The Sigma Protocol

Explosive praise for Robert Ludlum’s

THE SIGMA PROTOCOL

“Perfectly executed…Packed with all the classic Ludlum elements…thunders forward at breakneck pace.”

—People

“Vintage Ludlum.”

—Houston Chronicle

“Dazzling…a clean launch of the ’80s spy novel into a thrilling action/adventure web of intrigue meant for the 21st century.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[A] triumph…Harkens back to the roller coaster ride/thrill-a-minute
Bourne Identity
.”

—Midwest Book Review

“Ludlum at his best.”

—Sullivan County Democrat

“It’s amazing that ten pages before the end of the book, you still can’t figure out how he’s going to resolve the complex plot he’s presented. Yet he does, and pretty satisfactorily.”

—Colorado Springs Gazette

“[Ludlum] shows that…his storytelling skill was still at an all time high…provides no less suspense than his die-hard fans would expect.”

—Bookreporter.com

“An accomplished novel…classic Ludlum…moves at breakneck speed…with well-developed players and a fascinating stage, Ludlum has risen to some of his finest work in this clever and enjoyable novel.”

—Chattanooga Times Free Press

MORE…

“Ludlum keeps things moving with plenty of gunplay and running about…quite good.”

—Booklist

“A superior piece of work.”

—Roanoke Times

“Gripping…compelling…hooks readers and keeps [them] on the edge of their seats.”

—Charleston Post & Courier

The Bancroft Strategy
The Ambler Warning
The Tristan Betrayal
The Janson Directive
The Prometheus Deception
The Matarese Countdown
The Apocalypse Watch
The Road to Omaha
The Scorpio Illusion
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Icarus Agenda
The Bourne Supremacy
The Aquitaine Progression
The Parsifal Mosaic
The Bourne Identity
The Matarese Circle
The Gemini Contenders
The Holcroft Covenant
The Chancellor Manuscript
The Road to Gandolfo
The Rhinemann Exchange
The Cry of Halidon
Trevayne
The Matlock Paper
The Osterman Weekend
The Scarlatti Inheritance

Robert Ludlum

NOTE:
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE SIGMA PROTOCOL

Copyright © 2001 by Myn Pyn LLC.
Excerpt from
The Janson Directive
copyright © 2002 by Myn Pyn LLC.

All rights reserved.

For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

ISBN: 0-312-94358-X
EAN: 978-0-312-94358-5

Printed in the United States of America

St. Martin’s Press hardcover edition / October 2001
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / October 2002

St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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Zurich

“May I get you something to drink while you wait?”

The
Hotelpage
was a compact man who spoke English with only a trace of an accent. His brass name-plate gleamed against his loden-green uniform.

“No, thank you,” Ben Hartman said, smiling wanly.

“Are you sure? Perhaps some tea? Coffee? Mineral water?” The bellhop peered up at him with the bright-eyed eagerness of someone who has only a few minutes left to enhance his parting tip. “I’m terribly sorry your car is delayed.”

“I’m fine, really.”

Ben stood in the lobby of the Hotel St. Gotthard, an elegant nineteenth-century establishment that specialized in catering to the well-heeled international businessman—
and, face it, that’s me
, Ben thought sardonically. Now that he had checked out, he wondered idly whether he could tip the bellhop
not
to carry his bags,
not
to follow his every move a few feet behind, like a Bengali bride,
not
to offer unceasing apologies for the fact that the car that was to take Ben to the airport had not yet arrived. Luxury hotels the world over prided themselves on such coddling, but Ben, who traveled quite a bit, inevitably found it intrusive, deeply irritating. He’d spent so much time trying to break out of the cocoon, hadn’t he? But the cocoon—the stale
rituals of privilege—had won out in the end. The
Hotelpage
had his number, all right: just another rich, spoiled American.

Ben Hartman was thirty-six, but today he felt much older. It wasn’t just the jet lag, though he had arrived from New York yesterday and still felt that sense of dislocation. It was something about being in Switzerland again: in happier days, he’d spent a lot of time here, skiing too fast, driving too fast, feeling like a wild spirit among its stone-faced, rule-bound burghers. He wished he could regain that spirit, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t been to Switzerland since his brother, Peter—his identical twin, his closest friend in all the world—had been killed here four years ago. Ben had expected the trip to stir up memories, but nothing like this. Now he realized what a mistake he’d made coming back here. From the moment he’d arrived at Kloten Airport, he’d been distracted, swollen with emotion—anger, grief, loneliness.

But he knew better than to let it show. He’d done a little business yesterday afternoon, and this morning had a cordial meeting with Dr. Rolf Grendelmeier of the Union Bank of Switzerland. Pointless, of course, but you had to keep the clients happy; glad-handing was part of the job. If he was honest with himself, it
was
the job, and Ben sometimes felt a pang at how easily he slipped into the role, that of the legendary Max Hart-man’s only surviving son, the heir presumptive to the family fortune, and to the CEO’s office at Hartman Capital Management, the multibillion-dollar firm founded by his father.

Now Ben possessed the whole trick bag of international finance—the closet full of Brioni and Kiton suits, the easy smile, the firm handshake, and, most of all, the gaze: steady, level, concerned. It was a gaze that conveyed responsibility, dependability, and sagacity, and that, often as not, concealed desperate boredom.

