The Sigma Protocol (43 page)

For what the detective had discovered late yesterday afternoon was nothing less than sensational. The routine inquiries he had put out concerning Jürgen Lenz had come back with the most unexpected, the most astonishing answers.

Hoffman knew that Dr. Lenz no longer practiced medicine, but he wanted to know why. To that end he had requested a copy of Lenz’s medical license from the
Arztekammer
, the archives where the licenses of all doctors in Austria are kept.

There was no medical license for a Jürgen Lenz.

There had never been one.

Hoffman had wondered: How can this possibly be? Was Lenz lying? Had he never practiced medicine?

Lenz’s official biography, freely handed out at the Lenz Foundation offices, had him graduating from medical school at Innsbruck, so Hoffman checked there.

Jürgen Lenz had never gone to medical school at Innsbruck.

Driven now by an insatiable curiosity, Hoffman had gone to the Universität Wien, where the records of medical licensing examinations for all physicians in Austria are kept.

Nothing.

Hans Hoffman had furnished his client with the name and address of a man whose biography was faked. Something was very, very wrong.

Hoffman had pored over his notes, stored in his
laptop computer, trying to make sense of it, attempting to assemble the facts in some other way.

Now he stared at the screen again, scrolling down the list of records he had checked, trying to think of some omission that might explain this strange situation.

A loud flat buzz jolted him. Someone was calling up to his office from the street. He got up and went over to the intercom mounted on the wall.

“Yes?”

“I’m looking for Mr. Hoffman.”

“Yes?”

“My name is Leitner. I don’t have an appointment, but I have some important business to discuss.”

“What sort of business?” Hoffman asked. Not a salesman, he hoped.

“Some confidential work. I need his help.”

“Come on up. Second floor.” Hoffman pressed the button that electronically unlocked the building’s front door.

He saved the Lenz file, shut off his laptop, and opened his office door.

A man in a black leather jacket, with steel-gray hair, a goatee, and a stud earring in his left ear, said, “Mr. Hoffman?”

“Yes?” Hoffman sized him up, as he did all potential clients, attempting to assess how much money the fellow might have to spend. The man’s face was smooth, unlined, almost tight around his high cheekbones. Despite the steel-gray hair, he was probably no older than forty. Physically an impressive specimen, but the features were unremarkable, undistinguishable, except for the dead gray eyes. A serious man.

“Come on in,” Hoffman said cordially. “Tell me, what can I do for you?”

It was only nine in the morning when Anna returned to the hotel.

As she inserted the electronic key-card into the slot above the doorknob, she could hear the sound of water running. She entered swiftly, hanging up her coat in the closet by the door, and made her way into the bedroom. An important decision lay ahead of her: she would have to rely upon her intuitions, she knew.

Presently, there was the sound of the shower being turned off, and Ben appeared in the doorway of the bathroom, evidently unaware that she had returned.

He was still dripping water, a towel draped loosely around his midriff. His body was chiseled, heavily muscled in a way that once suggested manual labor and now, she knew, suggested privilege—a personal trainer, an active sports life. With a clinical eye, she surveyed the evidence of his physical regimen—the washboard stomach, the pectorals like twin shields, the swelling biceps. Water beaded on his tan skin. He’d removed the dressing from his shoulder, where a small, angry red patch was visible.

“You’re back,” he said, finally taking in her presence. “What’s new?”

“Here, let me take a look at the shoulder,” she said, and he walked toward her. Was her interest in him purely professional? Something in the pit of her stomach made her wonder.

“It’s pretty much healed,” she pronounced. She ran a finger around the perimeter of the reddened area. “You don’t really need the dressing anymore. A thin layer of Bacitracin, maybe. I’ve got a first-aid kit in my luggage.”

She went to retrieve it. When she returned, he was wearing boxer shorts, and had toweled himself off, but was still shirtless.

“Yesterday you were saying something about the CIA,” she said as she fumbled with the tube of ointment.

“Maybe I’m wrong about them, I don’t know anymore,” he said. “Lenz had his suspicions. But I can’t really bring myself to believe it.”

