The Sigma Protocol (30 page)

Without looking at him she took out her Justice Department ID with her free hand and flashed it at him.

“We lost another one,” Bartlett said.

Another one? So soon? The murders were accelerating.

The flight attendant drew back. “My apologies, ma’am.”

“You’re kidding me,” Anna groaned.

“In Holland. A town called Tilburg, a couple of hours south of Amsterdam. You might want to change planes in Zurich and go there.”

“No,” she said. “I’m going to Zurich. It’s a simple matter for me to have the FBI legat in Amsterdam request an immediate autopsy. This time at least we can tell them exactly what poisons to screen for.”

“Is that right?”

“I’m on my way to Zurich, Director. I’m going to catch myself a live one. Dead men don’t talk. Now, what was the name of the Tilburg victim?”

Bartlett paused. “A certain Hendrik Korsgaard.”

“Wait a minute!” Anna said sharply. “That name wasn’t on my list.”

There was silence on the other end.

“Talk to me, Bartlett, dammit!”

“There are other lists, Agent Navarro,” Bartlett said slowly. “I was hoping they wouldn’t prove… relevant.”

“Unless I’m greatly mistaken, this is a violation of our understanding, Director Bartlett,” Anna said quietly, her eyes darting around to verify that she wasn’t being overheard.

“Not at all, Ms. Navarro. My office works like any other, by a division of labor. Information is edited accordingly. Your responsibility was to find the killers. We had reason to believe that the names on the list I gave you, from the clearance files, were being targeted. We had no reason to believe that…the others were in jeopardy as well.”

“And did you know where the Tilburg victim resided?”

“We didn’t even know he was still living. Certainly, all efforts to locate him were in vain.”

“Then we can rule out the possibility that the killers have simply gained access to your files.”

“It’s gone far beyond that,” Bartlett said crisply. “Whoever’s killing these old men, they’ve got better sources than we do.”

It was not much past four in the morning by the time Ben located the
Universitätsbibliothek
on Zähringerplatz. The library wouldn’t open for another five hours.

In New York, he calculated, it was ten at night. His father would probably still be awake—he usually went to bed late and arose early, always had—and even if he were asleep, Ben wasn’t much concerned about waking him. Not anymore.

Wandering down the Universitätstrasse to stretch his legs, he made sure his cell phone was switched to the GSM standard used in Europe and placed a call to Bedford.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Walsh, answered.

Mrs. Walsh, an Irish version of Mrs. Danvers from
Rebecca
, Ben had always thought, had worked for the family for over twenty years, and Ben had never got past her haughty reserve.

“Benjamin,” she said. Her tone was strange.

“Good evening, Mrs. Walsh,” Ben said wearily. “I need to talk to my father.” He readied himself to do battle with his father’s gatekeeper.

“Benjamin, your father’s gone.”

He went cold. “Gone where?”

“Well, that’s just it, I don’t know.”

“Who does?”

“No one. A car came for Mr. Hartman this morning, and he wouldn’t say where he was going. Not a word. He said it would be ‘a while.’”

“A car? Was it Gianni?” Gianni was his father’s regular driver, a happy-go-lucky sort whom the old man regarded with a certain distanced affection.

“Not Gianni. Not a company car. He’s just gone. No explanation.”

“I don’t understand. He’s never done that before, has he?”

“Never. I know he packed his passport, because it’s gone.”

“His passport? Well, that tells us something, doesn’t it?”

“But I called his office, talked to his secretary, and she knew nothing about any international trip. I was hoping he might have said something to you.”

“Not a word. Did he get any phone calls…?”

“No, I don’t… Let me look at the message book.” She came back to the phone a minute later. “Just a Mr. Godwin.”

“Godwin?”

“Well, actually, it says Professor Godwin.”

The name took him by surprise. That had to be Ben’s college mentor, the Princeton historian John Barnes Godwin. Then again, he realized, it wasn’t particularly bizarre for Godwin to be calling Max: a few years ago, impressed by what Ben had told him about the famous historian, Max had given money to Princeton to set up a Center for the Study of Human Values, of which Godwin became the director. Yet his father hadn’t mentioned Godwin. Why were the two of them talking on the morning before Max disappeared?

