The Sigma Protocol

by Robert Ludlum

  Taine was visibly rattled, but closemouthed, as she expected. “I cannot help you. He has moved. No one can say where, and it is no one’s concern.”

  “Except the killers’?”

  “Even if there are such assassins,” Taine spoke with a display of skepticism, but he acceded too readily to her stipulation, “who’s to say they can find him if you cannot? Your own resources are obviously considerable.”

  “I have reason to believe they’ve already made headway.”

  A sharp glance: “Really? And why is that?”

  Anna shook her head. “There are certain matters I can only discuss with Gaston Rossignol himself.”

  “And why do you suppose anyone would want to kill him? He is among the most admired of Zurichers.”

  “Which explains why he’s living in hiding.”

  “What nonsense you speak,” Taine said, after a beat.

  Anna stared at him levelly for few moments. Then she handed him a card with her name on it, and her numbers at the Office of Special Investigations. “I will return in an hour. I have reason to think your own resources are pretty considerable. Check me out. Satisfy yourself as to my bona fides. Do whatever will help you to see that I am who I say I am, and that I’m representing myself accurately.”

  “How can I, a mere Swiss citizen…”

  “You have ways, Mr. Taine. And if you don’t, your friend does. I’m quite sure you’ll want to help your friend. I think we understand each other.”

  Two hours later, Anna Navarro paid a call to Taine at his place of work. The ministry of economic affairs was located in a marble building constructed in the familiar late-nineteenth-century Beaux Arts style. Taine’s own office was large, sunny, and book-lined. She was ushered in to him immediately upon her arrival; the dark-paneled door closed discreetly behind her.

  Taine sat quietly behind his burled walnut desk. “This was not my decision,” he stressed. “This is Monsieur Rossignol’s decision. I do not support it.”

  “You checked me out.”

  “You have been checked out,” Taine replied carefully, hewing to the passive voice. He returned her card to her. “Good-bye, Ms. Navarro.”

  The address was penciled in small print, in a blank space to the left of her name.

  Her first call was to Bartlett, updating him as to her progress. “You never cease to amaze me, Ms. Navarro,” he’d replied, a surprising note of genuine warmth in his voice.

  As she and Kesting drove to the Hottingen address, he said, “Your request for surveillance was approved this morning. Several unmarked police cars shall be engaged for the purpose.”

  “And his telephone.”

  “Yes, we can have a tap in place within hours. An officer at the Kantonspolizei will be assigned to listen in at the Mutterhaus.”

  “The Mutterhaus?”

  “Police headquarters. The Mother House, we call it.”

  They headed steadily uphill on Hottingerstrasse. The houses became larger and nicer, the trees denser. Finally they came to Hauserstrasse, and pulled into the driveway of a low-slung brownstone house set in the middle of a nicely landscaped yard. She noticed there were no unmarked police cruisers anywhere nearby.

  “This is the correct address,” Kesting said.

  She nodded. Another Swiss banker, she thought, with a big house and a nice yard.

  They got out and walked to the front door. Kesting rang the bell. “You do not mind, I hope, if I lead the interview.”

  “Not at all,” Anna replied. Whatever “international cooperation” meant on paper, that was the protocol and they both knew it.

  After waiting a few minutes, Kesting rang again. “He is an old man, and for some years he has been wheelchair-bound. It must take him time to move around his house.”

  After a few minutes more, Kesting said, “I cannot imagine he goes out very much at his age.” He rang again.

  I knew this was too easy, Anna thought. What a botch.

  “He may be ill,” Kesting said. Uneasily he turned the doorknob but the door was locked. Together, they walked around to the back door; it opened readily. He called into the house, “Dr. Rossignol, it is Kesting from the Public Prosecutor’s office.” The “Dr.” seemed purely an honorific.

  Silence.

  “Dr. Rossignol?”

  Kesting stepped into the house, Anna following. The lights were on, and she could hear classical music.

