The Sigma Protocol (23 page)

“So did he have to open it under his real name?”

“No. In
my
name. I’m the account holder, but Peter was what they call the ‘beneficial owner.’” He exhaled a plume of smoke. “We had to go in together to open the account, but Peter’s name appeared on one form only, known only to the account adviser. The Establishment of the Beneficial Owner’s Identity, it’s called. This form is kept locked away in the files.” In another room a telephone rang.

“Which bank?”

“I chose the Handelsbank Schweiz AG because it’s small and discreet. I’ve had clients who’ve happily
done business with the Handelsbank, clients whose money is, shall we say, not entirely clean.”

“So does this mean you can get into Peter’s vault for me?”

“I’m afraid not. You’ll have to accompany me. As the specified beneficiary and heir of the beneficial owner.”

“If it’s at all possible,” Ben said, “I’d like to go to the bank straightaway.” He remembered Schmid’s icy warnings that he was not to return—warnings that if he violated that agreement, he would be persona non grata, subject to immediate arrest.

The phone kept ringing. Deschner crushed out his cigarette in a saucer. “Very well. If you don’t mind, I’d like to answer that phone. Then I must make a call or two, reschedule my nine-thirty appointment.”

He went into an adjoining room, his study, and returned a few minutes later. “All right then, no problem. I was able to reschedule.”

“Thank you.”

“Certainly. The account adviser—that’s the banker, a senior vice president of the bank, Bernard Suchet—has all the relevant papers. He has a photocopy of Peter’s passport on file. They believe he has been dead for four years. So far as anyone knows, the recent…
tragedy
has not been reported. Your own identity will be easy to establish.”

“My arrival in this country came through somewhat irregular means,” Ben said, choosing his words carefully. “My legal presence here cannot be verified through the normal passport, customs, and immigration systems. What happens if they alert the authorities?”

“Let’s not think of all that can go wrong. Now, if I may finish dressing, we’re in business. Then let us go at once.”

Anna whirled around to Captain Bolgorio. “What? The body was
cremated?
We had an
agreement
, dammit…!”

The Paraguayan detective shrugged, hands spread, eyes wide with apparent concern. “Agent Navarro, please, let us discuss these things later, not in front of the bereaved—”

Ignoring him, Anna turned back to the widow. “Were you told there would be an autopsy?” she demanded.

“Don’t raise your voice to me,” Consuela Prosperi snapped. “I’m not a criminal.”

Anna looked at Bolgorio, livid. “Did
you
know her husband’s body was going to be cremated?”
Of course he knew, the bastard
.

“Agent Navarro, I told you, this is not my department.”

“But did you know this or
not?
”

“I have heard things. But I am a low man on the totem pole, please understand.”

“Are we finished here?” Consuela Prosperi asked.

“Not yet,” Anna said. “Were you pressured into a cremation?” she demanded of the widow.

The widow said to Bolgorio, “Captain, please remove her from my house.”

“My apologies, madame,” Bolgorio said. “Agent Navarro, we must go now.”

“We’re not finished here,” Anna said calmly. “You
were pressured, weren’t you?” She addressed Señora Prosperi. “What were you told—that your assets would be frozen, locked up, made inaccessible to you, unless you went along with this? Something like that?”

“Remove her from my house, Captain!” the widow commanded, raising her voice.

“Please, Agent Navarro—”

“Señora,” Anna said, “let me tell you something. I happen to know that a significant portion of your assets is invested in hedge funds and other investment partnerships and equities in the U.S. and abroad. The U.S. government has the power to seize those assets if it suspects you of being part of an international criminal conspiracy.” She stood and walked toward the door. “I’m getting on the phone to Washington right now, and that’s precisely what I’m going to order.”

From behind her, she heard the widow cry out, “She can’t do this, can she? You assured me my money was safe if I—”

“Keep quiet!” the homicide detective barked suddenly. Startled, Anna turned back, and saw Bolgorio standing face to face with the widow. His obsequiousness had vanished. “I’ll handle this.”

He strode toward Anna and grabbed her arm.

Outside the front gates of the Prosperi estate, Anna demanded, “What are you covering up?”

