The Sigma Protocol (10 page)

She was convinced that the real reason she hadn’t yet gotten married, had veered away from any relationship that seemed to be getting too serious, was that she wanted to control her own surroundings. You get married, you’re accountable to someone else. You want to buy something, you have to justify it. You can no longer work late without feeling guilty, having to apologize, to negotiate. Your time is under new management.

At the office people who didn’t know her well called her the “Ice Maiden” and probably a lot worse, mostly because she dated infrequently. It wasn’t just Dupree. People didn’t like to see attractive women unattached. It offended their sense of the natural order of things. What they failed to realize was that she was a genuine workaholic and seldom socialized, hardly had time to meet men anyway. The only pool of men she could draw from were in the OSI, and dating a colleague could only mean trouble.

Or so she told herself. She preferred not to dwell on the incident in high school that still shadowed her, but she thought of Brad Reedy almost daily, and with ferocious hatred. On the Metro she’d catch a whiff of the citrus cologne Brad used to wear and her heart would spasm with fear, then reflexive anger. Or she’d see on the street a tall blond teenage boy in a red-and-white-striped rugby shirt, and she’d see Brad.

She had been sixteen, physically a woman and, she was told, a beauty, though she didn’t yet know it or believe it. She still had few friends, but she no longer
felt like an outcast. She quarreled with her parents almost daily because she could no longer stand to live in their tiny house; she felt claustrophobic, she couldn’t breathe.

Brad Reedy was a senior and a hockey player, and therefore a member of the school’s aristocracy. She was a junior and couldn’t believe it when Brad Reedy,
the
Brad Reedy, had stopped by her locker and asked if she wanted to go out sometime. She thought it was a joke, that he’d been put up to it or something, and she scoffed, turning away. Already she’d begun to develop a protective layer of sarcasm.

But he persisted. She flushed, went numb, said I guess, maybe, sometime.

Brad offered to pick her up at her house, but she couldn’t bear the thought of his seeing how humble it was, so she pretended she had errands to do downtown anyway and insisted on meeting at the movie theater. For days before, she pored over
Mademoiselle
and
Glamour
. In a
Seventeen
magazine feature on “How to Catch His Eye” she found the perfect outfit, the sort of thing a rich, classy girl might wear, the kind of girl Brad’s parents would approve of.

She wore a Laura Ashley tiny floral-print dress with a high ruffled collar she’d bought at Goodwill, which she realized only after she bought it didn’t fit quite right. In her matching lime-green espadrilles and lime-green Pappagallo Bermuda bag and lime-green head-band, she suddenly felt ridiculous, a little girl dressing up for Halloween. When she met Brad, who was wearing a ripped pair of jeans and a striped rugby shirt, she realized how overdressed she was. She
looked
like she was trying too hard.

She felt as if the entire theater were watching her enter, this overdressed fake preppy with this golden boy.

He wanted to go out to the Ship’s Pub for pizza and a beer afterward. She had a Tab and tried to play mysterious and hard to get, but she already had a wild crush on this teenage Adonis and still couldn’t believe she was on a date with him.

After three, four beers, he began to get coarse. He drew close to her in the booth and put his hands on her. She pleaded a headache—it was the only thing she could think of on the spur of the moment—and asked him to drive her home. He took her out to the Porsche, drove crazily, and then made a “wrong turn” into the park.

He was a two-hundred-pound man, incredibly strong, fueled by just enough alcohol to make him dangerous, and he forcibly removed her clothes, put his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams, and kept chanting, “
Aw, you want it, you wetback bitch
.”

This was her first time.

For a year afterward she went to church regularly. The guilt burned inside her. If her mother ever found out, she was sure, it would destroy her.

It haunted her for years.

And her mother continued to clean the Reedys’ house.

Now she remembered the bank records, tented on the armchair. Couldn’t ask for more compelling reading material during a room-service dinner.

After a few minutes, she noticed a line of figures, then looked at it again. How could this be right? Four months ago, one million dollars had been wired into Robert Mailhot’s savings account.

