The Sigma Protocol

  “You say ‘Lenz’—he’s not your father?”

  A scowl. “My father married Lenz’s widow. But she has outlived both husbands. A strong woman. I take care of her. Please, get in.”

  Everything is a chance. He had not come this far to back out now. This man could finally lead him to the truth. After studying the enigmatic priest for a moment, he climbed into the back of the van.

  The priest slid the doors closed with the rumble of thunder. Now the only illumination came from a dim roof light. Except for pull-down seats the van was entirely empty.

  Everything is a chance.

  Ben wondered: What have I done?

  The engine started up, then protested all the way into first gear.

  This is how they execute people, Ben thought. I don’t know this man, genuine priest or not. Maybe he’s from one of those groups Sonnenfeld mentioned who defend and protect the old Nazis.

  After some twenty minutes, the van came to a halt. Its doors slid open, revealing a cobblestone street in dappled light that filtered through a canopy of trees. The length of the journey told him they were still in Buenos Aires, but the street looked entirely different from the city he had seen so far. It was serene and quiet but for birdsong. And, just barely audible, piano music.

  No, I’m not about to be killed.

  He wondered what Anna would think. No doubt she’d be appalled at the risk he’d taken. And she’d be right.

  They were parked in front of a two-story brick house with a roof of barrel tiles, not particularly large, but graceful. Wooden shutters on all the windows were closed. The piano music seemed to be coming from within the house, a Mozart sonata. A tall, serpentine wrought-iron fence enclosed the house and its small patch of yard.

  The priest took Ben by the elbow and helped him out of the van. Either his gun was now concealed or, less likely, it had been left in the van. At the front gate he keyed a code into a number pad, unlocking the gate with an electrical buzz.

  Inside, the house was cool and dark. The Mozart recording was coming from a room straight ahead. A note was bungled, the passage begun again, and Ben realized that this was no recording; someone was playing the piano with great skill. The old woman?

  He followed the priest into the room from which the piano music emanated. It was a small sitting room, book-lined, Oriental carpets on the floor. A tiny, birdlike old woman was hunched over a Steinway grand. She did not seem to notice when they entered. They sat down on a coarse, uncomfortable couch and waited in silence.

  When the piece was finished, she kept her hands frozen in the air, poised over the keys, then brought them slowly to her lap. The affectations of a concert pianist. Slowly she turned. Her face was prune-like, her eyes sunken, her neck crepey. She had to be ninety.

  Ben clapped a few times.

  She spoke in a quavering, hoarse small voice. “¿Quién es éste?”

  “Mother, this is Mr. Johnson,” the priest said. “Mr. Johnson, my stepmother.”

  Ben went over to her and took her fragile hand.

  The priest continued, to Ben, “And I am Francisco.”

  “Póngame en una silla cómoda,” the old woman said.

  Francisco put an arm around his stepmother and helped her into a chair. She said in decent English, “You come from Austria?”

  “I was just in Vienna, yes.”

  “Why have you come?”

  Ben began to speak, but she interrupted, fearful, “You are from the company?”

  The company? Did she mean Sigma? If so, he had to make her talk.

  “Frau… Frau Lenz, I’m afraid I’ve come here under false pretenses.”

  Francisco swiveled his head toward Ben, furious. “I’ll kill you!”

  “You see, Jürgen Lenz asked me to see you,” Ben said, ignoring him. He offered no explanation. Mention Austria, suggest that he had gained the trust of Jürgen Lenz. If pressed, he would improvise. He was getting good at that. “He asked me to meet with you and warn you to be especially careful, to tell you that your life may be in danger.”

  “I am not Frau Lenz,” she said haughtily. “I have not been Lenz for over thirty years. I am Señora Acosta.”

  “My apologies, señora.”

  But the old woman’s hauteur had given way to fear. “Why does Lenz send you? What does he want?”

  “Señora Acosta,” Ben began, “I’ve been asked—”

  “Why?” she asked, raising her quavering voice. “Why? You come here from Semmering? We’ve done nothing wrong! We’ve done nothing to break the agreement! Leave us alone!”

