The Sigma Protocol

by Robert Ludlum

  Another ten minutes of silence elapsed before Ben said flatly, “We’ve got to work out an itinerary.”

  Anna studied the article in the Herald Tribune again.

  “‘The suspect is believed to have used the names Robert Simon and John Freedman in his travels.’ So those IDs are blown.”

  How? Ben recalled Liesl’s explanation of how the credit accounts were kept current, how Peter had made the arrangements through her impeccably trustworthy second cousin. “Deschner,” Ben said tightly. “They must have gotten to him.” After a moment, he added, “I wonder why they didn’t release my real name. They’ve supplied aliases, but not the name ‘Benjamin Hartman.’”

  “No, it’s the smart thing to do. Look, they knew you weren’t traveling under your real name. Bringing your true identity into it might have muddied the waters. You’d get your Deerfield English teacher opining that the Benny she knew would never do such a thing. Plus the Swiss have gunshot residue analysis that puts you in the clear—but it’s all filed under Benjamin Hartman. If you’re running a dragnet, it makes sense to keep it simple.”

  Near the town of Croisilles, they saw a sign for a motel and pulled into a modern low-slung concrete building, a style Ben thought of as International Ugly.

  “Just one night,” Ben said, and counted out several hundred francs.

  “Passport?” the stone-faced clerk asked.

  “They’re in our bags,” Ben said apologetically. “I’ll bring them down to you later.”

  “Just one night?”

  “If that,” Ben said, giving Anna a theatrically lascivious look. “We’ve been touring France on our honeymoon.”

  Anna stepped over and put her head on Ben’s shoulder. “This is such a beautiful country,” she told the clerk. “And so sophisticated. I can’t get over it.”

  “Your honeymoon,” the clerk repeated, and, for the first time, smiled.

  “If you don’t mind, we’re in a hurry,” Ben said. “We’ve been driving for hours. We need a rest.” He winked.

  The clerk handed him a key attached to a heavy rubberized weight. “Just at the end of the hall. Room 125. You need anything, just call.”

  The room was sparsely furnished; the floor was covered with dull, mottled green carpeting and the brashly cherry-scented air freshener did not conceal the faint, unmistakable smell of mildew.

  Once the door closed behind them, they emptied the plastic bag Oscar had given them on the bed, along with their other recent purchases. Anna picked up an EU passport. The photograph was of her, although digitally altered in various ways. Anna said her newly assigned name aloud a few times, trying to get accustomed to the unfamiliar sounds.

  “I still don’t see how this is going to work,” Ben said.

  “Like your Oscar said, they categorize you before they really look at you. It’s called profiling. If you don’t belong to the suspect genus, you get a free pass.” Anna took out a tube of lipstick and, looking into a mirror, applied it carefully. She wiped it off a few times before she was confident that she had done it correctly.

  By then, Ben was already in the bathroom, his hair slick with syrupy, foamy hair dye, which gave off a tarry, ammoniac smell. The instructions said to wait twenty minutes before rinsing. It also cautioned against dyeing eyebrows, at the risk of blindness. Ben decided to take that risk. With a cotton swab, he applied the thick fluid to his brows, pressing a wad of tissue paper against his eyes to prevent it from dripping down.

  The twenty minutes felt like two hours. Finally, he stepped into the shower, blasted himself with water, and opened his eyes only when he was certain the peroxide had all been washed down the drain.

  He stepped out of the shower and looked at himself in the mirror. He was a plausible blond.

  “Say hello to David Paine,” he said to Anna.

  She shook her head. “The hair’s too long.” She held up the multi-cut electric clippers, chrome-clad except for the clear rubberized grip. “That’s what this baby is for.”

  In another ten minutes, his curls were flushed away, and he was ready to put on the neatly creased U.S. Army fatigues that Oscar Peyaud had provided him. Blond, crew cut, he looked like an officer, consistent with the insignia, patches, and overseas service bars on his green uniform coat. U.S. Army officers wore identifying badges when traveling by air, he knew. It wasn’t an inconspicuous way to travel; but being conspicuous in the right way could amount to a life-saving distraction.

