Most likely, he hadn’t been informed why, or whether they were dangerous. He must have been instructed to notify security, but security must not have arrived yet, or he wouldn’t be so anxious. She was checking out of the hotel prematurely. Which meant…well, there was more than one possibility. Perhaps she—he? they?—had only recently been targeted. In which case, preparations would not be fully in place.
“Listen,” she said. “Why don’t you just figure it out on your own time and send me the bill? No biggie, huh?”
“It will be just a few minutes,” the manager said, but he was not looking at her. Instead, he was making eye contact with a guard across the lobby.
Anna looked at her wristwatch ostentatiously. “Your cousins are going to be wondering what happened to us,” she said to Ben. “We’d better get a move on.”
The manager stepped around the counter, and placed a clammy hand on her arm. “In just a few minutes,” he said. Up close, he smelled unappetizingly of grilled cheese and hair oil.
“Get your hands off me,” Anna said in a tone of low menace. Ben was startled by the sudden steel in her voice.
“We can take you wherever you want to go,” the manager protested, in a tone that was more wheedling than threatening.
From across the lobby, the security guard was reducing the distance between him and them with long, fast strides.
Anna hoisted her garment bag over her shoulder and headed for the front door. “Follow me,” she said to Ben.
The two made their way quickly toward the entrance. The lobby guard, she knew, would have to confer with the manager before pursuing them outside of the building.
On the sidewalk in front of the hotel, she looked around carefully. At the end of the block, she saw a police officer speaking into a walkie-talkie, presumably giving his location. Which meant that he was likely the first on the scene.
She tossed her bag to Ben, and headed straight over to the policeman.
“Christ, Anna!” Ben snapped.
Anna stopped the policeman, and spoke to him in a loud, official-sounding voice. “You speak English?”
“Yes,” the cop said uncertainly. “English, yes.” He was crew-cut, athletic, and seemed to be in his late twenties.
“I’m with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Anna said. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation, do you understand? The FBI. We’re looking for an American fugitive from justice, and I’ve got to ask for your help. The woman’s name is Anna Navarro.” She flashed her OSI badge quickly while holding his gaze; he would see it without really looking at it.
“You say Anna Navarro,” the policeman said with recognition and relief. “Yes. We’ve been notified. In the hotel, yes?”
“She’s barricaded herself in her room,” Anna said. “Fourteenth floor. Room 1423. And she’s traveling with someone, right?”
The policeman shrugged. “Anna Navarro is the name we have,” he said.
Anna nodded. It was an important piece of information. “I’ve got two agents in place, all right? But as observers. We can’t act on Austrian territory. It’s up to you. I’m going to ask you to take the service entrance, on the side of the building, and make your way to the fourteenth floor. Are you O.K. with that?”
“Yes, yes,” the policeman said.
“And spread the word, O.K.?”
He nodded eagerly. “We’ll get her for you. Austria is, how do you say, a law-and-order place, yes?”
Anna shot him her warmest smile. “We’re counting on you.”
A few minutes later, Ben and Anna were in a taxicab en route to the airport.
“That was pretty ballsy,” Ben said quietly. “Going up to the cop that way.”
“Not really. Those are my people. I figured they’d just got word, or they would have been better prepared. Which means they had no idea what I look like. All they know is that they’re looking for an American, on behalf of the Americans. No way of knowing whether I’m the one to pursue or the one in pursuit.”
“When you put it that way…” Ben shook his head. “But why are they after you anyway?”
“I haven’t exactly figured it out, yet. I do know that somebody’s been spreading the word that I’ve gone rogue. Selling state secrets or whatever. The question is who, and how, and why.”
“Sounds to me like Sigma is going through channels. Using real police through manipulation.”
“Does, doesn’t it?”
“This is not good,” Ben said. “The idea that we’re going to have every cop in Europe on our ass, on top of whatever psycho-killers Sigma has on the payroll—it’s going to put a crimp in the game plan.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Anna said.