  “No! Silence, Mother!” the priest shouted.

  What was she referring to? The agreement…Was this what Peter had stumbled on to?

  “Señor Acosta, your son specifically asked me—”

  “My son?” the old woman rasped.

  “That’s right.”

  “You say my son in Vienna?”

  “Yes. Your son Jürgen.”

  The priest rose. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Tell him, Francisco,” the old woman said. “Francisco is my step son. From my second marriage. I never had any children.” Her face was contorted with fear. “I have no son.”

  The priest loomed menacingly over Ben. “You’re a liar,” he snapped. “You say you’re a lawyer for an estate, and now you lie to us again!”

  Head reeling, Ben attempted a quick recovery. “You have no son? Then I’m glad I’m here. Now I see I haven’t wasted my time, or my firm’s money, in coming down here to Buenos Aires.”

  The priest glowered. “Who sent you here?” “He is not from the company!” his stepmother croaked.

  “This is exactly the sort of fraud I need to clear up,” Ben said, feigning a sense of triumph. “So this Jürgen Lenz of Vienna—he says he is your son, but he is not your son? Then who is he?”

  The priest turned to his stepmother, who looked as if she were about to speak. “Say nothing!” he ordered. “Do not answer him!”

  “I cannot talk about him!” the old woman said. To her stepson, she added, “Why does he ask me about Lenz? Why do you invite him here?”

  “He is a liar, an impostor!” the priest said. “Vienna would send word ahead first before sending a messenger!” He reached behind him and produced his revolver, aiming it directly at Ben’s forehead.

  “What kind of a priest are you?” Ben asked in a hush. Not a priest. A priest would not put a gun to my head.

  “I’m a man of God who protects my family. Now leave here at once.”

  A sudden thought occurred to Ben, the obvious explanation, and he said to the old woman, “Your husband had another family. A son with another wife.”

  “You’re not welcome in this house,” the priest said with a wave of his weapon. “Out.”

  “Gerhard Lenz had no children!” the old woman cried.

  “Silence!” the priest thundered. “Enough! Say nothing more!”

  “He pretends to be the son of Gerhard Lenz,” Ben said, half to himself. “Why in the world would he pretend to be the son of…a monster?”

  “Stand up!” the priest commanded.

  “Gerhard Lenz didn’t die here, did he?” Ben said.

  “What are you saying?” the stepmother gasped.

  “If you don’t get out of here, I’ll kill you,” the priest said.

  Ben rose obediently, but looked at the old woman, sunk deep within her easy chair. “The rumors were true, then,” he said. “Gerhard Lenz wasn’t buried in Chacarita cemetery in 1961, was he? He escaped from Buenos Aires, evaded his pursuers—”

  “He died here!” the old woman said frantically. “There was a funeral! I myself flung dirt on his coffin!”

  “But you never saw his body, did you?” Ben said.

  “Out!” the priest barked.

  “Why is he saying these things to me?” she cried.

  She was interrupted by the ring of the telephone on a sideboard behind the priest. Without moving his revolver he reached to his ri
ght and snatched up the receiver. “Sí?”

  He seemed to be listening intently. Ben took advantage of the priest’s momentary inattention to sidle ever so subtly in the priest’s direction. “I need to reach Josef Strasser,” he said to the old woman.

  She spat out her reply, “If you’re really sent from Austria, you know how to reach him. You’re a liar!”

  Then Strasser was alive!

  Ben inched closer to the priest and continued talking to the stepmother. “I myself was lied to—set up!” There was in fact no logic in what he said, not without a fuller explanation, but he wanted only to confuse the old woman, rattle her further.

