The Sigma Protocol (62 page)

“I suspect you didn’t come here to discuss your personnel difficulties or management style, Mr. Dupree.”

“Hell, no,” Dupree said. “Here’s the thing. The rest
of us at Justice always give you guys at ICU a wide berth. You get up to your stuff, and most of the time we’re just as happy not to know about it. But this time, you started something that’s leaving jelly stains on my carpet, you see what I’m saying? Putting me in a tight spot. I’m not making any accusations, I’m just saying that it got me thinking.”

“An unaccustomed activity for you, no doubt. You will find it grows easier with practice.” Bartlett spoke with effortless mandarin disdain.

“I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed,” Dupree said. “But you’ll find I can still cut.”

“How reassuring.”

“It’s just that something about the whole thing smelled bad to me.”

Bartlett sniffed. “Aqua Velva, would that be? Or Old Spice? Your aftershave arrives before you do.”

Dupree just shook his head, in a show of good-natured confusion. “So I poked around a little. Learned a little more about you, about where you’ve been. I hadn’t realized before that you owned a huge piece of property on the Eastern Shore. Not your typical federal employee, I guess.”

“My mother’s father was one of the founders of Holleran Industries. She was one of the heirs to the estate. That’s not a secret. Nor is it something I choose to draw attention to, I’ll admit. I have little interest in the high life. The life I’ve decided to lead is a rather plain one, and my tastes are, on the whole, modest. Anyway, what of it?”

“Right, your mother was a Holleran heiress—I found that out, too. Came as a surprise, I got to say. Way I see it, it’s kind of flattering that a multimillionaire would deign to work among us.”

“All of us must make decisions in our lives.”

“Yup, I guess that’s true. But then I’m thinking, how
much else is there about Alan Bartlett that I don’t know about? Probably a lot, right? Like, what’s with all those trips to Switzerland? Now, Switzerland—I guess because at the OSI we’re always dealing with money-laundering, that place always sets off alarm bells. So it gets me wondering about these trips of yours.”

A beat. “Excuse me?”

“Well, you do head over to Switzerland a bunch, am I right?”

“What gives you that idea?”

Dupree pulled a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his jacket. It was slightly crumpled, but he laid it flat on Bartlett’s desk and smoothed it out. On it was a series of dots, in a roughly circular array. “Sorry it’s so crude, I drew it myself.” He pointed to the topmost dot. “Over here, we got Munich. Just under it, Innsbruck. Moving southeast, Milan. Turin. Then, a little more easterly and a little further north, Lyon. Dijon. Freiburg.”

“And this would be an adult-education course in geography that you’re taking?”

“Naw,” Dupree said. “Took me a long time to get this stuff. I had to go through the computers at passport control and the major airlines, too. Major pain in the ass, I can tell you. But these are all airports that you traveled through at some point over the past fifteen years. A lot of them direct from Dulles, some of them with a connecting flight through Frankfurt or Paris. So here I am, and I’m looking at this scatter of points. All these dreary goddamn airports and what do they have in common?”

“I expect you’re going to tell me,” Bartlett said, a look of chilly amusement in his eyes.

“Well, Christ, take a look at the scatter. What would you conclude? It’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re in a circle of points within a two-hundred-mile radius of Zurich.

They’re all a hop and a skip from Switzerland—that’s what these places got in common. They’re all places you’d go if you wanted to go to Switzerland and maybe didn’t want to have ‘Switzerland’ stamped on your passport.
Either
of your passports, in
your
case: I was impressed to see you have two authorized passports.”

“Which is not uncommon among officials in my particular line of work. You’re being absurd, Mr. Dupree, but I’ll play along. Let’s say I have indeed visited Switzerland—so what?”

“Right, so what? No harm, no foul. Only, why’d you tell me you didn’t?”

“You’re really being deliberately dense, Mr. Dupree, aren’t you? If I choose to discuss my vacation plans with you, you’ll be the first to know. Your behavior today calls into question your fitness to discharge your official responsibilities. It also, if I may say so, verges on insubordination.”

“I don’t report to you, Bartlett.”

