The Sigma Protocol (13 page)

“Ah, yes, I think I know what you mean. A man of about fifty years?”

“Yes, that’s the one. Can you please ask him to come to the phone? As I said, it’s urgent. An emergency.”

“Yes, at once, sir,” the waiter said, responding to the tension Ben had put in his voice. He set the phone down.

Leaving the line open, Ben slipped his phone into the breast pocket of his sport coat, left the rest room, and returned to the dining room. Ponytail was no longer sitting at his booth. The telephone was at the bar, which was situated in such a way that it couldn’t be seen from the entrance to the restaurant—Ben hadn’t seen it until he was seated at his table—and no one standing or sitting at it could see either the entrance or the area of the restaurant roughly between the rest room and the entrance. Ben moved quickly to the entrance and out the door. He had bought himself maybe fifteen seconds during which he could leave, unseen by Ponytail, who was at the moment talking into the telephone’s handset, hearing nothing but silence, wondering what had happened to the caller who had identified him so carefully.

Ben grabbed his bags from the ruined sedan and raced to the green Audi; a key was in the ignition, as if the driver had made preparations for a rapid getaway. Theft was probably unknown in this sleepy village, but there had to be a first time. Besides, Ben had a strong suspicion that Ponytail wasn’t in a position to notify the police about his vehicle’s disappearance. This way, he gained a working vehicle while depriving his pursuer of one. Ben leaped in and started it up. There was no sense in trying to be quiet now; Ponytail would hear the ignition of the engine. He threw the car into reverse, then, with a squeal of rubber, barreled over the cobblestoned expanse and, at top speed, out of the
Rathausplatz
.

Fifteen minutes later, he pulled up near a half-timbered stone building in a remote, wooded area off the small country road. A small sign in front read LANGASTHOF.

He tucked the car away discreetly behind a dense stand of pine trees and walked back to the front door of the guest house, where a small sign said EMPFANG, reception.

He rang the bell, and waited a few minutes before a light came on. It was midnight, and obviously he had awakened the proprietor.

An old man with a deeply lined face opened the door and, with a put-upon air, led Ben down a long, dark hall, switching on little wall sconce lights as he went, until he came to an oak-plank doorway marked 7. With an old skeleton key, he unlocked the door and switched on a small bulb, illuminating a snug room dominated by a double bed on which a white duvet was neatly folded. The diamond-patterned wallpaper was peeling.

“This is all we have,” the proprietor said gruffly.

“It’ll do.”

“I’ll put the heat on. It will take a good ten minutes.”

A few minutes later, after he’d unpacked only what he needed for the night, Ben went into the bathroom to run the shower. The setup looked so alien, so complicated—four or five knobs and dials, a telephone-style hand-shower hanging on a hook—that Ben decided it wasn’t worth it. He splashed cold water on his face, unwilling to wait for hot water to find its way through the pipes, brushed his teeth, and undressed.

The duvet was luxurious and lofty with goose down. He fell asleep almost immediately.

Some time later—hours, it seemed, though he couldn’t be sure, since his travel alarm clock was still in his suitcase—he heard a noise.

He sat upright, his heart racing.

He heard it again. It was a soft but audible squeak, floorboards beneath the carpet. It came from near the doorway.

He reached over to the end table and grabbed the brass lamp at its base. With the other hand, he slowly yanked the cord out of its wall socket, freeing the lamp to be swung.

He swallowed hard. His heart hammered. He quietly swung his feet free of the duvet and over to the floor.

He lifted the lamp slowly, careful not to disturb anything else on the end table. When he had a good grip on it, he quietly, quietly, hoisted it up above his head.

And sprang suddenly off the bed.

A powerful arm reached out, grabbed at the lamp, wrenched it from his hands. Ben lunged toward the dark shape, turned his shoulder, and jammed it into the intruder’s chest.

But in the same instant a foot swung out, catching Ben at the ankles, knocking him down. With all his strength, Ben tried to rear up and pummel his attacker with his elbows, but a knee rammed into his chest and his solar plexus, and the wind was knocked out of him. Before he had the chance to attempt another move, the intruder’s hands shot forward, slamming Ben’s shoulders down, pinning him to the floor. As soon as his breath came back, Ben let out a great bellow, but then a large hand clapped his mouth shut and Ben found himself looking into the haunted face of his brother.