  “Better make tracks,” Anna said. “The faster we can get out of this country, the safer we’ll be. Time’s on their side, not ours.”

  Carrying their belongings with them, the two walked to the end of the hall and stepped out into the parking lot.

  They tossed Anna’s garment bag in the backseat of the blue Renault, along with the white plastic sack that Oscar had given them. It contained the spent bottle of hair dye, and a few other pieces of garbage they didn’t want to leave behind. At this point, the smallest detail could give them away.

  “As I said, we’re down to our last card, our last play,” Anna said, as they made their way back on the highway heading north. “Strasser was a founder. We’ve got to find him.”

  “If he’s still alive.”

  “Was there any indication either way in Sonnenfeld’s file?”

  “I reread it this morning,” Ben said. “No, to be honest. And Sonnenfeld thought it was entirely possible that Strasser died, maybe even years ago.”

  “Or maybe not.”

  “Maybe not. You’re an incurable optimist. But what makes you think we’re not going to get arrested in Buenos Aires?”

  “Hell, like you’ve said, there were notorious Nazis living there openly for decades. The local police are going to be the least of our troubles.”

  “What about Interpol?”

  “That’s what I was thinking—they might be able to help us locate Strasser.”

  “Are you crazy? Talk about going into the lion’s den. They’re going to have your name on some watch list, aren’t they?”

  “You obviously don’t know anything about the way the Interpol office is run down there. Nobody checks IDs. You are who you claim you are. Not the most sophisticated operation, let’s just say. You got a better idea?”

  “Sonnenfeld said Gerhard Lenz’s widow may be alive,” Ben said broodingly. “Wouldn’t she be in a position to know?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” Ben said. “You really think we’ve got a shot at getting out of this country undetected?”

  “There aren’t going to be any transatlantic flights at this airport. But we can get to some of the European capitals. I suggest that we both travel separately. There’s a decent chance they’re looking for a man and a woman traveling together.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ll go via Madrid; you take Amsterdam.”

  They settled into another silence, less tense and more companionable. From time to time, Ben found his gaze drifted toward Anna. Despite all they had been through today, she was extravagantly beautiful. At one point, their glances met; Anna defused the faint awkwardness with a crooked grin.

  “Sorry, I’m still trying to get used to your new Aryan officer look,” she said.

  Some time later, Anna fished her cell phone out of her handbag and punched in a number.

  David Denneen’s voice had the tinny, artificial clarity conferred by decrypted telephony. “Anna!” he said. “Everything O.K.?”

  “David, listen. You’ve got to help me—you’re the only one I can trust.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “David, I need whatever you can get me on Josef Strasser. He was like Mengele’s smarter older brother.”

  “I’ll do whatever I can,” Denneen replied, his voice tentative, baffled. “Of course. But where do you want the material sent?”

  “BA.”

  He understood the abbreviation for Buenos Aires. “But I can’t exactly send the file care of the e
mbassy, can I?”

  “How about care of the American Express office?” Anna gave him a name to use.

  “Right. Low profile’s a good idea down there.”

  “So I hear. How bad is it?”

  “Great country, great people. But some long memories. Watch your back down there. Please, Anna. I’ll get right on to it.” And with that Denneen clicked off.

  The main border-control security room of the aéroport Lille-Lesquin was a drab, windowless interior space, with low acoustic-tiled ceilings, a white projection screen at one end of the room. Color photographs of internationally sought criminals hung beneath a black-and-white sign that read DÉFENSE DE FUMER. Nine immigration and border-control officials sat on folding chairs of tube metal and beige plastic while their boss, Bruno Pagnol, the director of security, filled them in on the new advisories of the afternoon. Marc Sully was one of them, and he tried not to look as bored as he felt. He had no love for his job, but wasn’t eager to lose it, either.

