The Sigma Protocol

  The car swung into traffic, barreling down the road. “That was no random attack,” Anna said. “That was deliberate. Planned, coordinated.”

  Ben looked at her dully. “Thank you,” he said to the policemen in the front seat.

  There was no reply. He realized that there was a Plexiglas barrier between the front and back seats, and he heard Anna say, “The partition—?”

  The Plexiglas had not been there before; it had just come up. Ben did not hear a police radio, or maybe the sound wasn’t coming through the Plexiglas.

  Anna seemed to notice the same thing at the same moment, for she leaned forward and banged on the Plexiglas, but the two policemen didn’t respond.

  The back doors locked automatically.

  “Oh, my God,” Anna breathed. “They’re not cops.”

  They pulled at the door handles, which did not yield. They grabbed at the door lock buttons, but they would not move.

  “Where’s your gun?” Ben whispered.

  “I don’t have one!”

  Headlights flashed by as the car accelerated down a four-lane highway. They were now clearly outside the city limits. Ben hammered at the Plexiglas partition with both fists, but neither the driver nor the passenger in the front seat seemed to notice.

  The car swerved onto an exit ramp. In a few minutes they were on a dark, two-lane road, lined with tall trees, and then without warning they turned off the road into an unlit cul-de-sac within a copse of tall trees.

  The engine was switched off. For a moment there was silence, interrupted only by the sound of an occasional car passing by.

  The two men in the front seat seemed to be conferring. Then the passenger got out and went around to the back of the car. The trunk popped open.

  In a moment he returned to his side of the car, clutching in his left hand something that looked like a piece of cloth. In his right he held a handgun. Then the driver got out, taking a gun from a shoulder holster. The back doors unlocked.

  The driver, apparently in charge, yanked open the door on Anna’s side and waved the gun at her. She got out slowly, put her hands up. He stepped back and, with his free left hand, slammed the car door shut, leaving Ben alone in the backseat.

  The deserted country road, the weapons… this was a classic execution.

  The other false policeman—or perhaps they were real ones; did it make any difference?—walked to where Anna stood, her hands in the air, and began frisking her for weapons, beginning with her underarms. His hands lingered on her breasts.

  He ran his hands down her side, moving them into her crotch, his fingers spending too much time there as well, then moved down the inside of her legs to her ankles. He pulled back, seemed to determine her safe. Then he took a burlap sack and placed it over her head, tightening it around her neck.

  The driver barked something, and she fell to her knees and clasped her hands behind her back.

  Ben saw with horror what was about to happen to her. “No!”

  The driver shouted another order, and the younger cop opened the car door, pointing his weapon at Ben. “Step out slowly,” he said in fluent English.

  There was no hope of making a dash for the road, nor of grabbing Anna and taking her to safety. Not faced with two men with guns. He got out of the car, thrust his hands in the air, and the younger one began frisking him too, this time more roughly.

  “No está enfierrado,” the man said. He’s clean.

  To Ben, he said conversationally, “Any sudden movements and we’ll kill you. Understand?”

  Yes, I understand. They’ll kill us both.

  A burlap sack went over his head. It stank of a horse barn, and was cinched tight at his neck, too tight, choking him. Everything was dark. He croaked, “Hey, watch it!”

  “Shut the hell up,” one of the men said. It sounded like the older man’s voice. “Or I kill you and no one find your body for days, hear me?”

  He heard Anna whisper, “Go along with them for now. We don’t exactly have a choice.”

  He felt something hard pressed against the back of his head. “Kneel,” a voice said.

  He knelt, and without being asked, he clasped his hands behind his back. “What do you want?” Ben said.

  “Shut the hell up!” one of them shouted. Something hard cracked against the back of his head. He groaned in pain.

  His abductors didn’t want to talk. They were going to die in this godforsaken field off a dark road in the middle of a country he didn’t know. He was thinking of how it all began, at the Bahnhofplatz in Zurich, with his near-death, or did it really begin with Peter’s disappearance? He recalled the agony of Peter’s murder in the country inn in rural Switzerland, but instead of demoralizing him, the memory gave him resolve. If he were killed here, at least he would have the satisfaction of knowing that he had done everything he could to find his brother’s murderers, and if he had failed to bring them to justice, or to discover what their reasons were, at least he had come close. He would leave behind no wife, no child, and in time he would be mostly forgotten by his friends, but in the history of the world all our lives are as brief as the winking of a firefly on a summer night, and he would not feel sorry for himself.

