Then he heard a shout from the encampment, an adolescent boy’s voice. Someone within had spotted him. The shout was soon joined by others, the wretched inmates suddenly waving at him, beckoning to him, calling to him. He understood at once what they wanted.
They wanted to be released.
They wanted his help. They saw him as a savior, someone outside who could help them escape. His stomach turned, he shivered, and not from the cold.
What was being done to them?
Suddenly a shout arose from another direction, and one of the guards pointed his weapon toward Ben. Now several of the guards were shouting at him, waving him away.
The threat was clear: get off the private property or we’ll shoot.
He heard a blast of gunfire and turned to see a fusillade of bullets pock the snow a few feet to his left.
They weren’t kidding, and they weren’t patient.
The refugee children were prisoners here. And Anna?
Was Anna inside there too?
Please, God, I hope she’s all right. I hope she’s alive.
He didn’t know whether to wish she was inside—or to pray she wasn’t.
Ben turned around and headed back down the mountainside.
“Well, I see you’re more aware now,” Lenz said, smiling brightly. He stopped at the foot of her bed and clasped his hands in front of him. “Perhaps now you’d like to say to whom you’ve told my real identity.”
“Screw you,” she said.
“I thought not,” he said equably. “Once the ketamine has worn off”—he glanced at his gold watch—“which will be in no more than another half an hour, certainly, you’ll be infused intravenously with about five milligrams of a powerful opioid called Versed. You have had this before? During surgery, perhaps?”
Anna gazed at him blankly.
He continued, unruffled. “Five milligrams is about the proper dose to make you relaxed but still responsive. You’ll feel a little rush, but this passes in ten seconds or so, and then you’ll feel calmer than you’ve ever felt before in your life. All your anxiety will seep out of you. It’s a wonderful feeling.”
He cocked his head to one side like a bird. “If we were to inject you with one single bolus of this drug, you’d stop breathing and very probably die. So we must titrate it slowly over eight to ten minutes. We certainly don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Anna gave a grunt that communicated, she hoped, both skepticism and sarcasm at once. Despite her chemically induced calm, she was at the same time deeply frightened.
“Rather, you’ll be found dead in your wrecked rental car, another victim of drunk driving—”
“I didn’t rent a car,” she slurred.
“Oh, in fact you did. Or rather, it was done for you, using your credit card. You were arrested last night in a neighboring town. Your blood-alcohol level was measured at two-point-five, which is surely why you got into an accident. You were kept overnight in a holding cell and then released. But you know how it is with problem drinkers—they never learn.”
She displayed no reaction. But her mind raced, desperate to find a way out of the maze. There had to be flaws in his plan, but where?
Lenz continued, “Versed, you see, is the most effective truth serum ever invented, even though it was not intended for this use. All the drugs the CIA has tried, like sodium pentothol or scopolamine, they never worked. But with the correct dose of Versed you’ll become so free of inhibitions that you’ll tell me anything I want to know. And here’s the magical thing: afterward you’ll remember nothing. You’ll talk and talk quite lucidly and yet, from the moment you’re put on the IV, you’ll have no memory of what happened. It’s really quite remarkable.”
A nurse entered the room, wide-hipped and squat and middle-aged. She rolled in a cart of equipment—tubes, blood-pressure cuffs, syringes—and began setting up. She watched Anna suspiciously as she filled a few of the syringes from little vials and then applied preprinted labels to them.
“This is Gerta, your nurse-anesthetist. She is one of our best. You are in good hands.” Lenz gave Anna a little wave as he left the room.
“How are you feeling?” Gerta asked perfunctorily, in a stern contralto, as she hung a bag of clear liquid on the IV stand to the left of Anna’s bed.
“Pretty…groggy…” Anna said, her voice trailing off, her eyes fluttering closed. But she was hyper-vigilant; now she had a tentative plan.
