Read Online The Sigma Protocol by Robert Ludlum - Free Book Online

are right now.”
    When Ben had hung up, Schmid led him into an adjoining room and sat him at a desk near another terminal. “Have you been to Switzerland before?” Schmid asked pleasantly, as if he were a tour guide.
    “A number of times,” Ben said. “Mostly to ski.”
    Schmid nodded distractedly. “A popular recreation. Very good for relieving stress, I think. Very good for letting off tension.” His gaze narrowed. “You must have a lot of stress from your work.”
    “I wouldn’t say that.”
    “Stress can make people do remarkable things. Day after day they bottle it up, and then, one day, boom! They explode. When this happens, they surprise themselves, I think, as much as other people.”
    “As I told you, the gun was planted. I never used it.” Ben was livid, but he spoke as coolly as he could. It would do no good to provoke the detective.
    “And yet by your own account, you killed a man, bludgeoned him with your bare hands. Is this something you do in your normal line of work?”
    “These were hardly normal circumstances.”
    “If I were to talk to your friends, Mr. Hartman, what would they tell me about you? Would they say you had a temper?” He gave Ben an oddly contemplative look. “Would they say you were… a violent man?”
    “They’d tell you I’m as law abiding as they come,” Ben said. “Where are you going with these questions?” Ben looked down at his own hands, hands that had slammed a lamp fixture against Cavanaugh’s skull. Was he violent? The detective’s imputations were preposterous—he’d acted purely in self-defense—and yet his mind drifted back a few years.
    He could see Darnell’s face even now. One of his fifth-graders at East New York, Darnell had been a goodkid, an A student, bright and curious, the best in his class. Then something happened to him. His grades dropped, and before long he stopped handing in homework altogether. Darnell never got in fights with the other kids, and yet from time to time welts would be visible on his face. Ben talked to him after class one day. Darnell couldn’t look him in the eye. His expression was cloudy with fear. Finally he told him that Orlando, his mother’s new boyfriend, didn’t want him to waste time on schoolwork; he needed him to help bring in money. “Bring in money how?” Ben had asked, but Darnell wouldn’t answer. When he telephoned Darnell’s mother, Joyce Stuart, her responses were skittish, evasive. She wouldn’t come into the school, refused to discuss the situation, refused to admit anything might be wrong. She, too, sounded scared. A few days later, he found Darnell’s address from student records and paid a visit.
    Darnell lived on the second floor of a building with a ruined facade, a stairwell festooned with graffiti. The buzzer was broken, but the apartment door was unlocked, and so he traipsed up the stairs and knocked on 2B. After a long wait, Darnell’s mother appeared, visibly battered—her cheeks bruised, her lips swollen. He introduced himself and asked to come in. Joyce paused, then led him toward the small kitchen, with its deeply gouged countertops of beige Formica and yellow cotton drapes flapping in the breeze.
    Ben heard yelling in the background before the mother’s boyfriend strode over. “Who the fuck are you?” demanded Orlando, a tall, powerfully built man in a red tank top and loose jeans. Ben recognized a convict’s physique: an upper body so overdeveloped that the muscles looked draped over his chest and shoulders like a lifejacket.
    “He’s Darnell’s schoolteacher,” Darnell’s mother said, the words cottony from her bruised lips.
    “And you—are you Darnell’s guardian?” Ben asked Orlando.
    “Hell, you could say I’m his teacher now. Only, I’m teaching him shit he needs to know. Unlike you.”
    Now Ben saw Darnell, fear making him look even younger than his ten years, padding into the kitchen to join them. “Go away, Darnell,” his mother said in a