The Sigma Protocol

  Anna nodded impatiently. As far as she could see, the Ghost was seeing ghosts. “How long is this assignment for? I’ve got a real job, you know.”

  “This is your ‘real’ job now. You’ve already been reassigned. We’ve made the arrangements. You understand your task, then?” His gaze softened. “This doesn’t seem to quicken your pulse, Ms. Navarro.”

  Anna shrugged. “I keep coming back to the fact that these guys are all in the graduating class, if you know what I mean. Old guys tend to pop off, O.K.? These were old guys.”

  “And in nineteenth-century Paris, getting trampled by a carriage was pretty commonplace,” Bartlett said.

  Anna furrowed her brow. “Excuse me?”

  Bartlett leaned back in his chair. “Have you ever heard of the Frenchman Claude Rochat? No? He’s someone I think about quite a bit. A dull, unimaginative, plodding, dogged fellow, who, in the 1860s and 1870s, worked as an accountant in the employ of the Directoire, France’s own bureau of intelligence. In 1867, it came to his attention that two low-level clerks at the Directoire, apparently unacquainted, had both been killed in the course of a fortnight—one the victim of an apparent street robbery, the other trampled to death by a mail coach. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time. Quite unremarkable. But still he wondered, especially after he learned that at the time of death, both of these humble clerks had on their persons costly gold pocket watches—in fact, as he confirmed, the two watches were identical, both with a fine cloisonné landscape on the inside of the watchcase. A small oddity, but it arrested his attention, and, to the exasperation of his superiors, he spent the next four years trying to figure out why, and how, this small oddity had come about. In the end, he uncovered a spy ring of extraordinary intricacy: the Directoire had been penetrated and manipulated by its Prussian counterparts.” He registered her darting glance and smiled: “Yes, those pocket watches in the case are the very ones. Exquisite craftsmanship. I acquired them a couple of decades ago at an auction. I like having them nearby. It helps me to remember.”

  Bartlett closed his eyes for a contemplative moment. “Of course, by the time Rochat completed his investigations, it was too late,” he went on. “Bismarck’s agents, through a cunning diet of misinformation, had already tricked France into declaring war. ‘À Berlin’ was the great cry. The result was disastrous for France: the military dominance it had enjoyed since the Battle of Rocroi in 1643 was completely destroyed, in just a couple of months. Can you imagine? The French army, with the Emperor at its head, was led straight into an ingenious ambush near Sedan. And that was the end, needless to say, for Napoleon III. The country lost Alsace-Lorraine, it had to pay staggering reparations, and it had to submit to two years of occupation. An extraordinary blow, it was—one that shifted the whole course of European history irreversibly. And just a few years earlier, Claude Rochat was tugging at a little thread, not knowing where it would lead, not knowing whether it would lead anywhere. It was just those two lowly clerks and their matching pocket watches.” Bartlett made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Most of the time, something that looks trivial really is trivial. Most of the time. My job is to worry about such matters. The tiny threads. The boring little discrepancies. The trivial little patterns that just might lead to larger patterns. The most important thing I do is the least glamorous thing imaginable.” An arched eyebrow. “I look for matching pocket watches.”

  Anna was silent for a few moments. The Ghost was living fully up to his reputation: cryptic, hopelessly obscure. “I appreciate the history lesson,” she said slowly, “but my frame of reference has always been the here and now. If you really think these deep-storage files have ongoing relevance, why not simply have the CIA investigate?”

  Bartlett withdrew a crisp silk pocket square from his suit jacket and began to polish his eyeglasses. “Things get rather awkward around here,” he said. “The ICU tends to get involved only in cases where there’s a real possibility of internal interference or anything else that might preclude a thorough inquiry. Let’s leave it at that.” There was a hint of condescension in his voice.

  “Let’s not,” Anna said sharply. It wasn’t a tone to take with the head of a division, especially one as powerful as the ICU, but subservience wasn’t in her skill set, and Bartlett might as well know at the outset whose services he had engaged. “With respect, you’re talking about the possibility that someone in, or retired from, the Agency may be behind the deaths.”

