He was bedraggled, shirt and tie askew, hair wild.
“What’s with the door chain?” he said. “You used to live in East New York, too?”
She stared. “What happened to you?”
After they’d each recounted the events of the last few hours, she said, “We have to get out of here.”
“Damn right,” Ben said. “There’s a hotel downtown, in the centro—sort of a fleabag, but supposed to be kind of charming. Run by British expatriates. The Sphinx.” He’d bought a South America guide at the airport. He thumbed through it, found the entry. “Here we go. We can either show up or call from the street, on my cell phone. Not from here.”
She nodded. “Maybe we should stay in the same room this time. Hunsband and wife.”
“You’re the expert,” he said. Was there a glint of amusement in his eyes?
She explained: “They’re going to call around looking for an American man and woman traveling together but staying in separate rooms. How long do you think it’ll take them to locate us?”
“You’re probably right. Listen—I have something.” He produced a folded sheet of paper from his inside jacket pocket.
“What’s that?”
“A fax.”
“From?”
“My researcher in New York. It’s the names of the board of directors of Armakon AG of Vienna. Owners of that little biotech startup in Philadelphia that made the poison that killed the old men.”
He handed it to her. “Jürgen Lenz,” she breathed.
“One of the directors. Is that an intriguing coincidence or what?”
Once again, Arliss Dupree returned to the paperwork in front of him and once again he found it impossible to focus. It was a long report prepared by the deputy director of the Executive Officer for U.S. Trustees, which oversees bankruptcy estates; the report detailed allegations of corruption involving the federal bankruptcy courts. Dupree read the same sentence three times before he set it aside and got himself another cup of the near-rancid coffee produced by the sputtering machine down the hall.
He had other things on his mind—that was the trouble. The developments involving Agent Navarro were annoying. Worse than annoying. They spelled major aggravation. He didn’t give a damn what happened to her. But if she’d been guilty of security breaches, it reflected badly on him. Which was totally unfair. And he couldn’t help thinking that it all started with that goddamn liver-spotted spook at the Internal Compliance Unit, Alan Bartlett. Whatever the hell that was about. Several times he’d made inquiries—proper, interdepartmental inquiries—and each time he had been rebuffed. As if he had some lowly custodial capacity at the Office of Special Investigations. As if the OSI itself weren’t worthy of a civil word. Whenever Dupree thought about it for too long, he had to loosen his tie. It was galling.
First that bitch Navarro was cherry-picked from his team to go gallivanting off God only knew where. Next thing, word came down that she was rotten, had been selling off information to traffickers and hostiles and whoever else. If so, she was Typhoid Mary, which—he kept coming back to it—was bad news for the person she’d reported to, namely, Arliss Dupree. If Dupree had any sense of which way the wind was blowing—and his career was based on his having that sense—a shit storm was coming his way.
And he was damned if his career was going to be dented by Navarro’s misconduct or—since the charges mostly sounded like bullshit to him—by Bartlett’s double-dealing. Dupree was, above all, a survivor.
Sometimes surviving meant that you took the bull by the goddamn horns. Dupree had friends of his own—friends who would tell him stuff he needed to know. And maybe paying a visit on the Ghost might help concentrate the old guy’s mind. Bartlett looked like a goddamned vapor trail, but he was a major power in the department, a mini J. Edgar Hoover. Dupree would have to deal with him carefully. Even so, Bartlett
had to learn that Dupree wasn’t somebody to mess with. The Ghost spent his days directing investigations into his colleagues; when was the last time anybody looked into what he was up to?
Dupree tore open a couple of envelopes of sugar and dumped it into his coffee. It still tasted foul, but he slurped it down anyway. He had a lot of work ahead of him. With any luck at all, Alan Bartlett would be getting a dose of his own medicine.
The rooms at the Sphinx were large and light-filled. There was one double bed, which they each glanced at warily, deferring any decisions on sleeping arrangements until later.
“What I still don’t understand,” she said, “is how anyone knew I was here and why.”
