The Sigma Protocol by Robert Ludlum
Was she sincere? His distrust had become almost a reflex. “Given that you seem to be the one pushing them to come after me, that strikes me as a hollow promise. I don’t have to stay here any longer, do I?”
She watched him silently, nibbling at the inside of a cheek. “No.” She took out a business card and jotted something down on the back of it, then handed it to him. “If you change your mind, here’s my hotel in Vienna.”
It was over. Thank God. He inhaled, felt the air reach the very bottom of his lungs, the anxiety suddenly lift.
“Nice to meet you, Agent Navarro,” Ben said, rising. “And thanks again for saving my life.”
Chapter Twenty-six
The pain was intense and overwhelming; another man would have passed out. Gathering his powers of mental concentration, Trevor assigned the pain to another body—a vividly imagined doppelgänger, someone who was convulsed with agony but who was not he. By sheer force of will, he managed to find his way through the streets of Vienna to a building on Taborstrasse.
Then he remembered that the car was stolen—his thinking was sluggish, that was what alarmed him most of all—and he drove five blocks away and abandoned it, the keys dangling from the ignition. Maybe some idiot would steal it and get caught in the citywide dragnet that was sure to follow.
He limped down the street, ignoring the many glances of the passersby. He knew his suit jacket was drenched with his own blood; he had put the trench coat on over it, but even that, too, had gotten soaked through. He had lost a great deal of blood. He felt lightheaded.
He was able to get back to Taborstrasse, to the street-level office marked with a brass plaque that said DR. THEODOR SCHREIBER, INTERNIST & GENERAL SURGEON.
The office was dark, and there was no answer when he buzzed. Trevor didn’t find this surprising, since it was after eight o’clock in the evening, and Dr. Schreiber kept regular hours. But he kept ringing the bell anyway. Schreiber lived in the flat behind his small office, and the bell rang in his living quarters as well, Trevor knew.
After five minutes, the light went on in the office, and then a voice came through the speaker, loud and annoyed: “Ja?”
“Dr. Schreiber, es is Christoph. Es ist ein Notfall.”
The front door of the building unlocked electronically. Then the door off the lobby, marked with the doctor’s name on another brass plaque, unlocked as well.
Dr. Schreiber was disgruntled. “You have interrupted my dinner,” he said gravely. “I trust it is important—” He noticed the blood-soaked trench coat. “All right, all right, follow me.” The physician turned and walked back toward the examination room.
Dr. Schreiber had a sister who lived in Dresden, in East Germany, for decades. Until the Wall came down, this simple accident of geography—he had escaped from East Berlin in 1961, while his sister had been forced to stay behind—had been enough to give East German intelligence leverage over the doctor.
But Stasi did not seek to blackmail him or to turn him into some sort of spy, as if a physician could ever be useful as a spy. No, Stasi had a far more mundane use for him: simply to serve as a doctor on call for its agents in Austria in cases of emergency. Physicians in Austria, as in many countries in the world, are required by law to report gunshot wounds to the police. Dr. Schreiber would be more discreet than that when the occasional wounded Stasi agent appeared at his office, usually in the middle of the night.
Trevor, who had lived as a Stasi illegal in London for many years before he was recruited to Sigma, had from time to time been dispatched to Vienna, under the cover of business travel, and twice he had needed to visit the good doctor.
Even now that the Cold War was long over, and Schreiber’s days of covert assistance to East Germany were pretty much finished, Trevor had little doubt that the physician would cooperate. Schreiber could still be prosecuted for his covert assistance to Stasi. That he would not want.
But his vulnerability did not keep Dr. Schreiber from bristling with resentment. “You are a most fortunate man,” the doctor said brusquely. “The bullet, you see, entered just over your heart. A slightly more direct angle and you would have died immediately. Instead, it appears to have entered at an oblique angle, digging a sort of trench in the skin and the fatty tissue beneath. It even tore away some of the surface fibers of the pectoralis major, your breast muscle. And exited right here, at the axilla. You must have turned just in time.”
Dr. Schreiber glanced over his half-glasses at Trevor, who did not reply.
He poked with a pair of forceps, and Trevor winced. The pain was overwhelming. His body was suffused with an unpleasant prickly heat.
“It also came close to causing great damage to the nerves and blood vessels in the area of the brachial plexus. Had it done so, you’d have lost the use of your right arm permanently. Maybe even lost the arm itself.”
“I’m left-handed,” Trevor said. “Anyway, I don’t need to know the gory details.”
“Yes,” the doctor said absently. “Well, you really should go to the hospital, the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, if we’re going to do this right.”
“That’s out of the question, and you know it.” A lightning bolt of pain shot down his arm.
The doctor changed into his scrubs, and injected several syringes of a local anesthetic around the wound. With a small pair of scissors and forceps he excised some blackened tissue, irrigated the wound, and then set about suturing it.
Trevor could feel a deep, tugging discomfort, but no real pain. He gritted his teeth. “I want you to make sure the wound doesn’t open up if I move around,” he said.
“You should take it easy for a little while.”
“I’m a fast healer.”
“That’s right,” the doctor said. “I remember now.” The man was a fast healer—freakishly so.
