The Sigma Protocol

by Robert Ludlum

  But how to explain the intricate deception of Ostrow, the false CIA man? Might he have been somehow connected to the heirs to some vast hidden fortune?

  “Theoretically, I suppose, my father could be one of the bad guys.” Ben said. “But I really don’t believe it.”

  “Why not?” She didn’t know how far to push him on this.

  “Because my father already has more money than he knows what to do with. Because he may be a ruthless businessman, and he may be a liar, but after talking with Sonnenfeld, I’m coming to think that he wasn’t fundamentally an evil man.”

  She doubted Hartman was holding anything back, but surely he was hampered by filial loyalty. Ben seemed to be a loyal person—an admirable quality, but sometimes loyalty could blind you to the truth.

  “What I don’t get is this: these guys are old and failing,” Hartman continued. “So why bother hiring someone to eliminate them? It’s hardly worth the risk.”

  “Unless you’re afraid one of them will talk, reveal the financial arrangement, whatever it is.”

  “But if they haven’t talked for half a century, what’s going to make them start now?”

  “Maybe some sort of pressure by legal authorities, triggered by the surfacing of this list. Faced with the threat of legal action, any one of them might easily have talked. Or maybe the Corporation is moving to a new phase, a transition, and sees itself as peculiarly vulnerable while it’s happening.”

  “I’m hearing a lot of conjecture,” he said. “We need facts.”

  She paused. “Who were you talking to on the phone just now?”

  “A corporate researcher I’ve used before. She found some intriguing background on Vortex Laboratories.”

  Anna was suddenly alert. “Yes?”

  “It’s wholly owned by the European chemicals and technology giant Armakon AG. An Austrian company.”

  “Austrian…” she murmured. “That is interesting.”

  “Those mammoth technology firms are always buying up tiny tech startups, hoping to snag the rights to stuff their own in-house research scientists haven’t invented.” He paused. “And one more thing. My friend in the Caymans was able to trace a few of the wire transfers.”

  Jesus. And her guy at the DOJ had turned up nothing. She tried to conceal her excitement. “Tell me.”

  “The money was sent from a shell company registered in the Channel Islands, a few seconds after it came in from Liechtenstein, from an Anstalt, a bearer-share company. Sort of a blind entity.”

  “If it came from a company, does that mean the names of the true owners are on file somewhere?”

  “That’s the tricky part. Anstalts are usually managed by an agent, often an attorney. They’re essentially dummy corporations that exist only on paper. An agent in Liechtenstein might manage thousands of them.”

  “Was your friend able to get the name of the Anstalt’s agent?”

  “I believe so, yes. Trouble is, barring torture, no agent will release information on any of the Anstalts he manages. They can’t afford to sabotage their reputation for discretion. But my friend’s working on it.”

  She grinned. The guy was growing on her.

  The phone rang.

  She picked it up. “Navarro.”

  “Anna, this is Walter Heisler. I have results for you.”

  “Results?”

  “On the gun that was dropped by the shooter in Hietzing. The prints you asked me to run. It matched a print, a digitized print, on file at Interpol. A Hans Vogler, ex-Stasi. Maybe he doesn’t expect to miss, or doesn’t expect us to be there, because he wears no gloves.”

  Heisler’s information was nothing new, but the fingerprints would be a valuable piece of evidence.

  “Fantastic. Walter, listen, I need to ask you another favor.”

  “You don’t sound surprised,” Heisler said, miffed. “I said he was ex-Stasi, you understand? Former East German secret intelligence service.”

  “Yes, Walter, I do understand, and I thank you. Very impressive.” She was being too brusque again, too businesslike, and she tried to soften her approach. “Thank you so much, Walter. And just one more thing…”

  Wearily: “Yes?”

  “One second.” She covered the phone’s mouthpiece and said to Ben, “You still haven’t reached Hoffman?”

  “Not a word. No answer there—it’s bizarre.”

