The Sigma Protocol (58 page)

“Roberto, help!” the widow cried. “Save my Francisco! Get this man out of here at once!”

“Señora, should I kill this intruder?” Roberto asked.

The man’s demeanor told Ben he would fire without remorse. Ben hesitated, unsure what to do. The priest was a hostage, with the revolver to his forehead, yet Ben knew he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. And even if he did, the man with the sawed-off shotgun would kill him in the blink of an eye.

But I can still bluff
, he realized.

“Roberto!” the old woman croaked. “Now!”

“Put the gun down or I’ll fire,” said the young man. “I don’t care what happens to this scumbag.” He indicated the priest.

“Yes, but the señora does,” Ben said. “We will lower our weapons at the same time.”

“All right,” the young man agreed. “Take the weapon away from his head, stand up, and get out of here. If you want to live.” He lowered the shotgun’s barrel, pointing it toward the floor, as Ben pulled the revolver away from the priest’s forehead. He got up slowly, the gun still lowered.

“Now move toward the door,” the man said.

Ben backed away, his right hand gripping the revolver, his left patting the air behind him, feeling for obstacles as he moved. The young man moved with him into the hall, his rifle still lowered.

“I just want you out of this house,” the man said calmly. “If you ever come near this house again, you’ll be killed on sight.” The priest had sullenly raised himself to a sitting position, looking drained and humiliated. Ben backed out of the open door—either the priest had left it open or Roberto had entered this way—and then pulled it shut.

In a few seconds he was running.

Anna paid the cabdriver and entered the small hotel, located on a quiet street in the district of Buenos Aires called La Recoleta. It was not, she thought uneasily, the sort of place where a single young woman traveling alone would easily go unnoticed.

The concierge greeted her by name, which disturbed her. Earlier in the day she and Ben had checked in, separately and several hours apart. They’d also called in their reservations separately and at different times. Staying in the same hotel made logistical sense, but it also increased certain risks.

The chambermaid’s cart was parked outside her room. Inconvenient. She wanted to be alone, go over the files, make phone calls; now she’d have to wait. As she entered she saw the maid, hunched over her open suitcase.

Taking files out of Anna’s leather portfolio
.

Anna stopped abruptly. The maid looked up, saw Anna, and dropped the files and portfolio back into the suitcase.

“What the hell are you doing?” Anna said, advancing on her.

The maid protested indignantly in Spanish, a mix of haughty denials. Anna followed her out into the hall, demanding to know what she was doing. “
Eh, ¿qué haces? ¡Ven para acá! ¿Qué cuernos haces revisando mi valija?
”

Anna tried to read the woman’s name tag, but the woman suddenly bolted, running down the corridor at top speed.

The maid hadn’t been just pilfering.
She had been going through Anna’s papers
. Whether she read English or not was beside the point; most likely she had been hired to steal any documents, papers, files, notes.

But hired by whom?

Who could possibly know Anna was here, or what she was investigating? She was being watched—but by whom?

Who knows I’m here? Denneen, yes, but had he told someone, some associate?

Had Peralta, the Interpol representative, figured out who she was? Was that possible?

Just as she reached for the bedside phone, it rang. The manager, calling to apologize? Or Ben?

She picked it up. “Hello?”

There was only dead air. No, not dead air: it was the familiar hiss of a surveillance tape. Then the sounds of faint, indistinct voices, becoming sharper, amplified.

A surge of adrenaline. “Who is this?”

She made out a voice: “
What about immigration records? Records of people who entered the country in the
forties and fifties?
” It was her own voice. Then the voice of a male interlocutor. Peralta.

On the telephone, someone was playing back a tape recording of the conversation between Peralta and herself.

They had heard everything, and they—whoever “they” were—knew precisely where she was and what she was after.

She sat on the edge of the bed, stunned and terrified. Now there could be no question her presence was known, despite all the precautions. The pilfering maid was no isolated player.

The phone rang again.

Prickly all over with terror, she snatched up the receiver. “Yes?”