“You’d be wise to leave things alone here,” Bolgorio said. There was malevolence in his voice now, a gleaming assuredness she hadn’t seen before. “You’re a visitor here. You are not in your own country.”

“How was it done? Were morgue orders ‘lost’ or ‘misfiled’? Did someone pay you off, is that how it happened?”

“What do you know of the way things work in Paraguay?” Bolgorio said, moving uncomfortably close
to her. She could feel his hot breath, the spray of spittle. “There are many things you don’t understand.”

“You
knew
the body had been destroyed. From the moment I called you, I had a feeling. You knew there was no body waiting for me in the morgue. Just tell me this: were you ordered, or were you paid? Where did the request come from—from outside the government, or from above?”

Bolgorio, unfazed, said nothing.

“
Who ordered the body destroyed?
”

“I like you, Agent Navarro. You’re an attractive woman. I do not want anything to happen to you.”

He intended to frighten her, and unfortunately it was working. But she gave him only a blank look. “That’s not a very subtle threat.”

“This is not a threat. I truly don’t want anything to happen to you. You need to listen to me, and then leave the country at once. There are people high up in our government who protect the Prosperis and others like them. Money changes hands, a great deal of it. You’ll accomplish nothing by putting your own life in peril.”

Oh
, she thought,
you don’t know who you’re dealing with. Threatening me that way is like waving a red flag at a bull
.

“Did you order the cremation personally?”

“It happened, that’s all I know. I told you, I’m not a powerful man.”

“Then someone must know that Prosperi’s death wasn’t natural. Why else would they destroy the evidence?”

“You are asking me questions I don’t know the answer to,” he said calmly. “Please, Agent Navarro. Please take care of your own safety. There are people here who prefer to keep things quiet.”

“Do you think
they
—these ‘people who prefer to
keep things quiet’—had Prosperi killed and didn’t want that revealed?”

Bolgorio looked away, as if in contemplation. “I’ll deny I ever told you this. I called the nursing agency before you got here. When I knew you were investigating Prosperi’s death. That seemed to me the obvious place to ask questions.”

“And?”

“The substitute nurse—the one who was with Prosperi the night he died—she has vanished.”

She felt her stomach plummet.
I knew it was too easy
, she thought.

“How did this nurse come to the agency?”

“She came with excellent credentials, they said. Her references checked out. She said she lived within walking distance of here, and if they had any assignments nearby… She did three different assignments, all in this area, and all very well. Suddenly, the regular night nurse assigned to Prosperi fell ill, and the substitute was available, and…”

“They have no way to reach her?”

“As I said, she disappeared.”

“But her paychecks, her bank account—”

“She was paid in cash. Not unusual in this country. Her home address was false. When we looked closely, everything about her was false. It was as if she had been created just for this occasion, like some stage set. And when the job had been accomplished, the set was struck.”

“Sounds like a professional backstopping job. I want to talk to the nursing agency.”

“You’ll learn nothing. And I will not help you do that. I’ve already told you too much. Please, leave at once. There are so many ways for an overly inquisitive foreigner to be killed here. Especially when very powerful people do not want things uncovered. Please—go.”

She knew he was completely serious. This wasn’t just a threat. She was more stubborn than anyone she knew, and she hated giving up.
But sometimes you just have to move on
, she told herself.
Sometimes the most important thing is just to stay alive
.

Zurich

By the time Ben Hartman and Matthias Deschner were walking down the Löwenstrasse, it had begun to drizzle. The sky was steel gray. The linden trees that lined the street rustled in the wind. A steeple clock struck the hour of nine o’clock in a melodious chime. Trams passed by down the middle of the street—the 6, the 13, the 11—each stopping with a squeal. FedEx trucks seemed to be everywhere: Zurich was a world banking capital, Ben knew, and banking was a time-sensitive business. Bankers hurried to work beneath umbrellas. A couple of Japanese girls, tourists, giggled. Unpainted wooden benches sat unoccupied beneath the lindens.

It drizzled, it stopped, it drizzled again. They came to a busy crosswalk where Lagerstrasse crossed the Löwenstrasse. A building that housed the Société de Banque Suisse stood empty, undergoing construction or renovation.

A pair of stylishly unshaven Italian men in identical black leather jackets passed by, both smoking. Then a matron wafting Shalimar.