“You’re good,” Peter said, “but I’m still better.”

Asunción, Paraguay

The rich Corsican was dying.

He had been dying for three or four years, however, and probably had a good two years or more left in him.

He lived in a grand Spanish Mission–style villa in a wealthy suburb of Asunción, at the end of a long drive lined with palm trees, surrounded by acres of beautifully landscaped property.

Señor Prosperi’s bedroom was on the second floor, and though it was flooded with light, it was so choked with medical equipment that it looked like an emergency room. His much younger wife, Consuela, had slept in her own bedroom for years.

When he opened his eyes this morning, he did not recognize the nurse.

“You’re not the regular girl,” he said, his voice a phlegm-laden croak.

“Your regular nurse is ill this morning,” said the pleasant-looking blond young woman. She was standing at the side of his bed, doing something to his IV drip.

“Who sent you?” Marcel Prosperi demanded.

“The nursing agency,” she replied. “Please calm down. It will do you no good to be upset.” She turned the valve on the drip fully open.

“You people are always pumping me full of things,” Señor Prosperi grumbled, but this was all he was able
to get out before his eyes closed and he lost consciousness.

A few minutes later the substitute nurse checked his pulse at the wrist and found there was none. Casually she turned the IV valve back to its usual setting.

Then, her face suddenly contorted by grief, she ran to break the terrible news to the old man’s widow.

Ben sat up on the carpeted floor, felt the blood drain from his head, then fell forward onto his knees.

He was overcome by vertigo, felt as if his head were spinning while his body was frozen, as if his head were disconnected from his body.

He was overcome by memories, of the funeral, of the burial ceremony at the small cemetery in Bedford. Of the rabbi chanting the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead:
Yisgadal v’yiskadash shmay rabbo
… Of the small wooden casket that held the remains, his father’s composure suddenly cracking as the casket was lowered into the hole, crumpling to the ground, fists clenched, his hoarse wail.

Ben squeezed his eyes shut. The memories kept flooding his overloaded mind. The call in the middle of the night. Driving out to Westchester County to break the news to his parents. He couldn’t do it over the phone.
Mom, Dad, I have some bad news about Peter
. A beat of silence; do I really have to go through this, what else is there to say? His father had been asleep in the immense bed, of course: it was four o’clock in the morning, an hour or so before the old man normally awoke.

His mother in her mechanized hospital bed in the adjoining room, the night nurse dozing on the couch.

Mom first. It seemed the right thing. Her love for her boys was uncomplicated, unconditional.

She whispered simply, “
What is it?
” and stared at
Ben uncomprehending. She seemed to have been yanked from deep in a dream: disoriented, still half in the dream world.
I just got a call from Switzerland, Mom
, and Ben, kneeling, put a gentle hand on her soft cheek as if to cushion the blow.

Her long hoarse scream awakened Max, who lurched in, one hand outstretched. Ben wanted to hug him, but Dad had never encouraged such intimacy. His father’s breath was fetid. His few strands of gray hair were matted, in wild disarray.
There’s been an accident. Peter
… At times like these we speak in clichés and mind it not a bit. Clichés are comforting; they’re well-worn grooves through which we can move easily, unthinkingly.

Max had at first reacted not at all as Ben had expected: the old man’s expression was stern, his eyes flashed with anger, not grief; his mouth came open in an O. Then he shook his head slowly, closing his eyes, and tears coursed down his pale lined cheeks as he shook his head and then collapsed to the floor. Now he seemed vulnerable, small, defenseless. Not the powerful, formidable man in the perfectly tailored suits, always composed, always in control.

Max didn’t go to comfort his wife. The two wept separately, islands of grief.

Now, like his father at the funeral, Ben squeezed his eyes shut, felt his extremities give out, unequal to the task of supporting him. He toppled forward, hands outstretched, touching his brother as he crumpled into his arms, feeling him to see if this phantasm were real.

Peter said, “Hey, bro’.”