  Just in the past week, Pagnol reminded them, they had arrested seven young Turkish women arriving from Berlin with illicit cargo in their bellies: having been recruited as “mules,” they had swallowed condoms packed with China White. Finding the seven was partly a matter of luck, but credit had to go to Jean-Daniel Roux (Roux gave a slit-eyed nod when the boss singled him out, pleased but determined not to look it), who was alert enough to catch the first of them. The woman had looked visibly woozy to him; as they later learned, one of the knotted condoms in her colon had started to leak. In fact, the woman almost overdosed on the contraband. In the hospital, they’d retrieved fifteen small balls, double-wrapped in latex, tied off with fishing line, each containing several grams of extremely pure heroin.

  “How’d they get it out of her?” one of the officers asked.

  Marc Sully, sitting in the back, farted audibly. “Rear extraction,” he said.

  The others laughed.

  The red-faced director of airport security frowned. He saw nothing funny. “The courier nearly died. These are desperate women. They’ll do anything. How much money do you think she was paid? A thousand francs, nothing more, and she almost died for it. Now she’s facing a very long jail sentence. These women are like walking suitcases. Hiding drugs in their own shit. And it’s our job to keep that poison out of the country. You want your kids hooked on it? So some fat-ass Asian can get rich? They think they can promenade right past us. Are you going to teach them better?”

  Marc Sully had been a member of the police aux frontières for four years, and sat through hundreds of briefings just like this one. Every year Pagnol’s face got a little redder, his collar a little tighter. Not that Sully was anyone to talk. He himself had always a little weight on him, wasn’t ashamed of it. Bit his nails to the quick, too, had given up trying to stop. The boss once told him he looked “sloppy,” but when Marc asked him how, he just shrugged. So nobody was going to put him on a recruitment poster.

  Marc knew he wasn’t popular with some of his younger colleagues, the ones who bathed every single day, afraid of smelling like a human being instead of a walking bar of deodorant soap. They’d walk around with their quiffs of freshly shampooed hair, smiling nicely at the prettier female passengers, as if they were going to find dates on the job. Marc thought they were fools. It was a dead-end job. Giving strip searches might be a way to get a sniff, especially if you were into third-world cul, but you weren’t going to bring anybody home that way.

  “Now two advisories fresh from la DCPAF.” The Direction centrale de la police aux frontière was the national bureau that gave them their orders. Pagnol pressed a few switches, and was able to project photographs directly from a computer. “Highest priority. This one’s an American. Mexican ancestry. She’s a professional. You find her, you be very careful. Treat her like a scorpion, right?”

  Grunts of assent.

  Sully squinted at the images. He wouldn’t mind giving her a taste of his baguette.

  “And here’s another one,” the security director said. “White male in his mid-thirties. Curly brown hair, green or hazel eyes, approximately one and three-quarters meters in height. Possible serial killer. Another American, they think. Very dangerous. There’s reason to believe he’s been in the country today, and that he’ll be trying to make his way out. We’ll be posting photographs at your stations, but I want you to take a careful look right now. If it turns out that they left through Lille-Lesquin and that the people here let them slip through, it won’t just be my job on the line. Everybody understand?”

  Sully nodded with everyone else. It annoyed Sully that Roux, that apple-cheeked hard-on, was still riding high for having lucked out with that Gastarbeiter whore. But who knew? Maybe it was Sully’s day to get lucky. He took another look at the photographs.

  Ben dropped off Anna by an airport shuttle bus stop, and deposited the blue Renault at the long-term parking lot at the aéroport Lille-Lesquin. They’d enter the airport separately, and take different flights.

  They agreed to meet in Buenos Aires within ten hours.

  Assuming nothing went wrong.