On the next block Deschner, who was wearing an ill-fitting black raincoat over an ugly checked jacket, stopped at a white stone building, resembling a town-house, on the front of which was mounted a small brass plaque. Engraved on it in graceful script were the words
HANDELSBANK SCHWEIZ AG
.

Deschner pulled open the heavy glass door.

Directly across the street, someone with the slender build of an adolescent was sitting at a café, under a red Coca-Cola parasol. He was wearing khaki cargo pants, a blue nylon backpack, and an MC Solaar T-shirt, and he was drinking an Orangina from the bottle. With languid movements, he flipped through a copy of a music magazine while speaking on a cell phone. From time to time he glanced at the entrance to the bank across the street.

A set of glass doors slid open electronically. They stood for a moment between thick doors, and then with a low buzz, the next set slid open.

The lobby of the Handelsbank was a large marble-floored chamber, completely empty except for a sleek black desk at the far end. A woman sat behind it, wearing a tiny wireless telephone headset, speaking quietly. She looked up as they entered.

“Guten morgen,”
she said.
“Kann ich Ihnen helfen?”

“Ja, guten morgen. Wir haben eine Verabredung mit Dr. Suchet.”

“Sehr gut, mein Herr. Einen Moment.”
She spoke softly into her mouthpiece.
“Er wird gleich unten sein, um Sie zu sehen.”

“You will like Bernard Suchet, I think,” Deschner said. “He’s a very good sort, a banker of the old school. Not one of these hustle-and-bustle young men in a hurry you see so much of in Zurich these days.”

At this point
, Ben thought,
I don’t care if he’s Charles Manson
.

A steel elevator pinged and slid open, and a round-shouldered large man in a tweed jacket strode up to them and shook hands first with Deschner, then with Ben.
“Es freut mich Dich wiederzusehen, Matthias,”
he exclaimed, and then, turning to Ben, “I am very pleased
to make your acquaintance, Mr. Hartman. Please, come with me.”

They rode up together in the elevator. There was a camera lens mounted discreetly on the ceiling. Suchet wore a permanent pleasant face. He had heavy rectangular-framed glasses, a double chin, and a large potbelly. His shirt was monogrammed with his initials on the pocket. A pocket square in his jacket matched his tie. A senior officer, Ben thought. Tweed jacket, not a banker’s suit: he’s above such things as dress code.

Ben watched him closely, waiting for any signs of suspicion. But Suchet seemed all business as usual.

The elevator opened on a waiting area covered in a wall-to-wall oatmeal deep-pile rug and furnished with antiques, not reproductions. They moved through the waiting area to a door, where Suchet inserted a badge that he wore on a chain around his neck, into an electronic card-reader.

Suchet’s office was just down the hall, a spacious, light-flooded room. A computer was the only object on his long glass-topped desk. He sat behind it, while Deschner and Ben sat across from him. A middle-aged woman entered with two espressos and two glasses of water on a silver tray and set them down on the desk before the two visitors. Then a young male came in and handed Dr. Suchet a file.

Suchet opened it. “You are Benjamin Hartman, of course,” he asked, moving his owlish gaze from the file to Ben.

Ben nodded, his stomach tightening.

“We have been provided with ancillary documentation certifying that you are the sole heir to the ‘beneficial owner’ of this account. And you affirm that you are, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“Legally I am satisfied with your documentation. And visually—well, it is clear you are indeed Peter Hartman’s twin brother.” He smiled. “So what can I do for you this morning, Mr. Hartman?”

The Handelsbank’s vaults were located in the basement of the building, a fluorescent-lit, low-ceilinged area that was nowhere near as sleek and modern as the upstairs. There were several numbered doors off a narrow corridor, presumably room-sized vaults. Several larger alcoves off the hallway appeared from a distance to be lined with brass, which upon closer inspection Ben saw were safe-deposit boxes of various sizes.

At the entrance to an alcove numbered 18C, Dr. Suchet stopped and handed Ben a key. He did not indicate which of the hundreds of vaults in this area was Peter’s. “I assume you would like privacy,” he said. “Herr Deschner and I shall leave you now. You can call me on this phone here”—he indicated a white phone on a steel table in the center of the room—“when you are finished.”