The Sigma Protocol (17 page)

Mailhot’s face had been pulled down from the top of the scalp, like a latex mask. The top of his head was open, the pink ridges of brain visible. Anna thought she might be sick. She saw a lung on a hanging scale. “How heavy?” she asked, pointing.

He smiled in appreciation. “Light. Two hundred forty grams. Not congested.”

“So he died quickly. We can rule out a CNS depressant.”

“As I said, it looks like a heart attack.” Higgins seemed to be running out of patience.

She told him what she wanted from the toxicology screen, reading off her notes. His eyes widened in disbelief. “Do you have any idea how costly this is going to be?”

She exhaled. “The U.S. government will pick up the cost, of course. I need to do this one thoroughly. If I don’t find it now, it’s likely I never will. Now I need to ask a favor.”

He looked at her steadily. She sensed his annoyance.

“I’m going to ask you to flay the body.”

“You’re kidding me, aren’t you?”

“I’m not.”

“May I remind you, Agent Navarro, that the widow wants an open-casket funeral?”

“All they see are the hands and face, right?” To flay the body meant to remove all the skin, in large chunks so it could be sewn back together. This enabled you to examine the subcutaneous skin. Sometimes this was the only way to discover injection marks. “Unless you object,” she said. “I’m just a visiting fireman.”

Higgins’s face flushed. He turned to the body, jabbing in the scalpel a bit too violently, and began removing the skin.

Anna felt light-headed. Once again she was afraid she might be sick. She left the morgue and returned to the corridor in search of the rest room. Ron Arsenault approached, clutching a giant cup of take-out coffee. “Are we still slicing and dicing in there?” he asked, his good humor seemingly restored.

“Worse than ever. We’re flaying the skin.”

“You can’t take it either?”

“I’m just using the little girl’s room.”

He looked skeptical. “No luck so far, I take it.”

She shook her head, frowned.

He shook his head. “Don’t you Yanks believe in old age?”

“I’ll be right back,” she said coolly.

She splashed her face with cold water from the sink, realizing too late that there were no paper towels here, only one of those hot-air hand dryers that never worked. She groaned, went to a stall, pulled a length of toilet paper off the roll, and blotted her face with the tissue, leaving white shreds here and there on her face. She looked in the mirror, noticed the dark circles under her eyes, flicked off the strings of toilet paper, reap-plied her makeup and returned to Arsenault feeling refreshed.

“He’s asking for you,” Arsenault said, excited.

Higgins held up a leathery yellow sheet of skin about three inches square as if it were a trophy. “You’re lucky I did the hands, too,” he said. “I’m going to catch hell from the funeral-home director, but presumably they’ve got makeup they can cake on to cover the mending.”

“What is it?” she asked, heartbeat accelerating.

“The back of the hand. The web of the thumb, the abductor pollucis. Take a look at this.”

She came closer, as did Arsenault, but she saw nothing. Higgins pulled the magnifying glass from the
examination table. “You see this little purplish-red flare, about half an inch long? Sort of flame-shaped?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s your injection mark. Believe me, that’s not where any nurse or doctor puts a syringe. You may have something, after all.”

Bedford, New York

Max Hartman sat in his high-backed leather desk chair, in the book-lined library where he usually received visitors. It was strange, Ben thought, the way his father chose to sit behind the barrier of his immense leathertopped mahogany desk, even when meeting with his own son.

In the tall chair the old man, once tall and strong, looked wizened, almost gnomelike, surely not the effect he’d intended. Ben sat on a leather chair facing the desk.

“When you called, you sounded as if you had something you wanted to talk to me about,” Max said.

He spoke with a refined mid-Atlantic accent, the German long submerged, barely detectable. As a young man recently arrived in America, Max Hartman had taken speech training and elocution lessons, as if he’d wanted to banish all traces of his past.

Ben peered at his father closely, trying to make sense of the man.
You were always an enigma to me. Distant, formidable, unknowable
. “I do,” he said.

