The Sigma Protocol

  Sonnenfeld looked pained. He averted his eyes. “There are times in life when one must choose sides,” he said. “When my treatment begins—”

  “Come, gentlemen,” Lenz interrupted again. “We must hurry.”

  Ben could hear the roar of a helicopter outside, as Godwin and Sonnenfeld moved toward the exit.

  “Benjamin,” Lenz said without turning around. “Please stay right there. I’m so glad to hear you may be interested in our project. So now you and I must have a little talk.”

  Ben felt something slam him from behind, and steel clamped against his wrist.

  Handcuffs.

  There was no way out.

  The guards dragged him through the great hall, past the exercise equipment and the medical monitoring stations.

  He screamed at the top of his lungs and let himself go limp. If any of the Wiedergeborenen remained, they’d see him being abducted, and surely they’d object. These were not evil people.

  But none of them remained, at least no one he could see.

  A third guard took his upper arm and joined the others. His legs and knees slid painfully against the stone floor, the abrasions excruciating. He kicked and struggled. A fourth arrived, and now they were able to hold Ben by each limb, though he torqued himself back and forth to make it as difficult for them as possible, and he kept shouting.

  They trundled him into an elevator. A guard pressed the second-floor button. In seconds the elevator opened on to a stark white corridor. As the guards carried him out—he’d ceased resisting; what was the point?—a passing nurse gaped at him, then looked away quickly.

  They brought him into what looked like a modified operating room and hoisted him onto a bed. An orderly who appeared to have been expecting him—had the guards radioed ahead?—fastened colored restraints to his ankles and wrists, and then, once he was secured to the table, removed the handcuffs.

  Exhausted, he lay flat, his limbs immobile. All of the guards but one filed out of the room, their work done. The remaining guard stood watch by the closed door, an Uzi across his chest.

  The door opened, and Jürgen Lenz entered. “I admire your cleverness,” he said. “I’d been assured that the old cave was sealed or at least impassable, so I thank you for pointing out the security risk. I’ve already ordered the entrance dynamited.”

  Ben wondered: Did Godwin really invite him to join them? Or was his old mentor simply trying to neutralize him? Lenz was far too suspicious to trust him anyway.

  Or was he?

  “Godwin asked me to join the project,” Ben said.

  Lenz wheeled a metal cart over next to the bed and busied himself with a hypodermic needle.

  “Godwin trusts you,” Lenz said, turning around. “I myself do not.”

  Ben watched his face. “Trusts me about what?”

  “About respecting our need for confidentiality. About who you or your investigative friend might have already talked to.”

  Here was his vulnerability! “If you release her unharmed, you and I can strike a bargain,” Ben said. “We each get what we want.”

  “And, of course, I can trust you to keep your word.”

  “It’d be in my own best interests,” Ben said.

  “People do not always act in their own self-interest. If I were ever to forget it, the angeli rebelli were there to remind me.”

  “Let’s keep it simple. My interest is in having you release Anna Navarro. Yours is to keep your project secret. We have a mutual interest in striking a deal.”

  “Well,” Lenz said dubiously. “Perhaps. But first I’ll need a little chemically inspired honesty, in case you don’t come by it naturally.”

  Ben tried to suppress the wave of panic. “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing harmful. A pleasant experience, in fact.”

  “I don’t think you have time for this. Especially with law-enforcement agents due to arrive at any second. This is your last chance to deal.”

  “Ms. Navarro is here on her own,” Lenz said. “She hasn’t called in anyone else. She told me so herself.” He held up the hypodermic. “And I assure you she was speaking the truth.”

  Keep conversing. Keep him diverted.

  “How do you know you can trust the scientists on your team?”

  “I don’t. Everything, all the materials, the computers, the sequencers, the slides, the formulas for the infusions—they’re all here.”

  Ben pressed. “You’re still vulnerable. Somebody could get access to whatever offsite storage arrangements you’ve got for the data files. And no encryption is unbreakable.”

