Strasser’s creased face had gotten even paler as he spoke, and now it was chalk-white. He had grown short of breath. “You Americans are disgusted by how we did our research, but you use fetal tissue from abortions for your transplants, yes? This is acceptable?”
Anna was pacing back and forth. “Ben, don’t debate with this monster.”
But Strasser would not stop. “Of course, there were many crackpot ideas. Trying to make girls into boys and boys into girls.” He chortled. “Or trying to create Siamese twins by connecting the vital organs of the twins, a total failure, we lost many twins that way—”
“And after Sigma was established, did you continue to keep in touch with Lenz?” Anna asked, cutting him off.
Strasser turned, seemingly perturbed at the interruption. “Certainly. Lenz relied on me for my expertise and my contacts.”
“Meaning what?” Ben said.
The old man shrugged. “He said he was doing work, doing research—molecular research—that would change the world.”
“Did he tell you what it was, this research?”
“No, not me. Lenz was a private, secretive man. But I remember he said once, ‘You simply cannot fathom what I’m working on.’ He asked me to procure sophisticated electron microscopes, very hard to get in those days. They had just been invented. Also, he wanted various chemicals. Many things that were embargoed because of the war. He wanted everything crated and sent to a private clinic he had set up in an old Schloss, a castle, he had seized during the invasion of Austria.”
“Where in Austria?” Anna asked.
“The Austrian Alps.”
“Where in the Alps? What town or village, do you remember?” Anna persisted.
“How can I possibly remember this, after all these years? Maybe he never told me. I only remember Lenz called it ‘the Clockworks’—because it had once been some kind of clock factory.”
A scientific project of Lenz’s. “A laboratory, then? Why?”
Strasser’s lips pulled down. He sighed reproachfully. “To continue the research.”
“What research?” he said.
Strasser fell silent, as if lost in thought.
“Come on!” Anna said. “What research?”
“I don’t know. There was much important research that began during the Reich. Gerhard Lenz’s work.”
Gerhard Lenz: what was it Sonnenfeld had said about Lenz’s horrific experiments in the camps? Human experimentation… but what?
“And you don’t know the nature of this work?”
“Not today. Science and politics—it was all the same to these people. Sigma was, from the beginning, a means of funneling support to certain political organizations, subverting others. The men we’re talking about—these were already men of enormous influence in the world. Sigma showed them that if they pooled their influence, the whole could be far, far greater than the sum of its parts. Collectively, there was very little they couldn’t affect, direct, orchestrate. But, you know, Sigma was a living thing. And like living things, it evolved.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “With funds provided by the largest corporations in the world, along with funds stolen from the state Reichsbank. We know who the founding board members were. You’re the last living member of that original board. But who are your successors?”
Strasser looked down the hall, but he seemed to be staring at nothing.
“Who controls it now? Give us names!” Ben shouted.
“I don’t know!” Strasser’s voice cracked. “They kept people like me quiet by sending us money regularly. We were lackeys, finally excluded from the inner councils of power. We should all be billionaires many, many times over. They send us millions, but it is crumbs, table scraps.” Strasser’s lips curled up in a repellent smile. “They give me table scraps, and now they wish to cut me off. They want to kill me because they don’t want to pay me anymore. They’re greedy, and they’re ashamed. After all I did for them, they regard me as an embarrassment. And a danger, because even though the doors have been shut to me for years, they still think I know too much. For making possible everything they do, how am I repaid? With contempt!” A growing sense of rage—the pent-up grievance of years—made his words hard metallic. “They act as if I am a poor relation, a black sheep, a foul-smelling derelict. The swells gather in their fancy-dress forum, and their biggest fear is that I will crash their party, like a skunk at a kaffeeklatsch. I know where they gather. I am not such a fool, such an ignoramus. I would not join them in Austria had they asked me to.”
Austria.
“What are you talking about?” Ben demanded. “Where are they gathering? Tell me.”
Strasser gave him a look that combined wariness and defiance. It was clear that he would say no more.
“Goddammit, answer me!”
“You are all the same,” Strasser spat. “You would think somebody my age would be treated with respect! I have nothing more to say to you.”
Anna was suddenly alert. “I hear sirens. This is it, Ben. We’re out of here.”
Ben stood directly in front of Strasser. “Herr Strasser, do you know who I am?”
“Who you are…?” Strasser stammered.
“My father is Max Hartman. I’m sure you remember the name.”
Strasser squinted. “Max Hartman… the Jew, our treasurer…?”
“That’s right. And he was an SS officer as well, I’m told.” But Sonnenfeld had said that would merely have been a cover, a ruse. His heart was pounding, he dreaded hearing Strasser’s confirmation of Max’s ugly past.
Strasser laughed, flashing his ruined brown teeth. “SS!” he laughed. “He was no SS. We gave him fake SS papers so odessa would smuggle him out of Germany into Switzerland, with no questions asked. That was the deal.”
Blood roared in Ben’s ears. He felt a wave of relief, a physical sensation.
