The Prometheus Deception/ The Sigma Protocol

“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.”

“Sigma’s objectives,” Ben echoed.

“Which is to say, stability. Tamping down dissent, ‘disappearing’ troublemakers and threats to the industrial state. When Gorbachev proved troublesome, we arranged his ouster. When regimes in the Pacific Rim proved balky, we arranged for an abrupt, massive flight of foreign capital, plunging their economies into a recession. When Mexico’s leaders proved less than cooperative, we arranged for a change in government.”

“My God,” Ben said, his mouth dry. “Listen to what you’re saying …”

“Oh yes. A session would be convened, a decision rendered and, shortly thereafter, executed. We were good at it, frankly—we could play the governments of the world like a pipe organ. Nor did it hurt that Sigma came to own an immense portfolio of companies, its ownership stakes hidden through various private equity firms. But a small inner circle came to believe that, in a new era, the answer wasn’t merely to tack to the latest winds, cope with cyclical crises. It was to perpetuate a stable leadership for the long run. And so in recent years, one very special project of Sigma’s came to the fore. The prospect of its success would revolutionize the nature of world control. No longer would it be about the allocation of funds, the directing of resources. It became, instead, a simple matter of who the ‘chosen’ would be. And I fought this.”

“You had a falling out with Sigma,” Ben said. “You became a marked man. And yet you kept its secrets.”

“I say it again: if ever the truth were to get out, about how many of the major events of the postwar era were secretly manipulated, scripted by this cabal, the reaction would be violent. There would be riots in the streets.”

“Why the sudden escalation of activity—you’re describing something that has unfolded over a period of decades!” Ben said.

“Yes, but we are talking about days,” Chardin replied.

“And you know this?”

“You wonder that a recluse like me should keep abreast of what is going on? You learn how to read the entrails. You learn, if you want to survive. And then there is precious little else to occupy a shut-in’s hours. Years among their company have taught me to detect signals in what would sound to you like static, mere noise.” He gestured toward the side of his head. Even through the cowl, Ben could tell that the man’s external ear was completely absent, the auditory canal simply a hole within an outgrowth of proud flesh.

“And this explains the sudden flurry of killings?”

“It is as I explained: Sigma has, of late, been undergoing one final transformation. A change of management, if you will.”

“Which you resisted.”

“Long before most were attuned to it. Sigma always reserved the right to ‘sanction’ any members whose absolute loyalty came into question. In my arrogance, I did not realize that my exalted position conferred no protection. Quite the contrary. But the cleansing, the purging of the dissidents, only began in earnest in the last several weeks. Those who were perceived as hostile to the new direction—along with those who worked for us—were designated as disloyal. We were called the angeli rebelli: rebel angels. If you recall that the original angeli rebelli had revolted against God Almighty himself, you grasp the sense of power and entitlement of Sigma’s current overlords. Or, shall I say, overlord, since the consortium has come under the direction of one … redoubtable individual. In the event, Sigma has run out the clock, so to say.”

“What clock? Explain it to me,” Ben began. So many questions crowded his mind.

“We’re talking about days,” Chardin repeated. “If that. What fools you are, coming to me as if knowing the truth could help you anymore. Coming to me when there is no time! Surely it is already too late.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s why I had assumed you’d been sent, at first. They know that they are never more vulnerable than shortly before the final ascendancy. As I’ve told you, now is a time for final mop-ups, for sterilization and autoclaving, for eliminating any evidence that might point to them.”

“Again, I ask you, why now?”

Chardin took out the atomizer and misted his filmy gray eyes again. There came a sudden explosion, bone-jarringly loud, which propelled Chardin, in his chair, backward to the floor. Both Ben and Anna sprang at once to their feet and saw with terror the two-inch round hole that instantaneously appeared in the plaster wall opposite, as if somehow put there by a large-bore drill.

“Move!” Anna screamed.

Where had this projectile—it seemed far too big to be a mere gunshot—come from? Ben leaped to one side of the room as Anna jumped to the other, and then he whirled around to look at the splayed body of the legendary financier. Forcing himself to survey, once more, the horrible ravines and crevices of scar tissue, he noticed Chardin’s eyes had rolled back into his head, leaving only the whites visible.

A wisp of smoke arose from a charred segment of his cowl, and Ben realized that an immense bullet had passed through Chardin’s skull. The faceless man—the man whose will to survive had enabled him to endure years of indescribable agony—was dead.

What had happened? How? Ben knew only that if they didn’t seek cover immediately they would be killed next. But where could they move, how could they escape an assault when they didn’t know where it came from? He saw Anna race to the far side of the room, then swiftly lower herself to the floor, lying flat, and he did the same.

