They sat, stunned, in the back of the cab.
Not until they had gone several blocks did either one speak.
“Oh, my God, Ben. Dear God.” Anna leaned back against the seat, eyes closed.
He put a hand on her shoulder, nothing more than a moment of comfort. There was nothing he could say to her, nothing that would mean anything.
“When Machado and I had dinner last night,” she said, “he told me that in all his years of investigations, he was never afraid. That I shouldn’t be afraid either.”
Ben didn’t know how to reply. He couldn’t shake the horror of seeing Machado’s incinerated body. The hand clutching the cell phone. Some say the world will end in fire. Shuddering, he flashed on Chardin’s faceless countenance, the man’s testimony that the horrors of surviving could be far greater than those of perishing. Sigma seemed to have a fondness for incendiary solutions. As gently as he could, he said, “Anna, maybe L should do this alone.”
“No, Ben,” she said sharply. Ben saw her steely resolve. She was staring straight ahead, her face tense, her jaw clenched.
It was as if what they’d just witnessed had fueled her determination instead of deterring her. She was intent on visiting Strasser, no matter what, and getting to the bottom of the conspiracy that was Sigma. Maybe it was crazy—maybe they were both crazy—but he knew he wasn’t going to turn back either. “Do you think either of us can just go back to our lives after what we’ve learned? Do you think we’d be allowed to?”
Another long silence elapsed.
“We’ll make a circuit,” she said. “Make sure no one’s staking out the house, waiting for us. Maybe they assume that since they’ve eliminated Machado, there’s no more threat.” There seemed to be relief in her voice, but he couldn’t be sure.
The cab barreled through the crowded streets of Buenos Aires toward the wealthy barrio of Belgrano. It occurred to Ben what a strange and terrible irony it was that a good man had just died so that they could try to save the life of an evil one. He wondered whether the same notion had occurred to her. Now we’re about to risk our lives to save the life of a world-historic villain, he reflected.
And the true scope of his villainy? Was there any way of knowing?
The harrowing words returned to him.
Wheels within wheels—that was the way we worked … . It never crossed anyone’s mind that the West had fallen under the administration of a hidden consortium. The notion would be inconceivable. Because if true, it would mean that over half of the planet was effectively a subsidiary of a single megacorporation—Sigma.
In recent years, one very special project of Sigma’s had come to the fore. The prospect of its success would revolutionize the nature of world control. No longer would it be about the allocation of funds, the directing of resources. It became, instead, a simple matter of who the “chosen” would be.
Was Strasser himself one of the “chosen”? Or maybe he, too, was dead.
Ben said, “I talked to Fergus, in the Caymans. He’s traced the wire transfers all the way back to Vienna.”
“Vienna,” she repeated without inflection.
She said nothing further. He wondered what she was thinking, but before he could ask, the cab pulled to a stop in front of a red-brick villa with white shutters. A white station wagon was parked in the small driveway.
Anna said something to the driver in Spanish, then turned to Ben. “I told him to circle the block. I want to look for parked cars, loiterers, anything suspicious.”
Ben knew it was time, once again, to defer to her. He’d simply have to trust that she knew what she was doing. “What’s our approach going to be?” he asked.
“All we have to do is get in the door. Warn him. Tell him his life’s in danger. I’ve got my DOJ credentials, which should be enough to make us legitimate in his eyes.”
“We’ve got to assume that he’s been warned—by the Kamaradenwerk
thugs, by Vera Lenz, by whatever other sort of early-warning systems he has in place. And then what if his life isn’t in danger? What if he’s the one behind the killings? Have you considered that?”
After a beat of silence, she conceded, “It’s a real risk.”
A real risk. That was a colossal understatement.
“You don’t have a weapon,” Ben reminded her.
“We only need his attention for a moment. Then if he chooses to listen further, he can.”
And if he was the one behind the killings? But it was useless to argue.
When they had made a complete circuit, the cab stopped, and they got out.
Although it was a warm, sunny day, Ben felt a chill, no doubt from fear. He was sure Anna was frightened, too, but she didn’t show it. He admired her strength.
