The Sigma Protocol (40 page)

“It’s Anna Navarro,” she said.

“Oh yeah, right, how ya doin’ there, Anna?”

She found herself switching into her regular-guy voice. This she did easily; it was how her father’s buddies talked, her neighbors back home. “Doin’ good, thanks. How’re we doin’ on the money trace?”

“Na-a-ah, nothin’. We’re buttin’ our heads against a big brick wall. It’s lookin’ like each of the dead guys got regular contributions booted into their accounts from some haven country. Cayman Islands, British Virgins, Curaçao. That’s where we keep hittin’ the wall.”

“What happens when you go to these offshore banks with an official request?”

A short bark of derision from Donahue. “They give us the finger. We give ’em an MLAT request for their financial records, they say they’ll get around to it some time next few years.” MLAT, she knew, was the mutual assistance treaty, which in principle obtained between the United States and many of these offshore havens. “BVI and Caymans are the worst, they tell us maybe two, three years it’ll take ’em.”

“Huh.”

“But even if they should just open up the magic doors and show us everything, all we’re going to get is where they got the money from, and you can bet your paycheck it’s some other offshore. Isle of Man, Bahamas, Bermuda, Lux, San Marino, Anguilla. Probably
a whole chain of offshores and shell companies. These days money can zip around the world, movin’ between a dozen accounts in, like, seconds.”

“Mind if I ask you something?” she said.

“Go ’head.”

“How do you guys ever get anything on money-laundering?”

“Oh, we get stuff,” he said, a little defensively. “It just takes years.”

“Great,” she said. “Thanks.”

In a small room on the fifth floor of the
Sicherheitsbüro
, at Vienna police headquarters on Rossauer Lände, a young man sat before a computer screen, wearing headphones. From time to time he snubbed out a cigarette in a large gold ashtray that sat on the gray Formica table next to a No Smoking sign.

In a small box on the top left of the screen was the telephone number he was monitoring, along with the date, the start time, duration of call measured in a tenth of a second, the telephone number called. Elsewhere on the screen was a list of telephone numbers, representing each call made from this number. All you had to do was to move the cursor to any of the numbers and double-click, and the digitally recorded conversation would start playing, either on the headphones or through the external speakers. Little red bars would dance as the volume fluctuated. You could adjust not only the volume but even the speed of playback.

Every telephone call the woman had made from her hotel room was recorded onto this computer’s hard disk. The technology was most impressive; it had been provided to the Vienna police by the Israelis.

The door to the little room opened and in came Detective Sergeant Walter Heisler across the institutional green linoleum floor. He, too, was smoking. He
gave a little jerk of his head by way of greeting. The tech removed his headphones, put out his cigarette, looked up.

“Anything interesting?” the detective asked.

“Most of the calls have been to Washington.”

“Strictly speaking, we’re supposed to inform Interpol when we record any international calls.” There was a twinkle in the detective’s eye.

The tech raised his eyebrows in silent complicity. Heisler pulled up a chair. “Mind if I join you?”

California

The young billionaire computer mogul Arnold Carr took the call on his cellular phone while he was strolling through a redwood forest in Northern California with his old friend and mentor the investment whiz Ross Cameron.

The two were spending a weekend in the company of some of America’s richest and most powerful men at the exclusive retreat known as the Bohemian Grove. There was some sort of idiotic game called paintball going on back at the encampment, presided over by the chief executive of BankAmerica and the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James.

But Carr, the founder of a vastly successful software company, rarely had the chance to hang out with his billionaire buddy Ross Cameron, the so-called sage of Sante Fe. So they had spent a lot of time hiking through the woods talking about money and business, philanthropy and art collecting, their kids, and the extraordinary, highly secret project they had both been invited to join.

Carr pulled the tiny, burring phone out of the pocket of his Pendleton plaid shirt with visible annoyance. Hardly anyone had this number, and the few employees
who’d dare call had been instructed not to bother him for any reason during his retreat weekend.

“Yeah,” Carr said.

