The Sigma Protocol

  She depressed the phone’s plunger and, before it could ring again, called down to the front desk. “I’ve been getting obscene calls,” she said in English.

  “Obscene…?” the switchboard operator repeated, not comprehending.

  “Amenazas,” she said. “Palabrotas.”

  “Oh, I’m very sorry, señorita, would you like me to call the police?”

  “I want you to hold all calls.”

  “Yes, ma’am, certainly.”

  She brooded for a minute, then retrieved a slip of paper from her purse, torn from a notepad in the Schiphol departure lounge. On it she had scrawled the phone number of a local private investigator that Denneen had recommended. Someone reliable, highly skilled, well connected with the authorities, but entirely honest, Denneen had assured her.

  She punched out the number, let it ring and ring.

  An answering machine came on. Sergio Machado identified himself and his agency. After the beep, she left her name and number, mentioned Denneen’s name. Then she called the hotel switchboard operator again and told her she would accept a call only from a Sergio Machado.

  She needed someone knowledgeable and resourceful and most of all trustworthy. You couldn’t hope to get anywhere, learn anything, without someone like that, unless you had a reliable contact in the governmental bureaucracy, and that she did not have.

  She went to the bathroom, splashed her face at the sink, first cold water, then hot. The telephone rang.

  Thickly, in a stupor, she walked to the bedside table.

  The phone rang again, then again.

  She stood over the phone, stared at it, considered what to do.

  She picked it up.

  Said nothing, waited.

  There was silence.

  “Hello?” a male voice said finally. “Is anyone there?”

  Quietly, mouth dry, she said: “Yes?”

  “Is this Anna Navarro?”

  “Who’s this?” She tried to keep her tone neutral.

  “It’s Sergio Machado—you just called me? I went out to get the mail, now I’m returning your call.”

  Relieved, she sighed, “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’ve just been getting a bunch of obscene calls. I thought it might be the caller again.”

  “What do you mean, obscene calls—like heavy breathing, that sort of thing?”

  “No. Nothing like that. It’s too complicated to get into.”

  “You in some kind of trouble?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know, probably. Anyway, listen, thanks for calling back. David Denneen thought you might be able to help me.”

  “Sure, you want to get a cup of coffee? Not like the shit you drink in America. Real coffee.”

  “Yeah, sure, I’d like that.” Already the anxiety was beginning to ebb.

  They agreed to meet early that evening in front of a café/restaurant not too far from his office. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. “I can’t promise anything more than that.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” she said.

  She hung up and stood over the phone for a moment, looking at it as if it were some alien life-form that had invaded the room.

  Ben and she would have to change hotels. Perhaps she had been followed from her visit with Peralta. Perhaps she had been followed from the airport. But her location and her mission were known: that was the real message of those calls. She knew better than to take them as anything other than threats.

  A knock at the door.

  Adrenaline propelled her to a position beside it. The safety chain was securely looped from the slide bolt in the door plate to the doorjamb.

  The door could not be opened with just a key.

  Could it?

  There was no peephole.

  “Who is it?” she said.

  The voice that replied was male, familiar. She never would have thought she’d be so glad to hear it.

  “It’s Ben,” the voice said.

  “Thank God,” she muttered.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  He was bedraggled, shirt and tie askew, hair wild.

  “What’s with the door chain?” he said. “You used to live in East New York, too?”

  She stared. “What happened to you?”

  After they’d each recounted the events of the last few hours, she said, “We have to get out of here.”

  “Damn right,” Ben said. “There’s a hotel downtown, in the centro—sort of a fleabag, but supposed to be kind of charming. Run by British expatriates. The Sphinx.” He’d bought a South America guide at the airport. He thumbed through it, found the entry. “Here we go. We can either show up or call from the street, on my cell phone. Not from here.”

  She nodded. “Maybe we should stay in the same room this time. Husband and wife.”

  “You’re the expert,” he said. Was there a glint of amusement in his eyes?

