The Sigma Protocol

  The man who killed his brother. “The Architect,” Anna gasped.

  Ben froze.

  Gaped, disbelieving, but it was true.

  “He was going to kill you both when he got within point-blank range,” the man said. Ben focused on his tawny skin, oddly long lashes, and square jaw. The man spoke with a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. “Which he would easily have done, since his appearance deceived you.”

  Ben recalled the odd gesture, the image of the frail old man reaching into his jacket, the almost apologetic expression.

  “Wait a minute,” Anna said. “You’re ‘Yossi.’ From Vienna. The Israeli CIA guy. Or so you pretended.”

  “Dammit, tell me who you are!” Ben said.

  “My name isn’t important,” he replied.

  “Yeah, well it is to me. Who are you?”

  “Yehuda Malkin.”

  The name meant nothing. “You’ve been following me,” Ben said. “I saw your partner in Vienna and in Paris.”

  “Yeah, he screwed up and got spotted. He’d been following you for the entire last week. I was doing backup. You may as well know: your father hired us, Ben.”

  My father hired them. For what? “Hired you…?”

  “Max Hartman bought our parents’ way out of Nazi Germany more than fifty years ago. And the man who was killed wasn’t just my partner. He was my cousin.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Goddammit to hell. Avi wasn’t meant to die. It wasn’t his time. Goddammit to hell.” He shook his head hard. His cousin’s death evidently hadn’t sunk in, and right now he wouldn’t let it—it wasn’t the moment. He looked hard at Ben, saw the confusion playing across his face. “Both of us owed your father everything. I guess he must’ve had some kind of in with the Nazis, because he did that for a bunch of other Jewish families in Germany too.”

  Max ransomed Jews—bought their way out of the camps? Then what Sonnenfeld said was true.

  Anna broke in, “Who trained you? You’re not American-trained.”

  The man turned to her. “I was born in Israel, on a kibbutz. My parents moved to Palestine after they escaped from Germany.”

  “You were in the Israeli army?”

  “Paratrooper. We moved to America in ’68, after the Six Day War. My parents were fed up with the fighting. After high school I joined the Israeli army.”

  “This whole CIA ruse in Vienna—what the hell was it about?” Anna demanded.

  “For that, I brought in an American comrade of mine. Our orders were to spirit Ben away from danger. Get him back in the States, and under our direct protection. Keep him safe.”

  “But how did you…” Anna started.

  “Look, we don’t have time for this. If you’re trying to interrogate Strasser, you’d better get in there before the cops show up.”

  “Right,” Anna said.

  “Wait,” Ben interrupted. “You say my father hired you. When?”

  The man looked around impatiently. “A week or so ago.” He called Avi and me, told us you were in some kind of danger. Said you were in Switzerland. He gave us names and addresses, places he thought you might turn up. He wanted us to do what we could to protect you. He said he didn’t want to lose another son.” He looked around quickly. “You were almost killed on our watch in Vienna. Again in Paris. And you sure had some kind of close call here.”

  Ben’s mind swirled with questions. “Where did my father go?”

  “I don’t know. He said Europe, but he didn’t specify, and it’s a big continent. He said he’d be out of contact with everyone for months. Left us a pile of money for travel expenses.” He smiled grimly. “A whole lot more than we’d ever need, frankly.”

  Anna, meanwhile, was leaning over Vogler’s body and had taken a weapon from a nylon shoulder holster. She unscrewed the silencer, put it in the jacket of her blazer and tucked the gun into the waistband of her skirt so it was hidden by the jacket. “But you didn’t follow us here,” she said, “did you?”

  “No,” he conceded. “Strasser’s name was on the list Max Hartman gave me, along with his address and cover identity.”

  “He knows what’s going on!” Ben said. “He knows who all the players are. He figured I’d eventually track Strasser down.”

  “But we were able to tail Vogler, who wasn’t much concerned about being followed himself. So once we knew he was flying to Argentina, and we had Strasser’s address…”

  “You’ve been watching Strasser’s house for the last couple of days,” Anna said. “Waiting for Ben to show up.”

  He glanced around again. “You guys ought to move it.”