  She removed her hand from the mouthpiece. “Walter, can you find out for me whatever you can about a private investigator in Vienna named Hans Hoffman?”

  There was silence.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, Anna, I am here. Why do you ask about this Hans Hoffman?”

  “I need some outside help here,” she replied, thinking quickly, “and his name was given to me—”

  “Well, I think you may have to find someone else.”

  “Why is that?”

  “About an hour ago a call came in to the Sicherheitsbüro from an employee of a Berufsdetektiv named Hans Hoffman. The woman, an investigator in Hoff-man’s office, came to work and discovered her boss dead. Shot at point-blank range in the forehead. And, curious—his right forefinger was cut off. Can this be the Hoffman you’re talking about?”

  Ben had stared in disbelief when Anna told him what she’d learned. “Christ, it’s as if they’re always just one behind us, whatever we do,” he murmured.

  “Maybe ‘ahead of us’ is the more accurate term.”

  Ben massaged his temples with the fingertips of both hands, and at last he spoke in a quiet voice. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Sigma has obviously been killing its own. Those victims you’re trying to find—they all have something in common with me, a shared enemy. We’ve observed the pattern—frightened old men going into hiding in the twilight of their lives, living under aliases. It’s a virtual certainty that they have some idea what the hell’s going on. That means our only hope is to establish contact with someone on the list who’s still alive, who can talk. Someone with whom I can establish common ground, a conduit of sympathy, enlist his help for reasons of his own self-protection.”

  Anna stood, paced the room. “That’s if there is anyone alive, Ben.”

  He stared at her a long while, saying nothing, the resolve in his eyes wavering. She could tell that he longed to trust her every bit as fervently as she hoped she could trust him. Softly, hesitantly, he replied: “I have a feeling—it’s just a feeling, an educated guess—that there may be at least one still alive.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A Frenchman named Georges Chardin.”

  She nodded slowly. “Georges Chardin…I’ve seen the name on the Sigma list—but he’s actually been dead for four years.”

  “But the fact that his name was in the Sigma files means Allen Dulles had him vetted for some reason.”

  “Back in the fifties, yeah. But remember, most of these people have been dead for a long while. My focus was on the ones who had fallen victim to the recent spate of killings—or who were about to. Chardin isn’t in either category. And he’s not a founder, so he’s not on your incorporation document.” The Sigma list contains more names than just the original incorporators. She looked at Ben hard. “My question is, how did you know to ask about him? Are you holding out on me?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “We don’t have time to play games,” Anna said. “Georges Chardin—I know him as a name on paper. But he’s no one famous, no one I’d ever heard of. So what’s his significance?”

  “The significance is his boss, a legendary French industrialist—a man who was one of the incorporators in the photo. A man named Émil Ménard. In his time, one of the greatest corporate titans. Back in 1945 he was a grand old man; he’s long dead.”

  “Him I know. He was the founder of Trianon, generally considered the first modern corporate conglomerate, correct?”

  “Right. Trianon is one of the biggest industrial empires in Fr
ance. Émil Ménard built Trianon into a French petrochemical giant that made even Schlumberger look like a five-and-dime.”

  “And so this Georges Chardin worked for the legendary Émil Ménard?”

  “Worked for him? He just about did his breathing for him. Chardin was his trusted lieutenant, aide-de-camp, factotum, whatever you want to call him. He wasn’t just Ménard’s right-hand man, he was practically his right hand. Chardin was hired in 1950 when he was only twenty, and in a few short years the greenhorn changed the way the cost of capital was accounted for, introduced a sophisticated new way of calculating return on investment, restructured the company accordingly. Way ahead of his time. A major figure.”

  “In your world, maybe.”

  “Granted. Point is, in very short order, the old man trusted his young protégé with everything, every detail in running his vast enterprise. After 1950, Émil Ménard didn’t go anywhere without Chardin. They say Chardin had all the firm’s ledgers memorized. He was a walking computer.” Ben produced the yellowed photograph of the Sigma group and placed it in front of Anna, pointing out Émil Ménard’s countenance. “What do you see?”

