The Sigma Protocol (53 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s why I had assumed you’d been sent, at first. They know that they are never more vulnerable than shortly before the final ascendancy. As I’ve told you, now is a time for final mop-ups, for sterilization and autoclaving, for eliminating any evidence that might point to them.”

“Again, I ask you,
why now?
”

Chardin took out the atomizer and misted his filmy gray eyes again. There came a sudden explosion, bone-jarringly loud, which propelled Chardin, in his chair, backward to the floor. Both Ben and Anna sprang at once to their feet and saw with terror the two-inch round hole that instantaneously appeared in the plaster wall opposite, as if somehow put there by a large-bore drill.

“
Move!
” Anna screamed.

Where had this projectile—it seemed far too big to be a mere gunshot—come from? Ben leaped to one side of
the room as Anna jumped to the other, and then he whirled around to look at the splayed body of the legendary financier. Forcing himself to survey, once more, the horrible ravines and crevices of scar tissue, he noticed Chardin’s eyes had rolled back into his head, leaving only the whites visible.

A wisp of smoke arose from a charred segment of his cowl, and Ben realized that an immense bullet had passed through Chardin’s skull. The faceless man—the man whose will to survive had enabled him to endure years of indescribable agony—was dead.

What had happened?
How?
Ben knew only that if they didn’t seek cover immediately they would be killed next. But where could they move, how could they escape an assault when they didn’t know where it came from? He saw Anna race to the far side of the room, then swiftly lower herself to the floor, lying flat, and he did the same.

And then came a second explosion, and another round punched through the solid exterior wall and then through the plaster interior wall. Ben saw a circle of daylight in the brick wall, saw now that the shots had come from outside!

Whatever their assailant was firing, the rounds had penetrated the brick wall as if it were a bead curtain. The last round had come dangerously close to Anna.

Nowhere was safe.

“Oh, my
God!
” Anna shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Ben whirled and looked out the window. In a glint of reflected sunlight, he caught the face of a man in a window directly across the narrow street.

The smooth, unlined skin, the high cheekbones
.

The assassin at Lenz’s villa. The assassin at the auberge in Switzerland…

The assassin who had murdered Peter
.

Stoked by a towering rage, Ben let out a loud shout, of warning, of disbelief, of anger. He and Anna simultaneously raced to the apartment’s exit. Another hole exploded, deafeningly, in the outside wall; Ben and Anna made a dash to the staircase. These missiles would not lodge in the flesh, nor sear skin; they would tear through the human body like a spear through a spider’s web. Clearly they were designed for use against armored tanks. The devastation they had done to the old building was incredible.

Ben ran after Anna, leaping and bounding down the dark stairs, as the volley of explosions continued, plaster and brick crumbling audibly behind them. Finally they staggered down to the small lobby. “This way!” whispered Anna, racing to an exit that would take them not to the rue des Vignoles but to a side street, making it far more difficult for the assassin to target them. Emerging from the building, they looked frantically about them.

Faces all around. At the corner of the rue des Orteaux, a blond woman, in denim and fake fur. At first glance, she looked like a hooker, or a junkie, but there was something about her that struck Ben as
off
. Again, it was a face he’d
seen
before. But where?

Suddenly he flashed back to the Bahnhofstrasse. An expensively dressed blonde, holding shopping bags from an upscale boutique. The flirtatious exchange of glances.

It was the same woman. A sentry for the Corporation? Across the street from her, a male adolescent in a ripped T-shirt and jeans: he, too, looked familiar, although Ben couldn’t place him. My God! Another one?

At the opposite end of the street stood a man with ruddy, weathered cheeks and wheat-field eyebrows.

Another familiar face
.

Three Corporation killers placed strategically around
them? Professionals intent on making sure they’d never escape?

“We’re boxed in,” he said to Anna. “At least one of them’s on either end of the street.” They froze in place, unsure how or where to move next.

Anna’s eyes searched the street, then she replied. “Listen, Ben. You said Chardin had chosen this district, this block, for good reason. We don’t know what contingency plans he had, what escape routes he’d mapped out in advance, but we know that he must have had something in mind. He was too smart
not
to have arranged for path redundancy.”