Still, he hadn’t really come to Switzerland to do business. At Kloten, a small plane would take him to St. Moritz for a ski vacation with an extremely wealthy, elderly client, the old man’s wife, and his allegedly beautiful granddaughter. The client’s arm-twisting was jovial but persistent. Ben was being fixed up, and he knew it. This was one of the hazards of being a presentable, well-off, “eligible” single man in Manhattan: his clients were forever trying to set him up with their daughters, their nieces, their cousins. It was hard to say no politely. And once in a while he actually met a woman whose company he enjoyed. You never knew. Anyway, Max wanted grandchildren.

Max Hartman, the philanthropist and holy terror, the founder of Hartman Capital Management. The self-made immigrant who’d arrived in America, a refugee from Nazi Germany, with the proverbial ten bucks in his pocket, had founded an investment company right after the war, and relentlessly built it up into the multibillion-dollar firm it was now. Old Max, in his eighties and living in solitary splendor in Bedford, New York, still ran the company and made sure no one ever forgot it.

It wasn’t easy working for your father, but it was even harder when you had precious little interest in investment banking, in “asset allocation” and “risk management,” and in all the other mind-numbing buzzwords.

Or when you had just about zero interest in money. Which was, he realized, a luxury enjoyed mainly by those who had too much of it. Like the Hartmans, with their trust funds and private schools and the immense Westchester County estate. Not to mention the twenty-thousand-acre spread near the Greenbrier, and all the rest of it.

Until Peter’s plane fell out of the sky, Ben had been able to do what he really loved: teaching, especially teaching kids whom most people had given up on. He’d
taught fifth grade in a tough school in an area of Brooklyn known as East New York. A lot of the kids were trouble, and yes, there were gangs and sullen ten-year-olds as well armed as Colombian drug lords. But they needed a teacher who actually gave a damn about them. Ben did give a damn, and every once in a while he actually made a difference to somebody’s life.

When Peter died, however, Ben had been all but forced to join the family business. He’d told friends it was a deathbed promise exacted by his mother, and he supposed it was. But cancer or no cancer, he could never refuse her anyway. He remembered her drawn face, the skin ashen from another bout of chemotherapy, the reddish smudges beneath her eyes like bruises. She’d been almost twenty years younger than Dad, and he had never imagined that she might be the first to go.
Work, for the night cometh
, she’d said, smiling bravely. Most of the rest she left unspoken. Max had survived Dachau only to lose a son, and now he was about to lose his wife. How much could any man, however powerful, stand?

“Has he lost you, too?” she had whispered. At the time, Ben was living a few blocks from the school, in a sixth-floor walk-up in a decrepit tenement building where the corridors stank of cat urine and the linoleum curled up from the floors. As a matter of principle, he refused to accept any money from his parents.

“Do you hear what I’m asking you, Ben?”

“My kids,” Ben had said, though there was already defeat in his voice. “They need me.”

“
He
needs you,” she’d replied, very quietly, and that was the end of the discussion.

So now he took the big private clients out to lunch, made them feel important and well cared for and flattered to be cosseted by the founder’s son. A little furtive volunteer work at a center for “troubled kids” who made
his fifth-graders look like altar boys. And as much time as he could grab traveling, skiing, parasailing, snowboarding, or rock-climbing, and going out with a series of women while fastidiously avoiding settling down with any of them.

Old Max would have to wait.

Suddenly the St. Gotthard lobby, all rose damask and heavy dark Viennese furniture, felt oppressive. “You know, I think I’d prefer to wait outside,” Ben told the
Hotelpage
. The man in the loden-green uniform simpered, “Of course, sir, whatever you prefer.”

Ben stepped blinking into the bright noontime sun, and took in the pedestrian traffic on the Bahnhofstrasse, the stately avenue lined with linden trees, expensive shops, and cafés, and a procession of financial institutions housed in small limestone mansions. The bellhop scurried behind him with his baggage, hovering until Ben disbursed a fifty-franc note and gestured for him to leave.

“Ah, thank you so
much
, sir,” the
Hotelpage
exclaimed with feigned surprise.

The doormen would let him know when his car appeared in the cobbled drive to the left of the hotel, but Ben was in no hurry. The breeze from Lake Zurich was refreshing, after time spent in stuffy, overheated rooms where the air was always suffused with the smell of coffee and, fainter but unmistakable, cigar smoke.

Ben propped his brand-new skis, Volant Ti Supers, against one of the hotel’s Corinthian pillars, near his other bags, and watched the busy street scene, the spectacle of anonymous passersby. An obnoxious young businessman braying into a cell phone. An obese woman in a red parka pushing a baby carriage. A crowd of Japanese tourists chattering excitedly. A tall middle-aged man in a business suit with his graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. A deliveryman with a box of lilies, attired in the
distinctive orange and black uniform of Blümchengallerie, the upscale flower chain. And a striking, expensively dressed young blonde, clutching a Festiner’s shopping bag, who glanced generally in Ben’s direction, and then glanced at him again—quickly, but with a flicker of interest before averting her eyes.
Had we but world enough and time
, thought Ben. His gaze wandered again. The sounds of traffic were continuous but muted, drifting in from the Löwenstrasse, a few hundred feet away. Somewhere nearby a high-strung dog was yip-ping. A middle-aged man wearing a blazer with an odd purple hue, a tad too stylish for Zurich. And then he saw a man about his age, walking with a purposeful stride past the Koss Konditerei. He looked vaguely familiar—