The Sigma Protocol (51 page)

“But you survived,” Ben said.

“I did not have the strength to force myself to stop breathing,” Chardin said. He paused again, the memory of pain imposing further pain. “They wanted to move me to a metropolitan hospital, but of course I would not permit it. I was beyond help anyway. Can you imagine what it is like when consciousness itself is nothing other than the consciousness of pain?”

“And yet you
survived
,” Ben repeated.

“The agony was beyond anything our species was
meant to endure. Wound dressings were an ordeal beyond imagining. The stench of necrotic flesh was overpowering even to me, and more than one orderly would routinely vomit upon entering my room. Then, after the granulation tissue formed, a new horror was in store for me—contracture. The scars would shrink and the agony would be rekindled all over again. Even today, the pain I live with every moment of every day is of a degree I never experienced in the whole of my preceding life. When I
had
a life. You cannot look at me, can you? No one can. But then I cannot look at myself, either.”

Anna spoke, clearly knowing that human contact had to be reestablished. “The strength you must have had—it’s extraordinary. No medical textbook could ever account for it. The instinct for survival. You emerged from that blaze. You were saved. Something inside you fought for life. It
had
to be for a reason!”

Chardin spoke quietly. “A poet was once asked, If his house were on fire, what would he save? And he said, ‘I would save the fire. Without fire, nothing is possible.’” His laughter was a low, disconcerting rumble. “Fire is after all what made civilization possible: but it can equally be an instrument of barbarity.”

Anna returned the shotgun to Chardin after removing a last shell from the chamber. “We need your help,” she said urgently.

“Do I look like I am in a position to help anyone, I who cannot help myself?”

“If you want to call your enemies to account, we may be your best bet,” Ben said somberly.

“There is no revenge for something like this. I did not survive by drinking the gall of rage.” He withdrew a small plastic atomizer from the folds of his robes, and directed a spray of moisture toward his eyes.

“For years, you were at the helm of a major petrochemical corporation, Trianon,” Ben prompted. He
needed to show Chardin that they had puzzled out the basic situation, needed to
enlist
him. “An industry leader, it was and remains. You were Émil Ménard’s lieutenant, the brains behind Trianon’s midcentury restructuring. He was a founder of Sigma. And in time you must have become a principal as well.”

“Sigma,” he repeated in a quavering voice. “Where it all begins.”

“And no doubt your genius in accounting helped in the great undertaking of spiriting assets out of the Third Reich.”

“Eh? Do you think
that
was the great project? That was
nothing
, a negligible exercise. The grand project…
le grand projet
…” He trailed off. “That was something of an entirely different order. And nothing you are equipped to comprehend.”

“Try me,” Ben said.

“And divulge the secrets I have spent my life protecting?”

“You said it yourself: What life?” Ben took a step toward him, forcing down his revulsion in order to maintain eye contact. “What have you left to lose?”

“At last you speak truly,” Chardin said softly, and his naked eyes seemed to swivel, peering penetratingly at Ben’s own eyes.

For a long moment he was silent. And then he began to talk, slowly, mesmerizingly.

“The story begins before me. It will continue, no doubt, after me. But its origins lie in the closing months of the Second World War, when a consortium of some of the world’s most powerful industrialists gathered in Zurich to determine the course of the postwar world.”

Ben flashed on the steely-eyed men in the old photograph.

“They were angry men,” Chardin went on, “who caught wind of what the ailing Franklin Roosevelt was
planning to do—let Stalin know he would not stand in the way of a massive Soviet land grab. And, of course, it’s what he did do before his death. In effect he was ceding half of Europe to the Communists! It was the grossest betrayal! These business leaders knew they would be unable to derail the disgraceful U.S.-Soviet bargain at Yalta. And so they formed a corporation that would be a beachhead, a means to channel vast sums of money into fighting communism, strengthening the will of the West. The next world war had begun.”

Ben looked at Anna, then stared off into space, hypnotized and astonished by Chardin’s words.