“Oh, my God,” Ben whispered. “Oh, my God.”

It was like seeing a ghost.

Ben took in a deep gulp of air, embraced his brother, and hugged him hard. “You bastard… You
bastard!
…”

“Is that the best you can do?” Peter asked.

Ben released the hold. “
What the hell—
”

But Peter’s face was stern. “You have to get out of here. Get out of the country as fast as you can. Immediately.”

Ben realized that his eyes were flooded with tears, which blurred his vision. “You bastard,” he said.

“You have to get out of Switzerland. They tried to get me. Now they’re after you, too.”

“What the hell…?” Ben repeated dully. “How could you…? What kind of twisted, sick joke? Mom died… she didn’t want to…You
killed her
.” Anger surged into his body, his veins and arteries, flushing his face. The two of them sat on the carpeted floor, staring at each other: an unconscious reenactment of their infancy, their toddler days, when they’d sit facing each other for hours, babbling in their invented language, the secret code no one else could understand. “What the hell was the
idea
?”

“You don’t sound happy to see me, Benno,” Peter said.

Peter was the only one who called him Benno. Ben rose to his feet, and Peter did the same.

It was always strange, looking into his twin brother’s face: all he ever saw were the differences. How one of Peter’s eyes was slightly larger than the other. The eyebrows that arched differently. The mouth wider than his, downwardly curved. The overall expression more serious, more dour. To Ben, Peter looked completely different. To anyone else the differences were microscopic.

He was almost bowled over by the sudden realization of how much he’d missed Peter, what a gaping wound his brother’s absence had been. He couldn’t help thinking of Peter’s absence as a form of bodily violence, a maiming.

For years, for all of their childhood, they had been
adversaries, competitors, antagonists. Their father had brought them up that way. Max, fearing that wealth would make his boys soft, had sent them to just about every “character-building” wilderness school and camp there was—the survival course where you had to subsist for three days on water and grass; camps for rock-climbing and canoeing and kayaking. Whether Max intended to or not he pushed his two sons to compete against each other.

Only when the two were separated during high school did the competitiveness wane. The distance from each other, and from their parents, finally allowed the boys to break free of the struggle.

Peter said, “Let’s get out of here. If you checked into this place under your own name, we’re screwed.”

Peter’s pickup truck, a rusty Toyota, was caked with mud. The cabin was littered with trash, the seats stained and smelling of dog. It was hidden in a copse a hundred feet or so from the inn.

Ben told him about the horrific pursuit on the roadways near Chur. “But that’s not all,” he went on. “I think I was followed most of the way here by another guy. All the way from Zurich.”

“A guy driving an Audi?” Peter asked, gunning the old Toyota’s arthritic engine as he pulled onto the dark country road.

“Right.”

“Fiftyish, long hair sort of tied back, kind of an old hippie?”

“That’s the one.”

“That’s Dieter, my spotter. My antenna.” He turned to Ben, smiled. “And my brother-in-law, sort of.”

“Huh?”

“Liesl’s older brother and protector. Only recently has he decided I’m good enough for his sister.”

“Some surveillance expert. I picked up on him. Stole his car, too. And I’m an amateur.”

Peter shrugged. He looked over his shoulder as he drove. “Don’t underestimate Dieter. He did thirteen years in Swiss army counterintelligence in Geneva. And he wasn’t trying to stay out of
your
sight. He was doing
counter
surveillance. It was just a precaution, once we’d learned that you’d arrived in the country. His job was to see if anyone was following you. To watch you, follow you, make sure you weren’t killed or abducted. It wasn’t a police car that saved your ass on Highway Number 3. Dieter put on the cop siren to fake them out. It was the only way. We’re dealing with highly skilled professionals.”

Ben sighed. “‘Highly skilled professionals.’ ‘
They’re
after you.’ ‘
They
.’ Who’s
they?
Jesus!”

“Let’s just say the Corporation.” Peter was looking in the rearview mirror. “Who the hell
knows
who they really are.”

Ben shook his head. “And I thought
I
was imagining things. You’re out of your goddamned mind.” He felt his face flush with anger. “You
bastard
, that accident…I always thought there was something fishy about it.”