One year later

  Getting the morning paper was a ritual, her ritual. Not because she liked to read the news; she didn’t. That was Nicholas’s habit, his need to stay in touch with the developments in the world they had left behind. It was a habit she disapproved of, precisely because they had left the world behind, at least the world of violence and weapons and lies.

  But getting the paper from town was the way she liked to start the day. She would arise early and go for a swim—their bungalow was just up the bluff from one of the most beautiful, bluest, and most isolated beaches they had ever seen—and then she would ride her horse into the tiny collection of ramshackle huts that passed for a village here. Along with the groceries flown in from a nearby, larger island, the proprietor of the general store always received a small stack of newspapers from the U.S.; she always set aside one for the lovely woman with the lilting foreign accent who came riding in each morning.

  Then Elena would gallop back along the deserted beach, the mile and a half to their bungalow. By that time, Nicholas was usually sitting on the stone patio he had laid himself, drinking coffee and reading. After breakfast they would go for another swim. So passed their days. It was paradise.

  Even when the blood test administered by the island’s sole doctor confirmed what she’d been feeling for several days, that she was pregnant, Elena continued to ride, though more carefully. They were overjoyed, planning for the arrival of a son or a daughter, discussing for hours how their lives would change and yet not change, their love deepening by the day.

  Money was not a concern. The government had provided them a generous lump-sum settlement which, invested carefully, yielded more than enough to live on. Rarely did they discuss what had brought them here, why it was so important for them to escape, why they had to live here under new identities. It was understood between them: that was the past, a terribly painful episode, and the less said about it the better.

  The mini-DVD she had recorded from Manning’s surveillance system that night had provided them with all the protection they needed. Not because it afforded them the opportunity to blackmail, strictly speaking—but because the explosive secrets it contained were secrets everyone preferred to remain buried. It could only be destabilizing for the world to know how close it had come to a bloodless coup, a nonviolent takeover by a group of individuals who believed that governments were obsolete—yet were on the verge of creating a supranational security administration that would have made Stalin’s U.S.S.R. or Hitler’s Bundesrepublik seem lax.

  Most of those individuals had perished in the fire at Manning’s San Simeon, burned alive in a terrible end. Yet there were others who had aided and abetted those men and women; and so arrests were made. Quietly and discreetly, the reasons understood without being made explicit, deals were struck. Gregson Manning was believed to be in a special federal facility in North Carolina, serving time for unspecified violations of section 1435 of the National Security Act, said to involve economic espionage; he was rumored to be isolated from all contacts or means of communication. Powerful voices in the Senate called for a recall vote on the treaty, renouncing votes made in haste. Some blamed Richard Lanchester for manipulating the process. Without American backing, the treaty agreement fell apart. The truth never had to come out.

  So sixteen copies of the DVD were made; one was couriered to the White House, using a code that Bryson knew marked it for the President’s eyes only; a second went to the Attorney General of the United States. Others went to London, Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, and other world capitals. Heads of state had to know what had almost transpired, or else the virus would endure.

  Of the three copies that remained, one was deposited with a lawyer Bryson knew to be trustworthy above and beyond, another was sealed in a safe-deposit box, and a third went with them, hidden somewhere on the island, insulated and protected. They were insurance policies. Bryson and Elena hoped they’d never have to collect on them.

  This morning, about an hour after bringing the morning paper, Elena emerged from the perfect water to find Bryson absorbed in the newspaper, which rippled and crinkled in the wind.

  “Only when you finally give up that nasty habit will you finally be free,” she scolded him.

  “You make it sound like smoking.”

  “It’s almost as bad.”

  “And probably almost as hard to give up. But if I do, what excuse will you have for your morning ride?”

  She chuckled. “Milk? Eggs? I’ll think of something.”

  “Jesus.” He was leaning close over the paper.

  “What is it?”

  “Buried on page D-16. The business section.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It’s a tiny item—reads like nothing more than a rewritten press release from the Systematix Corporation in Seattle.”

  “But … but Manning’s in prison!”

  “He is. His company’s being run by certain of his deputies in the interim. This dispatch says that the National Security Agency has just acquired a fleet of low-orbit surveillance satellites manufactured by Systematix.”