“The Interpol man—”
“Except that I saw him after the package was stolen from American Express.” She was standing by the tall windows, fiddling with the sheer, gauzy curtains. “Once the package was stolen, the bad guys knew I was looking for Strasser. Question is, how did anyone even know to take it? You didn’t tell anyone you were traveling to Buenos Aires with me, right?”
He didn’t like her implication, but he ignored it. “No. But did you make any phone calls from the hotel?”
She was silent a moment. “Yeah, I did. One to Washington.”
“Not hard to tap hotel phones if you have the proper contacts, right?”
She looked at him, visibly impressed. “That might also explain the fake CIA man. Yes. Did you give Jürgen Lenz any indication—”
“I never told Lenz I was even thinking of going to Buenos Aires, because at that point I wasn’t.”
“I wish there was a way to get Lenz’s fingerprints, run ’em through a bunch of databases, see what we turn up. Maybe there’s even a criminal record. Did he give you anything—a business card, anything?”
“Nothing, as far as I can recall—well, actually, I gave him the photograph to look at, the one I got from Peter’s bank vault in Zurich.”
“How many people have you shown it to?”
“You. A historian at the University of Zurich. Liesl. And Lenz. That’s all.”
“He handled it?”
“Oh yeah. Front and back, turned it over. His fingers were all over it.”
“Great, I’ll have a copy made and send the original off to AFIS.”
“How? I get the impression your DOJ privileges have been revoked.”
“But Denneen’s haven’t. If I can get it to him, he can pass it along to a friend in another agency, probably FBI. He’ll figure it out.”
He hesitated. “Well, if it enables us to get something on Lenz. Or to find Peter’s killers …”
“Excellent. Thank you.” She glanced at her watch. “Let’s continue this over supper. We’re meeting this detective, Sergio whatever, in a part of the city called La Boca. We can grab something to eat there.”
The cabdriver was a middle-aged woman with flabby arms, wearing a tank top. On the dashboard was a framed color photo of a child, presumably her own. A tiny leather moccasin dangled from the rearview mirror.
“A gun-toting priest,” Anna mused. “And I thought the Dominican nuns in church were scary.” She’d changed into a gray pleated skirt and white blouse, a pearl choker around her swan neck, and smelled of something floral and crisp. “He told you that Jürgen Lenz actually owns her house?”
“Actually, he used the phrase, ‘the man who calls himself Jürgen Lenz.’”
They entered a seedy working-class barrio on the southernmost tip of Buenos Aires. On their left was the Riachuelo Canal, a stagnant body of water in which rusting dredges and scows and hulks were halfsubmerged. Along the waterway were warehouses and meat-packing plants.
“She told you Gerhard Lenz had no children?” Anna’s brows were knit in concentration. “Am I missing something?”
“Uh-uh. He’s Lenz, yet he’s not Lenz.”
“So the man you met in Vienna, who everyone knows as Jürgen Lenz, is an impostor.”
“That would be the implication.”
“Yet whoever he really is, this old woman and her stepson obviously fear him.”
“No question about it.”
“But why in the world would Jürgen Lenz pretend to be the son of someone so infamous if he’s not?” she said. “It makes no sense.”
“We’re not talking about an Elvis impersonator here, granted. The thing is, we don’t really understand much about how succession works at Sigma. Maybe it was his way of gaining a foothold there. Representing himself as the direct descendant of one of the founders—that might have been the only way he could worm his way in.”
“That’s assuming that Jürgen Lenz is Sigma.”
“At this point, it seems safer than assuming the contrary. And, going from what Chardin said, the question with Sigma isn’t what they control, but what they don’t control.”
Darkness had settled. They were entering an area that was crowded, illlit, dangerous-seeming. The houses here were constructed of sheet metal, with corrugated metal roofs, painted pink and ocher and turquoise.
The cab pulled up in front of a restaurant-bar bustling with rowdy patrons at creaky wooden tables or gathered at the bar, talking and laughing. Prominently displayed behind the bar was a color portrait of Eva Peron. Ceiling fans turned slowly.