“No, because seven years ago, when you sought transfer to our unit, you were turned down. Judged
not
to be of ICU caliber.” Bartlett’s voice remained cool, but his cheeks had colored. Dupree knew he had rattled him. “And now, I’m afraid, I’ll have to call this conversation to an end.”

“I’m not finished with you, Bartlett,” Dupree said, standing up.

A death’s-head smile: “‘Great works are never finished. Only abandoned.’ So said Valéry.”

“Harper?”

“Good-bye, Mr. Dupree,” Bartlett said serenely. “Your commute home to Arlington is a long one at this time of day, and I know you’ll want to beat the rush hour.”

Ben awoke, aware first of the soft early-morning light, then of Anna’s soft breathing. They had slept in the
same bed. He sat up slowly, feeling the dull ache in his limbs, his neck. He could feel warmth radiating from her nightgown-clad body a few inches away.

He walked slowly to the bathroom, the pain now awakening too. He realized he’d slept through an entire day and night. Ben knew he was badly battered, but it was better to move around, stay as limber as possible, than to confine himself to bed. Either way it would take time to recover.

He returned to the bedroom, quietly picking up his phone. Fergus O’Connor in the Caymans was expecting his call. But when he tried to switch the phone on, he discovered that the battery was dead. Anna had apparently forgotten to charge it. He heard her stirring in the bed.

He slipped the phone into its charger cradle and called Fergus.

“Hartman!” Fergus exclaimed heartily, as if he’d been waiting for Ben’s call.

“Give me some news,” Ben said, hobbling to the window and looking out over the traffic.

“Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. Whaddaya want first?”

“Always the good first.”

There was a beep on the line—another call coming in—but he ignored it.

“Right. There’s one shady lawyer in Liechtenstein who came to his office this morning and discovered there’d been a break-in.”

“Awful sorry to hear that.”

“Yes. Particularly since one of his files is missing—the folder on an
Anstalt
he manages for some unnamed party or parties who reside in Vienna.”

“Vienna.” His stomach tightened.

“No names, unfortunately. A set of wire instructions, ID codes, and all that shit. But definitely Vienna-based.

The owners were careful to keep their names secret, even from this guy. Who, by the way, probably isn’t going to be calling the Liechtenstein cops about a missing file. Not with all the illegal shite he’s into.”

“Well done, Fergus. So what’s the bad news?”

“You’ve run up quite a bill. The job in Liechtenstein alone cost me fifty grand. You think those guys come cheap? They’re fucking
thieves
!” Even for Fergus, that was a significant charge. But given the information he’d turned up—which no law-enforcement agency could ever have gotten—it was worth it.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got any receipts for me,” Ben replied.

As soon as he disconnected the call, the phone rang. “Yes?”

“Anna Navarro, please!” a man’s voice shouted. “I need to talk to her!”

“She’s—who is this?”

“Just tell her it’s Sergio.”

“Ah, yes. Yes. Just a moment.”

Anna was awake; the ringing had awakened her. “Machado?” she murmured, her voice raspy from sleep. Ben gave her the phone.

“Sergio,” she said. “I’m sorry, I had the phone turned off, I think… All right, sure, that’s… What?…
What?
…Sergio, hello? Are you
there?
Hello?”

She pressed the Off button. “How weird,” she said.

“What is it?”

She stared at him, obviously mystified. “He said he’d been trying to reach me all night. He was calling from his car, in a part of town called San Telmo. He wants to meet at the Plaza Dorrego Bar, I think he said—he’s got a gun for me.”

“Why did he sound so frantic?”

“He said he didn’t want any part of this investigation any longer.”

“They got to him.”

“He really sounded frightened, Ben. He said—he said he’d been contacted by people, threatened—that these weren’t the usual locals who watch out for the fugitives.” She looked up, shaken. “And the call ended in midsentence.”

They could smell the fire even before they entered Plaza Dorrego. As their cab pulled up to the side of the Plaza Dorrego Bar, they saw a large crowd, ambulances and police cars and fire trucks.

The cabdriver spoke quickly.

“What’s he saying?” Ben asked.

“He says he can’t go any farther, there’s been some kind of accident. Come on.”