  “Which is precisely why there is no offsite storage,” Lenz said, with evident satisfaction in demonstrating the fallacies in Ben’s suppositions. “That represents a risk I cannot afford. In all honesty, I did not get where I am by placing excessive trust in my fellow man.”

  “As long as we’re both being honest, let me ask you something.”

  “Yes?” Lenz tapped Ben’s left forearm until a vein popped up.

  “I’d like to know why you had my brother killed.”

  Lenz jabbed a needle into the vein with what seemed unnecessary force. “It should never have happened. It was done by fanatics among my security people, and it’s something I deeply regret. A terrible mistake. They were concerned that his discovery of Sigma’s original board would imperil our work.”

  Ben’s heart thudded, and again he fought to control himself. “And my father? Did your ‘fanatics’ kill him, too?”

  “Max?” Lenz looked surprised. “Max is a genius. I very much admire the man. Oh no, I wouldn’t harm a hair on his head.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “Did he go somewhere?” Lenz asked innocently.

  Move on.

  “Then why kill all those other old men…?”

  There was a slight twitch under Lenz’s left eye. “Housecleaning. For the most part, we’re talking about individuals with personal involvement in Sigma who sought to resist the inevitable. They complained that Sigma had fallen under my sway, felt displaced by my emerging role. Oh, all our members were treated generously…”

  “Kept on a string, you mean. Given payments to fortify their discretion.”

  “As you like. But it was no longer enough, not now. What it came down to was a failure of vision. The point remains that they declined to, shall we say, get with the program. Then there were those who became importunate, possibly indiscreet, had long since ceased to have anything to offer. They were loose threads, and the time had come to snip them. Perhaps it seems harsh, but when there’s this much at stake, you do not simply give people a firm talking to, or spank their wrists, or put them in ‘time-out,’ yes? You take more definitive measures.”

  Don’t give up, Ben told himself. Keep him engaged.

  “Murdering these old men in itself seems a foolish risk, don’t you think? The deaths were bound to attract suspicion.”

  “Please. All the deaths appeared to be natural, but even if the toxin were discovered, these were men with plenty of worldly enemies—”

  Lenz heard the sound at the same moment Ben did.

  A burst of machine-gun fire not far away.

  And then another, even closer.

  A shout.

  Lenz turned toward the door, hypodermic needle in one hand. He said something to the guard standing by the door.

  The door burst open in a hail of bullets.

  A scream, and the guard collapsed in a pool of his own blood.

  Lenz dropped to the floor.

  Anna!

  Ben’s relief was enormous. She’s alive, somehow she’s alive.

  “Ben!” she shouted, flinging the door shut behind her and turning the lock. “Ben, you all right?”

  “I’m all right,” he called.

  “Stand up!” she screamed at Lenz. “You goddamned son of a bitch.”

  She advanced, machine gun leveled. She was wearing a doctor’s short white coat.

  Lenz stood. His face wa
s flushed, his silver hair mussed. “My guards will be here any second.” His voice quavered.

  “Don’t count on it,” Anna replied. “I’ve sealed off the entire wing, and the doors are jammed from the outside.”

  “You’ve killed that guard, I think,” Lenz said, bravado returning to his voice. “I thought the United States trained its agents only to kill in self-defense.”

  “Haven’t you heard? I’m off duty,” Anna said. “Hands away from your body. Where’s your weapon?”

  Lenz was indignant. “I have none.”

  Anna approached. “You don’t mind if I look, do you? Hands away from your body, I said.”

  Slowly she took a step toward Lenz, slid her free hand inside his jacket. “Let’s see,” she said. “I sure hope I can do this without setting off the damned machine gun. I’m not too familiar with these little guys.”

  Lenz paled.

  She produced a small handgun from inside Lenz’s suit with a flourish, like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a top hat.

  “Well, well,” she said. “Pretty slick for an old man, Jürgen. Or do your friends still call you Gerhard?”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Ben gasped, “Oh, my God.”

  Lenz pursed his lips, and then, oddly, he smiled.