“We’re dead.”
“That’s a little harsh.” Anna shrugged. “How about we approach this thing one step at a time?”
“How?”
“Ben Hartman and Anna Navarro are going to book a flight from Graz, about a hundred and fifty kilometers south, to Munich.”
“And what are we going to do in Munich?”
“We’re not going to Munich. The thing is, I already put a trace on your credit cards. That’s a genie I can’t put back in the bottle. You use any card under your name, and it’s going to sound an immediate alarm in Washington and God knows what branch offices we’ve got.”
“So we’re screwed.”
“So we use that. I need you to focus, Ben. Look, your brother prepared travel documents for him and Liesl, in case they needed to take off incognito. As far as we know, the IDs are still good, and the credit card ought to be functional. John and Paula Freedman are going to book tickets from Vienna on the next available flight to Paris. Replacing Liesl’s photo with mine won’t be a problem. A couple of generic-looking Americans, among tens of thousands who come in and out of the airport every day.”
“Right,” Ben said. “Right. I’m sorry, Anna. I’m not thinking clearly. But there are still risks, aren’t there?”
“Of course there are. Whatever we do has risks. But if we leave now, the chances are good that they’re not going to have photographs in place, and they’re not looking for Mr. and Mrs. Freedman. The main thing is to stay calm and stay smart. Ready to improvise, if need be.”
“Sure,” Ben said, but he didn’t sound it.
She looked at him. He somehow seemed young, younger than he’d been; the cockiness was gone, and he needed, she sensed, some reassurance. “After all you’ve been through, I know you’re not going to lose your head. You haven’t yet. And right now, that’s probably the most important thing.”
“Getting to Chardin is the most important thing.” “We’ll get to him,” Anna said, gritting her teeth in resolve. “We’ll get to him.”
Zurich
Matthias Deschner pressed both hands to his face, hoping for a moment of clarity in the darkness. One of the credit cards that Liesl’s boyfriend had, through his offices, established and maintained, had finally been put to use. The call was pro forma: because the account had not been used in quite some time, it fell to a clerk in a credit-security department somewhere to place a call and ascertain that the card had not gone missing.
Peter had provided for the automatic payment of the annual fee; the name, telephone number, and mailing address involved a corporate entity that Matthias had set up for him; all communications went to Deschner, as its legal representative. Deschner had felt quite uncomfortable with the whole thing—it seemed legally dubious, to say the least—but Liesl implored him for his help, and, well, he had done what he had done. In retrospect, he should have run, run in the opposite direction. Deschner believed himself to be an honorable man, but he had never had illusions of heroism.
Now a dilemma had arisen for a second time in a matter of days. Damn that Ben Hartman. Damn both the Hartman boys.
Deschner wanted to keep his word to Peter and Liesl—wanted to even though they both were now dead. But they were dead, and with it his oath. And there were now larger considerations.
His own survival, for one.
Bernard Suchet, at the Handelsbank, was too smart to have believed him when he said he’d been completely ignorant of what Peter Hartman was involved in. In truth, it was more a case of not wanting to know, of believing that what he did not know could not hurt him.
That was no longer true.
The more he thought about it, the angrier he became.
Liesl was a lovely girl—he got a lump in his throat when he thought about the necessary past tense—but it had been wrong of her, all the same, to have involved him in her affairs. It was an abuse of familial loyalties, was it not? He imagined himself carrying on a conversation, an argument, really, with his deceased cousin. It was wrong of her, so very wrong. He never wanted any part of her crusade. Had she any idea of the position she put him in?
Her words returned to him: We need your help. That is all. There is nobody else we can turn to. Deschner remembered the luminous clarity of her blue eyes, like a deep reservoir of alpine water, eyes whose righteousness seemed to expect equal righteousness in everyone else.
Deschner felt the beginnings of a throbbing headache. The young woman had asked for too much, that was all. Probably of the world, and certainly of him.