  She explained: “They’re going to call around looking for an American man and woman traveling together but staying in separate rooms. How long do you think it’ll take them to locate us?”

  “You’re probably right. Listen—I have something.” He produced a folded sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket.

  “What’s that?”

  “A fax.”

  “From?”

  “My researcher in New York. It’s the names of the board of directors of Armakon AG of Vienna. Owners of that little biotech startup in Philadelphia that made the poison that killed the old men.”

  He handed it to her. “Jürgen Lenz,” she breathed.

  “One of the directors. Is that an intriguing coincidence or what?”

  Once again, Arliss Dupree returned to the paperwork in front of him and once again he found it impossible to focus. It was a long report prepared by the deputy director of the Executive Officer for U.S. Trustees, which oversees bankruptcy estates; the report detailed allegations of corruption involving the federal bankruptcy courts. Dupree read the same sentence three times before he set it aside and got himself another cup of the near-rancid coffee produced by the sputtering machine down the hall.

  He had other things on his mind—that was the trouble. The developments involving Agent Navarro were annoying. Worse than annoying. They spelled major aggravation. He didn’t give a damn what happened to her. But if she’d been guilty of security breaches, it reflected badly on him. Which was totally unfair. And he couldn’t help thinking that it all started with that goddamn liver-spotted spook at the Internal Compliance Unit, Alan Bartlett. Whatever the hell that was about. Several times he’d made inquiries—proper, interdepartmental inquiries—and each time he had been rebuffed. As if he had some lowly custodial capacity at the Office of Special Investigations. As if the OSI itself weren’t worthy of a civil word. Whenever Dupree thought about it for too long, he had to loosen his tie. It was galling.

  First that bitch Navarro was cherry-picked from his team to go gallivanting off God only knew where. Next thing, word came down that she was rotten, had been selling off information to traffickers and hostiles and whoever else. If so, she was Typhoid Mary, which—he kept coming back to it—was bad news for the person she’d reported to, namely, Arliss Dupree. If Dupree had any sense of which way the wind was blowing—and his career was based on his having that sense—a shit storm was coming his way.

  And he was damned if his career was going to be dented by Navarro’s misconduct or—since the charges mostly sounded like bullshit to him—by Bartlett’s double-dealing. Dupree was, above all, a survivor.

  Sometimes surviving meant that you took the bull by the goddamn horns. Dupree had friends of his own—friends who would tell him stuff he needed to know. And maybe paying a visit on the Ghost might help concentrate the old guy’s mind. Bartlett looked like a god-damned vapor trail, but he was a major power in the department, a mini J. Edgar Hoover. Dupree would have to deal with him carefully. Even so, Bartlett had to learn that Dupree wasn’t somebody to mess with. The Ghost spent his days directing investigations into his colleague
s; when was the last time anybody looked into what he was up to?

  Dupree tore open a couple of envelopes of sugar and dumped it into his coffee. It still tasted foul, but he slurped it down anyway. He had a lot of work ahead of him. With any luck at all, Alan Bartlett would be getting a dose of his own medicine.

  The rooms at the Sphinx were large and light-filled. There was one double bed, which they each glanced at warily, deferring any decisions on sleeping arrangements until later.

  “What I still don’t understand,” she said, “is how anyone knew I was here and why.”

  “The Interpol man—”

  “Except that I saw him after the package was stolen from American Express.” She was standing by the tall windows, fiddling with the sheer, gauzy curtains. “Once the package was stolen, the bad guys knew I was looking for Strasser. Question is, how did anyone even know to take it? You didn’t tell anyone you were traveling to Buenos Aires with me, right?”

  He didn’t like her implication, but he ignored it. “No. But did you make any phone calls from the hotel?”

  She was silent a moment. “Yeah, I did. One to Washington.”

  “Not hard to tap hotel phones if you have the proper contacts, right?”

  She looked at him, visibly impressed. “That might also explain the fake CIA man. Yes. Did you give Jürgen Lenz any indication—”

  “I never told Lenz I was even thinking of going to Buenos Aires, because at that point I wasn’t.”

