The Sigma Protocol

by Robert Ludlum

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Just one thing: the couch is a little small, maybe a bit too short.”

  “I’ve slept on worse, believe me.”

  She got up, went to a closet, and found a blanket, handed it to him. “I can ask room service to bring up a toothbrush. In the morning we’re going to have to retrieve your clothes, your luggage, from your hotel.”

  “I don’t plan to go back.”

  “Definitely not a good idea. I’ll make arrangements.” She seemed to realize that she was standing a little too close, and she took a step backward, the gesture awkward. “Well, I’m going to turn in,” she said.

  He thought of something suddenly, an idea that had been teasing at the back of his mind since leaving Lenz’s villa. “The old Nazi hunter Jakob Sonnenfeld lives in this town, doesn’t he?”

  She turned toward him. “That sounds right.”

  “I read somewhere recently he may be ancient but he’s as sharp as ever. Plus, he’s supposed to have extensive files. I wonder…”

  “You think he’ll see you?”

  “I think it’s worth a try.”

  “Well, be careful if you do go. Take some security precautions. Don’t let anyone follow you there. For his sake.”

  “Hey, I’ll take any advice on that you want to give me.”

  While she got ready for bed, he called Bedford on his digital phone.

  Mrs. Walsh answered. She sounded agitated. “No, Benjamin, I haven’t heard a word. Not a word! He seems to have vanished without a trace. I’ve—well, I’ve brought the police in on this. I’m at my wits’ end!”

  Ben felt a dull headache starting: the tension, which for a while had abated, had returned. Rattled, he mumbled a few empty words of reassurance, disconnected the call, took off his jacket, and hung it on the back of the desk chair. Then, still dressed in his slacks and shirt, he settled onto the sofa and pulled the blanket over him.

  What did this mean, his father’s disappearing without leaving a word? He had voluntarily gotten into a limousine; it wasn’t a kidnapping. Presumably he knew where he was going.

  Which was where?

  He struggled to get comfortable on the couch, but Navarro was right, it was just an inch or two too short for comfort. He saw her sitting up in bed reading a file by the light of the bed lamp. Her soft brown eyes were caught by the pool of light.

  “Was that about your father?” she asked. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping, but—”

  “It’s O.K. Yeah, my father vanished a few days ago. Got in a limousine to the airport and was never heard from again.”

  She put down the file, sat up straight. “That’s a possible kidnapping. Which makes it federal business.”

  He swallowed, his mouth dry. Could he really have been abducted?

  “Tell me what you know,” she said.

  The phone jangled some hours later, awakening them both.

  Anna picked it up. “Yes?”

  “Anna Navarro?”

  “Yes, who’s this?”

  “Anna, I’m Phil Ostrow, from the American embassy here. I hope I’m not calling you too late.” A flat Midwestern American accent with Chicagoan vowels.

  “I had to get up to answer the phone anyway,” she said dryly. “What can I do for you?” What State Department hack called at midnight?

  “I—well, Jack Hampton suggested I call.” He paused significantly.

  Hampton was an operations manager for the CIA, and someone who had done Anna more than one assist on a previous assignment. A good man, as straightforward as you could be in an oblique business. She recalled Bartlett’s words about the “crooked timber of humanity.” But Hampton wasn’t built that way.

  “I have some information about the case you’re working.”

  “What’s your—Who are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I’d rather not get into all that over the phone. I’m a colleague of Jack’s.”

  She knew what that meant: CIA. Hence the Hampton connection. “What’s your information, or would you rather not get into that either?”

  “Let’s just say it’s important. Can you come by the office tomorrow morning, first thing? Seven too early for you?” What could it be that was so urgent? she wondered.

  “You guys do start early, don’t you? Yeah, I guess I can.”

  “All right—tomorrow morning, then. You been to the office before?”

  “Embassy?”

  “Across the street from the consular section.”

  He gave her directions. She hung up, puzzled. From across the room Ben said, “Everything O.K.?”