Gerta did something with what sounded like plastic tubing. After a few moments she said, “All right, I’ll come back. Doctor wants to wait until the ketamine is mostly out of your system. If we start the Versed now you may stop breathing. Anyway, I have to go to the anesthesia workroom. This sat probe is no good.” She closed the door behind her.
Anna opened her eyes and flung her body hard to the left, as hard as she could, augmenting the push by throwing her manacled arms into it. It was a movement she was beginning to master. The bed seemed to jump several inches toward the supply cart. There was no time to rest. One more try, and she was there.
She lifted her shoulders as far as the restraining belt would allow and pressed her face against the cold top edge of the cart. Out of the corner of her left eye she could see the safety pins, used to secure bandages, in their little square blister-wrap sterile packaging, just an inch or two away.
Yet still out of reach.
If she turned her neck to the left as far as it would go, she could almost look at the pack of safety pins straight on. The tendons on her neck and along her upper back were so strained they began to tremble. The ache quickly became excruciating.
Then, like a jeering child, she stuck her tongue all the way out. Tiny pinpoints of pain jabbed the under-side of her tongue at its root.
Finally she lowered her distended tongue to the surface of the cart as if it were a steam shovel. It touched the plastic of the package, and she slowly pulled her head backward, edging the pack along as she did, right to the edge of the cart. Just before it could teeter off the edge she clenched it between her teeth.
A footfall, and the door to her room came open.
Quick as a rattlesnake she lay back on the bed, the little blister-pack concealed under her tongue, its sharp edges poking at its base. How much had she seen? The nurse was coming toward her. Anna gagged but kept the packet in her closed mouth in a pool of saliva.
“Yes,” Gerta said, “ketamine can make you nauseated sometimes, it will do that. You’re awake, I see.”
Anna made a complaining mmmmph through her shut mouth and shut her eyes. Saliva pooled behind her front teeth. She forced herself to swallow.
Gerta came around to Anna’s right and began fumbling at the head of the bed. Anna shut her eyes and tried to make her breathing sound regular.
A few minutes later Gerta left the room again and closed the door quietly behind her.
She would be back much sooner this time, Anna knew.
There was blood in her mouth from where the packet had cut into soft tissue, and Anna moved it to her lips with her tongue and then spit it out, forward. It landed squarely on the back of her left hand. She moved her hands together and reached her right index finger over, pulling the safety-pin packet into her fist.
Now she moved quickly. She knew what she was doing, because she had picked these locks on more than one occasion when she had misplaced the key and was too embarrassed to ask for a replacement.
The wrapping came off with some difficulty, but then it was an easy thing to bend the safety pin’s point away from its clasp.
The left cuff first. She inserted the pinpoint into the lock, pushed the inner pins to the left, then to the right, and the lock clicked open.
Her left hand was free!
She felt exhilarated. Even more quickly now she freed her right hand, then the restraining belt, and then the door came open again with a low squeak. Gerta had returned.
Anna drew her hands back into the polyurethane cuffs so that they appeared still to be fastened an
d closed her eyes.
Gerta approached the bed. “I could hear you moving in here.”
Heart pounding so loud it had to be audible.
Anna opened her eyes slowly and made them look unfocused.
“I say enough is enough,” Gerta said menacingly. “I think you are making pretend.” Under her breath she added, “So we will have to take our chances.”
God, no.
She applied a rubber tourniquet to Anna’s left arm until the vein popped out, and inserted the intravenous needle, then turned her back to adjust the flow clamp on the IV tubing. In one snapping-turtle motion Anna pulled her hands free of the unlocked cuffs and tried silently to undo the tourniquet, quiet, must be quiet, but Gerta heard the snap of the rubber and turned around, and as she did Anna raised herself up off the bed as far as the chest belt would allow and caught the nurse’s neck with the crook of her right elbow, a strange gesture of affection. Pulled back hard on the rubber tube, hard against Gerta’s fleshy neck.
A yelp.