“Bormann chose him personally for the German delegation,” Strasser went on. “Not just because he was skilled at moving money around, but because we needed a… a false head—”
“A figurehead.”
“Yes. The industrialists from America and elsewhere were not so comfortable with what the Nazis had done. A Jewish participant was necessary to provide legitimacy—to show that we weren’t the wrong kind of Germans, to show that we were not zealots, not Hitler disciples. For his part, your father got for himself a good deal—he got his family out of the camps, and a lot of other Jewish families as well, and he was given forty million Swiss francs—almost a million dollars U.S. A lot of money.” A horrible smile. “Now he calls himself ‘rags to riches story.’ Is a million dollars rags? I don’t think.”
“Ben!” Anna shouted. Quickly she flashed the leather wallet that held her Department of Justice credentials. “Now you want to know who I am, Herr Strasser? I’m here on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations. I’m sure you know who they are.”
“Oh ho,” Strasser said. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m an Argentine citizen and I don’t recognize your authority.”
The sirens were louder, just a few blocks away it seemed.
Anna turned back to him. “So I guess we’ll see how serious the Argentine government is about extraditing war criminals. Out the back way, Ben.”
Strasser’s face flashed with rage. “Hartman,” he said hoarsely.
“Come on, Ben!”
Strasser crooked a finger at Ben, beckoning him. Ben could not resist. The old man began to whisper. Ben knelt down to listen.
“Hartman, do you know your father was a weak little man?” Strasser said. “A man without a spine. A coward and a fraud who pretends to be a victim.” Strasser’s lips were inches from Ben’s ear. His voice was singsong. “And you are the fraud’s son, that’s all. That is all you are to me.”
Ben closed his eyes, fought to control his anger.
The fraud’s son.
Was this true? Was Strasser right?
Strasser was clearly enjoyin
g Ben’s discomfort.
“Oh, you’d like to kill me right now, isn’t that right, Hartman?” Strasser said. “Yet you don’t. Because you’re a coward, like your father.”
Ben saw Anna starting down the hall.
“No,” he said. “Because I’d much rather you spend your remaining life in a stinking jail cell in Jerusalem. I’d like your last days to be as unpleasant as possible. Killing you is a waste of a bullet.”
He ran down the corridor, following Anna to the back of the house, as the sirens grew louder.
Crawl, don’t walk. The Architect knew that the effort to maintain orthostatic blood pressure in his head would be made much more difficult by standing erect, when there was as yet no absolute need to do so. It was a rational decision, and his ability to make it was almost as reassuring as the Glock he had retained in an ankle holster.
The front door was open, the hallway deserted. He crawled, in a standard infantry crawl, indifferent to the wide smear of blood he was leaving as his shirt-front draped against the blond flooring. Every yard seemed like a mile to him. But he would not be deterred.
You’re the best. He was seventeen, and the drill instructor told him so, in front of the entire battalion. You’re the best. He was twenty-three, and his commanding officer at Stasi had said so in an official report that he showed young Hans before forwarding it to his superior. You’re the best. These words from the head of his Stasi directorate: he had just returned from a “hunting trip” in West Berlin, having dispatched four physicists—members of an internationally distinguished team from the University of Leipzig—who had defected the day before. You’re the best: a top-level Sigma official, a white-haired American in flesh-toned glasses, had spoken those words to him. It was after he had stage-managed the death of a prominent Italian leftist, shooting him from across the street while the man was in the throes of passion with a fifteen-year-old Somali whore. But he would hear those words again. And again. Because they were true.
And because they were true, he would not give up. He would not succumb to the nearly overpowering urge to surrender, to sleep, to stop.
With robotic precision, he moved hand and knee and propelled himself down the hallway.
Finally, he found himself in a spacious, double-height room, its walls lined with books. Lizardlike eyes surveyed the area. His primary target was not present. A disappointment, not a surprise.
Instead, there was the wheezing, sweating weakling Strasser, a traitor who, too, was deserving of death.
How many more minutes of consciousness did the Architect have left? He eyed Strasser avidly, as if extinguishing his light might help to restore his own.
Shakily, he rose from the floor into a marksman’s crouch. He felt muscles in his body trying to spasm, but he held his arms completely still. The small Glock in his arms had now acquired the weight of a cannon, yet somehow he managed to raise the firearm until it was at the precisely correct angle.
It was at that moment that Strasser, perhaps alerted by the old-penny odor of blood, finally became aware of his presence.
The Architect watched the raisin-like eyes widen momentarily, then fall closed. Squeezing the trigger was like lifting a desk with one finger, but he would do so. Did so.
Or did he?
When he failed to hear the gun’s report, he first worried that he had not executed his mission. Then he realized that it was his sensory awareness that was beginning to shut down.
The room was swiftly darkening: he knew that brain cells starved of oxygen ceased to function—that the aural and optical functions shut down first, but that sentience itself would soon follow.
He waited until he saw Strasser hit the ground before he allowed his own eyes to close. As they did so, there was a fleeting awareness that his eyes would never open again; and then there was no awareness of anything at all.
