The Sigma Protocol (59 page)

“What I still don’t understand,” she said, “is how anyone knew I was here and
why
.”

“The Interpol man—”

“Except that I saw him
after
the package was stolen from American Express.” She was standing by the tall windows, fiddling with the sheer, gauzy curtains. “Once the package was stolen, the bad guys knew I was looking for Strasser. Question is, how did anyone even know to take it? You didn’t tell anyone you were traveling to Buenos Aires with me, right?”

He didn’t like her implication, but he ignored it. “No. But did you make any phone calls from the hotel?”

She was silent a moment. “Yeah, I did. One to Washington.”

“Not hard to tap hotel phones if you have the proper contacts, right?”

She looked at him, visibly impressed. “That might also explain the fake CIA man. Yes. Did you give Jürgen Lenz any indication—”

“I never told Lenz I was even thinking of going to Buenos Aires, because at that point I
wasn’t
.”

“I wish there was a way to get Lenz’s fingerprints, run ’em through a bunch of databases, see what we turn up. Maybe there’s even a criminal record. Did he give you anything—a business card, anything?”

“Nothing, as far as I can recall—well, actually, I gave him the photograph to look at, the one I got from Peter’s bank vault in Zurich.”

“How many people have you shown it to?”

“You. A historian at the University of Zurich. Liesl. And Lenz. That’s all.”

“He handled it?”

“Oh yeah. Front and back, turned it over. His fingers were all over it.”

“Great, I’ll have a copy made and send the original off to AFIS.”

“How? I get the impression your DOJ privileges have been revoked.”

“But Denneen’s haven’t. If I can get it to him, he can pass it along to a friend in another agency, probably FBI. He’ll figure it out.”

He hesitated. “Well, if it enables us to get something on Lenz. Or to find Peter’s killers…”

“Excellent. Thank you.” She glanced at her watch. “Let’s continue this over supper. We’re meeting this detective, Sergio whatever, in a part of the city called La Boca. We can grab something to eat there.”

The cabdriver was a middle-aged woman with flabby arms, wearing a tank top. On the dashboard was a framed color photo of a child, presumably her own. A tiny leather moccasin dangled from the rearview mirror.

“A gun-toting priest,” Anna mused. “And I thought the Dominican nuns in church were scary.” She’d changed into a gray pleated skirt and white blouse, a pearl choker around her swan neck, and smelled of something floral and crisp. “He told you that Jürgen Lenz actually owns her house?”

“Actually, he used the phrase, ‘the man who
calls
himself Jürgen Lenz.’”

They entered a seedy working-class barrio on the southernmost tip of Buenos Aires. On their left was the Riachuelo Canal, a stagnant body of water in which rusting dredges and scows and hulks were half-submerged. Along the waterway were warehouses and meat-packing plants.

“She told you Gerhard Lenz
had
no children?” Anna’s brows were knit in concentration. “Am I missing something?”

“Uh-uh. He’s Lenz, yet he’s
not
Lenz.”

“So the man you met in Vienna, who everyone knows as Jürgen Lenz, is an impostor.”

“That would be the implication.”

“Yet whoever he really is, this old woman and her stepson obviously fear him.”

“No question about it.”

“But why in the world would Jürgen Lenz pretend to be the son of someone so infamous if he’s
not?
” she said. “It makes no sense.”

“We’re not talking about an Elvis impersonator here, granted. The thing is, we don’t really understand much about how succession works at Sigma. Maybe it was his way of gaining a foothold there. Representing himself as the direct descendant of one of the founders—that might have been the only way he could worm his way in.”

“That’s assuming that Jürgen Lenz is Sigma.”

“At this point, it seems safer than assuming the contrary. And, going from what Chardin said, the question with Sigma isn’t what they control, but what they
don’t
control.”

Darkness had settled. They were entering an area that was crowded, ill-lit, dangerous-seeming. The houses here were constructed of sheet metal, with corrugated metal roofs, painted pink and ocher and turquoise.

The cab pulled up in front of a restaurant-bar bustling with rowdy patrons at creaky wooden tables or gathered at the bar, talking and laughing. Prominently displayed behind the bar was a color portrait of Eva Perón. Ceiling fans turned slowly.

They ordered
empanadas
and a San Telmo cabernet sauvignon and a bottle of
agua mineral gaseosa
. The wineglasses had the perspirant smell of old sponge. The napkins were slick squares of deli paper.