  Anna looked at the blond, crew-cut American officer, and felt confident that he’d elude detection. But despite her brave words to Ben, she felt no such confidence herself. Her hair was neither cut nor colored. It was combed out, and she had changed her garb, but otherwise she was entrusting her camouflage to something very small indeed. She felt a knot of fear in the pit of her stomach, and the fear fed on itself, for she knew nothing would betray her faster than the appearance of fear. She had to focus. Her usual hyperattentiveness to her surroundings could now be her undoing. Before she stepped into the terminal, she had to let every bit of fear and anxiety wash from her. She imagined herself traipsing through meadows filled with Bermuda grass and dandelions. She imagined holding hands with somebody constant and strong. It could be anybody—it was simply a mental exercise, as she was perfectly aware—but the person she kept imagining was Ben.

  Sully kept a sharp eye out at the incoming passengers by his station, alert for signs of anxiety or agitation, for customers traveling with too few bags or too many, for customers who fit the description they’d received from DCPAF.

  The man, third from the front of the line, caught his attention. He was the approximate height of the man they were looking for, had curly brown hair, and kept jingling the change in his pocket, a nervous tic. From his dress, he was almost certainly an American. Perhaps he had reason to be nervous.

  He waited until the man showed his ticket and passport to the airline security officer, and then stepped forward.

  “Just a few questions, sir,” Sully said, his eyes boring in on him.

  “Yeah, all right,” the man said.

  “Come with me,” Sully said, and drew him to a station post near the ticket counter. “So what took you to France?”

  “Medical conference.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  A sigh. “I work in sales for a pharmaceutical company.”

  “You’re a drug dealer!” Sully smiled, though his eyes remained wary.

  “In a matter of speaking,” the man replied wanly. He had a look on his face like he’d smelled something bad.

  Americans and their obsession with hygiene. Sully scrutinized his face for a moment longer. The man had the same angular cast to his face, square chin, curly hair. But the features didn’t look quite right—they were too small. And Sully didn’t hear real stress in the man’s voice when he answered questions. Sully was wasting his time.

  “O.K.,” he said. “Have a good trip.”

  Sully went back to scrutinizing the check-in line. A blond-haired woman with swarthy skin caught his eye. The suspect could have dyed her hair; the other specifics matched. He drifted toward her.

  “Could I see your passport, madame?” he said.

  The woman looked at him blankly.

  “Votre passeport, s’il vous plaît, madame.”

  “Bien sûr. Vous me croyez être a
nglaise? Je suis italienne, mais tous mes amis pensent que je suis allemande ou anglaise ou n’importe quoi.”

  According to her passport, she resided in Milan, and Sully thought it unlikely that an American could speak French with such an egregious Italian accent.

  No one else on line just then looked terribly promising. A dot-head with two bawling children was ahead of the blond Italian. As far as Sully was concerned, her kind couldn’t leave the country fast enough. Chicken vindaloo was going to end up being the national dish at the rate the goddamn dot-heads were immigrating. The Muslims were worse, of course, but the dot-heads with their unpronounceable names were pretty awful. Last year, when he’d dislocated his arm, the Indian doctor at the clinic had flatly refused to give him a real painkiller. Like maybe he was supposed to do some fakir-style mind control. If his arm wasn’t half out of its socket, he would have punched the guy.

  Sully glanced at the woman’s passport without interest and waved her and her sniveling brood through. The dot-head whore even smelled like saffron.

  A young Russian with acne. Last name was German, so probably a Jew. Mafiya? Not his problem just now.

  An honest-to-goodness Frenchman and his wife, off to a vacation.

  Another goddamn dot-head in a sari. Gayatri was the name, and then something unpronounceable. Curry cul.

  None of the other men fit the profile: too old, too fat, too young, too short.

  Too bad. Maybe it wasn’t going to be his lucky day after all.

  Anna settled into her coach-class seat, adjusting her sari and mentally repeating her name: Gayatri Chandragupta. It wouldn’t do to stumble over it if anyone were to ask. She was wearing her long black hair straight back, and when she’d caught a glimpse of her reflection in a window, she hardly recognized herself.