The Sigma Protocol (50 page)

The man appeared with a large black suitcase, and strode past her to the window, ignoring her for the moment. A very strange man.

“A nice view,” the man said.

“It gets no direct light,” Thérèse contradicted him scoldingly. “For most of the day, it is dark. You could develop film in here.”

“For some pursuits, that can be an advantage.”

Something was wrong. His accent was slipping, his French losing the straightened cadences of the social-services bureaucracy, sounding more casual, somehow less
French
.

Thérèse took a few steps away from the man. Her pulse quickened as she suddenly remembered the reports of a rapist who had been brutalizing women in the vicinity of the Place de la Réunion. Some of the women had been older, too. This man was an impostor, she decided. Her instincts told her so. Something about the way the man moved, with coiled, reptilian strength, confirmed her growing suspicion that he was, in fact, the Réunion rapist.
Mon dieu!
He’d gained the trust of
his victims, she had heard—victims who had invited the assailant into their very homes!

All her life, people had told her that she suffered from
une maladie nerveuse
. She knew better: she saw things, felt things, that others did not. Yet now, crucially, her antennae had failed her. How could she have been so foolish! Her eyes darted wildly around her apartment, looking for something she could use to protect herself. She picked up a heavy clay pot that contained a slightly shriveled rubber plant.

“I demand that you leave at once!” she said in a trembling voice.

“Madame, your demands are meaningless to me,” the smooth-faced man said quietly. He looked at her with quiet menace, a confident predator who knew that his prey was hopelessly outmatched.

She saw a flash of silver as he unsheathed a long, curved blade, and then she threw the heavy pot at him with all her might. But its weight worked against her: it arced quickly downward, striking the man in the legs, knocking him a few steps back but leaving him unharmed.
Jésus Christ!
What else could she use to defend herself? Her little broken-down TV! She yanked it from the countertop, hoisted it with great effort above her head, and tossed it at him as if aiming for the ceiling. The man, smiling, sidestepped the crude projectile. It thudded against the wall, then dropped to the floor, its plastic casing shattered along with the picture tube.

Dear God, no!
There had to be something else.
Yes
—the iron on the ironing board! Had she even turned it off? Thérèse dashed toward the iron, but as she grabbed it the intruder saw what she was attempting.

“Stop where you are, you revolting old cow,” called the man, a look of disgust crossing his face. “
Putain de
merde!
” With a lightning-fast motion, he grabbed another, smaller knife and flung it across the room. The deeply beveled steel came to a razor-sharp edge along the entire, arrow-shaped blade; the hollowed tang provided a streamlined counterweight.

Thérèse never saw it coming, but she felt its impact as the blade buried itself deep into her right breast. At first she thought whatever it was had struck her and bounced off. Then she looked down and saw the steel handle protruding from her blouse. It was odd, she thought, that she felt nothing; but then a sensation—cold, like an icicle—began to grow, and an area of red blossomed around the steel. Fear drained from her, replaced with sheer rage. This man thought she was just another victim, but he had misjudged her. She remembered the nighttime visits from her drunken father, which started when she was fourteen, his breath smelling like sour milk as he worked his stubby fingers into her, hurting her with his ragged nails. She remembered Laurent, and his last words to her. Indignation flooded her like water from an underground cistern, from every time she’d ever been taunted, cheated, bullied, abused.

Bellowing, she charged the evil intruder, all two hundred and fifty pounds of her.

And she tackled him, too, slammed him to the ground by sheer momentum.

She would have been proud of what she’d accomplished,
truie grasse
or no, if the man hadn’t shot her dead a split-second before her body crashed into his.

Trevor shuddered with revulsion as he pushed the obese, lifeless body off him. The woman was only slightly less off-putting in death that she’d been in life, he reflected as he returned his silenced pistol to its holster, feeling the cylinder’s heat against his thigh. The twin bullet
holes in her forehead were like a second pair of eyes. He dragged her away from the window. In retrospect, he should have shot her immediately upon gaining entry, but who knew she would turn out to be such a maniac? Anyway, there was always something unexpected. That was why he liked his vocation. It was never entirely routine; there was always the possibility of surprise, new challenges. Nothing, of course, he couldn’t handle. Nothing had ever turned up that the Architect couldn’t handle.