Twenty-five feet before Strasser’s house there was a security booth on the sidewalk. The guard was a stooped old man with wispy white hair and a drooping mustache, a blue cap perched almost comically atop his head. If ever there were a serious incident on the street, this guard would be useless, Ben thought. Still, it was best not to alert him, so the two of them continued their determined stride as if they belonged here.
They stopped before Strasser’s house, which was surrounded, like most of the houses on this street, by a fence. This one was of dark-stained wood, not wrought iron, and it was no higher than Ben’s chest. It was purely ornamental and seemed to send the message that the inhabitant of this house had nothing to hide. Anna unlatched the wooden gate, pulled it open, and they entered a small, well-kept garden. From behind they heard footsteps on the pavement.
Nervously, Ben turned. It was the security guard approaching, maybe. twenty feet away. He wondered whether Anna had an alibi prepared; he didn’t. The guard smiled. His dentures were ill-fitting and yellow. He said something in Spanish.
Anna muttered, “He wants to see our identification.” To the old man she said, “¡Cómo no, señor!” Certainly.
The guard reached into his jacket, oddly, as if to offer identification of his own.
Ben noticed a slight movement across the street, and he turned to look.
There was a man standing across the street. A tall man who had a ruddy face, a thatch of black hair going gray, and thick wheat-field eyebrows.
Ben felt a jolt of recognition. The face was horribly familiar.
Where have I seen him before?
Paris—the rue des Vignoles.
Vienna. The Graben.
And somewhere before that.
One of the killers.
He was aiming a gun at them.
Ben shouted, “Anna, get down!” He flung himself onto the concrete garden path.
Anna dove to her left, out of the line of fire.
There was a spit, and the guard’s chest erupted, a gusher of crimson, and he fell backward to the flagstone sidewalk. The ruddy-faced man raced toward them.
They were trapped inside Strasser’s yard.
The assassin had shot the guard! Ben and Anna had ducked, and the poor guard had been caught in the line of fire.
Next time the killer would not miss.
Even if I could run, Ben thought, it would be toward the killer.
And both of them were unarmed!
He heard the man shout in English, “It’s O.K.! It’s O.K.! I’m not going to shoot!”
Ruddy-face had his gun at his side as he raced toward them.
“Hartman!” he yelled. “Benjamin Hartman!”
Ben looked up, startled.
Anna screamed, “I’ve got a gun! Back off!”
But the ruddy-faced man still did not raise his weapon. “It’s O.K.! I’m not going to shoot!” The man flung his gun to the pavement in front of him, his hands outstretched. “He was about to kill you,” the ruddy-faced man said as he ran up to the body of the old man. “Look!”
Those were the last words the ruddy-faced man spoke.
Like a mannequin twitching with incipient life, the ancient guard moved an arm, yanking a slim, silenced revolver from his trousers, and pointing it at the ruddy-faced man who stood over him. There was a phut and then a soft-nosed slug slammed into his forehead and blew out the back of his skull.
What the hell was going on?
The ancient guard now began to sit up, even as blood still dribbled from his shirtfront. He had been wounded, perhaps mortally, but his firing arm was absolutely steady.
An impassioned bellow came from behind them: “No!”
Ben turned to see another man, stationed by an oak tree, at a diagonal from them: their side of the street, but twenty yards to their left. This man was holding a large rifle with a sniper scope, a marksman’s special.
The ruddy-faced killer’s backup?
The barrel was directed in their general direction.
There was no time to escape its deadly aim.
Immediately, Ben heard the blast of the high-powered rifle, too paralyzed with fear even to flinch.
Two, then three bullets hit the ancient guard in the center of his chest and he slumped back to the ground.
Once again they had been spared. Why? With the scoped rifle, there was no way the sniper could have missed his intended target.
The man with the rifle—a man with glossy black hair and olive skin—raced over to the crumpled, bloodied body of the watchman, ignoring them.
It made no sense. Why were the gunmen so intent on killing the old guard? Who was their real target?
Ben stood up slowly, and saw the man reach inside the jacket of the old man’s uniform, and pull out another weapon: a second slim automatic revolver, silencer screwed on to the barrel.
“Oh, dear God,” Anna said.
