The Sigma Protocol

  He removed his helmet and woolen cap, then the pack from his back, from which he took both of the semiautomatic pistols, placing everything but the weapons on one of the shelves. He slipped one of the weapons under the waistband of his heavy pants, at the small of his back. The other he held while he studied the photocopied floor plan. No doubt the place had been restored since its clock factory days, but it was unlikely that the basic plan had been much changed, or that the massive walls had been moved.

  He tried the doorknob. It turned easily, and the door opened.

  He emerged into a brightly lit corridor with stone floors and vaulted ceilings. There was no one in view.

  Arbitrarily, he turned right. The Vibram soles of his mountaineering boots muffled his footsteps. Except for the slight squish of wet leather, his walk was silent.

  He had not gone far before someone appeared at the end of the hall, striding directly toward him.

  Keep calm, he told himself. Act as if you belong.

  This was not easy, dressed as he was in his wet, mud-crusted climbing attire and heavy boots, his face still bruised and scratched from the incident in Buenos Aires.

  Quickly, now.

  On his left was a door. He stopped, listened for a moment, and then opened it, hoping what lay beyond was unoccupied.

  As he ducked into the room, the figure passed by, a man dressed in a white tunic or jumpsuit. A handgun was holstered at his waist. Obviously a guard.

  The room was perhaps twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. By the light from the corridor he could see that this was another storeroom, also lined with metal shelves. He located a switch and turned on the light.

  What he saw was too horrific to be real, and for a moment he was sure his eyes had been deceived by some sort of nightmarish optical illusion.

  But it was no illusion.

  God in heaven, he thought. This can’t be.

  He could barely stand to look, yet he couldn’t turn his eyes away.

  On the shelves were rows of dusty glass bottles, some as small as the Mason canning jars Mrs. Walsh used to preserve fruit in, some two feet tall.

  Each bottle held a fluid of some kind, which Ben assumed to be a preservative such as formalin, slightly cloudy with age and impurities.

  And floating in them, like pickles in brine, one to a bottle…

  No, this could not be.

  He felt his skin erupt in gooseflesh.

  In each bottle was a human baby.

  The bottles were arrayed with ghastly precision.

  In the smallest were tiny embryos, at the earliest stage of gestation, little pale pink prawns, translucent insects with grotesque large heads and tails.

  Then fetuses not much longer than an inch: hunched, stubby arms and oversized heads, suspended in the shrouds of their amniotic sacs.

  Fetuses not much bigger but looking more human, bent legs and waving arms, eyes like black currants, floating in perfectly round sacs surrounded by the ragged halo of the chorionic sac.

  Miniature infants, eyes closed, sucking thumbs, a tangle of tiny perfectly formed limbs.

  As the bottles increased in size so did their contents, until in the largest bottles floated full-term babies, ready to be born, eyes closed, arms and legs splayed, little hands waving or clenched, severed umbilical cords floating loose, swathed in translucent wisps of amniotic sac.

  There must have been a hundred embryos and fetuses and babies.

  Each bottle was labeled in German, in neat calligraphy, with a date (the date ripped from the womb?), prenatal age, weight in grams, size in centimeters.

  The dates ranged from 1940 to 1954.

  Gerhard Lenz had done experiments on human babies and children.

  It was worse than he’d ever imagined. The man was inhuman, a monster… But why were these ghastly exhibits still here?

  It was all he could do not to scream.

  He stumbled toward the door.

  On the facing wall were glass tanks, from a foot to almost five feet tall and two feet around, and in them floated not fetuses but small children.

  Small wizened children, from tiny newborns to toddlers to children seven or eight years old.

  Children, he guessed, who had been afflicted with the premature-aging syndrome known as progeria.

  The faces of little old men and women.

  His skin prickled.

  Children. Dead children.

  He thought of the poor father of Christoph in his gloomy apartment.

  My Christoph died happy.

  A private sanatorium, the woman at the foundation had said.