“Path redundancy?”

“Follow me.”

She ran straight toward the very apartment building where the assassin had taken up his seventh-floor perch. Ben saw where she was headed. “That’s insane!” he protested, but he followed nonetheless.

“No,” Anna replied. “The base of the building is one place he
can’t
reach.” The alleyway was dark and fetid, the scampering of rats evidence of the quantities of refuse that had been allowed to accumulate there. A locked metal gate blocked off its egress to the rue des Halles.

“Should we climb?” Ben looked doubtfully at the top of the gate whose sharp-pointed spearlike rods loomed twelve feet above them.

“
You
can,” Anna said, and unholstered a Glock. Three carefully aimed blasts, and the chain that locked the gate swung free. “The guy was using a.50 caliber rifle. There was a flood of them after Desert Storm. They were a hot commodity, because with the right ammunition they could put a hole right through an Iraqi tank. If you’ve got one of those monsters, a city like this might as well be made out of cardboard.”

“Shit. So what do we do?” Ben asked.

“Don’t get hit,” Anna replied tersely, and she began running, Ben close behind.

Sixty seconds later they found themselves on the rue de Bagnolet in front of La Flèche d’Or restaurant. Suddenly Ben darted across the street. “Stay with me.”

A heavy-set man was just getting off a Vespa, one of those small motorized
vélocipedes
that had achieved nuisance status among French drivers.

“
Monsieur
,” Ben said. “
J’ai besoin de votre vélo. Pardonnez-moi, s’il vous plaît
.”

The bear-like man gave him an incredulous look.

Ben pointed his gun at him and grabbed the keys. The owner stepped backward, cowering, as Ben leaped onto the small vehicle and revved the motor. “Get on,” Ben called out to Anna.

“You’re crazy,” she protested. “We’d be vulnerable to anyone in an automobile, once we get on the
Périphérique
. These things don’t go any faster than fifty miles an hour. It’s going to be a turkey shoot!”

“We’re not going on the
Périphérique
,” Ben said. “Or any other road. Climb
on
!”

Bewildered, Anna complied, taking the seat behind Ben on the motorbike.

Ben drove the Vespa around La Flèche d’Or and then, joltingly, down a concrete embankment that led to old railroad tracks. The restaurant, Anna could now see, was actually built directly over the tracks.

Now Ben steered onto the rusted tracks. They drove through a tunnel, then back into an open stretch. The Vespa kicked up dust, but the passage of time had flattened the tracks here into the earth, and the ride became smooth and swifter.

“So what happens when we meet a train?” Anna
shouted, grasping onto him tightly as they rolled over the tracks.

“There hasn’t been a train on these tracks for over half a century.”

“Aren’t we full of surprises.”

“The product of a misspent youth,” Ben shouted back. “I once messed around here as a teenager. We’re on a ghost railroad line known as the
Petite Ceinture
, the little belt. It runs all the way around the city. Phantom tracks. La Flèche d’Or is actually an old railroad station, built in the nineteenth century. Connected twenty stations in a loop around Paris—Neuilly, Porte Maillot, Clichy, Villette, Charonne, plenty more. The automobile killed it off, but nobody ever reclaimed the belt. Now it’s mostly a long stretch of nothing. I was thinking some more about why Chardin decided on this particular neighborhood, and then I remembered the phantom line. A useful piece of the past.”

They passed through another spacious tunnel, then back into the open air.

“Where are we now?” Anna asked.

“Hard to gauge, since you can’t see any of the landmarks from here,” Ben said. “But probably Ford d’Obervillier. Maybe Simplon. Way the hell away. Central Paris isn’t very big, of course. The whole thing is about forty square miles. If we can make our way into the métro and join a few hundred thousand Parisians there, we can begin to make our way to our next appointment.”

The Flann O’Brien—the bar’s name was displayed in coiled neon as well as painted in curlicued script in the window—was in the first arrondissement, on the rue Bailleul, near the Louvre-Rivoli stop. It was a dark, beery establishment, with lots of deeply grooved old
wood and a dark wood floor that had soaked up sloshes of Guinness for years.