The olive-skinned man grabbed a fistful of the guard’s wispy white hair and tugged at it, and it came off in one floppy piece, like the pelt of a rabbit, revealing the steel-gray hair underneath.
He yanked at the white mustache, which came off just as easily, then grabbed at the loose skin of the old man’s face, lifting off wrinkled, irregular patches of flesh-colored rubber.
“Latex prostheses,” the man said. He pulled off the nose, then the wrinkled bags under the old man’s eyes, and Ben recognized the smooth, unlined face of the man who had tried to kill him in front of Jürgen Lenz’s house in Vienna. The man who tried to kill them all in Paris.
The man who killed his brother.
“The Architect,” Anna gasped.
Ben froze.
Gaped, disbelieving, but it was true.
“He was going to kill you both when he got within point-blank range,” the man said. Ben focused on his tawny skin, oddly long lashes, and square jaw. The man spoke with a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. “Which he would easily have done, since his appearance deceived you.”
Ben recalled the odd gesture, the image of the frail old man reaching into his jacket, the almost apologetic expression.
“Wait a minute,” Anna said. “You’re ‘Yossi.’ From Vienna. The Israeli CIA guy. Or so you pretended.”
“Dammit, tell me who you are!” Ben said.
“My name isn’t important,” he replied.
“Yeah, well it is to me. Who are you?”
“Yehuda Malkin.”
The name meant nothing. “You’ve been following me,” Ben said. “I saw your partner in Vienna and in Paris.”
“Yeah, he screwed up and got spotted. He’d been following you for the entire last week. I was doing backup. You may as well know: your father hired us, Ben.”
My father hired them. For what? “Hired … ?”
“Max Hartman bought our parents’ way out of Nazi Germany more than fifty years ago. And the man who was killed wasn’t just my partner. He was my cousin.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Goddarnmit to hell. Avi wasn’t meant to die. It wasn’t his time. Goddammit to hell.” He shook his head hard. His cousin’s death evidently hadn’t sunk in, and right now he wouldn’t let it—it wasn’t the moment. He looked hard at Ben, saw the confusion playing across his face. “Both of us owed your father everything. I guess he must’ve had some kind of in with the Nazis, because he did that for a bunch of other Jewish families in Germany too.”
Max ransomed Jews—bought their way out of the camps? Then what Sonnenfeld said was true.
Anna broke in, “Who trained you? You’re not American-trained.”
The man turned to her. “I was born in Israel, on a kibbutz. My parents moved to Palestine after they escaped from Germany.”
“You were in the Israeli army?”
“Paratrooper. We moved to America in ’68, after the Six Day War. My parents were fed up with the fighting. After high school I joined the Israeli army.”
“This whole CIA ruse in Vienna—what the hell was it about?” Anna demanded.
“For that, I brought in an American comrade of mine. Our orders were to spirit Ben away from danger. Get him back in the States, and under our direct protection. Keep him safe.”
“But how did you …” Anna started.
“Look, we don’t have time for this. If you’re trying to interrogate Strasser, you’d better get in there before the cops show up.”
“Right,” Anna said.
“Wait,” Ben interrupted. “You say my father hired you. When?”
The man looked around impatiently. “A week or so ago.” He called Avi and me, told us you were in some kind of danger. Said you were in Switzerland. He gave us names and addresses, places he thought you might turn up. He wanted us to do what we could to protect you. He said he didn’t want to lose another son.” He looked around quickly. “You were almost killed on our watch in Vienna. Again in Paris. And you sure had some kind of close call here.”
Ben’s mind swirled with questions. “Where did my father go?”
“I don’t know. He said Europe, but he didn’t specify, and it’s a big continent. He said he’d be out of contact with everyone for months. Left us a pile of money for travel expenses.” He smiled grimly. “A whole lot more than we’d ever need, frankly.”
Anna, meanwhile, was leaning over Vogler’s body and had taken a weapon from a nylon shoulder holster. She unscrewed the silencer, put it in the jacket of her blazer and tucked the gun into the waistband of her skirt so it was hidden by the jacket. “But you didn’t follow us here,” she said, “did you?”
