The Sigma Protocol (25 page)

The plump man peeled plastic wrap from a white-bread sandwich, then tossed the plastic into the waters. A notably antisocial act by Swiss standards. Ben threw himself into the water, fully clothed, and started to swim toward the boat, his clothing impeding his powerful crawl stroke.

The water was frigid, carrying the bone-chilling cold of the glacier from which it originated, and Ben felt a stiffness seep through his body even as he propelled himself through the slow-moving current.

The man in the motorboat, pushing the sandwich into his face, slurping from his bottle of Kronenberg, was aware of nothing until the small motorboat tilted abruptly leeward. First two hands were visible, the fingers faintly bluish from the cold, and then he saw the man, fully dressed, pull himself up and into the boat, river water sluicing down an expensive-looking suit.

“
Was ist das!
” he shouted. He dropped his beer in alarm. “Wer sind Sie?”

“I need to borrow your boat,” Ben told him in German, trying to stop his teeth from chattering from the cold.

“
Nie! Raus!
” Get out! The man picked up his sturdy fishing pole and brandished it with intended menace.

“Your choice,” Ben said, and then sprang toward the man, tipping him over into the water, where he bobbed comically, buoyed by his life jacket but sputtering with indignation.

“Save your breath.” Ben pointed toward the nearby Zollstrasse bridge. “The tramline will take you wherever you need to go.” He reached over to the engine
throttle and turned it way up. The engine coughed, and then roared, the boat gaining speed as it headed south. He would not be taking it all the way to the Sihlwald, the forest preserve. Half a mile down the river bend would do it. Lying flat against the grip-textured fiber-glass floor of the boat, he was still able to see the taller buildings and storefronts along the Sihl, the immense Migros department store, a bland, boxy structure; the sooty spires of the Schwarzenkirche; the intricately frescoed walls of the Klathaus. Ben knew that he’d be vulnerable to any marksmen in position, but also that the chances of their having anticipated his movements were slim. He felt for the envelope in his jacket pocket, and the waxy enclosure crackled reassuringly. He assumed it was waterproof, but this wasn’t the time to make sure.

The motorboat moved faster, taking him beneath the algaed masonry of the Stauffacherstrasse bridge. Another fifth of a kilometer remained. Then came the unmistakable sounds of a major expressway, the whizzing noise of tires spinning along smooth-worn asphalt, of air against the carriages and contours of trucks and automobiles, the occasional bleat, treble and basso, of horns, the meshing gears of a hundred vehicles moving like the wind. It all fused into a white noise that rose and fell in intensity, the aural vibrations of industrial transportation blended into a mechanical surf.

Ben veered the thrumming motorboat toward the gently sloped retaining wall, heard the scrape of its fiberglass hull against brick as he brought it jerking to a halt. Then he sprang from the boat and toward the roadside gas station where he’d left his rented Range Rover, only minutes from the Nationalstrasse 3, the concrete river where he would merge into the swiftly coursing traffic.

Turning the steering wheel to change lanes, Ben felt a twinge in his left shoulder. He reached over with his right hand and rubbed it gently. Another twinge, sharper this time. He took his hand away. His fingers were sticky, maroon with congealing blood.

Matthias Deschner was in the same seat in front of Suchet’s desk that he had occupied just an hour before. Suchet, behind the desk, was hunched forward, his face tense.

“You should have warned me in advance,” the banker said angrily. “We could have stopped him from accessing the vault!”

“I had no advance notice myself!” Deschner objected. “They only contacted me yesterday. They demanded to know whether I was sheltering him.
Preposterous!
”

“You know full well the penalty for noncompliance in such matters.” Suchet’s face was mottled with rage and fear.

“They made it very clear,” Deschner said tonelessly.

“Only just now? Then they only just learned of your possible connection to the subject?”

“Certainly. Do you think I had any idea what these brothers were involved in? I knew nothing.
Nothing!
”

“That excuse has not always been successful in sparing the Teutonic neck, if I may speak historically.”

“A distant relative asked me for a favor,” Deschner protested. “I wasn’t apprised of its larger significance.”

“And you didn’t inquire?”