  “That confirms it,” the priest said, hanging up the phone. “That was Vienna. This man’s a fraud.” He looked at Ben. “You lied to us, Mr. Hartman!” he said, glancing behind him for an instant, and Ben immediately lunged. He grabbed the priest’s right wrist, the one holding the gun, twisting it with all his strength, and at the same time slammed his other hand into the priest’s throat, forefinger and thumb in a rigid V. The old woman screamed with terror. Caught by surprise, the priest cried out in pain. The revolver fell from his hand and clattered to the floor.

  With one immense movement Ben forced the priest to the floor, closing his grip around the priest’s neck. He could feel the bony cartilage of the larynx shift to one side. The man’s cry grew strangled as he sprawled against the tiled floor, his head at an unnatural angle, trying to rear up, trying to reach his free, left hand around, but it was vised beneath his rib cage. He struggled with great strength, gasping for breath. The old woman flung the backs of her hands against her face in a strange protective gesture.

  The gun! Must get the gun!

  Ben jammed his left hand more forcefully into the man’s throat, and thrust a knee into his stomach, aiming for the solar plexus. The priest’s sudden, involuntary exhalation of breath told Ben that he’d hit the mark. The priest’s dark eyes rolled upward so that only the whites were showing. He was momentarily paralyzed by the blow. Ben snatched the revolver from the floor, swung it around, and shoved it against the man’s forehead.

  He cocked the trigger. “Make a move, and you’re dead!”

  Immediately the priest’s body fell slack. “No!” he choked out.

  “Answer my questions! Tell the truth if you want to live!”

  “Don’t, please don’t! I’m a man of God.” “Right,” Ben snapped disdainfully. “How do I reach Josef Strasser?”

  “He is—I don’t know—please—my throat!”

  Ben eased the pressure a bit, enough to allow him to breathe and to speak. “Where’s Strasser?” he thundered.

  The priest gulped air. “Strasser—I don’t know how to reach Strasser—he lives in Buenos Aires, that’s all I know!” A small rivulet of urine appeared on the floor between the man’s legs.

  “Bullshit!” Ben shouted. “You give me an address or a phone number, or your stepmother will have no one to take care of her!”

  “No, please!” the old widow said, still cowering in her chair.

  “If—if you kill me,” the priest gasped, “you won’t get out of Buenos Aires alive! They’ll track you down—they’ll do things—you’ll wish—wish you were dead!”

  “Strasser’s address!”

  “I don’t have it!” the priest said. “Please! I have no way to reach Strasser!”

  “Don’t lie,” Ben said. “You all know each other. You are all tied together in a network. If you had to reach Strasser you have ways.”

  “I’m nothing! You kill me, I’m nothing to them! They’ll find you!”

  Ben wondered, who were “they”? Instead, he asked: “Who’s Jürgen Lenz?” He pressed the barrel of the gun against the priest’s forehead. There were a few drops of blood; he had broken the skin.

  “He—please, he’s powerful, he controls—he owns her house, her property, the man who calls himself Jürgen Lenz—”

  “Then who is he really?”

  “Put the gun down and get away from him.”

  The voice—low, calm, Spanish-accented—came from the doorway behind Ben. A tall man stood there holding a sawed-off shotgun. He was dressed in heavy green slacks and a denim work shirt, and he looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties, broad-chested and powerful.

  “Roberto, help!” the widow cried. “Save my Francisco! Get this man out of here at once!”

  “Señora, should I kill this intruder?” Roberto asked.

  The man’s demeanor told Ben he would fire without remorse. Ben hesitated, unsure what to do. The priest was a hostage, with the revolver to his forehead, yet Ben knew he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. And even if he did, the man with the sawed-off shotgun would kill him in the blink of an eye.

  But I can still bluff, he realized.

  “Roberto!” the old woman croaked. “Now!”

  “Put the gun down or I’ll fire,” said the young man. “I don’t care what happens to this scumbag.” He indicated the priest.

  “Yes, but the señora does,” Ben said. “We will lower our weapons at the same time.”

  “All right,” the young man agreed. “Take the weapon away from his head, stand up, and get out of here. If you want to live.” He lowered the shotgun’s barrel, pointing it toward the floor, as Ben pulled the revolver away from the priest’s forehead. He got up slowly, the gun still lowered.

