The Sigma Protocol by Robert Ludlum Read Free Book Online Page A

following. Am I supposed to contact these men?”
    “Not unless you’ve got a Ouija board. All eleven of these men are deceased. All passed from this vale of tears within the past two months. Several, you’ll see, in the United States, others in Switzerland, in England, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Greece… All apparently of natural causes.”
    Anna glanced at the sheet. Of the eleven, there were two names she recognized—one a member of the Lancaster family, a family that once owned most of the steel mills in the country, but was now better known for its foundation grants and other forms of philanthropy. Philip Lancaster was, in fact, somebody she’d assumed had died long ago. The other, Nico Xenakis, was presumably from the Greek shipping family. To be honest, she knew the name mainly in connection to another scion of the family—a man who had made a tabloid name for himself as a roué back in the sixties, when he’d dated a series of Hollywood starlets. None of theother names rang any bells. Looking at their dates of birth, she saw that all of them were old men—in their late seventies to late eighties.
    “Maybe the news hasn’t reached the ICU whiz kids,” she said, “but when you’ve had your three score and ten…well, no one gets out alive.”
    “In none of these cases is exhumation possible, I’m afraid,” Bartlett continued implacably. “Perhaps it’s as you say. Old men doing what old men will do. In those instances, we cannot prove otherwise. But in the last few days, we’ve had a stroke of luck. In a pro forma way, we put a roster of names on the ‘sentinel list’—one of those international conventions that nobody seems to take any notice of. The most recent death was of a retiree in Nova Scotia, Canada. Our Canadian friends are sticklers about procedures, and that’s how the alarm was sounded in time. In this instance, we have a body to work with. More precisely, you do.”
    “You’re leaving something out, of course. What is it that connects these men?”
    “To every question, there’s a surface answer and a deeper one. I’ll give you the surface answer, because it’s the only one I have. A few years ago, an internal audit was conducted of the CIA’s deep-storage records. Was a tip received? Let’s say it was. These were non-operational files, mind you. They weren’t agents or direct contacts. They were, in fact, clearance files. Each was marked ‘Sigma,’ presumably a reference to a codeword operation—of which there seems to be no trace in the Agency’s records. We have no information as to its nature.”
    “Clearance files?” Anna repeated.
    “Meaning that some time long ago each man had been vetted and cleared—for something, we don’t know what.”
    “And the source of origin was a CIA archivist.”
    He didn’t reply directly. “Each file has been authenticated by our top forensic document experts. They’re old, these files. They date as far back as the mid-forties, before there even was a CIA.”
    “You’re saying they were started by OSS?”
    “Exactly,” Bartlett said. “The CIA’s precursor. Many of the files were opened right around the time the war was ending, the Cold War beginning. The latest ones date from the mid-fifties. But I digress. As I say, we have this curious pattern of deaths. Of course, it would have gone nowhere, a question mark in a field full of question marks, except that we began to see a pattern, cross-checked and correlated with the Sigma files. I don’t believe in coincidences, do you, Ms. Navarro? Eleven of the men named in these files have died in a very short interval. The actuarial odds of this happening by chance are… remote at best.”
    Anna nodded impatiently. As far as she could see, the Ghost was seeing ghosts. “How long is this assignment for? I’ve got a real job, you know.”
    “This is your ‘real’ job now. You’ve already been reassigned. We’ve made the arrangements. You understand your task, then?” His