The Sigma Protocol (9 page)

The RCMP officer who picked her up at the airport, Anna knew, had spent a year at the FBI Academy learning homicide investigation techniques. He was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, she’d heard, but a good sort.

He stood outside the security gate, a tall, handsome thirtyish man in a blue blazer and red tie. He flashed a pearly smile, seemingly genuinely happy to see her. “Welcome to Nova Scotia,” he said. “I’m Ron Arsenault.” Dark-haired, brown-eyed, lantern jaw, high forehead. Dudley Do-Right, she thought to herself.

“Anna Navarro,” she said, shaking his hand firmly. Men always expect women to shake like a dead fish, so she always gave them her firmest handshake; it set the tone, let them know she was one of the guys. “Nice to meet you.”

He reached out for her carry-on garment bag, but she shook her head, smiled. “I’m O.K., thanks.”

“This your first time in Halifax?” He was obviously checking her out.

“Yeah. It looks beautiful from above.”

He chuckled politely as he guided her through the terminal. “I’ll be liaising with the Halifax locals for you. You got the records O.K.?”

“Thanks. Everything but the bank records.”

“Those should be in by now. If I find them I’ll drop them by your hotel.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure thing.” He squinted at something: contact lenses, Anna knew. “Tell you the truth, Miss Navarro—Anna?—some folks back in Ottawa can’t quite figure why you’re taking such an interest in the old geezer. Eighty-seven-year-old man dies in his home, natural causes, you gotta expect that, you know?”

They had reached the parking lot.

“The body’s in the police morgue?” she asked.

“Actually, in the morgue of the local hospital. Waiting in the fridge for you. You got to us before the old guy was planted, that’s the good news.”

“And the bad news?”

“Body had already been embalmed for burial.”

She winced. “That might screw up the tox screen.”

They got to a dark blue, late-model Chevrolet sedan that screamed “unmarked police vehicle.” He opened the trunk and put her bag in.

They drove for a while in silence.

“Who’s the widow?” she asked. It wasn’t in the file. “French-Canadian, too?”

“A local. Haligonian. Former schoolteacher. Tough old biddy, too. I mean, I feel bad for the lady, she’s just lost her husband, and the funeral was supposed to be tomorrow. We had to ask her to put it off. She had relatives
coming in from Newfoundland, too. When we mentioned autopsy she wigged out.” He glanced over at her, then back to the road. “Given how it’s evening, I thought you could settle in, and we can get started bright and early tomorrow morning. ME’s going to meet us at seven.”

She felt a pang of disappointment. She wanted to go right to work. “Sounds good,” she said.

More silence. It was good to have a liaison officer who didn’t seem to resent an emissary from the U.S. government. Arsenault was as friendly as could be. Maybe too much so.

“Here’s your inn. Your government doesn’t exactly spend the big bucks, hey?”

It was an unlovely Victorian house on Barrington Street, a large wooden building painted white with green shutters. The white paint had been soiled to a dirty gray.

“Hey, so let me take you out to dinner, unless you’ve got other plans. Maybe Clipper Cay, if you like seafood. Maybe catch some jazz at the Middle Deck…?” He parked the car.

“Thanks, but I’ve had a long day,” she said.

He shrugged, his disappointment obvious.

The inn had a faintly musty smell, as from a baseboard dampness that never quite went away. An old-fashioned carbon was made of her credit card and a brass key provided; she was prepared to tell the beefy guy at the front desk that she didn’t need help with her bags, but none was volunteered. The same slight mustiness pervaded her room, on the second floor, which was decorated in floral patterns. Everything in it looked worn, but not objectionably so. She hung her clothes in the closet, drew the curtains, and changed into gray sweats. A nice run would do her good, she decided.

She jogged along the Grand Parade, the square on
the west side of Barrington Street, then up George Street to the star-shaped fortress called The Citadel. She stopped, panting, at a newsstand and picked up a map of the city. She found the address; it wasn’t far at all from where she was staying. She could reach it in her run.

Robert Mailhot’s house was unremarkable but comfortable-looking, a two-story gray clapboard with a gabled roof, practically hidden in a wooded patch of land behind a chain-link fence.