“Members of our profession are trained
not
to ask too many questions. I’d think you’d agree with that.”

“And now you expose us
both
to danger!” Suchet snapped.

“As soon as he showed up, I was called. I could only presume they
wanted
him to access the vault!”

There was a knock at the door. Suchet’s secretary entered, holding aloft a small videocassette. “This just came for you from Security, sir.”

“Thank you, Inge,” Suchet said sweetly. “A messenger will be arriving momentarily. I’d like you to seal the tape in an envelope and give it to him.”

“Very good, sir,” the secretary said, and she left the office as quietly as she had come.

In a modern eight-story building on Schaffhausserstrasse, not far from the University of Zurich, three men sat in a room filled with high-powered computers and high-resolution video monitors. It was a studio rented from a multimedia production company that did duplication, restoration, and editing of video for surveillance firms and corporations.

One of the group, a white-haired, scrawny man in shirtsleeves who looked a great deal older than his forty-six years, took a videocassette from a D-2 composite digital-format videotape recorder and placed it in one of the video slots in a Quantel Sapphire video-imaging computer. He had just finished making a digital copy of the surveillance tape he’d been given. Now, using this British-made video-imaging computer that had originally been developed for the Home Office, Britain’s MI-5, he was going to magnify the image.

The white-haired man, who worked in silence, had been one of the top video-enhancement specialists in the Home Office until he was lured away by a private London security firm at double his old salary. These two gentlemen in the room with him had hired him, through the security firm, to do a quick job in Zurich. He had no idea who they were. All he knew was that they were paying him a generous bonus. They had flown him from London to Zurich business class.

Now the two mysterious men sat off by themselves,
talking. They could have been international businessmen from any country in the world, although in fact they were speaking Dutch, which the video expert understood reasonably well.

On the other side of the room, the white-haired technician stared at the computer screen. At the bottom it said CAM 2, along with the date and the time, which flashed by in fractions of a second. He called out to his clients: “All right, now tell me what you’d like done. You want the bloke electronically compared against a photo you’ve got?”

“No,” replied the first Dutchman. “We know who it is. We want to see what he’s reading.”

“I should have figured,” the technician groaned. “Good God, that piece of paper he’s holding is in shadow.”

“How’s the quality of the tape?” the second man asked.

“Not bad,” the tech said. “Two frames a second, which is standard. A lot of these banks use the most god-awful equipment, but fortunately this bank used a high-performance, high-res camera. I mean, I can’t say the camera was positioned terribly well, but that’s not uncommon either.”

The second businessman asked, “So you can zoom in on whatever he’s holding?”

“Sure. The software on this Quantel compensates for all the usual problems you get from digital enlargement—the blockiness and all that. That’s not the problem. The damned thing’s in shadow.”

“Well, you’re supposed to be the best,” the first man said sourly. “You’re certainly the most expensive.”

“I know, I know,” the tech said. “All true. Well, I can bring up the contrast.” He clicked on a pull-down menu that listed “Crisp,” “Zoom,” “Colouring,” and “Contrast.” By clicking on the “+” key he lightened the shadow until the paper the man in the bank vault was looking at was almost readable, then enhanced the resolution by clicking
another number. He tinkered with the contrast some more, then clicked “crisp” to sharpen the image further.

“Good,” he said at last.

“Can you see what he’s reading?” the second man asked.

“Actually, it’s a photograph.”

“A
photograph?
”

“Right. An old one. A group shot. Lots of conservatively dressed men. Looks like a bunch of businessmen. A couple of German officers, too. Yes, a group shot. Mountains in the background—”

“Can you make out their faces?”

“If you give me… just… ah, here we are.” He zoomed in on the photograph until it took up the entire screen. “‘Zurich, 1945,’ it says here. The ‘Sig’ something…?”

The second man glanced at the first. “Good heavens.” He approached the computer monitor.

The tech said, “Sigma AG?”

The second man muttered to the first, “He’s on to it.”

“As I thought,” the first said.

“All right,” said the second man to the technician. “I want you to print out a copy of that. I also want the best head shot of this fellow you can get.”

