“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. Ultraright-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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “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 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 coworkers 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 rnen, 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.

  I became, in a matter of weeks, Ménard’s personal assistant. I accompanied him absolutely everywhere. No one knew whether I was an amanuensis or a counselor. And in truth I moved, smoothly, from playing the first role to playing the second. The great man treated me far more like an adopted son than a paid employee. I was his only protégé, the sole acolyte who seemed worthy of his example. I would make proposals, sometimes bold ones, occasionally proposals that reversed years of planning. I suggested, for example, that we sell off an oil-exploration division that his managers had spent years in developing. I suggested massive investments in still unproven technologies. Yet when he heeded my advice, he almost invariably found himself pleased by the results. L’ombre de Ménard—the shadow of Ménard—became my nickname in the early 1950s. And even as he fought the disease, the lymphoma, that would ultimately claim his life, he and Trianon came to rely increasingly upon my judgment. My ideas were bold, unheard of, seemingly mad—and soon widely mimicked. Ménard studied me as much as I studied him, with both detachment and genuine affection. We were men in whom such qualities enjoyed an easy coexistence.

  Yet for all the privileges he granted me, I had sensed, for a while, that there was one final sanctum to which I had not been granted entry. There were trips he made without explanation, corporate allocations I could not make sense of and about which he would brook no discussion. Then the day came when he decided that I would be inducted into a society I knew nothing about, an organization you know as Sigma.

  I was still Ménard’s wunderkind, still the corporate prodigy, still in my early twenties, and utterly unprepared for what I was to see at the first meeting I attended. It was at a château in rural Switzerland, a magnificent ancient castle situated on a vast and isolated tract of land owned by one of the principals. The security there was extraordinary: even the landscaping, the trees and shrubbery surrounding the property, was designed to permit the clandestine arrival and departure of various individuals. So on my first visit, I was in no position to see the others arrive. And no form of surveillance equipment could have survived the high-intensity blasts of high and low electromagnetic pulses, the latest technology in those days. All items made of metal were required to be deposited in containers made of dense osmium; otherwise, even a simple wristwatch would have been stopped dead by the pulses. Menard and I came there in the evening, and were escorted directly to our rooms, he to a magnificent suite overlooking a small glacial lake, I to an adjoining chamber, less grand but exceedingly comfortable.

  The meetings began the next morning. About what was said then, I actually remember little. Conversations continued from earlier ones of which I knew nothing—it was difficult for a newcomer to orient himself. But I knew the faces of the men around the table, and it was a genuinely surreal experience, something a fantasist might have tried to stage. Ménard was a man who had few peers, with respect to his own wealth, his corporate power, or his vision. But what peers he had were there in the room. The heads of two warring, mighty steel conglomerates. The head of America’s leading electrical equipment manufacturers. Heavy industry. Petrochemicals. Technology. The men responsible for the so-called American century. Their counterparts from Europe. The most famous press baron in the world. The chief executives of wildly diversified portfolio companies. Men who, in combination, wielded control over assets that exceeded the gross domestic product of most of the countries in the world put together.

  My worldview was shattered that day, then and forever.

  Children, in history classes, are taught the names, the faces of political and military leaders. Here is Winston Churchill, here is Dwight Eisenhower, here is Franco and De Gaulle, Atlee and Macmillan. These men did matter. But they were, really, little more than spokesmen. They were, in an exalted sense, press secretaries, employees. And Sigma made sure of it. The men who truly had their hands on the levers of power were sitting around that long mahogany table. They were the true marionette masters.

  As the hours passed, and we drank coffee and nibbled on pastries, I realized what I was witness to: a meeting of the board of directors of a massive single corporation that controlled all other corporations.

  A board of directors in charge of Western history itself!

  It was their attitude, their perspective, that stayed with me, far more than any actual words that were uttered. For these were professional managers who had no time for useless emotion or irrational sentiments. They believed in the development of productivity, in the promulgation of order, in the rational concentration of capital. They believed, in plain English, that history—the very destiny of the human race—was simply too important to repose in the hands of the masses. The upheavals of two world wars had taught them that. History had to be managed. Decisions had to be made by dispassionate professionals. And the chaos threatened by communism—the turmoil, the redistribution of wealth it augured, made their project a matter of genuine and immediate urgency. It was a present danger to be averted, not some utopian scheme.