“These leaders of capitalism accurately foresaw that the people of Europe, embittered and sickened by fascism, would, in reaction, turn to the left. The soil had been scorched by the Nazis, these industrialists realized, and without the massive infusion of resources at key moments, socialism would begin to take root, first in Europe, then throughout the world. They saw their mission as preserving, fortifying, the industrial state. Which meant, as well, muffling the voices of dissent. Do these anxieties seem overstated? Not so. These industrialists knew how the pendulum of history worked. And if a fascist regime was followed by a socialist regime, Europe might be truly lost, as they saw it.

“It was seen as only prudent to enlist certain leading Nazi officials, who knew which way the wind was blowing and were also committed to combating Stalinism. And once the syndicate had established its political as well as financial foundations, it began manipulating world events, bankrolling political parties as if from behind a curtain. They were successful, astonishingly so! Their money, judiciously targeted, brought to life de Gaulle’s Fourth Republic in France, preserved the rightist Franco regime in Spain. In later years, the generals were placed in power
in Greece, bringing to an end the leftist regime that the people had elected. In Italy, Operation Gladio ensured that a continual campaign of low-level subversion would cripple the attempt of leftists to organize and influence national politics. Plans were drawn up for the paramilitary police, the
carabinieri
, to take over radio and television stations if necessary. We had extensive files on politicians, unionists, priests. Ultra-right-wing parties everywhere were secretly bolstered from Zurich, so as to make the conservatives seem moderate by contrast. Elections were controlled, bribes paid, leftist political leaders assassinated—and the strings were pulled by the puppet masters in Zurich, in conditions of absolute secrecy. Politicians such as Senator Joseph McCarthy in the U.S. were funded. Coups were financed throughout Europe and Africa and Asia. On the left, extremist groups were created, too, to serve as
agents provocateur
and guarantee popular revulsion toward their cause.

“This cabal of industrialists and bankers had seen to it that the world was made safe for capitalism. Your President Eisenhower, who warned about the rise of the military-industrial complex, saw only the tip of the iceberg. In truth, much of the entire history of the world in the last half-century was scripted by these men in Zurich and their successors.”

“
Christ!
” Ben interrupted. “You’re talking about…”

“Yes,” Chardin said, nodding his hideous faceless head. “Their cabal gave birth to the Cold War. They did. Or, as perhaps I should say,
we
did. Now do you begin to understand?”

Trevor’s fingers moved swiftly as he opened his suitcase and assembled the.50 caliber rifle, a customized version of the BMG AR-15. It was, in his view, a thing of beauty, a precision-machined sniper weapon with
relatively few moving parts, and a range of up to seventy-four hundred meters. At more proximate distances, its penetrative capacities were astonishing: it could pierce three inches of steel plate, would leave an exit hole in an automobile or hammer off a corner of a building. It could drive through crumbling mortar handily. The bullet would have a projection velocity of over three thousand feet per second. Resting on a bipod, and surmounted by a Leupold Vari-X scope with thermal imaging, the rifle would have the accuracy that he needed. He smiled as he seated the rifle into the bipod. He could hardly be considered underequipped for the job at hand.

His target, after all, was directly across the street.

“It’s
incredible
,” Anna said. “It’s… it’s too much to take
in!
”

“I have lived with it so long that it is to me a commonplace,” Chardin said. “But I recognize the immense upheavals that would ensue if others realized that the public history of their times was, in no small part,
scripted
—and scripted by a cadre of men like me: businessmen, financiers, industrialists, working through their widely dispersed confederates.
Scripted by Sigma
. The history books would all have to be rewritten. Lives of purpose would suddenly seem like nothing more than the twitching at the end of a marionette’s string. Sigma is a story of how the mighty have fallen, and the fallen become mighty. It is a story that must
never
be told. Do you understand that?
Never
.”

“But who would be brazen—
mad
—enough to undertake such a venture?” Ben rested his gaze on Chardin’s soft brown robes. Now he understood the physical necessity of such strange, loose clothing.