She asked the driver to wait for them, then she and Ben leaped out of the car and raced into the square. The smoke had mostly dissipated, but the air smelled of sulfur and carbon and combusted gasoline. Peddlers had temporarily abandoned their tables in the park at the center of the plaza, leaving their cheap jewelry and perfumes untended while they gathered to watch. Residents huddled in the doorways of the ancient tenements, to stare in fascinated horror.

It was immediately obvious what had happened. A car had been parked directly in front of the Plaza Dorrego Bar when it exploded, shattering the window of the bar, and blowing out windows across the street. Apparently it had burned for quite a while before the fire trucks were able to put it out. Even the white zebra stripes painted on the road near the wreck had been blackened.

A white-haired old woman in a brown print blouse was screaming, over and over, “
Madre de Dios! Madre de Dios!
”

Ben felt Anna grab his hand and squeeze it tight as
they watched the emergency medical workers hacksawing at the burnt-out carcass of the once-white Ford Escort, trying without success to extricate the charred body.

He felt her shudder when one of the workers managed to wrench back a chunk of metal, revealing the black incinerated arm, the wrist encircled by the blackened gold chain, the scorched claw of a hand gripping the little cell phone.

They sat, stunned, in the back of the cab.

Not until they had gone several blocks did either one speak.

“Oh, my God, Ben. Dear God.” Anna leaned back against the seat, eyes closed.

He put a hand on her shoulder, nothing more than a moment of comfort. There was nothing he could say to her, nothing that would mean anything.

“When Machado and I had dinner last night,” she said, “he told me that in all his years of investigations, he was never afraid. That I shouldn’t be afraid either.”

Ben didn’t know how to reply. He couldn’t shake the horror of seeing Machado’s incinerated body. The hand clutching the cell phone.
Some say the world will end in fire
. Shuddering, he flashed on Chardin’s faceless countenance, the man’s testimony that the horrors of surviving could be far greater than those of perishing. Sigma seemed to have a fondness for incendiary solutions. As gently as he could, he said, “Anna, maybe I should do this alone.”

“
No
, Ben,” she said sharply. Ben saw her steely resolve. She was staring straight ahead, her face tense, her jaw clenched.

It was as if what they’d just witnessed had fueled her determination instead of deterring her. She was intent on visiting Strasser, no matter what, and getting to the bottom of the conspiracy that was Sigma. Maybe it
was crazy—maybe they were
both
crazy—but he knew he wasn’t going to turn back either. “Do you think either of us can just go back to our lives after what we’ve learned? Do you think we’d be
allowed
to?”

Another long silence elapsed.

“We’ll make a circuit,” she said. “Make sure no one’s staking out the house, waiting for us. Maybe they assume that since they’ve eliminated Machado, there’s no more threat.” There seemed to be relief in her voice, but he couldn’t be sure.

The cab barreled through the crowded streets of Buenos Aires toward the wealthy barrio of Belgrano. It occurred to Ben what a strange and terrible irony it was that a good man had just died so that they could try to save the life of an evil one. He wondered whether the same notion had occurred to her.
Now we’re about to risk our lives to save the life of a world-historic villain
, he reflected.

And the true scope of his villainy? Was there any way of knowing?

The harrowing words returned to him.

Wheels within wheels—that was the way we worked.… It never crossed anyone’s mind that the West had fallen under the administration of a hidden consortium. The notion would be inconceivable. Because if true, it would mean that over half of the planet was effectively a subsidiary of a single megacorporation—Sigma
.

In recent years, one very special project of Sigma’s had come to the fore. The prospect of its success would revolutionize the nature of world control. No longer would it be about the allocation of funds, the directing of resources. It became, instead, a simple matter of who the “chosen” would be
.

Was Strasser himself one of the “chosen”? Or maybe he, too, was dead.

Ben said, “I talked to Fergus, in the Caymans. He’s traced the wire transfers all the way back to Vienna.”

“Vienna,” she repeated without inflection.

She said nothing further. He wondered what she was thinking, but before he could ask, the cab pulled to a stop in front of a red-brick villa with white shutters. A white station wagon was parked in the small driveway.

Anna said something to the driver in Spanish, then turned to Ben. “I told him to circle the block. I want to look for parked cars, loiterers, anything suspicious.”