  “Now move toward the door,” the man said.

  Ben backed away, his right hand gripping the revolver, his left patting the air behind him, feeling for obstacles as he moved. The young man moved with him into the hall, his rifle still lowered.

  “I just want you out of this house,” the man said calmly. “If you ever come near this house again, you’ll be killed on sight.” The priest had sullenly raised himself to a sitting position, looking drained and humiliated. Ben backed out of the open door—either the priest had left it open or Roberto had entered this way—and then pulled it shut.

  In a few seconds he was running.

  Anna paid the cabdriver and entered the small hotel, located on a quiet street in the district of Buenos Aires called La Recoleta. It was not, she thought uneasily, the sort of place where a single young woman traveling alone would easily go unnoticed.

  The concierge greeted her by name, which disturbed her. Earlier in the day she and Ben had checked in, separately and several hours apart. They’d also called in their reservations separately and at different times. Staying in the same hotel made logistical sense, but it also increased certain risks.

  The chambermaid’s cart was parked outside her room. Inconvenient. She wanted to be alone, go over the files, make phone calls; now she’d have to wait. As she entered she saw the maid, hunched over her open suitcase.

  Taking files out of Anna’s leather portfolio.

  Anna stopped abruptly. The maid looked up, saw Anna, and dropped the files and portfolio back into the suitcase.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Anna said, advancing on her.

  The maid protested indignantly in Spanish, a mix of haughty denials. Anna followed her out into the hall, demanding to know what she was doing. “Eh, ¿qué haces? ¡Ven para acá! ¿Qué cuernos haces revisando mi valija?”

  Anna tried to read the woman’s name tag, but the woman suddenly bolted, running down the corridor at top speed.

  The maid hadn’t been just pilfering. She had been going through Anna’s papers. Whether she read English or not was beside the point; most likely she had been hired to steal any documents, papers, files, notes.

  But hired by whom?

  Who could possibly know Anna was here, or what she was investigating? She was being watched—but by whom?

  Who knows I’m here? Denneen, yes, but had he told someone, some associate?

  Had Peralta, the Interpol representative, figured out who she was? Was that possible?

  Just as she reached for the bedside phone, it rang. The manager, calling to apologize? Or Ben?

  She
picked it up. “Hello?”

  There was only dead air. No, not dead air: it was the familiar hiss of a surveillance tape. Then the sounds of faint, indistinct voices, becoming sharper, amplified.

  A surge of adrenaline. “Who is this?”

  She made out a voice: “What about immigration records? Records of people who entered the country in the forties and fifties?” It was her own voice. Then the voice of a male interlocutor. Peralta.

  On the telephone, someone was playing back a tape recording of the conversation between Peralta and herself.

  They had heard everything, and they—whoever “they” were—knew precisely where she was and what she was after.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, stunned and terrified. Now there could be no question her presence was known, despite all the precautions. The pilfering maid was no isolated player.

  The phone rang again.

  Prickly all over with terror, she snatched up the receiver. “Yes?”

  “We want to capture the new Argentina. A place where people like yourself have been seeing that justice is done. A place with modern law enforcement, yet respect for democracy…” Her own voice, tinnily but crisply rendered through whatever eavesdropping equipment had been in place.

  A click.

  In her haste, she had left the room door open; she ran to close it. No one was in the corridor. She shut the door, double-locked it, seated the slide bolt of the safety chain in its socket.

  She ran to the window, its heavy drapes open, realizing she was exposed, a target for a shooter stationed in a window of any of the tall buildings across the street. She yanked the drapes closed to block the line of sight.

  The phone rang again.

  She walked to it slowly, put the handset to her ear, said nothing.

  “I didn’t get to be where I am today by being a pushover…”

  “Keep calling,” she finally forced herself to say into the phone, feigning calm. “We’re tracing the calls.”

  But no one was listening. There was only the dull hiss of a surveillance recording.