The Sigma Protocol (12 page)

But he had to lose them.

There would be plenty of opportunities in the tangle of roads around Chur; God knows he’d gotten lost there himself the last time he’d visited. Now he made a last-minute hairpin turn, veered onto the exit to the narrower Highway Number 3 going south toward St. Moritz. A few minutes later, the familiar blue Saab returned, perfectly centered in his rearview mirror. Driving too fast, Ben hurtled past Malix and Churwalden, making sharp ascents and sudden descents that made his stomach plunge. He turned onto poorly paved byways, taking them at speeds they weren’t meant for, and the combination of the rough surfaces and the Opel’s overstrained suspension system caused the car to shudder and jolt. Once, he could hear the car’s chassis scrape loudly against a bulge in the pavement, and he saw sparks in the rearview mirror.

Had he shaken his pursuers? The Saab would disappear for long intervals, but never long enough. Time and again, it reappeared, as if linked to him by a strong invisible coil. Ben sped through a series of tunnels cut into gorge faces, past limestone cliffs and old stone bridges spanning deep ravines. He was driving recklessly, his mounting terror overcoming anything like caution; he had to count on his pursuer’s prudence and sense of self-preservation. That was his only chance.

As he headed toward the narrow mouth of a tunnel, the Saab suddenly shot ahead of him and into the tunnel. Ben was puzzled: Had it been following another car all along? Only when Ben tried to emerge from the
short tunnel did he see, in the yellowish mercury lights, what was happening.

Fifty feet ahead, the Saab was now parked laterally across the narrow road, blocking the egress.

Its driver, in a dark overcoat and hat, was holding up a hand, signaling him to halt. It was a barricade, a roadblock.

Then Ben became aware that another car was following from the rear. A gray Renault sedan. A car he’d caught glimpses of before without focusing on. One of
them
, whoever they were.

Think, dammit!
They were trying to wedge him in, trap him inside the tunnel.
Oh, Christ!
He couldn’t allow that to happen! Ordinary caution told him to slam on the brakes before hitting the barrier ahead, but these weren’t ordinary circumstances. Instead, following some mad impulse, Ben barreled ahead, flooring the gas pedal, his Opel sedan ramming into the left side of the stationary two-door Saab. The Saab was a sports car, built for speed, he knew, but it was probably eight hundred pounds lighter, too. He saw the driver jump out of the way just before the collision propelled the Saab to one side. The sudden deceleration caused Ben to lurch forward against his straining seat belt and shoulder strap, the taut fabric cutting into his flesh like bands of steel, but the impact had cleared just enough room for him to scrape through, with a horrifying scrape of metal against metal. The car he was driving—its front end partly crumpled, viciously banged up—no longer resembled the gleaming model he’d rented, but the wheels still turned, and he roared ahead down the road, not daring to look back.

From behind him, he heard an explosion of gunfire.
Oh, dear Christ! It wasn’t over. It would never be over!

Galvanized by a fresh surge of adrenaline, Ben found his every sense gaining laser-like focus. The old gray
Renault, the one that had come up from behind him in the tunnel, had somehow made its way through the wreckage, too. In his rearview, Ben could see a weapon thrust through the passenger’s side window,
aiming
at him. It was a submachine gun, and, seconds later, it began firing off a nonstop fusillade of automatic fire.

Move!

Ben sped down an old stone bridge spanning a gorge so narrow there was barely room for traffic in either direction. Suddenly there came a hollow pop, an explosion of glass a few feet away. His rearview mirror had been shot out; bullets spiderwebbed the rear windshield. They knew exactly what they were doing, and soon he would be dead.

There was a muted explosion, like a dull popping noise, and the car suddenly lurched to the left: one of his tires had blown out.

They were firing at his tires. Trying to disable him. Ben remembered the security expert who’d lectured the senior executives at Hartman Capital Management about kidnapping risks in third-world countries, drilling them on a list of recommended countermeasures. They seemed laughably inadequate to the reality, then as now.
Don’t get out of the car
was one of the pointers, he remembered. It wasn’t clear he was going to have much of a choice.

