I became, in a matter of weeks, Ménard’s personal assistant. I accompanied him absolutely everywhere. No one knew whether I was an amanuensis or a counselor. And in truth I moved, smoothly, from playing the first role to playing the second. The great man treated me far more like an adopted son than a paid employee. I was his only protégé, the sole acolyte who seemed worthy of his example. I would make proposals, sometimes bold ones, occasionally proposals that reversed years of planning. I suggested, for example, that we sell off an oil-exploration division that his managers had spent years in developing. I suggested massive investments in still unproven technologies. Yet when he heeded my advice, he almost invariably found himself pleased by the results. L’ombre de Ménard—the shadow of Ménard—became my nickname in the early 1950s. And even as he fought the disease, the lymphoma, that would ultimately claim his life, he and Trianon came to rely increasingly upon my judgment. My ideas were bold, unheard of, seemingly mad—and soon widely mimicked. Ménard studied me as much as I studied him, with both detachment and genuine affection. We were men in whom such qualities enjoyed an easy coexistence.
Yet for all the privileges he granted me, I had sensed, for a while, that there was one final sanctum to which I had not been granted entry. There were trips he made without explanation, corporate allocations I could not make sense of and about which he would brook no discussion. Then the day came when he decided that I would be inducted into a society I knew nothing about, an organization you know as Sigma.
I was still Ménard’s wunderkind, still the corporate prodigy, still in my early twenties, and utterly unprepared for what I was to see at the first meeting I attended. It was at a château in rural Switzerland, a magnificent ancient castle situated on a vast and isolated tract of land owned by one of the principals. The security there was extraordinary: even the landscaping, the trees and shrubbery surrounding the property, was designed to permit the clandestine arrival and departure of various individuals. So on my first visit, I was in no position to see the others arrive. And no form of surveillance equipment could have survived the high-intensity blasts of high and low electromagnetic pulses, the latest technology in those days. All items made of metal were required to be deposited in containers made of dense osmium; otherwise, even a simple wristwatch would have been stopped dead by the pulses. Ménard and I came there in the evening, and were escorted directly to our rooms, he to a magnificent suite overlooking a small glacial lake, I to an adjoining chamber, less grand but exceedingly comfortable.
The meetings began the next morning. About what was said then, I actually remember little. Conversations continued from earlier ones of which I knew nothing—it was difficult for a newcomer to orient himself. But I knew the faces of the men around the table, and it was a genuinely surreal experience, something a fantasist might have tried to stage. Ménard was a man who had few peers, with respect to his own wealth, his corporate power, or his vision. But what peers he had were there in the room. The heads of two warring, mighty steel conglomerates. The head of America’s leading electrical equipment manufacturers. Heavy industry. Petrochemicals. Technology. The men responsible for the so-called American century. Their counterparts from Europe. The most famous press baron in the world. The chief executives of wildly diversified portfolio companies. Men who, in combination, wielded control over assets that exceeded the gross domestic product of most of the countries in the world put together.
My worldview was shattered that day, then and forever.
Children, in history classes, are taught the names, the faces of political and military leaders. Here is Winston Churchill, here is Dwight Eisenhower, here is Franco and de Gaulle, Atlee and Macmillan. These men did matter. But they were, really, little more than spokesmen. They were, in an exalted sense, press secretaries, employees. And Sigma made sure of it. The men who truly had their hands on the levers of power were sitting around that long mahogany table. They were the true marionette masters.
As the hours passed, and we drank coffee and nibbled on pastries, I realized what I was witness to: a meeting of the board of directors of a massive single corporation that controlled all other corporations.
A board of directors in charge of Western history itself!
It was their attitude, their perspective, that stayed with me, far more than any actual words that were uttered. For these were professional managers who had no time for useless emotion or irrational sentiments. They believed in the development of productivity, in the promulgation of order, in the rational concentration of capital. They believed, in plain English, that history—the very destiny of the human race—was simply too important to repose in the hands of the masses. The upheavals of two world wars had taught them that. History had to be managed. Decisions had to be made by dispassionate professionals. And the chaos threatened by communism—the turmoil, the redistribution of wealth it augured, made their project a matter of genuine and immediate urgency. It was a present danger to be averted, not some utopian scheme.
They assured each other of the need to create a planet where the true spirit of enterprise would ever be safe from the envy and avarice of the masses. After all, was a world purulent with communism and fascism a world any of us wished to bequeath to our children? Modern capital showed us the way—but the future of the industrial state had to be protected, sheltered from the storms. That was the vision. And though the origins of this vision lay in the global depression that preceded the war, the vision became infinitely more compelling in the wake of the destruction wreaked by the war itself.
