The Sigma Protocol (45 page)

“You think he wanted you to hear this?” There was a hint of scorn in Sonnenfeld’s voice. “You think you would really have understood? Millions incinerated, while Max Hartman comes to America simply because he was fortunate enough to have money? People in his situation never told anyone, my friend. They often did their best to try to forget it themselves. I know these things because it is my business to know, but they are best left unexposed.”

Ben didn’t know how to reply, said nothing.

“Even Churchill and Roosevelt—Himmler made them an offer, you know. In May of ’44. He was prepared to sell the Allies every single Jew the Nazis had, if the Allies would give them one truck for every hundred Jews. The Nazis would dismantle the gas chambers, stop murdering the Jews at once—all for some trucks they could use against the Russians. The Jews were for sale—but there were no buyers! Roosevelt and Churchill said no—they wouldn’t sell their souls to the devil. Easy for them to say, no? They could have saved a million European Jews, but no. There were Jewish
leaders who desperately wanted to make this deal. You see, you want to talk about morality, this wasn’t so simple, was it?” Sonnenfeld’s tone was bitter. “Now it’s so easy to talk about clean hands. But the result is that you’re here today. You exist because your father made an unsavory deal to save his own life.”

Ben’s mind flashed back to the image of his father, old and frail in Bedford, and the image of him, crisp and chiseled in the old photograph. What he had to go through to get here, Ben couldn’t begin to imagine. Yet would he really feel compelled to hide this? How much else had he been hiding? “But still, this all leaves unanswered the matter of his name on that document,” Ben prompted, “identifying him as SS….”

“In name only, I’m sure.”

“Meaning what?”

“How much do you know about your father?”

Good question, Ben thought. He said, “Less and less, it seems.” Max Hartman, powerful and intimidating, conducting a board meeting with gladiatorial selfconfidence. Hoisting Ben, age six, way up in the air. Reading
The Financial Times
at breakfast, distant and elusive.

How I tried to earn his love, his respect! And what a warm glow his approval gave me when he so rarely granted it.

What an enigma the man has always been.

“I can tell you this much,” Sonnenfeld said impassively. “When your father was still a young man, he was already a legend in German financial circles. A genius, it was said. But he was a Jew. Early in the war, when the Jews were being sent away, he was given the opportunity to work for the
Reichsbank
instead, designing intricate financial schemes that would allow the Nazis to circumvent the Allied blockades. He was given this SS title as a sort of cover.”

“So in a sense he helped finance the Nazi regime,” Ben said in a monotone. This was somehow no surprise, but still he felt his stomach plummet at hearing it confirmed.

“Unfortunately, yes. I’m sure he had his reasons—he was pressured, he had no choice. He would have been enlisted in this Sigma project as a matter of course.” He paused again, watching Ben steadily. “I think you are not very good at seeing shades of gray.”

“Odd talk for a Nazi hunter.”

“Again with that journalist’s tag,” Sonnenfeld said. “I fight for justice, and in the fight for justice you must be able to distinguish between the venial and the venal, between ordinary and outsized wrongdoing. Make no mistake: hardship brings out the best in no one.”

The room seemed to revolve slowly around him. Ben clasped his arms around himself, and breathed deeply, trying for a moment of calm, a moment of clarity.

He had a sudden mental picture of his father in his study, listening to Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
as he sat in his favorite overstuffed chair in darkness. Often in the evenings after dinner Max would sit alone with the lights off,
Don Giovanni
on the stereo. How lonely the man must have been, how frightened that his ugly past would someday emerge. Ben was surprised at the tenderness he suddenly felt.
The old man loved me as much as he was able to love anyone. How can I despise him?
It occurred to Ben that the real reason Lenz grew to hate his own father was not so much the repugnance of Nazism as the fact that he had abandoned them.

“Tell me about Strasser,” Ben said, realizing that only a change of subject could diminish the vertigo he was undergoing.

Sonnenfeld closed his eyes. “Strasser was a scientific adviser to Hitler.
Gevalt
, he was not a human being. Strasser was a brilliant scientist. He helped run
I. G. Farben, you know this famous I. G. Farben, the big industrial firm that was controlled by the Nazis? There, he helped to invent a new gas in pellet form called Zyklon-B. You would shake the pellets and they would turn into gas. Like magic! They first tried it in the showers at Auschwitz. A fantastic invention. The poison gas would rise in the gas chambers, and as the level rose the taller victims would step on the others to try to breathe. But everyone would die in four minutes.”