She sat down in the chair, looked more closely at the page. She felt a rush of adrenaline. She studied the column of numbers for a long time, her excitement growing. An image of Mailhot’s modest clapboard house popped into her head.

A million dollars.

This was becoming interesting.

Zurich

The streetlights flashed by, illuminating the backseat of the taxi like the jittery flashes of a strobe light. Ben stared straight ahead, looking at nothing, thinking.

The homicide detective had seemed disappointed when the lab results showed that Ben hadn’t fired the weapon, and processed his release papers with a show of reluctance. Obviously, Howie had managed to pull some strings to get his passport returned.

“I’m releasing you on one condition, Mr. Hartman—that you get out of my canton,” Schmid had told him. “Leave Zurich at once. If I ever find out you’ve returned here, it will not go well for you. The inquiry concerning the Bahnhofplatz shootings remains open, and there are enough unanswered questions that I would have reason to swear out a warrant for your arrest at any moment. And if our immigrations office, the
Einwanderungsbehörde
, gets involved, you should remember that you can be held in administrative detention for one year before your case reaches a magistrate. You have friends and connections, very impressive ones, but they will not be able to help you next time.”

But more than the threats, it was the question the detective had put so casually that haunted Ben.
Did
the Bahnhofplatz nightmare have anything to do with Peter’s death?

Ask it another way: What were the odds it
didn’t
have anything to do with Peter’s death? Ben always remembered what his college mentor, the Princeton historian John Barnes Godwin, used to say: Calculate the odds, and recalculate, and recalculate again. And then just go with your gut instinct.

His gut told him this was no coincidence.

Then there was the mystery surrounding Jimmy Cavanaugh. It wasn’t just the body that had disappeared. It was his identity, his entire existence. How could such a thing happen? And how had the shooter known where Ben was staying? It made no sense, none of it did.

The disappearance of the body, the planting of the handgun—that confirmed that the man he knew as Cavanaugh had been working with others. But with
whom?
Working on
what?
What possible interest, what possible
threat
, could Ben Hartman be to anyone?

Of course it had to do with Peter. That
had
to be it.

You see enough movies, you learn that bodies are “burned beyond recognition” only when something’s being covered up. One of Ben’s first, desperate thoughts upon hearing the unbearable news had been that maybe there’d been a mix-up, that it wasn’t really Peter Hartman who’d died in that plane. The authorities had made a mistake. Peter was still alive, and he’d call, and they’d laugh over the bungle in a grim sort of way. Ben had never dared suggest this to his father, not wanting to raise false hopes. And then the medical evidence arrived, and it was irrefutable.

Now, however, Ben began to focus on the real question: Not
was
it Peter, but
how
had he died? A plane crash could be an efficient way to conceal evidence of murder.

And then again, maybe it had been a genuine accident.

After all, who could have wanted Peter dead? Murdering someone and then crashing a plane—wasn’t that a ludicrously elaborate cover-up?

But this afternoon had redefined what was within the realm of plausibility. Because if Cavanaugh,
whoever
he was, had tried to kill him, for whatever unfathomable
reason, wasn’t it likely he—or others connected with Cavanaugh—had also killed Peter four years ago?

Howie had mentioned databases accessed by a colleague of his who did corporate espionage work. It struck Ben that Frederic McCallan, the aged client he was supposed to meet at St. Moritz, might be helpful in this regard. McCallan, in addition to being a serious Wall Street player, had served in more than one administration in Washington; he’d have no shortage of contacts and connections. Ben took out his multistandard Nokia phone and called the Hotel Carlton in St. Moritz. The Carlton was a quietly elegant place, opulent without being ostentatious, with a remarkable glassed-in pool overlooking the lake.

His call was put right through to Frederic McCallan’s room.

“You’re not standing us up, I hope,” old Frederic said jovially. “Louise will be devastated.” Louise was his allegedly beautiful granddaughter.

“Not at all. Things got a little hectic here, and I missed the last flight to Chur.” Strictly speaking this was true.

“Well, we had them set a place for you at dinner, figuring you’d show up eventually. When can we expect you?”