“No,” he conceded. “Strasser’s name was on the list Max Hartman gave me, along with his address and cover identity.”
“He knows what’s going on!” Ben said. “He knows who all the players are. He figured I’d eventually track Strasser down.”
“But we were able to tail Vogler, who wasn’t much concerned about being followed himself. So once we knew he was flying to Argentina, and we had Strasser’s address …”
“You’ve been watching Strasser’s house for the last couple of days,” Anna said. “Waiting for Ben to show up.”
He glanced around again. “You guys ought to move it.”
“Right, but first tell me this,” she went on. “Since you’ve been doing surveillance: did Strasser just recently return to Buenos Aires?”
“Apparently so. Back from some vacation, it looked like. He had a lot of luggage.”
“Any visitors since his return?”
The man thought a moment. “Not that I saw, anyway. Just a nurse who got here maybe a half hour ago …”
“A nurse!” Anna exclaimed. She looked at the white station wagon that was parked in front of the house. The car was emblazoned with the words PERMANENCIA EN CASA. “Come on!” she shouted.
“Oh, man,” Ben said, following her as she rushed to the front door and rang the bell repeatedly.
“Shit,” she groaned. “We’re too late.” Yehuda Malkin stood back and to one side.
In less than a minute, the door slowly came open. Before them stood an ancient man, withered and stooped, his deeply tanned, leathery face a mass of wrinkles.
Josef Strasser.
“¿Quién es éste?” he said, scowling. “Se está metiendo en mis cosas—ya llegó la enfermera que me tiene que revisar.”
“He says his nurse is here for his checkup,” Anna said. She raised her voice. “No! Herr Strasser—stay away from this nurse, I warn you!”
A white shape came into view behind the German. Ben said, “Anna! Behind him!”
The nurse approached the door, speaking quickly, chidingly it seemed, to Strasser. “¡Vamos, Senor Albrecht, vamos para allá, que estoy apurada! ¡Tengo que ver al próximo paciente todavía!”
“She’s telling him to hurry up,” Anna told Ben. “She’s got another patient to see. Herr Strasser, this woman isn’t a real nurse—I suggest you ask her for her credentials!”
The woman in the white uniform grasped the old man’s shoulder and pulled him half toward her in one violent gesture. “iYa mismo,” she said, “vamos!”
With her free hand she grabbed the door to pull it closed, but Anna bent forward to block the door’s arc with her knee.
Suddenly the nurse shoved Strasser aside. She reached into her uniform, and in one swift motion took out a gun.
But Anna moved even more quickly. “Freeze!”
The nurse fired.
At the same moment, Anna spun her body sideways, slamming Ben to the ground.
As Ben rolled to one side he heard a gunshot, followed by an animallike roar.
He realized what had happened: the nurse had shot at Anna, but Anna had dodged out of the line of fire, and it was the Israeli protector who had been hit.
A red oval appeared in the middle of the man’s forehead, and there was a spray of blood where the bullet exited his skull.
Anna got off two quick shots, and the fake nurse arched backward and then slumped to the floor.
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 nonvital 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 doppelganger, 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 histpry 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 Rio 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.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “With funds provided by the largest corporations in the world, along with funds stolen from the state Reichsbank. We know who the founding board members were. You’re the last living member of that original board. But who are your successors?”
Strasser looked down the hall, but he seemed to be staring at nothing.
“Who controls it now? Give us names!” Ben shouted.
“I don’t know!” Strasser’s voice cracked. “They kept people like me quiet by sending us money regularly. We were lackeys, finally excluded from the inner councils of power. We should all be billionaires many, many times over. They send us millions, but it is crumbs, table scraps.” Strasser’s lips curled up in a repellent smile. “They give me table scraps, and now they wish to cut me off. They want to kill me because they don’t want to pay me anymore. They’re greedy, and they’re ashamed. After all I did for them, they regard me as an embarrassment. And a danger, because even though the doors have been shut to me for years, they still think I know too much. For making possible everything they do, how am I repaid? With contempt!” A growing sense of rage—the pent-up grievance of years—made his words hard, metallic. “They act as if I am a poor relation, a black sheep, a foul-smelling derelict. The swells gather in their fancy-dress forum, and their biggest fear is that I will crash their party, like a skunk at a kaffeeklatsch. I know where they gather. I am not such a fool, such an ignoramus. I would not join them in Austria had they asked me to.”