“
We want to capture the
new
Argentina. A place where people like yourself have been seeing that justice is done. A place with modern law enforcement, yet respect for democracy…
” Her own voice, tinnily but crisply rendered through whatever eavesdropping equipment had been in place.

A click.

In her haste, she had left the room door open; she ran to close it. No one was in the corridor. She shut the door, double-locked it, seated the slide bolt of the safety chain in its socket.

She ran to the window, its heavy drapes open, realizing she was exposed, a target for a shooter stationed in a window of any of the tall buildings across the street. She yanked the drapes closed to block the line of sight.

The phone rang again.

She walked to it slowly, put the handset to her ear, said nothing.

“
I didn’t get to be where I am today by being a pushover…
”

“Keep calling,” she finally forced herself to say into the phone, feigning calm. “We’re tracing the calls.”

But no one was listening. There was only the dull hiss of a surveillance recording.

She depressed the phone’s plunger and, before it could ring again, called down to the front desk. “I’ve been getting obscene calls,” she said in English.

“Obscene…?” the switchboard operator repeated, not comprehending.

“
Amenazas
,” she said. “
Palabrotas
.”

“Oh, I’m very sorry, señorita, would you like me to call the police?”

“I want you to hold all calls.”

“Yes, ma’am, certainly.”

She brooded for a minute, then retrieved a slip of paper from her purse, torn from a notepad in the Schiphol departure lounge. On it she had scrawled the phone number of a local private investigator that Denneen had recommended. Someone reliable, highly skilled, well connected with the authorities, but entirely honest, Denneen had assured her.

She punched out the number, let it ring and ring.

An answering machine came on. Sergio Machado identified himself and his agency. After the beep, she left her name and number, mentioned Denneen’s name. Then she called the hotel switchboard operator again and told her she would accept a call only from a Sergio Machado.

She needed someone knowledgeable and resourceful and most of all trustworthy. You couldn’t hope to get anywhere, learn anything, without someone like that, unless you had a reliable contact in the governmental bureaucracy, and that she did not have.

She went to the bathroom, splashed her face at the sink, first cold water, then hot. The telephone rang.

Thickly, in a stupor, she walked to the bedside table.

The phone rang again, then again.

She stood over the phone, stared at it, considered what to do.

She picked it up.

Said nothing, waited.

There was silence.

“Hello?” a male voice said finally. “Is anyone there?”

Quietly, mouth dry, she said: “Yes?”

“Is this Anna Navarro?”

“Who’s this?” She tried to keep her tone neutral.

“It’s Sergio Machado—you just called me? I went out to get the mail, now I’m returning your call.”

Relieved, she sighed, “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’ve just been getting a bunch of obscene calls. I thought it might be the caller again.”

“What do you mean, obscene calls—like heavy breathing, that sort of thing?”

“No. Nothing like that. It’s too complicated to get into.”

“You in some kind of trouble?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know, probably. Anyway, listen, thanks for calling back. David Denneen thought you might be able to help me.”

“Sure, you want to get a cup of coffee? Not like the shit you drink in America. Real coffee.”

“Yeah, sure, I’d like that.” Already the anxiety was beginning to ebb.

They agreed to meet early that evening in front of a café/restaurant not too far from his office. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. “I can’t promise anything more than that.”

“That’s good enough for me,” she said.

She hung up and stood over the phone for a moment, looking at it as if it were some alien life-form that had invaded the room.

Ben and she would have to change hotels. Perhaps
she had been followed from her visit with Peralta. Perhaps she had been followed from the airport. But her location and her mission were known: that was the real message of those calls. She knew better than to take them as anything other than threats.

A knock at the door.

Adrenaline propelled her to a position beside it. The safety chain was securely looped from the slide bolt in the door plate to the doorjamb.

The door could not be opened with just a key.

Could it?

There was no peephole.

“Who is it?” she said.

The voice that replied was male, familiar. She never would have thought she’d be so glad to hear it.

