The Sigma Protocol (6 page)

Anna nodded. “I’m listening.”

“Excellent, Ms. Navarro.” Bartlett handed her a sheet of paper with a list of names on it, followed by dates of birth and countries of residence.

“I’m not following. Am I supposed to contact these men?”

“Not unless you’ve got a Ouija board. All eleven of these men are deceased. All passed from this vale of tears within the past two months. Several, you’ll see, in the United States, others in Switzerland, in England, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Greece… All apparently of natural causes.”

Anna glanced at the sheet. Of the eleven, there were two names she recognized—one a member of the Lancaster family, a family that once owned most of the steel mills in the country, but was now better known for its foundation grants and other forms of philanthropy. Philip Lancaster was, in fact, somebody she’d assumed had died long ago. The other, Nico Xenakis, was presumably from the Greek shipping family. To be honest, she knew the name mainly in connection to another scion of the family—a man who had made a tabloid name for himself as a roué back in the sixties, when he’d dated a series of Hollywood starlets. None of the
other names rang any bells. Looking at their dates of birth, she saw that all of them were old men—in their late seventies to late eighties.

“Maybe the news hasn’t reached the ICU whiz kids,” she said, “but when you’ve had your three score and ten…well, no one gets out alive.”

“In none of these cases is exhumation possible, I’m afraid,” Bartlett continued implacably. “Perhaps it’s as you say. Old men doing what old men will do. In those instances, we cannot prove otherwise. But in the last few days, we’ve had a stroke of luck. In a pro forma way, we put a roster of names on the ‘sentinel list’—one of those international conventions that nobody seems to take any notice of. The most recent death was of a retiree in Nova Scotia, Canada. Our Canadian friends are sticklers about procedures, and that’s how the alarm was sounded in time. In this instance, we have a body to work with. More precisely,
you
do.”

“You’re leaving something out, of course. What is it that connects these men?”

“To every question, there’s a surface answer and a deeper one. I’ll give you the surface answer, because it’s the only one I have. A few years ago, an internal audit was conducted of the CIA’s deep-storage records. Was a tip received? Let’s say it was. These were non-operational files, mind you. They weren’t agents or direct contacts. They were, in fact, clearance files. Each was marked ‘Sigma,’ presumably a reference to a codeword operation—of which there seems to be no trace in the Agency’s records. We have no information as to its nature.”

“Clearance files?” Anna repeated.

“Meaning that some time long ago each man had been vetted and cleared—for something, we don’t know what.”

“And the source of origin was a CIA archivist.”

He didn’t reply directly. “Each file has been authenticated by our top forensic document experts. They’re old, these files. They date as far back as the mid-forties, before there even
was
a CIA.”

“You’re saying they were started by OSS?”

“Exactly,” Bartlett said. “The CIA’s precursor. Many of the files were opened right around the time the war was ending, the Cold War beginning. The latest ones date from the mid-fifties. But I digress. As I say, we have this curious pattern of deaths. Of course, it would have gone nowhere, a question mark in a field full of question marks, except that we began to see a pattern, cross-checked and correlated with the Sigma files. I don’t believe in coincidences, do you, Ms. Navarro? Eleven of the men named in these files have died in a very short interval. The actuarial odds of this happening by chance are… remote at best.”

Anna nodded impatiently. As far as she could see, the Ghost was seeing ghosts. “How long is this assignment for? I’ve got a real job, you know.”

“This
is
your ‘real’ job now. You’ve already been reassigned. We’ve made the arrangements. You understand your task, then?” His gaze softened. “This doesn’t seem to quicken your pulse, Ms. Navarro.”

Anna shrugged. “I keep coming back to the fact that these guys are all in the graduating class, if you know what I mean. Old guys tend to pop off, O.K.? These were old guys.”

“And in nineteenth-century Paris, getting trampled by a carriage was pretty commonplace,” Bartlett said.

Anna furrowed her brow. “Excuse me?”

