At the end of Hochstrasse Ben found a sporting goods store that featured a wide variety of equipment for the tourist and sportsman. He rented a pair of cross-country skis and asked where he could rent a car.
No place for miles.
Parked at the side of the shop was a BMW motorcycle that looked old and decrepit but still functional. He struck a deal with the young man who managed the place, and owned the bike.
With the skis strapped to his back he set off across the ridge of the Semmering pass until he came to a narrow unmarked dirt road that wound steeply uphill through a ravine to the Schloss. The road was rutted and icy; it had evidently been used recently by trucks and other heavy vehicles.
When he had managed to climb perhaps a quarter of a mile, he came to a red sign that said BETRETEN VERBOTEN—PRIVATBESITZ: No Trespassing—Private Property.
Just ahead of the sign was a barrier gate whose arm was striped in yellow-and-black reflective paint. It appeared to be electronically controlled, but Ben was easily able to hop over it and then wheel the bike underneath, tipped at an angle.
Nothing happened: no Klaxon, no alarm bells.
He continued up the road, through dense snow-covered woods, and in a few minutes reached a high, crenellated stone wall. It looked centuries old, though recently restored.
From atop the wall rose several feet of thin, horizontally strung wire. At a distance, this addition was not visible, but Ben saw it clearly now. It was probably electrified, but he did not want to scale the wall and find out the hard way.
Instead, he followed the wall for a few hundred feet until it came to what appeared to be the main gate, about six feet wide and ten feet high, constructed of ornately scrolled wrought iron. Upon closer examination,
Ben realized that the fence was in fact steel painted to look like iron, entirely backed with a screen of woven wire fabric. This was certainly high-security, designed to foil intruders.
He wondered whether it was made to keep people out—or in.
Had Anna somehow gotten inside? he wondered. Was it possible? Or was she being held prisoner?
The dirt road came to an end another few hundred meters from the gate. Beyond it was glistening virgin snow. He parked the motorcycle, put on his skis, and set off across the snow, staying close to the wall.
His idea was to survey the entire perimeter of the property, or at least as much as was possible to examine, in hopes of discovering any holes in the security, any possible points of entry. But it did not look promising.
The snow was soft and deep, so he sank into the powder, and the even deeper drifts and dunes made maneuvering difficult. It was no easier once he got the hang of it, because the terrain became steeper, the skiing ever more arduous.
The ground next to the wall became higher, and pretty soon Ben could see over it.
Glare coming off the snow forced him to squint, but he could now make out the Schloss, a great rambling stone structure, more horizontal than vertical. At first glance this could have been a tourist attraction, but then he saw a couple of guards in military-style tunics, carrying submachine guns, patrolling the property.
Whatever was happening inside these walls was not simple research.
What he saw next was a profound shock. He didn’t understand it, but within the enclosed area were children, dozens and dozens of ragged-looking children, milling outside, in the cold. He peered again, squinting against the snow glare.
Who were they?
And why were they there?
This was no sanatorium, that was for sure; he wondered whether they were prisoners.
He skied uphill a short distance, close enough to get a better look, but not so close that he lost his line of sight behind the high stone wall.
Inside, next to the wall, was a fenced-in area the size of a city block. Within it were several large military-style tents jammed with children. It seemed to be a makeshift shantytown, a tent city, its inhabitants youth
from some Eastern European country. The steel fence that enclosed it was topped with coils of razor wire.
It was a strange vision. Ben shook his head as if to clear it of an optical illusion, then looked again. Yes. They were children, some toddlers, some teenagers, unshaven and rough-looking, smoking and shouting to one another; girls in headscarves, shabby peasant dresses, and tattered coats, children swarming all around.
He had seen news footage of people like this. Whoever they were, wherever they were from, they had that unmistakable look of impoverished youth driven out of their homes by war—Bosnian refugees, escapees from the conflicts in Kosovo and Macedonia, ethnic Albanians, perhaps.
Was Lenz sheltering war refugees here, on the grounds of his clinic?
Jürgen Lenz, humanitarian, giving shelter to refugees and ailing children?
Unlikely.
For this was hardly a shelter. These peasant children were packed into their tent city, inadequately dressed, freezing in the cold. And there were the armed guards. This looked like some kind of internment camp.