“
Christ
,” Anna whispered. She had avoided the shotgun spray by a couple of feet at most. “Not exactly the welcome wagon.”

But where was the shooter?

A steady succession of blasts was coming from the open apartment door, from somewhere within its darkened interior. Apparently the gunman was firing through the gap between the heavy steel door and the doorjamb.

Ben’s heart was thudding. “Georges Chardin,” he called out, “we haven’t come to harm you. We want to
help
you—and we need your help as well! Please,
listen
to us! Hear us out!”

From the dark recesses of the apartment emanated a bizarre rasping, a shuddering moan of terror, seemingly involuntary, like the night cry of a wounded animal. Still the man remained invisible, cloaked in darkness. They heard the click of a cartridge sliding into the chamber of a shotgun, and each of them raced to opposite ends of the long hallway.

Another explosion! A fusillade of pellets came through the open door, splintering the woodwork in the hall, gouging jagged crevices in the plaster walls. The air was heavy with the pungent odor of cordite. The entire hall now looked like a war zone.

“
Listen!
” Ben called out to their unseen adversary.
“We’re not firing back, can’t you see that? We’re not here to harm you in any way!” There was a pause: was the man hiding inside the apartment actually listening now? “We’re here to protect you against Sigma!”

Silence.

The man was listening! It was the invocation of the name of Sigma, the shibboleth of a long-buried conspiracy thundering in its impact.

At that same instant, Ben could see Anna hand-signaling to him. She wanted him to stay where he was while she made her own way into Chardin’s apartment. But
how
? With a glance, he saw the large double-hung window, saw her silently nudging open its heavy sash, felt a gust of cold air from outside. She was going to climb out the window, he realized with horror, walk along the narrow exterior ledge until she came to a window that opened directly into the Frenchman’s apartment. It was
madness
! He was seized with dread. A stray gust of wind, and she would fall to her death. But it was too late for him to say anything to her; she already had the window open and had stepped onto the ledge.
Christ Almighty!
he wanted to shout.
Don’t do it!

Finally a strange, deep baritone voice emerged from the apartment: “So this time they send an American.”

“There’s no ‘they,’ Chardin,” replied Ben. “It’s just us.”

“And who are you?” the voice came back, heavy with skepticism.

“We’re Americans, yes, who have…personal reasons why we need your help. You see, Sigma killed my brother.”

Another long silence ensued. Then: “I am not an idiot. You wish me to come out, and then you will trap me, take me alive. Well, you will
not
take me alive!”

“There are far easier ways, if that’s what we wanted
to do. Please, let us in—let us speak with you, if only for a minute. You can keep your weapon trained on us.”

“For what purpose do you want to speak with me?”

“We need your help in defeating them.”

A pause. Then a short, sharp bark of derisive laughter. “In defeating Sigma? You cannot! Until just now I thought one could only hide. How did you find me?”

“Through some damned clever investigative work. But you have my utmost admiration: You did a good job covering your tracks, I must say. A damned good job. It’s hard to relinquish control of family property. I understand that. So you used a
fictio juris
. Remote agency. Well designed. But then you’ve always been a brilliant strategic thinker. It wasn’t for nothing that you got to be Trianon’s
Directeur Général du Département des Finance
.”

Another long silence, followed by the scrape of a chair from inside the apartment. Was Chardin preparing to show his face after all? Ben glanced down the hall apprehensively, saw Anna carefully sliding one foot after another along the ledge while clinging to the parapet with both hands. Her hair blew in the wind. Then she was out of his line of sight.

He had to distract Chardin, keep him from noticing Anna’s appearance at his window.
He had to keep Chardin’s attention
.

“What is it you want from me?” came Chardin’s voice. His tone seemed neutral now.
He was listening; that was the first step
.

“Monsieur Chardin, we have information that could be invaluable to you. We know a great deal about Sigma, about the inheritors, the new generation that has seized control. The only protection—for either of us—is in knowledge.”

“There
is
no protection against them, you fool!”