A stranger seeing Max Hartman for the first time would notice the large bald head, speckled with age spots, the prominent fleshy ears. The eyes, large and rheumy, grotesquely magnified behind the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. The jutting jaw, the nostrils
permanently flared as if he were smelling a bad odor. Yet for all that age had wrought, it was evident that this was a man who’d once been quite handsome, even striking.

The old man was dressed, as he always was, in one of his bespoke suits, tailored for him on Savile Row, London. Today’s was a splendid charcoal, with a crisp white shirt, his initials monogrammed on the breast pocket; a blue and gold rep tie, heavy gold cuff links. Ten in the morning on a Sunday, and Max was dressed for a board meeting.

It was funny how your perceptions were shaped by your history, Ben reflected. At times he could observe his father as he was now, old and fragile, yet at other moments he couldn’t help seeing him through the eyes of an abashed child: powerful, intimidating.

The truth was, Ben and Peter had always been slightly afraid of their father, a little nervous around him. Max Hartman intimidated most people; why should his own sons be the exception? It took real effort to be Max’s son, to love and understand him and feel tenderness toward him. It was like learning a complex foreign language, one that Peter couldn’t, or wouldn’t, learn.

Ben suddenly flashed on Peter’s terrible, vindictive expression when he revealed what he’d discovered about Max. And then that image of Peter’s face gave way to a flood of memories of his adored brother. He felt his throat constrict, his eyes fill with tears.

Don’t think, he told himself. Don’t think of Peter. Here, in this house where we played hide-and-seek and pummeled each other, conspired in whispers in the middle of the night, screamed and laughed and cried
.

Peter’s gone, and now you’ve got to hang in there for him too
.

Ben had no idea how to begin, how to broach the subject. On the plane out of Basel he’d rehearsed how
he was going to confront his father. Now he’d forgotten everything he’d planned to say. The one thing he’d resolved was not to tell him about Peter, about his reappearance, his murder. For what? Why torture the old man? As far as Max Hartman knew, Peter had been killed years ago. Why should he be told the truth now that Peter really was dead?

Anyway, confrontation wasn’t Ben’s style. He let his father talk business, ask about the accounts Ben was managing. Man, he thought, the old guy is still sharp. He tried to change the subject, but there really wasn’t any easy or elegant way to say, By the way, Dad, were you a Nazi, if you don’t mind my asking?

Finally, Ben took a stab at it: “I guess being in Switzerland made me realize how little I know about, about when you were in Germany…”

His father’s eyes seemed to grow larger behind the magnifying lenses. He leaned forward. “Now, what inspires this sudden interest in family history?”

“Really, I think it was just being in Switzerland. It reminded me of Peter. This was the first time I’d been back there since his death.”

His father looked down at his hands. “I don’t dwell on the past, you know that. I never did. I only look ahead, not behind.”

“But your time at Dachau—we’ve never talked about that.”

“There’s really nothing to say. I was brought there, I was fortunate enough to survive, I was liberated on April 29, 1945. I will never forget the date, but it’s a part of my life I prefer to forget.”

Ben inhaled, then launched in. He was keenly aware that his relationship with his father was about to be altered forever, the fabric about to be torn. “Your name isn’t on the list of prisoners liberated by the Allies.”

It was a bluff. He watched his father’s reaction.

Max stared at Ben for a long moment, and then to Ben’s surprise he smiled. “You must always be wary of historical documents. Lists thrown together at a time of enormous chaos. Names spelled wrong, names omitted. If my name is missing from some list compiled by some U.S. Army sergeant, so what?”

“But you weren’t at Dachau, were you?” Ben asked quietly.

His father slowly swiveled his chair around, turning his back to Ben. His voice, when it came, was reedy, somehow distant. “What a strange thing to say.”

Ben felt his stomach flutter. “But true, right?”

Max swiveled back around. His face was expressionless, blank, but a blush had appeared on his papery cheeks. “There are people who make a profession out of denying that the Holocaust ever happened. So-called historians, writers—they publish books and articles saying the whole thing was a fake, a conspiracy. That millions of Jews weren’t murdered.”

Ben found his heart thudding, his mouth dry. “You were a lieutenant in Hitler’s SS. Your name is on a document—a document of incorporation listing members of a board of directors of a secret company. You were the treasurer.”

