The Sigma Protocol (55 page)

“Sonnenfeld said Gerhard Lenz’s widow may be alive,” Ben said broodingly. “Wouldn’t she be in a position to know?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Ben said. “You really think we’ve got a shot at getting out of this country undetected?”

“There aren’t going to be any transatlantic flights at this airport. But we can get to some of the European capitals. I suggest that we both travel separately. There’s a decent chance they’re looking for a man and a woman traveling together.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll go via Madrid; you take Amsterdam.”

They settled into another silence, less tense and more companionable. From time to time, Ben found his gaze drifted toward Anna. Despite all they had been through today, she was extravagantly beautiful. At one point, their glances met; Anna defused the faint awkwardness with a crooked grin.

“Sorry, I’m still trying to get used to your new Aryan officer look,” she said.

Some time later, Anna fished her cell phone out of her handbag and punched in a number.

David Denneen’s voice had the tinny, artificial clarity conferred by decrypted telephony. “Anna!” he said. “Everything O.K.?”

“David, listen. You’ve
got
to help me—you’re the only one I can trust.”

“I’m listening.”

“David, I need whatever you can get me on Josef Strasser. He was like Mengele’s smarter older brother.”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Denneen replied, his voice
tentative, baffled. “Of course. But where do you want the material sent?”

“BA.”

He understood the abbreviation for Buenos Aires. “But I can’t exactly send the file care of the embassy, can I?”

“How about care of the American Express office?” Anna gave him a name to use.

“Right. Low profile’s a good idea down there.”

“So I hear. How bad is it?”

“Great country, great people. But some long memories. Watch your back down there. Please, Anna. I’ll get right on to it.” And with that Denneen clicked off.

The main border-control security room of the
aéroport
Lille-Lesquin was a drab, windowless interior space, with low acoustic-tiled ceilings, a white projection screen at one end of the room. Color photographs of internationally sought criminals hung beneath a black-and-white sign that read
DÉFENSE DE FUMER
. Nine immigration and border-control officials sat on folding chairs of tube metal and beige plastic while their boss, Bruno Pagnol, the director of security, filled them in on the new advisories of the afternoon. Marc Sully was one of them, and he tried not to look as bored as he felt. He had no love for his job, but wasn’t eager to lose it, either.

Just in the past week, Pagnol reminded them, they had arrested seven young Turkish women arriving from Berlin with illicit cargo in their bellies: having been recruited as “mules,” they had swallowed condoms packed with China White. Finding the seven was partly a matter of luck, but credit had to go to Jean-Daniel Roux (Roux gave a slit-eyed nod when the boss singled him out, pleased but determined not to look it), who
was alert enough to catch the first of them. The woman had looked visibly woozy to him; as they later learned, one of the knotted condoms in her colon had started to leak. In fact, the woman almost overdosed on the contraband. In the hospital, they’d retrieved fifteen small balls, double-wrapped in latex, tied off with fishing line, each containing several grams of extremely pure heroin.

“How’d they get it out of her?” one of the officers asked.

Marc Sully, sitting in the back, farted audibly. “Rear extraction,” he said.

The others laughed.

The red-faced director of airport security frowned. He saw nothing funny. “The courier nearly died. These are desperate women. They’ll do anything. How much money do you think she was paid? A thousand francs, nothing more, and she almost died for it. Now she’s facing a very long jail sentence. These women are like walking suitcases. Hiding drugs in their own shit. And it’s our job to keep that poison out of the country. You want your kids hooked on it? So some fat-ass Asian can get rich? They think they can promenade right past us. Are you going to teach them better?”

Marc Sully had been a member of the
police aux frontières
for four years, and sat through hundreds of briefings just like this one. Every year Pagnol’s face got a little redder, his collar a little tighter. Not that Sully was anyone to talk. He himself had always a little weight on him, wasn’t ashamed of it. Bit his nails to the quick, too, had given up trying to stop. The boss once told him he looked “sloppy,” but when Marc asked him how, he just shrugged. So nobody was going to put him on a recruitment poster.