  Exclusive, private, very luxurious, she’d said.

  He turned, lightheaded, to leave the room, and heard footsteps.

  Carefully peering out of the doorway he saw another white-suited guard approaching, and he backed into the room, concealed himself behind the door.

  As the guard passed, he cleared his throat loudly, and he heard the footsteps halt.

  The guard, as Ben had expected, entered the room. Swift as a cobra, Ben lunged, slamming the butt of his revolver into the back of the guard’s head. The man collapsed.

  Ben shut the door behind him, placed his fingers on the guard’s neck and felt for a pulse. Alive but unconscious, though undoubtedly for a good long while.

  He removed the man’s holster and pulled out the Walther PPK, then stripped off the white jumpsuit.

  He removed his clammy clothes and donned the uniform. It was too large for him, but acceptable. Fortunately the shoes fit. With his thumb he flicked at the left of the Walther’s slide and removed the magazine. All eight brass cartridges were there.

  Now he had three handguns, an arsenal. He checked the pockets of the guard’s jumpsuit and found only a pack of cigarettes and a key-card, which he took.

  Then he returned to the corridor, pausing only to make sure no one else was in sight. Farther down the hall he came on the brushed steel double-doors of a large elevator, modern for this ancient building. He pressed the call button.

  A ping, and the doors opened immediately to reveal an interior lined with protective gray quilting. He entered, inspected the panel, and saw that a key-card had to be inserted before the elevator would move. He inserted the guard’s card, then pressed the button for the first floor. The doors closed rapidly, the elevator jolted upward, and opened a few seconds later onto another world entirely.

  It was a brightly lit, ultramodern-looking corridor that could have been in any prosperous corporate headquarters.

  The floors were carpeted in neutral industrial gray, the walls not the ancient stone of the floor below but smooth white tile. A couple of men in white coats, doctors or clinicians perhaps, passed by. One was pushing a metal cart. The other glanced at Ben but seemed to look through him.

  He strode purposefully down the hall. Two young Asian women, also in white jackets, stood by an open door to what appeared to be a laboratory, speaking a language Ben did not recognize. Absorbed in conversation, they paid no attention to him.

  Now he entered a large atrium, well lit by a combination of soft incandescent light and amber late-afternoon sun that filtered in through cathedral windows. This looked like it was once the grand entrance hall of the Schloss, artfully converted to a modern lobby. A graceful stone staircase wound upstairs. There were a number of doors in the lobby. Each was marked, in black type on white placards, with a number and letter, each accessible only by inserting a card into a card-reader. Each door probably led to a corridor.

  A dozen or so people were passing through, to and from the hallways, up or down the stairs, to the bank of elevators. Most wore lab coats, loose-fitting white pants, white shoes or sneakers. Only the guards, in their jump-suits, wore heavy-duty black shoes. A man in a white coat passed by the two Asian women and said something; the two women reversed course, back toward the laboratory. Obviously the man was someone senior, someone in charge.

  Two orderlies carried a stretcher across the lobby, on which an old man in a p
ale blue hospital gown lay still.

  Another patient in a hospital johnny came through the lobby, moving from corridor 3A to corridor 2B. This was a vigorous-looking young-middle-aged man of around fifty who hobbled as if he were in great pain.

  What the hell was all this?

  If Anna was indeed here, where was she?

  This clinic was far larger, far busier, than he had imagined. Whatever they were doing—whatever the purpose was of those nightmarish specimens in the basement, if indeed they had any bearing on the work being done here—there were a lot of people involved, both patients and doctors or laboratory researchers.

  She’s in here somewhere, I know she is.

  But is she safe? Alive? If she’d discovered whatever horrible thing was being done here, would they have let her live?

  Must go. Must move it.

  He walked through the atrium hurriedly, his face stern, a security guard dispatched to check out a disturbance. He stopped at the entrance to corridor 3B and inserted his key-card, hoping it gave him access to this area.