  They assured each other of the need to create a planet where the true spirit of enterprise would ever be safe from the envy and avarice of the masses. After all, was a world purulent with communism and fascism a world any of us wished to bequeath to our children? Modern capital showed us the way—but the future of the industrial state had to be protected, sheltered from the storms. That was the vision. And though the origins of this vision lay in the global depression that preceded the war, the vision became infinitely more compelling in the wake of the destruction wreaked by the war itself.

  I said little that day, not because I was by nature taciturn, but because I was quite literally speechless. I was a pygmy amonggiants. I was a peasant supping with emperors. I was beside myself, and all the while it was the most I could do to maintain a look of dispassion, in emulation of my great mentor. Those were the first hours I spent in the company of Sigma, and my life would never be the same again. The daily fodder of the newspapers—a labor strike here, a party assembly there, an assassination somewhere else—was no longer a record of random events. Behind these events could now be discerned a pattern—the complex and intricate machinations of a complex and intricate machine.

  To be sure, the founders, the principals, profited immensely. Their corporations, in every instance, thrived, while so many others, not fortunate enough to be part of Sigma, perished. But the real motivation was their larger vision: the West had to be united against a common foe, or it would soften and succumb. And the hardening of its battlements had to proceed with discretion and prudence. Too aggressive, too quick a push could trigger a backlash. Reform had to be titrated. One division focused on assassinations, removing thoughtful voices from the left. Another forged-the word is appropriate—the sorts of extremist groups, the Baader-Meinhofs and Red Brigades, that would be guaranteed to antagonize any moderate sympathizers.

  The Western world, and much of the rest, would respond to its ministrations, and it would accept the cover stories that accompanied them. In Italy, we created a network of twenty thousand “civic committees,” channeling money to the Christian Democrats. The Marshall Plan itself, like so much else, was hammered out by Sigma—very often Sigma had devised the very language of the acts that would be submitted to, and passed by the American Congress! All of the European recovery programs, economic cooperation agencies, eventually even NATO itself became organs of Sigma, which remained invisible—because it was ubiquitous. Wheels within wheels—that was the way we worked. In every textbook, you find boilerplate about the reconstruction of Europe accompanied by a photograph of General Marshall. Yet every detail had been outlined by us, mandated by us, long before.

  It never crossed anyone’s mind that the West had fallen under the administration of a hidden consortium. The notion would be inconceivable. Because if true, it would mean that over half of the planet was effectively a subsidiary of a single megacorporation.

  Sigma.

  Over time, older moguls died and were replaced with younger proteges. Sigma persisted, metamorphosing where necessary. We weren’t ideologues. We were pragmatists. Sigma merely sought to remodel the whole of the modern world. To claim nothing less than the ownership of history itself.

  And Sigma succeeded.

  Trevor Griffiths squinted through the thermal imaging scope. The heavy room-darkening drapes were optically opaque, but to the thermal scope, they were a gauzy scrim. Human figures were hazy green forms, like blobs of mercury, visibly changing shape as they moved around pillars and objects of furniture. The seated figure would be his primary target. The others would move away from the windows, thinking themselves safe, and he would destroy them through the wall of brick itself. One bullet would clear the way; the second would destroy his target. The remaining shells would complete the job.

  “If what you’re saying is true …” Ben began.

  “Men lie, for the most part, in order to save face. You can see I no longer have such motivation.” The slit that was Chardin’s mouth pulled up at the sides, in what was either a grimace or a smile. “I warned you that you were ill-equipped to understand what I had to say. Perhaps, though, you may now understand the situation somewhat more clearly than before. A great many powerful men everywhere—even today—have reason to keep the truth buried. More so than ever, indeed. For Sigma has, over the past several years, been moving in a new direction. In part, it was the result of its own successes. Communism was no longer a threat—it seemed pointless to continue to pour billions into the orchestration of civil acts and political forces. Not when there might be a more efficient way of achieving Sigma’s objectives.”