The Sigma Protocol (31 page)

Marquand spoke rapidly, quietly, and then hung up the phone.

“Vienna Sector is disturbed,” Marquand told the man beside him, a dark-haired, olive-skinned Frenchman some twenty years younger named Jean-Luc Passard. “The American survived the propane accident in St. Gallen.” He added darkly, “There can be no more errors. Not after the Bahnhofplatz debacle.”

“It was not your decision to assign the American soldier,” Jean-Luc said softly.

“Of course not, but neither did I object. The logic was persuasive: he’d spent time in proximity to the subject and could pick the face out of a crowd in a matter of seconds. No matter how often a stranger is shown a photograph, he could never move as quickly or as reliably as someone who has known the target personally.”

“We’ve now mobilized the very best,” Passard said. “With the Architect on the case, it will not be long before the mess is eliminated completely.”

“His perfectionism leads to persistence,” Marquand observed. “Still the pampered American is not to be underestimated.”

“The marvel is that he is still alive, the amateur,” Passard agreed. “Being a fitness freak does not give one survival skills.” He snorted and spoke mockingly in heavily accented English: “He doesn’t know the jungle. He knows the jungle gym.”

“All the same,” Marquand said, “there is such a thing as beginner’s luck.”

“He is no longer a beginner,” Passard observed.

Vienna

The elderly, well-dressed American emerged from the gate, walking stiffly and slowly, clutching a carry-on bag. He searched the crowd until he saw a uniformed limousine driver holding up a little sign with his name on it.

The old man gave a wave of acknowledgment, and the driver, accompanied by a woman in a white nurse’s uniform, hurried up to him. The driver took the American’s bag, and the nurse said, “How was your flight, sir?” She spoke in English with an Austrian-German accent.

The man grumbled, “I despise traveling. I can’t tolerate it anymore.”

The nurse escorted him through the crowds and to the street immediately outside, where a black Daimler limousine was parked. She helped him into the interior, which was equipped with the standard appurtenances—phone, TV, and bar. Tucked unobtrusively into one corner was an array of emergency medical equipment, including a small oxygen tank, hoses and face mask, defibrillator paddles, and IV tubes.

“Well, sir,” the nurse said once he was settled in the deeply cushioned leather seat, “the ride is not long at all, sir.”

The old man grunted, reclined the seat back, and closed his eyes.

“Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to make you more comfortable,” the nurse said.

Zurich

Anna was met at her hotel by a liaison officer from the office of the Public Prosecutor of the canton of Zurich. He was Bernard Kesting, a small, powerfully built, dark-haired young man with a heavy beard and eyebrows that joined in the middle. Kesting was unsmiling, all business, very professional: the quintessential Swiss bureaucrat.

After a few minutes of stilted introductory chat, Kesting led her to his car, a BMW 728, parked in the semicircular drive in front of the hotel.

“Rossignol is of course well known to us,” Kesting said, holding the car door open for her. “A revered figure in the banking community, for many, many years. Certainly my office has never had reason to question him.” She got into the car, but he stood there with the car door still open. “I’m afraid the nature of your inquiry was not made clear to us. The gentleman has never been accused of any crime, you know.”

“I understand.” She reached for the handle and closed the door herself. He made her nervous.

Behind the wheel, Kesting continued as he pulled out of the drive and headed down Steinwiesstrasse, a quiet residential street near the Kunsthaus. “He was, or is, a brilliant financier.”

“I can’t disclose the nature of our investigation,”
Anna said, “but I can tell you that he’s not the target of it.”

He was silent for a while, then said with some embarrassment, “You asked about protective surveillance. As you know, we haven’t been able to locate him precisely.”

“And this is customary for prominent Swiss bankers? To simply… disappear?”

“Customary? No. But then he is retired, after all. He is entitled to his eccentricities.”

“And how are his official communications handled?”

“Received by a trust, domestic representatives of an offshore entity that remains, even to them, completely opaque.”

“Transparency not being a notable Swiss value.”

Kesting glanced at her quickly, apparently unsure whether she was being snide. “It seems that at some point in the past year or so, he decided he wanted to, well, keep a lower profile. Perhaps he had the delusion that he was being stalked, pursued—he’s in his early nineties, after all, and mental deterioration can sometimes lead to paranoid fantasies.”

