The Sigma Protocol (64 page)

And suddenly, for the briefest moment, everything was quiet. In the near-silence Ben could hear the distant singing of a bird.

Anna said, “Ben, you O.K.?”

He grunted yes.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, turning to see what had happened. Then she spun back around toward the doorway.

Strasser, crouched on the floor in his pale blue bathrobe, shielding his face with his hands, keened and keened.

“Strasser?” she repeated.

“
Gott im Himmel
,” he moaned. “
Gott im Himmel. Sie haben mein Leben gerettet!
” Good God in heaven. You saved my life.

Images. Shapeless and unfocused, devoid of significance or definition, outlines blurring into plumes of gray, disintegrating into nothingness like a jet’s exhaust tracks in a windy sky. At first, there was only awareness, without even any defined object of awareness. He was so cold. So very cold. Save for the spreading warmth on his chest.

And where there was warmth, he felt pain.

That was good. Pain was good.

Pain was the Architect’s friend. Pain he could manage, could banish when he needed to. At the same time, it meant he was still alive.

Cold was not good. It meant that he had lost a great deal of blood. That his body had gone into shock to lessen the further loss of blood: his pulse would have slowed, his heart beating with lessened force, the vessels in his extremities constricting to minimize the flow of blood to non-vital parts of the body.

He had to do an inventory. He was on the ground, motionless. Could he hear? For a moment, nothing disturbed the profound silence within his head. Then, as if a connection had been established, he could hear voices, faintly, muffled, as if inside a building…

Inside a house.

Inside
whose
house?

He must have lost a great deal of blood. Now he forced himself to retrieve the memories of the past hour.

Argentina. Buenos Aires.

Strasser.

Strasser’s house. Where he had expected Benjamin Hartman and Anna Navarro and where he had encountered…
others
. Including someone armed with a marksman’s rifle.

He had taken several gunshots to the chest. Nobody could survive that.
No!
He banished the thought. It was an unproductive thought. A thought such as an amateur might have.

He had not been shot at all. He was fine. Weakened in ways he could compensate for, but not out of the running. They
thought
he was out of the running, and that would be his strength. The images wavered before his mind, but for a brief while he was able to fix them, the images, like passport photos, of his three targets. In order: Benjamin Hartman; Anna Navarro; Josef Strasser.

His mind was as thick and opaque as old crankshaft oil, but, yes, it would function. Yet again, it was a matter of mental concentration: he would
assign
the injuries to another body—a vividly conceived doppelgänger, someone who was bloodied and in shock but
who was not he
. He was fine. Once he had gathered his reserves, he would be able to move, to stalk. To kill. His sheer force of will had always triumphed over adversity, and it would again.

Had an observer been keeping a close watch on Hans Vogler’s body, he might possibly have detected, amid this furious gathering of mental fortitude, the barest flicker of an eyelid, nothing more. Every physical movement would now be planned and measured out
in advance, the way a man dying of thirst in a desert might ration swallows from a canteen. There would be no wasted movement.

The Architect lived to kill. It was his area of unexampled expertise, his singular vocation. Now he would kill if only to prove that he still lived.

“Who are you?” asked Strasser in a high-pitched, hoarse voice.

Ben glanced from the nurse-impostor in her blood-drenched white uniform, sprawled on the floor, to the assassin who had almost killed them both, to the mysterious protectors his father had hired, both now lying murdered on the red clay tiles of the patio.

“Herr Strasser,” Anna said, “the police will be here any moment. We have very little time.”

Ben understood what she was saying: the Argentine police weren’t to be trusted; they couldn’t be here when the police arrived.

They would have very little time to learn what they needed from the old German.

Strasser’s face was deeply creased and striated, etched with countless crisscrossing lines. His liver-colored lips stretched downward in a grimace, and they were wrinkled too, like elongated prunes. Seated on either side of his creviced, wide-nostriled nose were deep-sunk dark eyes like raisins in a ball of dough. “I am not Strasser,” he protested. “You are confused.”

“We know both your real name and your alias,” Anna said impatiently. “Now tell me: the nurse—was she your regular one?”

“No. My usual nurse was sick this week. I have anemia and I need my shots.”