Gerta flailed her hands, reached for her neck, tried to claw her fingers under the garrote, could not get a purchase, her fingernails scratching at her own neck, wriggling madly. Her face purpled. Her mouth gasped and sucked for breath. Gerta’s fluttering hands slowed; she was probably losing consciousness.
Within a few minutes Anna, almost numb from exertion, had the nurse gagged and cuffed to the bed rail. Springing open the ankle cuffs, she slipped off the bed, her body feeling buoyant, and cuffed Gerta to the anesthesia machine as well, which would not easily move.
She removed Gerta’s key ring from her belt, and glanced at the anesthesia cart.
It was full of weapons. She scooped up a handful of packaged hypodermic needles and several small glass ampules of various drugs, then remembered she was wearing a hospital johnny with no pockets.
In the supply closet hung two white cotton doctor’s jackets. She put one on, stuffed the pilfered supplies in both slash pockets, and ran from the room.
Chapter Forty-three
The records office for the Semmering area occupied a small basement room in a Bavarian-style building housing a scattering of municipal workers. There were rows of green filing cabinets, arranged by the number of the parcel of land.
“The Schloss Zerwald is not accessible to the public,” the white-haired woman who ran the office said flatly. “It is part of the Semmering Clinic. Strictly private.”
“I understand that,” Ben said. “It’s actually the old maps themselves that I’m interested in.” When Ben went on to explain that he was a historian researching the castles of Germany and Austria, she looked vaguely disapproving, as if she’d just smelled something fetid, but ordered her trembling teenage assistant to snap-to and pull out the property map from one of the drawers along the side wall of the room. It was a complicated-looking system, but the white-haired woman knew exactly where to find the documents Ben wanted.
The map had been printed in the early nineteenth century. The owner of the parcel of land, which in those days took up much of the mountainside, was identified as J. Esterházy. A cryptic series of markings ran through the parcel.
“What does this mean?” Ben asked, pointing.
The old woman scowled. “The caves,” she said. “The limestone caves in the mountain.”
Caves. It was a possibility.
“The caves run through the Schloss’s property?”
“Yes, of course,” she said impatiently.
Under the Schloss, that meant.
Trying to contain his excitement, he asked, “Can you make a copy of this map for me?”
A hostile look. “For twenty shillings.”
“Fine,” he said. “And tell me something: is there a floor plan of the Schloss anywhere?”
The young clerk at the sporting goods shop examined the property map as if it were an insoluble algebra problem. When Ben explained that the markings indicated a network of caves, he quickly agreed.
“Yes, the old caves run right underneath the Schloss,” he said. “I think there even used to be an entrance into the Schloss from the caves, but that was a long time ago and it must be blocked off.”
“Have you been in the caves?”
The young clerk looked up, appalled. “No, of course not.”
“Do you know anyone who has?”
He thought a moment. “Ja, I think so.”
“Do you think he might be willing to take me there, be my guide?”
“I doubt it.”
“Can you ask?”
“I’ll ask, but I don’t value your chances.”
Ben hadn’t expected a man in his late sixties, but that was who entered the shop half an hour later. He was small and wiry, with cauliflower ears, a long misshapen nose, a pigeon chest, ropy arms. He spoke rapidly and irritably in German to the clerk as he entered, then fell silent when he met Ben.
Ben said hello; the man nodded.
“He’s a little old, frankly,” Ben told the salesman. “Isn’t there someone younger and stronger?”
“There is younger but not stronger,” the older man said. “And no one who knows the caves better. Anyway, I am not so sure I want to do this.”
“Oh, you speak English,” Ben said, surprised.
“Most of us learned English during the war.”
“Do the caves still have an entrance into the Schloss?”
“There used to be. But why should I help you?”
“I need to get inside the Schloss.”
“You can’t. It is now a private clinic.”
“Still, I must get inside.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say it’s for personal reasons that are worth a great deal of money to me.” He told the old Austrian what he was willing to pay for his services.