When his father replied, it was in a terrible whisper. “I won’t listen to this,” he said.

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s why you never spoke about Dachau. Because it was all a fiction. You were never there. You were a Nazi.”

“How can you say such things?” the old man rasped. “How can you possibly believe this? How
dare
you insult me this way!”

“That document—it’s in Switzerland. Articles of incorporation. The whole truth is there.”

Max Hartman’s eyes flashed. “Someone showed you
a fraudulent document, designed to discredit me. And you, Benjamin, chose to believe it. The real question is why.”

Ben could feel the room revolving around him slowly. “
Because Peter told me himself!
” he shouted. “Two days ago in Switzerland. He found a document! He found out the truth. Peter found out what you had done. He tried to protect us from it.”

“
Peter
—?” Max gasped.

The expression of his father’s face was terrible, but Ben forced himself to keep going.

“He told me about this corporation, who you really were. He was telling me everything when he was
shot dead
.”

The blood had drained from Max Hartman’s face, the gnarled hand that rested on his desk visibly trembling.

“Peter was killed
before my eyes
.” And now Ben almost spat the words: “My brother, your son—another one of your victims.”

“
Lies!
” his father shouted.

“No,” Ben said. “The truth. Something you’ve kept from us all our lives.”

Abruptly, Max’s voice became hushed and cold, an arctic wind. “You speak of things you cannot possibly understand.” He paused. “This conversation is over.”

“I understand who
you
are,” Ben said. “And it sickens me.”

“
Leave
,” Max Hartman shouted and he raised a quivering arm toward the door. Ben could picture that same arm raised in an SS salute, in a past that was distant but not distant enough. Never distant enough. And he recalled some writer’s often quoted words:
The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past
.

“
Get out!
” his father thundered. “Get out of this house!”

Washington, D.C
.

The Air Canada flight from Nova Scotia arrived at Reagan National in the late afternoon. The taxi pulled up to Anna’s Adams-Morgan apartment building just before six. It was already dark.

She loved coming home to her apartment. Her sanctuary. The only place where she felt utterly in charge. It was a small one-bedroom in a bad neighborhood, but it was her own perfectly realized world.

Now, as she got out of the elevator on her floor, she met her neighbor, Tom Bertone, who was heading down. Tom and his wife, Danielle, were both lawyers, both a little effusive, a little
too
neighborly, but pleasant enough. “Hey, Anna, I met your kid brother today,” he said. “I guess he’d just gotten into town. Really nice guy.” And the elevator doors closed behind him.

Brother?

She had no brother
.

At the door to her apartment, she waited a long moment, trying to calm her racing heart. She fished out her gun, a government-issue 9 mm Sig-Sauer, holding it in one hand as she turned the key with the other. Her apartment was dark, and, recalling her early training, she went into standard E&S, evasion and search, tactics. That meant flattening yourself against a wall with a pistol drawn, then shifting to an orthogonal wall, and repeating the process. They drilled it into field agents with the training sets, but she never imagined she’d be doing it in her own apartment, her home, her
sanctuary
.

She closed the door behind her. Silence.

But there was
something
. A barely detectable odor of cigarettes, that was it. Too faint to be from an actual lighted cigarette; it had to be the residue from the clothing of someone who smoked.

Someone who had been in her apartment.

In the dim light provided by the streetlights outside, she could see something else: one of the drawers of her file cabinets was slightly ajar. She always kept them neatly shut.
Someone had been searching through her belongings
.

Her blood ran cold.

There was a draft from the bathroom: the window had been left open.

And then she heard a sound, quiet but not quiet enough: the almost inaudible squeak of a rubber-soled shoe on the bathroom tile.

The intruder was still there
.

She flipped on the main overhead light, wheeled around in a crouch, her 9 mm drawn, the weight of it balanced in her two hands. She was grateful that it was a Sig factory short trigger, which fit her hands better than the standard model. The intruder wasn’t visible, but the apartment was small and there weren’t many places he could be. She straightened up and, adhering to the perimeter rule—
hug the walls
, the E&S instructors liked to say—she made her way toward the bedroom.