The Sigma Protocol

by Robert Ludlum

  A heavy-set, doughy-faced woman of seventy-four with piggy features and lank black-dyed hair, Thérèse still told people she was a dressmaker, even though she hadn’t cut a piece of fabric in ten years, and even though she was never particularly accomplished at it. She grew up in Belleville, left school at the age of fourteen, and was never pretty enough to count on attracting the sort of man who would support her. In short, she had to learn a trade. As it happened, her grandmother had a friend who was a dressmaker and who agreed to take the girl on as an assistant. The old woman’s hands were stiff with arthritis, and her eyes had grown dim; Thérèse could be helpful, though the old woman—Tati Jeanne, Thérèse was encouraged to call her—always parted with the paltry few francs she paid her each week with an air of reluctance. Tati Jeanne’s already small clientele was dwindling, and with it her earnings; it was painful to have to share even a tiny amount with someone else.

  One day in 1945, a bomb fell near Thérèse as she was walking down the Porte de la Chapelle, and, though she was physically unharmed, the blast entered her dreams at night and stopped her from sleeping. Her nervous condition only worsened over time. She would start at the slightest noise, and she began to eat voraciously, whenever she could find the food to stuff herself with. When Tati Jeanne died, Thérèse took on her remaining clients, but it was scarcely a living.

  She was alone, as she’d always feared, but she had also learned there were worse things: she owed Laurent that much. Shortly after her sixty-fifth birthday, she met Laurent at the rue Ramponeau, in front of the Soeurs de Nazareth, where she collected a weekly parcel of food. Laurent, another native of the Ménilmontant area, was a decade older than she was, and looked older still. Hunched and bald, he wore a leather jacket whose sleeves were too long for him. He was walking a small dog, a terrier, and she asked the dog’s name, and they began to talk. He told her that he fed his dog, Poupée, before he fed himself, gave the dog first choice of everything. She told him about her panic attacks, and the fact that a magistrate for social services, l’Assedic, had once placed her under supervision. The magistrate also made sure that the state would provide her with five hundred francs a week. His interest in her perked up when he learned of the support she received. A month later, they were married. He moved into her flat near Charonne; to an impartial eye, it may have appeared small, spare, and dingy but it was still more appealing than his own place, from which he was about to be evicted. Soon after they were married, Laurent pressed her to return to her sewing: they needed the money, the food parcels from the Soeurs scarcely lasted them half the week, the checks from l’Assedic were woefully inadequate. She told people she was a dressmaker, didn’t she? Why, then, didn’t she make dresses? She demurred, quietly at first, holding out her pudgy, blunt fingers, and explaining she no longer had the manual dexterity. He remonstrated, less quietly. She countered with no little vehemence, pointing out that he had a knack for getting fired from even the lowliest jobs, and that she would never have married him if she’d known what a drunkard he was. Seven months later, in the heat of one of these increasingly frequent arguments, Laurent keeled over. His last words to her were “T’es grasse comme une truie”—You fat sow. Thérèse let a few minutes pass and her temper subside before she phoned for an ambulance. Later, she’d learn that her husband had been felled by a massive hemorrhagic stroke—an aneurysm deep in the brain. A harried physician told her something about how blood vessels were like inner tubes, and how a weakness in a vessel wall could suddenly give way. She wished Laurent’s last words to her had been more civil.

  To her few friends, she referred to her husband as a saint, but no one was fooled. Having been married was, at any rate, an education. For much of her life, she believed that a husband would have made her life complete. Laurent had showed her the untrustworthy nature of all men. As she watched various figures on the street corner near her hulking, poured-concrete apartment building, she fantasized about their private deviances. Which of these men was a junkie? Which a thief? Which beat his girlfriend?

  A knock at the door, loud and authoritative, jarred her from her reveries. “Je suis de l’Assedic, laissez-moi entrer, s’il vous plaît!” A man from the welfare department, asking to be let in.

  “Why did you not buzz?” barked Madame Broussard.