“Make fifty copies,” put in the first man, rising from his chair.

The second man crossed the room to talk to his colleague. “Put out the word,” he said quietly. “Our precautions have been inadequate. The American has become a serious threat.”

Washington, D.C
.

Anna Navarro hunched forward in her chair. Alan Bartlett’s office was as immaculate as ever, the man’s expression every bit as opaque.

“I’ve tracked Robert Mailhot’s money transfers from the Nova Scotia National Bank back to an account in the Caymans, and there, I’m afraid, I’ve hit a dead end,” Anna said. “The one source we’ve got there confirms that the account shows recent activity involving one of Prosperi’s funds, too. But there, as I say, the money trail goes cold. It’s one thing to learn where the money ends up. It’s another to learn who put the money there in the first place. Should we start working through regular channels?”

“Out of the question,” Bartlett said, a little peevish. “It would compromise the security of the entire operation. That means anyone with an interest in stopping the investigation can do so easily. It also means endangering the lives of others, people who may still be targets.”

“I understand,” Anna said. “But I don’t want a repeat of Asunción, either. That’s the price you pay for going through back-channels. Whoever’s behind this, this—for want of a better word, this conspiracy—obviously had enough influence to stop us.”

“Granted. But once we raise this thing to an A-II level, a sanctioned investigation, it’s like taking out an ad in
The New York Times
, telling the subjects of our inquiries what we’re up to. We can’t assume there aren’t people in the intelligence community working both sides on this matter.”

“An A-II is still highly privileged. I don’t agree—”

“No, you wouldn’t,” he said freezingly. “Perhaps I was wrong—perhaps you really are a loyal bureaucrat at heart.”

She ignored his barb. “I’ve been involved in many international investigations, including homicide investigations, that have been kept quiet. Particularly when we think someone in the government might be implicated.
In El Salvador, when government officials had Americans killed to cover up—”

“As you know, I’m
intimately
acquainted with your previous exploits, Agent Navarro,” Bartlett said impatiently. “You’re speaking of one foreign government. I’m speaking of half a dozen or more. There’s a difference.”

“You say there’s been a victim in Oslo now?”

“That’s our latest intelligence, yes.”

“Then we have the Attorney General’s office make a high-level, confidential appeal to the Office of the Norwegian State Prosecutor, requesting absolute secrecy.”

“
No
. The risks of a direct appeal to the Norwegian authorities are far too great.”

“Then I want the list. Not the list of corpses. I want the names of people with Sigma clearance files. Your ‘hot list.’”

“That’s impossible.”

“
I see
—I only get ’em when they’re dead. Well, in that case, I want off this job.”

He hesitated. “Don’t play games, Ms. Navarro. You’ve been assigned.” Bartlett’s carefully cultivated air of solicitude and noblesse had evaporated. Now Anna caught a glimpse of the steel that had placed Bartlett at the helm of one of the government’s most powerful investigative units. “It’s really not up to you.”

“I can get sick, suddenly become unable to perform my job. Be unable to travel.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“No, not if you gave me the hot list.”

“I told you. It’s impossible. This operation must abide by certain rules. If those rules sometimes amount to constraints, you must accept them as the parameters of your inquiry.”

“Look,” she said, “thirteen of the old men on your
Sigma list are now dead under ‘questionable circumstances,’ let’s just say. Three remain alive, right?”

“To the best of our knowledge.”

“Then let me put it to you this way. Once one of these guys dies, is killed, whatever—we can’t pay the body a visit without some kind of official government cooperation, on whatever level. Right? But if we get to one of them
before
he’s killed… Listen, I realize I’m supposed to be investigating dead people, not live ones. But if we consider them potential witnesses, put them under twenty-four-hour surveillance—
discreetly
, of course.…”

Bartlett stared at her, conflicting imperatives evidently playing across his face. Now he walked to a floor safe taller than he was, opened it, and pulled out a folder. He handed her a sheet of paper stamped
SECRET, NOFORN
, and
NOCONTRACT
. Those classifications stipulated that, in addition to high-level secrecy constraints, it was under no circumstances releasable to foreign nationals or contract employees. “The list,” he said quietly.