  “Ménard looks pretty haggard, to tell the truth. Not well at all.”

  “Correct. He was pretty seriously ill at that point. Spent the last decade of his life fighting cancer, though he was an incredibly formidable man right up until the end. But he died with the supreme confidence that his corporation would remain strong, continue to grow, because he had such a brilliant young Directeur Général du Département des Finance—basically, his chief financial officer.”

  “So you’re speculating that Ménard would have trusted Georges Chardin with the secret of the Sigma enterprise as well?”

  “I’m virtually certain of it. No doubt Chardin was completely in the background. But he was Ménard’s shadow every step of the way. It’s inconceivable that Chardin wouldn’t have been completely privy to the substance of Sigma, whatever its objectives and methods. And look at it from Sigma’s point of view: in order to stay alive, regardless of its true purpose, Sigma had to keep bringing in new recruits to replace the original founders. So Chardin is bound to have played a significant role, likely as a member of its inner council—Ménard would have made sure of that.”

  “O.K., O.K., you’ve got me convinced,” Anna put in impatiently. “But where does that get us today? We already know Chardin died four years ago. You think he might have left files, papers, or something?”

  “We’re told that Chardin died four years ago, sure. Right around the same time that my brother, Peter, arranged his fake death. What if he did something like what Peter did—arranged to disappear, go into hiding, escape the killers he knew were after him?”

  “Come on, Ben! You’re making all sorts of assumptions, jumping to unwarranted conclusions!”

  Ben replied patiently, “Your list indicated that he perished in a fire, right? The old ‘burned beyond recognition’ ruse? Like my brother? Sorry; won’t get fooled again.” He seemed to recognize the skepticism in her face. “Listen to me! You said it yourself. We have a string of old men who were killed presumably because somebody viewed them as a threat. Sigma, or its heirs or controllers. So let’s think this out: why might a bunch of old guys in the twilight of their lives be considered a serious enough threat to be murdered?” He stood up, began to pace. “You see, the mistake I was making all along was in viewing Sigma as merely a front organization, a false corporation—instead of a genuine one.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It should have been so obvious! I can give you a hundred instances from my Wall Street days. In 1992, one guy ousted another rival to become the sole CEO of Time Warner, and his first order of business was what? To purge the hostiles from the board of directors. That’s what management does. You get rid of your adversaries!”

  “But the Time Warner guy didn’t kill his opponents, I assume,” she said dryly.

  “On Wall Street we have different techniques for eliminating enemies.” Ben gave a twisted smile. “But he eliminated them all the same. It’s what always happens when there’s an abrupt change in management.”

  “So you’re suggesting there’s been a ‘change in management’ at Sigma.”

  “Exactly. A purge of what you might call dissident trustees.”

  “Rossignol, Mailhot, Prosperi, and the rest—you’re saying they were all dissidents? On the wrong side of the new management?”

  “Something like that. And Georges Chardin was known to be brilliant. No doubt he saw it coming, and so he arranged to disappear.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. But it’s still all in the realm of wild speculation.”

  “Not quite,” Ben said softly. He turned to face Anna directly. “Beginning with the time-honored principle ‘Follow the money,’ I hired a French investigator we’ve used before at Hartman Capital Management. A wizard named Oscar Peyaud. We’ve used him for due-diligence work in Paris, and every time he blows us away with the speed and quality of his work. And the size of his bill, but that’s another matter.”

  “Thanks for keeping me in the loop about what you were doing,” Anna said with heavy sarcasm. “So much for being partners.”

  “Listen to me. A man can’t live without some form of financial support. So I got to thinking, what would happen if you could track down the executor to Chardin’s estate—see in what form he left his assets, how he might have retained access to them?” He paused, took out a folded sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. “An hour ago this arrived from Paris, from Oscar Peyaud.”

