The Sigma Protocol (27 page)

But a few minutes later he could no longer see her headlights.

Where had she gone? Had she pulled off the road?
He accelerated, to see whether she had herself sped up, but after a kilometer he saw no trace of her.

She had to have turned off into the woods, though he didn’t seem to have passed by any roads or paths that led into the forest. He stopped, made a U-turn—no cars were coming in either direction—and reversed course, slowing down to look for any turnoffs.

It wasn’t easy; it had gotten quite dark.

Soon he spotted what could barely be called a road. It was a dirt trail that looked like a footpath, but upon closer examination he saw tire ruts.

He turned onto it, and saw at once that he would have to drive slowly. It was just wide enough for the Renault, but there was not quite enough clearance for the Range Rover. Twigs and branches scraped the sides of the car. He slowed down even more: the noise might attract her attention.

The St. Gallen map had told him that the forest he had entered was not large. It surrounded a small lake—a pond, actually—and there appeared to be no other road that led into or out of the woods.

Good.

Assuming the map was accurate.

The path came to a fork, and he stopped, got out of the car, and saw that one branch of the road dead-ended a hundred feet ahead. The other branch, deeply rutted, continued. He turned down that path and navigated with some difficulty, wondering how Liesl’s Renault could make it if the Range Rover was having such trouble.

It was not long before this path, too, came to an end.

And then he saw the Renault.

He parked his vehicle beside it, and got out. By now it was fully dark, and he could see nothing. Once the car’s engine was shut off there was mostly silence. Rustlings now and again that sounded like small animals. The chirp and twitter of birds.

His eyes became accustomed to the dark, and he could make out another path, even narrower, canopied with branches. Ducking down under one, he entered, losing his footing a few times, his hands held out before his face to shield his eyes from the twigs.

He saw a glow, and came upon a clearing. In it was a small cabin built of split logs and rough white plaster. There were several glass windows; it clearly wasn’t as rustic as it appeared. A light shone from inside. This was the back of the cabin; the entrance had to be on the other side. Treading softly, he approached the cabin and made his way around to the front, where he expected the entrance to be.

Suddenly there was a metallic click. He looked up with a jolt.

Liesl was standing before him, pointing a gun.

“
Stop right there!
” she shouted.

“Wait!” Ben called back. God, she was fearless, coming right out to confront the interloper. A split-second was all it would take for her to kill him.

“It’s
you!
” she spat out with sudden realization. “What the hell are you doing here?” She lowered the gun.

“I need your help, Liesl,” he said.

In the oblique moonlight her shadowed face seemed contorted with rage. “You must have followed me from the hospital! How dare you!”

“You’ve got to help me find something, Liesl, please.” He had to make her
listen
.

She whipped her head from side to side, frantic. “You have—compromised my security! Goddamn you to hell!”

“Liesl, I wasn’t followed.”

“How can you possibly know? Did you rent this car?”

“In Zurich.”

“Of course.
Idiot!
If they were watching you in Zurich, they’ll know you rented the car!”

“But no one followed me here.”

“What do you know?” she snapped. “You’re an amateur!”

“So are you.”

“Yes, but I am an amateur who has lived with the threat of death for four years. Now please, get out.
Go!
”

“No, Liesl,” he said with quiet finality. “We need to talk.”

The cabin was simple yet cozy, low-ceilinged, book-lined. Peter had built the bookshelves himself, Liesl said proudly. The floor was wideboard pine. There was a stone fireplace, a neat stack of split logs piled next to it, a wood stove, a small kitchen. The whole place smelled of smoke.

It was cold; she lit the wood stove for some heat. Ben took off his coat.

“You’re hurt,” Liesl said. “You’ve been hit.”

Ben looked at himself, saw that the left shoulder of his shirt was stiff with dried blood. Oddly, it hadn’t been painful—stress and exhaustion had somehow rendered him insensate to the injury, and he’d put it out of his mind during the long drive through the mountains.

“I’m sure it looks a lot worse than it is,” Ben said.

“That depends,” she said, “on what it looks like. Remove the shirt.” She spoke like the doctor she was.