  “But I did buzz. Repeatedly. The buzzer is broken. As is the gate. Do you claim you didn’t know?”

  “But why are you here? Nothing about my status has changed,” she protested. “My support…”

  “Is under review,” the man said, officiously. “I think we can straighten this all out if we just go over a few matters. Otherwise, the payments come to an end. I do not wish that to happen.”

  Thérèse trudged heavily over to the door and peered through the peephole. The man had the familiar haughtiness she associated with all fonctionnaires of the French state—clerks who imagined themselves to be civil servants, men given a thimbleful of power, and made despotic by it. Something about his voice, his accent seemed less familiar. Perhaps he came from a Belgian family. Thérèse did not like les Belges.

  She squinted. The man from social services was attired in the thin worsted wool jacket and cheap tie that seemed to come with the job; his hair was a thatch of salt and pepper and he seemed an unremarkable specimen except for his smooth, unlined face; the skin would be babyish, if it didn’t look almost tight.

  Thérèse unlocked the two deadbolts and released the chain before pressing the final latch and opening the door.

  As Ben followed Anna out of the café, he kept his eye on 1554 rue des Vignoles, trying to fathom its mysteries. The building was a picture of ordinary dilapidation—too distressed to excite anyone’s admiration, while not so distressed as to arrest anyone’s attention. But looking at it carefully—an exercise, Ben imagined, that no one had engaged in for many years—one could see the bones of a once elegant apartment building. It was evident from the oriel windows, crested with carved limestone, now randomly chipped and fractured. It was evident from the corners of the building, the quoins, where dressed stones had been laid so that their faces were alternately large and small; and the mansard roof, edged with a low, crumbling parapet. It was evident even from the narrow ledges that had once provided a balcony, before the iron rail was removed, no doubt after it had rusted to pieces and posed a hazard to public safety. A century ago, a measure of care had gone into the building’s construction, which decades of indifference could not entirely efface.

  Anna’s instructions to him had been clear. They would join a group of passersby as they crossed the street, falling into rhythm with their stride. They would be indistinguishable from people whose destination was the nearby shop that sold cheap liquor and cigarettes, or the shawarma place next to it, where a large, fatty oval loaf of meat rotated, close enough to the sidewalk that you could reach out and touch it; certainly swarms of flies did. Anyone watching from the window would see no departure from the ordinary patterns of pedestrian traffic; only when they passed in front of the main door would the two stop and enter.

  “Ring the bell?” Ben asked as they reached the building’s main entrance.

  “If we rang the bell, we wouldn’t be unannounced, would we? I thought that was the plan.” Glancing around quickly, Anna inserted a narrow tongue of steel into the lock and played with it for a few moments.

  Nothing.

  Ben felt a sense of rising panic. So far, they had been careful to blend in, to synchronize their pace with those of other pedestrians. But now they found themselves frozen in place; any casual observer would notice that something was wrong, that they did not belong here.

  “Anna,” he murmured with quiet urgency.

  She was bent over her work, and he could see that her forehead was damp with nervous perspiration. “Take out your wallet and start counting your bills,” she whispered. “Take out a phone and check for messages. Do something. Calmly. Slowly. Languorously.”

  The faint sound of metal rattling against metal c
ontinued as she spoke.

  Then finally, there was the sound of a bolt retracting. Anna turned the lever knob and opened the door. “Sometimes these locks require a little tender loving care. Anyway, it’s not exactly high security.”

  “Hidden in plain view, I think is the idea.”

  “Hidden, anyway. I thought you said nobody had ever seen him.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Did you stop and reflect that if he wasn’t crazy when he started out, he might have become so? Total social isolation will do that to a person.” Anna led him to the disheveled elevator. She pressed the call button, and they briefly listened to a rattling chain before they decided that taking the stairwell was the safer option. They made their way up seven flights, taking care to make as little noise as possible.

  The hallway of the top floor, an affair of grimy white tiles, stretched before them.

  Startlingly, the doorway of the sole apartment on the floor was already swinging open.

  “Monsieur Chabot,” Anna called out.

  There was no response.

