The Sigma Protocol (34 page)

One of the guests was a dignified, white-haired man of almost ninety. Although he was not one of the quatrocentões—he was in fact a native of Lisbon who had immigrated to São Paulo in the fifties—he was an enormously wealthy banker and landowner, and he had been for decades a business partner and friend of the bride’s father.

The old man’s name was Jorge Ramago, and he sat watching the couples dance, his noisettes de veau Périgourdine untouched. One of the waitresses, a dark-haired young woman, tentatively approached the old man and said in Portuguese, “Señor Ramago, there is a telephone call for you.”

Ramago turned slowly to look at her. “Telephone?”

“Yes, señor, they say it is urgent. From your home. Your wife.”

Ramago at once looked worried. “Where?—where?—” he faltered.

“This way, sir,” the waitress said, and she gently helped him to his feet. They walked slowly across the banquet room, for the old Lisboner was afflicted with rheumatism, though he was otherwise in excellent health.

Outside the banquet room, the waitress guided Ramago to an antique wooden telephone booth and assisted him into it, solicitously smoothing his rumpled dinner jacket.

Just as Ramago reached for the telephone, he felt a sharp pinprick in his upper thigh. He gasped, looked around, but the waitress was gone. The pain quickly subsided, though, and he put the handset up to his ear and listened. But all he could hear was the dial tone.

“There is no one on the line,” Ramago managed to say to no one just before he lost consciousness.

A minute or so later, one of the waiters noticed the old man passed out in the telephone booth. Alarmed, he called out for help.

The Austrian Alps

Patient Eighteen was awakened at midnight.

One of the nurses gently applied a tourniquet to his upper arm and began to draw blood.

“What the hell is this?” he groaned.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the nurse said. Her English was heavily accented. “We are required to take venous blood samples every four hours from midnight on, throughout the day.”

“Good God, for what?”

“It is to measure the levels of your serum Epo—erythropoietin.”

“I didn’t know I had any.” All this medical stuff was unsettling, but he knew there was much more to come.

“Please, go back to sleep, sir. You have a long day ahead of you.”

Breakfast was served in a lavish banquet room with the others. There was a buffet overflowing with fresh fruits, freshly baked biscuits and rolls, breakfast sausages, eggs, bacon, and ham.

When Patient Eighteen finished, he was escorted to an examination room in another wing.

There, another nurse gingerly cut into the skin of the inner part of his upper arm with a small scalpel.

He moaned.

“I’m sorry if I caused you pain,” the nurse said.

“My entire damned body’s one big pain. What’s this for?”

“A skin biopsy to examine the elastic fibers in the reticular dermis,” she replied, applying a bandage.

In the background, two white-coated physicians were quietly conferring in German. Patient Eighteen understood every word.

“His brain function is somewhat impaired,” the short, rotund one said, “but nothing you wouldn’t expect in a man of his age. No sign of senile dementia or Alzheimer’s.”

A tall, thin, gray-faced man said, “What about cardiac muscle mass?”

“Acceptable. But we measured the blood pressure at the posterior tibial artery, this time using Doppler ultrasonography, and we did find some peripheral arterial disease.”

“So his blood pressure is elevated.”

“Somewhat, but we expected that.”

“Have you counted the number of pitted blood cells?”

“I believe that’s being done in the lab right now.”

“Good. I think this one is a good candidate. I suggest we accelerate the tests.”

A good candidate, Patient Eighteen thought. So it would happen after all. He turned to the conferring doctors behind and smiled widely at them, feigning gratitude.

Vienna

The private investigator was almost half an hour late. Ben sat in the spacious lobby of his hotel just off the Kärntner Strasse, his mélange untouched, waiting for the detective whose name he had plucked from the yellow pages.

He knew there were far better ways to find the name of a PI than the Vienna telephone book—such as calling one of his several business contacts here and asking for a recommendation. But his instincts told him to avoid anyone he knew right now if he could possibly help it.

He’d gotten on the first train, showed up unannounced at a small hotel, and been lucky enough to get a room, registering under the name Robert Simon, one of his brother’s aliases. He was asked for his passport, and held his breath as it was inspected, but it obviously looked in order, plausibly battered and stamped, as if from a few years’ use.

