The Sigma Protocol

by Robert Ludlum

  “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.

  Ben Hartman recalled a particularly miserly client of Hartman Capital Management, who had an obsession with asset protection schemes. Ben came to dislike the man with a passion, but as much as he begrudged the time he’d spent working on the miser’s account, Ben realized that what he’d learned about the subterfuges of “asset protection” would now come in handy. “Gaston Rossignol must have blood relatives in the area,” Ben said to Carl Mercandetti. “I’m thinking of someone both reliable and compliant. Someone close enough to do his bidding, but decidedly younger than he is.” In any variant of a gift-leaseback scheme, Ben knew, it was an undesirable complication to be predeceased by the pseudo-beneficiary. And the clandestinity of any scheme depended upon the discretion of the enlisted partner.

  “You’re talking about Yves-Alain, of course,” the professor said.

  “Am I?”

  “You’ve just described him. Yves-Alain Taillé, the banker’s nephew. A civic leader here of some distinction, thanks to his family’s prominence, and a banker of no distinction at all, thanks to his intellectual mediocrity. Weak but well-meaning is the general consensus on him. Used to chair the Zurich Arts Council or some such. He has a sinecure at one of the private banks, a vice president of something or other. Easy enough to find out.”

  “And if I wanted to find out whether Taillé had title to property in the canton besides his primary residence? Aren’t there public tax documents in connection to estate transfers?”

  “There are municipal records in the Rathaus, just off the Limmat. But if it’s a recent title transfer, from the past five years, you can do an on-line search. The same with the tax documents you seek. They’re supposedly public documents, but they’re kept on a secure server, honoring one of the two great Swiss passions—those being for chocolate and for secrecy. I myself have a user ID and password that will provide access. Not so long ago, you see, the town fathers hired me to write something for a brochure to mark the six hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Zurich’s joining the Swiss Confederation. A bit more local than my usual research, but they were openhanded with the francs.”

  An hour later, Ben had an address, a residence decidedly more modest than Rossignol had formerly inhabited. Two hours later, after immersing himself in a series of tax documents of astounding intricacy, he had satisfied himself that it was Gaston Rossignol’s. For one thing, the title was in Taillé’s name, and yet it was not his primary residence. A country house? No one would have one in Zurich proper. A pied-á-terre for a mistress? But it was too grand for that. And what of the real-estate investment trust that maintained co-management privileges? Taillé did not enjoy unilateral control over the property’s disposition; he could not sell it or transfer the title without permission of the trust. And where was the trust headquartered? In one of the Channel Islands, Jersey. Ben smiled. Nicely done—a tax haven but not one of the truly infamous ones. It wasn’t as notorious as Nauru, but its banking establishment was even more tightly knit, more difficult to penetrate.

  Ben glanced again at the address he had jotted down. It was incredible to think that a brief car ride would take him to one of Sigma’s founders. Peter had tried to hide from Sigma, and it had destroyed him. Ben took a deep breath, and felt his stores of anger burn within him. Well, there’s been a change of plans, he thought. Now let Sigma try to hide from me.

  Chapter Twenty

  Ben found Gaston Rossignol’s house in the area of Zurich called Hottingen, a steep, hilly area overlooking the city. The houses here were situated on large lots and hidden by trees: very private, very secluded.

  Rossignol’s house was on Hauserstrasse, close to the Dolder Grand Hotel, the grande dame of Zurich hotels, generally considered the finest in all of Europe. The house was wide and low-slung, built of brownish stone apparently in the early part of the century.

  It didn’t look like any kind of safe house, Ben reflected, but perhaps that was what made it so effective. Rossignol had grown up in Zurich, but spent much of his career in Bern. He knew certain Zurichers of power and influence, of course, but it was not a place where he had casual acquaintances. Besides, the residents of the Hauserstrasse were the sort who kept to themselves; this was a neighborhood without neighborliness. An old man who cultivated his own garden would never attract notice. It would be a comfortable life, but an effectively obscure one, too.

  Ben parked the Range Rover on an incline down the block and set the emergency brake to keep it
from rolling. He opened the glove compartment and took out Liesl’s revolver. There were four shells remaining in the chamber. He would have to buy more ammunition somewhere if he wanted to use the weapon for protection. Making sure the safety was engaged, he slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  He rang the doorbell. There was no answer, and after a few minutes, he rang again.