  He thought of his father, wherever he’d vanished to, and regretted only that he’d never know the entire truth about the man.

  Out of the darkness came a sudden voice. The older man.

  “Now you answer some questions. What the hell you want with Josef Strasser?”

  So they wanted to talk after all.

  These goons were protecting Strasser.

  He waited for Anna to speak first, and when she didn’t, he said, “I’m an attorney. An American lawyer. I’m probating an estate—that means I’m trying to get him some money that’s been left to him.”

  Something cracked hard against the side of his head.

  “I want the truth, not your bullshit!”

  “I’m telling you the truth.” Ben’s voice was shaky. “Leave this woman out of it—she’s just my girlfriend. She’s got nothing to do with it. I dragged her along, she’d never been to Buenos Aires—”

  “Shut up!” one of them bellowed. Something slammed into his right kidney, and he tumbled to the ground, his face inside the burlap flat against the dirt. The pain was so acute he could not even groan. Then came a blinding pain as something cracked into the side of his face, perhaps a foot, and he smelled and tasted blood. Everything was bleached out.

  He screamed, “Stop! What do you want? I’ll tell you what you want!”

  He hunched forward, brought his hands around to protect his face, gasping from the unfathomable pain, and he felt blood seeping from his mouth. He braced himself for the next blow, but for a moment nothing happened.

  Then came the voice of the older one, quiet and matter-of-fact, as if making a reasonable point in a pleasant conversation. “The woman is not ‘just’ your girlfriend. She is Agent Anna Navarro, and she is on the payroll of the United States Justice Department. This we know. You, we want to know about.”

  “I’m helping her,” he managed to get out, cringing, and it came, a swift blow to the other side of his head. A lightning bolt of pain pierced his eyes. The pain was so great now, so constant and overwhelming, that he thought he could not possibly survive it.

  Then a pause, a momentary intermission in the torture session, and there was silence, the men seemingly waiting for him to speak again.

  But Ben’s mind was sluggish. Who—where were these men from? The man called Jürgen Lenz? Sigma itself? Their methods seemed too homespun for that. The Kamaradenwerk? That was more plausible. What answer would satisfy them, end the beatings, forestall the execution?

  Anna spoke. His ears were plugged, probably with blood, and he could barely hear what she said. “If you’re protecting Strasser,” she said in a voice that was surprisingly steady, “you’ll want to know what I’m doing here. I’ve come to Buenos Aires to warn him—not to seek his extradition.”

  One of the me
n laughed, but she kept speaking. Her voice seemed so far away. “Do you know that a number of Strasser’s comrades have been murdered in the last few weeks?”

  There was no response. “We have information that Strasser is about to be killed. The U.S. Justice Department has no interest in trying to seize him, or we’d have done it long ago. Whatever terrible things he’s done, he’s not wanted for war crimes. I’m trying to keep him from being murdered, so I can talk to him.”

  “Liar!” one of the men screamed. There was a thud, and Anna cried out.

  “Stop!” she shouted, her voice cracking. “There are ways you can check that I’m telling you the truth! We need to get to Strasser to warn him! If you kill us, you’ll be harming him!”

  “Anna!” Ben yelled. He needed to connect with her. “Anna, you O.K.? Just tell me you’re O.K.”

  His throat felt as if it were going to burst. The exertion of yelling made his head throb excruciatingly.

  Silence. Then her muffled voice: “I’m O.K.”

  It was the last thing he heard before everything vanished.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Ben awoke in a bed in a large, unfamiliar room with high ceilings, and tall windows that looked out over a city street he didn’t recognize.

  Evening, traffic noise, twinkling lights.

  A lanky woman with dark brown hair and brown eyes, in a T-shirt and black Lycra bicycle shorts, languidly curled in a chair, watching him.

  Anna.

  His head throbbed.