And then came a second explosion, and another round punched through the solid exterior wall and then through the plaster interior wall. Ben saw a circle of daylight in the brick wall, saw now that the shots had come from outside!

Whatever their assailant was firing, the rounds had penetrated the brick wall as if it were a bead curtain. The last round had come dangerously close to Anna.

Nowhere was safe.

“Oh, my God!” Anna shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

Ben whirled and looked out the window. In a glint of reflected sunlight, he caught the face of a man in a window directly across the narrow street.

The smooth, unlined skin, the high cheekbones.

The assassin at Lenz’s villa. The assassin at the auberge in Switzerland …

The assassin who had murdered Peter.

Stoked by a towering rage, Ben let out a loud shout, of warning, of disbelief, of anger. He and Anna simultaneously raced to the apartment’s exit. Another hole exploded, deafeningly, in the outside wall; Ben and Anna made a dash to the staircase. These missiles would not lodge in the flesh, nor sear skin; they would tear through the human body like a spear through a spider’s web. Clearly they were designed for use against armored tanks. The devastation they had done to the old building was incredible.

Ben ran after Anna, leaping and bounding down the dark stairs, as the volley of explosions continued, plaster and brick crumbling audibly behind them. Finally they staggered down to the small lobby. “This way!” whispered Anna, racing to an exit that would take them not to the rue des Vignoles but to a side street, making it far more difficult for the assassin to target them. Emerging from the building, they looked frantically about them.

Faces all around. At the corner of the rue des Orteaux, a blond woman, in denim and fake fur. At first glance, she looked like a hooker, or a junkie, but there was something about her that struck Ben as off. Again, it was a face he’d seen before. But where?

Suddenly he flashed back to the Bahnhofstrasse. An expensively dressed blonde, holding shopping bags from an upscale boutique. The flirtatious exchange of glances.

It was the same woman. A sentry for the Corporation? Across the street from her, a male adolescent in a ripped T-shirt and jeans: he, too, looked familiar, although Ben couldn’t place him. My God! Another one?

At the opposite end of the street stood a man with ruddy, weathered cheeks and wheat-field eyebrows.

Another familiar face.

Three Corporation killers placed strategically around them? Professionals intent on making sure they’d never escape?

“We’re boxed in,” he said to Anna. “At least one of them’s on either end of the street.” They froze in place, unsure how or where to move next.

Anna’s eyes searched the street, then she replied. “Listen, Ben. You said Chardin had chosen this district, this block, for good reason. We don’t know what contingency plans he had, what escape routes he’d mapped out in advance, but we know that he must have had something in mind. He was too smart not to have arranged for path redundancy.”

“Path redundancy?”

“Follow me.”

She ran straight toward the very apartment building where the assassin had taken up his seventh-floor perch. Ben saw where she was headed. “That’s insane!” he protested, but he followed nonetheless.

“No,” Anna replied. “The base of the building is one place he can’t reach.” The alleyway was dark and fetid, the scampering of rats evidence of the quantities of refuse that had been allowed to accumulate there. A locked metal gate blocked off its egress to the rue des Halles.

“Should we climb?” Ben looked doubtfully at the top of the gate whose sharp-pointed spearlike rods loomed twelve feet above them.

“You can,” Anna said, and unholstered a Glock. Three carefully aimed blasts, and the chain that locked the gate swung free. “The guy was using a .50 caliber rifle. There was a flood of them after Desert Storm. They were a hot commodity, because with the right ammunition they could put a hole right through an Iraqi tank. If you’ve got one of those monsters, a city like this might as well be made out of cardboard.”

“Shit. So what do we do?” Ben asked.

“Don’t get hit,” Anna replied tersely, and she began running, Ben close behind.

Sixty seconds later they found themselves on the rue de Bagnolet in front of La Flèche d’Or restaurant. Suddenly Ben darted across the street. “Stay with me.”

A heavyset man was just getting off a Vespa, one of those small motorized vélocipedes that had achieved nuisance status among French drivers.

“Monsieur,” Ben said. “J‘ai besoin de votre vélo. Pardonnez-moi, s’il vous plaît.”

The bear-like man gave him an incredulous look.

Ben pointed his gun at him and grabbed the keys. The owner stepped backward, cowering, as Ben leaped onto the small vehicle and revved the motor. “Get on,” Ben called out to Anna.

“You’re crazy,” she protested. “We’d be vulnerable to anyone in an automobile, once we get on the Périphérique. These things don’t go any faster than fifty miles an hour. It’s going to be a turkey shoot!”

“We’re not going on the Périphérique,” Ben said. “Or any other road. Climb on!”

Bewildered, Anna complied, taking the seat behind Ben on the motorbike.

