The Sigma Protocol (80 page)

“And Ben?” Anna presented the diminutive, brown-skinned man accompanying Denneen. “One more dear friend of mine I’d like you to meet: Ramon Perez.”

Another vigorous handshake. Ramon smiled, showing very white teeth. “An honor,” he said, bobbing his head a little.

He was still smiling when he and Anna drifted off to a corner to talk.

“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” Anna said. “What is it? What’s so funny?” Her moist eyes gleamed with amusement.

Ramon just shook his head. He glanced at her fiancé across the room and then at her, and still he was smiling.

“Ah,” she said at last. “I know what you’re thinking. ‘What a waste,’ right?”

Ramon shrugged but didn’t deny it.

Anna looked over toward Ben until their eyes met. “Well, let me tell you something,” she said. “He ain’t wasted on me.”

Afterward, Ben and Anna found an HCM Lincoln Town Car waiting for them in front of the Metropolis; the driver, seeing them emerge, stood stiffly in front of the car, ready to open the rear door. Ben held Anna’s hand in his gently as the two walked toward the vehicle that would take them away. A faint drizzle made the streets gleam in the evening dusk.

Then Ben started, felt a twinge of adrenaline: the driver looked curiously youthful, almost adolescent, yet compactly, powerfully built. A kaleidoscope flashed before his mind, nightmarish images from a time not long in the past. Ben grasped Anna’s hand fiercely.

The driver turned to face Ben, and the glow from the arched windows of the Metropolis illuminated his face. It was Gianni, Max’s driver for the last two years of his life, a gap-toothed, boyish, high-spirited fellow. Gianni took off his taupe cap, waved it.

“Mr. Hartman,” he called out.

Ben and Anna entered the car, and Gianni closed the door with an efficient thunk before settling into the driver’s seat.

“Where to, Mr. Hartman?” Gianni asked.

Ben glanced at his watch. The night was young, and tomorrow wasn’t a school day, anyway. He turned to Anna. “Where to, Ms. Navarro?” Ben asked.

“Anywhere at all,” she said. “As long as it’s with you.” Her hand found his again, and she rested her head on his shoulder.

Ben inhaled deeply, sensed the warmth of her face
next to his, and felt at peace. It was an odd, unaccustomed feeling.

“Just drive,” Ben said. “All right, Gianni? Anywhere, nowhere—just drive.”

USA TODAY

INSIDERS SPECULATE ABOUT

NEXT SUPREME COURT NOMINEE

Declaring that he “deeply regretted but fully understood” Justice Miriam Bateman’s decision to step down from the U.S. Supreme Court at the conclusion of the spring term, President Maxwell said that he and his advisers would take their time and make a “considered, deliberate” decision about who would be proposed as her successor. “Living up to Justice Bateman’s probity and wisdom will be a heavy burden on any nominee, and we approach this task with humility and with open minds,” the President said in a press conference. However, insiders have already produced a short list of names believed to be under active consideration…

THE FINANCIAL TIMES

MERGER TALKS BETWEEN ARMAKON, TECHNOCORP

In what would be an unusual pairing of two New Economy powerhouses, officials at both the Vienna-based agricultural and biotechnology giant Armakon and the Seattle-based software giant Technocorp acknowledged that the corporations had entered into preliminary merger negotiations. “Biotech is increasingly
about computing, and software is increasingly about applications,” Arnold Carr, Technocorp’s CEO, told reporters. “We’ve been strategic partners in the past, but a more formal consolidation would, we believe, ensure the long-term growth of both our companies.” One prominent member of Technocorp’s board of directors, former Secretary of State Dr. Walter Reisinger, said that the boards of both companies fully supported management in the decision. According to Reinhard Wolff, the managing director of Armakon, the merger would obviate the need for costly outsourcing of programming and potentially represent billions in savings. He credited the “truly wise and distinguished directors” of both companies with having facilitated the negotiations.

Large shareholders in both companies seemed to approve of the merger talks. “There is strength in unity,” Ross Cameron, whose Sante Fe Group holds 12.5 percent of Technocorp’s series A stock, said in a prepared statement, “and we believe that together these companies have a tremendous amount to offer the world.”

