The Sigma Protocol (72 page)

Then, at last, the passageway began to widen, its ceiling rising to four feet, enabling him to lift his numbed belly out of the ice water, get to his feet, and stoop-walk.

It was not long, though, before his back began to ache, and rather than continue he stopped for a moment and set down the pack, resting his hands on his thighs.

When he was able to go farther, he noticed that the ceiling was lowering again, back to two, maybe three feet high. He got onto his hands and knees and began scuttling along like a crab.

But not for long. The rocky floor bruised his kneecaps. He attempted to ease the stress by putting his weight on his elbows and toes instead. When he wearied of that, he continued crawling. The ceiling became lower still, and he turned onto his side, pushing with his feet and pulling with his arms along the winding tunnel.

Now the ceiling height had diminished to no more than eighteen inches, scraping against his back, and he had to stop for a moment to suppress a wave of panic. He was back to belly-crawling again, only this time there was no end in sight. His headlamp shone a beam for twenty feet or so, but the coffin-sized, even coffin-shaped tunnel seemed to go on and on. The walls seemed to narrow.

Through the scrim of his fear, he observed that the passage appeared to be winding slowly uphill, that water no longer pooled on the floor, though it was still damp, and that, horribly, rock was now scraping against both his stomach and his back.

He continued pushing his pack ahead of him. The tunnel was now barely twelve inches high.

Ben was trapped.

No, not trapped, not yet, exactly, but it certainly felt that way. Terror overwhelmed him. He had to
squeeze
himself through. His heart raced, his body flooded with fear, and he had to stop.

The worst thing, he knew, was to panic. Panic caused you to freeze up, lose flexibility. He breathed slowly in and out a few times, then exhaled completely to reduce his chest diameter so he could fit through the passage.

Sweating and clammy, he forced himself to squirm ahead, trying to focus on where he was going and why, how crucial it was. He thought ahead, to what he would do once he got into the
Schloss
.

The uphill slope was becoming steeper. He inhaled and felt the walls press in on his chest, keeping him from filling his lungs with air. This prompted a surge of adrenaline, which made his breathing fast and shallow, made him feel as if he were about to suffocate, and he had to stop once again.

Don’t think.

Relax
.

No one else knew he was down here. He would be buried alive here in this pitch-black hell where there was no day or night.

Ben found himself listening to this voice with skepticism, as his braver, better self now assumed command of his brain. He began to feel his heart slow, felt the delicious cold air hit the bottom of his lungs, felt calm spread through his body like ink on a blotter.

Steadily now, with an inner serenity, he urged his body along, earthwormed, wriggled, ignoring the chafing of his back.

Suddenly the ceiling soared upward and the walls widened, and he got to his aching hands and knees and crawled up the incline. He had arrived at a sort of twilit grotto, where he was able to stand fully, blessedly, upright.

He was aware of the faintest glimmering of light.

It was a very dim and distant light, but to him it seemed almost as bright as day, as joy-inspiring as sunrise.

Directly ahead of him was the cave exit, and it was indeed shaped a little like a keyhole. He scrambled up a scree pile, then sort of half-mantled himself into the lip of the opening, pushing down with both hands until he could support his body on rigid arms.

There he saw the close-set rusted iron bars of an ancient gate that was fitted into the irregular cave mouth as tightly as a manhole cover. He could not make out what lay behind the gate but he could see an oblong shaft of light, as if from under a door.

He drew out the skeleton key Neumann had given him, inserted it into the lock, and turned it.

Tried
to turn it.

But it would not turn. The key would not
move
.

The lock was rusted shut. That had to be it; the old lock hadn’t been replaced, at least not for decades. The entire thing, he saw, was one solid mass of rust. He wriggled the key back and forth again, but it would not turn.

“Oh, my God,” Ben said out loud.

He was done for
.

This was the one thing neither he nor Neumann had anticipated.

He could see no other way in. Even if he had the tools, there was no way to dig around the gate; it was embedded in solid rock. Would he now have to somehow climb back
out?

Or maybe… Maybe one of the bars was so rusted through that he could push it out. He tried that, banging his gloved fist against the iron bars until the pain was too great, but no: the gate was solid. The rust was only on the surface.

In desperation, he grabbed the bars and rattled them, like an enraged lifer in San Quentin, and suddenly there was a metallic clatter.

One of the hinges had broken off.

He rattled again, harder, until another hinge popped off.

He kept rattling, exuberantly, and finally the third and last hinge fell to the ground.

He grabbed the gate with both hands, lifted it up and pushed it forward, and gently lowered it to the ground.

He was inside.

Ben felt something hard and smooth and dusty: it was a solid iron door, secured by a heavy latch. He lifted the latch and pushed at the door, and the door gave a brief high screech. Obviously it hadn’t been opened in decades. He pushed with all his weight. With a moan, the door gave way.

He found himself in a larger space of some sort, though it was still small. His eyes, used to the dark, began to discern shapes, and he followed the narrow shaft of light to another door, where he felt around on either side for a light switch.

He found the switch, and a light came on from a single bulb mounted on the ceiling.

He was, he could see, in a small storage closet. The stone walls were lined with steel shelves painted an indeterminate beige, holding old cardboard boxes, wooden crates, and cylindrical metal tanks.

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.