Then he heard a shout from the encampment, an adolescent boy’s voice. Someone within had spotted him. The shout was soon joined by others, the wretched inmates suddenly waving at him, beckoning to him, calling to him. He understood at once what they wanted.
They wanted to be released.
They wanted his help. They saw him as a savior, someone outside who could help them escape. His stomach turned, he shivered, and not from the cold.
What was being done to them?
Suddenly a shout arose from another direction, and one of the guards pointed his weapon toward Ben. Now several of the guards were shouting at him, waving him away.
The threat was clear: get off the private property or we’ll shoot.
He heard a blast of gunfire and turned to see a fusillade of bullets pock the snow a few feet to his left.
They weren’t kidding, and they weren’t patient.
The refugee children were prisoners here. And Anna?
Was Anna inside there too?
Please, God, I hope she’s all right. I hope she’s alive.
He didn’t know whether to wish she was inside—or to pray she wasn’t.
Ben turned around and headed back down the mountainside.
“Well, I see you’re more aware now,” Lenz said, smiling brightly. He stopped at the foot of her bed and clasped his hands in front of him. “Perhaps now you’d like to say to whom you’ve told my real identity.”
“Screw you,” she said.
“I thought not,” he said equably. “Once the ketamine has worn off”—he glanced at his gold watch—“which will be in no more than another half an hour, certainly, you’ll be infused intravenously with about five milligrams of a powerful opioid called Versed. You have had this before? During surgery, perhaps?”
Anna gazed at him blankly.
He continued, unruffled. “Five milligrams is about the proper dose to make you relaxed but still responsive. You’ll feel a little rush, but this passes in ten seconds or so, and then you’ll feel calmer than you’ve ever felt before in your life. All your anxiety will seep out of you. It’s a wonderful feeling.”
He cocked his head to one side like a bird. “If we were to inject you with one single bolus of this drug, you’d stop breathing and very probably die. So we must titrate it slowly over eight to ten minutes. We certainly don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Anna gave a grunt that communicated, she hoped, both skepticism and sarcasm at once. Despite her chemically induced calm, she was at the same time deeply frightened.
“Rather, you’ll be found dead in your wrecked rental car, another victim of drunk driving—”
“I didn’t rent a car,” she slurred.
“Oh, in fact you did. Or rather, it was done for you, using your credit card. You were arrested last night in a neighboring town. Your blood-alcohol level was measured at two-point-five, which is surely why you got into an accident. You were kept overnight in a holding cell and then released. But you know how it is with problem drinkers—they never learn.”
She displayed no reaction. But her mind raced, desperate to find a way out of the maze. There had to be flaws in his plan, but where?
Lenz continued, “Versed, you see, is the most effective truth serum
ever invented, even though it was not intended for this use. All the drugs the CIA has tried, like sodium pentothol or scopolamine, they never worked. But with the correct dose of Versed you’ll become so free of inhibitions that you’ll tell me anything I want to know. And here’s the magical thing: afterward you’ll remember nothing. You’ll talk and talk quite lucidly and yet, from the moment you’re put on the IV, you’ll have no memory of what happened. It’s really quite remarkable.”
A nurse entered the room, wide-hipped and squat and middle-aged. She rolled in a cart of equipment—tubes, blood-pressure cuffs, syringes—and began setting up. She watched Anna suspiciously as she filled a few of the syringes from little vials and then applied preprinted labels to them.
“This is Gerta, your nurse-anesthetist. She is one of our best. You are in good hands.” Lenz gave Anna a little wave as he left the room.
“How are you feeling?” Gerta asked perfunctorily, in a stern contralto, as she hung a bag of clear liquid on the IV stand to the left of Anna’s bed.
“Pretty … groggy …” Anna said, her voice trailing off, her eyes fluttering closed. But she was hyper-vigilant; now she had a tentative plan.
Gerta did something with what sounded like plastic tubing. After a few moments she said, “All right, I’ll come back. Doctor wants to wait until the ketamine is mostly out of your system. If we start the Versed now you may stop breathing. Anyway, I have to go to the anesthesia workroom. This sat probe is no good.” She closed the door behind her.
Anna opened her eyes and flung her body hard to the left, as hard as she could, augmenting the push by throwing her manacled arms into it. It was a movement she was beginning to master. The bed seemed to jump several inches toward the supply cart. There was no time to rest. One more try, and she was there.