“And perhaps it wasn’t a delusion.”

Kesting gave her a sharp look but said nothing.

Herr Professor Doktor Carl Mercandetti had warmed immeasurably when Ben mentioned that he was a friend of Professor John Barnes Godwin. “There is no inconvenience, and nothing to apologize for. I have an office in the library. Why don’t you meet me there mid-morning? I’ll be there anyway. I hope Godwin didn’t tell you—I’m supposed to be publishing a monograph as part of a Cambridge University Press series that he’s editing, and already I’m two years late with it! He tells me my sense of timing is a touch Mediterranean.” Mercandetti’s laugh was booming even over the phone line.

Ben had been vague about what he’d wanted from
Mercandetti, and Mercandetti, judging from his high jollity, had probably assumed it was as much by way of a social call as anything.

Ben spent the first part of the morning searching through every directory of corporations in Switzerland he could find, even running a computer search of all telephone listings. But he could find no record of such a corporation as Sigma AG. So far as he could see, there was no public record that it ever did exist.

Carl Mercandetti was more austere-looking in person than Ben had imagined when they spoke on the telephone. He was around fifty, slight, with a gray crew cut and oval wire-rimmed glasses. When Ben introduced himself, however, the eyes became lively, and his handclasp was welcoming.

“Any friend of God’s…” Mercandetti said.

“And I thought it was only Princeton undergraduates who called him that.”

Mercandetti shook his head, smiling. “In the years I’ve known him, I’d say he’s only grown into his nickname. I’m quite terrified he’ll be there at the pearly gates, saying, ‘Now, a small query about footnote forty-three in your last article…’”

After a few minutes, Ben mentioned his efforts to track down a corporation named Sigma AG, one founded in Zurich toward the end of the Second World War. He didn’t explain further: the scholar would doubtless assume it was the sort of thing that an international banker might well pursue, perhaps in the course of corporate due diligence. In any case, Ben knew he would not be ill-served by reticence.

When he learned of Ben’s immediate concerns, Mercandetti was polite but unengaged. The name Sigma clearly meant little to him.

“You say it was established in 1945?” the historian asked.

“That’s right.”

“A magnificent year for Bordeaux, did you know that?” He shrugged. “Of course, we’re talking well over half a century ago. Many companies that were founded during the war, or right after, failed. Our economy was not so good as it is now.”

“I have reason to believe it still exists,” Ben said.

Mercandetti cocked his head good-naturedly. “What sort of information do you have?”

“It’s not solid information, really. It’s more along the lines of—of, well, people talking. People in a position to know.”

Mercandetti seemed amused and skeptical. “Do these people have any more information? The name could easily have been changed.”

“But isn’t there some record somewhere of corporate name changes?”

The historian’s eyes scanned the vaulted ceiling of the library. “There’s a place you might check. It’s called the
Handelsregisteramt des Kantons Zürich
—the registry of all corporations founded in Zurich. All companies established here must file papers with the registry.”

“All right. And let me ask you something else. This list here.” He slid the list of directors of Sigma AG, which he had recopied in his own hand, across the sturdy oak table. “Do you recognize any of these names?”

Mercandetti put on a pair of reading glasses. “Most of these names—they are names of well-known industrialists, you know. Prosperi, here, is a sort of underworld figure—I think he just died, just recently. In Brazil or Paraguay, I forget which. These men are mostly dead or very ancient by now. Oh, and Gaston Rossignol, the banker—he must live in Zurich.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I haven’t heard otherwise. But if he’s alive he must be in his eighties or nineties.”

“Is there a way to find out?”

“Have you tried the telephone book?” An amused look.

“There were a handful of Rossignols. None of them with the right first initial.”

Mercandetti shrugged. “Rossignol was a major financier. Helped restore the solidity of our banking system after the Second World War. He had many friends here. But perhaps has retired to the Cap d’Antibes, and is slathering coconut oil on his liver-spotted shoulders even as we speak. Or perhaps he now seeks to avoid any sort of attention, for some reason of his own. With the recent controversies over Swiss gold and the Second World War, there have been agitators, some of them vigilantes. Even a Swiss banker cannot live in a vault, of course. So one takes precautions.”

One takes precautions. “Thanks,” he said. “This is extremely helpful.” Now he pulled out the black-and-white photograph he’d taken from the Handelsbank and handed it to the academic. “Do any of these men look familiar?”