  The page was blank except for a brief address:

  Rogier Chabot

  1554 rue des Vignoles

  Paris 20

  Anna looked up, at once puzzled and excited. “Chabot?”

  “Georges Chardin’s alias, I would bet. I think we have our man. Now it’s just a matter of our getting to him before Sigma does.”

  An hour later, the phone on Walter Heisler’s desk rang. A cycle of two short rings: an internal line. Heisler was drawing deep on a cigarette—he was working through the third pack of Casablancas of the day—when he picked up, and there was a two-second pause before he spoke: “Heisler.”

  It was the tech from the small room on the fifth floor. “Did you get the bulletin on the American, Navarro?”

  “What bulletin?” Heisler slowly let the warm smoke plume through his nostrils.

  “Just came in.”

  “Then it’s probably been sitting in the message center all morning.” The Sicherheitsbüro message center, operating with what he regarded as third-world inefficiency, was a bane of his existence. “What’s up, then? Or do I need to find out by listening to the news on the radio?” This was how he had taken to formulating the complaint. Once he really did find out the whereabouts of a fugitive from a local radio station, the messengers having misplaced the morning’s faxed bulletin somewhere en route to his desk.

  “She’s a rogue, it seems. We’ve been used. The U.S. government has a warrant out for her. Not my department, but I thought somebody should give you a heads-up.”

  “Christ!” Heisler said, and let his cigarette drop from his mouth into his mug of coffee, heard the quick sizzle of the quenched butt. “Shit! A fucking embarrassment.”

  “Not so embarrassing if you’re the one who brings her in, eh?” the tech said carefully.

  “Checking out of Room 1423,” Anna said to the harried-looking clerk at the front desk. She placed her two electronic key-cards on the black granite counter.

  “One moment, please. If I can just have your signature on the final bill, ja?” The man was weary-looking, and fortyish, with slightly concave cheeks, and dirty-blond hair—dyed?—combed forward, flat against his skull, in a seeming attempt to simulate youth. He wore a crisp uniform jacket of some sort of brown synthetic, with slightly fraying epaulets. Anna had a sudden vision of him as she imagined he became after hours—dressed in black leather, heavily spritzed with musky cologne, haunting
nightclubs where the dim light might help him get lucky with a schöne Mädchen.

  “Of course,” Anna said.

  “We hope you enjoyed your stay, Ms. Navarro.” He typed numbers on a keyboard, and then looked up at her, showing a toothy, yellow-tinged smile. “Apologies. It’s going to take a few moments to bring the records up. A problem in the system. Computers, right?” He smiled wider, as if he had said something witty. “Wonderful labor-saving devices. When they work. Let me get the manager.” He picked up a red handset, and said a few words in German.

  “What’s going on?” asked Ben, who was standing behind her.

  “A computer problem, he says,” Anna murmured.

  From behind the counter, a short, big-bellied man emerged in a dark suit and tie. “I’m the manager, and I’m so sorry for the delay,” the man said to her. He exchanged glances with the clerk. “A glitch. It’s going to take a few minutes to retrieve the records. Phone calls, all of that. We’ll get it for you soon, and then you can take a look and make sure it looks right. Wouldn’t want you billed for the phone calls in Room 1422. Sometimes happens with the new system. Miracle of modern technology.”

  Something was wrong, and it wasn’t the computer system.

  The manager was jovial and reassuring and effusive, and yet, despite the lobby’s slight chilliness, Anna noticed the beads of sweat on his forehead. “Come and sit in my office while we get this straightened out. Take a load off your feet, yes? You’re off to the airport, yes? You have transportation arranged? Why don’t you let the hotel car take you?—our compliments. The least we can do for the inconvenience.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Anna said, thinking that she recognized the type well from her years of investigations—the type of person whom tension made talkative. The man was under orders to detain them. That much was clear.

  “Not at all. Not at all. You come with me, and have a nice cup of coffee. Nobody makes it like the Viennese, yes?”