Austria.
“What are you talking about?” Ben demanded. “Where are they gathering? Tell me.”
Strasser gave him a look that combined wariness and defiance. It was clear that he would say no more.
“Goddammit, answer me!”
“You are all the same,” Strasser spat. “You would think somebody my age would be treated with respect! I have nothing more to say to you.”
Anna was suddenly alert. “I hear sirens. This is it, Ben. We’re out of here.”
Ben stood directly in front of Strasser. “Herr Strasser, do you know who I am?”
“Who you are … ?” Strasser stammered.
“My father is Max Hartman. I’m sure you remember the name.”
Strasser squinted. “Max Hartman … the Jew, our treasurer … ?”
“That’s right. And he was an SS officer as well, I’m told.” But Sonnenfeld had said that would merely have been a cover, a ruse. His heart was pounding, he dreaded hearing Strasser’s confirmation of Max’s ugly past.
Strasser laughed, flashing his ruined brown teeth. “SS!” he laughed. “He was no SS. We gave him fake SS papers so ODESSA would smuggle
him out of Germany into Switzerland, with no questions asked. That was the deal.”
Blood roared in Ben’s ears. He felt a wave of relief, a physical sensation.
“Bormann chose him personally for the German delegation,” Strasser went on. “Not just because he was skilled at moving money around, but because we needed a … a false head—”
“A figurehead.”
“Yes. The industrialists from American and elsewhere were not so comfortable with what the Nazis had done. A Jewish participant was necessary to provide legitimacy—to show that we weren’t the wrong kind of Germans, to show that we were not zealots, not Hitler disciples. For his part, your father got for himself a good deal—he got his family out of the camps, and a lot of other Jewish families as well, and he was given forty million Swiss francs—almost a million dollars U.S. A lot of money.” A horrible smile. “Now he calls himself ‘rags to riches story.’ Is a million dollars rags? I don’t think.”
“Ben!” Anna shouted. Quickly she flashed the leather wallet that held her Department of Justice credentials. “Now you want to know who I am, Herr Strasser? I’m here on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations. I’m sure you know who they are.”
“Oh ho,” Strasser said. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m an Argentine citizen and I don’t recognize your authority.”
The sirens were louder, just a few blocks away it seemed.
Anna turned back to him. “So I guess we’ll see how serious the Argentine government is about extraditing war criminals. Out the back way, Ben.”
Strasser’s face flashed with rage. “Hartman,” he said hoarsely.
“Come on, Ben!”
Strasser crooked a finger at Ben, beckoning him. Ben could not resist. The old man began to whisper. Ben knelt down to listen.
“Hartman, do you know your father was a weak little man?” Strasser said. “A man without a spine. A coward and a fraud who pretends to be a victim.” Strasser’s lips were inches from Ben’s ear. His voice was singsong. “And you are the fraud’s son, that’s all. That is all you are to me.”
Ben closed his eyes, fought to control his anger.
The fraud’s son.
Was this true? Was Strasser right?
Strasser was clearly enjoying Ben’s discomfort.
“Oh, you’d like to kill me right now, isn’t that right, Hartman?” Strasser said. “Yet you don’t. Because you’re a coward, like your father.”
Ben saw Anna starting down the hall.
“No,” he said. “Because I’d much rather you spend your remaining life in a stinking jail cell in Jerusalem. I’d like your last days to be as unpleasant as possible. Killing you is a waste of a bullet.”
He ran down the corridor, following Anna to the back of the house, as the sirens grew louder.
Crawl, don’t walk. The Architect knew that the effort to maintain orthostatic blood pressure in his head would be made much more difficult by standing erect, when there was as yet no absolute need to do so. It was a rational decision, and his ability to make it was almost as reassuring as the Glock he had retained in an ankle holster.
The front door was open, the hallway deserted. He crawled, in a standard infantry crawl, indifferent to the wide smear of blood he was leaving as his shirtfront draped against the blond flooring. Every yard seemed like a mile to him. But he would not be deterred.