Ben drove the Vespa around the La Flèche d’Or and then, joltingly, down a concrete embankment that led to old railroad tracks. The restaurant, Anna could now see, was actually built directly over the tracks.

Now Ben steered onto the rusted tracks. They drove through a tunnel, then back into an open stretch. The Vespa kicked up dust, but the passage of time had flattened the tracks here into the earth, and the ride became smooth and swifter.

“So what happens when we meet a train?” Anna shouted, grasping onto him tightly as they rolled over the tracks.

“There hasn’t been a train on these tracks for over half a century.”

“Aren’t we full of surprises.”

“The product of a misspent youth,” Ben shouted back. “I once messed around here as a teenager. We’re on a ghost railroad line known as the Petite Ceinture, the little belt. It runs all the way around the city. Phantom tracks. La Flèche d’Or is actually an old railroad station, built in the nineteenth century. Connected twenty stations in a loop around Paris—Neuilly, Porte Maillot, Clichy, Villette, Charonne, plenty more. The automobile killed it off, but nobody ever reclaimed the belt. Now it’s mostly a long stretch of nothing. I was thinking some more about why Chardin decided on this particular neighborhood, and then I remembered the phantom line. A useful piece of the past.”

They passed through another spacious tunnel, then back into the open air.

“Where are we now?” Anna asked.

“Hard to gauge, since you can’t see any of the landmarks from here,” Ben said. “But probably Ford d’Obervillier. Maybe Simplon. Way the hell away. Central Paris isn’t very big, of course. The whole thing is about forty square miles. If we can make our way into the métro and join a few hundred thousand Parisians there, we can begin to make our way to our next appointment.”

The Flann O’Brien—the bar’s name was displayed in coiled neon as well as painted in curlicued script in the window—was in the first arrondissement, on the rue Bailleul, near the Louvre-Rivoli stop. It was a dark, beery establishment, with lots of deeply grooved old wood and a dark wood floor that had soaked up sloshes of Guinness for years.

“We’re meeting him at an Irish bar?” Anna asked. Her head swiveled around by something like reflex, as she scanned their surroundings, alert to any sign of threat.

“Oscar has a sense of humor, what can I say?”

“And remind me why you’re so sure he can be trusted?”

Ben turned serious. “We’ve got to deal with probabilities, not possibilities, we’re agreed on that. And so far he’s been on the level. What makes Sigma a menace is the fact that it commands the loyalty of true believers. Oscar’s too damn greedy to be a believer. Our checks have always cleared. I think that counts with Oscar.”

“The honor of the cynic.”

Ben shrugged. “I’ve got to go with my gut. I like Oscar, always have. I think he likes me.”

The din in the Flann O’Brien, even at this hour, was overwhelming, and it took their eyes a while to adjust to the dim lighting.

Oscar was tucked away at a banquette toward the back, a diminutive gray-haired man behind an enormous tankard of viscous stout. Beside the tankard was a neatly folded newspaper, with a half-completed crossword puzzle. He had an amused expression on his face, as if he were about to wink—Anna soon realized that this was simply his habitual expression—and he greeted the two with a simple wave of the hand.

“I’ve been waiting for forty minutes,” he said. He grabbed Ben’s hand in an affectionate, wrestling clasp. “Forty billable minutes.” He seemed to be savoring the world as it rolled off his tongue.

“A bit of a holdup at our previous engagement,” Ben said tersely.

“I can imagine.” Oscar nodded at Anna. “Madame,” he said. “Please, sit.”

Ben and Anna slid onto the banquette on either side of the small Frenchman.

“Madame,” he said, turning his full attention to her. “You are even more beautiful than your photograph.”

“Sorry?” Anna replied, puzzled.

“A set of photographs of you was recently, wired to my colleagues in la Sûreté. Digital image files. I got a set of them myself. Came in handy.”

“For his work,” Ben explained.

“My artisans,” Oscar said. “So very good and so very expensive.” He tapped Ben on his forearm.

“I’d expect nothing less.”

“Of course, Ben, I can’t say your photograph does justice to you either. Those paparazzi, they never find the flattering angle, do they?”

Ben’s smile faded. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m very proud of myself for doing the Herald Tribune crossword puzzle. Not every Frenchman could do it, you’ll grant. I’ve almost finished this one. All I need now is a fifteen-letter word for an internationally wanted fugitive from justice.”

He turned the newspaper over.

“‘Benjamin Hartman’—would that do it?”

Ben looked at the front page of the Tribune and felt as if he had been plunged headfirst into ice water. SERIAL KILLER SOUGHT was the headline. Beside it was a low-resolution photograph of him, apparently taken from a surveillance camera. His face was shadowed, the image grainy, but it was unmistakably him.