“Let me have the number,” he said.

He thanked her and clicked off.

Strange, he thought. For a brief moment he imagined that his father was fleeing somewhere, because he knew his past had been uncovered or was about to be uncovered. But that made no sense—fleeing what? Fleeing where?

Ben was exhausted and emotionally depleted, and he knew he was not thinking clearly. He badly needed sleep. He was making connections now that weren’t quite logical.

He thought: Peter knew things, things about their
father’s past, about a company Max had helped set up, and then Peter was killed.

And then…

And then I found a photograph of the founders of this corporation, my father among them. And I followed to Liesl and Peter’s cabin, and I found a page from the incorporation document setting this company up. And then they’d tried to kill both me and Liesl and cover up the evidence by blowing up the cabin
.

So is it possible that they… again, the faceless, anonymous They… had gotten to my father, informed him that the secret was out, the secret of his past, or maybe the secret of this strange corporation? Or both?

Yes, of course it was possible. Since They seem to be trying to eliminate anyone who knows about this company…

Why else had Max disappeared so suddenly, so mysteriously?

Might he have been compelled to go somewhere, to meet with certain people…

There was only one thing Ben felt sure of: that his father’s sudden disappearance was in some way connected with the murders of Peter and Liesl, and with the uncovering of this document.

He returned to the Range Rover, noticed in the light of the rising sun the deep scratches that defaced its sides, and drove back to Zähringerplatz.

Then he settled back in the Rover and placed a call to Princeton, New Jersey.

“Professor Godwin?”

The old professor sounded as if he’d been asleep.

“It’s Ben Hartman.”

John Barnes Godwin, historian of Europe in the twentieth century and once Princeton’s most popular
lecturer, had been retired for years. He was eighty-two but still came into his office every day to work.

An image of Godwin came into Ben’s mind—tall and gaunt, white-haired, the deeply wrinkled face.

Godwin had been not just Ben’s faculty adviser but a sort of father figure as well. Ben remembered once sitting in Godwin’s book-choked office in Dickinson Hall. The amber light, the vanilla-mildew smell of old books.

They’d been talking about how FDR managed to maneuver the isolationist United States into the Second World War. Ben was writing his senior thesis about FDR and had told Godwin that he was offended by Roosevelt’s trickery.

“Ah, Mr. Hartman,” Godwin replied. That was what he called Ben in those days. “How is your Latin?
Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona
.”

Ben looked at the professor blankly.

“‘For a good cause,’” Godwin translated with a slow, sly smile, “‘wrongdoing is virtuous.’ Publilius Syrus, who lived in Rome a century before Christ, and said a lot of smart things.”

“I don’t think I agree,” Ben said, the morally indignant undergraduate. “To me that sounds like a rationalization for screwing people over. I hope I never catch myself saying that.”

Godwin regarded him with what seemed to be puzzlement. “I suppose that’s why you refuse to join your father’s business,” he said pointedly. “You’d rather be pure.”

“I’d rather teach.”

“But why are you so sure you want to teach?” Godwin had asked, sipping tawny port.

“Because I love it.”

“You’re certain?”

“No,” Ben admitted. “How can a twenty-year-old be certain of anything?”

“Oh, I find that twenty-year-olds are certain of most things.”

“But why should I go into something I have no interest in, working in a company my father built, to make even more money that I don’t need? I mean, what good does our money do for society? Why should I have great wealth while others have no food on the table?”

Godwin closed his eyes. “It’s a luxury to thumb your nose at money. I’ve had some extremely rich students, even a Rockefeller, in my class. And they all struggle with this same dilemma—not to let the money rule your life or define you, but, instead, to do something meaningful with your life. Now, your father is one of our nation’s great philanthropists—”

“Yeah, wasn’t it Reinhold Niebuhr who said that philanthropy is a form of paternalism? The privileged class tries to preserve its status by doling out funds to the needy?”