Back in the hotel room, Ben and Anna rifled through a stack of papers that they’d hurriedly purchased at a newsstand on the way. Chardin had referred to an imminent development. And the “fancy-dress forum” in Austria that Strasser had mentioned chimed with an item they’d recently come across: but what was it?
The answer was within their grasp.
It was Anna who came across the item in El País, Argentina’s leading newspaper. It was another brief article about the International Children’s Health Forum—a con-vocation of world leaders to discuss matters of pressing mutual concern, especially with respect to the developing world. But what caught her eye this time was the city where the meeting was to be held: Vienna, Austria.
She read on. There was a list of sponsors—among them, the Lenz Foundation. Translating from the Spanish, she read the article out loud to Ben.
A shiver ran down his spine. “My God,” he said. “This is it! It has to be. Chardin said only days remained. What he was talking about has to be related to this conference. Read me the list of sponsors again.”
Anna did so.
And Ben started to make a few phone calls. These were calls to foundation professionals, people who were delighted to hear from one of their contributors. Slipping into a familiar role, Ben sounded hale and hearty when he spoke to them, but what he learned was profoundly dismaying.
“They’re great people, the folks from the Lenz Foundation,” Geoffrey Baskin, programs director for the Robinson Foundation, told him in his dulcet New Orleans accent. “It’s really their baby, but they just wanted to keep a low profile. They put it together, footed most of the bill—it’s hardly fair that we’re getting any of the glory. But I guess they wanted to make sure it had an international feeling. Like I say, they’re really selfless.”
“That’s nice to hear,” Ben said. His kept his tone up-beat even as he felt a rising sense of dread. “We may be partnering with them on a special project, so I just wanted to get your sense of them. Really nice to hear.”
Dignitaries and leaders from around the world would be gathering in Vienna, under the auspices of the Lenz Foundation…
They had to get to Vienna.
It was the one place in the world they shouldn’t be showing their faces, and the one place where they had no choice but to go.
Anna and he paced the hotel room. They could take precautions—precautions that now came as second nature: disguise, falsified identities, separate flights.
But the risks seemed much greater now.
“If we’re not just chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, we’ve got to assume that every commercial flight into Vienna is going to be scrutinized very carefully,” Anna said. “They’re going to be on full alert.”
Ben felt the flicker of an idea. “What did you say again?”
“They’re going to be on full alert. Border control isn’t going to be a cakewalk. More like a gauntlet.”
“Before that.”
“I said we’ve got to assume that every commercial flight into Vienna…”
“That’s it,” Ben said.
“What’s it?”
“Anna, I’m going to take a risk here. And the calculation is that it’s a smaller risk than we’d otherwise be facing.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m going to call a guy named Fred McCallan. He was the codger I was supposed to go skiing with in St. Moritz.”
“You were going to St. Moritz to go skiing with a ‘codger.’”
Ben blushed. “Well, there was a granddaughter in the picture.”
“Go on.”
“More to the point, though, there’s a private jet in the picture. A Gulfstream. I’ve been in it once. Very red. Red seats, red carpeting, red TV set. Fred will still be at the Hotel Carlton there, and the plane will probably be at the little airport in Chur.”
“So you’re going to call him up and ask for the keys. Kind of like borrowing someone’s station wagon to pick up groceries, right?”
“Well…”
Anna shook her head. “It’s true what they say—the rich really are different from you and me.” She shot him a look. “I mea
n, of course, just me.”
“Anna…”
“I’m scared as shit, Ben. Bad jokes come with the territory. Listen, I don’t know this guy from Adam. If you think you can trust him—if that’s what your gut is telling you—then I can live with it.”
“Because you’re right, it’s the commercial flights they’ll be watching…”
Anna nodded vigorously. “So long as they’re not coming from places like Colombia, private flights get pretty much a free pass. If this guy’s pilot can move the Gulfstream to Brussels, let’s say…”
“We go directly to Brussels, assuming nobody’s onto the IDs Oscar made for us. Then transfer to Fred’s private jet and fly to Vienna that way. That’s the way the Sigma principals travel. Chances are, they’re not going to be expecting a Gulfstream with two fugitives on board.”
“O.K., Ben,” Anna said. “I call this the beginning of a plan.”
Ben dialed the number of the Hotel Carlton and waited a minute for the front desk to connect him.
Fred McCallan’s voice boomed even through the international phone lines. “My God, Benjamin, do you have any idea of the hour? Never mind, I suppose you’re calling to apologize. Though I’m not the one you should apologize to. Louise has been devastasted. Devastated. And you two have so much in common.”
“I understand, Fred, and I…”
“But actually I’m glad you finally called. Do you realize they’re saying the most preposterous things about you? A guy called me up and gave me an earful. They’re saying that…”
“You’ve got to believe me, Fred,” Ben said urgently, cutting him off, “there’s no truth to those reports whatever—I mean, whatever they’re accusing me of, you’ve got to believe me when I say that…”
The Sigma Protocol Page 51