“Who knew my friend was such a celebrity?” Oscar said, and turned the paper over again. He laughed loudly, and Ben belatedly joined him, realizing it was the only way one escaped notice in a bar filled with drink-fueled merriment.

From the next banquette over, he overheard a Frenchman trying to sing “Danny Boy,” with uncertain pitch and an only rough approximation of the vowels. Oh, Danny Boy, ze peeps ze peeps are caaalling.

“This is a problem,” Ben said, his urgent tone belying the soapy grin on his face. His eyes darted back to the newspapers. “This is an Eiffel Tower-sized problem.”

“You kill me,” Oscar said, slapping Ben on the back as if he had uttered a hilarious joke. “The only people who say there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” he said, “have never gotten bad publicity.” Then he tugged a package from beneath the cushion of his seat. “Take this,” he said.

It was a white plastic bag with gaudy lettering, from a tourist gift shop somewhere. I love Paris in the Springtime, it said, with a heart standing in for the word “love.” It had the kind of stiff plastic handles that snapped shut when pressed together.

“For us?” Anna asked doubtfully.

“No tourist should be without,” Oscar said. His eyes were playful; they were also intensely serious.

’Teez I’ll be here in sunshine or in shaadow.

Oh, Danny boy, I love you sooo.

The drunken Frenchman at the next banquette was now joined, in various keys, by his three companions.

Ben sank lower in his seat, as the full weight of his predicament bore upon him.

Oscar punched him in the arm; it looked jocular, but it stung. “Don’t slink down in your seat,” he whispered. “Don’t look furtive, don’t avoid eye contact, and don’t try to look inconspicuous. That’s about as effective as a movie star putting on sunglasses to shop at Fred Segal, tu comprends?”

“Oui,” Ben said weakly.

“Now,” Oscar said, “what’s that charming American expression you have? ‘Get the fuck out of here.’”

After acquiring a few items at some small side-street stalls, they returned to the métro, where they were just another couple of moony-eyed tourists to the casual spectator.

“We’ve got to make plans—plans for what the hell to do next,” Ben said.

“Next? I don’t see what choice we have,” Anna said. “Strasser’s the one surviving link we know about—a member of Sigma’s board of incorporators who’s still alive. We’ve got to reach him somehow.”

“Who says he’s still alive?”

“We can’t afford to assume otherwise.”

“You realize they’re going to be watching every airport, every terminal, every gate.”

“It’s occurred to me, yes,” Anna replied. “You’re beginning to think like a professional. A real fast learner.”

“I believe they call this the immersion method.”

On a long underground journey to one of the banlieues, the downtrodden areas that ringed Paris proper, the two conversed in low voices, making plans like lovebirds, or fugitives.

They got out at the stop at La Courneuve, an old-fashioned working-class neighborhood. It was only a few miles away, but a different world—a place of two-story houses and unpretentious shops that sold things to use, not to display. In the windows of the bistros and convenience stores, posters for Red Star, the second-division soccer team, were prominent. La Courneuve, due north of Paris, wasn’t far from Charles De Gaulle airport, but that was not where they’d be heading.

Ben pointed to a bright red Audi across the street. “How about that one?”

Anna shrugged. “I think we can find something less noticeable.” A few minutes later, they came across a blue Renault. The car had a light coating of grime, and on the floor inside there were yellow wrappers from fast-food meals, and a few cardboard coffee cups.

“I’ll put my money on the owner being home for the night,” Ben said. Anna set to work with her rocker pick, and a minute later had the car door unlocked. Disassembling the ignition cylinder on the steering column took a little more time, but soon the motor roared to life and the two took off down the street, driving at the legal speed limit.

Ten minutes later, they were on the Al highway, en route to the Lille-Lesquin airport in Nord-Pas de Calais. The trip would take hours, and involve risks, but they were calculated ones: auto theft was commonplace in La Courneuve, and the predictable police response would be to make perfunctory inquiries among the locals known to be involved in the activity. The matter would almost certainly not be referred to the Police Nationale, which patrolled the major thoroughfares.

They drove in silence for half an hour, lost in their own thoughts.

Finally, Anna spoke. “The whole thing Chardin talked about—it’s just impossible to absorb. Somebody tells you that everything you know about modern history is wrong, upside down. How can that be?” Her eyes remained fixed on the road in front of her, and she sounded as utterly drained as Ben felt.

“I don’t know, Anna. Things stopped making sense for me that day at the Bahnhofplatz.” Ben tried to stave off a profound sense of enervation. The rush of their successful escape had long since given way to a larger sense of dread, of terror.

“A few days ago, I was essentially conducting a homicide investigation, not examining the foundations of the modern age. Would you believe?”