The first thing he’d done was to look through the Vienna phone book for an investigator who seemed, from his advertisement anyway, reputable. Several were located in the first district, the heart of the city where Ben’s hotel was; one in particular advertised his services in locating long-lost relatives. Ben had hired him over the phone, asking him to run a background check on an Austrian citizen.

Now he was beginning to wonder whether the PI was going to show at all.

Then a portly man of about forty plopped himself into the chair across the low table from Ben. “You are Mr. Simon?” He set down a battered leather portfolio on the table.

“That’s me.”

“Hans Hoffman,” the PI said. “You have the money?”

“Nice to meet you too,” Ben said sardonically. He took out his wallet, counted out four hundred dollars, and slid it across the table.

Hoffman stared at it for a moment.

“Something wrong?” Ben asked. “You prefer Austrian shillings? Sorry, I haven’t gone to a bank yet.”

“There was an additional expense involved,” the detective said.

“Oh really?”

“A courtesy payment to an old buddy of mine in the HNA, the
Heeres Nachrichtenamt
—Austrian military intelligence.”

“Translation, a bribe,” Ben said.

Hoffman shrugged.

“I don’t imagine this buddy of yours gave you a receipt?”

Hoffman sighed. “This is how we do things here. You can’t get the sort of information you’re looking for without exploring various channels. This friend will have to use his military intelligence ID card to get information. It will be another two hundred dollars. The number—it was unlisted, by the way—and address I can get you now.”

Ben counted it out; it was the end of his cash.

The detective counted the bills. “I don’t know why you wanted this person’s number and address, but you must be involved in some interesting business.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Your man is a very important figure in Vienna.” He signaled for the waitress; when she came, he ordered a mélange and a Maximilian torte.

From his briefcase he removed a laptop computer, snapped it open, and turned it on. “The very latest in biometrics,” he said proudly. “Fingertip sensor. Uses my fingerprint as a password. Without it, the computer’s locked. No one does these things like the Germans.”

The detective tapped at the keys for a few seconds, then turned it around to face Ben. The screen was blank except for the name and address of Jürgen Lenz.

“You know him?” Hoffman said, turning the laptop back toward himself. “He is an acquaintance of yours?”

“Not exactly. Tell me about him.”

“Ah, well, Dr. Lenz is one of the wealthiest men in Vienna, a leading philanthropist and patron of the arts. His family foundation builds medical clinics for the poor. He’s also on the board of the Vienna Philharmonic.”

The waitress set down a coffee and pastry in front of Hoffman. The detective lunged for them before the waitress had even turned to leave.

“What kind of doctor is Dr. Lenz?”

“A medical doctor, but he gave up his practice years ago.”

“How old?”

“In his fifties, I would say.”

“Medicine must be something of a family tradition.”

Hoffman laughed. “You’re remembering his father, Gerhard Lenz. An interesting case. Our country is perhaps not the most progressive, in some ways. My compatriots would prefer to forget any such unpleasantness. It’s the Austrian way: as the saying goes, we’ve convinced ourselves that Beethoven was an Austrian, and
Hitler was a German. But Jürgen is cut from a different cloth. This is a son who seeks to make up for the crimes of the father.”

“Really?”

“Oh, very much. Jürgen Lenz is resented in some circles for being so outspoken about these crimes. Even denouncing his own father. He is known to feel deep shame about what his father did.” He looked at his torte impatiently. “But unlike many children of the famous Nazis, he does something about it. The Lenz Foundation is Austria’s leading supporter of Holocaust studies, historical scholarship, libraries in Israel…they fund anything that seeks to fight hate crimes, racism, that sort of thing.” He returned to his pastry, wolfing it down as if fearing it would be snatched away.

Lenz’s son was a leading anti-Nazi? Perhaps they had more in common than he had supposed. “All right,” Ben said, gesturing to the waitress for the check with the universal air-scrawl. “Thank you.”

“Anything else I can do for you?” the detective asked, brushing crumbs off the lapels of his jacket.

