The Sigma Protocol (39 page)

She leaned closer. “It’s a matter of public record that your brother had been trying to build a case against the Swiss banking establishment. Gaston Rossignol was a preeminent Swiss banker. You visit him, and he turns up dead. Let’s get back to that. Then suddenly you’re in Vienna meeting with the son of an infamous Nazi. And your father was in a concentration camp. It looks an awful lot like some kind of vengeance trip you’re on.”

So that was it. Maybe it would look like that to someone who didn’t know the truth. But I can’t tell her the truth!

“That’s preposterous,” Ben snapped. “I don’t even
want to dignify your fantasies about vendettas and violence. You talk about Swiss bankers. I do deals with these people, Agent Navarro. It’s my job. International finance doesn’t really lend itself to murderous rampages, O.K.? In my world, the main injuries you inflict are paper cuts.”

“Then explain what happened on the Bahnhofplatz.”

“I can’t. I’ve been through that with the Swiss bulls over and over again.”

“And explain how you tracked down Rossignol.”

Ben shook his head.

“And the others. Come on. I want to know where you got their names and their whereabouts.”

Ben just looked at her.

“Where were you on Wednesday?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Nova Scotia, by any chance?”

“Come to think of it, I was being arrested in Zurich,” he shot back. “You can check with your friends at the Zurich police. See, I like to get arrested in every country I visit. It’s really the best way to appreciate the local customs.”

She ignored his barb. “Tell me what got you arrested.”

“You know as well as I do.”

Navarro turned to her brooding sidekick, who exhaled a plume of smoke, then looked back at Ben. “Several times in the last couple of days you yourself were almost killed. Including today—”

In his dull, dazed anxiety, he was surprised to feel a warm rush of gratitude. “You saved my life. I guess I should thank you.”

“Damn right you should,” she replied. “Now tell me, why do you think someone was trying to kill you? Who might have known what you were up to?”

Nice try, lady. “I have no idea.”

“I’ll bet you have some idea.”

“Sorry. Maybe you can ask your friends over at the CIA what they’re trying to cover up. Or is your office involved in the cover-up, too?”

“Mr. Hartman, your twin brother was killed in Switzerland, in a suspicious plane crash. More recently, you’ve had some unexplained connection to shootings in that country. Death seems to follow you around like a cheap cologne. What am I supposed to think?”

“Think whatever you like. I didn’t commit any crime.”

“I’m going to ask you this one more time: Where did you get their names and addresses?”

“Whose?”

“Rossignol and Lenz.”

“I told you, mutual acquaintances.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Believe what you like.”

“What are you hiding? Why don’t you level with me, Mr. Hartman?”

“Sorry. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Agent Navarro folded, then unfolded, her long shapely legs. “Mr. Hartman,” she said with utmost exasperation. “I’m going to offer you a deal. You cooperate with me, and I’ll do my best to get the Swiss and the Austrians to back off.”

Was she sincere? His distrust had become almost a reflex. “Given that you seem to be the one pushing them to come after me, that strikes me as a hollow promise. I don’t have to stay here any longer, do I?”

She watched him silently, nibbling at the inside of a cheek. “No.” She took out a business card and jotted something down on the back of it, then handed it to him. “If you change your mind, here’s my hotel in Vienna.”

It was over. Thank God. He inhaled, felt the air reach the very bottom of his lungs, the anxiety suddenly lift.

“Nice to meet you, Agent Navarro,” Ben said, rising. “And thanks again for saving my life.”

The pain was intense and overwhelming; another man would have passed out. Gathering his powers of mental concentration, Trevor assigned the pain to another body—a vividly imagined doppelgänger, someone who was convulsed with agony but who was not he. By sheer force of will, he managed to find his way through the streets of Vienna to a building on Taborstrasse.

Then he remembered that the car was stolen—his thinking was sluggish, that was what alarmed him most of all—and he drove five blocks away and abandoned it, the keys dangling from the ignition. Maybe some idiot would steal it and get caught in the citywide dragnet that was sure to follow.

He limped down the street, ignoring the many glances of the passersby. He knew his suit jacket was drenched with his own blood; he had put the trench coat on over it, but even that, too, had gotten soaked through. He had lost a great deal of blood. He felt lightheaded.