  “I wish there was a way to get Lenz’s fingerprints, run ’em through a bunch of databases, see what we turn up. Maybe there’s even a criminal record. Did he give you anything—a business card, anything?”

  “Nothing, as far as I can recall—well, actually, I gave him the photograph to look at, the one I got from Peter’s bank vault in Zurich.”

  “How many people have you shown it to?”

  “You. A historian at the University of Zurich. Liesl. And Lenz. That’s all.”

  “He handled it?”

  “Oh yeah. Front and back, turned it over. His fingers were all over it.”

  “Great, I’ll have a copy made and send the original off to AFIS.”

  “How? I get the impression your DOJ privileges have been revoked.”

  “But Denneen’s haven’t. If I can get it to him, he can pass it along to a friend in another agency, probably FBI. He’ll figure it out.”

  He hesitated. “Well, if it enables us to get something on Lenz. Or to find Peter’s killers…”

  “Excellent. Thank you.” She glanced at her watch. “Let’s continue this over supper. We’re meeting this detective, Sergio whatever, in a part of the city called La Boca. We can grab something to eat there.”

  The cabdriver was a middle-aged woman with flabby arms, wearing a tank top. On the dashboard was a framed color photo of a child, presumably her own. A tiny leather moccasin dangled from the rearview mirror.

  “A gun-toting priest,” Anna mused. “And I thought the Dominican nuns in church were scary.” She’d changed into a gray pleated skirt and white blouse, a pearl choker around her swan neck, and smelled of something floral and crisp. “He told you that Jürgen Lenz actually owns her house?”

  “Actually, he used the phrase, ‘the man who calls himself Jürgen Lenz.’”

  They entered a seedy working-class barrio on the southernmost tip of Buenos Aires. On their left was the Riachuelo Canal, a stagnant body of water in which rusting dredges and scows and hulks were half-submerged. Along the waterway were warehouses and meat-packing plants.

  “She told you Gerhard Lenz had no children?” Anna’s brows were knit in concentration. “Am I missing something?”

  “Uh-uh. He’s Lenz, yet he’s not Lenz.”

  “So the man you met in Vienna, who everyone knows as Jürgen Lenz, is an impostor.”

  “That would be the implication.”

  “Yet whoever he really is, this old woman and her stepson obviously fear him.”

  “No question about it.”

  “But why in the world would Jürgen Lenz pretend to be the son of someone so infamous if he’s not?” she said. “It makes no sense.”

  “We’re not talking about an Elvis impersonator here, granted. The thing is, we don’t really understand much about how succession works at Sigma. Maybe it was his way of gaining a foothold there. Representing himself as the direct descendant of one of the founders—that might have been the only way he could worm his way in.”

  “That’s assuming that Jürgen Lenz is Sigma.”

  “At this point, it seems safer than assuming the contrary. And, going from what Chardin said, the question with Sigma isn’t what they control, but what they don’t control.”

  Darkness had settled. They were entering an area that was crowded, ill-lit, dangerous-seeming. The houses here were constructed of sheet metal, with corrugated metal roofs, painted pink and ocher and turquoise.

  The cab pulled up in front of a restaurant-bar bustling with rowdy patrons at creaky wooden tables or gathered at the bar, talking and laughing. Prominently displayed behind the bar was a color portrait of Eva Perón. Ceiling fans turned slowly.

  They ordered empanadas and a San Telmo cabernet sauvignon and a bottle of agua mineral gaseosa. The wineglasses had the perspirant smell of old sponge. The napkins were slick squares of deli paper.

  “The widow thought you were from ‘Semmering,’” Anna said when they were settled. “What do you think she meant—a place? A company?”

  “I don’t know. A place, I suppose.”

  “And when she mentioned ‘the company’?”

  “I took that to be Sigma.”

  “But there’s another company. Jürgen Lenz—whoever he really is—is on the Armakon board.”

