank?”

  “It’s a list of board members of a corporation that was founded in the last days of the Second World War.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she breathed. “So that’s it.”

  Ben drew a folded, grimy square of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to her. “Sorry, it’s a bit soiled. I’ve been keeping it in my shoe. To keep it out of the hands of people like you.”

  She perused it, frowning. “Max Hartman. Your father?”

  “Alas.”

  “Did he tell you about this corporation?”

  “No way. My brother came across it.”

  “But wasn’t your father a Holocaust survivor—?”

  “And now we come to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

  “Wasn’t there some physical mark—a tattoo or something?”

  “A tattoo? At Auschwitz, yes. At Dachau, no.”

  She didn’t seem to be listening. “My God,” she said. “The string of mysterious homicides—every single name is here.” She seemed to be speaking to herself, not to him. “Rossignol… Prosperi… Ramago…they’re all here. No, they’re not all on my list. Some overlap, but…” She looked up. “What did you hope to learn from Rossignol?”

  What was she getting at? “I thought he might know why my brother was killed, and who did it.”

  “But he was himself killed before you got to him.”

  “So it seems.”

  “Did you look into this Sigma company, try to locate it, trace its history?”

  Ben nodded. “But I turned up nothing. Then again, maybe it never existed, if you know what I mean.” Seeing her frown, he went on. “A notional entity, like a shell company.”

  “What kind of shell company?”

  Ben shook his head. “I don’t know. Something involving American military intelligence, maybe.” He told her of Lenz’s worries.

  “I don’t think I buy it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I work for the government, don’t forget. The bureaucracy leaks like a sieve. They’d never be able to coordinate a series of murders without the world finding out.”

  “Then what do you figure the link is? Apart from the obvious, I mean.”

  “I’m not sure how much I can tell you.”

  “Look,” Ben said fiercely, “if we’re going to share information—if we’re going to help each other—you can’t hold back. You have to trust me.”

  She nodded, then seemed to come to a decision. “For one thing, they aren’t, or weren’t, janitors, believe me, none of them. They all had great, visible wealth, or most of them, anyway. The only one who lived modestly, at least that I saw, still had tons of money in the bank.” She told him about her investigation in general terms.

  “You said one of them worked for Charles High-smith, right? So it’s as if you’ve got your titans here, and then the guys who work for them, their trusted lieutenants and whatnot. And back in 1945 or so, Allen Dulles is running clearances on them, because they’re all playing together, and Dulles doesn’t like to be surprised by his playmates.”

  “Which still leaves the larger question unanswered. What’s the game? Why was Sigma formed in the first place? For what?”

  “Maybe the explanation is simple,” Ben said. “Bunch of moguls got together in 1944,’45, to siphon off a huge amount of money from the Third Reich. They divided up the spoils and got even richer. The way guys like that think, they probably told themselves they were reclaiming what was properly theirs.”

  She seemed perplexed. “O.K., but here’s what doesn’t fit. You’ve got people who, right up until their deaths just days ago, were receiving regular, large payments. Wire transfers into their bank accounts, in amounts ranging from a quarter-million to a half-million bucks.”

  “Wired from where?”

  “Laundered. We don’t know where the money originated; we only know the very last links in the chains—places like the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos.”

  “Haven countries,” Ben said.

  “Exactly. Beyond that, it’s impossible to get any information.”

  “Not necessarily,” Ben said. “Depends on who you know. And whether you’re willing to bend the law a little. Grease some palms.”

  “We don’t bend the law.” Agent Navarro said this with an almost haughty pride.

  “That’s why you don’t know shit about where the money came from.”

  She looked startled, as if he’d slapped her face. Then she laughed. “What do you know about laundering money?”

  “I don’t do it myself, if that’s what you’re thinking, but my company does have an offshore division that manages funds—to avoid taxes, government regulations, all that good stuff. Also, I’ve had clients who are very good at hiding their assets from people like you. I know people who can get information out of offshore banks. They specialize in it. Charge a fortune. They can dig up financial information anywhere in the world, all through th
eir personal contacts, knowing who to pay off.”

  After a few seconds, she said, “How would you feel about working with me on this? Informally, of course.”

  Surprised, Ben asked, “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Share information. We have an overlap of motivations. You want to know who killed your brother and why. I want to know who’s been killing the old men.”

  Is she on the level? he wondered. Was this some kind of trick? What did she really want?

  “You think the murderers are one and the same? My brother and these men on that list of yours?”

  “I’m convinced of it now. All part of the same pattern, the same mosaic.”

  “What’s in it for me?” He looked at her boldly but softened it with a grin.

  “Nothing official, let me tell you that right up front. Maybe a little protection. Put it this way—they’ve already tried to kill you more than once. How long is your luck going to hold?”

  “And if I stick close to you, I’m safe?”

  “Safer, maybe. You got a better idea? You did come to my hotel, after all. Anyway, the cops took your gun, right?”

  True. “I’m sure you understand my reluctance—after all, until very recently you wanted me in prison.”

  “Look, feel free to go back to your hotel. Have a good night’s sleep.”

  “Point taken. You’re making a generous offer. Maybe one I’d be foolish to turn down. I—I don’t know.”

  “Well, sleep on it.”

  “Speaking of sleep—”

  Her eyes searched the room. “I—”

  “I’ll call down to the front desk and get myself a room.”

  “I doubt you’ll get one. There’s some conference here, and they’re booked to capacity. I got one of the last rooms available. Why don’t you sleep on the couch?”

  He gave her a quick look. Did the uptight Special Agent Navarro just invite him to spend the night in her room? No. He was deluding himself. Her body language, the unspoken signals, made it clear: she’d invited him here to hide out, not to slip into her bed.