  “They try to bury the news, but it’s really not very subtle, is it? Where are you going?”

  Bryson had got up from his beach chair and was bounding up the dune to their bungalow. She followed him up. The wind carried the sound to her, so that she knew he had the television on. Another terrible habit she wanted to break him of: he had rigged up a satellite dish so that he could watch the news, though he had promised to keep that to a minimum.

  Bryson was watching CNN, but was frustrated that there was no news, just some fashion segment. He turned toward her. “Ted Waller didn’t die in that fire, you know. I saw the forensic reports, everything out of the Seattle Medical Examiner’s office, and all the bodies were identified. Waller wasn’t among them.”

  “I know that. We’ve known that for a year. What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I see Waller’s hand in this. Wherever he went, wherever he disappeared to, he has to be involved in this. I’m certain of it.”

  “Trust your instincts, I always say,” came the voice from the television.

  Elena screamed, pointed at the television. Bryson whirled around. His heart was thudding rapidly. Ted Waller’s face filled the screen.

  “What is this?” Elena gasped. “Is this a show …?”

  “Call it reality TV,” said Waller.

  “We were assured we’d be left alone!” Bryson thundered. “However you managed this satellite-feed interruption, it’s a violation!” Bryson started pressing buttons on the remote, changing channels frantically. Waller’s face was on each one, staring out at them phlegmatically.

  “I still regret that we weren’t able to say good-bye properly,” Waller said from the TV screen. “I really do hope there’s no bad blood.”

  Speechless, Bryson scanned the small living room frantically. Microscopic surveillance devices could be planted absolutely anywhere and everywhere, undetectable …

  “I’ll be in touch when the time is right, Nicky. Now may be premature.” Waller looked off into the distance as if about to add something, and a hint of a smile came to his lips. “Well, I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Not if I see you first, Ted,” Bryson said acidly, and now he settled back in his chair. “We have a great deal of evidence in safekeeping, evidence we won’t hesitate to release.”

  On the screen, Waller’s gaze turned wary.

  “Remember, Ted—it’s what you don’t see that always gets you.”

  Abruptly, Waller’s image disappeared, replaced by a game show.

  A move had been made. And countered. Bryson felt fury, outrage at the violation—and yet, after so many years in the service of the great game, oddly stirred as well. If Elena caught a glimpse of this, she kept it to herself. She still went for her early-morning rides, and they still spent much of the day outdoors, either on the shimmering white beach or on their wooden deck, surrounded by bougainvillea and shaded by young palm trees that undulated gently in the breeze.

  Bryson had made a complete break from his past life, while he and Elena prepared to nurture the new life that was on its way. In the sun, his scars faded, and there were days when—the air fragrant with frangipani and lime and salt water—the dull ache from his old wounds grew imperceptible, like memories just out of reach. At moments, he almost thought he had left the world behind.

  Almost.

  THE SIGMA PROTOCOL

  CHAPTER ONE

  Zurich

  “May I get you something to drink while you wait?”

  The Hotelpage was a compact man who spoke English with only a trace of an accent. His brass nameplate gleamed against his loden-green uniform.

  “No, thank you,” Ben Hartman said, smiling wanly.

  “Are you sure? Perhaps some tea? Coffee? Mineral water?” The bellhop peered up at him with the bright-eyed eagerness of someone who has only a few minutes left to enhance his parting tip. “I’m terribly sorry your car is delayed.”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  Ben stood in the lobby of the Hotel St. Gotthard, an elegant nineteenth-century establishment that specialized in catering to the well-heeled international businessman—and, face it, that’s me, Ben thought sardonically. Now that he had checked out, he wondered idly whether he could tip the bellhop not to carry his bags, not to follow his every move a few feet behind, like a Bengali bride, not to offer unceasing apologies for the fact that the car that was to take Ben to the airport had not yet arrived. Luxury hotels the world over prided themselves on such coddling, but Ben, who traveled quite a bit, inevitably found it intrusive, deeply irritating. He’d spent so much time trying to break out of the cocoon, hadn’t he? But the cocoon—the stale rituals of privilege—had won out in the end. The Hotelpage had his number, all right: just another rich, spoiled American.