  In a sedate voice, she said, “Hey.”

  “Hey,” he said. “I’m alive.” The nightmarish scene began to come back to him, but he couldn’t remember when he lost consciousness.

  She smiled. “How’re you feeling?”

  He thought about this for a moment. “Sort of like the guy who falls from the top of a skyscraper, and someone sticks his head out of a tenth-floor window and asks how he’s doing, and the guy says, Well, so far I’m fine.”

  Anna chuckled.

  “I have kind of a low-grade headache.” He turned his head from side to side, felt the pain sear and sparkle behind his eyeballs. “Maybe not so low-grade.”

  “Well, you got bashed up pretty bad. For a while I thought you might have a concussion, but I guess not. Not from what I can tell.” She paused. “They kicked me around a little, but they seemed to be focusing on you.”

  “Real gentlemen.” He thought a moment, still disoriented. “How’d I get back here?”

  “I guess they got tired of beating on you, or maybe they got scared when you passed out. At any rate, they brought us back to town, dropped us off somewhere in La Boca.”

  The only light in the room came from a lamp beside the bed where he lay. He became aware of bandages, on his forehead and side. “Who did this?”

  “What do you mean—who were they? Or who bandaged you up?”

  “Who fixed me up?”

  “Moi,” she said, bowing her head modestly. “Medical supplies courtesy the Sphinx, mostly peroxide and Betadine.”

  “Thank you.” His thinking was muzzy and slow. “So who were those guys?”

  “Well, we’re alive,” she said, “so I’m guessing they’re local muscle. Pistoleros, they’re called, guns for hire.”

  “But the police car…”

  “The Argentine police are famous for corruption. A lot of them moonlight as pistoleros. But I don’t think they were connected with Sigma. Kamaradenwerk, or something along those lines—thugs who look out for the old Germans. The local network could have been alerted lots of ways. My Interpol friend—I gave him a fake name, but he might have seen an ID photo. Maybe it was the stolen package at American Express. Maybe it was my investigator guy, Machado. Maybe your pistol-packin’ priest. But enough questions. I want you to take it easy.”

  He tried to sit up, felt a pain in his side, lay back down. Now he remembered being kicked in the stomach, the groin, the kidneys.

  His eyelids kept drooping, the room going in and out of focus, and soon he succumbed to sleep.

  When he awoke again, it was still night, and the room was mostly dark. The only light came from the street, but it was enough to see the shape in bed next to him. He could smell her faint perfume. He thought, Now she’s willing to share a bed.

  The next time he awoke, the room was bright. It hurt his eyes to look around. He heard the sound of water running in the bathroom, and struggled to sit up.

  Anna emerged in a cloud of steam, wrapped in a bath towel.

  “He’s awake,” she said. “How’s it feel?”

  “A little better.”

  “Good. You want me to order some coffee from room service?”

  “They have room service here?”

  “Yeah, you’re feeling better,” she said with a laugh. “The old sense of humor’s starting to come back.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Understandable. We didn’t have a chance to eat dinner last night.” She turned back toward the bathroom.

  He was in a clean T-shirt and boxer shorts. “Who changed my clothes?”

  “Me.”

  “My shorts, too?”

  “Mm-hmm. You were soaked in blood.”

  Well, well, he thought, amused. Our first moment of intimacy and I slept through it.

  She began brushing her teeth and reemerged a few minutes later, makeup applied, wearing a white T-shirt and violet gym shorts.

  “What do you think happened?” he asked. His head was beginning to clear. “You think your call to that private detective, what’s-his-name, was intercepted?”

  “Possibly.”

  “From now on we use my digital phone only. Let’s assume even the Sphinx’s switchboard is tapped.”

  She placed two pillows behind him. She wore no perfume now but smelled pleasantly of soap and shampoo. “Mind if I use it now to call our last hotel? My friend in Washington thinks I’m staying there, and might be trying to reach me.” She tossed him a copy of the International Herald Tribune. “You take it easy. Read, sleep, whatever.”

  “Make sure it’s charged. You might have to plug it in.”