“We’re meeting him at an Irish bar?” Anna asked. Her head swiveled around by something like reflex, as she scanned their surroundings, alert to any sign of threat.

“Oscar has a sense of humor, what can I say?”

“And remind me why you’re so sure he can be trusted?”

Ben turned serious. “We’ve got to deal with probabilities, not possibilities, we’re agreed on that. And so far he’s been on the level. What makes Sigma a menace is the fact that it commands the loyalty of true believers. Oscar’s too damn
greedy
to be a believer. Our checks have always cleared. I think that counts with Oscar.”

“The honor of the cynic.”

Ben shrugged. “I’ve got to go with my gut. I like Oscar, always have. I think he likes me.”

The din in the Flann O’Brien, even at this hour, was overwhelming, and it took their eyes a while to adjust to the dim lighting.

Oscar was tucked away at a banquette toward the back, a diminutive gray-haired man behind an enormous tankard of viscous stout. Beside the tankard was a neatly folded newspaper, with a half-completed crossword puzzle. He had an amused expression on his face, as if he were about to wink—Anna soon realized that this was simply his habitual expression—and he greeted the two with a simple wave of the hand.

“I’ve been waiting for forty minutes,” he said. He grabbed Ben’s hand in an affectionate, wrestling clasp. “Forty
billable
minutes.” He seemed to be savoring the world as it rolled off his tongue.

“A bit of a holdup at our previous engagement,” Ben said tersely.

“I can imagine.” Oscar nodded at Anna. “Madame,” he said. “Please, sit.”

Ben and Anna slid onto the banquette on either side of the small Frenchman.

“Madame,” he said, turning his full attention to her. “You are even more beautiful than your photograph.”

“Sorry?” Anna replied, puzzled.

“A set of photographs of you was recently wired to my colleagues in
la Sûreté
. Digital image files. I got a set of them myself. Came in handy.”

“For his work,” Ben explained.

“My
artisans
,” Oscar said. “So very good and so
very
expensive.” He tapped Ben on his forearm.

“I’d expect nothing less.”

“Of course, Ben, I can’t say your photograph does justice to you either. Those paparazzi, they never find the flattering angle, do they?”

Ben’s smile faded. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m very proud of myself for doing the
Herald Tribune
crossword puzzle. Not every Frenchman could do it, you’ll grant. I’ve almost finished this one. All I need now is a fifteen-letter word for an internationally wanted fugitive from justice.”

He turned the newspaper over.

“‘Benjamin Hartman’—would that do it?”

Ben looked at the front page of the
Tribune
and felt as if he had been plunged headfirst into ice water.
SERIAL KILLER SOUGHT
was the headline. Beside it was a low-resolution photograph of him, apparently taken from a surveillance camera. His face was shadowed, the image grainy, but it was unmistakably him.

“Who knew my friend was such a celebrity?” Oscar said, and turned the paper over again. He laughed loudly, and Ben belatedly joined him, realizing it was the only way one escaped notice in a bar filled with drink-fueled merriment.

From the next banquette over, he overheard a Frenchman trying to sing “Danny Boy,” with uncertain pitch and an only rough approximation of the vowels.
Oh, Danny Boy, ze peeps ze peeps are caaalling
.

“This is a problem,” Ben said, his urgent tone belying the soapy grin on his face. His eyes darted back to the newspapers. “This is an Eiffel Tower–sized problem.”

“You
kill
me,” Oscar said, slapping Ben on the back as if he had uttered a hilarious joke. “The only people who say there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” he said, “have never gotten bad publicity.” Then he tugged a package from beneath the cushion of his seat. “Take this,” he said.

It was a white plastic bag with gaudy lettering, from a tourist gift shop somewhere.
I love Paris in the Springtime
, it said, with a heart standing in for the word “love.” It had the kind of stiff plastic handles that snapped shut when pressed together.

“For us?” Anna asked doubtfully.

“No tourist should be without,” Oscar said. His eyes were playful; they were also intensely serious.

’
Teez I’ll be here in sunshine or in shaadow
.

Oh, Danny boy, I love you sooo
.

The drunken Frenchman at the next banquette was now joined, in various keys, by his three companions.