  “Yeah,” she said unconvincingly. “Everything’s fine.”

  “We can’t stay here, you know.”

  “Correct. Tomorrow we should both move.”

  “You seem worried, Agent Navarro.”

  “I’m always worried,” she said. “I live my life worried. And call me Anna.”

  “I never used to worry much,” he said. “Good night, Anna.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  It was the sound of a blow-dryer that awakened Ben; after a few groggy moments, he realized that he was in a hotel room in Vienna, and that his back ached from a night on the couch.

  He craned his neck forward, heard the satisfying crack of vertebrae, felt some welcome relief from the stiffness.

  The bathroom door opened and light flooded half the room. Anna Navarro was dressed in a tweedy brown suit, a little dowdy but not unbecoming, and her face was made up.

  “I’ll be back in an hour or so,” she said crisply. “Go back to sleep.”

  Directly across the street from the consular section of the U.S. embassy, just as Ostrow had described, was a drab modern office building. The placard in the lobby listed a number of U.S. and Austrian business offices, and on the eleventh floor, sure enough, the Office of the United States Trade Representative—the cover for the Vienna office of the CIA. Such feelers from agencies she was investigating were far from unusual; they’d sometimes resulted in her best leads.

  Anna entered an unremarkable reception area, where a young woman sat at a government-issue desk, beneath the Great Seal of the United States, answering the phone and typing at a computer keyboard. She didn’t look up. Anna introduced herself, and the receptionist pressed a button and announced her.

  In less than a minute a man with the pallor of a bureaucratic lifer bustled out. His cheeks were acne-scarred and sunken, his hair graying auburn. His eyes were small and gray behind large wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Miss Navarro?” he said, thrusting out a hand. “I’m Phil Ostrow.”

  The receptionist buzzed them through the door from which he had appeared, and Ostrow guided her to a small conference room where a slender, darkly handsome man was sitting at a fake-wood-grain Formica-topped table. He had bristling, brush cut black hair salted with gray, brown eyes, long black lashes. Late thirties, maybe, Middle Eastern. Ostrow and Anna sat on either side of him.

  “Yossi, this is Anna Navarro. Anna, Yossi.”

  Yossi’s face was tanned, the lines around his eyes deeply etched, either from squinting in the sun or from a life of great stress. His chin was square and cleft. There was something almost pretty about his face, though it was masculinized by his weathered skin and a day-old growth of beard.

  “Good to meet you, Yossi,” she said.

  She nodded warily, unsmiling; he did the same. He did not offer his hand.

  “Yossi’s a case officer—you don’t mind my telling her that much, do you, Yossi?” said Ostrow. “He works under deep commercial cover here in Vienna. A good setup. He emigrated to the States from Israel when he was in his late teens. Now everyone assumes he’s an Israeli—which means every time he gets into trouble, someone else gets the blame.” Ostrow chuckled.

  “Ostrow, enough—no more,” Yossi said. He spoke in a gruff baritone, his English accented with guttural Hebrew R’s. “Now, we should understand each other: a number of
men all around the world have been found dead in the last few weeks. You are investigating these deaths. You know these are murders, but you do not know who is behind them.”

  Anna gazed at him dully.

  “You interrogated Benjamin Hartman at the Sicherheitsbüro. And you’ve been in close contact with him since. Yes?”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  Ostrow spoke. “We’re making an official interagency request that you remand Hartman to our custody.”

  “What the hell…?”

  “You’re over your head here, Officer.” Ostrow returned her gaze levelly.

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Hartman’s a security risk. A two-woman man, O.K.?”

  Anna recognized the agency slang—it referred to double agents, American assets who had been recruited by hostile parties. “I don’t understand. Are you saying that Hartman’s one of yours?” That was madness. Or was it? It would explain how he was able to travel through European countries without alerting passport control, among other things that had puzzled her. And wouldn’t his cover as an international financier lend itself to all sorts of agency work? The named scion of a well-known financial outfit—no concocted legend could ever be as versatile and as persuasive.