“Mr. Carr, I’m so sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning,” the voice purred. “This is Mr. Holland. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

Carr recognized the voice instantly. “Oh, no way,” he said, suddenly cordial. “I’ve been up for hours. What’s up?”

When “Mr. Holland” had finished, Carr said, “Let me see what I can do.”

Ben arrived at his hotel around nine o’clock at night, hungry but unable to eat, jittery from too much caffeine. He’d taken a cab from police headquarters, since driving the Opel Vectra was out of the question. Two of its windows had been shattered in the shootout, the leather seats covered with rounded shards of glass.

The lobby was quiet, the hotel guests either out at dinner or returned to their rooms. Several Oriental rugs overlapped one another; here and there patches of highly polished marble floor gleamed.

The concierge, a too-slick middle-aged man with alert eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses, handed him the room key before Ben said a word.

“Thanks,” Ben said. “Any messages for me?” Perhaps the private detective.

The concierge tapped at his computer keyboard. “No, sir, just the one you already retrieved.”

“Which one was that?”
What?
he thought, alarmed.
I haven’t gotten a single message since I got to Vienna
.

“I don’t know, sir. You called in a few hours ago.” More tapping. “At six-twenty this evening you got a message from the hotel operator.”

“Could you give it to me again?” This was either a mistake or…

“I’m sorry, sir, once the guest retrieves a message, it’s deleted from the system.” He gave Ben a feral smile. “We can’t keep all messages forever, you know.”

Ben took the small brass-cage elevator to the fourth floor, nervously fingering the large brass sphere that dangled from the room key. He couldn’t put it past Agent Navarro to have had some male colleague call the hotel to get his messages, see whom he was in touch with.

But who had left a message? Besides Agent Navarro, only the private detective knew his whereabouts. It was surely too late to call the detective, Hans Hoffman; he wouldn’t be in his office this late at night.

Navarro was suspicious about his motives, yet she couldn’t seriously think he had killed Rossignol. Could she? She had to know she wasn’t dealing with a serial murderer. After all, she’d mentioned she had expertise in homicide; she had to know who fit the profile and who didn’t.

So what was she really after?

Was it possible she was actually working for the CIA or some gray-haired contingent thereof, mopping up, helping cover up their involvement by shifting suspicion to him?

And the fact remained: Gaston Rossignol, a founder of this mysterious corporation that might or might not have had CIA involvement, had just been murdered. As had Peter, whose single error, it seemed, was to have dug up a list of directors of this very same corporation. Had the same people killed both of them? It certainly seemed likely.

But American killers? CIA?

It was difficult to fathom. Jimmy Cavanaugh was an American…Yet couldn’t he have been working for foreigners?

And then there was Max’s baffling disappearance.

Why had he vanished? Godwin had shed no light on that mystery. Why had Max called Godwin just before leaving?

Was his father dead now, too?

It was time to place another call to Bedford.

He walked down the long corridor, struggled with the room key for a moment, and then the door came open. He froze.

The lights were off.

Yet he had left all the lights in the room on when he’d left. Had someone turned them off?

Oh, come on, he told himself. Surely the chambermaid had turned them off. The Austrians prided themselves on being environmentally conscientious.

Was he overthinking this? Was he being ridiculously paranoid? Was this what the last few days had done to him?

Still…

Quietly, without entering, he closed the door, turned the key to lock it again, and went back down the hall in search of a porter or bell captain. None was anywhere to be seen. He circled back and took the stairs down to the third floor. There, at the end of another long hall, he spotted a porter coming out of a room.

“Excuse me,” Ben said, accelerating his stride. “Can you help me?”

The young porter turned. “Sir?”

“Listen,” Ben said, “I locked myself out of my room. Can you let me in?” He palmed the porter a fifty-shilling note, about eight dollars, and added sheepishly, “This is the second time I’ve done it. I don’t want to have to go back to the concierge. It’s up one flight. Four-sixteen.”

“Oh yes, certainly, sir. Ah, moment please.” He searched through a ring of keys on his belt. “Yes, sir, please.”

They took the elevator up to the fourth floor. The porter opened the door to 416. Feeling a little foolish,
Ben stood behind him and off to one side, so that he could see into the room at an oblique angle, without being seen.

