The Sigma Protocol

by Robert Ludlum

  Suchet was flanked by Matthias Deschner and two security guards, their weapons drawn.

  “Mr. Hartman, the Kantonspolizei have informed me that you are in this country illegally. Which means that you are perpetrating a fraud,” the banker said. Deschner’s face was a mask of neutrality.

  “What are you talking about?” Ben said indignantly. Had they seen him slip the photo into his jacket?

  “We are to detain you until the authorities arrive, momentarily.”

  Ben stared at him, speechless.

  “Your actions put you in violation of the Swiss Federal Criminal Code,” Suchet continued loudly. “You seem to be implicated in other offenses as well. You will not be permitted to leave except in the custody of the police.”

  Deschner was silent. In his eyes Ben could see what appeared to be fear. Why was he saying nothing?

  “Guards, please escort Mr. Hartman to Secure Room Number 4. Mr. Hartman, you will take nothing with you. You are hereby detained awaiting official arrest.”

  The guards approached, weapons still pointed at him.

  Ben got to his feet, his hands open at his side, and began walking down the corridor, the two guards falling in beside him. As he passed Deschner, he saw the attorney give the tiniest shrug of his shoulders.

  Peter’s words of caution: They practically own half the cops. Schmid’s words of menace: the Einwanderungsbehörde can hold you in administrative detention for a year before your case reaches a magistrate.

  He couldn’t allow himself to be taken in. What galvanized him wasn’t the chance that he would be killed or locked up, but the fact that in either case his investigations would come to an end. Peter’s efforts would have been in vain. The Corporation would have won.

  He couldn’t let that happen. Whatever the price.

  Secure Rooms, die Stahlkammern, were, Ben knew, where items of intrinsic value—gold, gemstones, bearer bonds—were displayed and assessed whenever an owner requested an official audit of his stored possessions. Though lacking vault-like impregnability, they were indeed secure, with reinforced steel doors and closed-circuit surveillance systems. At the entrance of Zimmer Vier, one of the guards waved an electronic reader by a blinking red light; when the door unlocked, he gestured Ben to enter first, and the two guards followed him. Then the door closed with a series of three audible clicks.

  Ben looked around him. The room was brightly lit and sparely furnished; it would be difficult to lose, or hide, a single gemstone in this space. The slate-tiled floor was polished to a dark sheen. There was a long table of perfectly clear Plexiglas, and six folding chairs of gray painted metal.

  One of the guards—burly and overweight, his red, fleshy face suggesting a steady diet of beef and beer—gestured for Ben to sit down on a chair. Ben paused before complying. The two guards had reholstered their sidearms, but made it abundantly clear that they wouldn’t hesitate to use cruder physical means if he were less than cooperative.

  “And so we wait, ja?” said the second guard, in heavily accented English. The man, his light brown hair brush cut, was leaner and, Ben judged, probably much faster than his cohort. Doubtless mentally swifter as well.

  Ben turned to him. “How much do they pay you here? I’m a very rich man, you know. I can give you a very nice life if I choose. You do me a favor, I’ll do you one.” He made no effort to disguise his naked desperation; they would either respond or they would not.

  The leaner guard snorted and shook his head. “You should speak your proposal louder, to be sure that the microphones pick it up.”

  They had no reason to believe that Ben would be good for his word, and there were no assurances he could make, while in captivity, to persuade them otherwise. Still, their amused contempt was encouraging: his best chance now was to be underestimated. Ben stood up, groaning, and clutched his midriff.

  “Sit down,” the guard commanded firmly.

  “The claustrophobia…I can’t take the… small, enclosed places!” Ben spoke in a tone that was increasingly frantic, verging on hysteria.

  Both guards looked at each other and laughed scornfully—they would not be taken in by such an obvious ploy.

  “No, no, I’m serious,” Ben said with growing urgency. “My God! How explicit do I have to be? I have a…a nervous stomach. I have to get to a bathroom immediately or I’ll…have an accident.” He was playing the role of the flighty, flaky American to the hilt. “Stress brings it on much more quickly! I need my pills. Dammit! My Valium! A sedative. I have terrible claustrophobia—I can’t be in enclosed spaces. Please!” As he spoke he started to gesticulate wildly, as if having a panic attack.

  The lean guard just regarded him with an amused contemptuous half-smile. “You will have to take it up with the prison infirmary.”

  With a manic, stricken expression, Ben stepped closer to him, his gaze flicking toward the holstered gun and then back at the lean man’s face. “Please, you don’t understand!” He waved his hands even more wildly. “I’ll have a panic attack! I need to go to the bathroom! I need a tranquilizer!” With lightning speed, he thrust both hands into the guard’s hip holster and retrieved the short-barreled revolver. Then he took two steps back, holding the piece in his hands, his performance abruptly over.

  “Keep your hands at shoulder level,” he told the thickly built guard. “Or I fire, and you both die.”

  The two guards exchanged glances.

  “Now one of you will take me out of this place. Or both of you will die. It’s a good deal. Take it before the offer expires.”

  The guards conferred briefly in Schweitzerdeutsch. Then the lean one spoke. “It would be extremely stupid of you to use this gun, if you even know how, which I doubt. You will be imprisoned for the rest of your life.”