  “Dr. Rossignol?” Kesting said more loudly. He ventured forward into the house. Soon they found themselves in the dining room, where the lights were on, and a tape deck played music. Anna could smell coffee, eggs, some kind of fried meat.

  “Dr.—Oh, dear God!”

  Horrified, Anna saw what Kesting had seen.

  An old man sat in a wheelchair at the table, before a plate of breakfast. His head was on his chest, the eyes fixed and dilated. He was dead.

  They’d gotten to him too! That in itself didn’t surprise her. What stunned her was the timing—so soon before their arrival, it had to be. As if they knew the authorities were coming.

  She tasted fear.

  “Dammit,” she said. “Call an ambulance. And the homicide squad. And please, don’t let them touch anything.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  A squad of crime-scene officers from the homicide squad of the Zurich Kantonspolizei arrived within the hour and took video and still photographs. The victim’s house was dusted carefully for fingerprints, particularly the front and back doors and the three windows that could be accessed from the ground level. Anna asked the specialist to print both Rossignol’s wheelchair and all exposed skin on the deceased’s body. Elimination prints were taken from Rossignol himself before the body was removed.

  Had the Americans not taken such an interest in Rossignol prior to his murder, even requesting surveillance, the old man’s death would certainly have been treated as a natural occurrence. Gaston Rossignol had been ninety-one, after all.

  But instead an autopsy was ordered, with special attention paid to the ocular fluid. The postmortem would be done in the facilities of the University of Zurich Institute of Legal Medicine, as was standard, since Zurich had no medical examiner.

  Anna returned to her hotel. Exhausted—she hadn’t slept on the plane, had decided against taking an Ativan—she drew the curtains, got into an oversize T-shirt, and climbed into the bed.

  She was jarred awake by the telephone. Momentarily disoriented, she thought she was back in Washington, that it was the middle of the night. She glanced at the phosphorescent dial of her watch and saw that it was two-thirty in the afternoon, Zurich time. She picked up the phone.

  “Is this Miss Navarro?” a man’s voice asked.

  “That’s me,” she croaked, then cleared her throat. “Who’s this?”

  “I’m Sergeant Major Schmid from the Kantonspolizei. I’m a homicide detective. I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

  “No, no, I was just dozing. What’s up?”

  “The fingerprints have come back with some interesting results. Can you find your way to police headquarters?”

  Schmid was an affable man with a wide face, short hair, and ridiculous little bangs. He wore a navy blue shirt and had a gold chain around his neck.

  His office was pleasant, light-filled, sparsely furnished. Two blond-wood desks faced one another; she sat at one, he at the other.

  Schmid toyed with a paper clip. “The fingerprints were run at the Kriminaltechnik. Rossignol’s prints were eliminated, leaving a number of other prints, most of them unidentified. He was a widower, so we assume they belong to his housekeeper and a few others who worked at his house. The housekeeper was on duty overnight, until this morning, when she made his breakfast and then left. They must have been watching the house and saw her depart.”

  “He didn’t have a nurse?”

  “No,” Schmid said, bending the wire paper clip back and forth. “You know, we now have a computerized database of fingerprints just like yours.” He was referring t
o the Automated Fingerprint Identification Service, which stored a bank of millions of prints. “The prints were scanned in, digitized, and sent by modem to the central registry in Bern, where they were run against all available databases. The search did not take long. We got a match very quickly.”

  She sat up. “Oh?”

  “Yes, this is why the case was assigned to me. The prints belong to an American who was detained here just a few days ago in connection with a shooting in the vicinity of the Bahnhofplatz.”

  “Who is he?”

  “An American named Benjamin Hartman.”

  The name meant nothing to her. “What do you know about him?”

  “A fair amount. You see, I questioned him myself.” He handed her a file folder containing photocopies of Hartman’s U.S. passport, driver’s license, credit cards, and his Swiss police records with mug shots.