Ben undid the buttons of his white pinpoint Oxford cloth shirt. The fabric adhered to the top of his left shoulder, and when he tugged, there was a warning twinge of pain.

Liesl took a clean sponge, soaked it with warm water, and wet the area. Then she carefully peeled the shirt from his wounded shoulder. “You’ve been incredibly lucky: a bullet creased you, no more. Tell me what happened.”

As Liesl tended to his wound, Ben recounted the events that happened only hours before.

“There’s debris here. It must be cleansed carefully, or there will be the risk of infection.” She sat him next to the sink, poured some boiling water from a kettle, and left it to cool in a porcelain bowl. She went away for a few minutes and reappeared with a quantity of gauze and a yellow plastic bottle of antiseptic.

Ben found himself wincing as she carefully washed the area, then wincing again as she daubed it with cotton saturated with the brown-colored antiseptic. “Cleaning it hurts worse than getting it did,” Ben said.

Liesl applied four strips of medical adhesive tape to secure the sterile wound dressing in place. “You won’t be so lucky next time,” she said dryly.

“What I most need right now isn’t luck,” Ben said. “It’s knowledge. I need to understand what the hell is going on. I need to get a fix on Sigma. They sure seem to have a fix on me.”

“Luck, knowledge—trust me, you’ll need both.” Now she handed him a shirt. A heavy shirt of knitted cotton. One of Peter’s.

Suddenly the reality of the past few days, the reality he’d tried to hold at bay, reared up and he felt a surge of vertigo, panic, sorrow, despair.

“I’ll help you put it on,” she said, alert to the anguish that played across his face.

He had to regain his composure, he knew, if only for her sake. He could merely guess at her own wrenching pain. When the shirt was on him, Liesl stared at him for a few moments. “You’re so alike. Peter never told me. I think he never realized how alike you are.”

“Twins never recognize themselves in each other.”

“It was more than that. And I don’t mean physically. Some people would have said that Peter was aimless. I knew better. He was like a sail, something that’s slack
only until it captures the wind. And then it possesses the force of the wind.” She shook her head, as if frustrated by her fumbling attempts to communicate. “I mean that Peter had a larger sense of purpose.”

“I knew what you meant. It’s what I admired most about him, the life he came to create for himself.”

“It was a passion,” Liesl said, her eyes sad, gleaming, “a passion for justice, and it infused every aspect of his being.”

“‘A passion for justice.’ Those aren’t words that mean much in the world of asset management,” Ben said bitterly.

“A world you found stifling,” Liesl said. “It was suffocating you by degrees, wasn’t it, just as Peter said it would?”

“There are quicker ways to die,” Ben said. “As I’ve had reason to learn of late.”

“Tell me about the school where you taught. In New York, Peter said. I’ve been to New York a couple of times, as an adolescent, and once, later, to a medical conference.”

“It was in New York, yes. But not a New York any tourist ever sees. I taught in a place called East New York. About five square miles of some of the worst-off people in the whole city. You’ve got some auto shops, and bodegas, places that’ll sell you cigarettes and booze, and places that’ll cash your checks. The Seventy-fifth Precinct—what the cops call the Seven-Five, those unfortunate enough to be assigned to it. When I was teaching, there were more than a hundred homicides in the Seven-Five. Some nights, it sounded like Beirut. You’d go to sleep to the sound of Saturday Night Specials. A desperate place. Pretty much written off by the rest of society.”

“And that’s where you taught.”

“I thought it was obscene that in America, the
wealthiest nation in the world, this sort of desolation was still tolerable. Here was a place that made Soweto look like Scarsdale. Sure, there were the usual ineffectual poverty programs, but there was also the unspoken conviction of futility. ‘The poor will always be with us’—nobody used those words anymore, but that’s what they meant. They used other code words, talked about ‘structural’ this and ‘behavioral’ that, and, hey, the middle class was doing just fine, wasn’t it? So I stuck it out. I wasn’t going to save the world, I wasn’t naïve. But I told myself that if I could save one kid, maybe two, maybe three, my efforts wouldn’t have been wasted.”

“And did you?”

