The Sigma Protocol

  “Anything to alleviate the dull tedium of your days,” Anna said.

  “Put yourself in my position, Ms. Navarro. A rogue U.S. agent takes a very peculiar interest in me—this isn’t something that happens every day. Naturally I wonder: Have you come across someone or something that is a threat to me? Have you broken ranks and come to tell me about some hostile intrigue within American intelligence? I know our investigations of Operation Paper Clip have earned me enemies in some American circles. Have you come to warn me of some imminent menace? The imagination whirls. The mind boggles. So how could I resist meeting with you? You knew I could not.”

  “We’re getting off the subject,” Anna broke in. “None of this—”

  Lenz talked over her. “So you’ll appreciate how sorely disappointed I was when I learned that you’re here only to hurl absurd, unfounded, and easily discredited accusations. From all indications, you’re not only off the reservation, as your countrymen like to say—you’re out of your mind.” He pointed to his desk. “I need only pick up this phone and call a friend of mine in the Justice Ministry and you would be remanded to the tender mercies of the U.S. authorities.”

  You want a fight, she thought, you got it. He was not going to intimidate her. Not with what she knew about him.

  “You’re perfectly right,” she said calmly. “You could pick up that phone and do that. But I wonder whether it would best serve your interests.”

  Lenz had turned his back on her and was heading toward the exit. “Miss Navarro, your silly games really don’t interest me. Now would you please leave my office this moment, or shall I be forced to—”

  “Just before I came here I stopped at the local DHL office, where a document was waiting for me. It contained the results of a search I requested. I had submitted a set of your fingerprints and asked the lab to identify them. It took a long time. Our Latent Fingerprints Section had to dig deep to find a match. But they did.” She took a breath. “Dr. Lenz, I know who you are. I don’t understand it. I really can’t fathom it, to be quite honest. But I know who you really are.”

  She was terrified, more frightened than she’d ever been before. Her heart was hammering; blood rushed in her ears. She knew she had no backup.

  Lenz stopped short, a few feet from the exit, and closed the door. When he turned around, his face had gone dark with rage.

  Chapter Forty

  Ben joined the modest crowd of journalists and cameramen assembled outside the Wiener Stadthalle Civic Center, the large, beige stone structure where the International Children’s Health Forum was to be hosted. He made eye contact with a cold and miserable-looking man—paunchy, middle-aged, dressed in a fraying tan trench coat. Ben extended a hand. “I’m Ron Adams,” he said. “With American Philanthropy magazine. Been standing out here long?”

  “Too damn long,” the rumpled man said. He spoke with a cockney accent. “Jim Bowen, Financial Times. European correspondent and pathetic wretch.” He shot Ben a comic, mock-baleful glance. “My editor sweet-talked me into going with promises of schnitzel and strudel and Sachertorte, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, that’s a bit of all right then.’ Higgins will never hear the end of it: there’s a solemn vow. Two days of standing around in this lovely frigid rain, my little piggies turning into popsicles, down to practically my last fag, and all we get are the same damn press releases they’re faxing all the bureaus.”

  “But you must be seeing some pretty grand poobahs sauntering in and out. I’ve looked at the guest list.”

  “Well, that’s the thing—wherever they are, they’re not here. Maybe they’re just as bored with the program as everybody else. Probably all decided to nip out and take a quick skiing vacation. Strictly B-list, the only people I’ve caught sight of. Our photographer’s taken to drink, he has. I think he’s got the right idea, too. I’ve got half a mind to pop down the corner for a pint, except they serve the ale too damn cold in this country. Ever notice that? Plus which, the stuff they make tastes like piss.”

  The big names weren’t here? Did that mean that the Sigma conclave was taking place elsewhere? Ben’s stomach plummeted: Had he been misled? Perhaps Strasser had been mistaken. Or perhaps he and Anna had made a false assumption somewhere along the line.

  “Any rumors about where the muckety-mucks are hanging out?” Ben kept his tone light.