  She examined the copies closely, fascinated. Could this be her man, the killer? An American? Mid-thirties, an investment banker for a financial firm called Hartman Capital Management. A family business, she assumed. That probably meant he had money. Lives in New York City. Here on a Swiss ski vacation, he had told Schmid.

  But that could be a lie.

  Three of the remaining Sigma victims had been killed during the time he was here in Zurich. One victim had lived in Germany, which was a train ride away, so that was a possibility. Another was in Austria; also possible.

  But Paraguay? That was a long plane flight from here.

  Yet the possibility could not be ruled out. Neither could the possibility that he was not working alone.

  “What happened on the Bahnhofstrasse?” she asked. “He shoot someone?”

  The paper clip Schmid was worrying snapped in the middle. “There was gunfire along the street and in the shopping arcade beneath the Bahnhofplatz. He was questioned in connection with that. Personally, I don’t think he was the shooter. He insists someone tried to shoot him.”

  “Anyone killed?”

  “Several bystanders. And, in his account, the guy he insists tried to shoot him.”

  “Hmm,” she said, puzzled. A bizarre tale: How much of it was true? Who was this guy? “You let him go?”

  “We had no basis on which to hold him. And there was some string-pulling from his firm. He was instructed to leave the canton.”

  Not in my backyard: Was that the Zurich approach to law enforcement? Anna wondered sourly. “Any idea where he is now?”

  “At the time, he claimed he was planning to go to St. Moritz. The Hotel Carlton. But we’ve since learned that he never checked in. Then, yesterday, we received a report that he’d reappeared in Zurich, at the Handelsbank Schweiz. We tried to bring him in for further questioning, but he escaped. Another misadventure, accompanied by shooting. It follows him around.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Anna said. “Do you have a way of finding out whether Hartman is staying at some other hotel in Zurich, or anywhere else in the country?”

  Schmid nodded. “I can contact the Hotel Control in each of the cantons. Copies of all hotel registration forms go to the local police.”

  “How current are they?”

  “Sometimes not so current,” Schmid admitted. “At least we can tell where he was.”

  “If he checked in under his own name.”

  “All legitimate hotels require foreigners to show their passports.”

  “Maybe he has more than one passport. Maybe he’s not staying at a ‘legitimate’ hotel. Maybe he has friends here.”

  Schmid looked mildly annoyed. “But you see, I’ve met him, and he didn’t look to me like someone who carries false passports.”

  “Some of these international businessmen, you know, have second passports from places like Panama or Ireland or Israel. They come in handy sometimes.”

  “Yes, but such passports would still have their true names on them, right?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. Is there a way to tell if he left the country?”

  “There are many different ways to leave the country—plane, automobile, train, even on foot.”

  “Don’t the border police keep records?”

  “Well, the border police are supposed to look at passports,” Schmid admitted, “but often they don’t. Our best bet would be the airlines. They keep records of all passengers.”

  “What if he left by train?”

  “Then we may find no trace, unless he made a seat reservation on an international train. But I wouldn’t be hopeful.”

  “No,” Anna said, ruminating. “Can you start the search?”

  “Of course,” Schmid said indignantly. “It is standard.”

  “When can I expect the autopsy results back? I’m particularly interested in the toxicology.” She knew she was probably pushing the man a little too hard. But there was no choice.

  Schmid shrugged. “It could be a week. I could put in a request to speed things up.”

  “I have one specific neurotoxin I’d like them to search for,” she said. “That shouldn’t take so long.”

  “I can call for you.”

  “Would you? And bank records. I need Rossignol’s bank records going back two years. Will Swiss banks cooperate, or are they going to give us that whole secrecy song-and-dance?”

  “They will cooperate with the police on a homicide,” Schmid said huffily.

  “That’s a nice surprise. Oh, and one more thing. The photocopies you took of his credit cards—think I could have those?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. She was actually starting to like the fellow.