Just then, he heard the unmistakable wail of a police siren. Through a jagged hole in the opaque rear wind-shield, he saw that a third vehicle was coming up fast from behind the gray sedan, this one a civilian unmarked car with a flashing blue light on its roof. That was all he could see: it was too far away to make out the model. Confusion filled Ben’s mind again, but abruptly the gunfire ceased.

He watched as the gray sedan made a sudden 180-degree turn over the shoulder of the road, zooming back
on the narrow embankment and taking off past the police car. The Renault, his pursuers inside, had gotten away!

Ben brought his car to a halt just after the stone bridge, lolling his head back in his shock and exhaustion, waiting for the
Polizei
to arrive. A minute went by, and then another. He craned his neck back to the lethal stretch of road.

But the police car was gone now, too. The crumpled Saab had been abandoned.

He was alone, the only sound the ticking of his car’s engines, and the hammering of his own heart. He pulled his Nokia from his pocket, remembered his conversation with Schmid, and made a decision.
They can lock you up for twenty-four hours without any cause
, Howie had told him. Schmid had made it clear that he was looking for an excuse to do just that. He would put off calling the
Polizei
. He couldn’t think straight anymore.

As the adrenaline ebbed, panic gave way to a sense of profound depletion. He badly needed to rest. He needed to refuel, to take stock.

He drove his ruined Opel, the engine straining, the shredded tires making for a bone-jarring ride, a few miles up a hilly road to the nearest town, although really it was a village, a
Dorf
. Its narrow streets were lined with ancient stone buildings, progressing from tiny dilapidated structures to larger, half-timbered houses. A few lights were on, but most of the windows were dark. The street was unevenly paved, and the car’s undercarriage, now low to the ground, regularly bumped and scraped against the cobblestone.

The narrow road became a main street soon enough, lined now with great gabled stone houses and rows of slate-shingled buildings. Now he came to a large cobblestoned square, marked RATHAUSPLATZ, dominated
by an ancient Gothic cathedral. At the center of the square was a stone fountain. He appeared to be in a seventeenth-century village built upon much older ruins, its buildings a peculiar hodgepodge of architectural styles.

Across the town square from the cathedral was a seventeenth-century manor house with crow-stepped gables, marked with a small wooden sign identifying it as the
Altes Gebäude
, the Old Building, though it looked newer than most of the other buildings in town. Lights blazed from its small-mullioned windows. It was a tavern, a place to get food and drink, to sit and rest and
think
. He parked his wreck alongside an old farm truck, where it would be largely concealed from view, and went in, his trembling, twitching legs barely supporting his weight.

Inside, the place was warm and cozy, lit by a flickering fire in an immense stone hearth. It smelled of wood smoke and fried onions and roasted meats, wonderful and inviting. It looked like a traditional Swiss
Stübli
, an old-style restaurant. One round wooden table was obviously the
Stammtisch
, the place reserved for the regulars who came in every day to drink beer and play cards for hours. Five or six men, mostly farmers or laborers, regarded him with hostile suspicion, then went back to their cards. Sprinkled throughout the room were others having dinner or drinking.

Ben realized only now how famished he was. He looked around for a waiter or waitress, saw none, and sat down at an empty table. When a waiter arrived, a small round man of early middle age, Ben ordered something typically Swiss, heavy and reliable:
Rösti
, roasted potatoes, with
Geschnetzeltes
, or bits of veal in cream sauce, with a
Vierterl
, a quarter-liter carafe of local red wine. When the waiter returned ten minutes later, balancing several plates on his arm, Ben
asked in English: “Where’s a good place to spend the night?”

The waiter frowned and set down the dinner plates in silence. He moved aside the glass ashtray and the red
Altes Gebäude
matchbook, poured the deep red wine into a stemmed glass. “The Langasthof,” he said, in a heavy Romansch accent. “It’s the only place for twenty kilometers around.”

While the waiter gave him directions, Ben tucked into his
Rösti
. They were brown and crisp, onion-tangy, delicious. He continued wolfing down his dinner, glancing through the partly fogged window at the small parking area outside. Another car was parked alongside his, obstructing his view. A green Audi.

Something twanged at the back of his mind.

