The Sigma Protocol (7 page)

“I’ll pursue the sort of investigation I’ve been trained to do,” Anna said warily. “That’s all I can promise.”

“That’s all I’m asking for,” Bartlett replied smoothly. “Your skepticism may be well founded. But one way or the other, I’d like to be sure. Go to Nova Scotia. Assure me that Robert Mailhot really did die of natural causes. Or—confirm that he
didn’t
.”

Ben was driven to the headquarters of the
Kantonspolizei
, the police of the canton of Zurich, a grimy yet elegant old stone building on Zeughausstrasse. He was led in through an underground parking garage by two silent young policemen and up several long flights of stairs into a relatively modern building that adjoined the older one. The interior looked like it belonged in a suburban American high school, circa 1975. To any of his questions, his two escorts answered only with shrugs.

His thoughts raced. It was no accident that Cavanaugh was there on Bahnhofstrasse. Cavanaugh had been in Zurich with the deliberate intent to murder him. Somehow the body had disappeared, had been removed swiftly and expertly, and the gun planted in his bag. It was clear that others were involved with Cavanaugh, professionals. But who—and, again,
why?

Ben was taken first to a small fluorescent-lit room and seated in front of a stainless-steel table. As his police escorts remained standing, a man in a short white coat emerged and, without making eye contact, said, “
Ihre Hände, bitte
.” Ben extended his hands. It was pointless to argue, he knew. The technician pumped a mist from a plastic spray bottle on both sides of his hands, then rubbed a cotton-tipped plastic swab lightly but thoroughly over the back of his right hand. Then he placed the swab in a plastic tube. He repeated the exercise
for the palm, and then did the same with Ben’s other hand. Four swabs now reposed in four carefully labeled plastic tubes, and the technician took them with him as he left the room.

A few minutes later, Ben arrived at a pleasant, sparely furnished office on the third floor, where a broad-shouldered, stocky man in plainclothes introduced himself as Thomas Schmid, a homicide detective. He had a wide, pockmarked face and a very short haircut with short bangs. For some reason Ben remembered a Swiss woman he’d once met at Gstaad telling him that cops in Switzerland were called
bullen
, “bulls,” and this man demonstrated why.

Schmid began asking Ben a series of questions—name, date of birth, passport number, hotel in Zurich, and so on. He sat at a computer terminal, typing out the answers with one finger. A pair of reading glasses hung from his neck.

Ben was angry, tired, and frustrated, his patience worn thin. It took great effort to keep his tone light. “Detective,” he said, “am I under arrest or not?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, this has been fun and all, but if you’re not going to arrest me, I’d like to head on back to my hotel.”

“We would be happy to arrest you if you’d like,” the detective replied blandly, the barest glint of menace in his smile. “We have a very nice cell waiting for you. But if we can keep this friendly, it will all be much simpler.”

“Aren’t I allowed to make a phone call?”

Schmid extended both hands, palms up, at the beige phone at the edge of his crowded desk. “You may call the American consulate here, or your attorney. As you wish.”

“Thank you,” Ben said, picking up the phone and glancing at his watch. It was early afternoon in New
York. Hartman Capital Management’s in-house attorneys all practiced tax or securities law, so he decided to call a friend who practiced international law.

Howie Rubin and he had been on the Deerfield ski racing team together and had become close friends. Howie had come to Bedford several times for Thanksgiving and, like all of Ben’s friends, had particularly taken to Ben’s mother.

The attorney was at lunch, but Ben’s call was patched through to Howie’s cell phone. Restaurant noise in the background made Howie’s end of the conversation hard to make out.

“
Christ
, Ben,” Howie said, interrupting Ben’s summary. Someone next to him was talking loudly. “All right, I’ll tell you what I tell all my clients who get arrested while on ski vacations in Switzerland. Grin and bear it. Don’t get all high and mighty. Don’t play the indignant American. No one can grind you down with rules and regulations and everything-by-the-book like the Swiss.”

Ben glanced at Schmid, who was tapping at his keyboard and no doubt listening. “I’m beginning to see that. So what am I supposed to do?”

“The way it works in Switzerland, they can hold you for up to twenty-four hours without actually arresting you.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“And if you piss them off, they can throw you in a dirty little holding cell overnight. So don’t.”