  The cockney scribe snorted. “Bloody hell. Know what it is? It’s like one of those sodding nightclubs where all the really hip people get shown to a special room, and the squares get stuck in a pen with hay on the floor.” He rummaged through a badly squashed and nearly empty pack of Silk Cuts. “Bloody hell.”

  Ben’s mind raced. Jürgen Lenz was clearly calling the shots here. Just as clearly, the real action wasn’t taking place at the conference at all. The answer was no doubt to be found in the Lenz Foundation’s activities. And here, an indirect approach would probably yield the quickest results. Back at the hotel, he worked the phones, keeping one eye on his watch. He wanted to collect as much information as possible before he and Anna compared notes at the end of the day.

  “Cancer Foundation of Austria.”

  “I’d like to speak with the administrator in charge of fund-raising, please,” Ben said. There was a click, several seconds of hold music—“Tales from the Vienna Woods,” naturally—and then another woman’s voice: “Schimmel.”

  “Frau Schimmel, my name’s Ron Adams, and I’m an American journalist in Vienna, working on a profile of Jürgen Lenz for American Philanthropy magazine.”

  The administrator’s voice changed instantly from wary to exuberant: “Yes, certainly! How may I help you?”

  “I guess I’m really interested—especially in light of the International Children’s Health Forum—in documenting his generosity, the extent of his support for your foundation, his involvement, that sort of thing.”

  The vague question elicited an even vaguer reply. She went on at length, then he hung up, frustrated. He had called the Lenz Foundation and asked a low-level staffer for a list of all charities they funded. No questions were asked: as a tax-exempt institution, the Lenz Foundation was obligated to divulge all of its gifts.

  But what he was looking for specifically, he had no idea. He was probing mindlessly. There had to be a way to penetrate the facade of Jürgen Lenz, philanthropist. Yet there seemed to be no logic to the type of grants Lenz made, no commonality, no organizing principle. Cancer—Kosovo—Progeria—The German-Jewish Dialogue? Those were the main ones. But if there was a connection, he had yet to find it, even after calling three different charities.

  One more try, he told himself, and then move on. He got up from the desk in the hotel room, got a Pepsi from the little refrigerator, returned to the desk, and dialed another number from the list.

  “Hello, Progeria Institute.”

  “May I speak to the administrator in charge of fund-raising, please?”

  A few seconds went by.

  “Meitner.”

  “Yes, Frau Meitner. My name is Ron Adams…”

  Without much hope he went through his now-standard interview. The woman was, like all the administrators he talked to, a great fan of Jürgen Lenz and delighted to sing his praises.

  “Mr. Lenz is really our chief benefactor,” she said. “Without him, I think we could not exist. You know, this is a tragic and exceedingly rare disorder.”

  “I really don’t know anything about it,” he said politely. He realized he was wasting time when there was none to spare.

  “To put it simply, it’s premature aging. The full name is Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome. It causes a child to age seven or eight times faster than he should. A ten-year-old child with progeria will look like an eighty-year-old man, with arthritis and heart problems and all the rest. Most of them die by the age of thirteen. Seldom do they grow taller than the height of the average five-year-old.”

  “My God,” Ben said, genuinely appalled.

  “Because it’s so rare, it is what is called an ??
?orphan disease,’ which means it gets very little funding for research, and the drug companies have no financial incentive to find a cure. That’s why his help is so terribly important.”

  Biotech companies… Vortex.

  “Why do you think Mr. Lenz takes such a personal interest?”

  A hesitation. “I think perhaps you should ask Mr. Lenz.”

  He sensed the sudden chill in her voice. “If there’s anything you’d like to tell me off the record…”

  A pause. “Do you know who Jürgen Lenz’s father was?” the woman said carefully.

  Did anyone? “Gerhard Lenz, the Nazi doctor,” Ben replied.

  “Correct. Off the record, Mr. Adams, I’m told that Gerhard Lenz did some ghastly experiments on children with progeria. No doubt Jürgen Lenz simply wishes to undo what his father did. But please don’t print that.”