  “Right, but first tell me this,” she went on. “Since you’ve been doing surveillance: did Strasser just recently return to Buenos Aires?”

  “Apparently so. Back from some vacation, it looked like. He had a lot of luggage.”

  “Any visitors since his return?”

  The man thought a moment. “Not that I saw, anyway. Just a nurse who got here maybe a half hour ago…”

  “A nurse!” Anna exclaimed. She looked at the white station wagon that was parked in front of the house. The car was emblazoned with the words PERMANENCIA EN CASA. “Come on!” she shouted.

  “Oh, man,” Ben said, following her as she rushed to the front door and rang the bell repeatedly.

  “Shit,” she groaned. “We’re too late.” Yehuda Malkin stood back and to one side.

  In less than a minute, the door slowly came open. Before them stood an ancient man, withered and stooped, his deeply tanned, leathery face a mass of wrinkles.

  Josef Strasser.

  “¿Quién es éste?” he said, scowling. “Se está metiendo en mis cosas—ya llegó la enfermera que me tiene que revisar.”

  “He says his nurse is here for his checkup,” Anna said. She raised her voice. “No! Herr Strasser—stay away from this nurse, I warn you!”

  A white shape came into view behind the German. Ben said, “Anna! Behind him!”

  The nurse approached the door, speaking quickly, chidingly it seemed, to Strasser. “¡Vamos, Señor Albrecht, vamos para allá, que estoy apurada! ¡Tengo que ver al próximo paciente todavía!”

  “She’s telling him to hurry up,” Anna told Ben. “She’s got another patient to see. Herr Strasser, this woman isn’t a real nurse—I suggest you ask her for her credentials!”

  The woman in the white uniform grasped the old man’s shoulder and pulled him half toward her in one violent gesture. “¡Ya mismo,” she said, “vamos!”

  With her free hand she grabbed the door to pull it closed, but Anna bent forward to block the door’s arc with her knee.

  Suddenly the nurse shoved Strasser aside. She reached into her uniform, and in one swift motion took out a gun.

  But Anna moved even more quickly. “Freeze!”

  The nurse fired.

  At the same moment, Anna spun her body sideways, slamming Ben to the ground.

  As Ben rolled to one side he heard a gunshot, followed by an animal-like roar.

  He realized what had happened: the nurse had shot at Anna, but Anna had dodged out of the line of fire, and it was the Israeli protector who had been hit.

  A red oval appeared in the middle of the man’s forehead, and there was a spray of blood where the bullet exited his skull.

  Anna got off two quick shots, and the fake nurse arched backward and then slumped to the floor.

  And suddenly, for the briefest moment, everything was quiet. In the near-silence Ben could hear the distant singing of a bird.

  Anna said, “Ben, you O.K.?”

  He grunted yes.

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said, turning to see what had happened. Then she spun back around toward the doorway.

  Strasser, crouched on the floor in his pale blue bathrobe, shielding his face with his hands, keened and keened.

  “Strasser?” she repeated.

  “Gott im Himmel,” he moaned. “Gott im Himmel. Sie haben mein Leben gerettet!” Good God in heaven. You saved my life.

/>   Images. Shapeless and unfocused, devoid of significance or definition, outlines blurring into plumes of gray, disintegrating into nothingness like a jet’s exhaust tracks in a windy sky. At first, there was only awareness, without even any defined object of awareness. He was so cold. So very cold. Save for the spreading warmth on his chest.

  And where there was warmth, he felt pain.

  That was good. Pain was good.

  Pain was the Architect’s friend. Pain he could manage, could banish when he needed to. At the same time, it meant he was still alive.

  Cold was not good. It meant that he had lost a great deal of blood. That his body had gone into shock to lessen the further loss of blood: his pulse would have slowed, his heart beating with lessened force, the vessels in his extremities constricting to minimize the flow of blood to non-vital parts of the body.

  He had to do an inventory. He was on the ground, motionless. Could he hear? For a moment, nothing disturbed the profound silence within his head. Then, as if a connection had been established, he could hear voices, faintly, muffled, as if inside a building…

  Inside a house.

  Inside whose house?

  He must have lost a great deal of blood. Now he forced himself to retrieve the memories of the past hour.

