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 come th 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, para sailing 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 cafes, 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
Blumchengallerie, the upscale flower chain. And a striking,