Bartlett leaned back in his chair. “Have you ever heard of the Frenchman Claude Rochat? No? He’s someone I think about quite a bit. A dull, unimaginative, plodding, dogged fellow, who, in the 1860s and 1870s, worked as an accountant in the employ of the
Directoire
, France’s
own bureau of intelligence. In 1867, it came to his attention that two low-level clerks at the
Directoire
, apparently unacquainted, had both been killed in the course of a fortnight—one the victim of an apparent street robbery, the other trampled to death by a mail coach. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time. Quite unremarkable. But still he wondered, especially after he learned that at the time of death, both of these humble clerks had on their persons costly gold pocket watches—in fact, as he confirmed, the two watches were
identical
, both with a fine cloisonné landscape on the inside of the watchcase. A small oddity, but it arrested his attention, and, to the exasperation of his superiors, he spent the next four years trying to figure out why, and how, this small oddity had come about. In the end, he uncovered a spy ring of extraordinary intricacy: the
Directoire
had been penetrated and manipulated by its Prussian counterparts.” He registered her darting glance and smiled: “Yes, those pocket watches in the case are the very ones. Exquisite craftsmanship. I acquired them a couple of decades ago at an auction. I like having them nearby. It helps me to remember.”

Bartlett closed his eyes for a contemplative moment. “Of course, by the time Rochat completed his investigations, it was too late,” he went on. “Bismarck’s agents, through a cunning diet of misinformation, had already tricked France into declaring war. ‘
À Berlin
’ was the great cry. The result was disastrous for France: the military dominance it had enjoyed since the Battle of Rocroi in 1643 was completely destroyed, in just a couple of months. Can you imagine? The French army, with the Emperor at its head, was led straight into an ingenious ambush near Sedan. And that was the end, needless to say, for Napoleon III. The country lost Alsace-Lorraine, it had to pay staggering reparations, and it had to submit to two years of occupation. An extraordinary blow, it
was—one that shifted the whole course of European history irreversibly. And just a few years earlier, Claude Rochat was tugging at a little thread, not knowing where it would lead, not knowing whether it would lead anywhere. It was just those two lowly clerks and their matching pocket watches.” Bartlett made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Most of the time, something that looks trivial really
is
trivial.
Most
of the time. My job is to worry about such matters. The tiny threads. The boring little discrepancies. The trivial little patterns that just might lead to larger patterns. The most important thing I do is the least glamorous thing imaginable.” An arched eyebrow. “I look for matching pocket watches.”

Anna was silent for a few moments. The Ghost was living fully up to his reputation: cryptic, hopelessly obscure. “I appreciate the history lesson,” she said slowly, “but my frame of reference has always been the here and now. If you really think these deep-storage files have ongoing relevance, why not simply have the CIA investigate?”

Bartlett withdrew a crisp silk pocket square from his suit jacket and began to polish his eyeglasses. “Things get rather awkward around here,” he said. “The ICU tends to get involved only in cases where there’s a real possibility of internal interference or anything else that might preclude a thorough inquiry. Let’s leave it at that.” There was a hint of condescension in his voice.

“Let’s not,” Anna said sharply. It wasn’t a tone to take with the head of a division, especially one as powerful as the ICU, but subservience wasn’t in her skill set, and Bartlett might as well know at the outset whose services he had engaged. “With respect, you’re talking about the possibility that someone in, or retired from, the Agency may be behind the deaths.”

The director of the Internal Compliance Unit blanched slightly. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t deny it.”

Bartlett sighed. “Of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever made.” A tight smile.

“If you think Central Intelligence might be compromised, why not bring in the FBI?”

Bartlett snorted delicately. “Why not bring in the Associated Press? The Federal Bureau of Investigation has many strengths, but discretion isn’t among them. I’m not sure you appreciate the sensitivity of this matter. The fewer people who know about it, the better. That’s why I’m not involving a team—just an individual. The right individual, I dearly hope, Agent Navarro.”

“Even if these deaths really are murders,” she said, “it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever find the killer, I hope you know that.”

“That’s the standard bureaucratic response,” Bartlett said, “but you don’t strike me as a bureaucrat. Mr. Dupree says you’re stubborn and ‘not exactly a team player.’ Well, that’s precisely what I wanted.”