“The widow thought you were from ‘Semmering,’” Anna said when they were settled. “What do you think she meant—a place? A company?”

“I don’t know. A place, I suppose.”

“And when she mentioned ‘the company’?”

“I took that to be Sigma.”

“But there’s another company. Jürgen Lenz—whoever he really is—is on the Armakon board.”

“How much are you going to trust this Machado guy with what we know?”

“Not at all,” she replied. “I simply want him to find Strasser for us.”

They finished with a couple of
humitas
, creamy sweet-corn paste in cornhusk packets, and coffee.

“I assume the Interpol guy wasn’t much help,” Ben said.

“He denied the possibility that Strasser might live here. Highly suspicious. Interpol was controlled by the Nazis for a time, just before the Second World War, and some people think it never really purged itself. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if this guy’s in the pocket of one of these Nazi protection rackets. Now, your guntoting priest—”

“My gun-toting priest insisted he had no way to reach Strasser, but I don’t believe him.”

“I’ll bet he got on the phone to Strasser the moment you were out the door.”

Ben reflected. “If he called Strasser… What if we could somehow get the widow’s telephone records?”

“We can ask Machado. He may be able to do it, or know who to reach out to.”

“Speaking of reaching out, do you know what this guy looks like?”

“No, but we’re meeting him right in front.”

The street was crowded and raucous and electric—rock music blaring from speakers set out on sidewalks, an opera’s aria, tango music from a nearby cantina.
Porteños
strolled down the cobblestones of the Caminito, a pedestrian thoroughfare, browsing at the stalls of an
open-air market. People came in and out of the restaurant, repeatedly colliding with Ben and Anna without apology.

Ben noticed a gaggle of young boys in their late teens or early twenties, a roving gang of eight or more toughs, heading toward him and Anna, talking loudly, laughing, drunk on alcohol and testosterone. Anna muttered something to Ben out of the side of her mouth, something he couldn’t quite understand. Several of the guys were staring directly at him and Anna with something more than idle curiosity, and in an instant the gang surrounded them.

“Run!” he shouted, and he was slugged in the stomach by a fist.

He protected his abdomen with both arms, as something slammed into his left kidney—a foot!—and he lunged forward to ward off the attack. He heard Anna scream, but it seemed to come from a great distance. He was blocked, hemmed in; his assailants, though evidently teenagers, seemed to be trained in combat. He couldn’t move, and he was being pummeled. In his peripheral vision he could see Anna flinging one of the attackers aside with surprising strength, but then several more grabbed her. Ben tried to break free, but was overwhelmed by a barrage of fists and kicks.

He saw the glint of knife blades, and a knife slashed against his side. A hot line of sensation exploded into vast pain, and he grabbed the hand holding the knife, twisted it hard, and heard a yelp. He kicked at his attackers, slammed wildly with his fists, connecting a few times, and he felt an elbow jabbed into his rib cage, then a knee in his stomach. Breath left him, and he gasped helplessly, then a foot kicked him in the testicles and he doubled over in pain.

He heard the whoop of a siren, and he heard Anna shout, “Over here! Oh, thank God!” A foot kicked him
hard on the side of his head, and he could taste blood. He flung his hands out, half protectively, half in an attempt to grab whatever he could, to stop the pummeling; he heard shouting, new voices, and he lurched to his feet to see a couple of policemen shouting at his accosters.

One of the cops grabbed him, yelled, “
¡Vamos, vamos por acá, que los vamos a sacar de acá!
” Come on, get over here, we’ll get you out of here! Another cop pulled Anna toward the cruiser. Somehow he made it to the police car, saw the door open, felt a shove, and he was inside. The door slammed behind him, and all the shouts and screams of the crowd were muted.

“You all right?” one of the cops said from the front seat.

Ben groaned.

Anna said, “
Gracias!
” Ben noticed that her blouse was torn, her pearl choker was gone. “We’re American…” she began, then seemed to think for a moment. “My purse,” she said. “Shit. My money was in there.”

“Passport?” Ben managed to croak out.

“Back in the room.” The car was moving. She turned to him. “My God, what was that? You O.K., Ben?”

“I’m not sure.” The screaming pain in his groin was beginning to subside. There was a sticky warmth where he’d been slashed by the knife. He touched his side, felt the blood.