  The director of the Internal Compliance Unit blanched slightly. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t deny it.”

  Bartlett sighed. “Of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.” A tight smile.

  “If you think Central Intelligence might be compromised, why not bring in the FBI?”

  Bartlett snorted delicately. “Why not bring in the Associated Press? The Federal Bureau of Investigation has many strengths, but discretion isn’t among them. I’m not sure you appreciate the sensitivity of this matter. The fewer people who know about it, the better. That’s why I’m not involving a team—just an individual. The right individual, I dearly hope, Agent Navarro.”

  “Even if these deaths really are murders,” she said, “it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever find the killer, I hope you know that.”

  “That’s the standard bureaucratic response,” Bartlett said, “but you don’t strike me as a bureaucrat. Mr. Dupree says you’re stubborn and ‘not exactly a team player.’ Well, that’s precisely what I wanted.”

  Anna forged ahead. “You’re basically asking me to investigate the CIA. You want me to examine a series of deaths to establish that they are murders, and then—”

  “And then to amass any evidence that would allow us to conduct an audit.” Bartlett’s gray eyes shone through his plastic-rimmed glasses. “No matter who’s implicated. Is that clear?”

  “As mud,” Anna said. A seasoned investigator, she was used to conducting interviews with witnesses and suspects alike. Sometimes you simply needed to listen. Sometimes, however, you needed to goad, to provoke a response. Art and experience came in knowing when. Bartlett’s story was perforated with elisions and omissions. She appreciated the need-to-know reflexes of a wily old bureaucrat, but in her experience, it helped to know more than you strictly needed to. “I’m not going to play blindman’s bluff,” she said.

  Bartlett blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You must have copies of these Sigma files. You must have scrutinized them closely. And yet you claim you have no idea what Sigma was about.”

  “Where are you going with this?” His voice was cool.

  “Will you show me these files?”

  A rictuslike smile: “No. No, that won’t be possible.”

  “Why not?”

  Bartlett put his glasses on again. “I’m not under investigation here. As much as I admire your tactics of interrogation. Anyway, I believe I’ve been clear on the relevant points.”

  “No, dammit, that’s not good enough! You’re fully acquainted with these files. If you don’t know what they add up to, then at least you’ve got to have your suspicions. An educated hypothesis. Anything at all. Save your poker face for your Tuesday-night card game. I’m not playing.”

  Bartlett finally erupted. “For Christ’s sake, you’ve seen enough to know that we’re talking about the reputation of some of the major figures of the postwar era. These are clearance files. By themselves, they prove nothing. I had you vetted before our conversation—did that implicate you in my affairs? I trust your discretion. Of course I do. But we’re talking about prominent individuals as well as obscure ones. You can’t simply go stomping around in your sensible shoes.”

  Anna listened carefully, listened to the undertone of tension in his voice. “You talk about reputations, yet that’s not what you’re really concerned about, is it?” she pressed. “I need more to go on!”

  He shook his head. “It’s like trying to fashion a rope ladder out of goss
amer. Nothing that we’ve ever been able to pin down. Half a century ago, something was hatched. Something. Something that involved vital interests. The Sigma list encompasses a curious collection of individuals—some were industrialists, we know, and there are others whose identity we haven’t been able to figure out at all. What they have in common is that a founder of the CIA, someone with enormous power in the forties and fifties, took a direct interest in them. Was he enlisting them? Targeting them? We’re all playing blindman’s bluff. But it would seem that an undertaking of enormous secrecy was launched. You asked what connects these men. In a real sense, we simply don’t know.” He adjusted his cuffs, the nervous tic of a fastidious man. “You might say we’re at the pocket-watch stage.”

  “No offense, but the Sigma list—that goes back half a century!”