  The door lock clicked. He entered a long white corridor that could have been in any hospital anywhere.

  Among the many people passing by was a white-uniformed woman, presumably a nurse, who appeared to be walking a small child on a leash.

  It was as if she were walking a large, obedient dog.

  Ben looked at the child more closely and realized from the papery skin, the wrinkled and wizened face, that this was a little boy afflicted with progeria, looking very much like the child in the photographs in the father’s apartment he had so recently visited. He also looked like the full-grown children, preserved in formaldehyde, in that nightmarish basement room.

  The boy walked like an old man, his gait wide-legged and rickety.

  Ben’s fascination cooled to an icy anger.

  The boy stopped in front of a door and waited patiently while the woman holding the leash unlocked the door with a key on a loop around her neck. The door led into a large glassed-in area fully visible from the hall.

  The long room behind the plate glass could have been a hospital nursery, except that everyone inside was a progeric. There were seven or eight little wizened children here. At first glance, Ben thought they were on leashes, too; on closer inspection, he saw that each was connected to some sort of clear plastic tube coming from his or her back. The tubes were connected to shiny metal columns. It appeared that each child was being kept on an intravenous drip through the tubing. They had no eyebrows or eyelashes, their heads were small and shriveled, their skin crepey. The few who were walking shuffled like old men.

  Some squatted on the floor, quietly absorbed in games or puzzles. Two of them were playing together, their tubes entangled. A little girl with a long blond wig wandered aimlessly about the floor, chanting or talking to herself, her words inaudible.

  The Lenz Foundation.

  A few selected progeric children were invited each year to the clinic.

  No visitors were allowed.

  This was no summer camp, no retreat. The children were being treated like animals. They were, they had to be, human subjects in some sort of experiment.

  Children in the basement pickled in formaldehyde. Children being treated like dogs.

  A private sanatorium.

  This was neither a sanatorium nor, he was sure, a clinic.

  Then what was it? What kind of “science” was being done here?

  Nauseated, he turned and continued down the hall until it came to an end. To his left was a red door, locked, accessible only by key-card. Unlike most of the other hallway doors he’d seen here, this door had no window.

  The door was unmarked. He knew he had to find out what lay behind it.

  Ben inserted the guard’s key-card, but this time it did nothing. Apparently this door required a different level of access.

  Just as he turned away, the door came open.

  A man in a white coat emerged, clutching a clipboard, a stethoscope dangling out of one pocket. A doctor. The man glanced incuriously at Ben, nodded, and held the door open for him. Ben passed through the doorway.

  He was not prepared for what he saw.

  He was in a high-ceilinged room as big as a basketball court. The vaulted stone ceiling and leaded stained-glass cathedral windows appeared to be all that remained of the original architecture. The floor plan indicated that this enormous chamber had originally been a grand private chapel as big as a church. Ben wondered whether it had later been used as the main factory floor. He estimated it was more than a hundred feet long, maybe a hundred feet wide, the ceilings easily thirty feet high.

  Now it was clearly an immense medical facility. Yet at the same time it looked almost like a health club, at once well equipped and spartan.

  In one area of the room was a line of hospital beds, each separated from the other by a curtain. Some of the beds were empty; on others, maybe five or six of them, patients lay supine, connected to some sort of monitor and IV stand.

  In another area was a long row of black treadmills, each equipped with an EKG monitor. On a few of them elderly men and women were running in place, electrodes or probes sprouting from their arms and legs, necks and heads.

  Here and there were nurses’ stations, respirators, anesthesia equipment. A dozen or so doctors and nurses observed, assisted, or bustled about. All the way around the enormous room ran a catwalk, roughly twenty feet above the floor and ten feet from the ceiling.

  Ben realized that he had been standing at the room’s entrance for too long. In a guard’s uniform, he had to act as if he were on assignment. So he walked, slowly and purposefully, into the room, checking one side and then another.