  He leaned back and idly flipped through the pages. An earthquake in the Gujarat state in India. A California utilities company facing a shareholders’ lawsuit. World leaders set to gather at the International Children’s Health Forum. He put the paper aside and shut his eyes, but only to rest. He’d had enough sleep. He listened to her talk to the hotel in La Recoleta, her voice lulling. She had a lively, infectious laugh.

  She appeared to have lost her sharp edge, her defensiveness. Now she seemed confident and assured, but without the brittleness. Maybe it was his weakness that allowed her to be strong. Maybe she liked to nurture. Maybe it was the shared adventure they had just been through, or his concern for her, or maybe it was pity for what had happened to him, or misplaced guilt. Maybe it was all these things.

  She ended the phone conversation. “Well, this is interesting.”

  “Hmm?” He opened his eyes. She was standing beside the bed, her hair tousled, her breasts outlined beneath the white cotton T-shirt. He felt the tug of arousal.

  “I got a message from Sergio the private eye, apologizing for being late, he was tied up on a case. Sounds entirely innocent.”

  “Call was intercepted at the hotel, probably.”

  “I’m going to meet him.”

  “Are you crazy? Haven’t you had enough traps for one lifetime?”

  “On my terms. My arrangement.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I know what I’m doing. I may screw up—I do screw up sometimes—but you know, I’m actually considered pretty good at what I do.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But you don’t do organized crime or drugs, you don’t do shoot-’em-up stuff. I think we’re both in over our heads.”

  He felt oddly protective of her, even though she was no doubt a far better shot than he, more equipped to defend herself. Yet at the same time—even more perplexing—he felt safer wit
h her around.

  She came over and sat on the bed next to him. He edged over a bit to give her room. “I appreciate your worrying about me,” she said. “But I’ve been trained, and I have been a field agent.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “No apology necessary. No offense taken.”

  He stole a quick glance at her. He wanted to say, My God, you’re beautiful, but he didn’t know how she might take it. She still seemed pretty defensive.

  She said, “Are you doing this for your brother or for your father?”

  The question caught him by surprise. He hadn’t expected such bluntness. And he realized the answer wasn’t simple. “Maybe both,” he said. “Mostly for Peter, of course.”

  “How well did you and Peter get along?”

  “Do you know any twins?” he asked.

  “Not well.”

  “I suspect it’s the closest relationship there is, closer than many husbands and wives. Not that I know about that firsthand. But we protected each other. We could almost read each other’s mind. Even when we fought—and we did, believe me—afterward we each felt more guilty than angry. We competed with each other in sports and such, but not really in any other way. When he was happy, I was happy. When something good happened to him, I felt like it had happened to me. And vice versa.”

  To his surprise he saw tears in her eyes. For some reason that brought tears to his own.

  He continued, “When I say we were close, that seems so inadequate. You don’t say you’re ‘close’ to your leg or your hand, right? He was like a part of my body.”

  It all came back to him suddenly, a jumble of memories, or really, images. Peter’s murder. His mind-boggling reappearance. The two of them, as kids, running through the house, laughing. Peter’s funeral.

  He turned away in embarrassment, covered his face with his hand, unable to stanch the sob that welled up.

  He heard a low keening and realized that Anna was crying too, which surprised him and, most of all, moved him. She took his hand in hers and squeezed tight. Her cheeks glistening with tears, she put an arm gently around his shoulders, then both of her arms, and she embraced him, seemingly careful of his wounds, and laid her face damply on his shoulder. It was a moment of intimacy that at once startled him and felt natural, part of the complex, passionate Anna he was slowly coming to know. He took solace from her, and she from him. He could feel her heart thudding against his chest, her warmth. She raised her head off his shoulder and slowly, tentatively at first, placed her lips against his, her eyes closed tight. They kissed slowly, tenderly at first, then deeply and with abandon. His arms encircled her lithe body, his fingers exploring her as his mouth and tongue did the same. They had crossed a line each of them had invisibly and firmly drawn some time ago, a boundary, a high wall between natural impulses, containing and isolating the powerful electrical charges that now crackled back and forth between them. And somehow, when they made love, it didn’t seem as awkward as he’d imagined it might be, when he’d allowed himself to imagine it.