“Then what do you recommend?”

“Hartman, you can charm a dog off a meat truck, buddy boy, so just be your usual self. Any problems, call me and I’ll get on the phone and threaten an international incident. One of my partners does a lot of corporate espionage work, point being we’ve got access to some pretty high-powered databases. I’ll pull Cavanaugh’s records,
see what we can find. Give me the phone number where you are right now.”

When Ben had hung up, Schmid led him into an adjoining room and sat him at a desk near another terminal. “Have you been to Switzerland before?” Schmid asked pleasantly, as if he were a tour guide.

“A number of times,” Ben said. “Mostly to ski.”

Schmid nodded distractedly. “A popular recreation. Very good for relieving stress, I think. Very good for letting off tension.” His gaze narrowed. “You must have a lot of stress from your work.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Stress can make people do remarkable things. Day after day they bottle it up, and then, one day,
boom!
They explode. When this happens, they surprise themselves, I think, as much as other people.”

“As I told you, the gun was planted. I never used it.” Ben was livid, but he spoke as coolly as he could. It would do no good to provoke the detective.

“And yet by your own account, you killed a man, bludgeoned him with your bare hands. Is this something you do in your normal line of work?”

“These were hardly normal circumstances.”

“If I were to talk to your friends, Mr. Hartman, what would they tell me about you? Would they say you had a temper?” He gave Ben an oddly contemplative look. “Would they say you were… a violent man?”

“They’d tell you I’m as law abiding as they come,” Ben said. “Where are you going with these questions?” Ben looked down at his own hands, hands that had slammed a lamp fixture against Cavanaugh’s skull.
Was
he violent? The detective’s imputations were preposterous—he’d acted purely in self-defense—and yet his mind drifted back a few years.

He could see Darnell’s face even now. One of his fifth-graders at East New York, Darnell had been a good
kid, an A student, bright and curious, the best in his class. Then something happened to him. His grades dropped, and before long he stopped handing in homework altogether. Darnell never got in fights with the other kids, and yet from time to time welts would be visible on his face. Ben talked to him after class one day. Darnell couldn’t look him in the eye. His expression was cloudy with fear. Finally he told him that Orlando, his mother’s new boyfriend, didn’t want him to waste time on schoolwork; he needed him to help bring in money. “Bring in money how?” Ben had asked, but Darnell wouldn’t answer. When he telephoned Darnell’s mother, Joyce Stuart, her responses were skittish, evasive. She wouldn’t come into the school, refused to discuss the situation, refused to admit anything might be wrong. She, too, sounded scared. A few days later, he found Darnell’s address from student records and paid a visit.

Darnell lived on the second floor of a building with a ruined facade, a stairwell festooned with graffiti. The buzzer was broken, but the apartment door was unlocked, and so he traipsed up the stairs and knocked on 2B. After a long wait, Darnell’s mother appeared, visibly battered—her cheeks bruised, her lips swollen. He introduced himself and asked to come in. Joyce paused, then led him toward the small kitchen, with its deeply gouged countertops of beige Formica and yellow cotton drapes flapping in the breeze.

Ben heard yelling in the background before the mother’s boyfriend strode over. “Who the fuck are you?” demanded Orlando, a tall, powerfully built man in a red tank top and loose jeans. Ben recognized a convict’s physique: an upper body so overdeveloped that the muscles looked draped over his chest and shoulders like a lifejacket.

“He’s Darnell’s schoolteacher,” Darnell’s mother said, the words cottony from her bruised lips.

“And you—are you Darnell’s guardian?” Ben asked Orlando.

“Hell, you could say I’m his teacher now. Only, I’m teaching him shit he needs to know. Unlike you.”

Now Ben saw Darnell, fear making him look even younger than his ten years, padding into the kitchen to join them. “Go away, Darnell,” his mother said in a half-whisper.

“Darnell don’t need you filling his head with bull-shit. Darnell needs to learn how to move rocks.” Orlando smiled, revealing a gleaming gold front.

Ben felt a jolt.
Moving rocks:
selling crack. “He’s a fifth-grader. He’s ten years old.”

“That’s right. A juvenile. Cops know he ain’t worth arresting.” He laughed. “I gave him the choice, though: he could either peddle rocks or peddle his ass.”

