You asked what connects these men. In a real sense, we simply don’t
know.” He adjusted his cuffs, the nervous tick of a fastidious man.
“You might say we’re at the pocket-watch stage.”
“No offense, but the Sigma list that goes back half a century!”
“Ever been to the Somme, in France?” Bartlett asked abruptly, his eyes
a little too bright. “You ought to go just to look at the poppies
growing among the wheat. Every once in a while, a farmer in the Somme
cuts down an oak tree, sits down on the trunk, and then sickens and
dies. Do you know why? Because during the First World War, a battle
had taken place on that field, a canister of mustard gas deployed. The
poison gets absorbed by the tree as a sapling, and decades later it’s
still potent enough to kill a man.”
“And that’s Sigma, do you think?”
Bartlett’s gaze grew in intensity. “They say the more you know, the
more you know you don’t know. I find the more you know, the more
unsettling it is to come across things you don’t know about. Call it
vanity, or call it caution. I worry about what becomes of unseen little
saplings.” A wan smile. “The crooked timber of humanity it always
comes down to the crooked timber. Yes, I appreciate that all this
sounds like ancient history to you, and perhaps it is, Agent Navarro.
You’ll come back and set me straight.”
“I wonder,” she said.
“Now, you’ll be making contact with various law-enforcement officials,
and as far as anyone knows, you’ll be conducting a completely open
homicide investigation. Why the involvement of an OSI agent? Your
explanation will be terse: because these names have cropped up in the
course of an ongoing investigation into the fraudulent transfer of
funds, the details of which nobody will press you to disclose. A simple
cover, nothing elaborate required.”
“I’ll pursue the sort of investigation I’ve been trained to do,” Anna
said warily. “That’s all I can promise.”
“That’s all I’m asking for,” Bartlett replied smoothly. “Your
skepticism may be well founded. But one way or the other, I’d like to
be sure. Go to Nova Scotia. Assure me that Robert Mailhot really did
die of natural causes. Or confirm that he didn’t.”
CHAPTER FOUR.
Ben was driven to the headquarters of the Kantonspolizei, the police of
the canton of Zurich, a grimy yet elegant old stone building on
Zeughausstrasse. He was led in through an underground parking garage by
two silent young policemen and up several long flights of stairs into a
relatively modern building that adjoined the older one. The interior
looked like it belonged in a suburban American high school, circa 1975.
To any of his questions, his two escorts answered only with shrugs.
His thoughts raced. It was no accident that Cavanaugh was there on
Bahnhofstrasse. Cavanaugh had been in Zurich with the deliberate intent
to murder him. Somehow the body had disappeared, had been removed
swiftly and expertly, and the gun planted in his bag. It was clear that
others were involved with Cavanaugh, professionals. But who–and,
again, why?
Ben was taken first to a small fluorescent-lit room and seated in front
of a stainless-steel table. As his police escorts remained standing, a
man in a short white coat emerged and, without making eye contact, said,
“Ihre Hande, bitte.” Ben extended his hands. It was pointless to
argue, he knew. The technician pumped a mist from a plastic spray
bottle on both sides of his hands, then rubbed a cotton-tipped plastic
swab lightly but thoroughly over the back of his right hand. Then he
placed the swab in a plastic tube. He repeated the exercise for the
palm, and then did the same with Ben’s other hand. Four swabs now
reposed in four carefully labeled plastic tubes, and the technician took
them with him as he left the room.
A few minutes later, Ben arrived at a pleasant, sparely furnished office
on the third floor, where a broad-shouldered, stocky man in plainclothes
introduced himself as Thomas Schmid, a homicide detective. He had a
wide, pockmarked face and a very short haircut with short bangs. For
some reason Ben remembered a Swiss woman he’d once met at Gstaad telling
him that cops in Switzerland were called bull en “bulls,” and this man
demonstrated why.
Schmid began asking Ben a series of questions–name, date of birth,
passport number, hotel in Zurich, and so on. He sat at a computer
terminal, typing out the answers with one finger. A pair of reading
glasses hung from his neck.
Ben was angry, tired, and frustrated, his patience worn thin. It took
great effort to keep his tone light. “Detective,” he said, “am I under
arrest or not?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, this has been fun and all, but if you’re not going to arrest me,
I’d like to head on back to my hotel.”
“We would be happy to arrest you if you’d like,” the detective replied
blandly, the barest glint of menace in his smile. “We have a very nice
cell waiting for you. But if we can keep this friendly, it will all be
much simpler.”
“Aren’t I allowed to make a phone call?”
Schmid extended both hands, palms up, at the beige phone at the edge of
his crowded desk. “You may call the American consulate here, or your
attorney. As you wish.”
“Thank you,” Ben said, picking up the phone and glancing at his watch.
It was early afternoon in New York. Hartman Capital Management’s
in-house attorneys all practiced tax or securities law, so he decided to
call a friend who practiced international law.
Howie Rubin and he had been on the Deerfield ski racing team together
and had become close friends. Howie had come to Bedford several times
for Thanksgiving and, like all of Ben’s friends, had particularly taken
to Ben’s mother.
The attorney was at lunch, but Ben’s call was patched through to Howie’s
cell phone. Restaurant noise in the background made Howie’s end of the
conversation hard to make out.
“Christ, Ben,” Howie said, interrupting Ben’s summary. Someone next to
him was talking loudly. “All right, I’ll tell you what I tell all my
clients who get arrested while on ski vacations in Switzerland. Grin
and bear it. Don’t get all high and mighty. Don’t play the indignant
American. No one can grind you down with rules and regulations and
everything-by the-book like the Swiss.”
Ben glanced at Schmid, who was tapping at his keyboard and no doubt
listening. “I’m beginning to see that. So what am I supposed to do?”
“The way it works in Switzerland, they can hold you for up to twenty
four hours without actually arresting you.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“And if you piss them off, they can throw you in a dirty little holding
cell overnight. So don’t.”
“Then what do you recommend?”
“Hartman, you can charm a dog off a meat truck, buddy boy, so just be
your usual self. Any problems, call me and I’ll get on the phone and
threaten an international incident. One of my partners does a lot of
corporate espionage work, point being we’ve got access to some pretty
high-powered databases. I’ll pull Cavanaugh’s records, see what we can
find. Give me the phone number where you are right now.”
When Ben had hung up, Schmid led him into an adjoining room and sat him
at a desk near another terminal. “Have you been to Switzerland before?”
Schmid asked pleasantly, as if he were a tour guide.
“A number of times,” Ben said. “Mostly to ski.”
Schmid nodded distractedly. “A popular recreation. Very good for
relieving stress, I think. Very good for letting off tension.” His
gaze narrowed. “You must have a lot of stress from your work.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Stress can make people do remarkable things. Day after day they bottle
it up, and then, one day, boom! They explode. When this happens, they
surprise themselves, I think, as much as other people.”
“As I told you, the gun was planted. I never used it.” Ben was livid,
but he spoke as coolly as he could. It would do no good to provoke the
detective.
“And yet by your own account, you killed a man, bludgeoned him with your
bare hands. Is this something you do in your normal line of work?”
“These were hardly normal circumstances.”
“If I were to talk to your friends, Mr. Hartman, what would they tell
me about you? Would they say you had a temper?” He gave Ben an oddly
contemplative look. “Would they say you were … a violent man?”
“They’d tell you I’m as law abiding as they come,” Ben said. “Where are
you going with these questions?” Ben looked down at his own hands,
hands that had slammed a lamp fixture against Cavanaugh’s skull. Was he
violent? The detective’s imputations were preposterous he’d acted
purely in self-defense and yet his mind drifted back a few years.