Could he be lying? Had he been deceiving her last night? It seemed incredible. It defied every instinct, every intuition she possessed. She could detect no bravado, no tension in his voice—none of the usual signals of deception.

As she rubbed the antiseptic ointment on his shoulder, their faces were close. She smelled the soap, and the green-apple fragrance of the hotel shampoo, and something more, something faintly loamy, which was the man himself. She inhaled quietly, deeply. And then, abruptly beset by a storm of emotions, she moved away.

Was her radar, her assessment of his honesty, being distorted by other feelings? That wasn’t something she could afford in her position, especially under the current circumstances.

On the other hand, what if the CIA officers had been misinformed? Who were their sources, anyway? A caseworker was only as good as his assets. She knew as well as anyone how fallible the system could be. And if there were CIA involvement, would it be safe to remand him to that agency? There was too much uncertainty in her world: she had to trust her instincts, or she was lost.

Now she dialed Walter Heisler. “I need to ask you a favor,” she said. “I called Hartman’s hotel. He seems to have left without checking out. There was some sort of shootout. Evidently he’s left his luggage there. I want to go through it, really take my time with it.”

“Well, you know, that’s actually our property, once an investigation is started.”

“Have you started one?”

“No, not yet, but—”

“Then could you please do me a huge favor and have the luggage shipped over to me, at my hotel?”

“Well, I suppose this can be arranged,” Heisler said sullenly. “Though it is… rather unorthodox.”

“Thanks, Walter,” she said warmly, and hung up.

Ben wandered over to her, still wearing nothing but boxer shorts. “Now, that’s what I call full service,” he said, grinning.

She tossed him an undershirt. “It’s a little chilly outside,” she said, her throat dry.

Ben Hartman walked out of the hotel, glancing around nervously. Showered and shaved, even though he was wearing the same now-rumpled clothes he’d slept in, he felt decently crisp. He took in the broad, heavily trafficked avenue and beyond, the green of the Stadt-park, feeling exposed, vulnerable, then he turned right and headed toward the first district.

He had spent the last half hour making telephone calls, one after another. First he had awakened a contact, a friend of a friend, in the Cayman Islands, who operated a two-man “investigative” service that supposedly did background checks for multinational corporations on potential hires. In reality, the firm was most often engaged by wealthy individuals or multinationals who once in a while had a reason to penetrate the secrecy of the banks down there.

O’Connor Security Investigations was the highly secretive enterprise of an Irish expatriate and former constabulary officer named Fergus O’Connor, who had first come to the Caymans as a security guard for a British bank there and stayed. He’d become a security officer, then chief of security. When he realized that his web of contacts and his expertise were marketable—he
knew all the other chiefs of security, knew who could be paid off and who couldn’t, knew how the system really operated—he’d gone into business for himself.

“This better be bloody important,” Fergus had growled into the phone.

“I don’t know about that,” Ben replied. “But it will be awfully lucrative.”

“Now we’re talkin’,” Fergus said, mollified.

Ben read a list of routing codes and wire-transfer numbers to him, and said he’d call back at the end of the day.

“It’ll take me a hell of a lot longer than that,” Fergus objected.

“Even if we double your usual fee? Does that speed things up?”

“Bloody well right it does.” There was a pause. “By the way, you do know that they’re saying the most appalling things about you, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“A whole load of bollocks. You know how the rumor mill goes. They say you’ve gone off on some murderous rampage.”

“You’re kidding.”

“They say you killed your own brother.”

Ben didn’t respond, but felt sick. Was there not a sense in which it was true?

“Just crazy stuff like that. Not my specialty, but I know a thing or two about how people spread rumors in the financial world, just to stir things up. A load of bollocks, as I say. Still, it’s interesting that someone’s decided to put it out.”

Jesus. “Thanks for the heads-up, Fergus,” Ben said, sounding wobblier than he would have liked.

He took a few deep breaths to steady himself, and placed a second call, to a young woman in the New
York office of a different sort of investigative firm. This company was large, international, legitimate, staffed with ex–FBI agents and even a few ex–CIA officers. Knapp Incorporated specialized in helping corporations conduct “due diligence” on potential business partners and solving white-collar crime, embezzlements, inside thefts—a gumshoe agency on a global scale. From time to time it was hired by Hartman Capital Management.