  São Paulo, Brazil

  The wedding reception was being held at the most ultra-exclusive private club in all of Brazil, the Hipica Jardins.

  The club’s members were mainly drawn from the quatrocentões, Brazil’s aristocracy, descendants of the original Portuguese settlers who had been in the country for at least four hundred years. They were the land barons, the owners of paper mills and newspapers and publishing houses and playing-card factories, the hotel magnates—the richest of the rich, as the long line of Bentleys and Rolls-Royces parked in front of the clubhouse attested.

  Tonight many of them had turned out, resplendent in white tie and tails, to celebrate the wedding of the daughter of one of Brazil’s plutocrats, Doutor Otavio Carvalho Pinto. His daughter, Fernanda, was marrying into an equally illustrious family, the Alcantara Machados.

  One of the guests was a dignified, white-haired man of almost ninety. Although he was not one of the quatrocentões—he was in fact a native of Lisbon who had immigrated to São Paulo in the fifties—he was an enormously wealthy banker and landowner, and he had been for decades a business partner and friend of the bride’s father.

  The old man’s name was Jorge Ramago, and he sat watching the couples dance, his noisettes de veau Périgourdine untouched. One of the waitresses, a dark-haired young woman, tentatively approached the old man and said in Portuguese, “Señor Ramago, there is a telephone call for you.”

  Ramago turned slowly to look at her. “Telephone?”

  “Yes, señor, they say it is urgent. From your home. Your wife.”

  Ramago at once looked worried. “Where?—where?—” he faltered.

  “This way, sir,” the waitress said, and she gently helped him to his feet. They walked slowly across the banquet room, for the old Lisboner was afflicted with rheumatism, though he was otherwise in excellent health.

  Outside the banquet room, the waitress guided Ramago to an antique wooden telephone booth and assisted him into it, solicitously smoothing his rumpled dinner jacket.

  Just as Ramago reached for the telephone, he felt a sharp pinprick in his upper thigh. He gasped, looked around, but the waitress was gone. The pain quickly subsided, though, and he put the handset up to his ear and listened. But all he could hear was the dial tone.

  “There is no one on the line,” Ramago managed to say to no one just before he lost consciousness.

  A minute
or so later, one of the waiters noticed the old man passed out in the telephone booth. Alarmed, he called out for help.

  The Austrian Alps

  Patient Eighteen was awakened at midnight.

  One of the nurses gently applied a tourniquet to his upper arm and began to draw blood.

  “What the hell is this?” he groaned.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the nurse said. Her English was heavily accented. “We are required to take venous blood samples every four hours from midnight on, throughout the day.”

  “Good God, for what?”

  “It is to measure the levels of your serum Epo—erythropoietin.”

  “I didn’t know I had any.” All this medical stuff was unsettling, but he knew there was much more to come.

  “Please, go back to sleep, sir. You have a long day ahead of you.”

  Breakfast was served in a lavish banquet room with the others. There was a buffet overflowing with fresh fruits, freshly baked biscuits and rolls, breakfast sausages, eggs, bacon, and ham.

  When Patient Eighteen finished, he was escorted to an examination room in another wing.

  There, another nurse gingerly cut into the skin of the inner part of his upper arm with a small scalpel.

  He moaned.

  “I’m sorry if I caused you pain,” the nurse said.

  “My entire damned body’s one big pain. What’s this for?”

  “A skin biopsy to examine the elastic fibers in the reticular dermis,” she replied, applying a bandage.

  In the background, two white-coated physicians were quietly conferring in German. Patient Eighteen understood every word.

  “His brain function is somewhat impaired,” the short, rotund one said, “but nothing you wouldn’t expect in a man of his age. No sign of senile dementia or Alzheimer’s.”

  A tall, thin, gray-faced man said, “What about cardiac muscle mass?”

  “Acceptable. But we measured the blood pressure at the posterior tibial artery, this time using Doppler ultrasonography, and we did find some peripheral arterial disease.”