You’re the best. He was seventeen, and the drill instructor told him so, in front of the entire battalion. You’re the best. He was twenty-three, and his commanding officer at Stasi had said so in an official report that he showed young Hans before forwarding it to his superior. You’re the best. These words from the head of his Stasi directorate: he had just returned from a “hunting trip” in West Berlin, having dispatched four physicists—members of an internationally distinguished team from the University of Leipzig—who had defected the day before. You’re the best: a top-level Sigma official, a white-haired American in flesh-toned glasses, had spoken those words to him. It was after he had stage-managed the death of a prominent Italian leftist, shooting him from across the street while the man was in the throes of passion with a fifteen-year-old Somali whore. But he would hear those words again. And again. Because they were true.
And because they were true, he would not give up. He would not succumb to the nearly overpowering urge to surrender, to sleep, to stop.
With robotic precision, he moved hand and knee and propelled himself down the hallway.
Finally, he found himself in a spacious, double-height room, its walls
lined with books. Lizardlike eyes surveyed the area. His primary target was not present. A disappointment, not a surprise.
Instead, there was the wheezing, sweating weakling Strasser, a traitor who, too, was deserving of death.
How many more minutes of consciousness did the Architect have left? He eyed Strasser avidly, as if extinguishing his light might help to restore his own.
Shakily, he rose from the floor into a marksman’s crouch. He felt muscles in his body trying to spasm, but he held his arms completely still. The small Glock in his arms had now acquired the weight of a cannon, yet somehow he managed to raise the firearm until it was at the precisely correct angle.
It was at that moment that Strasser, perhaps alerted by the old-penny odor of blood, finally became aware of his presence.
The Architect watched the raisin-like eyes widen momentarily, then fall closed. Squeezing the trigger was like lifting a desk with one finger, but he would do so. Did so.
Or did he?
When he failed to hear the gun’s report, he first worried that he had not executed his mission. Then he realized that it was his sensory awareness that was beginning to shut down.
The room was swiftly darkening: he knew that brain cells starved of oxygen ceased to function—that the aural and optical functions shut down first, but that sentience itself would soon follow.
He waited until he saw Strasser hit the ground before he allowed his own eyes to close. As they did so, there was a fleeting awareness that his eyes would never open again; and then there was no awareness of anything at all.
Back in the hotel room, Ben and Anna rifled through a stack of papers that they’d hurriedly purchased at a newsstand on the way. Chardin had referred to an imminent development. And the “fancy-dress forum” in Austria that Strasser had mentioned chimed with an item they’d recently come across: but what was it?
The answer was within their grasp.
It was Anna who came across the item in El País, Argentina’s leading
newspaper. It was another brief article about the International Children’s Health Forum—a convocation of world leaders to discuss matters of pressing mutual concern, especially with respect to the developing world. But what caught her eye this time was the city where the meeting was to be held: Vienna, Austria.
She read on. There was a list of sponsors—among them, the Lenz Foundation. Translating from the Spanish, she read the article out loud to Ben.
A shiver ran down his spine. “My God,” he said. “This is it! It has to be. Chardin said only days remained. What he was talking about has to be related to this conference. Read me the list of sponsors again.”
Anna did so.
And Ben started to make a few phone calls. These were calls to foundation professionals, people who were delighted to hear from one of their contributors. Slipping into a familiar role, Ben sounded hale and hearty when he spoke to them, but what he learned was profoundly dismaying.
“They’re great people, the folks from the Lenz Foundation,” Geoffrey Baskin, programs director for the Robinson Foundation, told him in his dulcet New Orleans accent. “It’s really their baby, but they just wanted to keep a low profile. They put it together, footed most of the bill—it’s hardly fair that we’re getting any of the glory. But I guess they wanted to make sure it had an international feeling. Like I say, they’re really selfless.”
“That’s nice to hear,” Ben said. His kept his tone upbeat even as he felt a rising sense of dread. “We may be partnering with them on a special project, so I just wanted to get your sense of them. Really nice to hear.”
Dignitaries and leaders from around the world would be gathering in Vienna, under the auspices of the Lenz Foundation …
They had to get to Vienna.