  “I won’t,” Ben promised. But if Jürgen Lenz was not Gerhard’s son, why the interest in the same causes? What sort of bizarre masquerade was this?

  “You know, Mr. Lenz even sends a few of these poor children to a private sanatorium in the Austrian Alps that his foundation runs.”

  “Sanatorium?”

  “Yes, I think it’s known as the Clockworks.”

  Ben bolted upright. The Clockworks: the place where Strasser had sent the senior Lenz electron microscopes. If Jürgen was Gerhard’s son, he would have inherited it. But was he really using it as a sanatorium?

  He attempted a breezy tone. “Oh, where’s that?”

  “The Alps. I don’t know exactly where. I’ve never been there. It’s exclusive, private, very luxurious. A real escape from the bustle of the city.”

  “I’d love to talk to a child who’s been there.” And find out what’s really going on.

  “Mr. Adams,” she said somberly, “the children who are invited are usually at the very end of their brief lives. Frankly, I don’t know of any who might still be living. But I’m sure one of the parents wouldn’t mind talking to you about Mr. Lenz’s generosity.”

  The man’s apartment was a fourth-floor walk-up in a dismal apartment building in Vienna’s twelfth district, a small and dark place that smelled of stale cigarette smoke and cooking grease.

  After the death of their beloved son at the age of eleven, the man explained, he and his wife had divorced. Their marriage had not survived the stress of their son’s illness and death. Prominently displayed next to the sofa was a large color photograph of their boy, Christoph. It was hard to tell his age; he could have been eight or eighty. He was completely bald, with a receding chin, a large head with a small face, bulging eyes, the wizened countenance of a very old man.

  “My son died at the sanatorium,” the man said. He had a full gray beard, bifocal glasses, a scraggly fringe around a bald pate. His eyes were filled with tears. “But at least he was happy at the end of his life. Dr. Lenz is a most generous man. I’m glad Christoph could die happy.”

  “Did you ever visit Christoph there, at the Clockworks?” Ben asked.

  “No, parents are not permitted. It’s a place only for children. All of the children’s medical problems are taken care of by an expert medical staff. But he sent me postcards.” He got up and returned a few minutes later with a picture postcard. The handwriting was a large, childish scrawl. Ben turned the card over and saw the color photograph of an alpine mountain. The caption beneath the photograph said SEMMERING.

  Lenz’s widow had mentioned Semmering.

  Strasser had talked about Gerhard Lenz’s research clinic in the Austrian Alps.

  Could it be the same place?

  Semmering.

  He had to find Anna immediately, get this information to her.

  He looked up from the card and saw the father weeping silently. In a minute the man was able to speak. “This is what I always tell myself. My Christoph died happy.”

  They had arranged to meet back at the hotel no later than seven o’clock that evening.

  If she was unable to return by then, Anna said, she’d call. If for some reason she was unable to call, or thought it was unsafe to do so, she had specified a fall-back meeting place: nine o’clock at the Schweizerhaus in the Prater.

  By eight o’clock she hadn’t returned to the hotel, and there was no message.

  She’d been gone for almost the entire day. Even if Lenz had agreed to see her, Ben couldn’t figure out how she could spend more than an hour or two at the foundation. But she’d been gone almost twelve hours.

  Twelve hours.

  He was beginning to worry.

  At eight-thirty, when she still hadn’t called, he left for the Schweizerhaus, on Strasse des Ersten Mai 2. By now he was beyond nervous; he was fearful that something had happened to her. He asked himself, Am I overreacting? She doesn’t have to account for her whereabouts at all times.

  Still…

  It was a lively place, renowned for its roasted pork hocks served with mustard and horseradish sauce. Ben sat alone at a table for two, waiting, nursing a Czech Budweiser beer.

  Waiting.

  The beer didn’t calm his nerves. All he could think about was Anna, and what might have become of her.

  By ten o’clock there was still no sign of her. He called the hotel, but she had neither arrived nor left a message. He repeatedly checked his phone to make sure it was on so she could reach him if she tried.

  He ordered dinner for two, but by the time the food arrived he’d lost his appetite.