  “Monsieur Chardin!” she called, exchanging a look with Ben.

  There was a movement from within, shrouded in the gloom.

  “Georges Chardin!” Anna called again. “We come with information that may be of value to you.”

  A few moments of silence followed—and then a deafening blast.

  What had happened?

  A glance at the hallway directly facing the open door made things clear: it was cratered with a deadly spray of lead pellets.

  Whoever was in there was firing a shotgun at them.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you people,” Thérèse Broussard said, color rising to her cheeks. “Nothing has changed about my circumstances since my husband died. Nothing, I tell you.”

  The man appeared with a large black suitcase, and strode past her to the window, ignoring her for the moment. A very strange man.

  “A nice view,” the man said.

  “It gets no direct light,” Thérèse contradicted him scoldingly. “For most of the day, it is dark. You could develop film in here.”

  “For some pursuits, that can be an advantage.”

  Something was wrong. His accent was slipping, his French losing the straightened cadences of the social-services bureaucracy, sounding more casual, somehow less French.

  Thérèse took a few steps away from the man. Her pulse quickened as she suddenly remembered the reports of a rapist who had been brutalizing women in the vicinity of the Place de la Réunion. Some of the women had been older, too. This man was an impostor, she decided. Her instincts told her so. Something about the way the man moved, with coiled, reptilian strength, confirmed her growing suspicion that he was, in fact, the Réunion rapist. Mon dieu! He’d gained the trust of his victims, she had heard—victims who had invited the assailant into their very homes!

  All her life, people had told her that she suffered from une maladie nerveuse. She knew better: she saw things, felt things, that others did not. Yet now, crucially, her antennae had failed her. How could she have been so foolish! Her eyes darted wildly around her apartment, looking for something she could use to protect herself. She picked up a heavy clay pot that contained a slightly shriveled rubber plant.

  “I demand that you leave at once!” she said in a trembling voice.

  “Madame, your demands are meaningless to me,” the smooth-faced man said quietly. He looked at her with quiet menace, a confident predator who knew that his prey was hopelessly outmatched.

  She saw a flash of silver as he unsheathed a long, curved blade, and then she threw the heavy pot at him with all her might. But its weight worked against her: it arced quickly downward, striking the man in the legs, knocking him a few steps back but leaving him unharmed. Jésus Christ! What else could she use to defend herself? Her little broken-down TV! She yanked it from the countertop, hoisted it with great effort above her head, and tossed it at him as if aiming for the ceiling. The man, smiling, sidestepped the crude projectile. It thudded against the wall, then dropped to the floor, its plastic casing shattered along with the picture tube.

  Dear God, no! There had to be something else. Yes—the iron on the ironing board! Had she even turned it off? Thérèse dashed toward the iron, but as she grabbed it the intruder saw what she was attempting.

  “Stop where you are, you revolting old cow,” called the man, a look of disgust crossing his face. “Putain de merde!” With a lightning-fast motion, he grabbed another, smaller knife and flung it across the room. The deeply beveled steel came to a razor-sharp edge along the entire, arrow-shaped blade; the hollowed tang provided a streamlined counterweight.

  Thérèse never saw it coming, but she felt its impact as the blade buried itself deep into her right breast. At first she thought whatever it was had struck her and bounced off. Then she looked down and saw the steel handle protruding from her blouse. It was odd, she thought, that she felt nothing; but then a sensation—cold, like an icicle—began to grow, and an area of red blossomed around the steel. Fear drained from her, replaced with sheer rage. This man thought she was just another victim, but he had misjudged her. She remembered the nighttime visits from her drunken father, which started when she was fourteen, his breath smelling like sour milk as he worked his stubby fingers into her, hurting her with his ragged nails. She remembered Laurent, and his last words to her. Indignation flooded her like water from an underground cistern, from every time she’d ever been taunted, cheated, bullied, abused.

  Bellowing, she charged the evil intruder, all two hundred and fifty pounds of her.

  And she tackled him, too, slammed him to the ground by sheer momentum.