“I don’t know if you are a banker, at heart, or a history buff,” Mercandetti said merrily. “Or a dealer in old photographs—quite a trade these days. Collectors pay fortunes for nineteenth-century tintypes. Not my sort of thing at all. Give me color any day.”

“This isn’t exactly a vacation snap,” Ben said mildly.

Mercandetti smiled and picked up the photo. “That must be Cyrus Weston—yes, with his trademark hat,” he said. He pointed with a stubby finger. “That looks like Avery Henderson, dead many years. This is Émil Ménard, who built Trianon, really the first modern conglomerate. This may be Rossignol, but I’m not sure.
One always imagines him with his great bald dome, not this thatch of dark hair, but he was a much younger man here. And over here…” A minute passed in silence before Mercandetti dropped the photo. His smile had vanished. “What sort of prank is this?” he asked Ben, looking at him over his reading glasses. A bemused expression crossed his face.

“How do you mean?”

“This must be some sort of montage, something involving trick photography.” The academic spoke with a trace of annoyance.

“Why do you say that? Surely Weston and Henderson were acquainted.”

“Weston and Henderson? Surely they were. And surely they were never in the same place as Sven Norquist, the Norwegian shipping magnate, and Cecil Benson, the British automotive magnate, and Drake Parker, the head of the petrochemical giant, and Wolfgang Siebing, the German industrialist, whose family company once made military equipment and now is best known for its coffeemakers. And a dozen more of their ilk. Some of these men were archrivals, some in completely different lines of enterprise. To posit that all these people had met—now that would involve rewriting twentieth-century business history, for a start.”

“Couldn’t this have been a sort of mid-century economic conference, like Davos?” Ben ventured. “A precursor to the Bilderberg conferences, maybe? Some meeting of the corporate titans?”

The historian pointed to another figure. “This can only be someone’s idea of a joke. A very cleverly doctored image.”

“Who’s that you’re pointing at?”

“That, of course, is Gerhard Lenz, the Viennese scientist.” Mercandetti’s tone was hard.

The name sounded vaguely familiar, but Ben wasn’t sure in what context he knew it. “Who is he again?”

“Was. He died in South America. Dr. Gerhard Lenz, a brilliant mind, by all accounts, was not to mention the product of Vienna’s finest medical training, the epitome of Viennese civilization. Sorry, I’m being sarcastic, and that doesn’t suit a historian. The fact is that Lenz, like his friend Josef Mengele, was infamous in his own right for his experiments on concentration camp prisoners, on crippled children. He was already in his late forties when the war ended. His son still lives in Vienna.”

My God
. Gerhard Lenz was one of the twentieth century’s great monsters. Ben felt lightheaded. Gerhard Lenz, a light-eyed Nazi officer, was standing immediately next to Max Hartman.

Mercandetti fished an 8x loupe from a jacket pocket—he regularly had to resort to magnification in his archival research, Ben guessed—and scrutinized the image. Then he examined the yellowed card stock on which the emulsion was fixed. After a few minutes, he shook his head. “Indeed, it looks real. And yet it is not possible. It cannot be real.” Mercandetti spoke with quiet vehemence, and Ben wondered whether he was mostly trying to persuade himself. For even as he denied the evidence of his eyes, the historian looked ashen. “Tell me,” he said, and now his tone was brittle, all traces of bonhomie having evaporated. “Where did you get this?”

One takes precautions. Gaston Rossignol was alive: the death of so august a figure would not have passed without notice. And yet after another hour of research, Mercandetti and he came up empty-handed. “I apologize for a fruitless search,” Mercandetti said resignedly. “But then I am a historian, not a private detective. Besides,
I would have imagined that this sort of thing would be down your alley, given your familiarity with financial stratagems.”

The academic was right; it should have occurred to Ben already. What Mercandetti was alluding to—financial stratagems, he called it—went by the name of asset protection, and it was something Ben had some familiarity with. Now it was his turn to sit back and think. Prominent men do not simply disappear; they create legal edifices behind which to shelter. The task of hiding one’s place of residence from pursuers was not so unlike the task of hiding it from creditors or from the taxation powers of the state. Rossignol would want to retain control of his possessions while seeming to have been divested of them. It would not be easy to keep tabs on a man without property.