Another long silence, followed by the scrape of a chair from inside the apartment. Was Chardin preparing to show his face after all? Ben glanced down the hall apprehensively, saw Anna carefully sliding one foot after another along the ledge while clinging to the parapet with both hands. Her hair blew in the wind. Then she was out of his line of sight.
He had to distract Chardin, keep him from noticing Anna’s appearance at his window. He had to keep Chardin’s attention.
“What is it you want from me?” came Chardin’s voice. His tone seemed neutral now. He was listening; that was the first step.
“Monsieur Chardin, we have information that could be invaluable to you. We know a great deal about Sigma, about the inheritors, the new generation that has seized control. The only protection—for either of us—is in knowledge.”
“There is no protection against them, you fool!”
Ben raised his voice. “Goddamn it! Your rationality was once legendary. If you’ve lost that, Chardin, then they’ve won anyway! Can’t you see how unreasonable you’re being?” In a gentler tone, he added, “If you send us away, you’ll always wonder what you might have learned. Or perhaps you’ll never have the opportunity—”
Suddenly there was the sound of glass breaking from inside the apartment, followed immediately by a loud crash and a clatter.
Had Anna made it through a window into Chardin’s apartment safely? A few seconds later he heard Anna’s voice, loud and clear. “I’ve got his shotgun! And it’s trained on him now.” She obviously spoke for Chardin’s benefit as well as Ben’s.
Ben strode toward the open door and entered the still-darkened room. It was hard to see anything but shapes; when his eyes adjusted, after a few seconds, he made out Anna, dimly outlined against a thick curtain, holding the long-barreled gun.
And a man in a peculiar, heavy robe with a cowl rose slowly, shakily to his feet. He did not appear to be a vigorous man; he was indeed a shut-in.
It was plain what had happened. Anna, plunging through the window, had leaped onto the long, ungainly shotgun, pinioning it to the floor; the impact must have knocked him over.
For a few moments, all three of them stood in silence. Chardin’s breathing was audible—heavy, nearly agonal, his face shadowed within his cowl.
Watching carefully to make sure Chardin didn’t have another weapon concealed in the folds of his monklike garment, Ben fumbled for a light switch. When the lights went on, Chardin abruptly turned away from them both, facing the wall. Was Chardin reaching for another gun?
“Freeze!” Anna shouted.
“Use your vaunted powers of reason, Chardin,” Ben said. “If we wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. That’s obviously not why we’re here!”
“Turn and face us,” Anna commanded.
Chardin was silent for a moment. “Be careful of what you ask for,” he rasped.
“Now, dammit!”
Moving as if in slow motion, Chardin complied and when Ben’s mind grasped the reality of what he saw, his stomach heaved and he nearly retched. Nor could Anna disguise her shocked intake of breath. It was a horror beyond imagining.
They were staring into an almost featureless mass of scar tissue, wildly various in texture. In areas it appeared crenellated, almost scalloped; in other areas, the proud flesh was smooth and nearly shiny, as if lacquered or covered in plastic wrap. Naked capillaries made the oval that had once been his face an angry, beefy red, except where varicosities yielded coils of dark purple. The staring, filmy gray eyes looked startlingly out of place—two large marbles left on a slick blacktop by a careless child.
Ben averted his gaze, and then, wrenchingly, forced himself to look again. More details were visible. Embedded in a horribly webbed and wrinkled central concavity were two nasal openings, higher than the nostrils would once have been. Below, he made out a mouth that was little more than a gash, a wound within a wound.
“Oh, dear God.” Ben slowly breathed the words.
“You are surprised?” Chardin said, the words scarcely appearing to come from his wound-like mouth. It was if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy, one designed by a de-ranged sadist. A cough-laugh. “The reports of my death were quite accurate, all except for the assertion of death itself. ‘Burned beyond recognition’—yes, indeed I was. I should have perished in the blaze. Often I wish that I had. My survival was a freak accident. An enormity. The worst fate a human being can have.”
“They tried to kill you,” Anna whispered. “And they failed.”