Sonnenfeld paused, gazed into some middle distance. In the long silence Ben could hear the ticking of a mechanical clock.

“Very efficient,” Sonnenfeld at last resumed. “For this we must thank Dr. Strasser. And do you know that Allen Dulles, your CIA director in the fifties, was I. G. Farben’s American lawyer and loyal defender? Yes, it is true.”

Somewhere Ben had heard this before, but it still amazed him. Slowly, he said, “So both Strasser and Lenz were partners, in a sense.”

“Yes. Two of the most brilliant, most terrible Nazi scientists. Lenz with his experiments on children, on twins. A brilliant scientist, far ahead of his time. Lenz took a particular interest in the metabolism of children. Some he would starve to death in order to observe how their growth slowed and stopped. Some he would actually freeze, to see how that affected their growth. He saw to it that all the children who suffered from progeria, a horrible form of premature aging, were sent to him for study.” He went on bitterly: “A lovely man, Dr. Lenz. Very close to the high command, of course. As a scientist, he was better trusted than most politicians. He was thought to have ‘purity of purpose.’ And of course our Dr. Strasser. Lenz went to Buenos Aires too, as so many of them did after the war. Have you been
there? It is a lovely city. Truly. The Paris of South America. No wonder all the Nazis wanted to live there. And then Lenz died there.”

“And Strasser?”

“Perhaps Lenz’s widow knows the whereabouts of Strasser, but don’t even think of asking her. She’ll never reveal it.”

“Lenz’s widow?” Ben asked, sitting upright. “Yes, Jürgen Lenz mentioned his mother had retired there.”

“You spoke with Jürgen Lenz?”

“Yes. You know him, I gather?”

“Ah, this is a complicated story, Jürgen Lenz. I must admit to you, at first I found it extremely difficult to accept money from this man. Of course, without contributions we would have to close down. In this country, where they have always protected the Nazis, even protect them to this day, I get no donations. Not a cent! Here they haven’t prosecuted a single Nazi case in over twenty years! Here I was for years Public Enemy Number One. They used to spit at me on the street. And Lenz, well, from Lenz this so clearly seemed to be guilt money. But then I met the man, and I quickly changed my mind. He’s sincerely committed to doing good. For example, he’s the sole underwriter of the progeria foundation in Vienna. No doubt he wants to undo his father’s work. We mustn’t hold against him his father’s crimes.”

Sonnenfeld’s words resounded. His father’s crimes. How bizarre that Lenz and I should be in a similar situation.

“The prophet Jeremiah, you know, he tells us, ‘They shall say no more, the fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ And Ezekiel says, ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.’ It is very clear.”

Ben was silent. “You say Strasser may be alive.”

“Or he may be dead,” Sonnenfeld replied quickly. “Who knows about these old men? I’ve never been able to make certain.”

“You must have a file on him.”

“Don’t speak to me of such things. Are you in the grip of the fantasy that you will find this creature and he will tell you what you want, like some genie?” Sonnenfeld sounded evasive. “For years I have been dogged with young fanatics seeking vengeance, to slake some sense of disquiet with the blood of a certified villain. It is a puerile pursuit, which ends badly for everyone. You had persuaded me you were not one of them. But Argentina is another country, and surely the wretch is dead.”

The young woman who had answered the door when Ben arrived now reappeared, and a murmured conversation ensued. “An important telephone call which I must take,” Sonnenfeld said apologetically, and he withdrew to a back room.

Ben looked around him, at the huge slate-colored filing cabinets. Sonnenfeld had been distinctly evasive when the subject came to Strasser’s current whereabouts. Was he holding out on him? And if so, why?

From Sonnenfeld’s manner, he inferred that the telephone call was expected to be a long one. Perhaps long enough to allow a quick search of the files. Impulsively, Ben moved to an immense, five-drawer filing cabinet marked R–S. The drawers were locked but the key was on top of the cabinet: not exactly high security, Ben noted. He opened the bottom drawer, found it densely packed with yellowed file folders and crumbling papers. Stefans. Sterngeld. Streitfeld.