I said little that day, not because I was by nature taciturn, but because I was quite literally speechless. I was a pygmy among giants. I was a peasant supping with emperors. I was beside myself, and all the while it was the most I could do to maintain a look of dispassion, in emulation of my great mentor. Those were the first hours I spent in the company of Sigma, and my life would never be the same again. The daily fodder of the newspapers—a labor strike here, a party assembly there, an assassination somewhere else—was no longer a record of random events. Behind these events could now be discerned a pattern—the complex and intricate machinations of a complex and intricate machine.
To be sure, the founders, the principals, profited immensely. Their corporations, in every instance, thrived, while so many others, not fortunate enough to be part of Sigma, perished. But the real motivation was their larger vision: the West had to be united against a common foe, or it would soften and succumb. And the hardening of its battlements had to proceed with discretion and prudence. Too aggressive, too quick a push could trigger a backlash. Reform had to be titrated. One division focused on assassinations, removing thoughtful voices from the left. Another forged—the word is appropriate—the sorts of extremist groups, the Baader-Meinhofs and Red Brigades, that would be guaranteed to antagonize any moderate sympathizers.
The Western world, and much of the rest, would respond to its ministrations, and it would accept the cover stories that accompanied them. In Italy, we created a network of twenty thousand “civic committees,” channeling money to the Christian Democrats. The Marshall Plan itself, like so much else, was hammered out by Sigma—very often Sigma had devised the very language of the acts that would be submitted to, and passed by the American Congress! All of the European recovery programs, economic cooperation agencies, eventually even NATO itself became organs of Sigma, which remained invisible—because it was ubiquitous. Wheels within wheels—that was the way we worked. In every textbook, you find boilerplate about the reconstruction of Europe accompanied by a photograph of General Marshall. Yet every detail had been outlined by us, mandated by us, long before.
It never crossed anyone’s mind that the West had fallen under the administration of a hidden consortium. The notion would be inconceivable. Because if true, it would mean that over half of the planet was effectively a subsidiary of a single megacorporation.
Sigma.
Over time, older moguls died and were replaced with younger protégés
. Sigma persisted, metamorphosing where necessary. We weren’t ideologues. We were pragmatists. Sigma merely sought to remodel the whole of the modern world. To claim nothing less than the ownership of history itself.
And Sigma succeeded.
Trevor Griffiths squinted through the thermal imaging scope. The heavy room-darkening drapes were optically opaque, but to the thermal scope, they were a gauzy scrim. Human figures were hazy green forms, like blobs of mercury, visibly changing shape as they moved around pillars and objects of furniture. The seated figure would be his primary target. The others would move away from the windows, thinking themselves safe, and he would destroy them through the wall of brick itself. One bullet would clear the way; the second would destroy his target. The remaining shells would complete the job.
“If what you’re saying is true…” Ben began.
“Men lie, for the most part, in order to save face. You can see I no longer have such motivation.” The slit that was Chardin’s mouth pulled up at the sides, in what was either a grimace or a smile. “I warned you that you were ill-equipped to understand what I had to say. Perhaps, though, you may now understand the situation somewhat more clearly than before. A great many powerful men everywhere—even today—have reason to keep the truth buried. More so than ever, indeed. For Sigma has, over the past several years, been moving in a new direction. In part, it was the result of its own successes. Communism was no longer a threat—it seemed pointless to continue to pour billions into the orchestration of civil acts and political forces. Not when there might be a more efficient way of achieving Sigma’s objectives.”
“Sigma’s objectives,” Ben echoed.
“Which is to say, stability. Tamping down dissent, ‘disappearing’ troublemakers and threats to the industrial state. When Gorbachev proved troublesome, we arranged his ouster. When regimes in the Pacific Rim proved balky, we arranged for an abrupt, massive flight of foreign capital, plunging their economies into a recession. When Mexico’s leaders proved less than cooperative, we arranged for a change in government.”
“My God,” Ben said, his mouth dry. “Listen to what you’re saying…”
“Oh yes. A session would be convened, a decision rendered and, shortly thereafter, executed. We were good at it, frankly—we could play the governments of the world like a pipe organ. Nor did it hurt that Sigma came to own an immense portfolio of companies, its ownership stakes hidden through various private equity firms. But a small inner circle came to believe that, in a new era, the answer wasn’t merely to tack to the latest winds, cope with cyclical crises. It was to perpetuate a stable leadership for the long run. And so in recent years, one very special project of Sigma’s came to the fore. The prospect of its success would revolutionize the nature of world control. No longer would it be about the allocation of funds, the directing of resources. It became, instead, a simple matter of who the ‘chosen’ would be. And I fought this.”
“You had a falling out with Sigma,” Ben said. “You became a marked man. And yet you kept its secrets.”