The car swung into traffic, barreling down the road. “That was no random attack,” Anna said. “That was deliberate. Planned, coordinated.”

Ben looked at her dully. “Thank you,” he said to the policemen in the front seat.

There was no reply. He realized that there was a Plexiglas barrier between the front and back seats, and he heard Anna say, “The partition—?”

The Plexiglas had not been there before; it had just come up. Ben did not hear a police radio, or maybe the sound wasn’t coming through the Plexiglas.

Anna seemed to notice the same thing at the same moment, for she leaned forward and banged on the Plexiglas, but the two policemen didn’t respond.

The back doors locked automatically.

“Oh, my God,” Anna breathed. “
They’re not cops
.”

They pulled at the door handles, which did not yield. They grabbed at the door lock buttons, but they would not move.

“Where’s your gun?” Ben whispered.

“I don’t
have
one!”

Headlights flashed by as the car accelerated down a four-lane highway. They were now clearly outside the city limits. Ben hammered at the Plexiglas partition with both fists, but neither the driver nor the passenger in the front seat seemed to notice.

The car swerved onto an exit ramp. In a few minutes they were on a dark, two-lane road, lined with tall trees, and then without warning they turned off the road into an unlit cul-de-sac within a copse of tall trees.

The engine was switched off. For a moment there was silence, interrupted only by the sound of an occasional car passing by.

The two men in the front seat seemed to be conferring. Then the passenger got out and went around to the back of the car. The trunk popped open.

In a moment he returned to his side of the car, clutching in his left hand something that looked like a piece of cloth. In his right he held a handgun. Then the driver got out, taking a gun from a shoulder holster. The back doors unlocked.

The driver, apparently in charge, yanked open the
door on Anna’s side and waved the gun at her. She got out slowly, put her hands up. He stepped back and, with his free left hand, slammed the car door shut, leaving Ben alone in the backseat.

The deserted country road, the weapons… this was a classic execution.

The other false policeman—or perhaps they were real ones; did it make any difference?—walked to where Anna stood, her hands in the air, and began frisking her for weapons, beginning with her underarms. His hands lingered on her breasts.

He ran his hands down her side, moving them into her crotch, his fingers spending too much time there as well, then moved down the inside of her legs to her ankles. He pulled back, seemed to determine her safe. Then he took a burlap sack and placed it over her head, tightening it around her neck.

The driver barked something, and she fell to her knees and clasped her hands behind her back.

Ben saw with horror what was about to happen to her. “
No!
”

The driver shouted another order, and the younger cop opened the car door, pointing his weapon at Ben. “Step out slowly,” he said in fluent English.

There was no hope of making a dash for the road, nor of grabbing Anna and taking her to safety. Not faced with two men with guns. He got out of the car, thrust his hands in the air, and the younger one began frisking him too, this time more roughly.

“
No está enfierrado
,” the man said. He’s clean.

To Ben, he said conversationally, “Any sudden movements and we’ll kill you. Understand?”

Yes, I understand. They’ll kill us both
.

A burlap sack went over his head. It stank of a horse barn, and was cinched tight at his neck, too tight,
choking him. Everything was dark. He croaked, “Hey, watch it!”

“Shut the hell up,” one of the men said. It sounded like the older man’s voice. “Or I kill you and no one find your body for days, hear me?”

He heard Anna whisper, “Go along with them for now. We don’t exactly have a choice.”

He felt something hard pressed against the back of his head. “Kneel,” a voice said.

He knelt, and without being asked, he clasped his hands behind his back. “What do you want?” Ben said.

“Shut the hell up!” one of them shouted. Something hard cracked against the back of his head. He groaned in pain.

His abductors didn’t want to talk. They were going to die in this godforsaken field off a dark road in the middle of a country he didn’t know. He was thinking of how it all began, at the Bahnhofplatz in Zurich, with his near-death, or did it really begin with Peter’s disappearance? He recalled the agony of Peter’s murder in the country inn in rural Switzerland, but instead of demoralizing him, the memory gave him resolve. If he were killed here, at least he would have the satisfaction of knowing that he had done everything he could to find his brother’s murderers, and if he had failed to bring them to justice, or to discover what their reasons were, at least he had come close. He would leave behind no wife, no child, and in time he would be mostly forgotten by his friends, but in the history of the world all our lives are as brief as the winking of a firefly on a summer night, and he would not feel sorry for himself.