Godwin glanced up, impressed. Ben tried not to smile. He’d just read this in his theology class, and the line had stuck in his mind.

“A question, Ben. Is becoming a grade school teacher actually your way of rebelling against your father?”

“Maybe so,” Ben said, unwilling to lie. He wanted to add that it was Godwin who had inspired him to teach, but that might sound too… something.

He was surprised when Godwin replied, “Bully for you. That takes guts. And you’ll be a great teacher, I have no doubt of it.”

Now, Ben said, “I’m sorry to be calling you so late—”

“Not at all, Ben. Where are you? The connection—”

“Switzerland. Listen, my father’s disappeared—”

“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”

“He left home this morning, went somewhere, we
don’t know where, and I was wondering because you called him this morning, just before that…”

“I was returning his call, really. He wanted to talk about another gift to the center he was planning to make.”

“That’s it?”

“I’m afraid so. Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I can recall. But if he happens to call me again, is there a way I can get in touch with you?”

Ben gave Godwin his digital number. “Another question. Do you know anyone on the faculty of the University of Zurich? Someone who does what you do—modern European history.”

Godwin paused for a moment. “At the University of Zurich? You can’t do any better than Carl Mercandetti. A first-class researcher. Economic history’s his specialty, but he’s very wide-ranging in the best European tradition. The fellow also has an astounding collection of grappa, though I suppose that’s neither here nor there. Regardless, Mercandetti’s your man.”

“I appreciate it,” Ben said, and he hung up.

Then he put the car seat back and tried to doze for a few hours.

He slept fitfully, his sleep disturbed by unceasing nightmares in which he was forced to see the cabin explode time and again.

When he awoke at a few minutes after nine, he saw in the rearview mirror how unshaven and dirty he looked, saw the deep circles under his eyes, but he didn’t have what it took to find a place to shave and wash.

There wasn’t any time in any case.

It was time to begin excavating a past that was no longer the past.

Paris

Only a small brass plaque marked the office of Groupe TransEuroTech SA, on the third floor of a limestone building on the avenue Marceau in the eighth arrondissement. The plaque, mounted on the stone to the left of the front door, was but one of seven brass plaques bearing the names of law firms and other small companies, and as such it attracted little attention.

The office of TransEuroTech never received un-scheduled visitors, but anyone who happened to pass by the third floor would see nothing out of the ordinary: a young male receptionist sitting behind a glass teller’s window made of a bullet-resistant polycarbonate material that looked like plain glass. Behind him, a small, bare room furnished with a few molded-plastic chairs, and a single door to the interior offices.

No one would, of course, realize that the receptionist was actually an armed and experienced ex-commando, or see the concealed surveillance cameras, the passive infrared motion detectors, the balanced magnetic switches embedded in every door.

The conference room deep inside the offices was actually a room within a room: a module separated from the surrounding concrete walls by foot-thick rubber blocks that kept all vibrations (specifically human speech) from transferring out. Immediately adjacent
to the conference module was a permanent installation of antennae constantly searching for HF, UHF, VHF, and microwave transmissions—any attempt, that is, to listen in on the discussions held within the room. Attached to the antennae was a spectrum analyzer programmed to check across the spectrum for any anomalies.

At one end of a coffin-shaped mahogany conference table sat two men. Their conversation was protected against interception by both white-noise generators and a “babble tape,” which sounded like the yammer of a crowded bar at happy hour. Anyone somehow able to bypass the elaborate security and listen in would be unable to separate the words of the two men at the table from the background noise.

The older of the two was speaking on a sterile telephone, a flat black box of Swiss manufacture. He was a pasty-faced, worried-looking man in his mid-fifties with gold-framed glasses, a soft jowly face, oily skin, and receding hair dyed an unnatural russet. His name was Paul Marquand, and he was a vice president of security for the Corporation. Marquand had come to the Corporation by a route common to corporate-security directors of international businesses: he had spent time in the French infantry, was forced out for wild behavior and joined the French Foreign Legion, later moving to the U.S., where he’d worked as a strikebreaker for a mining company before he was hired to do corporate security for a multinational firm.