“Oh no. I think that in most respects they quite succeeded,” Chardin said, and winced: a twitch of dark red muscle around one of his eyeballs. It was apparent that the simple act of talking was painful to him. He was enunciating with exaggerated precision, but the damage meant that certain consonants remained blurry. “A close confidant of mine had suspicions that they might try to eliminate me. Talk had already begun about dispatching the angeli rebelli. He came by my country estate—too late. There were ashes, and blackened timber, and charred ruins everywhere. And my body, what was left of it, was as black as any of it. He thought he could detect a pulse, my friend did. He brought me to a tiny provincial hospital, thirty kilometers away, told them a tale about an overturned kerosene lamp, gave them a false name. He was canny. He understood that if my enemies knew I had survived, they would try again. Months passed in that tiny clinic. I had burns over ninety-five percent of my body. I was not expected to live.” He spoke haltingly but hypnotically: a tale never before spoken. And then he sat down in a tall-backed wooden chair, seemingly depleted.
“But you survived,” Ben said.
“I did not have the strength to force myself to stop breathing,” Chardin said. He paused again, the memory of pain imposing further pain. “They wanted to move me to a metropolitan hospital, but of course I would not permit it. I was beyond help anyway. Can you imagine what it is like when consciousness itself is nothing other than the consciousness of pain?”
“And yet you survived,” Ben repeated.
“The agony was beyond anything our species was meant to endure. Wound dressings were an ordeal beyond imagining. The stench of necrotic flesh was overpowering even to me, and more than one orderly would routinely vomit upon entering my room. Then, after the granulation tissue formed, a new horror was in store for me—contracture. The scars would shrink and the agony would be rekindled all over again. Even today, the pain I live with every moment of every day is of a degree I never experienced in the whole of my preceding life. When I had a life. You cannot look at me, can you? No one can. But then I cannot look at myself, either.”
Anna spoke, clearly knowing that human contact had to be reestablished. “The strength you must have had—it’s extraordinary. No medical textbook could ever account for it. The instinct for survival. You emerged from that blaze. You were saved. Something inside you fought for life. It had to be for a reason!”
Chardin spoke quietly. “A poet was once asked, If his house were on fire, what would he save? And he said, ‘I would save the fire. Without fire, nothing is possible.’” His laughter was a low, disconcerting rumble. “Fire is after all what made civilization possible: but it can equally be an instrument of barbarity.”
Anna returned the shotgun to Chardin after removing a last shell from the chamber. “We need your help,” she said urgently.
“Do I look like I am in a position to help anyone, I who cannot help myself?”
“If you want to call your enemies to account, we may be your best bet,” Ben said somberly.
“There is no revenge for something like this. I did not survive by drinking the gall of rage.” He withdrew a small plastic atomizer from the folds of his robes, and directed a spray of moisture toward his eyes.
“For years, you were at the helm of a major petrochemical corporation, Trianon,” Ben prompted. He needed to show Chardin that they had puzzled out the basic situation, needed to enlist him. “An industry leader, it was and remains. You were Émil Ménard’s
lieutenant, the brains behind Trianon’s midcentury restructuring. He was a founder of Sigma. And in time you must have become a principal as well.”
“Sigma,” he repeated in a quavering voice. “Where it all begins.”
“And no doubt your genius in accounting helped in the great undertaking of spiriting assets out of the Third Reich.”
“Eh? Do you think that was the great project? That was nothing, a negligible exercise. The grand project… le grand projet…” He trailed off. “That was something of an entirely different order. And nothing you are equipped to comprehend.”
“Try me,” Ben said.
“And divulge the secrets I have spent my life protecting?”
“You said it yourself: What life?” Ben took a step toward him, forcing down his revulsion in order to maintain eye contact. “What have you left to lose?”
“At last you speak truly,” Chardin said softly, and his naked eyes seemed to swivel, peering penetratingly at Ben’s own eyes.
For a long moment he was silent. And then he began to talk, slowly, mesmerizingly.
“The story begins before me. It will continue, no doubt, after me. But its origins lie in the closing months of the Second World War, when a consortium of some of the world’s most powerful industrialists gathered in Zurich to determine the course of the postwar world.”
Ben flashed on the steely-eyed men in the old photograph.
