Free The Sigma Protocol by Robert Ludlum Page A

Kantonspolizei headquarters on Zeughausstrasse. Inside, two men smoked and said nothing, weary from the long wait. The sudden ringing of the cellular phone mounted on the center console startled them. The passenger picked it up, listened, said, “ Ja, danke ,” and hung up.
    “The American is leaving the building,” he said.
    A few minutes later they saw the American emerge from the side entrance and get into a taxi. When it was halfway down the block, the driver pulled the car into the early-evening traffic.

Chapter Five
    Halifax, Nova Scotia
    When the Air Canada pilot announced they were about to land, Anna Navarro removed her files from the tray table, lifted it closed, and tried to focus her mind on the case ahead of her. Flying terrified her, and the only thing worse than landing was taking off. Her stomach flip-flopped. As usual she fought an irrational conviction that the plane would crash and she would end her life in a fiery inferno.
    Her favorite uncle, Manuel, had been killed when the clattering old cropduster he worked in dropped an engine and plummeted. But that was so long ago, she’d been ten or eleven, and a deathtrap cropduster had no resemblance to the sleek 747 she was in now.
    She’d never told any of her OSI colleagues about her anxiety, on the general principle that you should never let them see your vulnerabilities. But she was convinced that somehow Arliss Dupree knew, the way a dog smells fear. In the last six months he’d forced her to practically live on planes, flying from one lousy assignment to another.
    The only thing that allowed her to keep her composure was to spend the flight immersed in her case files. They always absorbed her, fascinated her. The dry-as-dust autopsy and pathology reports beckoned to her to solve their mysteries.
    As a child she’d loved doing the intricate five-hundred-piece puzzles her mother brought home, the gifts from a woman whose house her mother cleaned and whose kids had no patience for puzzles. Far more than seeing the glossy image emerge, she loved the sound and feel of the puzzle pieces snapping into place. Often the old puzzles were missing pieces, lost by their careless original owners, and that had always irritated her. Even as a kid she’d been a perfectionist.
    On some level, this case was a thousand-piece puzzle spilled on the carpet before her.
    During this Washington-Halifax flight she had pored over a folder of documents faxed from the RCMP in Ottawa. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada’s equivalent of the FBI, was, despite its archaic name, a top-notch investigative agency. The working relationship between DOJ and RCMP was good.
    Who are you? she wondered, staring at a photograph of the old man. Robert Mailhot of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the kindly retiree, devout member of the Church of Our Lady of Mercy. Not the sort of person you’d expect to have a CIA clearance file, deep-storage or no.
    What could have connected him to the vaporous machinations of long-dead spymasters and businessmen that Bartlett had stumbled on? She was certain that Bartlett had a file on him, but had chosen not to give her access to it. She was certain, too, that he wanted her to find out the relevant details for herself.
    A provincial judge in Nova Scotia agreed to issue a search warrant. The documents she wanted—telephone and credit-card records—had been faxed to her in D.C. in a matter of hours. She was OSI; nobody thought to question her vague cover story about an ongoing investigation into fraudulent international transfer of funds.
    Still, the file told her nothing. The cause of death,recorded on the certificate in the crabbed and almost illegible handwriting of a physician, presumably the old man’s doctor, was “natural causes,” with “coronary thrombosis” added in brackets. And maybe it was only that.
    The deceased had made no unusual purchases; his only long-distance calls were to Newfoundland and Toronto. So far, no traction. Maybe she’d