The Sigma Protocol (11 page)

He pulled over to the side of the road, his heart pounding. He let out a long, relieved sigh. It was the jet lag, his body still on New York time, the length of the day, the madness at the Bahnhofplatz finally catching up with him.

It was time to get off the highway. St. Moritz was maybe a couple of hours away, but he didn’t dare risk driving any longer. He had to find a place to spend the night.

Two cars passed by, though Ben did not see them.

One was a green Audi, battered and rusty, almost ten years old. Its driver and sole occupant, a tall man of around fifty with long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, turned to inspect Ben’s car, parked on the side of the road.

When the Audi had traveled about a hundred meters beyond Ben’s car, it, too, pulled over to the shoulder.

Then a second car passed Ben’s Opel: a gray sedan with two men inside. “
Glaubst Du, er hat uns entdeckt?
”
the driver asked the passenger in Swiss-German. You think he’s spotted us?

“It’s possible,” the passenger replied. “Why else would he have stopped?”

“He could be lost. He is looking at a map.”

“That could be a ruse. I’m going to pull over.”

The driver noticed the green Audi at the side of the road. “Are we expecting company?” he asked.

Halifax, Nova Scotia

The next morning Anna and Sergeant Arsenault drove up to the house belonging to Robert Mailhot’s widow and rang the bell.

The widow opened the front door a suspicious few inches and stared out at them from the dark of her front hall. She was a small woman of seventy-nine with snow-white hair in a neat bouffant, a large, round head, an open face but wary brown eyes. Her wide flat nose was red, evidence either of weeping or booze.

“Yes?” She was, unsurprisingly, hostile.

“Mrs. Mailhot, I’m Ron Arsenault from the RCMP, and this is Anna Navarro from the United States Department of Justice.” Arsenault spoke with a surprising tenderness. “We wanted to ask you some questions. Could we come in?”

“Why?”

“We have some questions, that’s all.”

The widow’s small brown eyes shone fiercely. “I’m not talking to any police. My husband’s dead. Why don’t you just leave me
alone
?”

Anna sensed the desperation in the old woman’s voice. Her maiden name, according to the documents, was Marie LeBlanc, and she was just about eight years younger than her husband. She didn’t have to talk with
them, though she probably didn’t know that. Everything now turned on the dance of persuasion.

Anna hated dealing with the families of murder victims. Pestering them with questions at such a terrible time, days or even hours after the death of a loved one, was unbearable.

“Mrs. Mailhot,” Arsenault said in an official voice, “we have reason to believe someone may have killed your husband.”

The widow stared at them for a moment. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. The space between front door and jamb narrowed.

“You may be right,” Anna said softly. “But if anyone did anything to him, we want to know about it.”

The widow hesitated. After a moment, she scoffed, “He was old. He had a bad heart. Leave me alone.”

She felt sorry for the old woman, having to undergo interrogation at such a terrible time. But the widow could kick them out any minute, and she couldn’t allow that to happen. In a gentle voice she said, “Your husband could have lived longer than he did. You two could have had more time together. We think someone may have taken that away from you. Something no one had the right to take. If anyone did that to you, we want to find out who it was.”

The widow’s stare seemed to relent.

“Without your help, we’ll never know who took your husband from you.”

Slowly the space widened and the screen door came open.

The front parlor was dark. Mrs. Mailhot switched on a lamp, which cast a sulfurous light. She was wide-hipped and even shorter than she had first appeared to be. She wore a neat gray pleated skirt and an ivory fisherman’s sweater.

The room was gloomy but immaculate, and it smelled of lemon oil. Recently cleaned—perhaps because Mrs. Mailhot expected relatives at her husband’s funeral. Hair and fiber would be a problem. The “crime scene,” such as it was, was not exactly preserved.

The room, Anna noticed, was furnished with great attention to detail. Lace doilies adorned the arms of the tweedy sofa and armchairs. All the white fringed silk lampshades matched. On little end tables silver-framed photographs were placed just so. One of them was a black-and-white wedding picture: a plain, vulnerable-looking bride, the groom dark-haired, sharp-featured, proud.

