“You said it yourself: What life?” Ben took a step toward him, forcing
down his revulsion in order to maintain eye contact. “What have you
left to lose?”
“At last you speak truly,” Chardin said softly, and his naked eyes
seemed to swivel, peering penetratingly at Ben’s own eyes.
For a long moment he was silent. And then he began to talk, slowly,
mesmerizingly.
“The story begins before me. It will continue, no doubt, after me. But
its origins lie in the closing months of the Second World War, when a
consortium of some of the world’s most powerful industrialists gathered
in Zurich to determine the course of the postwar world.”
Ben flashed on the steely-eyed men in the old photograph.
“They were angry men,” Chardin went on, “who caught wind of what the
ailing Franklin Roosevelt was planning to do–let Stalin know he would
not stand in the way of a massive Soviet land grab. And, of course,
it’s what he did do before his death. In effect he was ceding half of
Europe to the Communists! It was the grossest betrayal! These business
leaders knew they would be unable to derail the disgraceful U.S.-Soviet
bargain at Yalta. And so they formed a corporation that would be a
beachhead, a means to channel vast sums of money into fighting
communism, strengthening the will of the West. The next world war had
begun.”
Ben looked at Anna, then stared off into space, hypnotized and
astonished by Chardin’s words.
“These leaders of capitalism accurately foresaw that the people of
Europe, embittered and sickened by fascism, would, in reaction, turn to
the left. The soil had been scorched by the Nazis, these industrialists
realized, and without the massive infusion of resources at key moments,
socialism would begin to take root, first in Europe, then throughout the
world. They saw their mission as preserving, fortifying, the industrial
state. Which meant, as well, muffling the voices of dissent. Do these
anxieties seem overstated? Not so. These industrialists knew how the
pendulum of history worked. And if a fascist regime was followed by a
socialist regime, Europe might be truly lost, as they saw it.
“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 cambinieri, 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 under
equipped 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 mid century 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 Lycee 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 Ecole Normale
Superieure 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. Emil Menard 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