Ben did not directly reply: what reply could there be? “The homicides,” he said. He felt a vague unease. “You said it started with Mailhot in Nova Scotia, the man who worked for Charles Highsmith, one of the Sigma founders. And then there was Marcel Prosperi, who was himself one of the principals. Rossignol, likewise.”

“Three points determine a plane,” Anna said. “High-school geometry.”

Something clicked in Ben’s mind. “Rossignol was alive when you flew off to see him, but dead by the time you arrived, right?”

“Right, but—”

“What’s the name of the man who gave you the assignment?”

She hesitated. “Alan Bartlett.”

“And when you’d located Rossignol, in Zurich, you told him, right?”

“First thing,” Anna said.

Ben’s mouth became dry. “Yes. Of course you did. That’s why he brought you in, in the first place.”

“What are you talking about?” She craned her neck and looked at him.

“Don’t you see? You were the cat’s-paw, Anna. He was using you.”

“Using me how?”

The sequence of events cascaded in Ben’s mind. “Think, dammit! It’s just the way you might prepare a bloodhound. Alan Bartlett first gives you the scent. He knows the way you work. He knew the next thing you’d demand …”

“He knew I’d ask him for the list,” Anna said, her voice hollow. “Is this possible? That damned show of reluctance on his part—a piece of theater for my benefit, knowing it would only steel my resolve? The same with the goddamn car in Halifax: maybe he knew a scare like that would make me that much keener.”

“And so you get a list of names. Names of people connected with Sigma. But not just any names: these are people who are in hiding. People whom Sigma cannot find—not without alerting them. Nobody connected with Sigma could possibly reach these people. Otherwise they would have been dead already.”

“Because …” Anna began slowly. “Because all of the victims were angeli rebelli. The apostates, the dissidents. People who could no longer be trusted.”

“And Chardin told us that Sigma was approaching a delicate transitional phase—a time of maximum vulnerability. It needed these people eliminated. But you could find somebody like Rossignol precisely because you were who you said you were. You really were trying to save his life. And your bona fides could be verified in meticulous detail. Yet you had been unknowingly programmed!”

“Which is why Bartlett gave me the assignment in the first place,” Anna said, her voice growing steadily louder, a realization dawning. “So that I would locate the remaining angeli rebelli.” She banged a hand on the dashboard.

“Whom Bartlett would then arrange to have killed. Because Bartlett is working for Sigma.” He hated himself for the pain that his words had to be causing her, but everything was now coming into sharp focus.

“And in effect so was I. Goddamn it to hell! So was I.”

“Unwittingly,” Ben emphasized. “As a pawn. And when you were becoming too hard to control, he tried to pull you off the case. They’d already found Rossignol, they didn’t need you anymore.”

“Christ!” Anna said.

“Of course, it’s no more than a theory,” Ben said, though he felt certain he was speaking the truth.

“A theory, yes. But it makes too much damned sense.”

Ben didn’t reply. The demand that reality make sense seemed now an outlandish luxury. Chardin’s words filled his mind, their meaning as hideous as the face of the man who spoke them. Wheels within wheels—that was the way we worked … organs of Sigma, which remained invisible … Every detail had been outlined 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 the planet was effectively a subsidiary of a single megacorporation. Sigma.

Another ten minutes of silence elapsed before Ben said flatly, “We’ve got to work out an itinerary.”

Anna studied the article in the Herald Tribune again. “‘The suspect is believed to have used the names Robert Simon and John Freedman in his travels.’ So those IDs are blown.”

How? Ben recalled Liesl’s explanation of how the credit accounts were kept current, how Peter had made the arrangements through her impeccably trustworthy second cousin. “Deschner,” Ben said tightly. “They must have gotten to him.” After a moment, he added, “I wonder why they didn’t release my real name. They’ve supplied aliases, but not the name ‘Benjamin Hartman.’”

“No, it’s the smart thing to do. Look, they knew you weren’t traveling under your real name. Bringing your true identity into it might have muddied the waters. You’d get your Deerfield English teacher opining that the Benny she knew would never do such a thing. Plus the Swiss have gunshot residue analysis that puts you in the clear—but it’s all filed under Benjamin Hartman. If you’re running a dragnet, it makes sense to keep it simple.”

Near the town of Croisilles, they saw a sign for a motel and pulled into a modern low-slung concrete building, a style Ben thought of as International Ugly.

“Just one night,” Ben said, and counted out several hundred francs.

“Passport?” the stone-faced clerk asked.

“They’re in our bags,” Ben said apologetically. “I’ll bring them down to you later.”

“Just one night?”