“They were angry men,” Chardin went on, “who caught wind of what the ailing Franklin Roosevelt was planning to do—let Stalin know he would not stand in the way of a massive Soviet land grab. And, of course, it’s what he did do before his death. In effect he was ceding half of Europe to the Communists! It was the grossest betrayal! These business leaders knew they would be unable to derail the disgraceful U.S.-Soviet bargain at Yalta. And so they formed a corporation that would be a beachhead, a means to channel vast sums of money into fighting communism, strengthening the will of the West. The next world war had begun.”
Ben looked at Anna, then stared off into space, hypnotized and astonished by Chardin’s words.
“These leaders of capitalism accurately foresaw that the people of Europe, embittered and sickened by fascism, would, in reaction, turn to the left. The soil had been scorched by the Nazis, these industrialists realized, and without the massive infusion of resources at key moments, socialism would begin to take root, first in Europe, then throughout the world. They saw their mission as preserving, fortifying, the industrial state. Which meant, as well, muffling the voices of dissent. Do these anxieties seem overstated? Not so. These industrialists knew how the pendulum of history worked. And if a fascist regime was followed by a socialist regime, Europe might be truly lost, as they saw it.
“It was seen as only prudent to enlist certain leading Nazi officials, who knew which way the wind was blowing and were also committed to combating Stalinism. And once the syndicate had established its political as well as financial foundations, it began manipulating world events, bankrolling political parties as if from behind a curtain. They were successful, astonishingly so! Their money, judiciously targeted, brought to life de Gaulle’s Fourth Republic in France, preserved the rightist Franco regime in Spain. In later years, the generals were placed in power in Greece, bringing to an end the leftist regime that the people had elected. In Italy, Operation Gladio ensured that a continual campaign of low-level subversion would cripple the attempt of leftists to organize and influence national politics. Plans were drawn up for the paramilitary police, the carabinieri, to take over radio and television stations if necessary. We had extensive files on politicians, unionists, priests. Ultra-right-wing parties everywhere were secretly bolstered from Zurich, so as to make the conservatives seem moderate by contrast. Elections were controlled, bribes paid, leftist political leaders assassinated—and the strings were pulled by the puppet masters in Zurich, in conditions of absolute secrecy. Politicians such as Senator Joseph McCarthy in the U.S. were funded. Coups were financed throughout Europe and Africa and Asia. On the left, extremist groups were created, too, to serve as agents provocateur and guarantee popular revulsion toward their cause.
“This cabal of industrialists and bankers had seen to it that the world was made safe for capitalism. Your President Eisenhower, who warned about the rise of the military-industrial complex, saw only the tip of the iceberg. In truth, much of the entire history of the world in the last half-century was scripted by these men in Zurich and their successors.”
“Christ!” Ben interrupted. “You’re talking about…”
“Yes,” Chardin said, nodding his hideous faceless head. “Their cabal gave birth to the Cold War. They did. Or, as perhaps I should say, we did. Now do you begin to understand?”
Trevor’s fingers moved swiftly as he opened his suitcase and assembled the.50 caliber rifle, a customized version of the BMG AR-15. It was, in his view, a thing of beauty, a precision-machined sniper weapon with relatively few moving parts, and a range of up to seventy-four hundred meters. At more proximate distances, its penetrative capacities were astonishing: it could pierce three inches of steel plate, would leave an exit hole in an automobile or hammer off a corner of a building. It could drive through crumbling mortar handily. The bullet would have a projection velocity of over three thousand feet per second. Resting on a bipod, and surmounted by a Leupold Vari-X scope with thermal imaging, the rifle would have the accuracy that he needed. He smiled as he seated the rifle into the bipod. He could hardly be considered underequipped for the job at hand.
His target, after all, was directly across the street.
Chapter Thirty-three
“It’s incredible,” Anna said. “It’s… it’s too much to take in!”
“I have lived with it so long that it is to me a commonplace,” Chardin said. “But I recognize the immense upheavals that would ensue if others realized that the public history of their times was, in no small part, scripted—and scripted by a cadre of men like me: businessmen, financiers, industrialists, working through their widely dispersed confederates. Scripted by Sigma. The history books would all have to be rewritten. Lives of purpose would suddenly seem like nothing more than the twitching at the end of a marionette’s string. Sigma is a story of how the mighty have fallen, and the fallen become mighty. It is a story that must never be told. Do you understand that? Never.”