  Anna pocketed Lenz’s handgun. “For the longest time it baffled me,” she said. “The federal ID lab ran the prints but turned up nothing, no matter how many databases they used. They tried the army intelligence files, but still nothing. Until they went back to the old ten-print cards from the war and a few years after, which haven’t yet been digitized, why should they be, right? Your SS prints were included in the Army’s files, I guess because you escaped.”

  Lenz watched her, amused.

  “The techies speculated that maybe the prints on the photo I’d sent them were old, but the strange thing was, the fingerprint oil, the perspiration residue they call it, was fresh. Made no sense to them.”

  Ben looked at Lenz. Yes, he resembled the Gerhard Lenz who appeared in the picture with Max Hartman. Lenz in that 1945 photo was in his mid-forties. That made him, what, over a hundred years old.

  It seemed impossible.

  “I was my own first successful subject,” Gerhard Lenz said quietly. “Almost twenty years ago I was for the first time able to arrest, then reverse, my own aging. Only a few years ago did we devise a formulation that works reliably on everyone.” He was looking off in the distance, his gaze unfocused. “It meant that everything that Sigma stood for could now be made secure.”

  “All right,” Anna interrupted. “Give me the key to the restraints.”

  “I don’t have the key. The orderly—”

  “Forget it.” She shifted the machine gun to her right hand, pulled a straightened paper clip out of a jacket pocket, and freed Ben, handing him a long plastic object, which he glanced at and understood at once.

  “Don’t move a muscle,” Anna shouted, thrusting the Uzi in Lenz’s direction. “Ben, take those restraints and lock this bastard to something immobile.” She quickly looked around. “We’ve got to get out of here as fast as possible, and—”

  “No,” Ben said, steely.

  She turned, startled. “What are you—?”

  “He’s holding prisoners here—young people in tents outside, sick kids in at least one of the wards. We’ve got to let them out first!”

  Anna understood immediately. She nodded. “Fastest way is to shut down the security system. De-electrify the fences, unlock…” She turned to Lenz, adjusted the machine gun in her hands. “There’s a master control panel, an override, in your office. We’re taking a little walk.”

  Lenz looked phlegmatic. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about. All security for the clinic is controlled from the central guard station on the first level.”

  “Sorry,” Anna said. “I’ve already ‘debriefed’ one of your guards.” She pointed with the Uzi toward a closed door, not the one through which they’d entered. “Let’s go.”

  Lenz’s office was immense, dark, cathedral-like.

  Glimmers of pale light filtered in through slot windows cut into the stone walls high above their heads. Most of the room was in shadows, except for a small circle of light from a green-glass-shaded library lamp in the middle of Lenz’s massive walnut desk.

  “I assume you don’t object to my putting on the lights so I can see what I’m doing,” Lenz said.

  “Sorry,” Anna said. “We don’t need it. Just go around to the other side of your desk and push the button that raises the control panel. Let’s make this easy.”

  Lenz hesitated but a moment, then followed her directions. “This is a pointless exercise,” he said with weary contempt as he walked around to his side of the desk. She followed, sidling, the weapon always leveled at him.

  Ben came just behind her. A second set of eyes in case Lenz attempted something, as he was sure Lenz would do.

  Lenz pushed a recessed button at the front edge of the desk. There was a mechanical rumble, and a long, flat section arose from the middle of the desktop like a horizontal tombstone: a brushed-steel instrument panel, strange-looking atop the Gothic desk.

  Set into the steel was what appeared to be a flat plasma screen, on which nine small squares, glowing ice blue, were arranged in rows of three. Each square display showed a different view of the interior and exterior of the Schloss. Below the screen was an array of silver toggle switches.

  In one display the progeric children played, tethered to their poles; in another, refugees milled about around their tents on the snow, smoking. Guards stood by various entrances. Other guards patrolled the grounds. Winking red lights every few feet along the electrified fences atop the ancient stone walls, presumably showing that the system was still operational.

  “Move it,” Anna commanded.