“Possibly,” Ben said, suddenly tired. “Possibly. I wasn’t around any longer to find out, was I?” He spat out the words with distaste: “I was ordering truffled timbales at Aureole, quaffing Cristal with clients.”

“Sounds like a terrible shock to the system, that kind of change,” Liesl said gently. She attended to his words carefully, perhaps in need of distraction from her own pain.

“It was deadening, I think. The hell of it was, I was actually good at it. I had a knack for the game, the rituals of client courtship. If you wanted someone who could order at the city’s most expensive restaurants without glancing at the menu, I was your man. And then, as often as I could, I’d go risk my neck—recreationally, of course. I was an extreme-sport junkie. I’d go climb the Vermillion Cliffs, in Arizona. Sail solo to Bermuda. Go para-skiing in Cameron Pass. Courtney—an old girlfriend of mine—used to insist I had a death wish, but that wasn’t it at all. I did those things to feel alive.” He shook his head. “It sounds silly now, doesn’t it? The idle diversions of a pampered rich kid, someone who hadn’t figured out a reason for getting dressed in the morning.”

“Maybe it was because you’d been taken from your natural element,” Liesl said.

“And what was that? I’m not sure that saving souls in East New York was going to be a lifelong calling, either. Anyway, I never got the chance to find out.”

“I think you were a sail, like Peter. You just needed to find your wind.” She smiled sadly.

“The wind found me, it would seem. And it’s a god-damn monsoon. Some conspiracy that was launched half a century ago and is still claiming lives. Specializing in the people I love. Maybe you’ve never been in a small boat during a storm, Liesl, but I have. And the first thing you do is drop the sail.”

“Is that really an option now?” She poured him a small quantity of brandy in a water glass.

“I don’t even know what the options are. You and Peter have spent a lot more time thinking about it than I have. What conclusions did you come to?”

“Just the ones I told you. A great deal of conjecture for the most part. Peter did a lot of research into the period. He was disheartened by what he found out. The Second World War was a conflict that had clear rights and wrongs, and yet many of those involved were utterly indifferent to what was at stake. There were numerous corporations whose only concern was to maintain their operating margin. Some, alas, even viewed the war as an opportunity to be exploited—an opportunity to increase their profits. The victors never adequately came to grips with this legacy of corporate double-dealing. It was never convenient to do so.” Her sardonic half-smile reminded Ben of his brother’s banked sense of outrage, his smoldering anger.

“Why not?”

“Too many American and British industries might have had to be seized for trading with the enemy, for collaboration. Better to sweep the problem under the
carpet. The Dulles brothers, you know, made sure of it. Tracking down the real collaborators—it wouldn’t have looked good. It would have blurred the lines between good and evil, interfered with the myth of Allied innocence. Forgive me if I don’t explain myself very well—these are stories I have heard many times. There was a young attorney in the Justice Department who dared make a speech about collaborations between American businessmen and the Nazis. He was immediately fired. After the war, German officials were called to task, some of them. And yet the citadel of Axis industrialists was never probed, never disturbed. Why prosecute German industrialists who had done business with Hitler—who had, really, made Hitler possible—given that they were just as happy now to do business with America? When overzealous officials at Nuremberg had a few of them convicted, your John J. McCloy, the American High Commissioner, had their sentences commuted. The ‘excesses’ of fascism were regrettable, but industrialists had to look after each other, right?”

Once again, he could almost detect Peter’s passionate voice in her recountings. Dully, he said, “I still have a hard time getting my mind around it—financial partnerships when the two sides were at war?”

“Things aren’t always as they seem. Hitler’s senior-most intelligence officer, Reinhard Gehlen, had already begun planning his own surrender in 1944. The high command knew which way the wind was blowing, they knew Hitler was mad, irrational. So they bartered. They microfilmed their files on the U.S.S.R., buried them in watertight drums in the mountain meadows of the Alps, not a hundred miles from here, and presented themselves to the American Counterintelligence Corps to make a deal. After the war, you Americans put Gehlen in charge of the ‘South German Industrial Development Organization.’”

Ben shook his head blearily. “It sounds like you both got pretty immersed in this stuff. And it sounds like I’m way out of my depths.” He knocked back the rest of the brandy.