  “Ever been to the Somme, in France?” Bartlett asked abruptly, his eyes a little too bright. “You ought to go—just to look at the poppies growing among the wheat. Every once in a while, a farmer in the Somme cuts down an oak tree, sits down on the trunk, and then sickens and dies. Do you know why? Because during the First World War, a battle had taken place on that field, a canister of mustard gas deployed. The poison gets absorbed by the tree as a sapling, and decades later it’s still potent enough to kill a man.”

  “And that’s Sigma, do you think?”

  Bartlett’s gaze grew in intensity. “They say the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. I find the more you know, the more unsettling it is to come across things you don’t know about. Call it vanity, or call it caution. I worry about what becomes of unseen little saplings.” A wan smile. “The crooked timber of humanity—it always comes down to the crooked timber. Yes, I appreciate that all this sounds like ancient history to you, and perhaps it is, Agent Navarro. You’ll come back and set me straight.”

  “I wonder,” she said.

  “Now, you’ll be making contact with various law-enforcement officials, and as far as anyone knows, you’ll be conducting a completely open homicide investigation. Why the involvement of an OSI agent? Your explanation will be terse: because these names have cropped up in the course of an ongoing investigation into the fraudulent transfer of funds, the details of which nobody will press you to disclose. A simple cover, nothing elaborate required.”

  “I’ll pursue the sort of investigation I’ve been trained to do,” Anna said warily. “That’s all I can promise.”

  “That’s all I’m asking for,” Bartlett replied smoothly. “Your skepticism may be well founded. But one way or the other, I’d like to be sure. Go to Nova Scotia. Assure me that Robert Mailhot really did die of natural causes. Or—confirm that he didn’t.”

  Chapter Four

  Ben was driven to the headquarters of the Kantonspolizei, the police of the canton of Zurich, a grimy yet elegant old stone building on Zeughausstrasse. He was led in through an underground parking garage by two silent young policemen and up several long flights of stairs into a relatively modern building that adjoined the older one. The interior looked like it belonged in a suburban American high school, circa 1975. To any of his questions, his two escorts answered only with shrugs.

  His thoughts raced. It was no accident that Cavanaugh was there on Bahnhofstrasse. Cavanaugh had been in Zurich with the deliberate intent to murder him. Somehow the body had disappeared, had been removed swiftly and expertly, and the gun planted in his bag. It was clear that others were involved with Cavanaugh, professionals. But who—and, again, why?

  Ben was taken first to a small fluorescent-lit room and seated in front of a stainless-steel table. As his police escorts remained standing, a man in a short white coat emerged and, without making eye contact, said, “Ihre Hände, bitte.” Ben extended his hands. It was pointless to argue, he knew. The technician pumped a mist from a plastic spray bottle on both sides of his hands, then rubbed a cotton-tipped plastic swab lightly but thoroughly over the back of his right hand. Then he placed the swab in a plastic tube. He repeated the exercise for the palm, and then did the same with Ben’s other hand. Four swabs now reposed in four carefully labeled plastic tubes, and the technician took them with him as he left the room.

  A few minutes later, Ben arrived at a pleasant, sparely furnished office on the third floor, where a broad-shouldered, stocky man in plainclothes introduced himself as Thomas Schmid, a homicide detective. He had a wide, pockmarked face and a very short haircut with short bangs. For some reason Ben remembered a Swiss woman he’d once met at Gstaad telling him that cops in Switzerland were called bullen, “bulls,” and this man demonstrated why.

  Schmid began asking Ben a series of questions—name, date of birth, passport number, hotel in Zurich, and so on. He sat at a computer terminal, typing out the answers with one finger. A pair of reading glasses hung from his neck.

  Ben was angry, tired, and frustrated, his patience worn thin. It took great effort to keep his tone light. “Detective,” he said, “am I under arrest or not?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, this has been fun and all, but if you’re not going to arrest me, I’d like to head on back to my hotel.”

  “We would be happy to arrest you if you’d like,” the detective replied blandly, the barest glint of menace in his smile. “We have a very nice cell waiting for you. But if we can keep this friendly, it will all be much simpler.”

  “Aren’t I allowed to make a phone call?”