  Sitting in a modern black-leather-and-steel chair was an old man. A plastic tube was attached to one arm and connected to an IV stand. The man was speaking on a phone, a folder of papers in his lap. Obviously he was a patient, but he was clearly engaged in some kind of business.

  In a few places the man’s hair had the downy look of a newborn’s. Around the sides the hair was coarser, denser, and more luxuriant, white or gray at the ends, but growing in black or dark brown.

  And the man looked familiar. His face was often on the cover of Forbes or Fortune, Ben thought. A businessman or investor, someone famous.

  Yes! It had to be Ross Cameron, the so-called “sage of Santa Fe.” One of the richest men in the world.

  Ross Cameron. There was no question about it now.

  Seated next to him was a much younger man whom Ben recognized right away. This was unquestionably Arnold Carr, the fortyish software billionaire and founder of Technocorp. Cameron and Carr were known to be friends; Cameron was sort of Carr’s mentor or guru, kind of a father-son relationship. Carr, too, was hooked up to an IV; he also was speaking on the phone, obviously conducting business, though without any papers.

  Two legendary billionaires, sitting side by side like a couple of guys in a barbershop.

  In a “clinic” in the Austrian Alps.

  Being infused with some kind of fluid.

  Were they being studied? Treated for something? Something bizarre was taking place here, something secret and important enough to require fully armed security, important enough to kill people over.

  A third man walked over to Cameron, said a few words in greeting. Ben recognized the chairman of the Federal Reserve, now in his seventh decade and among the most revered figures in Washington.

  Nearby, a nurse adjusted a blood pressure cuff on—well, it had to be Sir Edward Downey, but he looked the way he had when he was England’s Prime Minister, three decades ago.

  Ben kept walking until he reached the treadmills, where a man and a woman were running next to each other, talking, out of breath. They each wore gray sweatpants and sweatshirts and white running shoes, and both had electrodes taped to their foreheads, the backs of their heads and necks, their arms and legs. The threadlike wires coming out of the electrodes rose neatly behind each of them, out of the way, connected t
o Siemens monitors that seemed to be recording their heart rates.

  Ben recognized both of them, too.

  The man was Dr. Walter Reisinger, the Yale professor turned Secretary of State. In person, Reisinger looked healthier than he seemed on TV or in photographs. His skin glowed, though that might have been a result of the running, and his hair seemed darker, though it was probably dyed.

  The woman he was talking to on the next treadmill resembled Supreme Court Justice Miriam Bateman. But Justice Bateman was known to be nearly crippled with arthritis. During State of the Union addresses, when the Supreme Court filed in, Justice Bateman was always the slowest, walking with a cane.

  This woman—this Justice Bateman—was running like an Olympic athlete in training.

  Were these people look-alikes of famous world figures? Ben wondered. Doubles? Yet that wouldn’t explain the infusions, the training.

  Something else.

  He heard the Dr. Reisinger clone voice saying something to the Justice Bateman clone about “the Court’s decision.”

  This was no clone. This had to be Justice Miriam Bateman.

  So then what was this place? Was this some sort of health spa for the rich and famous?

  Ben had heard of such places, in Arizona or New Mexico or California, sometimes Switzerland or France. Places where the elite went to recover from plastic surgery, from alcoholism or drug dependency, to lose ten or twenty pounds.

  But this—?

  The electrodes, the IV tubes, the EKG screens…?

  These famous people—all, except Arnold Carr, old—were being closely monitored, but what for?

  Ben came upon a row of StairMasters, on one of which an ancient man was moving up and down at top speed, just as Ben regularly did at his health club. This man, too—no one Ben recognized—was clad in gray sweats. The front of his sweatshirt was darkened with sweat.

  Ben knew young athletes in their twenties who couldn’t sustain such a grueling pace for more than a few minutes. How in the world was this old man, with his wrinkled face and liver-spotted hands, able to do it?

  “He’s ninety-six years old,” a man’s voice boomed. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”