Atop the walnut television cabinet was a line of identical little ivory elephant figurines. Tacky, yet touching.

“Oh, aren’t those
exquisite
,” Anna said, pointing the elephants out to Arsenault.

“Sure are,” Arsenault said unconvincingly.

“Are they Lenox?” Anna asked.

The widow looked surprised, then gave a proud little smile. “You collect them?”

“My mother did.” Her mother had neither the time nor the money to collect anything except her meager paychecks.

The old woman gestured. “Please sit down.”

Anna took a seat on the couch, Arsenault in the adjoining armchair. She remembered this was the room in which Mailhot had been found dead.

Mrs. Mailhot sat in an uncomfortable-looking ladder-back chair all the way across the room. “I wasn’t here when my husband died,” she said sadly. “I was visiting my sister like I do every Tuesday night. I just feel so terrible he died without me here.”

Anna nodded sympathetically. “Maybe we can talk a little about the way he passed…”

“He died from heart failure,” she said. “The doctor told me that.”

“And he may have,” Anna said. “But sometimes a person can be killed in such a way that it doesn’t look like murder.”

“Why would anyone want to kill Robert?”

Arsenault gave Anna a quick, almost undetectable glance. There was something about the woman’s intonation: it wasn’t a rhetorical question. She sounded as if she really wanted to know. The approach they took now would be crucial. The two had been married since 1951—half a century together. She surely had some inkling of whatever it was, if anything, that her husband might have been involved in.

“You two retired here a few years ago, is that right?”

“Yes,” the old woman said. “What does this have to do with his death?”

“You lived on your husband’s pension?”

Mrs. Mailhot raised her chin defiantly. “Robert took care of the money. He told me never to worry about those things.”

“But did he ever tell you where the money was coming from?”

“I told you, Robert took care of everything.”

“Did your husband tell you that he had one point five million dollars in the bank?”

“We can show you the bank records if you’d like,” Arsenault put in.

The old widow’s eyes betrayed nothing. “I told you, I know very little about our finances.”

“He never talked to you about receiving money from anyone?” Arsenault asked.

“Mr. Highsmith was a generous man,” she said slowly. “He never forgot the little people. The people who had helped him.”

“These were payments from Charles Highsmith?”

Arsenault prompted. Charles Highsmith was a famous, some would say notorious, media baron. With holdings even more extensive than his competitor Conrad Black’s, he owned newspapers, radio stations, and cable companies across North America. Three years ago, Highsmith had died, evidently having fallen overboard from his yacht, although the precise circumstances of the incident remained a matter of some controversy.

The widow nodded. “My husband was in his employ for most of his life.”

“But Charles Highsmith died three years ago,” Arsenault said.

“He must have left instructions for his estate. My husband didn’t explain such things to me. Mr. High-smith made sure we always had enough. That’s the kind of man he was.”

“And what did your husband do to inspire such loyalty?” Anna asked.

“There’s no secret about that,” the widow replied.

“Until he retired fifteen years ago, he worked for him as a bodyguard,” Arsenault said. “And factotum. Someone who did special errands.”

“He was a man Mr. Highsmith could trust implicitly,” the old woman said, as if echoing an overheard accolade.

“You moved here from Toronto right after Charles Highsmith’s death,” Anna said, glancing at her file.

“My husband… had certain ideas.”

“About Highsmith’s death?”

The old woman spoke with obvious reluctance. “Like many people, he wondered about it. About whether it was an accident. Of course, Robert was retired by that point, but he still consulted on security. Sometimes he blamed himself for what happened. I think that’s why he was a little…funny about it. He convinced himself that if it wasn’t an accident, then maybe Highsmith’s
enemies would come after him one day. It sounds crazy. But you understand, he was my husband. I never questioned his decisions.”

“That’s why you moved here,” Anna said, half to herself. After decades in major cities like London and Toronto, her husband had rusticated himself—had, in fact, gone into hiding. He moved to the place his ancestors and hers had once made a home, a place where they knew all the neighbors, a place that seemed safe, where they could keep a low profile.

Mrs. Mailhot was silent. “I never really believed it. My husband had his suspicions, that was all. As he aged, he became more anxious. Some men are like that.”