She lifted her shoulders as far as the restraining belt would allow and pressed her face against the cold top edge of the cart. Out of the corner of her left eye she could see the safety pins, used to secure bandages, in their little square blister-wrap sterile packaging, just an inch or two away.
Yet still out of reach.
If she turned her neck to the left as far as it would go, she could almost look at the pack of safety pins straight on. The tendons on her neck and along her upper back were so strained they began to tremble. The ache quickly became excruciating.
Then, like a jeering child, she stuck her tongue all the way out. Tiny pinpoints of pain jabbed the underside of her tongue at its root.
Finally she lowered her distended tongue to the surface of the cart as if it were a steam shovel. It touched the plastic of the package, and she slowly pulled her head backward, edging the pack along as she did, right to the edge of the cart. Just before it could teeter off the edge she clenched it between her teeth.
A footfall, and the door to her room came open.
Quick as a rattlesnake she lay back on the bed, the little blister-pack concealed under her tongue, its sharp edges poking at its base. How much had she seen? The nurse was coming toward her. Anna gagged but kept the packet in her closed mouth in a pool of saliva.
“Yes,” Gerta said, “ketamine can make you nauseated sometimes, it will do that. You’re awake, I see.”
Anna made a complaining mmmmph through her shut mouth and shut her eyes. Saliva pooled behind her front teeth. She forced herself to swallow.
Gerta came around to Anna’s right and began fumbling at the head of the bed. Anna shut her eyes and tried to make her breathing sound regular.
A few minutes later Gerta left the room again and closed the door quietly behind her.
She would be back much sooner this time, Anna knew.
There was blood in her mouth from where the packet had cut into soft tissue, and Anna moved it to her lips with her tongue and then spit it out, forward. It landed squarely on the back of her left hand. She moved her hands together and reached her right index finger over, pulling the safety-pin packet into her fist.
Now she moved quickly. She knew what she was doing, because she had picked these locks on more than one occasion when she had misplaced the key and was too embarrassed to ask for a replacement.
The wrapping came off with some difficulty, but then it was an easy thing to bend the safety pin’s point away from its clasp.
The left cuff first. She inserted the pinpoint into the lock, pushed the inner pins to the left, then to the right, and the lock clicked open.
Her left hand was free!
She felt exhilarated. Even more quickly now she freed her right hand,
then the restraining belt, and then the door came open again with a low squeak. Gerta had returned.
Anna drew her hands back into the polyurethane cuffs so that they appeared still to be fastened and closed her eyes.
Gerta approached the bed. “I could hear you moving in here.”
Heart pounding so loud it had to be audible.
Anna opened her eyes slowly and made them look unfocused.
“I say enough is enough,” Gerta said menacingly. “I think you are making pretend.” Under her breath she added, “So we will have to take our chances.”
God, no.
She applied a rubber tourniquet to Anna’s left arm until the vein popped out, and inserted the intravenous needle, then turned her back to adjust the flow clamp on the IV tubing. In one snapping-turtle motion Anna pulled her hands free of the unlocked cuffs and tried silently to undo the tourniquet, quiet, must be quiet, but Gerta heard the snap of the rubber and turned around, and as she did Anna raised herself up off the bed as far as the chest belt would allow and caught the nurse’s neck with the crook of her right elbow, a strange gesture of affection. Pulled back hard on the rubber tube, hard against Gerta’s fleshy neck.
A yelp.
Gerta flailed her hands, reached for her neck, tried to claw her fingers under the garrote, could not get a purchase, her fingernails scratching at her own neck, wriggling madly. Her face purpled. Her mouth gasped and sucked for breath. Gerta’s fluttering hands slowed; she was probably losing consciousness.
Within a few minutes Anna, almost numb from exertion, had the nurse gagged and cuffed to the bed rail. Springing open the ankle cuffs, she slipped off the bed, her body feeling buoyant, and cuffed Gerta to the anesthesia machine as well, which would not easily move.
She removed Gerta’s key ring from her belt, and glanced at the anesthesia cart.
It was full of weapons. She scooped up a handful of packaged hypodermic needles and several small glass ampules of various drugs, then remembered she was wearing a hospital johnny with no pockets.
In the supply closet hung two white cotton doctor’s jackets. She put one on, stuffed the pilfered supplies in both slash pockets, and ran from the room.