  Ben Hartman was thirty-six, but today he felt much older. It wasn’t just the jet lag, though he had arrived from New York yesterday and still felt that sense of dislocation. It was something about being in Switzerland again: in happier days, he’d spent a lot of time here, skiing too fast, driving too fast, feeling like a wild spirit among its stone-faced, rule-bound burghers. He wished he could regain that spirit, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t been to Switzerland since his brother, Peter—his identical twin, his closest friend in all the world—had been killed here four years ago. Ben had expected the trip to stir up memories, but nothing like this. Now he realized what a mistake he’d made coming back here. From the moment he’d arrived at Kloten Airport, he’d been distracted, swollen with emotion—anger, grief, loneliness.

  But he knew better than to let it show. He’d done a little business yesterday afternoon, and this morning had a cordial meeting with Dr. Rolf Grendelmeier of the Union Bank of Switzerland. Pointless, of course, but you had to keep the clients happy; glad-handing was part of the job. If he was honest with himself, it was the job, and Ben sometimes felt a pang at how easily he slipped into the role, that of the legendary Max Hartman’s only surviving son, the heir presumptive to the family fortune, and to the CEO’s office at Hartman Capital Management, the multibillion-dollar firm founded by his father.

  Now Ben possessed the whole trick bag of international finance—the closet full of Brioni and Kiton suits, the easy smile, the firm handshake, and, most of all, the gaze: steady, level, concerned. It was a gaze that conveyed responsibility, dependability, and sagacity, and that, often as not, concealed desperate boredom.

  Still, he hadn’t really come to Switzerland to do business. At Kloten, a small plane would take him to St. Moritz for a ski vacation with an extremely wealthy, elderly client, the old man’s wife, and his allegedly beautiful granddaughter. The client’s arm-twisting was jovial but persistent. Ben was being fixed up, and he knew it. This was one of the hazards of being a presentable, well-off, “eligible” single man in Manhattan: his clients were forever trying to set him up with their daughters, their nieces, their cousins. It was hard to say no politely. And once in a while he actually met a woman whose company he enjoyed. You never knew. Anyway, Max wanted grandchildren.

  Max Hartman, the philanthropist and holy terror, the founder of Hartman Capital Management. The self-made immigrant who’d arrived in America, a refugee from Nazi Germany, with the proverbial ten bucks in his pocket, had founded an investment company right after the war, and relentlessly built it up into the multibillion-dollar firm it was now. Old Max, in his eighties and living in solitary splendor in Bedford, New York, still ran the company and made sure no one ever forgot it.

  It wasn’t easy working for your father, but it was even harder when you had precious little interest in investment banking, in “asset allocation” and “risk management,” and in all the other mind-numbing buzzwords.

  Or when you had just about zero interest in money. Which was, he realized, a luxury enjoyed mainly by those who had too much of it. Like the Hartmans, with their trust funds and private schools and the immense Westchester County estate. Not to mention the twenty-thousand-acre spread near the Greenbriar, and all the rest of it.

  Until Peter’s plane fell out of the sky, Ben had been able to do what he really loved: teaching, especially teaching kids whom most people had given up on. He’d taught fifth grade in a tough school in an area of Brooklyn known as East New York. A lot of the kids were trouble, and yes, there were gangs and sullen ten-year-olds as well armed as Colombian drug lords. But they needed a teacher who actually gave a damn about them. Ben did give a damn, and every once in a while he actually made a difference to somebody’s life.

  When Peter died, however, Ben had been all but forced to join the family business. He’d told friends it was a deathbed promise exacted by his mother, and he supposed it was. But cancer or no cancer, he could never refuse her anyway. He remembered her drawn face, the skin ashen from another bout of chemotherapy, the reddish smudges beneath her eyes like bruises. She’d been almost twenty years younger than Dad, and he had never imagined that she might be the first to go. Work, for the night cometh, she’d said, smiling bravely. Most of the rest she left unspoken. Max had survived Dachau only to lose a son, and now he was about to lose his wife. How much could any man, however powerful, stand?

  “Has he lost you, too?” she had whispered. At the time, Ben was living a few blocks from the school, in a sixth-floor walk-up in a decrepit tenement building where the corridors stank of cat urine and the linoleum curled up from the floors. As a matter of principle, he refused to accept any money from his parents.