Ben raised his voice. “
Goddamn it!
Your rationality was once legendary. If you’ve lost that, Chardin, then they’ve won anyway! Can’t you see how unreasonable you’re being?” In a gentler tone, he added, “If you send us away, you’ll always wonder what you might have learned. Or perhaps you’ll never have the opportunity—”

Suddenly there was the sound of glass breaking from inside the apartment, followed immediately by a loud crash and a clatter.

Had Anna made it through a window into Chardin’s apartment safely? A few seconds later he heard Anna’s voice, loud and clear. “I’ve got his shotgun! And it’s trained on him now.” She obviously spoke for Chardin’s benefit as well as Ben’s.

Ben strode toward the open door and entered the still-darkened room. It was hard to see anything but shapes; when his eyes adjusted, after a few seconds, he made out Anna, dimly outlined against a thick curtain, holding the long-barreled gun.

And a man in a peculiar, heavy robe with a cowl rose slowly, shakily to his feet. He did not appear to be a vigorous man; he was indeed a shut-in.

It was plain what had happened. Anna, plunging through the window, had leaped onto the long, ungainly shotgun, pinioning it to the floor; the impact must have knocked him over.

For a few moments, all three of them stood in silence. Chardin’s breathing was audible—heavy, nearly agonal, his face shadowed within his cowl.

Watching carefully to make sure Chardin didn’t have another weapon concealed in the folds of his monklike garment, Ben fumbled for a light switch. When the lights went on, Chardin abruptly turned away from them both, facing the wall. Was Chardin reaching for another gun?

“Freeze!” Anna shouted.

“Use your vaunted powers of reason, Chardin,” Ben said. “If we wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. That’s obviously
not
why we’re here!”

“Turn and face us,” Anna commanded.

Chardin was silent for a moment. “Be careful of what you ask for,” he rasped.

“
Now
, dammit!”

Moving as if in slow motion, Chardin complied and when Ben’s mind grasped the reality of what he saw, his stomach heaved and he nearly retched. Nor could Anna disguise her shocked intake of breath. It was a horror beyond imagining.

They were staring into an almost featureless mass of scar tissue, wildly various in texture. In areas it appeared crenellated, almost scalloped; in other areas, the proud flesh was smooth and nearly shiny, as if lacquered or covered in plastic wrap. Naked capillaries made the oval that had once been his face an angry, beefy red, except where varicosities yielded coils of dark purple. The staring, filmy gray eyes looked startlingly out of place—two large marbles left on a slick blacktop by a careless child.

Ben averted his gaze, and then, wrenchingly, forced himself to look again. More details were visible. Embedded in a horribly webbed and wrinkled central concavity were two nasal openings, higher than the nostrils would once have been. Below, he made out a mouth that was little more than a gash, a wound within a wound.

“
Oh, dear God
.” Ben slowly breathed the words.

“You are surprised?” Chardin said, the words scarcely appearing to come from his wound-like mouth. It was if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy, one designed by a de-ranged sadist. A cough-laugh. “The reports of my death were quite accurate, all except for the assertion of death itself. ‘Burned beyond recognition’—yes, indeed I was. I should have perished in the blaze. Often I wish that I had.
My survival was a freak accident. An enormity. The worst fate a human being can have.”

“They tried to kill you,” Anna whispered. “And they failed.”

“Oh no. I think that in most respects they quite succeeded,” Chardin said, and winced: a twitch of dark red muscle around one of his eyeballs. It was apparent that the simple act of talking was painful to him. He was enunciating with exaggerated precision, but the damage meant that certain consonants remained blurry. “A close confidant of mine had suspicions that they might try to eliminate me. Talk had already begun about dispatching the
angeli rebelli
. He came by my country estate—too late. There were ashes, and blackened timber, and charred ruins everywhere. And my body, what was left of it, was as black as any of it. He thought he could detect a pulse, my friend did. He brought me to a tiny provincial hospital, thirty kilometers away, told them a tale about an overturned kerosene lamp, gave them a false name. He was canny. He understood that if my enemies knew I had survived, they would try again. Months passed in that tiny clinic. I had burns over ninety-five percent of my body. I was not expected to live.” He spoke haltingly but hypnotically: a tale never before spoken. And then he sat down in a tall-backed wooden chair, seemingly depleted.