STRASSER
. The name penned in brown faded ink. He plucked it out, and then had a sudden thought. He went to the K–M file. There was a thick file for Gerhard
Lenz, but that wasn’t the one he was interested in. It was the thin file next to it—the file for his widow—that he wanted.

This one was tightly wedged in. He heard footsteps: Sonnenfeld was returning, more quickly than Ben had expected! He tugged on the folder, worried it from side to side until it was slowly released from the others. Taking the trench coat he’d draped on an adjoining chair, he quickly shoved the yellowed folders under it and returned to his seat just as Sonnenfeld entered.

“It’s a dangerous thing to disturb the peace of old men,” Sonnenfeld announced as he rejoined him. “Maybe you think they’re toothless, wizened creatures. Indeed they are. But they have a powerful support network, even now. Especially in South America, where they have extensive loyalists. Thugs, like the
Kamaradenwerk
. They are protected the way wild animals protect their enfeebled elders. They kill whenever they must—they never hesitate.”

“In Buenos Aires?”

“There more than anywhere else. Nowhere are they so powerful.” He looked weary. “This is why you must never go there and ask about the old Germans.”

Sonnenfeld got up unsteadily, and Ben rose, too. “Even today, you see, I must have a security guard at all times. It is not much, but it is what we can afford to pay for.”

“Yet you insist on living in a city where they don’t like questions about the past,” Ben said.

Sonnenfeld put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Ah, well, you see, if you are studying malaria, Mr. Hartman, you must live in the swamp, no?”

Julian Bennett, assistant deputy of operations at the National Security Agency, sat facing Joel Skolnik, the
deputy director of the Department of Justice in the small executive dining room in the NSA’s Fort Mead headquarters. Though Skolnik, lanky and balding, held a higher bureaucratic rank, Bennett’s manner was peremptory. The National Security Agency was structured in such a way as to insulate people like Bennett from bureaucratic oversight outside of the agency. The effect was to encourage a certain arrogance, and Bennett was not one to disguise it.

An overdone lamb chop and a lump of steamed spinach, mostly uneaten, sat on the plate in front of Skolnik. His appetite had long since disappeared. Past a thin veneer of amiability, Bennett’s manner was subtly hectoring, and his message frankly alarming.

“This doesn’t look good for you,” Bennett was telling him, not for the first time. His small, wide-spaced eyes and light-colored eyebrows gave him a vaguely porcine look.

“I realize this.”

“You’re supposed to be running a tight ship here,” Bennett said. His own plate was clean; he had devoured his porterhouse in several swift bites: plainly a man who ate simply for fuel. “And the stuff we’ve been coming across is pretty damn disquieting.”

“You’ve been clear about that,” Skolnik said, hating the way it came out—deferential, even cowed. He knew it was always a mistake to show fear to a man like Bennett. It was like blood in the water to a shark.

“The recklessness about matters of national security your people have shown—it compromises us all. I look at the way your staffers have conducted themselves, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. What’s the use of bolting the front door when the back door is swinging in the wind?”

“Let’s not exaggerate the possible exposure at issue,” Skolnik said. Even to himself, the starchy words sounded defensive.

“I want you to assure me that the rot is contained with the Navarro woman.” Bennett leaned over and patted Skolnik’s forearm in a gesture that was half intimate and half menacing. “And that you’ll use all means at your disposal to bring the woman in.”

“That much goes without saying,” the DOJ man said, swallowing hard.

“Now stand up,” the goateed man said, waving the Makarov in his left hand.

“It’ll do you no good. I won’t put my finger on the sensor,” said the detective, Hans Hoffman. “Now get out of here, before something happens that you’ll regret.”

“I never have regrets,” the man said blandly. “Stand up.”

Hoffman stood up reluctantly. “I tell you—”

The intruder rose too and approached him. “I tell you again,” Hoffman said, “it will do you no good to kill me.”

“I don’t need to kill you,” the man said blandly. In one lightning-swift movement he lunged.

Hoffman saw the glint of something metallic even before he felt the unbelievable pain explode in his hand. He looked down. There was a stump where his index finger had been. The cut had been perfect. At the base of where his finger had been, right next to the fatty part of the thumb, he could see a white circle of bone within a larger circle of flesh. In the millisecond before he screamed, he saw the razor-sharp hunting knife in the man’s hand, and then he noticed with dazed fascination the dismembered finger lying on the carpet like a useless
discarded chicken part flung there by some careless butcher.