“If that,” Ben said, giving Anna a theatrically lascivious look. “We’ve been touring France on our honeymoon.”

Anna stepped over and put her head on Ben’s shoulder. “This is such a beautiful country,” she told the clerk. “And so sophisticated. I can’t get over it.”

“Your honeymoon,” the clerk repeated, and, for the first time, smiled.

“If you don’t mind, we’re in a hurry,” Ben said. “We’ve been driving for hours. We need a rest.” He winked.

The clerk handed him a key attached to a heavy rubberized weight. “Just at the end of the hall. Room 125. You need anything, just call.”

The room was sparsely furnished; the floor was covered with dull, mottled green carpeting and the brashly cherry-scented air freshener did not conceal the faint, unmistakable smell of mildew.

Once the door closed behind them, they emptied the plastic bag Oscar had given them on the bed, along with their other recent purchases. Anna picked up an EU passport. The photograph was of her, although digitally altered in various ways. Anna said her newly assigned name aloud a few times, trying to get accustomed to the unfamiliar sounds.

“I still don’t see how this is going to work,” Ben said.

“Like your Oscar said, they categorize you before they really look at you. It’s called profiling. If you don’t belong to the suspect genus, you get a free pass.” Anna took out a tube of lipstick and, looking into a mirror, applied it carefully. She wiped it off a few times before she was confident that she had done it correctly.

By then, Ben was already in the bathroom, his hair slick with syrupy, foamy hair dye, which gave off a tarry, ammoniac smell. The instructions said to wait twenty minutes before rinsing. It also cautioned against dyeing eyebrows, at the risk of blindness. Ben decided to take that risk. With a cotton swab, he applied the thick fluid to his brows, pressing a wad of tissue paper against his eyes to prevent it from dripping down.

The twenty minutes felt like two hours. Finally, he stepped into the shower, blasted himself with water, and opened his eyes only when he was certain the peroxide had all been washed down the drain.

He stepped out of the shower and looked at himself in the mirror. He was a plausible blond.

“Say hello to David Paine,” he said to Anna.

She shook her head. “The hair’s too long.” She held up the multi-cut electric clippers, chrome-clad except for the clear rubberized grip. “That’s what this baby is for.”

In another ten minutes, his curls were flushed away, and he was ready to put on the neatly creased U.S. Army fatigues that Oscar Peyaud had provided him. Blond, crew cut, he looked like an officer, consistent with the insignia, patches, and overseas service bars on his green uniform coat. U.S. Army officers wore identifying badges when traveling by air, he knew. It wasn’t an inconspicuous way to travel; but being conspicuous in the right way could amount to a life-saving distraction.

“Better make tracks,” Anna said. “The faster we can get out of this country, the safer we’ll be. Time’s on their side, not ours.”

Carrying their belongings with them, the two walked to the end of the hall and stepped out into the parking lot.

They tossed Anna’s garment bag in the backseat of the blue Renault, along with the white plastic sack that Oscar had given them. It contained the spent bottle of hair dye, and a few other pieces of garbage they didn’t want to leave behind. At this point, the smallest detail could give them away.

“As I said, we’re down to our last card, our last play,” Anna said, as they made their way back on the highway heading north. “Strasser was a founder. We’ve got to find him.”

“If he’s still alive.”

“Was there any indication either way in Sonnenfeld’s file?”

“I reread it this morning,” Ben said. “No, to be honest. And Sonnenfeld thought it was entirely possible that Strasser died, maybe even years ago.”

“Or maybe not.”

“Maybe not. You’re an incurable optimist. But what makes you think we’re not going to get arrested in Buenos Aires?”

“Hell, like you’ve said, there were notorious Nazis living there openly for decades. The local police are going to be the least of our troubles.”

“What about Interpol?”

“That’s what I was thinking—they might be able to help us locate Strasser.”

“Are you crazy? Talk about going into the lion’s den. They’re going to have your name on some watch list, aren’t they?”

“You obviously don’t know anything about the way the Interpol office is run down there. Nobody checks IDs. You are who you claim you are. Not the most sophisticated operation, let’s just say. You got a better idea?”

“Sonnenfeld said Gerhard Lenz’s widow may be alive,” Ben said broodingly. “Wouldn’t she be in a position to know?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“I’ll try to remember that,” Ben said. “You really think we’ve got a shot at getting out of this country undetected?”

“There aren’t going to be any transatlantic flights at this airport. But we can get to some of the European capitals. I suggest that we both travel separately. There’s a decent chance they’re looking for a man and a woman traveling together.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll go via Madrid; you take Amsterdam.”

They settled into another silence, less tense and more companionable. From time to time, Ben found his gaze drifted toward Anna. Despite all they had been through today, she was extravagantly beautiful. At one point, their glances met; Anna defused the faint awkwardness with a crooked grin.