  Argentina. Buenos Aires.

  Strasser.

  Strasser’s house. Where he had expected Benjamin Hartman and Anna Navarro and where he had encountered…others. Including someone armed with a marksman’s rifle.

  He had taken several gunshots to the chest. Nobody could survive that. No! He banished the thought. It was an unproductive thought. A thought such as an amateur might have.

  He had not been shot at all. He was fine. Weakened in ways he could compensate for, but not out of the running. They thought he was out of the running, and that would be his strength. The images wavered before his mind, but for a brief while he was able to fix them, the images, like passport photos, of his three targets. In order: Benjamin Hartman; Anna Navarro; Josef Strasser.

  His mind was as thick and opaque as old crankshaft oil, but, yes, it would function. Yet again, it was a matter of mental concentration: he would assign the injuries to another body—a vividly conceived doppelgänger, someone who was bloodied and in shock but who was not he. He was fine. Once he had gathered his reserves, he would be able to move, to stalk. To kill. His sheer force of will had always triumphed over adversity, and it would again.

  Had an observer been keeping a close watch on Hans Vogler’s body, he might possibly have detected, amid this furious gathering of mental fortitude, the barest flicker of an eyelid, nothing more. Every physical movement would now be planned and measured out in advance, the way a man dying of thirst in a desert might ration swallows from a canteen. There would be no wasted movement.

  The Architect lived to kill. It was his area of unexampled expertise, his singular vocation. Now he would kill if only to prove that he still lived.

  “Who are you?” asked Strasser in a high-pitched, hoarse voice.

  Ben glanced from the nurse-impostor in her blood-drenched white uniform, sprawled on the floor, to the assassin who had almost killed them both, to the mysterious protectors his father had hired, both now lying murdered on the red clay tiles of the patio.

  “Herr Strasser,” Anna said, “the police will be here any moment. We have very little time.”

  Ben understood what she was saying: the Argentine police weren’t to be trusted; they couldn’t be here when the police arrived.

  They would have very little time to learn what they needed from the old German.

  Strasser’s face was deeply creased and striated, etched with countless crisscrossing lines. His liver-colored lips stretched downward in a grimace, and they were wrinkled too, like elongated prunes. Seated on either side of his creviced, wide-nostriled nose were deep-sunk dark eyes like raisins in a ball of dough. “I am not Strasser,” he protested. “You are confused.”

  “We know both your real name and your alias,” Anna said impatiently. “Now tell me: the nurse—was she your regular one?”

  “No. My usual nurse was sick this week. I have anemia and I need my shots.”

  “Where have you been for the last month or two?”

  Strasser shifted from one foot to another. “I have to sit down,” he wheezed. He moved slowly down the hallway.

  They followed him down the hall, to a large, ornate, book-lined room. It was a library, a two-story atrium with walls and shelves of burnished mahogany.

  “You live in hiding,” Anna said. “Because you’re a war criminal.”

  “I am no war criminal!” Strasser hissed. “I’m as innocent as a baby.”

  Anna smiled. “If you aren’t a war criminal,” she replied, “why are you hiding?”

  He faltered, but only for a moment. “Here it has become fashionable to expel former Nazis. And yes, I was a member of the National Socialist party. Argentina signs agreements with Israel and Germany and America—they want to change their image. Now they only care what America thinks. They’d expel me just to make the American President smile. And you know, here in Buenos Aires, tracking down Nazis is a business! For some journalists it’s a full-time job, how they make their living! But I was never a Hitler loyalist. Hitler was a ruinous madman—that was clear early in the war. He would be the destruction of all of us. Men like me knew that other accommodations had to be reached. My people sought to kill the man before he could do further damage to our industrial capacities. And our projections were correct. By the war’s end, America had three-quarters of the world’s invested capital, and two-thirds of the world’s industrial capacity.” He paused, smiled. “The man was simply bad for business.”

  “If you’d turned against Hitler, why are you still protected by the Kamaradenwerk?” Ben asked.

  “Illiterate thugs,” Strasser scoffed. “They are as ignorant of history as the avengers they seek to thwart.”