“You thought it was an eccentricity of his.”

“We all have our eccentricities.”

“And what do you think now?” Anna said gently.

“Now I don’t know what to think.” The old woman’s eyes grew moist.

“Do you know where he kept his financial records?”

“There are checkbooks and all that sort of thing in a box upstairs.” She shrugged. “You can look if you want.”

“Thank you,” Anna said. “We need to go through with you the last week or so of your husband’s life,” Anna said. “In detail. His habits, where he went, any place he traveled. Any calls he might have placed or received. Any letters he got. Any restaurants you went to. Any repairmen or workers who might have come to the house—plumbers, telephone repairmen, carpet cleaners, meter readers. Anything you can think of.”

They interviewed her for the next two hours, stopping only to use the toilet. Even when it was clear the widow was becoming weary, they forged ahead, determined to push her as hard as she’d let them. Anna knew that if they were to stop and ask to come back in the morning, she might change her mind in the meantime
about speaking to them. She might speak to a friend, a lawyer. She might tell them to go to hell.

But two hours later they knew little more than when they began. The widow gave them permission to inspect the house, but they found no signs of forced entry at the front door or any of the windows. Likely the killer—if indeed the old man
had
been murdered—got into the house by means of subterfuge, or was an acquaintance.

Anna found an old Electrolux vacuum cleaner in a closet and removed the bag. It was full, which meant it probably hadn’t been changed since Mailhot died. Good. She’d have the crime-scene people do a fresh-bag vacuum when they arrived. Maybe there would be some trace evidence after all.

Maybe they’d even turn up footprints, tire tracks. She would order elimination prints from the widow and anyone else who visited regularly, and have all the usual surfaces printed.

When they returned to the front parlor, Anna waited for the widow to sit and then chose a chair near her. “Mrs. Mailhot,” she began delicately, “did your husband ever tell you
why
he thought Charles Highsmith might have been the victim of foul play?”

The widow looked at her a long time, as if deciding what to reveal. “
Les grands hommes ont leurs ennemis
,” she said at last, ominously. “Great men have great enemies.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Mrs. Mailhot did not meet her gaze. “It’s just something my husband used to say,” she replied.

Switzerland

Ben took the first exit he came to.

The road went straight for a while, cutting through
flat farmland, and then, after crossing over a set of train tracks, it began to twist through hilly terrain. Every twenty minutes or so, he’d pull over to consult his road map.

He was approaching Chur on the A3 highway, south of Bad Ragaz, when he began to focus on the dark blue Saab behind him. He didn’t have the road to himself and he didn’t expect to. Perhaps the Saab was carrying another lot of ski-happy vacationers. But there was something about the car, something about the way its pace seemed to synchronize with his. Ben pulled over to the side of the road, and the Saab drove right past him. There—he had been imagining things.

Now he resumed his drive. He was being paranoid, and after what he’d been through, who could blame him? He thought once more about Jimmy Cavanaugh, and then abruptly reeled his thoughts in: it filled him with vertigo, like staring into an abyss—a mystery piled upon a mystery. For his own sanity, he could not allow himself to dwell on it. There would be time to sort things out later. Right now, he needed
motion
.

Ten minutes later, images of carnage in the Shopville started to crowd his mind once more, and he reached for the radio dial to distract himself. Speed would help, too, he figured, and he stepped on the accelerator hard, felt the gears mesh smoothly and the car push faster up the sloping highway. He glanced at his rearview mirror and saw a blue Saab—the same blue Saab, he was certain. And as he accelerated, the Saab accelerated, too.

A knot formed in his stomach. At higher speeds, drivers intuitively leave greater distances between themselves and the next car, but the Saab had maintained precisely the same distance behind him as before. If it had wanted to pass him, it would have turned into the passing lane, which meant that its passengers had something else in mind. Ben peered in the rearview again,
tried see through the other car’s windshield, but it was hard to make out anything more than shadows. He could see only that there were two people in the front.
What the hell were they up to?
Now Ben fixed his attention on this road ahead of him. He wasn’t going to let on that he was even aware of them.