He was able to get back to Taborstrasse, to the street-level office marked with a brass plaque that said
DR. THEODOR SCHREIBER, INTERNIST
&
GENERAL SURGEON
.

The office was dark, and there was no answer when he buzzed. Trevor didn’t find this surprising, since it was after eight o’clock in the evening, and Dr. Schreiber kept regular hours. But he kept ringing the bell anyway. Schreiber lived in the flat behind his small office, and the bell rang in his living quarters as well, Trevor knew.

After five minutes, the light went on in the office, and then a voice came through the speaker, loud and annoyed: “
Ja?
”

“
Dr. Schreiber, es is Christoph. Es ist ein Notfall
.”

The front door of the building unlocked electronically. Then the door off the lobby, marked with the doctor’s name on another brass plaque, unlocked as well.

Dr. Schreiber was disgruntled. “You have interrupted my dinner,” he said gravely. “I trust it is important—” He noticed the blood-soaked trench coat. “All right, all right, follow me.” The physician turned and walked back toward the examination room.

Dr. Schreiber had a sister who lived in Dresden, in East Germany, for decades. Until the Wall came down, this simple accident of geography—he had escaped from East Berlin in 1961, while his sister had been forced to stay behind—had been enough to give East German intelligence leverage over the doctor.

But Stasi did not seek to blackmail him or to turn him into some sort of spy, as if a physician could ever be useful as a spy. No, Stasi had a far more mundane use for him: simply to serve as a doctor on call for its agents in Austria in cases of emergency. Physicians in Austria, as in many countries in the world, are required by law to report gunshot wounds to the police. Dr. Schreiber would be more discreet than that when the occasional wounded Stasi agent appeared at his office, usually in the middle of the night.

Trevor, who had lived as a Stasi illegal in London for many years before he was recruited to Sigma, had from time to time been dispatched to Vienna, under the cover of business travel, and twice he had needed to visit the good doctor.

Even now that the Cold War was long over, and Schreiber’s days of covert assistance to East Germany were pretty much finished, Trevor had little doubt that
the physician would cooperate. Schreiber could still be prosecuted for his covert assistance to Stasi. That he would not want.

But his vulnerability did not keep Dr. Schreiber from bristling with resentment. “You are a most fortunate man,” the doctor said brusquely. “The bullet, you see, entered just over your heart. A slightly more direct angle and you would have died immediately. Instead, it appears to have entered at an oblique angle, digging a sort of trench in the skin and the fatty tissue beneath. It even tore away some of the surface fibers of the pectoralis major, your breast muscle. And exited right here, at the axilla. You must have turned just in time.”

Dr. Schreiber glanced over his half-glasses at Trevor, who did not reply.

He poked with a pair of forceps, and Trevor winced. The pain was overwhelming. His body was suffused with an unpleasant prickly heat.

“It also came close to causing great damage to the nerves and blood vessels in the area of the brachial plexus. Had it done so, you’d have lost the use of your right arm permanently. Maybe even lost the arm itself.”

“I’m left-handed,” Trevor said. “Anyway, I don’t need to know the gory details.”

“Yes,” the doctor said absently. “Well, you really should go to the hospital, the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, if we’re going to do this right.”

“That’s out of the question, and you know it.” A lightning bolt of pain shot down his arm.

The doctor changed into his scrubs, and injected several syringes of a local anesthetic around the wound. With a small pair of scissors and forceps he excised some blackened tissue, irrigated the wound, and then set about suturing it.

Trevor could feel a deep, tugging discomfort, but no real pain. He gritted his teeth. “I want you to make
sure the wound doesn’t open up if I move around,” he said.

“You should take it easy for a little while.”

“I’m a fast healer.”

“That’s right,” the doctor said. “I remember now.” The man was a fast healer—freakishly so.

“Time is the one luxury I don’t have,” Trevor said. “I want you to sew it up tight.”

“Then I can use heavier suture materials—3-0 nylon, say—but it may leave a rather ugly scar.”

“It doesn’t concern me.”

“Fine,” the doctor said, turning back to his steel cart of equipment.