“We’ll need equipment,” the man said. “You can climb?”
His name was Fritz Neumann, and he had been caving around Semmering for longer than Ben had been alive. He was also immensely strong, yet nimble and graceful.
Toward the end of the war, he said, when he was a boy of eight, his parents had joined a Catholic workers’ Resistance cell that was secretly fighting the Nazis, who had invaded their part of Austria. The old Clockworks had been seized by the Nazis and turned into a regional command post.
Unknown to the Nazis who lived and worked in the Schloss, there was a crawl space off the basement of the old castle with a slot entrance to a limestone cave that ran beneath the castle’s property. The Schloss had in fact been built over this mouth quite deliberately, because the original inhabitants, concerned about attacks on their stronghold, had wanted a secret exit. Over the centuries the cave mouth had largely been forgotten.
But during the war, when the Nazis had commandeered the Clockworks, the members of the Resistance realized they were in possession of a crucial piece of knowledge that would enable them to spy on the Nazis, to commit sabotage and subversion—and, if they were quite careful about it, to do it without the Nazis even realizing how it was done.
The Resistance had spirited dozens of prisoners out of the Schloss, and the Nazis had never figured out how.
As an eight-year-old boy, Fritz Neumann had helped his parents and their friends, and he had committed the cave’s intricate passages to memory.
Fritz Neumann was the first off the ski lift, Ben close behind. The ski area was on the north face of the mountain. The Schloss was on the opposite side, but Neumann had judged it easier to reach the mouth of the cave this way.
Their skis had Randonee bindings, which allow the heel to go free for cross-country skiing but can be locked in for downhill. Even more important, the bindings allowed them to wear mountaineering boots instead of ski boots. Neumann had outfitted them both: flexible twelve-point crampons favored by Austrian climbers on hard ice; Petzl headlamps; ice axes with wrist leashes; climbing harnesses; pitons; and carabiners.
All easily obtained at the shop.
The guns Ben wanted were not so easily foun
d. But this was hunting country, and quite a few of the old man’s friends had handguns as well as shotguns, and one of them was willing to make a deal.
Wearing woolen balaclavas, windproof pants and gaiters, alpine climbing packs, and thin polypropylene gloves, they cross-country skied to the summit, then locked in their bindings for the long downhill stretch on the south face. Ben considered himself a good skier, but Neumann was a phenomenon, and Ben found it difficult to keep up as the older man negotiated the virgin snow. The air was frigid, and Ben’s face, the exposed part anyway, quickly began to smart. Ben found it amazing that Neumann was able to lead the way through paths that were barely paths, until he saw the dashes of red paint on the occasional fir tree, which seemed to mark the way.
They had been skiing for twenty minutes when they came to a crevasse at the beginning of the timberline, and shortly thereafter a steep gorge. They stopped about ten feet from the edge, removed their skis, and concealed them in a copse.
“The cave, as I tell you, it is very difficult to get to,” Neumann said. “Now we rope down. But you say you know how, yes?”
Ben nodded, inspecting the cliff. He estimated the drop at about a hundred feet, maybe less. From here he could see Lenz’s Schloss, so far down the mountain that it seemed an architect’s model.
Neumann set out a neat butterfly coil of rope. Ben was relieved to see it was dynamic kernmantle rope, made of twisted nylon threads.
“It is eleven millimeters,” Neumann said. “It is O.K. for you?”
Ben nodded again. For a drop like this, that was just fine. Whatever it took to reach Anna.
From this angle, he couldn’t see the mouth of the cave. He assumed it was an opening on the cliff face.
Neumann knelt near the cliff edge by an outcropping of rock, and began driving the pitons in with a hammer he took from a holster. Each piton gave off a reassuring ringing sound that rose in pitch the deeper it was driven in, indicating that it was sunk in solidly.
Then, looping the rope around the largest rock, he pulled it through the pitons.