  Around midnight he returned to the empty hotel room. He tried to read for a while but was unable to concentrate.

  The sandpaper of Chardin’s voice: Wheels within wheels—that was the way we worked.… Strasser: a cabal within a cabal… Lenz said he was doing work that would change the world.

  He fell asleep on top of the bed, in his clothes, with all the room lights on, and slept fitfully.

  He and Peter were strapped to two gurneys, side by side; above them was Dr. Gerhard Lenz, gowned and masked in full surgical garb. His light eyes, however, unmistakable. “We will make the two of them one,” he was saying to a hatchet-faced assistant. “We will connect their organs so that neither will be viable without the other. Together, both will survive—or together, both will die.” A gloved hand wielded a scalpel like a violin bow, pressing it against flesh in bold, confident strokes. The pain was beyond endurance.

  Struggling against the restraints, he turned to see his brother’s face, staring, frozen in horror.

  “Peter!” he called out.

  His brother’s mouth gaped open, and under the harsh overhead lights, Ben could see that Peter’s tongue had been removed. The heavy smell of ether filled the air, and a black mask was forcibly placed over Ben’s face. But it didn’t produce unconsciousness; if anything, he grew more alert, more aware of the horrors being done to him.

  He awoke at three in the morning.

  And still Anna hadn’t returned.

  A long, sleepless night followed.

  He tried to doze but was unable to. He hated not having anyone to call, or anything he could do to locate her.

  He sat, tried to read, couldn’t focus. He could think only of Anna.

  Oh, God, he loved her so.

  At seven, groggy and disoriented, he called down to the front desk, for the fifth time, to see whether Anna might have called from somewhere in the middle of the night.

  No message.

  He took a shower, shaved, ordered a room service breakfast.

  He knew something had happened to Anna; he was certain of it. There was no way in the world she would have voluntarily gone off someplace without calling in.

  Something had happened to her.

  He drank several cups of the strong black coffee, then forced himself to eat a hard roll.

  He was terrified.

  In Währinger Strasse, there was an “Internet café,” one of several such places listed in the Vienna telephone book. This one called itself an Internet Bar/Kaffehaus and turned out to be a garishly fluorescent
-lit room with a few iMacs on little round Formica tables, and an espresso machine. The floor was sticky and the place smelled of beer. It charged fifty Austrian shillings for thirty minutes of Internet access time.

  He typed the word Semmering in several different search engines and came up with the same entries each time: home pages for ski resorts, hotels, and general chamber-of-commerce-type descriptions of a village and ski resort in the Austrian Alps about ninety kilometers from Vienna.

  Desperate, knowing he could be making a terrible mistake, he found a public telephone and called the Lenz Foundation. This was the last place he knew she’d gone. It was crazy, almost pointless, to ask there, but what else was there to do?

  He asked for Jürgen Lenz’s office, and then asked Lenz’s executive assistant whether a woman named Anna Navarro had been in.

  She seemed to know Anna’s name immediately, without hesitation. But instead of answering his question, she demanded to know his name.

  Ben identified himself as being an “attaché” from the U.S. embassy.

  “Who is this calling?” the woman demanded to know.

  He supplied a false name.

  “Dr. Lenz has asked me to take a number, and he’ll call you back.”

  “Actually, I’m going to be out of the office the whole day. Let me talk to Dr. Lenz, if I could,” he said.

  “Dr. Lenz is not available.”

  “Well, do you have any idea when he’ll be free to talk? It’s important that we speak.”

  “Dr. Lenz is out of the office,” she said coldly.

  “All right, I’ve got his home phone number, I’ll try him there.”

  The secretary hesitated. “Dr. Lenz is not in Vienna,” she offered.

  Not in Vienna. Smoothly: “It’s just that the ambassador himself asked me to speak to him. A matter of great urgency.”

  “Dr. Lenz is with a special delegation from the International Children’s Health Forum—he’s taken them on a private tour of some of our facilities. That’s no secret. Did the ambassador want to join them? If so, I’m afraid it’s too late.”