The Sigma Protocol (29 page)

He and his brother were packed into a sealed boxcar, jammed with other people, unbearably hot, foul-smelling, because none of the prisoners had bathed in days. He was unable to move his limbs. Soon he passed out, and the next thing he knew they were somewhere else, again in a crowd of prisoners, walking skeletons with shaved heads. But Peter looked relieved, because at last he would be allowed to take a shower, and so what if it was a communal shower? Ben was overcome with panic, because he knew. Somehow he knew. He tried to shout: “Peter! No! This is not a shower—it’s a gas chamber! Get out! It’s a gas chamber!” Yet his words would not come out. The others stood there like zombies, and Peter just glared at him, not understanding. A baby was crying, and then a few young women. He tried to shout again, but nothing came out. He was wild with terror. He felt suffocated, claustrophobic. He saw his brother’s upturned head, welcoming the water he expected to come from the nozzles. At the same time, he could hear the knobs being turned, the rusty
squeak-squeak-squeak of the valves opening, the hiss of the gas. He shouted, “No!” opened his eyes, and looked around at the pitch-dark study.

Slowly he sat up, listening. There was no rusty squeak; he had dreamed it. He was in his late brother’s cabin in the woods, and he had been sleeping.

But had he heard a noise, or had he dreamed that, too?

Then he heard the thunk of a car door closing.

It was unmistakable; there is no other sound like that. And it was a big car, perhaps a truck. His Range Rover?

He bolted out of bed, grabbed the flashlight, slipped quickly into his jeans and sneakers, and threw on his leather jacket. He thought: Could it be Liesl who’d gotten into, or out of, the Range Rover for some reason? He passed by her bedroom and pushed open the door.

She was in bed, eyes closed, asleep.

Oh, God. It was someone else. Someone was out there!

He rushed to the front door, grabbed the revolver from the table, opened the door silently. He looked around the clearing, illuminated by the pale light of a crescent moon. He didn’t want to switch on the flash-light, didn’t want to call attention to himself or alert whoever was out there.

Then he heard an ignition turn and the roar of an engine coming to life. He raced outside, saw the Range Rover still parked there, caught the red taillights of a truck.

“Hey!” he shouted, running after it.

The truck was barreling down the narrow dirt path at maximum speed, constrained only by the closeness of the trees. Ben ran faster, gun in one hand, clutching the Mag-Lite flashlight in the other like a baton at one of his college track meets. The taillights grew farther away
even as he put on a burst of speed, the branches whipping his face, though he barely noticed. He was a machine, a running machine, a track star once again, and he would not let that truck get away, and as he tore down the dirt road that connected with the path from the cabin he thought, Did they hear a noise in the cabin? Were they planning a break-and-enter but were frightened away? and he kept on going, faster and faster, and the red lights grew smaller and smaller, the truck getting away from him, and then he knew that he’d never catch it. The truck was gone. He turned around, headed back toward the cabin, suddenly remembering the Range Rover. He could try to chase them down in the Rover! There were only two directions the truck could have gone; he could race after them in his vehicle. He ran back down the path toward the cabin, and was suddenly jolted by a tremendous, ear-splitting explosion in front of him, coming from the cabin, an explosion that turned the night sky orange and red like a giant Roman candle, and then he saw with terror that the cabin was ablaze, a ball of fire.

Washington, D.C
.

The zipper on Anna’s garment bag snagged on one of her dresses just as the taxi arrived and honked impatiently.

“All right, all right,” she groaned. “Cool it.”

She yanked at the zipper again, with no luck. Then the telephone rang. “Good God!”

She was late, trying to get to Reagan National Airport to catch the evening flight to Zurich. No time to get the phone. She decided to let the voice mail answer it; then she changed her mind.

“Agent Navarro, forgive me for calling you at home.” She recognized the high, hoarse voice at once, though she’d only spoken to him once before. “I got your home number from Sergeant Arsenault. It’s Denis Weese from the Chemistry Section of the Nova Scotia Forensic Laboratory.”

He spoke excruciatingly slowly. “Yes,” she said impatiently, “the toxicologist. What’s up?”

