Free The Sigma Protocol by Robert Ludlum

enrolled in the school, at least not in the decade you attended. And there have never been any Cavanaughs in Homer. Not anywhere in that county. Not at Georgetown, either. Oh, and we checked with all sorts of hifalutin databases, too. If there were a James Cavanaugh that came close to matching your description, we’d have foundhim. Tried every spelling variant, too. You have no idea how powerful the databases are they’ve got these days. A person leaves tracks like a slug, we all do. Credit, Social Security, military, you name it. This guy’s totally off the grid. Weird, huh?”
    “There’s got to be some mistake. I know he was enrolled at Princeton.”
    “You think you know that. Doesn’t seem possible, does it?”
    Ben felt sick to his stomach. “If this is true, it doesn’t help us.”
    “No,” Howie agreed. “But I’ll keep trying. Meantime, you got my cellular, right?”
    Ben replaced the receiver, stunned. Schmid continued: “Mr. Hartman, were you here on business or holiday?”
    He forced himself to focus, and spoke as civilly as he could. “Ski vacation, as I said. I had a couple of bank meetings, but only because I was passing through Zurich.” Jimmy Cavanaugh never existed .
    Schmid clasped his hands. “The last time you were in Switzerland was four years ago, yes? To claim the body of your brother?”
    Ben paused a moment, unable to stop the sudden flood of memories. The phone call in the middle of the night: never good news. He’d been asleep next to Karen, a fellow teacher, in his grubby apartment in East New York. He grumbled, rolled over to answer the call that changed everything .
    A small rented plane Peter was flying solo had crashed a few days earlier in a gorge near Lake Lucerne. Ben’s name was listed on the rental papers as next-of-kin. It had taken time to identify the deceased, but dental records made a definitive identification possible. The Swiss authorities were ruling it an accident. Ben flew to Lake Lucerne to claim the body and brought his brother home—what was left of him after the fuselage had exploded—in a little cardboard carton not much bigger than a cake box .
    The entire plane flight home he didn’t cry. That would only come later, when the numbness began to wear off. His father had collapsed, weeping, upon hearing the news; his mother, already confined to bed because of the cancer, had screamed with all of her strength .
    “Yes,” Ben said quietly. “That was the last time I was here.”
    “A striking fact. When you come to our country, death seems to accompany you.”
    “What are you getting at?”
    “Mr. Hartman,” Schmid said, in a more neutral tone of voice, “do you think there is any connection between your brother’s death and what happened today?”
    At the headquarters of the Swiss national police, the Stadtpolizei , in Bern, a plump middle-aged woman with heavy black horn-rimmed glasses glanced up at her computer screen and was surprised to see a line of text begin to flash. After staring at it for a few seconds, she remembered what she had long ago been instructed to do, and she jotted down the name and the long series of numbers after the name. Then she knocked at the glass-paned door of her immediate supervisor.
    “Sir,” she said. “A name on the RIPOL watch list was just activated.” RIPOL was an acronym for Recherche Informations Policier , the national criminal and police database that contained names, fingerprints, license plate numbers—a vast range of law-enforcement data used by the federal, canton, and local police.
    Her boss, a priggish man in his mid-forties who was known to be on the fast track at the Stadtpolizei , took the slip of paper, thanked his loyal secretary, and dismissed her. Once she had closed his office door, hepicked up a secure phone that was not routed through the main switchboard, and dialed a number he rarely ever called.
    A battered old gray sedan of indeterminate make idled down the block from