She had made enemies of an organization that murdered people with the simple indifference of a meter maid dispensing parking tickets. Now Liesl was dead, and it seemed quite possible that she would take him with her.
They would learn that the card had been activated. And then they would learn that Dr. Matthias Deschner had himself been notified of this fact but failed to report it. Soon there would be no more Dr. Matthias Deschner. He thought of his daughter, Alma, who in just two months would be getting married. Alma had talked about how much she was looking forward to walking down the aisle with her father by her side. He swallowed hard and imagined Alma walking down the aisle alone. No, it could not be. It would be not just reckless but actively selfish of him.
The throbbing behind his eyes was undiminished. He reached into his desk drawer, removed a bottle of Panadol, and dry-swallowed a bitter, chalky tablet.
He looked at the clock.
He would report the credit activation call. But not immediately. He would wait for several hours to pass. Then he would call.
The tardiness could be easily explained, and they would be grateful for his having volunteered the information. Surely they would.
And just maybe the delay would give the Hartman boy a running start. A few more hours on this earth, anyway. He owed him that much, Deschner decided, but perhaps no more.
Chapter Thirty-two
Paris
The twentieth arrondissement of Paris, its easternmost, and seamiest, district, slopes on a butte adjoining the highway that rings Paris and defines its limits, the Périphérique. In the eighteenth century, the land supported a village of winegrowers called Charonne. Over the years, the vineyards gave way to small houses, and the houses, in turn, had largely given way to charmless, unlovely structures of concrete. Today, such street names as the rue des Vignoles seem laughably out of place in the downtrodden urban milieu.
The trip to Paris had been nerve-racking; every incidental glance seemed to hold meaning, the very impassivity of les douaniers, the customs officials, seemed a possible subterfuge, a prelude to arrest. But Anna had experience with the balkiness of international alerts, knew how the bureaucracies of each border authority impeded the efficient execution of security directives. She wasn’t surprised that they’d slipped through. She also knew that, next time, it was a good bet they wouldn’t.
Only in the near anonymity of the dense-packed RER from De Gaulle did they start to relax. Now Anna and Ben emerged from the Gambetta métro stop, walked passed the large Mairie, or courthouse, and down the rue Vitruve to the rue des Orteaux. They turned right. Opposite them, to either side of the rue des Vignoles, were several narrow streets that followed the precise layout of the vineyards that they supplanted.
The area around Charonne, just south of Belleville, was among the least prototypically Parisian of Parisian neighborhoods, its denizens as likely to be Africans, Spaniards, or Antilleans as French. Even before recent waves of immigration, however, it had long earned the scorn of the city’s bourgeois. It was a place where the poor and the criminal classes were seen to have congregated, a place where the insurrectionists of the Paris Commune, fueled by the disarray of the Second Empire, found populist support. A place of the disaffected, and the neglected. The twentieth arrondissement’s one claim to fame was the cemetery du Père Lachaise, a forty-four-hectare garden of graves; starting in the nineteenth century, Parisians who would never otherwise deign to visit this arrondissement, let alone live there, agreed to consign their bodies there after death.
Dressed in the casual attire of American tourists, Anna and Ben took in their surroundings as they walked: the aroma of falafel stands, the thudding rhythm of North African pop spilling from open windows, street vendors hawking tube socks and dog-eared copies of Paris Match. The people on the street came in every color, and spoke in a variety of accents. There were the young artists with complicated body piercings who no doubt saw themselves as the legitimate successors to Marcel Duchamp; there were immigrants from the Mahgreb hoping to earn enough money to send to their relatives in Tunisia or Algeria. The smell of pot or hashish, rich and resinous, wafted from the occasional alleyway.
“It’s hard to imagine a corporate honcho retiring to this sort of neighborhood,” Anna said. “What, did they run out of beachfront properties at Côte d’Azure?”