Wasn’t a green Audi behind him for a good stretch of A3 out of Zurich? He remembered having seen one, worrying whether he was being followed, dismissing it as a figment of an overactive imagination.

Turning his gaze, he thought he saw, in his peripheral vision, someone staring at him. Yet when his eyes swept the room, there was no one giving him so much as a casual glance. Ben set down his wineglass.
What I need is some black coffee
, he thought,
not more wine. I’m starting to see things that aren’t there
.

Most of his dinner was gone, downed in record time. Now it sat heavily in his stomach, a leaden mass of greasy potatoes and cream sauce. He looked around for the waiter to order a strong coffee. Once again he got that creepy sensation of someone looking over at him, then looking away. He turned to his left, where most of the scarred wooden tables were empty, but a few people sat in dark booths, deep in shadow, next to a long, ornately carved wooden bar that was dark and unoccupied, the only object on its surface an old-fashioned white rotary-dial telephone. One man was sitting alone
in a booth, drinking coffee and smoking, a middle-aged man in a worn brown leather bomber jacket with long graying hair pulled back into a ponytail.
I’ve seen him before
, Ben thought.
I know I’ve seen him before
. But where? Now the man casually brought an elbow to the table, leaned forward, and rested his head on the outstretched palm, the hand cradling the side of his face.

The gesture was too studied. The man was trying to hide his face, trying too hard to be casual about it.

Ben remembered a tall man in a business suit, sallow complexion, long gray hair worn in a ponytail. But from where? He had caught a quick glance of such a man, thinking in passing how ridiculous, how dated, a ponytail looked on a businessman. How…eighties.

The Bahnhofstrasse.

Ponytail man had been among the crowd milling around the pedestrian shopping district just before he spotted Jimmy Cavanaugh. Now he was certain of it. The man had been in the vicinity of the Hotel St. Gotthard; later, he’d followed Ben in a green Audi; now he was here, looking decidedly out of place.

Dear Christ, he’s tailing me, too
, Ben thought.
Since this afternoon, he’s been watching me
. He felt his stomach tighten.

Who was he, and why was he here? If, like Jimmy Cavanaugh, he wanted to kill Ben—for whatever reason Cavanaugh had tried—why hadn’t he done so already? There had been plenty of opportunities. Cavanaugh had pulled out a gun in broad daylight right on the Bahnhofstrasse. Why would Ponytail hesitate to fire at him in a mostly empty tavern?

He signaled the waiter, who bustled over with a questioning look. “Could I have a coffee?” Ben asked.

“Certainly, sir.”

“And where’s your rest room, your WC?”

The waiter pointed toward a dimly lit corner of the
room, where a small corridor was barely visible. Ben pointed in that direction too, confirming the rest room’s location in as broad a gesture as possible.

So Ponytail could see where he was going.

Ben slipped some money under his plate, pocketed one of the restaurant’s matchbooks, got up slowly, and made his way toward the rest room. It was located just off the small corridor, on the other side of the dining room from the kitchen. Restaurant kitchens usually had service entrances from the outdoors, Ben knew, so they made good escape routes. And he didn’t want Ponytail thinking he was trying to leave the restaurant through the kitchen. This rest room was small and windowless; he couldn’t leave this way. Ponytail, presumably some sort of professional, would likely have already checked out the means of egress.

He locked the rest room door. There was an ancient toilet and equally ancient marble sink basin, and it smelled pleasantly of cleaning liquid. He pulled out his digital phone and dialed the telephone number of the
Altes Gebäude
. Ben could hear the faint sound of a telephone ringing somewhere in the restaurant. Probably the old rotary-dial phone he’d seen on the bar near Pony-tail’s booth, or one in the kitchen, if there was one there. Or both.

A man’s voice answered, “
Altes Gebäude, guten Abend
.” Ben was fairly sure it was the waiter.

Making his voice deep and gravelly, Ben said, “I need to speak to one of your customers, please. Someone who’s having dinner there tonight. It’s urgent.”

“
Ja?
Who is that?”

“Someone you probably don’t know. Not a regular. It’s a gentleman with long gray hair in a ponytail. He’s probably wearing a leather jacket, he always does.”