Trevor Griffiths left his hotel, the Imperial, on the Kärntner Ring a few blocks from the Opera. Not only was the Imperial the finest hotel in Vienna, Trevor reflected, but it was famous as the headquarters of the Nazis during the war, the location from which they governed the city. He liked the hotel anyway.

It was a short stroll down Mariahilfer Strasse to a small bar on Neubaugasse. The garish red neon sign flashed the bar’s name: broadway club. He sat in a booth at the back of the ill-lit basement room and waited. In his bespoke gray worsted double-breasted suit, he looked somewhat out of place here, like a businessman, a high-level executive perhaps, or a prosperous attorney.

The bar was choked with foul cigarette smoke. Trevor could not tolerate it, hated the way his hair and clothes would stink afterward. He glanced at his watch, an Audemars Piguet, top of the line, one of the few indulgences he allowed himself. Expensive suits and watches and good rough sex. What else was there, really, if you had no interest in food, art, or music?

He was impatient. The Austrian contact was late, and Trevor could not abide tardiness.

Finally, after almost half an hour, the Austrian showed up, a square, hulking troglodyte named Otto. Otto slid into the booth and placed a worn red felt bag in front of Trevor.

“You’re English, yes?”

Trevor nodded, zipped open the bag. It contained two large metal pieces, a 9 mm Makarov, the barrel threaded for a silencer, and the long, perforated sound-suppressor itself. “Ammo?” Trevor asked.

“Is in there,” Otto said. “Nine by eighteen. Lots.”

The Makarov was a good choice. Unlike the 9 mm Parabellum, it was subsonic. “What’s the make?” Trevor asked. “Hungarian? Chinese?”

“Russian. But it’s good one.”

“How much?”

“Three thousand shillings.”

Trevor grimaced. He didn’t mind spending money, but he resented highway robbery. He switched to German, so Otto, whose English was poor, would miss nothing. “
Der Markt ist mit Makarovs überschwemmt
.” The market’s flooded with Makarovs.

Otto became suddenly alert.

“These things are a dime a dozen,” Trevor continued in German. “Everyone makes them, they’re all over the place. I’ll give you a thousand shillings, and you should count yourself lucky to get that.”

Respect entered Otto’s expression. “You’re German?”
he asked, amazed. Actually, if Otto were a perceptive listener, he’d have placed Trevor’s German as coming from the Dresden region.

Trevor had not spoken German in quite a while; he’d had no opportunity to do so. But it came back easily.

It was, after all, his native tongue.

Anna had dinner alone at a Mövenpick restaurant a few blocks from her hotel. There was nothing on the menu that interested her, and she decided she was no connoisseur of Swiss cuisine.

Normally, she found dining alone in a foreign city depressing, but tonight she was too absorbed in her thoughts to feel lonely. She was seated by the window, in a long row of lone diners, most of them reading newspapers or books.

At the American consulate, she used a secure fax line to transmit everything she had on Hartman, including his credit cards, to the ICU and had asked that the ID unit contact each of the credit-card companies and activate an instant trace, so that they would be informed within minutes whenever he used one of the cards.

She had also asked them to dig up whatever they could on Hartman himself, and someone had called her back on the encrypted cell phone less than an hour later.

They had struck gold.

According to Hartman’s office, he was on vacation in Switzerland, but hadn’t checked in with the office in several days. They didn’t have his travel itinerary; he hadn’t provided one. They had no way to contact him.

But then the ID tech had learned something interesting: Hartman’s only sibling, a twin brother, had died in a plane crash in Switzerland four years earlier. Apparently
he’d been on some Swiss-gold crusade before his death. She didn’t know what to make of that except that it raised all sorts of questions.

And Benjamin Hartman, the tech told her, was loaded. The company he worked for, Hartman Capital Management, managed investment funds and had been founded by Hartman’s father.

Who was a well-known philanthropist and a Holocaust survivor.

Possibilities suggested themselves. Poor little rich boy, son of a survivor, gets it in his head that the Swiss bankers haven’t been doing right by the Holocaust victims. Now his twin takes up the same crusade, trying for some sort of misguided revenge on a Swiss banking bigwig. A rich boy’s half-cocked vendetta.

Or maybe he was in it deeper—working for whatever this Sigma outfit had morphed into. For some unexplained reason.