A joint press release issued by the companies said that the combined corporation would be able to take a position of leadership in the health sciences.

“Given Armakon’s record of extensive research in biotechnology, and Technocorp’s enormous resources,” Wolff stated, “the merged companies will be able to push back the frontiers of the life sciences in ways we cannot simply foresee.”

On Wall Street, analysts had sharply divided reactions to the proposed merger…

Turn the page for an excerpt from

ROBERT LUDLUM’S

THE JANSON DIRECTIVE

Now available from St. Martin’s Paperbacks!

Two uniformed women were standing behind a counter as he entered the Platinum Club lounge of Pacifica Airlines. The uniforms and the counter were both the same blue-gray hue. The women’s jackets featured the sort of epaulets to which the major airlines were so devoted. In another place and time, Janson reflected, they would have rewarded extensive battlefield experience.

One of the women had been speaking to a jowly, heavyset man who wore an open blue blazer and a beeper clipped to his belt. A glint of badge metal from his inside coat pocket told Janson that he was an FAA inspector, no doubt taking his break where there was human scenery to be enjoyed. They broke off when Janson stepped forward.

“Your boarding card, please,” the woman said, turning to him. She had a powdery tan that ended somewhere below her chin, and the kind of brassy hair that came from an applicator tip.

Janson flashed his ticket and the plastic card with which Pacifica rewarded its extremely frequent fliers.

“Welcome to the Pacifica Platinum Club, Mr. Janson,” the woman twinkled.

“We’ll let you know when your plane is about to board,” the other attendant—chestnut bangs, eye shadow that matched the blue piping on her jacket—told him in a low, confiding voice. She gestured toward the entrance to the lounge area as if it were the pearly gates. “Meantime,
enjoy our hospitality facilities and relax.” An encouraging nod and a broad smile; Saint Peter’s could not have held more promise.

Carved out between the structural girders and beams of an overloaded airport, venues like Pacifica’s Platinum Club were where the modern airline tried to cater to the carriage trade. Small bowls were filled not with the salted peanuts purveyed to
les misérables
in coach but with the somewhat more expensive tree nuts: cashews, almonds, walnuts, pecans. At a granite-topped beverage station, there were crystal jugs sticky with peach nectar and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The carpeting was microfiber swank, the airline’s signature blue-gray adorned with trellises of white and navy. On round tables interspersed among large armchairs were neatly folded copies of the
International Herald Tribune, USA Today
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and the
Financial Times
. A Bloomberg terminal flickered with meaningless numbers and images, shadow puppets of the global economy. Through louvered blinds, the tarmac was only just visible.

Janson flipped through the papers with little interest. When he turned to the
Journal
’s “Market Watch,” he found his eyes sliding down column inches of familiarly bellicose metaphors: bloodshed on Wall Street as a wave of profit takers launched an onslaught against the Dow. A sports column in
USA Today
was taken up with the collapse of the Raiders’ offense in the face of the rampaging blitzes of the Vikings’ linemen. Meanwhile, invisible speakers piped in a song by the pop diva
du jour
, from the soundtrack of a blockbuster movie about a legendary Second World War battle. An expense of blood and sweat had been honored by an expense of studio money and computer-graphics technology.

Janson settled heavily into one of the cloth-upholstered armchairs, his eyes drifting toward the dataport
stations where brand managers and account executives plugged in their laptops and collected e-mail from clients, employers, prospects, underlings, and lovers, in an endless search for action items. Peeking from attaché cases were the spines of books purporting to offer marketing advice from the likes of Sun Tzu, the art of war repurposed for the packaged-goods industry. A sleek, self-satisfied, unthreatened folk, Janson mused of the managers and professionals who surrounded him. How these people loved peace, yet how they loved the imagery of war! For them, military regalia could safely be romanticized, the way animals of prey became adornments after the taxidermist’s art.