They ordered empanadas and a San Telmo cabernet sauvignon and a bottle of agua mineral gaseosa. The wineglasses had the perspirant smell of old sponge. The napkins were slick squares of deli paper.
“The widow thought you were from ‘Semmering,’” Anna said when they were settled. “What do you think she meant—a place? A company?”
“I don’t know. A place, I suppose.”
“And when she mentioned ‘the company’?”
“I took that to be Sigma.”
“But there’s another company. Jürgen Lenz—whoever he really is—is on the Armakon board.”
“How much are you going to trust this Machado guy with what we know?”
“Not at all,” she replied. “I simply want him to find Strasser for us.”
They finished with a couple of humitas, creamy sweet-corn paste in cornhusk packets, and coffee.
“I assume the Interpol guy wasn’t much help,” Ben said.
“He denied the possibility that Strasser might live here. Highly suspicious.
Interpol was controlled by the Nazis for a time, just before the Second World War, and some people think it never really purged itself. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if this guy’s in the pocket of one of these Nazi protection rackets. Now, your gun-toting priest—”
“My gun-toting priest insisted he had no way to reach Strasser, but I don’t believe him.”
“I’ll bet he got on the phone to Strasser the moment you were out the door.”
Ben reflected. “If he called Strasser … What if we could somehow get the widow’s telephone records?”
“We can ask Machado. He may be able to do it, or know who to reach out to.”
“Speaking of reaching out, do you know what this guy looks like?”
“No, but we’re meeting him right in front.”
The street was crowded and raucous and electric—rock music blaring from speakers set out on sidewalks, an opera’s aria, tango music from a nearby cantina. Porteños strolled down the cobblestones of the Carninito, a pedestrian thoroughfare, browsing at the stalls of an open-air market. People came in and out of the restaurant, repeatedly colliding with Ben and Anna without apology.
Ben noticed a gaggle of young boys in their late teens or early twenties, a roving gang of eight or more toughs, heading toward him and Anna, talking loudly, laughing, drunk on alcohol and testosterone. Anna muttered something to Ben out of the side of her mouth, something he couldn’t quite understand. Several of the guys were staring directly at him and Anna with something more than idle curiosity, and in an instant the gang surrounded them.
“Run!” he shouted, and he was slugged in the stomach by a fist.
He protected his abdomen with both arms, as something slammed into his left kidney—a foot!—and he lunged forward to ward off the attack. He heard Anna scream, but it seemed to come from a great distance. He was blocked, hemmed in; his assailants, though evidently teenagers, seemed to be trained in combat. He couldn’t move, and he was being pummeled. In his peripheral vision he could see Anna flinging one of the attackers aside with surprising strength, but then several more grabbed her. Ben tried to break free, but was overwhelmed by a barrage of fists and kicks.
He saw the glint of knife blades, and a knife slashed against his side. A hot line of sensation exploded into vast pain, and he grabbed the hand holding the knife, twisted it hard, and heard a yelp. He kicked at his attackers, slammed wildly with his fists, connecting a few times, and he felt an elbow jabbed into his rib cage, then a knee in his stomach. Breath left him, and he gasped helplessly, then a foot kicked him in the testicles and he doubled over in pain.
He heard the whoop of a siren, and he heard Anna shout, “Over here! Oh, thank God!” A foot kicked him hard on the side of his head, and he could taste blood. He flung his hands out, half protectively, half in an attempt to grab whatever he could, to stop the pummeling; he heard shouting, new voices, and he lurched to his feet to see a couple of policemen shouting at his accosters.
One of the cops grabbed him, yelled, “¡Vamos, vamos por acá, que los vamos a sacar de acá!” Come on, get over here, we’ll get you out of here! Another cop pulled Anna toward the cruiser. Somehow he made it to the police car, saw the door open, felt a shove, and he was inside. The door slammed behind him, and all the shouts and screams of the crowd were muted.
“You all right?” one of the cops said from the front seat.
Ben groaned.
Anna said, “Gracias!” Ben noticed that her blouse was torn, her pearl choker was gone. “We’re American …” she began, then seemed to think for a moment. “My purse,” she said. “Shit. My money was in there.”