  Still no answer.

  He tried the knob, but the door was locked.

  He noticed a late-model Mercedes parked in the carport at one side of the house. Rossignol’s car or someone else’s, he couldn’t know.

  He turned to leave when it occurred to him to try all the doors, and he went around the side of the house. The lawn was newly mown, flower gardens well tended. Someone took good care of the property. The back of the house was grander than the front, a large sweep of land bordered by more flower gardens, bathed by the morning sun. A cupola sat in the middle of a large terrace at the back of the house, near an arrangement of deck chairs.

  Ben approached the back entrance. He pulled open a glass storm door and then tried the knob.

  The knob turned.

  He opened the door, his heart hammering, and braced for an alarm to go off, but heard none.

  Was Rossignol here? Or anyone else, a servant, a housekeeper, family?

  He entered the house, into a dark, tiled mud room. A few coats hung on hooks, along with an assortment of wooden canes with ornamental handles. Passing through the mud room, he entered what looked like a study, a small room furnished with a large desk, a few bookcases. Gaston Rossignol, once the pillar of Switzerland’s banking establishment, seemed to be a man of relatively modest tastes.

  On the desk was a green blotter pad, next to it a sleek black Panasonic telephone with modern gimmicks built in: conference, caller ID, intercom, speakerphone, digital answering machine.

  As he was staring at the phone, it rang. It was earsplittingly loud, the ringer turned up to maximum volume. He froze, expecting Rossignol to enter, wondering how he would explain himself. It rang again, three times, four, then stopped.

  He waited.

  No one had picked up. Did that mean no one was home? He glanced at the caller ID screen, saw that the number was a long series of digits, obviously long distance.

  He decided to move on farther into the house. As he walked down a corridor, he heard faint music playing—Bach, it sounded like—but where was it coming from?

  Was someone in fact home?

  From the far end of the hall he saw the glow of light coming from a room. He approached, and the music grew louder.

  Now he entered what he immediately recognized as a formal dining room, a long table in the center of the room covered with a crisp white linen tablecloth and set with a silver coffeepot on a silver tray, a single place setting at which was a plate of eggs and sausage. Breakfast appeared to have been served by a housekeeper, but where was he or she? A portable tape player on a buffet against one wall was playing a Bach cello suite.

  And sitting at the table, his back to Ben, was an old man in a wheelchair. A tanned bald head, fringed with gray, a bull neck, round shoulders.

  The old man didn’t seem to have heard Ben entering. He was probably hard of hearing, Ben decided, a guess confirmed by the hearing aid in the old man’s right ear.

  Still, taking no chances, he slid his hand into the front pocket of his leather jacket, felt the bulk of the revolver, pulled it out, and cocked the hammer. The old man didn’t move. He had to be seriously deaf, or his hearing aid was turned off.

  Suddenly Ben was jolted by the ring of the telephone, just as loud in here as it had been in the study a minute ago.

  Yet the old man didn’t move.

  It rang again, a third time, a fourth, and stopped.

  Then he heard a man’s voice coming from down the hall, the tone frantic. After a moment, Ben realized that the voice was coming from the answering machine, but he couldn’t make out what it was saying.

  He took a few steps closer, then placed the barrel of the revolver against the old man’s head. “Don’t move.”

  The old man’s head fell forward, lolling on his chest.

  Ben grabbed the arm of the wheelchair with his free hand and spun it around.

  The old man’s chin was on his chest, the eyes wide and staring at the floor. Lifeless.

  Ben’s body flooded with panic.

  He felt the food on the plate. The eggs and sausage were still warm.

  Apparently Rossignol had died just moments ago. Had he been killed?

  If so, the killer could be in the house right now!

  He raced down the corridor from which he had come, and the telephone rang again. In the study, he looked at the caller ID screen: the same long series of digits, beginning with 431. Where was the call from? The numbers were familiar. A country in Europe, he felt sure.

  The answering machine came on.

  “Gaston? Gaston?” a man’s voice shouted.

  The words were in French, but spoken by a foreigner, and Ben could make out few of the heavily accented words.

  Who was calling Rossignol, and why?

  Another ring: the doorbell!

  He raced to the back entrance, which he’d left partially open. No one was there.