“I say it again: if ever the truth were to get out, about how many of the major events of the postwar era were secretly manipulated, scripted by this cabal, the reaction would be violent. There would be riots in the streets.”
“Why the sudden escalation of activity—you’re describing something that has unfolded over a period of decades!” Ben said.
“Yes, but we are talking about days,” Chardin replied.
“And you know this?”
“You wonder that a recluse like me should keep abreast of what is going on? You learn how to read the entrails. You learn, if you want to survive. And then there is precious little else to occupy a shut-in’s hours. Years among their company have taught me to detect signals in what would sound to you like static, mere noise.” He gestured toward the side of his head. Even through the cowl, Ben could tell that the man’s external ear was completely absent, the auditory canal simply a hole within an outgrowth of proud flesh.
“And this explains the sudden flurry of killings?”
“It is as I explained: Sigma has, of late, been undergoing one final transformation. A change of management, if you will.”
“Which you resisted.”
“Long before most were attuned to it. Sigma always reserved the right to ‘sanction’ any members whose absolute loyalty came into question. In my arrogance, I did not realize that my exalted position conferred no protection. Quite the contrary. But the cleansing, the purging of the dissidents, only began in earnest in the last several weeks. Those who were perceived as hostile to the new direction—along with those who worked for us—were designated as disloyal. We were called the angeli rebelli: rebel angels. If you recall that the original angeli rebelli had revolted against God Almighty himself, you grasp the sense of power and entitlement of Sigma’s current overlords. Or, shall I say, overlord, since the consortium has come under the direction of one… redoubtable individual. In the event, Sigma has run out the clock, so to say.”
“What clock? Explain it to me,” Ben began. So many questions crowded his mind.
“We’re talking about days,” Chardin repeated. “If that. What fools you are, coming to me as if knowing the truth could help you anymore. Coming to me when there is no time! Surely it is already too late.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s why I had assumed you’d been sent, at first. They know that they are never more vulnerable than shortly before the final ascendancy. As I’ve told you, now is a time for final mop-ups, for sterilization and autoclaving, for eliminating any evidence that might point to them.”
“Again, I ask you, why now?”
Chardin took out the atomizer and misted his filmy gray eyes again. There came a sudden explosion, bone-jarringly loud, which propelled Chardin, in his chair, backward to the floor. Both Ben and Anna sprang at once to their feet and saw with terror the two-inch round hole that instantaneously appeared in the plaster wall opposite, as if somehow put there by a large-bore drill.
“Move!” Anna screamed.
Where had this projectile—it seemed far too big to be a mere gunshot—come from? Ben leaped to one side of the room as Anna jumped to the other, and then he whirled around to look at the splayed body of the legendary financier. Forcing himself to survey, once more, the horrible ravines and crevices of scar tissue, he noticed Chardin’s eyes had rolled back into his head, leaving only the whites visible.
A wisp of smoke arose from a charred segment of his cowl, and Ben realized that an immense bullet had passed through Chardin’s skull. The faceless man—the man whose will to survive had enabled him to endure years of indescribable agony—was dead.
What had happened? How? Ben knew only that if they didn’t seek cover immediately they would be killed next. But where could they move, how could they escape an assault when they didn’t know where it came from? He saw Anna race to the far side of the room, then swiftly lower herself to the floor, lying flat, and he did the same.
And then came a second explosion, and another round punched through the solid exterior wall and then through the plaster interior wall. Ben saw a circle of daylight in the brick wall, saw now that the shots had come from outside!
Whatever their assailant was firing, the rounds had penetrated the brick wall as if it were a bead curtain. The last round had come dangerously close to Anna.
Nowhere was safe.
“Oh, my God!” Anna shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here!”
Ben whirled and looked out the window. In a glint of reflected sunlight, he caught the face of a man in a window directly across the narrow street.
The smooth, unlined skin, the high cheekbones.
The assassin at Lenz’s villa. The assassin at the auberge in Switzerland…
The assassin who had murdered Peter.
Stoked by a towering rage, Ben let out a loud shout, of warning, of disbelief, of anger. He and Anna simultaneously raced to the apartment’s exit. Another hol
e exploded, deafeningly, in the outside wall; Ben and Anna made a dash to the staircase. These missiles would not lodge in the flesh, nor sear skin; they would tear through the human body like a spear through a spider’s web. Clearly they were designed for use against armored tanks. The devastation they had done to the old building was incredible.
Ben ran after Anna, leaping and bounding down the dark stairs, as the volley of explosions continued, plaster and brick crumbling audibly behind them. Finally they staggered down to the small lobby. “This way!” whispered Anna, racing to an exit that would take them not to the rue des Vignoles but to a side street, making it far more difficult for the assassin to target them. Emerging from the building, they looked frantically about them.