“Passport?” Ben managed to croak out.
“Back in the room.” The car was moving. She turned to him. “My God, what was that? You O.K., Ben?”
“I’m not sure.” The screaming pain in his groin was beginning to subside. There was a sticky warmth where he’d been slashed by the knife. He touched his side, felt the blood.
The car swung into traffic, barreling down the road. “That was no random attack,” Anna said. “That was deliberate. Planned, coordinated.”
Ben looked at her dully. “Thank you,” he said to the policemen in the front seat.
There was no reply. He realized that there was a Plexiglas barrier between the front and back seats, and he heard Anna say, “The partition—?”
The Plexiglas had not been there before; it had just come up. Ben did not hear a police radio, or maybe the sound wasn’t coming through the Plexiglas.
Anna seemed to notice the same thing at the same moment, for she leaned forward and banged on the Plexiglas, but the two policemen didn’t respond.
The back doors locked automatically.
“Oh, my God,” Anna breathed. “They’re not cops.”
They pulled at the door handles, which did not yield. They grabbed at the door lock buttons, but they would not move.
“Where’s your gun?” Ben whispered.
“I don’t have one!”
Headlights flashed by as the car accelerated down a four-lane highway. They were now clearly outside the city limits. Ben hammered at the Plexiglas partition with both fists, but neither the driver nor the passenger in the front seat seemed to notice.
The car swerved onto an exit ramp. In a few minutes they were on a dark, two-lane road, lined with tall trees, and then without warning they turned off the road into an unlit cul-de-sac within a copse of tall trees.
The engine was switched off. For a moment there was silence, interrupted only by the sound of an occasional car passing by.
The two men in the front seat seemed to be conferring. Then the passenger got out and went around to the back of the car. The trunk popped open.
In a moment he returned to his side of the car, clutching in his left hand something that looked like a piece of cloth. In his right he held a handgun. Then the driver got out, taking a gun from a shoulder holster. The back doors unlocked.
The driver, apparently in charge, yanked open the door on Anna’s side and waved the gun at her. She got out slowly, put her hands up. He stepped back and, with his free left hand, slammed the car door shut, leaving Ben alone in the backseat.
The deserted country road, the weapons … this was a classic execution.
The other false policeman—or perhaps they were real ones; did it make any difference?—walked to where Anna stood, her hands in the
air, and began frisking her for weapons, beginning with her underarms. His hands lingered on her breasts.
He ran his hands down her side, moving them into her crotch, his fingers spending too much time there as well, then moved down the inside of her legs to her ankles. He pulled back, seemed to determine her safe. Then he took a burlap sack and placed it over her head, tightening it around her neck.
The driver barked something, and she fell to her knees and clasped her hands behind her back.
Ben saw with horror what was about to happen to her. “No!”
The driver shouted another order, and the younger cop opened the car door, pointing his weapon at Ben. “Step out slowly,” he said in fluent English.
There was no hope of making a dash for the road, nor of grabbing Anna and taking her to safety. Not faced with two men with guns. He got out of the car, thrust his hands in the air, and the younger one began frisking him too, this time more roughly.
“No está enfierrado,” the man said. He’s clean.
To Ben, he said conversationally, “Any sudden movements and we’ll kill you. Understand?”
Yes, I understand. They’ll kill us both.
A burlap sack went over his head. It stank of a horse barn, and was cinched tight at his neck, too tight, choking him. Everything was dark. He croaked, “Hey, watch it!”
“Shut the hell up,” one of the men said. It sounded like the older man’s voice. “Or I kill you and no one find your body for days, hear me?”
He heard Anna whisper, “Go along with them for now. We don’t exactly have a choice.”
He felt something hard pressed against the back of his head. “Kneel,” a voice said.
He knelt, and without being asked, he clasped his hands behind his back. “What do you want?” Ben said.
“Shut the hell up!” one of them shouted. Something hard cracked against the back of his head. He groaned in pain.