  It was the wrong tone: wary, alarmed, yet without terror. The guard was not at all unnerved. Perhaps Ben’s earlier performance of weakness had been too effective. Ben could see that a measure of skepticism remained in their expressions and posture. At once, he knew what he must say. “You think I wouldn’t fire this gun?” Ben spoke in a bored voice, only his eyes blazing. “I killed five at the Bahnhofplatz. Two more won’t weigh on my mind.”

  The guards suddenly grew rigid, all condescension having instantly evaporated. “Das Monster vom Bahnhofplatz,” the fleshy one said hoarsely to his partner as a look of horror crossed his face. The blood drained from his florid complexion.

  “You!” Ben barked at him, seizing the advantage. “Take me out of here.” Within seconds, the thickset guard used his electronic reader to open the door. “And if you want to live, you’ll stay behind,” he told the leaner, evidently cleverer one. The door closed behind him, the three muffled clicks verifying that the bolts had electronically slid into place.

  Frog-marching the guard in front of him, Ben traveled swiftly down the beige-carpeted corridor. The feed from the closed-circuit video probably went into archival storage and examination, rather than being viewed in real time, but there was no way to be certain.

  “What’s your name?” Ben demanded. “Wie heissen Sie?”

  “Laemmel,” the guard grunted. “Christoph Laemmel.” He reached the end of the corridor and started to turn left.

  “No,” Ben hissed. “Not that way! We’re not going out the front. Take me out the back way. The service entrance. Where the trash is taken out.”

  Laemmel paused in momentary confusion. Ben placed the revolver near one of his beet-red ears, letting him feel the cold metal. Moving more quickly, the guard took him down the back stairs, the ugly, dented steel a dramatic contrast with the polished formality of the bank’s public spaces. The gloom of the stairwell was scarcely diminished by the naked, low-wattage electric bulbs that protruded from the wall at each landing.

  The guard’s heavy shoes clattered on the metal stairs.

  “Quiet,” Ben said, speaking to him in German. “Make no sound, or I will make a very deafening one, and it will be the last thing you ever hear.”

  �
�You have no chance,” Laemmel said in a low, frightened voice. “No chance at all.”

  Finally, they reached the wide double doors that led to the back alleyway. Ben pressed on the cross latch, made sure that the doors opened from within. “This is the end of our little trip together,” he said.

  Now Laemmel grunted. “Do you think you are any safer outside of this building?”

  Ben stepped into the shadowy alleyway, feeling the cool air against his flushed face. “What the Polizei do is not your personal concern,” he said, keeping his gun drawn.

  “Die Polizei?” Laemmel replied. “I do not speak of them.” He spat.

  An eel of fear thrashed in Ben’s belly. “What are you talking about?” he demanded urgently. Ben gripped the gun in both his hands and raised it to Laemmel’s eyes. “Tell me!” he said with furious concentration. “Tell me what you know!”

  There was a sudden exhalation of breath from Laemmel’s throat, and a warm mist of crimson spattered Ben’s face. A bullet had torn through the man’s neck. Had Ben somehow lost his grip, squeezed the trigger without realizing it? A second explosion, inches away from his head, answered the question. There was a shooter in position.

  Oh, Christ! Not again!

  As the guard crumpled face forward, Ben lunged down the dank alley. He heard a popping noise, as if from a toy gun, then a metallic reverberation, and a pockmark suddenly appeared on the large Dumpster to his left. The shooter had to be firing from his right.

  As he felt something hot crease his shoulder, he dove behind the Dumpster: temporary refuge, but any port in a storm. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the movement of something small and dark—a rat, displaced by his arrival. Move! The ledge of the cement wall that separated the bank’s back lot from that of its neighbor was at shoulder height; Ben stuck the gun in the waistband of his trousers and, with both hands, lifted himself up and over. A short pathway now separated him from Usteristrasse. Grasping the revolver, he fired wildly, in three different areas. He wanted the shooter to take cover, believing he was under fire. He needed the time. Every second now was precious.

  There was return fire, and he could hear the slugs hitting the concrete retainer, but Ben was safely on the other side.

  Now he charged, pumping his feet down the alley to Usteristrasse, fast. Faster. Faster still! “Run like your life depends on it,” his track coach would tell him before competitions. Now it did.

  And what if there were more than one shooter? But surely they wouldn’t have had enough warning to put a whole team into position. The thoughts jostled and collided in Ben’s mind. Focus, dammit.

  A brackish smell cued him to his next move: it was a breeze from the Sihl River, the charmless narrow waterway that branched off from the Limmat at the Platz-promenade. Now he crossed the Gessner Allee, scarcely looking at the traffic, hurtling in front of a taxicab whose bearded driver honked and cursed at him before stepping on the brakes. But he’d made it across. The Sihl, banked with a declivity of blackened cinder blocks, stretched before him. His eyes scanned the water frantically until he fixed on a small motorboat. They were a common sight on the Sihl; this one had a single passenger, a plump, beer-swilling man with sunglasses and a fishing pole, though he was not yet fishing. His life jacket made his already bulky proportions look even bulkier. The river would take him to the Sihlwald, a nature preserve ten kilometers south of Zurich, where the riverbanks flattened out in the woodlands and became furrowed with brooks. It was a popular destination among the city’s inhabitants.

  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.”

&n
bsp; “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.

  Chapter Fifteen

  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.