“Well, the ocular fluid you asked me to look at?”

She finally worked the fabric of her dress loose from the zipper’s teeth. She tried not to think of how much the dress had cost. Damage had been done, but maybe it wouldn’t be too noticeable. “You find anything?”

“It’s most interesting.” The taxi’s honking grew more insistent.

“Can you hold on a second?” she said, then dropped the phone to the carpet and ran to the window. “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” she shouted.

The driver yelled up, “Navarro? You called for a taxi?”

“You can put the meter on. I’ll be down in a few.” She ran back to pick up the phone. “Sorry. The ocular fluid, you said.”

“The band showed up on electrofluoresis,” the toxicologist went on. “It’s not a naturally occurring protein. It’s a peptide, a sort of folded chain of amino acids—”

She dropped the garment bag to the floor. “Some synthetic compound, is that what you’re saying?” Not a naturally occurring protein. Something that was created in a laboratory. What could this mean?

“One that selectively binds to neuroreceptors. That explains why we didn’t find any traces of it in the bloodstream. It can only be detected, in trace quantities, in the spinal and ocular fluid.”

“Meaning it goes right to the brain, basically.”

“Well, yes.”

“What kind of compound are we talking here?”

“It’s an exotic. I guess the closest thing to it found in nature is a venom peptide, like snake venom. But the molecule’s clearly synthetic.”

“It’s a poison, then.”

“An entirely new molecule, one of the new toxins that scientists are now able to synthesize. I’m guessing that what it does is induce cardiac arrest. It goes right to the brain, crossing the blood-brain barrier, but leaves no traces in the blood serum. Really quite something.”

An entirely new molecule.

“Let me ask you something. What do you think this toxin is intended to be used for? Biological warfare?”

He laughed uneasily. “No, no, no, nothing of the sort. One does see such synthetic peptides created, sort of modeled, on naturally occurring poisons found in toads or snails or snakes or whatever, in basic biotech research. You see, the fact that they selectively bind to certain proteins makes them useful for tagging them. It’s the same property that makes them toxic, but that’s not why people concoct them.”

“So this—this substance—might have been made by a biotechnology company.”

“Or any company with a research arm in molecular biochemistry. Could be any of the big agricultural firms, too. Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, you name it. I don’t know where this was created, of course.”

“I’m going to ask you a favor,” she said. “I’m going to ask you to fax whatever you got on this to this number, O.K.?” She gave him a fax number, thanked him, hung up, and called the ICU. If she missed the plane, so be it. Right now nothing was more important than this.

“Can you patch me in to whoever has liaison with the U.S. Patent Office?” she said. When she’d been put through, she said, “Agent Stanley, this is Agent Anna Navarro. I need you to check something for me real quick and get back to me. In a couple of minutes you’re going to get a fax from the Nova Scotia Forensic Laboratory. It’s a description of a synthetic molecule. I need you to do a search for me at the U.S. Patent Office. I want to know if any company has filed a patent for this thing.”

Find out who makes it, and you’ll find the killer. One will lead to the other.

She hoped it would be that simple.

The taxi driver was honking again, and she went to the window to tell him to cool his jets.

Switzerland

Virtually catatonic, Ben drove to Zurich. Back into the lion’s den, he thought ruefully to himself. Yes, he was persona non grata there, but it was a city of nearly four hundred thousand; he’d make out so long as he kept a low profile and avoided any tripwires. And where would those be? It was a risk, a definite, calculated risk, but there was no reason to believe that safe refuge lay elsewhere. Liesl had quoted Peter’s warning words: the question isn’t where they are, it’s where they aren’t.

Oh, God. Liesl! The odor of wood smoke that permeated his clothes was a wrenching, steady reminder of her, of the once-comfortable cabin, of the explosion he had witnessed but could scarcely comprehend.

The one thing he clung to, the one thing that allowed him to keep his sanity, was that Liesl had probably been dead when the cabin had burst into flames.

Oh, Christ!