“Sorry, I’m still trying to get used to your new Aryan officer look,” she said.

Some time later, Anna fished her cell phone out of her handbag and punched in a number.

David Denneen’s voice had the tinny, artificial clarity conferred by decrypted telephony. “Anna!” he said. “Everything O.K.?”

“David, listen. You’ve got to help me—you’re the only one I can trust.”

“I’m listening.”

“David, I need whatever you can get me on Josef Strasser. He was like Mengele’s smarter older brother.”

“I’ll do whatever I can,” Denneen replied, his voice tentative, baffled. “Of course. But where do you want the material sent?”

“BA.”

He understood the abbreviation for Buenos Aires. “But I can’t exactly send the file care of the embassy, can I?”

“How about care of the American Express office?” Anna gave him a name to use.

“Right. Low profile’s a good idea down there.”

“So I hear. How bad is it?”

“Great country, great people. But some long memories. Watch your back down there. Please, Anna. I’ll get right on to it.” And with that Denneen clicked off.

The main border-control security room of the aeroport Lille-Lesquin was a drab, windowless interior space, with low acoustic-tiled ceilings, a white projection screen at one end of the room. Color photographs of internationally sought criminals hung beneath a black-and-white sign that read DÉFENSE DE FUMER. Nine immigration and border-control officials sat on folding chairs of tube metal and beige plastic while their boss, Bruno Pagnol, the director of security, filled them in on the new advisories of the afternoon. Marc Sully was one of them, and he tried not to look as bored as he felt. He had no love for his job, but wasn’t eager to lose it, either.

Just in the past week, Pagnol reminded them, they had arrested seven young Turkish women arriving from Berlin with illicit cargo in their bellies: having been recruited as “mules,” they had swallowed condoms packed with China White. Finding the seven was partly a matter of luck, but credit had to go to Jean-Daniel Roux (Roux gave a slit-eyed nod when the boss singled him out, pleased but determined not to look it), who was alert enough to catch the first of them. The woman had looked visibly woozy to him; as they later learned, one of the knotted condoms in her colon had started to leak. In fact, the woman almost overdosed on the contraband. In the hospital, they’d retrieved fifteen small balls, double-wrapped in latex, tied off with fishing line, each containing several grams of extremely pure heroin.

“How’d they get it out of her?” one of the officers asked.

Marc Sully, sitting in the back, farted audibly. “Rear extraction,” he said.

The others laughed.

The red-faced director of airport security frowned. He saw nothing funny. “The courier nearly died. These are desperate women. They’ll do anything. How much money do you think she was paid? A thousand francs, nothing more, and she almost died for it. Now she’s facing a very long jail sentence. These women are like walking suitcases. Hiding drugs in their own shit. And it’s our job to keep that poison out of the country. You want your kids hooked on it? So some fat-ass Asian can get rich? They think they can promenade right past us. Are you going to teach them better?”

Marc Sully had been a member of the police aux frontières for four years, and sat through hundreds of briefings just like this one. Every year Pagnol’s face got a little redder, his collar a little tighter. Not that Sully was anyone to talk. He himself had always a little weight on him, wasn’t ashamed of it. Bit his nails to the quick, too, had given up trying to stop. The boss once told him he looked “sloppy,” but when Marc asked him how, he just shrugged. So nobody was going to put him on a recruitment poster.

Marc knew he wasn’t popular with some of his younger colleagues, the ones who bathed every single day, afraid of smelling like a human being instead of a walking bar of deodorant soap. They’d walk around with their quiffs of freshly shampooed hair, smiling nicely at the prettier female passengers, as if they were going to find dates on the job. Marc thought they were fools. It was a dead-end job. Giving strip searches might be a way to get a sniff, especially if you were into third-world cul, but you weren’t going to bring anybody home that way.

“Now two advisories fresh from la DCPAF.” The Direction centrale de la police aux frontière was the national bureau that gave them their orders. Pagnol pressed a few switches, and was able to project photographs directly from a computer. “Highest priority. This one’s an American. Mexican ancestry. She’s a professional. You find her, you be very careful. Treat her like a scorpion, right?”

Grunts of assent.

Sully squinted at the images. He wouldn’t mind giving her a taste of his baguette.

“And here’s another one,” the security director said. “White male in his mid-thirties. Curly brown hair, green or hazel eyes, approximately one and three-quarters meters in height. Possible serial killer. Another American, they think. Very dangerous. There’s reason to believe he’s been in the country today, and that he’ll be trying to make his way out. We’ll be posting photographs at your stations, but I want you to take a careful look right now. If it turns out that they left through Lille-Lesquin and that the people here let them slip through, it won’t just be my job on the line. Everybody understand?”