  “How much are you going to trust this Machado guy with what we know?”

  “Not at all,” she replied. “I simply want him to find Strasser for us.”

  They finished with a couple of humitas, creamy sweet-corn paste in cornhusk packets, and coffee.

  “I assume the Interpol guy wasn’t much help,” Ben said.

  “He denied the possibility that Strasser might live here. Highly suspicious. Interpol was controlled by the Nazis for a time, just before the Second World War, and some people think it never really purged itself. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if this guy’s in the pocket of one of these Nazi protection rackets. Now, your guntoting priest—”

  “My gun-toting priest insisted he had no way to reach Strasser, but I don’t believe him.”

  “I’ll bet he got on the phone to Strasser the moment you were out the door.”

  Ben reflected. “If he called Strasser… What if we could somehow get the widow’s telephone records?”

  “We can ask Machado. He may be able to do it, or know who to reach out to.”

  “Speaking of reaching out, do you know what this guy looks like?”

  “No, but we’re meeting him right in front.”

  The street was crowded and raucous and electric—rock music blaring from speakers set out on sidewalks, an opera’s aria, tango music from a nearby cantina. Porteños strolled down the cobblestones of the Caminito, a pedestrian thoroughfare, browsing at the stalls of an open-air market. People came in and out of the restaurant, repeatedly colliding with Ben and Anna without apology.

  Ben noticed a gaggle of young boys in their late teens or early twenties, a roving gang of eight or more toughs, heading toward him and Anna, talking loudly, laughing, drunk on alcohol and testosterone. Anna muttered something to Ben out of the side of her mouth, something he couldn’t quite understand. Several of the guys were staring directly at him and Anna with something more than idle curiosity, and in an instant the gang surrounded them.

  “Run!” he shouted, and he was slugged in the stomach by a fist.

  He protected his abdomen with both arms, as something slammed into his left kidney—a foot!—and he lunged forward to ward off the attack. He heard Anna scream, but it seemed to come f
rom a great distance. He was blocked, hemmed in; his assailants, though evidently teenagers, seemed to be trained in combat. He couldn’t move, and he was being pummeled. In his peripheral vision he could see Anna flinging one of the attackers aside with surprising strength, but then several more grabbed her. Ben tried to break free, but was overwhelmed by a barrage of fists and kicks.

  He saw the glint of knife blades, and a knife slashed against his side. A hot line of sensation exploded into vast pain, and he grabbed the hand holding the knife, twisted it hard, and heard a yelp. He kicked at his attackers, slammed wildly with his fists, connecting a few times, and he felt an elbow jabbed into his rib cage, then a knee in his stomach. Breath left him, and he gasped helplessly, then a foot kicked him in the testicles and he doubled over in pain.

  He heard the whoop of a siren, and he heard Anna shout, “Over here! Oh, thank God!” A foot kicked him hard on the side of his head, and he could taste blood. He flung his hands out, half protectively, half in an attempt to grab whatever he could, to stop the pummeling; he heard shouting, new voices, and he lurched to his feet to see a couple of policemen shouting at his accosters.

  One of the cops grabbed him, yelled, “¡Vamos, vamos por acá, que los vamos a sacar de acá!” Come on, get over here, we’ll get you out of here! Another cop pulled Anna toward the cruiser. Somehow he made it to the police car, saw the door open, felt a shove, and he was inside. The door slammed behind him, and all the shouts and screams of the crowd were muted.

  “You all right?” one of the cops said from the front seat.

  Ben groaned.

  Anna said, “Gracias!” Ben noticed that her blouse was torn, her pearl choker was gone. “We’re American…” she began, then seemed to think for a moment. “My purse,” she said. “Shit. My money was in there.”

  “Passport?” Ben managed to croak out.

  “Back in the room.” The car was moving. She turned to him. “My God, what was that? You O.K., Ben?”

  “I’m not sure.” The screaming pain in his groin was beginning to subside. There was a sticky warmth where he’d been slashed by the knife. He touched his side, felt the blood.