One of Knapp’s star investigators was Megan Crosby, a Harvard Law grad who did corporate background checks like no one else. She had an uncanny knack for rooting out and then untangling Byzantine, heavily cloaked corporate structures designed to escape the scrutiny of regulators, wary investors, or competitors, and was as good as anyone at flushing out who really owned whom, who was behind what shell company. How she did it she never divulged to her clients. A magician must not divulge his tricks. Ben had taken Megan out to lunch a number of times and, since he sometimes had occasion to call her from Europe, she had given him her home phone number.

“It’s three in the morning, who’s calling?” was how she answered the phone.

“Ben Hartman, Megan. Forgive me, it’s important.”

Megan was instantly alert for her lucrative client. “No problem. What can I do for you?”

“I’m in the middle of a big-deal meeting in Amsterdam,” he explained, lowering his voice. “There’s a small biotech firm in Philadelphia called Vortex Laboratories I’m intrigued by.” Anna, wanting his help, had mentioned Vortex to him. “I want to know who owns them, who they might have quiet partnerships with, that kind of thing.”

“I’ll do what I can,” she said, “but no promises.”

“End of the day possible?”

“Jesus.” She paused. “End of which day are we talking? Yours or mine? That extra six hours will make a difference.”

“Then make it the end of your day. Do what you can.”

“Got it,” she said.

“One more thing. There’s a guy named Oscar Peyaud, based in Paris, that HCM has used for French due-diligence. Knapp has him on retainer. I need direct contact info for him.”

By ten o’clock the Graben, one of Vienna’s great pedestrian thoroughfares, was bustling with window-shoppers, businesspeople, tourists. He turned onto Kohlmarkt and passed Café Demel, the renowned pastry shop, where he turned to look at the lavish display windows. In its reflection, he noticed someone glancing at him and then quickly looking away.

A tall, thuggish-looking man in an ill-fitting dark blue raincoat. He had a thatch of unruly salt-and-pepper black hair, a ruddy face, and the heaviest eyebrows Ben had ever seen, a veritable wheat field of brow almost an inch thick, mostly black but salted with a little gray. The man’s cheeks were covered with gin blossoms, the spiderwebs of broken capillaries that come from heavy drinking.

Ben knew he had seen the man before. He was convinced of it.

Somewhere, some time in the last day or two he had seen this same ruddy-cheeked man with the wheat-field eyebrows. In a crowd somewhere, but where?

Or had he?

Was paranoia overcoming him? Was he seeing faces, imagining that his enemies were everywhere?

Ben turned to look again, but the man had disappeared.

“My dear Ms. Navarro,” Alan Bartlett said. “I wonder if we have different conceptions of what the fulfillment of your brief consists of. I must say I’m disappointed. You created high expectations.”

Anna had placed a call to Robert Polozzi, of ID Section, only to be switched over, with no warning, to Bartlett.

“Listen,” she protested, phone handset vised between her neck and left shoulder, “I think I’m on the verge—”

Bartlett talked over her words. “You are supposed to check in on a regular basis, Agent Navarro. And not disappear like a college student on spring break.”

“If you’ll listen to what I’ve turned up—” Anna began, exasperated.

“No, you listen to me, Agent Navarro. Your instructions are to wrap this matter up, and that’s what you are going to do. We’ve learned that Ramago has already been taken out. Rossignol was our last, best chance. I can’t speak to what means you used to reach him, but it quite clearly resulted in his death. Apparently I was misled as to your sense of discretion.” Bartlett’s voice was an icicle.

“But the Sigma list—”

“You spoke to me of surveillance and preemption with respect to this subject. You did not alert me that you meant to draw a large bull’s-eye on him. How many times did I emphasize the delicacy of your charge? How many times?”

Anna felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. “I apologize if anything that I did had the effect of—”

“No, Agent Navarro, I blame myself. It was I who made the assignment. I cannot say I wasn’t counseled against it. It was my own mulishness, you see. Trusting you with this assignment was my mistake. I take full responsibility.”

“Cut the crap,” Anna said, suddenly fed up. “You don’t have the data to support your accusations.”