“You must first understand the visionary, triumphalist sense of mission and accomplishment that suffused the midcentury corporation,” Chardin said. “We had already transformed man’s destiny, remember. My God, the automobile, the airplane, soon the jet: man could move along the ground at speeds inconceivable to our ancestors—man could fly through the heavens! Radio waves and sound waves could be used to provide a sixth
sense, vision where vision had never been possible. Computation itself could now be automated. And the breakthroughs in the material sciences were equally extraordinary—in metallurgy, in plastics, in production techniques yielding new forms of rubber and adhesives and textiles, and a hundred other things. The ordinary landscape of our lives was being transformed. A revolution was taking place in every aspect of modern industry.”

“A second industrial revolution,” Ben said.

“A second, a third, a fourth, a
fifth
,” Chardin replied.

“The possibilities seemed infinite. The capabilities of the modern corporation seemed to be unbounded. And after the dawn of nuclear science—my God, what
couldn’t
we achieve if we set our minds to it? There was Vannevar Bush, Lawrence Marshall, and Charles Smith, at Raytheon, doing pioneering work in everything from microwave generation to missile guidance systems to radar surveillance equipment. So many of the discoveries that became ubiquitous in later decades—xerography, microwave technologies, binary computing, solid-state electronics—had already been conceived and prototyped at Bell Labs, General Electric, Westinghouse, RCA, IBM, and other corporations. The material world was succumbing to our will. Why not the political realm as well?”

“And where were
you
during all this?” Ben asked.

Chardin’s eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance. From the folds of his cloak, he withdrew the atomizer, and moistened his eyes again. He pressed a white handkerchief to the area under his slash-like mouth, which was slick with saliva. And, haltingly at first, he began to speak.

I was a child—eight years old when the war broke out. A student at a shabby little provincial school, the Lycée
Beaumont, in the city of Lyon. My father was a civil engineer with the city, my mother a schoolteacher. I was an only child, and something of a prodigy. By the time I was twelve, I was taking courses in applied mathematics at the
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon,
the teacher’s college. I had genuine quantitative gifts, and yet the academy held no appeal for me. I wanted something else. The ozone-scented arcana of number theory held little allure. I wanted to affect the real world, the realm of the everyday. I lied about my age when I first sought employment in the accounting department of Trianon. Émil Ménard was already heralded as a prophet among CEOs, a true visionary. A man who had forged a company out of disparate parts, where no one had previously seen any potential for connection. A man who realized that by assembling once segmented operations you could create an industrial power infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. To my eyes, as an analyst of capital, Trianon was a masterpiece—the Sistine Chapel of corporate design
.

Within a matter of months, word of my statistical prowess had reached the head of the department for which I worked, Monsieur Arteaux. He was an older gentleman, a man of few hobbies and a near total devotion to Ménard’s vision. Some of my co-workers found me cold, but not Monsieur Arteaux. With us, conversation flowed as if between two sports fans. We could discuss the relative advantages of internal capital markets or alternate measurements of equity risk premiums, and do so for hours. Matters that would stupefy most men, but which involved the architecture of capital itself—rationalizing the decisions of where to invest and reinvest, how risk was best to be apportioned. Arteaux, who was nearing retirement, put everything on the line by arranging for me to be introduced to the great man himself, catapulting me over endless
managerial layers. Ménard, amused by my obvious youth, asked me a few condescending questions. I replied with rather serious and rather provocative responses—in truth, responses that verged on rudeness. Arteaux himself was appalled. And Ménard was, so it seems, captivated. An unusual response, but it was, in capsule form, an explanation of his own greatness. He told me later that my combination of insolence and thoughtfulness reminded him of no one so much as himself. A magnificent egotist, he was, but it was an
earned
egotism. My own arrogance—for even as a child I was tagged with that attribute—was perhaps not unfounded, either. Humility was a fine thing for men of the cloth. But rationality decreed that one be sensible to one’s own capabilities. I had considerable expertise in the techniques of valuation. Why shouldn’t it logically extend to the valuation of oneself? My own father was, I believed, handicapped by a deferential manner; he esteemed his own gifts too little, and persuaded others to undervalue them in turn. That would not be my mistake
.