Marc knew he wasn’t popular with some of his younger colleagues, the ones who bathed every single
day, afraid of smelling like a human being instead of a walking bar of deodorant soap. They’d walk around with their quiffs of freshly shampooed hair, smiling nicely at the prettier female passengers, as if they were going to find dates on the job. Marc thought they were fools. It was a dead-end job. Giving strip searches might be a way to get a sniff, especially if you were into third-world
cul
, but you weren’t going to bring anybody home that way.

“Now two advisories fresh from
la DCPAF
.” The
Direction centrale de la police aux frontière
was the national bureau that gave them their orders. Pagnol pressed a few switches, and was able to project photographs directly from a computer. “Highest priority. This one’s an American. Mexican ancestry. She’s a professional. You find her, you be very careful. Treat her like a scorpion, right?”

Grunts of assent.

Sully squinted at the images. He wouldn’t mind giving her a taste of his baguette.

“And here’s another one,” the security director said. “White male in his mid-thirties. Curly brown hair, green or hazel eyes, approximately one and three-quarters meters in height. Possible serial killer. Another American, they think. Very dangerous. There’s reason to believe he’s been in the country today, and that he’ll be trying to make his way out. We’ll be posting photographs at your stations, but I want you to take a careful look right now. If it turns out that they left through Lille-Lesquin and that the people here let them slip through, it won’t just be
my
job on the line. Everybody understand?”

Sully nodded with everyone else. It annoyed Sully that Roux, that apple-cheeked hard-on, was still riding high for having lucked out with that
Gastarbeiter
whore. But who knew? Maybe it was Sully’s day to get lucky. He took another look at the photographs.

Ben dropped off Anna by an airport shuttle bus stop, and deposited the blue Renault at the long-term parking lot at the
aéroport
Lille-Lesquin. They’d enter the airport separately, and take different flights.

They agreed to meet in Buenos Aires within ten hours.

Assuming nothing went wrong.

Anna looked at the blond, crew-cut American officer, and felt confident that he’d elude detection. But despite her brave words to Ben, she felt no such confidence herself. Her hair was neither cut nor colored. It was combed out, and she had changed her garb, but otherwise she was entrusting her camouflage to something very small indeed. She felt a knot of fear in the pit of her stomach, and the fear fed on itself, for she knew nothing would betray her faster than the appearance of fear. She had to focus. Her usual hyperattentiveness to her surroundings could now be her undoing. Before she stepped into the terminal, she had to let every bit of fear and anxiety wash from her. She imagined herself traipsing through meadows filled with Bermuda grass and dandelions. She imagined holding hands with somebody constant and strong. It could be anybody—it was simply a mental exercise, as she was perfectly aware—but the person she kept imagining was Ben.

Sully kept a sharp eye out at the incoming passengers by his station, alert for signs of anxiety or agitation, for customers traveling with too few bags or too many, for customers who fit the description they’d received from
DCPAF
.

The man, third from the front of the line, caught his attention. He was the approximate height of the man they were looking for, had curly brown hair, and kept
jingling the change in his pocket, a nervous tic. From his dress, he was almost certainly an American. Perhaps he had reason to be nervous.

He waited until the man showed his ticket and passport to the airline security officer, and then stepped forward.

“Just a few questions, sir,” Sully said, his eyes boring in on him.

“Yeah, all right,” the man said.

“Come with me,” Sully said, and drew him to a station post near the ticket counter. “So what took you to France?”

“Medical conference.”

“You’re a doctor?”

A sigh. “I work in sales for a pharmaceutical company.”

“You’re a drug dealer!” Sully smiled, though his eyes remained wary.

“In a matter of speaking,” the man replied wanly. He had a look on his face like he’d smelled something bad.

Americans and their obsession with hygiene. Sully scrutinized his face for a moment longer. The man had the same angular cast to his face, square chin, curly hair. But the features didn’t look quite right—they were too small. And Sully didn’t hear real stress in the man’s voice when he answered questions. Sully was wasting his time.

“O.K.,” he said. “Have a good trip.”

Sully went back to scrutinizing the check-in line. A blond-haired woman with swarthy skin caught his eye. The suspect could have dyed her hair; the other specifics matched. He drifted toward her.