The blue light of a television flickered behind lace curtains in a front room. The widow, presumably, was watching TV. Anna stopped for a moment across the street, watching intently.

She decided to cross the narrow street to take a closer look. She wanted to see if it was indeed the widow, and if so, how she was behaving. Did she appear to be in mourning or not? Such things couldn’t always be intuited simply by observing at a distance, but you never knew what you might pick up. And if Anna positioned herself in the shadows outside the house, she might not be seen by suspicious neighbors.

The street was deserted, though music played from one house, a TV from another, and a foghorn sounded in the distance. She crossed toward the house—

Suddenly, a pair of high-intensity headlights appeared out of nowhere. They blinded her, growing larger and brighter as a vehicle roared toward her. With a scream, Anna lunged toward the curb, unseeing, desperately trying to jump out of the way of the insane, out-of-control car. It must have been gliding down the street, lights off, its quiet engine noise masked by the ambient street noise, until it was but a few feet away, then suddenly switched on its lights.

And now it was barreling toward her! There was no mistaking it, the car wasn’t slowing, wasn’t moving
straight down the road like an automobile simply going far too fast. It veered toward the shoulder of the road, toward the curb, heading right at her. Anna recognized the vertical chrome grill of a Lincoln Town Car, its flattened rectangular headlights somehow giving it a predatory, sharklike appearance.

Move!

The car’s wheels squealed, the engine at full throttle, as the maniacal car bore down on her.

She turned around to see it hurtling at her just ten or twenty feet away, the headlights dazzling. Terrified, screaming, a split-second away from death, she leaped into the boxwood hedge that surrounded the house next to the widow’s, the stiff, prickly branches scraping at her sweatpants-covered legs, and rolled over and over on the small lawn.

She heard the crunch of the car hitting the boxwood, then the loud squeal of tires as she looked up to see the car veer away from her, spraying mud everywhere, the powerful engine racing down the narrow dark road, and then the headlights vanished just as abruptly as they had appeared.

The car was gone.

What had just happened?

She jumped to her feet, her heart thudding, adrenaline flooding throughout her body, the terror weakening her knees so that she could barely stand up.

What the hell was that all about?

The car had headed right for her, quite deliberately targeting her, as if trying to run her down.

And then… it had unaccountably disappeared!

She noticed several faces looking through windows on either side of the street, some of them closing drapes as soon as she noticed them.

If the car had for some reason been aiming for her, trying to kill her, why hadn’t it finished the job?

It was entirely illogical, maddeningly so.

She walked, panting deeply, coughing painfully, drenched with sweat. She tried to clear her head, but the fear would not leave her, and she remained unable to make sense of the bizarre incident.

Had someone just tried to kill her, or not?

And if so—why?

Could it have been a drunk, a joyrider? The car’s motions had seemed far too deliberate, too elaborately choreographed for that.

The only logical answers required a paranoid mind-set, and she adamantly refused to allow her thoughts to go in that direction.
That way madness lies
. She thought of Bartlett’s ominous words about decades-old plans hatched in utmost secrecy, old men with secrets to hide, powerful people desperate to protect reputations. But Bartlett was a man who, by his own admission, sat in an office surrounded by yellowed paper, far removed from reality, a setting all too conducive to the weaving of conspiracy theories.

Still, was it not possible that the incident with the car had been an attempt to frighten her off the case?

If so, they had picked the wrong person to try such a technique on. For it served only to stiffen her determination to find out what the real story was.

London

The pub, called the Albion, was located on Garrick Street, at the edge of Covent Garden. It had low ceilings, rough-hewn wooden tables, and sawdust floors, the sort of place that had twenty real ales on tap and served bangers and mash, kidney pudding, and spotted dick, and was jammed at lunchtime with a stylish crowd of bankers and advertising executives.

Jean-Luc Passard, a junior security officer for the Corporation, entered the pub and saw at once why the Englishman had chosen this place to meet. It was so dense with people that the two of them would certainly go unnoticed.