“Where have you been for the last month or two?”

Strasser shifted from one foot to another. “I have to
sit down,” he wheezed. He moved slowly down the hallway.

They followed him down the hall, to a large, ornate, book-lined room. It was a library, a two-story atrium with walls and shelves of burnished mahogany.

“You live in hiding,” Anna said. “Because you’re a war criminal.”

“I am
no
war criminal!” Strasser hissed. “I’m as innocent as a baby.”

Anna smiled. “If you aren’t a war criminal,” she replied, “why are you hiding?”

He faltered, but only for a moment. “Here it has become fashionable to expel former Nazis. And yes, I was a member of the National Socialist party. Argentina signs agreements with Israel and Germany and America—they want to change their image. Now they only care what America thinks. They’d expel me just to make the American President smile. And you know, here in Buenos Aires, tracking down Nazis is a business! For some journalists it’s a full-time job, how they make their living! But I was never a Hitler loyalist. Hitler was a ruinous madman—that was clear early in the war. He would be the destruction of all of us. Men like me knew that other accommodations had to be reached. My people sought to kill the man before he could do further damage to our industrial capacities. And our projections were correct. By the war’s end, America had three-quarters of the world’s invested capital, and two-thirds of the world’s industrial capacity.” He paused, smiled. “The man was simply bad for business.”

“If you’d turned against Hitler, why are you still protected by the
Kamaradenwerk?
” Ben asked.

“Illiterate thugs,” Strasser scoffed. “They are as ignorant of history as the avengers they seek to thwart.”

“Why did you go out of town?” Anna interrupted.

“I was staying at an
estancia
in Patagonia owned by my wife’s family. My late wife’s family. At the foot of the Andes, in Río Negro province. A cattle and sheep ranch, but very luxurious.”

“Do you go there regularly?”

“This is the first time I go there. My wife died last year and… Why do you ask these things?”

“That’s why they couldn’t find you to kill you,” Anna said.

“Kill me…But
who
is trying to kill me?”

Ben looked at Anna, urging her to continue speaking.

She replied, “The company.” “The company?”

“Sigma.”

She was bluffing, Ben knew, but she did it with great conviction. Chardin’s words came to his mind, unbidden.
The Western world, and much of the rest, would respond to its ministrations, and it would accept the cover stories that accompanied them
.

Now Strasser was brooding. “The new leadership. Yes, that is it. Ah, yes.” His raisin eyes gleamed.

“What is the ‘new leadership’?” Ben prompted.

“Yes, of course,” Strasser went on as if he hadn’t heard Ben. “They are afraid I know things.”

“
Who?
” Ben shouted.

Strasser looked up at him, startled. “I helped them set it up. Alford Kittredge, Siebert, Aldridge, Holleran, Conover—all those crowned heads of corporate empires. They had contempt for me, but they needed me, didn’t they? They needed my contacts high up in the German government. If the venture wasn’t properly multinational, it had no hope of succeeding. I had the trust of the men at the very top. They knew I had done things for them that forever placed me beyond the pale of ordinary humanity. They knew I had made that ultimate
sacrifice for them. I was a go-between trusted by all sides. And now that trust has been betrayed, exposed for the charade it always was. Now it has become clear that they were using me for their own ends.”

“You talked about the new leaders—is Jürgen Lenz one of them?” Anna asked urgently. “Lenz’s son?”

“I have never met this Jürgen Lenz. I didn’t know Lenz had a son, but then I wasn’t an intimate of his.”

“But you were both scientists,” Ben said. “In fact, you invented Zyklon-B, didn’t you?”

“I was one of a
team
that invented Zyklon-B,” he replied. He pulled at his shabby blue bathrobe, adjusted it at the neck. “Now all the apologists attack me for my role in this, but they do not consider how elegant was this gas.”

“Elegant?” Ben repeated. For a second he thought he’d misheard.
Elegant
. The man was loathsome.

“Before Zyklon-B, the soldiers had to shoot every prisoner,” Strasser said. “Terrible bloodbaths. Gas was so clean and simple and elegant. And you know, gassing the Jews actually spared them.”