  Yossi and Ostrow exchanged glances. “Not one of ours, exactly.”

  “No? Then whose?”

  “Our theory is that he’s been on retainer from someone in our outfit who’s been freelancing, let’s say. We could be talking false-flag recruitment.”

  “You bring me here and talk to me about theories?”

  “We need him back on American soil. Please, Agent Navarro. You really don’t know who you’re dealing with here.”

  “I’m dealing with someone who’s confused about a number of things. And who’s still in shock from the death of his twin brother—killed, he believes.”

  “We know all about it. Hasn’t it occurred to you that he may have killed him, too?”

  “You’re joking.” The imputation was incredible, and terrible; could it be true?

  “What do you really know about Benjamin Hartman?” Ostrow demanded testily. “I’ll ask another question. What do you know about how your list of targets started to make the rounds? Information doesn’t want to be free, Agent Navarro. Information wants to command top dollar, and someone like Benjamin Hartman has the wherewithal to pay it.”

  Grease some palms: Hartman’s words.

  “But why? What’s his agenda?”

  “We’re never going to find out so long as he’s cavorting around Europe, are we?” Ostrow paused. “Yossi hears things from his former compatriots. Mossad has caseworkers in this town, too. There’s a possible connection with your victims.”

  “A splinter group?” she asked. “Or are you talking about the Kidon?” She meant the assassination unit of Mossad.

  “No. It is nothing official. It is private business.”

  “Involving Mossad agents?”

  “And some freelancers they hire.”

  “But these murders aren’t Mossad signature killings.”

  “Please,” Yossi said, his face creasing with distaste. “Don’t be naïve. You think my brethren all the time are leaving their business cards? When they want to be credited, sure. Come on!”

  “So then they don’t want to be credited.”

  “Of course not. Is too sensitive. Potentially can be explosive in the current climate. Israel doesn’t want to be connected.”

  “So who are they working for?”

  Yossi glanced at Ostrow, then back at Anna. He shrugged.

  “Not for Mossad, is that what you’re saying?”

  “For Mossad to order assassinations, this is very formalized thing. There is whole internal system, ‘execution list,’ that the Prime Minister must sign off on. He must initial each name on the list, or it must not be carried out. People in Mossad and Shin Bet have been forced out for ordering killings without approval from top. That is why I tell you this is not authorized sanctions.”

  “So I ask you again: Who are they working for?”

  Again Yossi looked at Ostrow, but this time his glance seemed to be a prompt, a nudge.

  “You didn’t hear this from me,” Ostrow said.

  She felt gooseflesh. Thunderstruck, she whispered, “You’re kidding me.”

  “See, the Agency would never dirty its own hands,” Ostrow said. “Not anymore. In the good old days, we wouldn’t hesitate to rub out some tin-pot dictator if he looked at us the wrong way. Now we got presidential directives and congressional oversight committees and CIA directors whose balls have been lopped off. Christ, we’re afraid to give a foreign citizen a head cold.”

  There was a knock on the door. A young man stuck his head in. “Langley on three, Phil,” he said.

  “Tell ’em I didn’t get in yet.” The door closed, and Ostrow rolled his eyes.

  “Let me get this straight,” Anna said, addressing Ostrow. “You guys passed intelligence on to some Mossad freelancers?”

  “Someone did. That’s all I know. The rumor is that Ben Hartman served as a go-between.”

  “You got hard evidence?”

  “Yossi’s come up with some suggestive details,” Ostrow said quietly. “He described enough of the ‘watermarks,’ the ‘sanitation’ procedures, the interoffice markings, to tell me this came directly from CIA. I’m talking about shit that can’t be made up, marks and glyphs that are rotated daily.”

  Anna could put two and two together: Yossi himself had to have been an American penetration agent, a deep-cover asset, spying on Mossad for the CIA. She considered asking about it directly, but decided it would be a breach of professional etiquette. “Who at Langley?” she asked.