  She would have been proud of what she’d accomplished, truie grasse or no, if the man hadn’t shot her dead a split-second before her body crashed into his.

  Trevor shuddered with revulsion as he pushed the obese, lifeless body off him. The woman was only slightly less off-putting in death that she’d been in life, he reflected as he returned his silenced pistol to its holster, feeling the cylinder’s heat against his thigh. The twin bullet holes in her forehead were like a second pair of eyes. He dragged her away from the window. In retrospect, he should have shot her immediately upon gaining entry, but who knew she would turn out to be such a maniac? Anyway, there was always something unexpected. That was why he liked his vocation. It was never entirely routine; there was always the possibility of surprise, new challenges. Nothing, of course, he couldn’t handle. Nothing had ever turned up that the Architect couldn’t handle.

  “Christ,” Anna whispered. She had avoided the shotgun spray by a couple of feet at most. “Not exactly the welcome wagon.”

  But where was the shooter?

  A steady succession of blasts was coming from the open apartment door, from somewhere within its darkened interior. Apparently the gunman was firing through the gap between the heavy steel door and the doorjamb.

  Ben’s heart was thudding. “Georges Chardin,” he called out, “we haven’t come to harm you. We want to help you—and we need your help as well! Please, listen to us! Hear us out!”

  From the dark recesses of the apartment emanated a bizarre rasping, a shuddering moan of terror, seemingly involuntary, like the night cry of a wounded animal. Still the man remained invisible, cloaked in darkness. They heard the click of a cartridge sliding into the chamber of a shotgun, and each of them raced to opposite ends of the long hallway.

  Another explosion! A fusillade of pellets came through the open door, splintering the woodwork in the hall, gouging jagged crevices in the plaster walls. The air was heavy with the pungent odor of cordite. The entire hall now looked like a war zone.

  “Listen!” Ben called out to their unseen adversary. “We’re not firing back, can’t you see that? We’re not here to harm you in any way!” There was a pause: was the man hiding inside the apartment actually listening now? “We’re here to protect you against Sigma!”

  Silence.

&
nbsp; The man was listening! It was the invocation of the name of Sigma, the shibboleth of a long-buried conspiracy thundering in its impact.

  At that same instant, Ben could see Anna hand-signaling to him. She wanted him to stay where he was while she made her own way into Chardin’s apartment. But how? With a glance, he saw the large double-hung window, saw her silently nudging open its heavy sash, felt a gust of cold air from outside. She was going to climb out the window, he realized with horror, walk along the narrow exterior ledge until she came to a window that opened directly into the Frenchman’s apartment. It was madness! He was seized with dread. A stray gust of wind, and she would fall to her death. But it was too late for him to say anything to her; she already had the window open and had stepped onto the ledge. Christ Almighty! he wanted to shout. Don’t do it!

  Finally a strange, deep baritone voice emerged from the apartment: “So this time they send an American.”

  “There’s no ‘they,’ Chardin,” replied Ben. “It’s just us.”

  “And who are you?” the voice came back, heavy with skepticism.

  “We’re Americans, yes, who have…personal reasons why we need your help. You see, Sigma killed my brother.”

  Another long silence ensued. Then: “I am not an idiot. You wish me to come out, and then you will trap me, take me alive. Well, you will not take me alive!”

  “There are far easier ways, if that’s what we wanted to do. Please, let us in—let us speak with you, if only for a minute. You can keep your weapon trained on us.”

  “For what purpose do you want to speak with me?”

  “We need your help in defeating them.”

  A pause. Then a short, sharp bark of derisive laughter. “In defeating Sigma? You cannot! Until just now I thought one could only hide. How did you find me?”

  “Through some damned clever investigative work. But you have my utmost admiration: You did a good job covering your tracks, I must say. A damned good job. It’s hard to relinquish control of family property. I understand that. So you used a fictio juris. Remote agency. Well designed. But then you’ve always been a brilliant strategic thinker. It wasn’t for nothing that you got to be Trianon’s Directeur Général du Département des Finance.”