Anna forged ahead. “You’re basically asking me to investigate the CIA. You want me to examine a series of deaths to establish that they are murders, and then—”

“And then to amass any evidence that would allow us to conduct an audit.” Bartlett’s gray eyes shone through his plastic-rimmed glasses. “No matter who’s implicated. Is that clear?”

“As mud,” Anna said. A seasoned investigator, she was used to conducting interviews with witnesses and suspects alike. Sometimes you simply needed to listen. Sometimes, however, you needed to goad, to provoke a response. Art and experience came in knowing when. Bartlett’s story was perforated with elisions and omissions. She appreciated the need-to-know reflexes of a wily old bureaucrat, but in her experience, it helped to know more than you strictly needed to. “I’m not going to play blindman’s bluff,” she said.

Bartlett blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“You must have copies of these Sigma files. You must have scrutinized them closely. And yet you claim you have no idea what Sigma was about.”

“Where are you going with this?” His voice was cool.

“Will you show me these files?”

A rictuslike smile: “No. No, that won’t be possible.”

“Why not?”

Bartlett put his glasses on again. “I’m not under investigation here. As much as I admire your tactics of interrogation. Anyway, I believe I’ve been clear on the relevant points.”

“No, dammit, that’s not good enough! You’re fully acquainted with these files. If you don’t know what they add up to, then at least you’ve got to have your suspicions. An educated hypothesis. Anything at all. Save your poker face for your Tuesday-night card game. I’m not playing.”

Bartlett finally erupted. “For Christ’s sake, you’ve seen enough to know that we’re talking about the reputation of some of the major figures of the postwar era. These are
clearance
files. By themselves, they prove nothing. I had you vetted before our conversation—did that implicate you in my affairs? I trust your discretion. Of course I do. But we’re talking about prominent individuals as well as obscure ones. You can’t simply go stomping around in your sensible shoes.”

Anna listened carefully, listened to the undertone of tension in his voice. “You talk about reputations, yet that’s not what you’re really concerned about, is it?” she pressed. “I need more to go on!”

He shook his head. “It’s like trying to fashion a rope ladder out of gossamer. Nothing that we’ve ever been able to pin down. Half a century ago, something was hatched.
Something
. Something that involved vital interests. The Sigma list encompasses a curious collection of
individuals—some were industrialists, we know, and there are others whose identity we haven’t been able to figure out at all. What they have in common is that a founder of the CIA, someone with enormous power in the forties and fifties, took a direct interest in them. Was he enlisting them?
Targeting
them? We’re
all
playing blindman’s bluff. But it would seem that an undertaking of enormous secrecy was launched. You asked what connects these men. In a real sense, we simply don’t know.” He adjusted his cuffs, the nervous tic of a fastidious man. “You might say we’re at the pocket-watch stage.”

“No offense, but the Sigma list—that goes back half a
century!
”

“Ever been to the Somme, in France?” Bartlett asked abruptly, his eyes a little too bright. “You ought to go—just to look at the poppies growing among the wheat. Every once in a while, a farmer in the Somme cuts down an oak tree, sits down on the trunk, and then sickens and dies. Do you know why? Because during the First World War, a battle had taken place on that field, a canister of mustard gas deployed. The poison gets absorbed by the tree as a sapling, and decades later it’s still potent enough to kill a man.”

“And that’s Sigma, do you think?”

Bartlett’s gaze grew in intensity. “They say the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. I find the more you know, the more unsettling it is to come across things you don’t know about. Call it vanity, or call it caution. I worry about what becomes of unseen little saplings.” A wan smile. “The crooked timber of humanity—it always comes down to the crooked timber. Yes, I appreciate that all this sounds like ancient history to you, and perhaps it is, Agent Navarro. You’ll come back and set me straight.”

“I wonder,” she said.

“Now, you’ll be making contact with various law-enforcement officials, and as far as anyone knows, you’ll be conducting a completely open homicide investigation. Why the involvement of an OSI agent? Your explanation will be terse: because these names have cropped up in the course of an ongoing investigation into the fraudulent transfer of funds, the details of which nobody will press you to disclose. A simple cover, nothing elaborate required.”