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”

  Yossi, a spectator at a bullfight, smiled for the first time. His smile was dazzling.

  “You don’t know me,” Ostrow said, “but anyone who does knows I’m an avid enough bureaucratic game-player to want to screw someone there I don’t like. If I had the name, I’d hand it to you just to burn the guy.”

  That she believed: that would be the natural response of an Agency infighter. But she was determined not to let him see that she was persuaded. “What’s the motivation here? Are you talking about fanatics in the CIA?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know anyone there who has strong feelings about anything except vacation policy.”

  “Then why? What possible motivation?”

  “My guess? Let me tell you something.” Ostrow took off his glasses, cleaned the lenses on his shirt. “You’ve got a list of crooks and capitalists, small fry working for big fry. When it comes to CIA and the Nazis, right after the war, that’s where some serious skeletons are buried. My theory? Someone highly placed, and I do mean highly placed, saw that some names from a long time ago were about to get out.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He put the glasses back on. “Names of old guys we used, paid off. Guys who’d mostly disappeared into the mists of history, O.K.? Suddenly a list comes out, and guess what? The names of some of the old-timers in the Agency who aided and abetted this shit are gonna come out, too. Maybe some financial shenanigans, some double-dipping into the old well. The old geezers sure as hell are gonna squeal like pigs, rat out their handlers. So who’re you gonna call? Who else but some fanatical Israelis. Neat and clean. Talk about ghosts left over from the Second World War, do some hand-waving about inexplicable vengeance killings, save Old Boy asses—everybody’s happy.”

  Yeah, she thought grimly. Everybody’s happy.

  “Listen to me. There’s a convergence of interests here. You’re trying to figure out a string of homicides. We’re trying to figure out a string of security breaches. But we can’t chase this thing down without Ben Hartman. I’m not going to dump a load of supposition on you. There’s a good chance that he’s being hunted by the same people he
works for. Mop-ups never end—that’s the problem with them.”

  Mopping up: Was that what she herself was doing?

  Ostrow seemed to respond to the hesitant look on her face. “We just need to know what’s true and what isn’t.”

  “You’ve got paperwork?” Anna asked.

  Ostrow tapped a stapled document with a blunt finger. A capitalized section heading stood out: CUSTODIAL CONVEYANCE OF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN. “Yes, I’ve got the paperwork. Now all I need’s the body. Jack Hampton said you’d understand about these things.”

  “What do you have in mind for the delivery?”

  “Look, there are delicate issues of extraterritoriality here…”

  “Meaning you don’t want me to bring him here.”

  “You got that right. We will make house calls, though. You can cuff him, give us the signal, and we’ll show up with bells on. If you want to keep your hands completely clean, that’s fine, too. Give us a time and location, preferably someplace semi-secluded, and…”

  “And we’ll handle the rest.” Yossi was somber once more.

  “Christ, you guys really are cowboys, aren’t you?” Anna said.

  “Cowboys who ride Aeron chairs, for the most part,” Ostrow replied wryly. “But, sure, we can still manage an exfiltration when we have to. Nobody gets hurt. It’s a clean snatch-and-grab—surgical.”

  “Surgery hurts.”

  “Don’t overthink it. It’s the right thing to do. And it means we all get our jobs done.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” Anna said, grimacing.

  “Then take this under advisement, too.” Ostrow took out a sheet of paper with departure times of non-stop flights from Vienna to Dulles International Airport in Washington, and to Kennedy Airport in New York. “Time is of the essence.”

  In a dark second-floor office on Wallnerstrasse, the portly Berufsdetektiv Hans Hoffman slammed down the telephone and cursed aloud. It was ten in the morning and he had already called the American four times at his hotel, with no luck. The message he’d left the night before had gone unanswered, too. The hotel had no other telephone number for Hartman and would not divulge whether or not he’d even spent the night at the hotel.