By now he had put together how it had happened; it all made a chilling kind of sense. The squeaking he had heard in the middle of the night, which had incorporated itself into his terrible dream, had come from the valve of the propane tank being turned all the way open. The cabin had quickly filled with the odorless propane—he had already stepped outside by then—which was intended to overwhelm, put to sleep, then kill the occupants of the cabin. To cover up the evidence, a timed fuse had somehow gone off. Certainly it hadn’t taken much to ignite the highly flammable gas. The accident would be ascribed by the local authorities to a faulty propane tank, not an uncommon hazard in rural areas.

And then whoever had done it had gotten into his truck and stolen away.

By the time Ben returned to the Range Rover—a matter of seconds, really, after the explosion—the cabin was pretty much gone.

She had not suffered. She had surely been either asleep or dead before her little cabin became an inferno.

He couldn’t stand to think of it!

For four years Liesl and Peter had lived there, lived their lives in hiding, surely always fearful, but fundamentally undisturbed. Probably they could have gone on living there for years.

Until Ben had shown up in Zurich.

And brought out these zealots, in effect luring Peter to his death.

And led these faceless, anonymous zealots to Liesl, the woman who had once saved Peter’s life.

Ben was beyond grief. He no longer felt the sharp stab of guilt, because he was numb. He felt nothing anymore. The shock had turned him into a cadaver, driving through the night, staring straight ahead, a machine without emotions.

But as he approached the darkened city, he began to feel one single emotion: a slowly growing, burning anger. A fury at those who had targeted innocent and good people who’d done nothing wrong but come across a bit of information by accident.

These killers, and those who directed them, remained faceless in his mind. He could not picture them, but he was determined to unmask them. They wanted him dead; they intended to frighten him into silence. But instead of running away, instead of hiding, he had made up his mind to run
toward
them, though from a direction they could not anticipate. They wanted to operate from the shadows; he would shine light on them. They wanted to conceal; he would expose.

And if his father was one of them…

He needed to dig into the past now, to excavate, to learn who these murderers were, and where they came from, and above all what they were hiding. Ben knew the rational response was to be frightened, and though that he certainly was, his fear was now subordinate to his rage.

He knew he had crossed some line into an obsession beyond any rationality.

But who were these faceless attackers?

Men who had been mobilized by the board of the corporation Max Hartman had helped set up. Madmen? Fanatics? Or simply mercenaries, hired by a corporation that had been founded, decades ago, by a group of prominent industrialists and high-ranking Nazis—among them his own father—who were now trying to conceal the unlawful origins of their original wealth? Cold-blooded mercenaries without any ideology except the profit motive, the almighty dollar, the Deutschmark, the Swiss franc…

There were layers upon layers of interlocking possibilities.

He needed cold hard information.

Ben vaguely remembered being told that one of Switzerland’s great research libraries was at the University of Zurich, in the hills overlooking the city, and that was where he now headed, the logical place to begin digging up the past.

Washington, D.C
.

Anna watched queasily as the flight attendant demonstrated the flimsy thing you put over your nose and mouth to help you breathe if the plane goes down. She’d once read an article in one of those on-line magazines that said that nobody had ever survived an emergency water landing
of an airplane. Never. She took a pharmacy bottle of Ativan from her purse. It was beyond the expiration date, but she didn’t particularly care. This was the only way she was going to make it across the Atlantic.

She was startled to hear her ICU-issue StarTac trilling from deep in the recesses of her purse. Government-standard cryptotelephony, and hardly bulkier than the usual consumer model. She’d forgot to turn it off.

She pulled it out. “Navarro.”

“Please hold for Alan Bartlett,” she heard in a lightly accented Jamaican voice.

She felt a tap on her shoulder. It was a flight attendant. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “You’re not allowed to have any cellular phones turned on during the flight.”

“We’re not flying yet,” Anna pointed out.

“Agent Navarro,” Bartlett said. “I’m glad I caught you.”

“Ma’am,” the flight attendant persisted, “airline regulations forbid you from using cell phones once the aircraft has left the gate.”

“Sorry, this’ll just be a minute.” To Bartlett she said, “What have you got for me? I’m on a plane to Zurich.”

“Ma’am,” the flight attendant said loudly, exasperated.