  Lenz bowed his head indulgently, and began toggling each switch off in order from left to right. Nothing happened, no sign of the security system shutting down. “We will find other progerics,” Lenz said as he switched them off, “and there’s an endless supply of youthful war refugees, displaced children the world doesn’t miss—there always seems to be a war somewhere.” This thought seemed to amuse him.

  The winking red lights had gone out. A cluster of refugee children was playing a game near one of the tall iron gates. One of them pointed—noticing that the red power lights had stopped blinking.

  Another of them ran up to the gate, tugged at it.

  The gate slowly came open.

  Tentatively the child walked through the gate, looking back at the others, beckoning. Slowly another joined him, passing through the gate to freedom. They appeared to be shouting to the others, though there was no sound.

  Then a few more of the children. A bedraggled-looking girl with matted curly hair. Another young boy.

  More children.

  Frenetic movement. The children began to scramble out, pushing and shoving.

  Lenz watched, his expression inscrutable. Anna’s attention was riveted on him, the Uzi still pointed.

  In another screen, a door to the children’s ward was now wide open. A nurse appeared to be waving the children out, looking around furtively.

  “So they are escaping,” Lenz said, “but for you it will not be so easy. Forty-eight security guards have been trained to shoot any intruders on sight. You will never make it outside.” He reached for a large ornate brass lamp to switch it on, and Ben snapped to attention, sure that Lenz was about to pick the lamp up to hurl or swing it, but instead Lenz tugged at a protruding section of the base and pulled out a small oblong object that he instantly pointed at Ben. It was a compact, brass-plated pistol, cleverly concealed.

  “Drop it!” Anna shouted.

  Ben was a few feet to Anna’s side, and Lenz could not cover them both. “I suggest you put down your weapon at once,” Lenz said. “That way no one will be hurt.”

  “I don’t think so,” Anna said. “We’re not exactly evenly
matched.”

  Lenz, unfazed, said blandly, “But you see, if you begin to fire at me, your friend here will be killed, too. You must ask yourself how important it is to kill me—whether it’s really worth it.”

  “Drop the goddamn toy gun,” Anna said, although Ben could see it was no toy.

  “Even if you succeed in killing me, you change nothing. My work will continue even without me. But your friend Benjamin will simply be dead.”

  “No!” came a hoarse shout.

  An old man’s voice.

  Lenz spun around to look.

  “Lassen Sie ihn los! Lassen Sie meinen Sohn los! Let him go!”

  The voice came from a corner of the great room that was hidden in shadows. Lenz pointed his weapon toward the voice, then seemed to reconsider, and swung it back toward Ben.

  The voice again: “Let my son go!”

  In the dim light Ben could just make out the seated figure.

  His father. In his hand was a gun, too.

  For a moment Ben couldn’t speak.

  He thought it might be a trick of the strange oblique light, and he looked again, and knew that what he saw was real.

  Quieter now, Max’s voice: “Let them both go.”

  “Ah, Max, my friend,” Lenz called, in a loud and hearty voice. “Perhaps you can talk reason to these two.”

  “Enough of the killing,” Max said. “Enough bloodshed. It’s over now.”

  Lenz stiffened. “You are a foolish old man,” he replied.

  “You’re right,” Max said. He remained seated, but his gun was still trained on Lenz. “And I was a foolish young man, too. I was beguiled by you then, just as now. All my life I’ve lived in fear of you and your people. Your threats. Your blackmail.” His voice rose, choked with rage. “No matter what I built or what I became, you were always there.”

  “You can lower your gun, my friend,” Lenz said mildly. His weapon was still pointed at Ben, but for a split-second he turned to Max.

  I can rush him, tackle him to the floor, Ben thought. The next time his attention is diverted.

  Max continued as if he hadn’t heard, and as if there were no one in the room but Lenz. “Don’t you see I’m not afraid of you any longer?” His voice reverberated against the stone walls. “I will never forgive myself for what I did, for helping you and your butcher friends. For making my deal with the devil. Once I thought it was the right thing to do, for my family, for my future, for the world’s. But I was lying to myself. What you did to my son, my Peter—” His voice broke.