“Time is the one luxury I don’t have,” Trevor said. “I want you to sew it up tight.”
“Then I can use heavier suture materials—3-0 nylon, say—but it may leave a rather ugly scar.”
“It doesn’t concern me.”
“Fine,” the doctor said, turning back to his steel cart of equipment.
When he had finished, he said, “For the pain, I can give you some Demerol.” He added dryly, “Or would you prefer to go without anything?”
“Some ibuprofen should be enough,” Trevor said.
“As you wish.”
Trevor stood, wincing. “All right then, I appreciate your help.” He handed the doctor a few thousand-shilling notes.
The physician looked at him and said, quite insincerely, “Any time.”
Anna splashed her face with hot water. Thirty times, her mother had trained her: her mother’s only vanity. Keeps the skin vital and glowing.
Over the running water she heard the phone ringing. Grabbing a towel to dry her face, she ran to catch it.
“Anna, it’s Robert Polozzi. Am I calling you too late?”
Robert Polozzi from ID Section.
“No, not at all, Robert. What is it?”
“Listen: about the patent search.”
She’d forgotten about the patent search. She patted her dripping face.
He said: “The neurotoxin—”
“Oh, right. You found something?”
“So get this. May 16 of this year, patent number—well, it’s a long number—anyway, a patent for this exact synthetic compound was applied for by a small Philadelphia-based biotech company called Vortex. It’s a, it says, ‘a synthetic analog of the venom of the conus sea snail for proposed in-vitro applications.’ And then some mumbo jumbo about ‘localizing ion channels’ and ‘tagging chemochyme receptors.’” He paused, then resumed, his voice tentative. “I called the place. Vortex, I mean. On a pretext, of course.”
A little unorthodox, but she didn’t mind. “Learn anything?”
“Well, not exactly. They say their stocks of this toxin are minimal and under tight control. It’s hard to produce, so they don’t have much, and anyway the stuff is u
She felt a growing excitement. “He told you the stuff is under tight control—that means it’s under lock and key?”
“Right.”
“And this guy strikes you as on the level?”
“I think so, but who knows?”
“Great work, thanks. Can you find out from them whether any of their supply of this stuff has been found missing or otherwise unaccounted for?”
“Already did,” the researcher said proudly. “The answer’s no.”
A pang of disappointment. “Can you find out for me everything you can about Vortex? Owners, principals, employees, and so on?”
“Will do.”
She hung up, sat on the edge of the bed, pondered. It was possible that tugging at this thread would unravel the conspiracy behind the murders. Or unravel nothing.
The whole investigation was proving increasingly frustrating. Nor had the Vienna police had any luck chasing down the shooter. The shooter’s Peugeot had previously been reported stolen—surprise, surprise. Another dead end.
This Hartman she found baffling. Against her will she also found him appealing, even attractive. But he was a type. A golden boy, born to money, graced with good looks, overconfident. He was Brad, the football player who’d raped her. The world cut men like that a break. Men like that, a blunt-speaking girlfriend of hers in college used to say, thought their shit didn’t stink. They thought they could get away with anything.
But was he a killer? Somehow it seemed unlikely. She believed his version of what had happened at Rossignol’s in Zurich; it jibed with the fingerprint patterns and with her own sense of him. Yet he was carrying a gun, passport control had no record of him arriving in Austria, and he’d offered no explanation for that.… On the other hand, a thorough search of his car hadn’t revealed anything. No syringe, no poisons, nothing.
Whether he was a part of this conspiracy was hard to say. He’d thought his brother had been killed four years ago; maybe that murder had been the catalyst for those murders that came later. But why so many, and in such a short span of time?
The fact remained: Benjamin Hartman knew more. Yet she didn’t have the authority, or the grounds, to hold him. It was deeply frustrating. She wondered whether her desire—all right, obsession—to get him had to do with the rich-boy thing, the old wounds, Brad…
She took her address book from the end table, looked up a phone number, and dialed.
It rang several times before a gravelly male voice answered, “Donahue.” Donahue was a money-laundering guru at DOJ, and she’d quietly enlisted his help before she’d left for Switzerland. No context; just some account information. Donahue didn’t mind being kept in the dark about the nature of her investigation; he seemed to regard it as a challenge.
“It’s Anna Navarro,” she said.
“Oh yeah, right, how ya doin’ there, Anna?”
She found herself switching into her regular-guy voice. This she did easily; it was how her father’s buddies talked, her neighbors back home. “Doin’ good, thanks. How’re we doin’ on the money trace?”
“Na-a-ah, nothin’. We’re buttin’ our heads against a big brick wall. It’s lookin’ like each of the dead guys got regular contributions booted into their accounts from some haven country. Cayman Islands, British Virgins, Curaçao. That’s where we keep hittin’ the wall.”
“What happens when you go to these offshore banks with an official request?”
A short bark of derision from Donahue. “They give us the finger. We give ’em an MLAT request for their financial records, they say they’ll get around to it some time next few years.” MLAT, she knew, was the mutual assistance treaty, which in principle obtained between the United States and many of these offshore havens. “BVI and Caymans are the worst, they tell us maybe two, three years it’ll take ’em.”