“But who would be brazen—mad—enough to undertake such a venture?” Ben rested his gaze on Chardin’s soft brown robes. Now he understood the physical necessity of such strange, loose clothing.
“You must first understand the visionary, triumphalist sense of mission and accomplishment that suffused the midcentury corporation,” Chardin said. “We had already transformed man’s destiny, remember. My God, the automobile, the airplane, soon the jet: man could move along the ground at speeds inconceivable to our ancestors—man could fly through the heavens! Radio waves and sound waves could be used to provide a sixth sense, vision where vision had never been possible. Computation itself could now be automated. And the breakthroughs in the material sciences were equally extraordinary—in metallurgy, in plastics, in production techniques yielding new forms of rubber and adhesives and textiles, and a hundred other things. The ordinary landscape of our lives was being transformed. A revolution was taking place in every aspect of modern industry.”
“A second industrial revolution,” Ben said.
“A second, a third, a fourth, a fifth,” Chardin replied.
“The possibilities seemed infinite. The capabilities of the modern corporation seemed to be unbounded. And after the dawn of nuclear science—my God, what couldn’t we achieve if we set our minds to it? There was Vannevar Bush, Lawrence Marshall, and Charles Smith, at Raytheon, doing pioneering work in everything from microwave generation to missile guidance systems to radar surveillance equipment. So many of the discoveries that became ubiquitous in later decades—xerography, microwave technologies, binary computing, solid-state electronics—had already been
conceived and prototyped at Bell Labs, General Electric, Westinghouse, RCA, IBM, and other corporations. The material world was succumbing to our will. Why not the political realm as well?”
“And where were you during all this?” Ben asked.
Chardin’s eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance. From the folds of his cloak, he withdrew the atomizer, and moistened his eyes again. He pressed a white handkerchief to the area under his slash-like mouth, which was slick with saliva. And, haltingly at first, he began to speak.
I was a child—eight years old when the war broke out. A student at a shabby little provincial school, the Lycée Beaumont, in the city of Lyon. My father was a civil engineer with the city, my mother a schoolteacher. I was an only child, and something of a prodigy. By the time I was twelve, I was taking courses in applied mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, the teacher’s college. I had genuine quantitative gifts, and yet the academy held no appeal for me. I wanted something else. The ozone-scented arcana of number theory held little allure. I wanted to affect the real world, the realm of the everyday. I lied about my age when I first sought employment in the accounting department of Trianon. Émil Ménard was already heralded as a prophet among CEOs, a true visionary. A man who had forged a company out of disparate parts, where no one had previously seen any potential for connection. A man who realized that by assembling once segmented operations you could create an industrial power infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. To my eyes, as an analyst of capital, Trianon was a masterpiece—the Sistine Chapel of corporate design.
Within a matter of months, word of my statistical prowess had reached the head of the department for which I worked, Monsieur Arteaux. He was an older gentleman, a man of few hobbies and a near total devotion to Ménard’s vision. Some of my co-workers found me cold, but not Monsieur Arteaux. With us, conversation flowed as if between two sports fans. We could discuss the relative advantages of internal capital markets or alternate measurements of equity risk premiums, and do so for hours. Matters that would stupefy most men, but which involved the architecture of capital itself—rationalizing the decisions of where to invest and reinvest, how risk was best to be apportioned. Arteaux, who was nearing retirement, put everything on the line by arranging for me to be introduced to the great man himself, catapulting me over endless managerial layers. Ménard, amused by my obvious youth, asked me a few condescending questions. I replied with rather serious and rather provocative responses—in truth, responses that verged on rudeness. Arteaux himself was appalled. And Ménard was, so it seems, captivated. An unusual response, but it was, in capsule form, an explanation of his own greatness. He told me later that my combination of insolence and thoughtfulness reminded him of no one so much as himself. A magnificent egotist, he was, but it was an earned egotism. My own arrogance—for even as a child I was tagged with that attribute—was perhaps not unfounded, either. Humility was a fine thing for men of the cloth. But rationality decreed that one be sensible to one’s own capabilities. I had considerable expertise in the techniques of valuation. Why shouldn’t it logically extend to the valuation of oneself? My own father was, I believed, handicapped by a deferential manner; he esteemed his own gifts too little, and persuaded others to undervalue them in turn. That would not be my mistake.