  “Why did you go out of town?” Anna interrupted.

  “I was staying at an estancia in Patagonia owned by my wife’s family. My late wife’s family. At the foot of the Andes, in Río Negro province. A cattle and sheep ranch, but very luxurious.”

  “Do you go there regularly?”

  “This is the first time I go there. My wife died last year and… Why do you ask these things?”

  “That’s why they couldn’t find you to kill you,” Anna said.

  “Kill me…But who is trying to kill me?”

  Ben looked at Anna, urging her to continue speaking.

  She replied, “The company.” “The company?”

  “Sigma.”

  She was bluffing, Ben knew, but she did it with great conviction. Chardin’s words came to his mind, unbidden. The Western world, and much of the rest, would respond to its ministrations, and it would accept the cover stories that accompanied them.

  Now Strasser was brooding. “The new leadership. Yes, that is it. Ah, yes.” His raisin eyes gleamed.

  “What is the ‘new leadership’?” Ben prompted.

  “Yes, of course,” Strasser went on as if he hadn’t heard Ben. “They are afraid I know things.”

  “Who?” Ben shouted.

  Strasser looked up at him, startled. “I helped them set it up. Alford Kittredge, Siebert, Aldridge, Holleran, Conover—all those crowned heads of corporate empires. They had contempt for me, but they needed me, didn’t they? They needed my contacts high up in the German government. If the venture wasn’t properly multinational, it had no hope of succeeding. I had the trust of the men at the very top. They knew I had done things for them that forever placed me beyond the pale of ordinary humanity. They knew I had made that ultimate sacrifice for them. I was a go-between trusted by all sides. And now that trust has been betrayed, exposed for the charade it always was. Now it has become clear that they were using me for their own ends.”

  “You talked about the new leaders—is Jürgen Lenz one of them?” Anna asked urgently. “Lenz’s son?” r />
  “I have never met this Jürgen Lenz. I didn’t know Lenz had a son, but then I wasn’t an intimate of his.”

  “But you were both scientists,” Ben said. “In fact, you invented Zyklon-B, didn’t you?”

  “I was one of a team that invented Zyklon-B,” he replied. He pulled at his shabby blue bathrobe, adjusted it at the neck. “Now all the apologists attack me for my role in this, but they do not consider how elegant was this gas.”

  “Elegant?” Ben repeated. For a second he thought he’d misheard. Elegant. The man was loathsome.

  “Before Zyklon-B, the soldiers had to shoot every prisoner,” Strasser said. “Terrible bloodbaths. Gas was so clean and simple and elegant. And you know, gassing the Jews actually spared them.”

  Ben echoed: “Spared them.” Ben was sickened.

  “Yes! There were so many deadly diseases that went around those camps, they would have suffered much longer, much more painfully. Gassing them was the most humanitarian option.”

  Humanitarian. I’m looking in the face of evil, Ben thought. An old man in a bathrobe uttering pieties.

  “How nice,” Ben said.

  “This is why we called it ‘special treatment.’”

  “Your euphemism for extermination.”

  “If you wish.” He shrugged. “But you know, I didn’t hand-pick victims for the gas chambers like Dr. Mengele or Dr. Lenz. They call Mengele the Angel of Death, but Lenz was the real one. The real Angel of Death.”

  “But not you,” Ben said. “You were a scientist.”

  Strasser sensed the sarcasm. “What do you know of science?” he spat. “Are you a scientist? Do you have any idea how far ahead of the rest of the world we Nazi scientists were? Do you have any idea?” He spoke in a high tremulous voice. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth. “They criticize Mengele’s twin studies, yet his findings are still cited by the world’s leading geneticists! The Dachau experiments in freezing human beings—those data are still used! What they learned at Ravensbrück about what happens to the female menstrual cycle under stress—when the women learned they were about to be executed—scientifically this was a breakthrough! Or Dr. Lenz’s experiments on aging. The famine experiments on Soviet prisoners of war, the limb transplants—I could go on and on. Maybe it’s not polite to talk about it, but you still use our science. You’d rather not think about how the experiments were done, but don’t you realize that one of the main reasons we were so advanced was precisely because we were able to experiment on live human beings?”