It was the one place in the world they shouldn’t be showing their faces, and the one place where they had no choice but to go.
Anna and he paced the hotel room. They could take precautions—precautions that now came as second nature: disguise, falsified identities, separate flights.
But the risks seemed much greater now.
“If we’re not just chasing a will-o’-the-wisp, we’ve got to assume that
every commercial flight into Vienna is going to be scrutinized very carefully,” Anna said. “They’re going to be on full alert.”
Ben felt the flicker of an idea. “What did you say again?”
“They’re going to be on full alert. Border control isn’t going to be a cakewalk. More like a gauntlet.”
“Before that.”
“I said we’ve got to assume that every commercial flight into Vienna …”
“That’s it,” Ben said.
“What’s it?”
“Anna, I’m going to take a risk here. And the calculation is that it’s a smaller risk than we’d otherwise be facing.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m going to call a guy named Fred McCallan. He was the codger I was supposed to go skiing with in St. Moritz.”
“You were going to St. Moritz to go skiing with a ‘codger.’”
Ben blushed. “Well, there was a granddaughter in the picture.”
“Go on.”
“More to the point, though, there’s a private jet in the picture. A Gulfstream. I’ve been in it once. Very red. Red seats, red carpeting, red TV set. Fred will still be at the Hotel Carlton there, and the plane will probably be at the little airport in Chur.”
“So you’re going to call him up and ask for the keys. Kind of like borrowing someone’s station wagon to pick up groceries, right?”
“Well …”
Anna shook her head. “It’s true what they say—the rich really are different from you and me.” She shot him a look. “I mean, of course, just me.”
“Anna …”
“I’m scared as shit, Ben. Bad jokes come with the territory. Listen, I don’t know this guy from Adam. If you think you can trust him—if that’s what your gut is telling you—then I can live with it.”
“Because you’re right, it’s the commercial flights they’ll be watching …”
Anna nodded vigorously. “So long as they’re not coming from places like Colombia, private flights get pretty much a free pass. If this guy’s pilot can move the Gulfstream to Brussels, let’s say …”
“We go directly to Brussels, assuming nobody’s onto the IDs Oscar made for us. Then transfer to Fred’s private jet and fly to Vienna that way. That’s the way the Sigma principals travel. Chances are, they’re not going to be expecting a Gulfstream with two fugitives on board.”
“O.K., Ben,” Anna said. “I call this the beginning of a plan.”
Ben dialed the number of the Hotel Carlton and waited a minute for the front desk to connect him.
Fred McCallan’s voice boomed even through the international phone lines. “My God, Benjamin, do you have any idea of the hour? Never mind, I suppose you’re calling to apologize. Though I’m not the one you should apologize to. Louise has been devastasted. Devastated. And you two have so much in common.”
“I understand, Fred, and I …”
“But actually I’m glad you finally called. Do you realize they’re saying the most preposterous things about you? A guy called me up and gave me an earful. They’re saying that …”
“You’ve got to believe me, Fred,” Ben said urgently, cutting him off, “there’s no truth to those reports whatever—I mean, whatever they’re accusing me of, you’ve got to believe me when I say that …”
“And I laughed in his face!” Fred was saying, having talked over Ben’s interjection. “I told him, maybe that’s what you get from your creepy English boarding schools, but I’m a Deerfield man myself, and there’s no way on God’s green earth that …”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence, Fred. The thing is …”
“Top-seeded in tennis, I told him. You were, weren’t you?”
“Well, actually …”
“Track and field? I was a track and field man myself—did I ever show you my trophies? Louise thinks it’s ridiculous that I’m still boasting about them fifty years later, and she’s right. But I’m incorrigible.”
“Fred, I’ve got a really, really, really big favor to ask.”
“For you, Benny? You’re practically family, you know that. One day you might actually be family. Just say the word, my boy. Just say the word.”
As Anna said, it was the beginning of a plan, no more. But foolproof would take more time than they had. Because the one thing that was certain was that they had to make their way to Vienna as fast as possible, or it would be too late.
Unless it was, as Chardin had suggested, already too late.