His abductors didn’t want to talk. They were going to die in this godforsaken field off a dark road in the middle of a country he didn’t know. He was thinking of how it all began, at the Bahnhofplatz in Zurich,
with his near-death, or did it really begin with Peter’s disappearance? He recalled the agony of Peter’s murder in the country inn in rural Switzerland, but instead of demoralizing him, the memory gave him resolve. If he were killed here, at least he would have the satisfaction of knowing that he had done everything he could to find his brother’s murderers, and if he had failed to bring them to justice, or to discover what their reasons were, at least he had come close. He would leave behind no wife, no child, and in time he would be mostly forgotten by his friends, but in the history of the world all our lives are as brief as the winking of a firefly on a summer night, and he would not feel sorry for himself.
He thought of his father, wherever he’d vanished to, and regretted only that he’d never know the entire truth about the man.
Out of the darkness came a sudden voice. The older man.
“Now you answer some questions. What the hell you want with Josef Strasser?”
So they wanted to talk after all.
These goons were protecting Strasser.
He waited for Anna to speak first, and when she didn’t, he said, “I’m an attorney. An American lawyer. I’m probating an estate—that means I’m trying to get him some money that’s been left to him.”
Something cracked hard against the side of his head.
“I want the truth, not your bullshit!”
“I’m telling you the truth.” Ben’s voice was shaky. “Leave this woman out of it—she’s just my girlfriend. She’s got nothing to do with it. I dragged her along, she’d never been to Buenos Aires—”
“Shut up!” one of them bellowed. Something slammed into his right kidney, and he tumbled to the ground, his face inside the burlap flat against the dirt. The pain was so acute he could not even groan. Then came a blinding pain as something cracked into the side of his face, perhaps a foot, and he smelled and tasted blood. Everything was bleached out.
He screamed, “Stop! What do you want? I’ll tell you what you want!”
He hunched forward, brought his hands around to protect his face, gasping from the unfathomable pain, and he felt blood seeping from his mouth. He braced himself for the next blow, but for a moment nothing happened.
Then came the voice of the older one, quiet and matter-of-fact, as if making a reasonable point in a pleasant conversation. “The woman is
not ‘just’ your girlfriend. She is Agent Anna Navarro, and she is on the payroll of the United States Justice Department. This we know. You, we want to know about.”
“I’m helping her,” he managed to get out, cringing, and it came, a swift blow to the other side of his head. A lightning bolt of pain pierced his eyes. The pain was so great now, so constant and overwhelming, that he thought he could not possibly survive it.
Then a pause, a momentary intermission in the torture session, and there was silence, the men seemingly waiting for him to speak again.
But Ben’s mind was sluggish. Who—where were these men from? The man called Jürgen Lenz? Sigma itself? Their methods seemed too homespun for that. The Kamaradenwerk? That was more plausible. What answer would satisfy them, end the beatings, forestall the execution?
Anna spoke. His ears were plugged, probably with blood, and he could barely hear what she said. “If you’re protecting Strasser,” she said in a voice that was surprisingly steady, “you’ll want to know what I’m doing here. I’ve come to Buenos Aires to warn him—not to seek his extradition.”
One of the men laughed, but she kept speaking. Her voice seemed so far away. “Do you know that a number of Strasser’s comrades have been murdered in the last few weeks?”
There was no response. “We have information that Strasser is about to be killed. The U.S. Justice Department has no interest in trying to seize him, or we’d have done it long ago. Whatever terrible things he’s done, he’s not wanted for war crimes. I’m trying to keep him from being murdered, so I can talk to him.”
“Liar!” one of the men screamed. There was a thud, and Anna cried out.
“Stop!” she shouted, her voice cracking. “There are ways you can check that I’m telling you the truth! We need to get to Strasser to warn him! If you kill us, you’ll be harming him!”
“Anna!” Ben yelled. He needed to connect with her. “Anna, you O.K.? Just tell me you’re O.K.”
His throat felt as if it were going to burst. The exertion of yelling made his head throb excruciatingly.
Silence: Then her muffled voice: “I’m O.K.”
It was the last thing he heard before everything vanished.