  “Do you hear what I’m asking you, Ben?”

  “My kids,” Ben had said, though there was already defeat in his voice. “They need me.”

  “He needs you,” she’d replied, very quietly, and that was the end of the discussion.

  So now he took the big private clients out to lunch, made them feel important and well cared for and flattered to be cosseted by the founder’s son. A little furtive volunteer work at a center for “troubled kids” who made his fifth-graders look like altar boys. And as much time as he could grab traveling, skiing, parasailing, snowboarding, or rock-climbing, and going out with a series of women while fastidiously avoiding settling down with any of them.

  Old Max would have to wait.

  Suddenly the St. Gotthard lobby, all rose damask and heavy dark Viennese furniture, felt oppressive. “You know, I think I’d prefer to wait outside,” Ben told the Hotelpage. The man in the loden-green uniform simpered, “Of course, sir, whatever you prefer.”

  Ben stepped blinking into the bright noontime sun, and took in the pedestrian traffic on the Bahnhofstrasse, the stately avenue lined with linden trees, expensive shops, and cafés, and a procession of financial institutions housed in small limestone mansions. The bellhop scurried behind him with his baggage, hovering until Ben disbursed a fifty-franc note and gestured for him to leave.

  “Ah, thank you so much, sir,” the Hotelpage exclaimed with feigned surprise.

  The doormen would let him know when his car appeared in the cobbled drive to the left of the hotel, but Ben was in no hurry. The breeze from Lake Zurich was refreshing, after time spent in stuffy, overheated rooms where the air was always suffused with the smell of coffee and, fainter but unmistakable, cigar smoke.

  Ben propped his brand-new skis, Volant Ti Supers, against one of the hotel’s Corinthian pillars, near his other bags, and watched the busy street scene, the spectacle of anonymous passersby. An obnoxious young businessman braying into a cell phone. An obese woman in a red parka pushing a baby carriage. A crowd of Japanese tourists chattering excitedly. A tall middle-aged man in a business suit with his graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. A deliveryman with a box of lilies, attired in the distinctive orange and black uniform of Blümchengallerie, the upscale flower chain. And a striking, expensively dressed young blonde, clutching a Festiner’s shopping bag, who glanced generally in Ben’s direction, and then glanced at him again—quickly, but with a flicker of interest before averting her eyes. Had we but world enough and time, thought Ben. His gaze wandered again. The sounds of traffic were continuous but muted, drifting in from the Löwenstrasse, a few hundred feet away. Somewhere nearby a high-strung dog was yipping. A middle-aged man wearing a blazer with an odd purple hue, a tad too stylish for Zurich. And then he saw a man about his age, walking with a purposeful stride past the Koss Konditerei. He looked vaguely familiar—

  Very familiar.

  Ben did a double-take, peered more closely. Was that—could that really be—his old college buddy Jimmy Cavanaugh? A quizzical smile spread over Ben’s face.

  Jimmy Cavanaugh, whom he’d known since his sophomore year at Princeton. Jimmy, who’d glamorously lived off-campus, smoked unfiltered cigarettes that would have choked an ordinary mortal, and could drink anybody under the table, even Ben, who had something of a reputation in that regard. Jimmy had come from a small town in western upstate New York called Homer, which supplied him with a storehouse of tales. One night, after he taught Ben the finer points of downing Tequila shots with beer chasers, Jimmy had him gasping for breath with his stories about the town sport of “cow tipping.” Jimmy was rangy, sly, and worldly, had an immense repertory of pranks, a quick wit, and the gift of gab. Most of all, he just seemed more alive than most of the kids Ben knew: the clammy-palmed preprofessionals trading tips about the entrance exams for law school or B-school, the pretentious French majors with their clove cigarettes and black scarves, the sullen burn-out cases for whom rebellion was found in a bottle of green hair dye. Jimmy seemed to stand apart from all that, and Ben, envying him his simple ease with himself, was pleased, even flattered by the friendship. As so often happens, they’d lost touch after college; Jimmy had gone off to do something at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and Ben had stayed in New York. Neither of them was big on college nostalgia, and then distance and time had done their usual job. Still, Ben reflected, Jimmy Cavanaugh was probably one of the few people he actually felt like talking to just now.