He noticed a shape, a silhouette! The figure of a man outlined against backlight from the open bathroom door. The man was crouching down, pointing a long-barreled gun toward the door!

The man turned, and his face became visible. It was the assassin who’d tried to kill him a few hours ago in front of Jürgen Lenz’s villa! The assassin in the Swiss auberge.

The man who killed his brother.

The porter screamed, “No!” and ran away down the hall.

For a moment the killer was confused—he’d expected Ben, not a uniformed hotel employee. The hesitation was long enough for Ben to take off. Behind him came a series of muted spits, then the much louder explosions of bullets pocking the walls. The porter’s screams became even louder, more frantic, and the gunfire came closer, and then came the racing footsteps of the gunman, and Ben put on a burst of speed. Straight ahead was the door to the stairway, and he quickly rejected it—he didn’t want to be a prisoner in a stairwell with an armed killer after him. Instead he whipped around the corridor to the right, saw an open room door, a housekeeping cart in front of it, and he leaped into the room, swinging the door shut behind him. His back pressed against the door, he gasped for breath, wondering whether the killer had seen him enter the room. He heard muffled footsteps racing by: the killer had passed. He heard the porter shout, calling someone; he didn’t sound as if he’d been wounded, which was a relief.

A cry from inside the room! He saw a small, dark-skinned maid in a light blue uniform cowering in the corner of the room.

“Quiet!” Ben hissed.

“Who are you?” the maid gasped, terrified. She spoke in heavily accented English. “Please don’t hurt me!”

“Quiet,” Ben repeated. “Get down. If you keep quiet, you won’t get hurt!”

The maid flattened herself against the carpeting, whimpering in abject terror.

“Matches!” Ben said. “I need matches!”

“The ashtray! Please—the desk, next to the television!”

Ben found them and located the smoke/heat detector mounted on the ceiling above him. He stood on a chair, lit a match, held it to the coil. In a few seconds he could hear the Klaxon of a fire alarm sounding in the room and in the corridor outside—a rasping metallic shriek caterwauling at regular, rapid intervals. The sound was everywhere! Shouts and screams came from the hall as hotel guests ran from their rooms. In another few seconds, water began spraying from the sprinkler system in the ceiling, drenching the carpet and bed. The maid screamed again as Ben turned and opened the door, quickly looking out in either direction. The hall was chaos: people running about, some huddled in bafflement, gesturing this way and that, yelling to one another as water spewed from the sprinklers all along the ceiling the length of the corridor. Ben ran out of the room, joining the frenzied crowd in a rush to the stairwell. He knew, from the height of the main staircase that led into the hotel’s front entrance, that the stairwell had to have its own exit onto the street or back alley.

The stairwell door opened onto a dark corridor, illuminated only by a flickering, buzzing fluorescent ceiling fixture, but it was enough light to make out the double doors of the hotel kitchen. He raced toward it, pushed the doors open without stopping, and saw
the inevitable service entrance. He reached the door, felt the flow of cold air from the outside, slid open the heavy steel bolt, and pulled the massive door open. A ramp led down into a narrow alley crowded with trash-cans. He propelled himself down, and, with fire engine sirens sounding in the distance, disappeared into the dark alley.

Twenty minutes later he came to the tall modern building overlooking the Danube canal, on the far side of the Stadtpark, a characterless American hotel that was part of an international chain. He strode purposefully through the lobby to the elevators, a hotel guest who obviously belonged.

He knocked on the door of Room 1423.

Special Agent Anna Navarro cracked open the door. She was in a flannel nightgown, her makeup was off, and yet she was luminous.

“I think I’m ready to cooperate,” Ben said.

Anna Navarro fixed Hartman a drink from the honor bar: a toy bottle of Scotch, a little green bottle of mineral water, a few miniature cubes of ice from the tiny freezer. She was, if possible, even more businesslike than she’d been at the police station. Over her flannel nightgown she’d cinched a white terry-cloth robe. Probably it didn’t help, Ben reflected, having a strange man in the close quarters of her hotel room when she was dressed for bed.