Ben echoed: “Spared them.” Ben was sickened.

“Yes! There were so many deadly diseases that went around those camps, they would have suffered much longer, much more painfully. Gassing them was the most humanitarian option.”

Humanitarian. I’m looking in the face of evil
, Ben thought.
An old man in a bathrobe uttering pieties
.

“How nice,” Ben said.

“This is why we called it ‘special treatment.’”

“Your euphemism for extermination.”

“If you wish.” He shrugged. “But you know, I didn’t hand-pick victims for the gas chambers like Dr. Mengele or Dr. Lenz. They call Mengele the Angel of Death, but Lenz was the real one. The real Angel of Death.”

“But not you,” Ben said. “You were a scientist.”

Strasser sensed the sarcasm. “What do you know of science?” he spat. “Are you a scientist? Do you have any idea how far ahead of the rest of the world we Nazi scientists were? Do you have any
idea?
” He spoke in a high tremulous voice. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth. “They criticize Mengele’s twin studies, yet his findings are still cited by the world’s leading geneticists! The Dachau experiments in freezing human beings—those data are still used! What they learned at Ravensbrück about what happens to the female menstrual cycle under stress—when the women learned they were about to be executed—scientifically this was a breakthrough! Or Dr. Lenz’s experiments on aging. The famine experiments on Soviet prisoners of war, the limb transplants—I could go on and on. Maybe it’s not polite to talk about it, but you still use our science. You’d rather not think about how the experiments were done, but don’t you realize that one of the main reasons we were so advanced was precisely
because
we were able to experiment on live human beings?”

Strasser’s creased face had gotten even paler as he spoke, and now it was chalk-white. He had grown short of breath. “You Americans are disgusted by how we did our research, but you use fetal tissue from abortions for your transplants, yes? This is acceptable?”

Anna was pacing back and forth. “Ben, don’t debate with this monster.”

But Strasser would not stop. “Of course, there were many crackpot ideas. Trying to make girls into boys and boys into girls.” He chortled. “Or trying to create Siamese twins by connecting the vital organs of the twins, a total failure, we lost many twins that way—”

“And after Sigma was established, did you continue to keep in touch with Lenz?” Anna asked, cutting him off.

Strasser turned, seemingly perturbed at the interruption.
“Certainly. Lenz relied on me for my expertise and my contacts.”

“Meaning what?” Ben said.

The old man shrugged. “He said he was doing work, doing research—
molecular
research—that would change the world.”

“Did he tell you what it was, this research?”

“No, not me. Lenz was a private, secretive man. But I remember he said once, ‘You simply cannot fathom what I’m working on.’ He asked me to procure sophisticated electron microscopes, very hard to get in those days. They had just been invented. Also, he wanted various chemicals. Many things that were embargoed because of the war. He wanted everything crated and sent to a private clinic he had set up in an old
Schloss
, a castle, he had seized during the invasion of Austria.”

“Where in Austria?” Anna asked.

“The Austrian Alps.”

“Where in the Alps? What town or village, do you remember?” Anna persisted.

“How can I possibly remember this, after all these years? Maybe he never told me. I only remember Lenz called it ‘the Clockworks’—because it had once been some kind of clock factory.”

A scientific project of Lenz’s. “A laboratory, then? Why?”

Strasser’s lips pulled down. He sighed reproachfully. “To continue the research.”

“What research?” he said.

Strasser fell silent, as if lost in thought.

“Come
on!
” Anna said. “
What
research?”

“I don’t know. There was much important research that began during the Reich. Gerhard Lenz’s work.”

Gerhard Lenz: what was it Sonnenfeld had said about Lenz’s horrific experiments in the camps? Human experimentation… but what?

“And you don’t know the nature of this work?”

“Not today. Science and politics—it was all the same to these people. Sigma was, from the beginning, a means of funneling support to certain political organizations, subverting others. The men we’re talking about—these were already men of enormous influence in the world. Sigma showed them that if they pooled their influence, the whole could be far, far greater than the sum of its parts. Collectively, there was very little they couldn’t affect, direct, orchestrate. But, you know, Sigma was a living thing. And like living things, it evolved.”