When he had finished, he said, “For the pain, I can give you some Demerol.” He added dryly, “Or would you prefer to go without anything?”

“Some ibuprofen should be enough,” Trevor said.

“As you wish.”

Trevor stood, wincing. “All right then, I appreciate your help.” He handed the doctor a few thousand-shilling notes.

The physician looked at him and said, quite insincerely, “Any time.”

Anna splashed her face with hot water. Thirty times, her mother had trained her: her mother’s only vanity. Keeps the skin vital and glowing.

Over the running water she heard the phone ringing. Grabbing a towel to dry her face, she ran to catch it.

“Anna, it’s Robert Polozzi. Am I calling you too late?”

Robert Polozzi from ID Section.

“No, not at all, Robert. What is it?”

“Listen: about the patent search.”

She’d forgotten about the patent search. She patted her dripping face.

He said: “The neurotoxin—”

“Oh, right. You found something?”

“So get this. May 16 of this year, patent number—well, it’s a long number—anyway, a patent for this exact synthetic compound was applied for by a small Philadelphia-based biotech company called Vortex. It’s a, it says, ‘a synthetic analog of the venom of the conus sea snail for proposed in-vitro applications.’ And then some mumbo jumbo about ‘localizing ion channels’ and ‘tagging chemochyme receptors.’” He paused, then resumed, his voice tentative. “I called the place. Vortex, I mean. On a pretext, of course.”

A little unorthodox, but she didn’t mind. “Learn anything?”

“Well, not exactly. They say their stocks of this toxin are minimal and under tight control. It’s hard to produce, so they don’t have much, and anyway the stuff is used in ridiculously tiny quantities, and it’s still experimental. I asked them whether it could be used as a poison, and the guy I talked to, the scientific director of the firm, said of course it could—the conus sea snail’s venom, as found in nature, is highly deadly. He said a tiny amount could induce immediate heart failure.”

She felt a growing excitement. “He told you the stuff is under tight control—that means it’s under lock and key?”

“Right.”

“And this guy strikes you as on the level?”

“I think so, but who knows?”

“Great work, thanks. Can you find out from them whether any of their supply of this stuff has been found missing or otherwise unaccounted for?”

“Already did,” the researcher said proudly. “The answer’s no.”

A pang of disappointment. “Can you find out for me everything you can about Vortex? Owners, principals, employees, and so on?”

“Will do.”

She hung up, sat on the edge of the bed, pondered. It was possible that tugging at this thread would unravel the conspiracy behind the murders. Or unravel nothing.

The whole investigation was proving increasingly frustrating. Nor had the Vienna police had any luck chasing down the shooter. The shooter’s Peugeot had previously been reported stolen—surprise, surprise. Another dead end.

This Hartman she found baffling. Against her will she also found him appealing, even attractive. But he was a type. A golden boy, born to money, graced with good looks, overconfident. He was Brad, the football player who’d raped her. The world cut men like that a break. Men like that, a blunt-speaking girlfriend of hers in college used to say, thought their shit didn’t stink. They thought they could get away with anything.

But was he a killer? Somehow it seemed unlikely. She believed his version of what had happened at Rossignol’s in Zurich; it jibed with the fingerprint patterns and with her own sense of him. Yet he was carrying a gun, passport control had no record of him arriving in Austria, and he’d offered no explanation for that.… On the other hand, a thorough search of his car hadn’t revealed anything. No syringe, no poisons, nothing.

Whether he was a part of this conspiracy was hard to say. He’d thought his brother had been killed four years ago; maybe that murder had been the catalyst for those murders that came later. But why so many, and in such a short span of time?

The fact remained: Benjamin Hartman knew more. Yet she didn’t have the authority, or the grounds, to hold him. It was deeply frustrating. She wondered whether her desire—all right, obsession—to get him had to do with the rich-boy thing, the old wounds, Brad…

She took her address book from the end table, looked up a phone number, and dialed.

It rang several times before a gravelly male voice answered, “Donahue.” Donahue was a money-laundering guru at DOJ, and she’d quietly enlisted his help before she’d left for Switzerland. No context; just some account information. Donahue didn’t mind being kept in the dark about the nature of her investigation; he seemed to regard it as a challenge.