The words, the man’s casual brutality, sickened Ben, but he forced himself to speak calmly. “Darnell has more potential than anyone in his class. You have a duty to let him excel.”

Orlando snorted. “He can make his living on the street, same as me.”

Then he heard Darnell’s treble voice, shaky but resolute. “I don’t want to do it anymore,” he told Orlando. “Mr. Hartman knows what’s right.” Then, louder, bravely: “I don’t want to be like you.”

Joyce Stuart’s features froze in a preemptive cringe: “Don’t, Darnell.”

It was too late. Orlando lashed out, cracking the ten-year-old in the jaw, the blow propelling him out of the room. He turned to Ben: “Now get your ass out of here. In fact, let me help you.”

Ben felt himself stiffen as rage coursed through his body. Orlando slammed his open hand against Ben’s chest, but instead of staggering backward, Ben lunged toward him, pounding a fist into the man’s temple, then
another, pummeling his head like a speedbag. Stunned, Orlando froze for a crucial few moments, and then his powerful arms banged uselessly against Ben’s sides—Ben was too close for him to land a punch. And the frenzy of rage was an anaesthetic, anyway: Ben didn’t even feel the body blows until Orlando slid limply to the floor. He was down, not out.

Orlando’s eyes flicked at him, the leering defiance replaced by fear. “You crazy,” he murmured.

Was he? What had come over him? “If you ever touch Darnell again,” Ben said, with a deliberate calm he did not feel, “I will kill you.” He paused between each word for emphasis. “Do we understand each other?”

Later, from his friend Carmen in social services, he’d find out that Orlando left Joyce and Darnell later that day, never to return. If Ben hadn’t been told, though, he soon would have guessed from the dramatic improvement in Darnell’s grades and general demeanor.

“All right, man,” Orlando had said at the time, in a subdued tone, gazing up at him from the kitchen floor. “See, we just had a misunderstanding.” He coughed. “I ain’t looking for more trouble.” He coughed again and murmured, “You crazy. You crazy.”

“Mr. Hartman, can you please put your right thumb here?” Schmid indicated a small white oblong marked IDENTIX TOUCHVIEW, on top of which a small oval glass panel glowed ruby red.

Ben placed his right thumb on the glass oval, then did the same with his left. His prints appeared immediately, much enlarged, on a computer monitor angled partly toward him.

Schmid tapped in a few numbers and hit the return key, setting off the high-pitched screech of a modem. He turned toward Ben and said apologetically, “This goes right to Bern. We will know in five or ten minutes.”

“Know what?”

The detective rose and gestured for Ben to follow him back to the first room. “Whether there is already a warrant for your arrest in Switzerland.”

“I think I might remember if there was one.”

Schmid stared at him a long time before he started to speak. “I know your type, Mr. Hartman. For rich Americans like you, Switzerland is a country of chocolates, banks, cuckoo clocks, and ski resorts. You’d like to imagine that each of us is your
Hausdiener
, your manservant, yes? But you do know Switzerland. For centuries, every European power wished to make us its duchy. None ever succeeded. Now maybe your country, with its power and wealth, thinks it can do the same. But you are not—what is your expression—‘calling the shots’ here. There is no chocolate for you in this office. And it is not up to you to decide when, or whether, you are released.” He leaned back in his chair, smiling gravely. “Welcome to Switzerland, Herr Hartman.”

Another man, tall and thin, in a heavily starched white lab coat, came into the room as if on cue. He wore rimless glasses and had a small bristle mustache. Without introducing himself, he pointed to a white-tiled section of the wall marked with metric gradations. “You will please to stand there,” he ordered.

Trying not to show his exasperation, Ben stood with his back flat against the tiles. The technician measured his height, then led him to a white lab sink, where he turned a lever that extruded a white paste and instructed Ben to wash his hands. The soap was creamy yet gritty and smelled of lavender. At another station, the tech rolled sticky black ink onto a glass plate and had Ben place each hand flat onto it. With long, delicate, manicured fingers, he rolled each of Ben’s fingers first on blotter paper, then carefully onto separate squares on a form.

While the technician worked, Schmid got up and
went into the adjoining room, then returned a few moments later. “Well, Mr. Hartman, we did not get a hit. There is no warrant outstanding.”