“It’s Ben,” the voice said.

“Thank God,” she muttered.

He was bedraggled, shirt and tie askew, hair wild.

“What’s with the door chain?” he said. “You used to live in East New York, too?”

She stared. “What happened to you?”

After they’d each recounted the events of the last few hours, she said, “We have to get out of here.”

“Damn right,” Ben said. “There’s a hotel downtown, in the
centro
—sort of a fleabag, but supposed to be kind of charming. Run by British expatriates. The Sphinx.” He’d bought a South America guide at the airport. He thumbed through it, found the entry. “Here we go. We can either show up or call from the street, on my cell phone. Not from here.”

She nodded. “Maybe we should stay in the same room this time. Husband and wife.”

“You’re the expert,” he said. Was there a glint of amusement in his eyes?

She explained: “They’re going to call around looking for an American man and woman traveling together but staying in separate rooms. How long do you think it’ll take them to locate us?”

“You’re probably right. Listen—I have something.” He produced a folded sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket.

“What’s that?”

“A fax.”

“From?”

“My researcher in New York. It’s the names of the board of directors of Armakon AG of Vienna. Owners of that little biotech startup in Philadelphia that made the poison that killed the old men.”

He handed it to her. “Jürgen Lenz,” she breathed.

“One of the directors. Is that an intriguing coincidence or what?”

Once again, Arliss Dupree returned to the paperwork in front of him and once again he found it impossible to focus. It was a long report prepared by the deputy director of the Executive Officer for U.S. Trustees, which oversees bankruptcy estates; the report detailed allegations of corruption involving the federal bankruptcy courts. Dupree read the same sentence three times before he set it aside and got himself another cup of the near-rancid coffee produced by the sputtering machine down the hall.

He had other things on his mind—that was the trouble. The developments involving Agent Navarro were annoying. Worse than annoying. They spelled major aggravation. He didn’t give a damn what happened to her. But if she’d been guilty of security breaches, it reflected badly on him. Which was totally unfair. And he couldn’t help thinking that it all started with that goddamn liver-spotted spook at the Internal Compliance Unit, Alan Bartlett. Whatever the hell
that
was about. Several times he’d made inquiries—proper, interdepartmental inquiries—and each time he had been rebuffed. As if he had some lowly custodial capacity at the Office of Special Investigations. As if the OSI itself weren’t worthy of a civil word. Whenever Dupree thought about it for too long, he had to loosen his tie. It was
galling
.

First that bitch Navarro was cherry-picked from his team to go gallivanting off God only knew where. Next
thing, word came down that she was rotten, had been selling off information to traffickers and hostiles and whoever else. If so, she was Typhoid Mary, which—he kept coming back to it—was bad news for the person she’d reported to, namely, Arliss Dupree. If Dupree had any sense of which way the wind was blowing—and his career was based on his having that sense—a shit storm was coming his way.

And he was damned if his career was going to be dented by Navarro’s misconduct or—since the charges mostly sounded like bullshit to him—by Bartlett’s double-dealing. Dupree was, above all, a survivor.

Sometimes surviving meant that you took the bull by the goddamn horns. Dupree had friends of his own—friends who would tell him stuff he needed to know. And maybe paying a visit on the Ghost might help concentrate the old guy’s mind. Bartlett looked like a god-damned vapor trail, but he was a major power in the department, a mini J. Edgar Hoover. Dupree would have to deal with him carefully. Even so, Bartlett had to learn that Dupree wasn’t somebody to mess with. The Ghost spent his days directing investigations into his colleagues; when was the last time anybody looked into what
he
was up to?

Dupree tore open a couple of envelopes of sugar and dumped it into his coffee. It still tasted foul, but he slurped it down anyway. He had a lot of work ahead of him. With any luck at all, Alan Bartlett would be getting a dose of his own medicine.

The rooms at the Sphinx were large and light-filled. There was one double bed, which they each glanced at warily, deferring any decisions on sleeping arrangements until later.