“Could I see your passport, madame?” he said.

The woman looked at him blankly.

“
Votre passeport, s’il vous plaît, madame
.”

“
Bien sûr. Vous me croyez être anglaise? Je suis italienne, mais tous mes amis pensent que je suis allemande ou anglaise ou n’importe quoi
.”

According to her passport, she resided in Milan, and Sully thought it unlikely that an American could speak French with such an egregious Italian accent.

No one else on line just then looked terribly promising. A dot-head with two bawling children was ahead of the blond Italian. As far as Sully was concerned, her kind couldn’t leave the country fast enough. Chicken vindaloo was going to end up being the national dish at the rate the goddamn dot-heads were immigrating. The Muslims were worse, of course, but the dot-heads with their unpronounceable names were pretty awful. Last year, when he’d dislocated his arm, the Indian doctor at the clinic had flatly refused to give him a real painkiller. Like maybe he was supposed to do some fakir-style mind control. If his arm wasn’t half out of its socket, he would have punched the guy.

Sully glanced at the woman’s passport without interest and waved her and her sniveling brood through. The dot-head whore even smelled like saffron.

A young Russian with acne. Last name was German, so probably a Jew.
Mafiya?
Not his problem just now.

An honest-to-goodness Frenchman and his wife, off to a vacation.

Another goddamn dot-head in a sari. Gayatri was the name, and then something unpronounceable. Curry
cul
.

None of the other men fit the profile: too old, too fat, too young, too short.

Too bad. Maybe it wasn’t going to be his lucky day after all.

Anna settled into her coach-class seat, adjusting her sari and mentally repeating her name: Gayatri Chandragupta.
It wouldn’t do to stumble over it if anyone were to ask. She was wearing her long black hair straight back, and when she’d caught a glimpse of her reflection in a window, she hardly recognized herself.

Buenos Aires

Anna looked anxiously through the plate glass of the American Express office at the sedate, tree-lined Plaza Libertador General San Martín. The park, once a bull ring, once a slave market, was now dominated by the great bronze statue of General José de San Martín astride his horse. The sun blazed fiercely. Inside it was air-conditioned, ice-cold, and quiet.

“Señorita Acampo?”

She turned to see a slender man in a close-fitting blue blazer, stylish heavy black-framed glasses. “I am very sorry, señorita, but we cannot locate this package.”

“I don’t understand.” She switched to Spanish so there would be no mistake: “
Está registrado que lo recibió?
”

“We received it, yes, madam, but it cannot be found.”

Maddening, but this at least was progress. The last employee had adamantly denied a package had ever been received in her name.

“Are you saying it’s lost?”

A quick reflexive shrug like a nervous tic. “Our computers show it was sent from Washington, D.C., and received here yesterday, but after that, I cannot say. If you’ll fill out this form, we’ll begin a search throughout our system. If it’s not located, you’re entitled to full replacement value.”

Damn it! It seemed unlikely to her that the envelope had been lost. More likely it had been stolen. But by whom? And why? Who knew what was inside? Who knew to look? Had Denneen given her up? She could scarcely credit it. Possibly his phone was tapped, unknown to him. In truth, there were too many potential explanations, and none of them changed the basic fact: if it
had
been stolen, whoever had done it now knew who she was—and why she was here.

The office of Interpol Argentina is located within the headquarters of the
Policía Federal Argentina
on Suipacha. Interpol’s man in Buenos Aires was Miguel Antonio Peralta, the
Jefe Seccion Operaciónes
. A plaque on his door read
SUBCOMISARIO DEPARTAMENTO INTERPOL
. He was a round-shouldered, bulky man with a large, round head. Strands of black hair matted across the top of his pate advertised his baldness instead of disguising it.

His wood-veneered office was jammed with tributes to Interpol’s work. Plaques and commemorative plates from grateful police forces around the world crowded the walls, along with crucifixes and diplomas and images of saints and a framed apostolic benediction on his family from the Pope himself. An antique silver–framed sepia photograph of his policeman father was almost as prominent.