“Actually, it’s nearly perfect,” Ben said, reflective. “If you wanted to disappear, there’s no better place. Nobody notices anybody else, nobody knows anybody else. If for some reason you wanted to stay in town, it’s the most heterogeneous place you’ll find, thronged with strangers, new immigrants, artists, eccentrics of every persuasion.” Ben knew this city, as Anna did not, and his familiarity gave him a measure of much needed confidence.
Anna nodded. “Safety in numbers.”
“Plus you’re still near local mass transit, a maze of streets, a fast train out of town, and the Périphérique. A good setup when you’re planning multiple escape routes.”
Anna smiled. “You’re a fast learner. Sure you don’t want a job as a government investigator? We can offer you a salary of fifty-five thousand dollars and your very own parking space.”
“Tempting,” Ben said.
They walked past La Flèche d’Or, the red-tile-roofed restaurant that was perched over a rusted ghost track. Then Ben led the way down another block to a small Moroccan café, where the air was humid and fragrant with various couscous dishes. “I can’t vouch for the food,” he said. “But the view has a lot to recommend it.”
Through the plate glass, they could see the stone triangle that was 1554 rue des Vignoles. Seven stories high, the building occupied a freestanding island surrounded by narrow streets on three sides. Its facade was stained dark with automotive exhaust and dappled with acidic bird droppings. Squinting, Anna could make out the anomalous remains of decorative gargoyles; erosion from the elements made them look as if they had melted in the sun. The marble ledges, ornamental revetment, and parapets seemed the folly of a long-ago builder, a throw-back to an era when some still harbored upmarket dreams for the arrondissement. The building, unremarkable in most ways, breathed the gentle decrepitude of neglect and indifference.
“According to my source, Peyaud, he’s known as ‘L’Ermite.’ The hermit. He lives on the entire top floor. Makes noises from time to time, so they know he’s there. That and the deliveries he gets—groceries and the like. But even the delivery boys have never seen him. They drop off the stuff in the dumbwaiter, and collect their francs when the dumbwaiter comes back down. The few people who pay him any mind at all pretty much dismiss him as a real eccentric. Then again, this place is populated with eccentrics.” He tucked into his lamb tagine greedily.
“So he’s reclusive.”
&nb
sp; “Very reclusive. It’s not just the delivery boys he avoids—nobody’s ever seen him. Peyaud talked to the woman who lives on the ground floor. She and everyone else in the building have decided he’s an elderly, paranoid, morbidly shy rentier. A case study in advanced agoraphobia. They don’t realize that he owns the building.”
“And you think we’re going to make an unannounced visit to this possibly unhinged, possibly paranoid, possibly dangerous, and certainly disturbed and frightened individual, and he’s going to pour us some decaf and tell us whatever we want to know?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all.” Ben gave her a reassuring grin. “It might not be decaf.”
“You have boundless faith in your own charm, I’ll give you that.” Anna looked doubtfully at her vegetarian couscous. “He does speak English?”
“Fluently. Almost all French businessmen do, which is how you can tell them apart from French intellectuals.” He wiped his mouth with a flimsy paper napkin. “My contribution is, I got us here. You’re the professional; you’re in charge now. What do the field manuals say? What do you do in a situation like this—what’s the established modus operandi?”
“Let me think. The MO for a friendly visit with a psychotic whom the world believes to be dead and who you think holds the secret to a menacing global organization? I’m not so sure that one’s in the field manual, Ben.”
The lamb tagine started to weigh heavily in his stomach.
She took his hand as they stood up. “Just follow my lead.”
Thérèse Broussard gazed sullenly out the window, down at the foot traffic on the rue des Vignoles seven stories below. She gazed as she might have gazed at a fire, if her chimney hadn’t been plugged with concrete years back. She gazed as she might have gazed at her little television set, if it hadn’t been détraquée for the past month. She gazed to soothe her nerves and alleviate her boredom; she gazed because she had nothing better to do. Besides, she’d just spent ten minutes ironing her large, baggy undergarments, and needed a break.
The Sigma Protocol Page 38