  Schmid extended both hands, palms up, at the beige phone at the edge of his crowded desk. “You may call the American consulate here, or your attorney. As you wish.”

  “Thank you,” Ben said, picking up the phone and glancing at his watch. It was early afternoon in New York. Hartman Capital Management’s in-house attorneys all practiced tax or securities law, so he decided to call a friend who practiced international law.

  Howie Rubin and he had been on the Deerfield ski racing team together and had become close friends. Howie had come to Bedford several times for Thanksgiving and, like all of Ben’s friends, had particularly taken to Ben’s mother.

  The attorney was at lunch, but Ben’s call was patched through to Howie’s cell phone. Restaurant noise in the background made Howie’s end of the conversation hard to make out.

  “Christ, Ben,” Howie said, interrupting Ben’s summary. Someone next to him was talking loudly. “All right, I’ll tell you what I tell all my clients who get arrested while on ski vacations in Switzerland. Grin and bear it. Don’t get all high and mighty. Don’t play the indignant American. No one can grind you down with rules and regulations and everything-by-the-book like the Swiss.”

  Ben glanced at Schmid, who was tapping at his keyboard and no doubt listening. “I’m beginning to see that. So what am I supposed to do?”

  “The way it works in Switzerland, they can hold you for up to twenty-four hours without actually arresting you.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “And if you piss them off, they can throw you in a dirty little holding cell overnight. So don’t.”

  “Then what do you recommend?”

  “Hartman, you can charm a dog off a meat truck, buddy boy, so just be your usual self. Any problems, call me and I’ll get on the phone and threaten an international incident. One of my partners does a lot of corporate espionage work, point being we’ve got access to some pretty high-powered databases. I’ll pull Cavanaugh’s records, see what we can find. Give me the phone number where you are right now.”

  When Ben had hung up, Schmid led him into an adjoining room and sat him at a desk near another terminal. “Have you been to Switzerland before?” Schmid asked pleasantly, as if he were a tour guide.

  “A number of times,” Ben said. “Mostly to ski.”

  Schmid nodded distractedly. “A popular recreation. Very good for relieving stress, I think. Very good for letting off tension.” His gaze narrowed. “You must have a lot of stress from your work.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Stress can make peopl
e do remarkable things. Day after day they bottle it up, and then, one day, boom! They explode. When this happens, they surprise themselves, I think, as much as other people.”

  “As I told you, the gun was planted. I never used it.” Ben was livid, but he spoke as coolly as he could. It would do no good to provoke the detective.

  “And yet by your own account, you killed a man, bludgeoned him with your bare hands. Is this something you do in your normal line of work?”

  “These were hardly normal circumstances.”

  “If I were to talk to your friends, Mr. Hartman, what would they tell me about you? Would they say you had a temper?” He gave Ben an oddly contemplative look. “Would they say you were… a violent man?”

  “They’d tell you I’m as law abiding as they come,” Ben said. “Where are you going with these questions?” Ben looked down at his own hands, hands that had slammed a lamp fixture against Cavanaugh’s skull. Was he violent? The detective’s imputations were preposterous—he’d acted purely in self-defense—and yet his mind drifted back a few years.

  He could see Darnell’s face even now. One of his fifth-graders at East New York, Darnell had been a good kid, an A student, bright and curious, the best in his class. Then something happened to him. His grades dropped, and before long he stopped handing in homework altogether. Darnell never got in fights with the other kids, and yet from time to time welts would be visible on his face. Ben talked to him after class one day. Darnell couldn’t look him in the eye. His expression was cloudy with fear. Finally he told him that Orlando, his mother’s new boyfriend, didn’t want him to waste time on schoolwork; he needed him to help bring in money. “Bring in money how?” Ben had asked, but Darnell wouldn’t answer. When he telephoned Darnell’s mother, Joyce Stuart, her responses were skittish, evasive. She wouldn’t come into the school, refused to discuss the situation, refused to admit anything might be wrong. She, too, sounded scared. A few days later, he found Darnell’s address from student records and paid a visit.