The Sigma Protocol (73 page)

Two orderlies carried a stretcher across the lobby, on which an old man in a pale 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 to 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?”

Ben looked around, then up. The person speaking was standing on the catwalk, just above Ben.

It was Jürgen Lenz.

A soft, low chime filled the air, melodic and sedate. Jürgen Lenz, resplendent in a charcoal suit, blue shirt, and silver tie, under a neatly pressed white doctor’s coat, strolled down wrought-iron stairs to the main floor. He glanced over at the treadmills and StairMasters. The Supreme Court Justice and the former Secretary of State and most of the others were beginning to finish their exercise sessions, dismount from the machines, nurses removing the wires from their bodies.

“That’s the signal for the next helicopter shuttle to Vienna,” he explained to Ben. “Time to return to the International Children’s Health Forum they were so kind as to depart. Needless to say, they’re busy people despite their age. In fact, I’d say
because
of their age. They all have much to give the world—which is why I’ve selected them.”

He made a subtle hand gesture. Both of Ben’s arms were suddenly grabbed from behind. Two guards held him while another expertly frisked him, removing all three weapons.

Lenz waited impatiently as the weapons were confiscated, like a dinner-table raconteur whose tale has been interrupted by the serving of the salad course.

“What have you done with Anna?” Ben asked, his voice steely.

“I was about to ask you the very same thing,” Lenz replied. “She insisted on inspecting the clinic, and of
course I couldn’t refuse. But somehow, along the way, we lost her. Apparently she knows something about evading security systems.”

Ben studied Lenz, trying to determine how much of this was truth. Was that his way of stalling, of refusing to bring him to her? Was he negotiating? Ben felt a surge of panic.

Is he lying? Fabricating a story he knows that I’ll believe, that I’ll
want
to believe?

Have you killed her, you lying bastard?

Then again, that Anna might have disappeared to investigate what was happening in the clinic was plausible. Ben said, “Let me warn you right now, if anything happens to her—”

“But nothing will, Benjamin. Nothing will.” Lenz put his hands in his pockets, head bowed. “We are in a clinic, after all, that is devoted to life.”

“I’m afraid I’ve already seen too much to believe that.”

“How much do you really
understand
of whatever you’ve seen?” Lenz said. “I’m sure that once you truly grasp the work we’re doing, you’ll appreciate its importance.” He motioned for the guards to let Ben go. “This is the culmination of a lifetime’s work.”

Ben said nothing. Escaping was out of the question. But in fact he wanted to remain here.

You killed my brother
.

And Anna? Have you killed her, too?

He became aware that Lenz was speaking. “It was Adolf Hitler’s great obsession, you know. The Thousand-Year Reich, and all that nonsense—though it lasted, what, twelve years? He had a theory that the bloodlines of the Aryans had been polluted, adulterated, because of interbreeding. Once the so-called ‘master race’ was purified it would be extremely long-lived. Rubbish, of course. But I’ll give the old madman
credit. He was determined to discover how he and the Reich’s leaders could live longer, and so he gave a handful of his brightest scientists free rein. Unlimited funds. Do your experiments on concentration-camp prisoners. Whatever you like.”

“Made possible by the generous sponsorship of the greatest monster of the twentieth century,” Ben said, biting off his words.

“A mad despot, let us agree. And his talk of a thousand-year Reich was laughable—a deeply unstable man, promising an epoch of lasting stability. But his pairing of the two desiderata—longevity and stability—was
not
ill-founded.”