There were moments when Janson almost felt that he, too, had been stuffed and mounted. Nearly every raptor was now on the endangered-species list, not least the bald eagle, and Janson recognized that he himself had once been a raptor—a force of aggression against forces of aggression. Janson had known ex-warriors who had become addicted to a diet of adrenaline and danger, and who, when their services were no longer required, had effectively turned themselves into toy soldiers. They spent their time stalking opponents in the Sierre Madre with paintball guns or, worse, pimping themselves out to unsavory firms with unsavory needs, usually in parts of the world where baksheesh was the law of the land. Janson’s contempt for these people was profound. And yet he sometimes asked himself whether the highly specialized assistance he offered American businesses was not merely a respectable version of the same thing.

He was lonely, that was the truth of it, and his loneliness was never more acute than in the odd interstices of his overscheduled life—the time spent after checking in and before takeoff, the time spent waiting in overde-signed venues meant, simply, for waiting. At the end of
his next flight, nobody was anticipating his arrival except another visored limo driver who would have misspelled his name on a white cardboard sign, and then another corporate client, an anxious division head of a Los Angeles–based light industrial firm. It was a tour of duty that took Janson from one corner office to another. There was no wife and no children, though once there had been a wife and at least hopes for a child, for Helene had been pregnant when she died. “To make God laugh, tell Him your plans,” she used to quote her grandfather as saying, and the maxim had been borne out, horribly.

Janson eyed the amber bottles behind the bar, their crowded labels an alibi for the forgetfulness they held inside. He kept himself in fighting trim, trained obsessively, but even when he was in active deployment he was never above a slug or two. Where was the harm?

“Paging Richard Alexander,” a nasal voice called through the public announcement system. “Passenger Richard Alexander. Please report to any Pacifica counter.”

It was the background noise of any airport, but it jolted Janson out of his reverie. Richard Alexander was an operational alias he had often used in bygone days. Reflexively, he craned his head around him. A minor coincidence, he thought, and then he realized that, simultaneously, his cell phone was purring, deep in his breast pocket. He inserted the earphone of the Nokia tri-band and pressed
SND
. “Yes?”

“Mr. Janson? Or should I say, Mr. Alexander?” A woman’s voice, sounding strained, desperate.

“Who is this?” Janson spoke quietly. Stress numbed him, at least at first—made him calmer, not more agitated.

“Please, Mr. Janson. It’s urgent that we meet
at once
.” The vowels and consonants had the precision that was
peculiar to those who were both foreign-born and well educated. And the ambient noise in the background was even more suggestive.

“Say more.”

There was a pause. “When we meet.”

Janson pressed
END
, terminating the call. He felt a prickling on the back of his neck. The coincidence of the page and the call, the specification that a meeting take place immediately: the putative supplicant was obviously in close proximity. The call’s background acoustics had merely cinched his suspicions. Now his eyes darted from person to person, even as he tried to figure out who would seek him out this way.

Was it a trap, set by an old, unforgiving adversary? There were many who would feel avenged by his death; for a few, possibly, the thirst for vengeance would not be entirely unjustified. And yet the prospect seemed unlikely. He was not in the field; he was not spiriting a less-than-willing VKR “defector” from the Dardanelles through Athens to a waiting frigate, bypassing every legal channel of border control. He was in O’Hare Airport, for God’s sake. Which may have been why this rendezvous was chosen. People tended to feel safe at an airport, moated by metal detectors and uniformed security guards. It would be a cunning act to take advantage of that illusion of security. And, in an airport that handled nearly 200,000 travelers each day, security was indeed an illusion.

Possibilities were considered and swiftly discarded. By the thick plate glass overlooking the tarmac, sitting in slats of sunlight, a blond woman was apparently studying a spreadsheet on her laptop; her cell phone was at her side, Janson verified, and unconnected to any earpiece. Another woman, closer to the entrance, was engaged in spirited conversation with a man whose wedding ring was visible only as a band of pale skin on
an otherwise bronzed hand. Janson’s eyes kept roaming until, seconds later, he saw her, the one who had just called.

Sitting with deceptive placidity in a dim corner of the lounge was an elegant, middle-aged woman holding a cell phone to her ear. Her hair was white, worn up, and she was attired in a navy Chanel suit with discreet mother-of-pearl buttons. Yes, she was the one: he was certain of it. What he could not be certain of were her intentions. Was she an assassin, or part of a kidnapping team? These were among a hundred possibilities that, however remote, he had to rule out. Standard tactical protocol, ingrained from years in the field, demanded it.