“I’m going to rent a car and drive up tonight.”

“Drive? But that’ll take you
hours!
”

“It’s a pleasant drive,” he said. And a long drive was precisely what he needed to clear his head right now.

“Surely you can charter a flight if you have to.”

“Can’t,” he said without elaborating. The fact was, he wanted to avoid the airport, where others—if there
were
others—might be expecting him. “I’ll see you at breakfast, Freddie.”

The taxicab took Ben to an Avis on Gartenhofstrasse, where he rented an Opel Omega, got directions, and set off without incident on the A3 highway, heading southeast out of Zurich. It took a while to get the feel of the road, the great speed at which Swiss drivers raced along their main highways, the aggressive way they signaled that they wanted to pass by pulling up right behind you and flashing their high beams.

Once or twice he had a flash of paranoia—a green Audi seemed to be following him but then disappeared. After a while he began to feel as if he’d left all that madness behind in Zurich. Soon he’d be at the Carlton in St. Moritz, and that was inviolable.

He thought about Peter, as he’d done so often in the last four years, and he felt the old guilt, felt his stomach tighten, then flip over. Guilt that he’d let his brother die alone, because in the last few years of Peter’s life he’d barely even talked to him.

But he knew Peter wasn’t alone at the end. He’d been living with a Swiss woman, a medical student he’d fallen in love with. Peter had told him about it on the phone a couple of months before he was killed.

Ben had seen Peter exactly twice since college. Twice.

As kids, before Max had sent them off to different prep schools, they’d been inseparable. They fought constantly, they wrestled each other until one could claim,
You’re good, but I’m better
. They hated each other and loved each other, and they were never apart.

But after college Peter had joined the Peace Corps and gone to Kenya. He had no interest in Hartman Capital Management either. Nor would he take anything out of his trust fund. What the hell do I need it for in Africa? he’d said.

The fact was that Peter wasn’t just doing something meaningful with his life. He was escaping Dad. Max
and he had never gotten along. “Christ!” Ben had exploded at him once. “You want to avoid Dad, you can live in Manhattan and simply not call him. Have lunch with Mom once a week or something. You don’t need to live in some goddamned mud hut, for God’s sake!”

But no. Peter had returned to the States twice: once when their mother had her mastectomy, and once after Ben had called to tell him that Mom’s cancer had spread and she didn’t have long to live.

By that time Peter had moved to Switzerland. He’d met a Swiss woman in Kenya. “She’s beautiful, she’s brilliant, and she still hasn’t seen through me,” Peter had told him over the phone. “File that one under ‘strange but true.’” That was a favorite boyhood expression of Peter’s.

The girl was returning to medical school and he was going with her to Zurich. Which was what had first got the two of them talking. You’re tagging along with some chick you met? Ben had said scornfully. He was jealous—jealous that Peter had fallen in love, and jealous, on some crazy brotherly level, that he’d been replaced at the center of Peter’s life.

No, Peter had said, it wasn’t just that. He’d read an article in an international edition of
Time
magazine about an old woman, a Holocaust survivor, living in France, desperately poor, who’d tried without success to get one of the big Swiss banks to give back the modest sum her father had left for her before he’d perished in the camps.

The bank had demanded her father’s death certificate.

She’d told them that the Nazis hadn’t issued death certificates for the six million Jews they’d murdered.

Peter was going to get the old woman what was due her. Dammit, he said, if a Hartman can’t wrest this
lady’s money from the greedy paws of some Swiss banker, who can?

No one was as stubborn as Peter. No one except Old Max, maybe.

Ben had little doubt Peter had won the battle.

He began to feel weary. The highway had become monotonous, lulling. His driving had fallen naturally into the rhythm of the road, and other cars no longer seemed to be trying to pass him quite so often. His eyelids began to droop.

There came a blaring car horn, and he was dazzled by headlights. With a jolt he realized that he’d momentarily fallen asleep behind the wheel. He reacted quickly, spinning the car to the right, swerving out of the oncoming lane of traffic, just barely missing a collision.