  Move it!

  He stepped outside and ran around the side of the house, slowing when he got near the front. From behind some tall shrubbery, he could see a white police cruiser passing slowly by, patrolling the neighborhood, he guessed.

  A low wrought-iron fence separated Rossignol’s yard from the neighbor’s. He raced to the low fence, and leaped over it into the neighbor’s yard, which was roughly the same size as Rossignol’s, though not as ornately landscaped. He was taking an enormous chance of being spotted by anyone in the neighbor’s house, but no one called out to him, there were no shouts, and he kept running, around the far side of the house and out to Hauserstrasse. A hundred feet or so down the street was the Rover. He ran to it, leaped in, and keyed the ignition. It roared to life.

  He made a quick U-turn and then drove down the steep street, deliberately slowing his pace to that of a local driving to work.

  Someone had just tried to call Rossignol. Someone calling from a place whose telephone number began with 431.

  The digits tumbled around in his brain until something clicked.

  Vienna, Austria.

  The call had come from Vienna. These men have successors, heirs, Liesl had said. One of them, Mercandetti had told him, resided in Vienna: the son of the monster Gerhard Lenz. With Rossignol dead, it was as logical a lead to follow as any. Not a certainty—far from a certainty—but at least a possibility. A possible lead when there was a paucity of leads.

  In a few minutes he had arrived in the heart of the city, near the Bahnhofplatz, where Jimmy Cavanaugh had tried to kill him. Where it had all begun.

  He had to get on the next train to Vienna.

  The Austrian Alps

  There was a soft knock on the door, and the old man called out irritably, “Yes?”

  A physician in a white coat entered, a short, rotund man with round shoulders and a potbelly.

  “How is everything, sir?” the physician asked. “How is your suite?”

  “You call this a suite?” Patient Eighteen asked. He lay atop the narrow single bed, fully dressed in his rumpled three-piece suit. “It’s a goddamned monk’s cell.”

  Indeed, the room was simply furnished, with only a chair, a desk, a reading lamp, and a television set. The stone floor was bare.

  The physician smiled wanly. “I am Dr. Löfquist,” he said, sitting in the chair beside the bed. “I would like to welcome you, but I must also warn you. This will be a very rigorous and difficult ten days. You will be put through the most extensive physical and mental tests you have ever had.”

  Patient Eighteen did not bother to sit up. “Why the hell the mental?”

  “Because, you see, not everyone is eligible.”

  “What happens if you thin
k I’m crazy?”

  “Anyone not invited to join is sent home with our regrets.”

  The patient said nothing.

  “Perhaps you should take a rest, sir. This afternoon will be tiring. There will be a CAT scan, a chest X-ray, then a series of cognitive tests. And, of course, a standard test for depression.

  “I’m not depressed,” the patient snapped.

  The doctor ignored him. “Tonight you will be required to fast, so that we may accurately measure plasma cholesterol, triglycerides, lipoproteins, and so on.”

  “Fast? You mean starve? I’m not starving myself!”

  “Sir,” the doctor said, rising, “you are free to go any time you wish. If you stay, and if you are invited to join us, you will find the procedure to be lengthy and quite painful, I must be honest. But it will be like nothing you have ever experienced in your long life. Ever. This I promise you.”

  Kesting did not conceal his surprise when Anna returned several hours later with an address; and in truth Anna shared a measure of that surprise. She had done what she’d determined to do, and it had worked. After a few readings of the Rossignol file, she had come up with one name that could be of help: that of a Zurich civil servant named Daniel Taine. The name recurred in several different contexts, and further inquiries had confirmed her intuition. Gaston Rossignol had been Taine’s first employer, and, it appeared, something of a mentor. In the seventies, Taine and Rossignol were partners in a limited liability venture involving high-yield Eurobonds. Rossignol had sponsored Taine’s application to the Kifkintler Society, a men’s club whose membership included many of Zurich’s most powerful citizens. Now Taine, having made his small fortune, served in various honorific capacities in the canton. He was someone with precisely the sort of access and resources to ensure that his old mentor’s plans ran smoothly.

  Anna had dropped in on Taine at his home unannounced, identified herself, and laid her cards on the table. Her message was simple. Gaston Rossignol was in serious, imminent danger.