Sully nodded with everyone else. It annoyed Sully that Roux, that apple-cheeked hard-on, was still riding high for having lucked out with that Gastarbeiter whore. But who knew? Maybe it was Sully’s day to get lucky. He took another look at the photographs.

Ben dropped off Anna by an airport shuttle bus stop, and deposited the blue Renault at the long-term parking lot at the aéroport Lille-Lesquin. They’d enter the airport separately, and take different flights.

They agreed to meet in Buenos Aires within ten hours.

Assuming nothing went wrong.

Anna looked at the blond, crew-cut American officer, and felt confident that he’d elude detection. But despite her brave words to Ben, she felt no such confidence herself. Her hair was neither cut nor colored. It was combed out, and she had changed her garb, but otherwise she was entrusting her camouflage to something very small indeed. She felt a knot of fear in the pit of her stomach, and the fear fed on itself, for she knew nothing would betray her faster than the appearance of fear. She had to focus. Her usual hyperattentiveness to her surroundings could now be her undoing. Before she stepped into the terminal, she had to let every bit of fear and anxiety wash from her. She imagined herself traipsing through meadows filled with Bermuda grass and dandelions. She imagined holding hands with somebody constant and strong. It could be anybody—it was simply a mental exercise, as she was perfectly aware—but the person she kept imagining was Ben.

Sully kept a sharp eye out at the incoming passengers by his station, alert for signs of anxiety or agitation, for customers traveling with too few bags or too many, for customers who fit the description they’d received from DCPAF.

The man, third from the front of the line, caught his attention. He was the approximate height of the man they were looking for, had curly brown hair, and kept jingling the change in his pocket, a nervous tic. From his dress, he was almost certainly an American. Perhaps he had reason to be nervous.

He waited until the man showed his ticket and passport to the airline security officer, and then stepped forward.

“Just a few questions, sir,” Sully said, his eyes boring in on him.

“Yeah, all right,” the man said.

“Come with me,” Sully said, and drew him to a station post near the ticket counter. “So what took you to France?”

“Medical conference.”

“You’re a doctor?”

A sigh. “I work in sales for a pharmaceutical company.”

“You’re a drug dealer!” Sully smiled, though his eyes remained wary.

“In a matter of speaking,” the man replied wanly. He had a look on his face like he’d smelled something bad.

Americans and their obsession with hygiene. Sully scrutinized his face for a moment longer. The man had the same angular cast to his face, square chin, curly hair. But the features didn’t look quite right—they were too small. And Sully didn’t hear real stress in the man’s voice when he answered questions. Sully was wasting his time.

“O.K.,” he said. “Have a good trip.”

Sully went back to scrutinizing the check-in line. A blond-haired woman with swarthy skin caught his eye. The suspect could have dyed her hair; the other specifics matched. He drifted toward her.

“Could I see your passport, madame,” he said.

The woman looked at him blankly.

“Votre passeport, s’il vous plait, madame.”

“Bien sûr. Vous me croyez etre anglaise? Je suis italienne, mais tous mes amis pensent que je suis allemande ou anglaise ou n’importe quoi.”

According to her passport, she resided in Milan, and Sully thought it unlikely that an American could speak French with such an egregious Italian accent.

No one else on line just then looked terribly promising. A dot-head with two bawling children was ahead of the blond Italian. As far as Sully was concerned, her kind couldn’t leave the country fast enough. Chicken vindaloo was going to end up being the national dish at the rate the goddamn dot-heads were immigrating. The Muslims were worse, of course, but the dot-heads with their unpronounceable names were pretty awful. Last year, when he’d dislocated his arm, the Indian doctor at the clinic had flatly refused to give him a real painkiller. Like maybe he was supposed to do some fakir-style mind control. If his arm wasn’t half out of its socket, he would have punched the guy.

Sully glanced at the woman’s passport without interest and waved her and her sniveling brood through. The dot-head whore even smelled like saffron.

A young Russian with acne. Last name was German, so probably a Jew. Mafiya? Not his problem just now.

An honest-to-goodness Frenchman and his wife, off to a vacation.

Another goddamn dot-head in a sari. Gayatri was the name, and then something unpronounceable. Curry cul.

None of the other men fit the profile: too old, too fat, too young, too short.

Too bad. Maybe it wasn’t going to be his lucky day after all.

Anna settled into her coach-class seat, adjusting her sari and mentally repeating her name: Gayatri Chandragupta. It wouldn’t do to stumble over it if anyone were to ask. She was wearing her long black hair straight back, and when she’d caught a glimpse of her reflection in a window, she hardly recognized herself.