“Huh.”
“But even if they should just open up the magic doors and show us everything, all we’re going to get is where they got the money from, and you can bet your paycheck it’s some other offshore. Isle of Man, Bahamas, Bermuda, Lux, San Marino, Anguilla. Probably a whole chain of offshores and shell companies. These days money can zip around the world, movin’ between a dozen accounts in, like, seconds.”
“Mind if I ask you something?” she said.
“Go ’head.”
“How do you guys ever get anything on money-laundering?”
“Oh, we get stuff,” he said, a little defensively. “It just takes years.”
“Great,” she said. “Thanks.”
In a small room on the fifth floor of the Sicherheitsbüro, at Vienna police headquarters on Rossauer Lände, a young man sat before a computer screen, wearing headphones. From time to time he snubbed out a cigarette in a large gold ashtray that sat on the gray Formica table next to a No Smoking sign.
In a small box on the top left of the screen was the telephone number he was monitoring, along with the date, the start time, duration of call measured in a tenth of a second, the telephone number called. Elsewhere on the screen was a list of telephone numbers, representing each call made from this number. All you had to do was to move the cursor to any of the numbers and double-click, and the digitally recorded conversation would start playing, either on the headphones or through the external speakers. Little red bars would dance as the volume fluctuated. You could adjust not only the volume but even the speed of playback.
Every telephone call the woman had made from her hotel room was recorded onto this computer’s hard disk. The technology was most impressive; it had been provided to the Vienna police by the Israelis.
The door to the little room opened and in came Detective Sergeant Walter Heisler across the institutional green linoleum floor. He, too, was smoking. He gave a little jerk of his head by way of greeting. The tech removed his headphones, put out his cigarette, looked up.
“Anything interesting?” the detective asked.
“Most of the calls have been to Washington.”
“Strictly speaking, we’re supposed to inform Interpol when we record any international calls.” There was a twinkle in the detective’s eye.
The tech raised his eyebrows in silent complicity. Heisler pulled up a chair. “Mind if I join you?”
California
The young billionaire computer mogul Arnold Carr took the call on his cellular phone while he was strolling through a redwood forest in Northern California with his old friend and mentor the investment whiz Ross Cameron.
The two were spending a weekend in the company of some of America’s richest and most powerful men at the exclusive retreat known as the Bohemian Grove. There was some sort of idiotic game called paintball going on back at the encampment, presided over by the chief executive of BankAmerica and the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James.
But Carr, the founder of a vastly successful software company, rarely had the chance to hang out with his billionaire buddy Ross Cameron, the so-called sage of Sante Fe. So they had spent a lot of time hiking through the woods talking about money and business, philanthropy and art collecting, their kids, and the extraordinary, highly secret project they had both been invited to join.
Carr pulled the tiny, burring phone out of the pocket of his Pendleton plaid shirt with visible annoyance. Hardly anyone had this number, and the few employees who’d dare call had been instructed not to bother him for any reason during his retreat weekend.
“Yeah,” Carr said.
“Mr. Carr, I’m so sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning,” the voice purred. “This is Mr. Holland. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
Carr recognized the voice instantly. “Oh, no way,” he said, suddenly cordial. “I’ve been up for hours. What
When “Mr. Holland” had finished, Carr said, “Let me see what I can do.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
Ben arrived at his hotel around nine o’clock at night, hungry but unable to eat, jittery from too much caffeine. He’d taken a cab from police headquarters, since driving the Opel Vectra was out of the question. Two of its windows had been shattered in the shootout, the leather seats covered with rounded shards of glass.
The lobby was quiet, the hotel guests either out at dinner or returned to their rooms. Several Oriental rugs overlapped one another; here and there patches of highly polished marble floor gleamed.
The concierge, a too-slick middle-aged man with alert eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, handed him the room key before Ben said a word.
“Thanks,” Ben said. “Any messages for me?” Perhaps the private detective.
The concierge tapped at his computer keyboard. “No, sir, just the one you already retrieved.”
“Which one was that?” What? he thought, alarmed. I haven’t gotten a single message since I got to Vienna.
“I don’t know, sir. You called in a few hours ago.” More tapping. “At six-twenty this evening you got a message from the hotel operator.”
“Could you give it to me again?” This was either a mistake or…
“I’m sorry, sir, once the guest retrieves a message, it’s deleted from the system.” He gave Ben a feral smile. “We can’t keep all messages forever, you know.”
Ben took the small brass-cage elevator to the fourth floor, nervously fingering the large brass sphere that dangled from the room key. He couldn’t put it past Agent Navarro to have had some male colleague call the hotel to get his messages, see whom he was in touch with.
But who had left a message? Besides Agent Navarro, only the private detective knew his whereabouts. It was surely too late to call the detective, Hans Hoffman; he wouldn’t be in his office this late at night.
Navarro was suspicious about his motives, yet she couldn’t seriously think he had killed Rossignol. Could she? She had to know she wasn’t dealing with a serial murderer. After all, she’d mentioned she had expertise in homicide; she had to know who fit the profile and who didn’t.