The Englishman was sitting alone in a booth. He was as described: a nondescript man of about forty, with bristly, prematurely gray hair. On closer inspection, his face was smooth, almost tight, as if from surgery. He wore a blue blazer and white turtleneck. His shoulders were broad, his waist narrow; he looked, even at a distance, physically imposing. Yet you would not pick him out in a lineup.

Passard sat down at the booth, put out his hand. “I’m Jean-Luc.”

“Trevor Griffiths,” the Englishman said. He shook hands with barely any pressure at all, the greeting of a man who did not care what you thought of him. His hand was large, smooth, and dry.

“It’s an honor to meet you,” Passard said. “Your services to the Corporation over the years are the stuff of legend.”

Trevor’s dead gray eyes showed nothing.

“We wouldn’t have brought you out of your… retirement if it weren’t absolutely necessary.”

“You screwed up.”

“We had bad luck.”

“You want a backup.”

“An insurance policy, so to say. An added safeguard. We really can’t afford to fail.”

“I work alone. You know this.”

“Of course. Your record puts your methods beyond second-guessing. You will handle the matter as you see best.”

“Good. Now, do we know the target’s whereabouts?”

“He was last spotted in Zurich. We’re not certain where he’s headed next.”

Trevor cocked an eyebrow.

Passard flushed. “He is an amateur. He surfaces periodically. We will pick up his trail again soon.”

“I will require a good set of photographs of the target from as many angles as you have.”

Passard slid a large manila envelope across the table. “Done. Also, here are the encoded instructions. As you’ll understand, we want the job to be done quickly and untraceably.”

Trevor Griffiths’s stare reminded Passard of a boa constrictor. “You have already brought in several second-raters. Not only have you thereby lost both money and time, but you have alerted the target. He is now fearful, cautious, and no doubt has been frightened into depositing documents with attorneys to be mailed in the event of his demise, that sort of thing. He will therefore be considerably more difficult to take out. Neither you nor your superiors need to advise me on how to do my job.”

“But you’re confident you can do it, yes?”

“I assume that was why you came to me?”

“Yes.”

“Then please don’t ask foolish questions. Are we done here? Because I have a busy afternoon ahead of me.”

Anna returned to her room at the inn, poured a tiny screw-top bottle of white wine from the minibar into a plastic cup, downed it, and then ran a bath, making the water as hot as she could stand. For fifteen minutes, she soaked herself, trying to think calming thoughts, but the image of the Town Car’s vertical chrome grill kept intruding on her consciousness. And she remembered
the Ghost’s soft-spoken remark: “
I don’t believe in coincidences, do you, Ms. Navarro?
”

Slowly, her sense of self-possession returned to her. These things happened, didn’t they? Part of her job was to know where significance might lie, but it was an occupational hazard to impute significance where there was none.

Presently, she slipped into a terry-cloth robe, feeling much calmer and now ravenously hungry. Slipped beneath the door of her room was a manila envelope. She picked it up and sank into a floral-upholstered armchair. Copies of Mailhot’s bank statements going back four years.

The phone rang.

It was Sergeant Arsenault.

“So is half past ten going to be all right for our visit with the widow?” Around him she could hear the bustle of a police station in the evening.

“I’ll meet you there at ten-thirty,” Anna replied crisply. “Thanks for the confirmation.” She debated whether to tell him about the Town Car, her brush with death, but held back. Somehow she was afraid that it would diminish her authority—that she would sound vulnerable, fearful, easily spooked.

“Right, then,” Arsenault said, and there was a hesitation in his voice. “Well, I guess I’ll be heading home. I don’t suppose—I’ll be driving by your way, so if you have any second thoughts about grabbing a bite…” He spoke haltingly. “Or having a nightcap.” He was obviously trying to keep it light. “Or whatever.”

Anna didn’t reply immediately. In truth, she wouldn’t have minded company just then. “That’s nice of you to offer,” she said finally. “But I’m really tired.”

“Me, too,” he said quickly. “Long day. All right, then. See you in the morning.” His voice had subtly shifted:
no longer a man talking to a woman, but one professional talking to another.

She hung up with a slight sense of emptiness. Then she closed the curtains to the room and started sorting through her documents. There was still plenty of stuff to work through.