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.”
“I’m not following.”
“We human beings are singularly ill-designed in one respect. Of all the species on the planet, we require the longest period of gestation and childhood—of development. And really, we must think about intellectual as well as physical development. Two decades for complete physical maturation, often another decade or more to attain full professional mastery in our area of specialization. Somebody with a highly involved craft, such as a surgeon, may be well into his fourth decade before he has achieved
full competence at his vocation. The process of learning and progressive mastery continues—and then, just as he reaches its height, what happens? His eyes begin to dim, his fingers to lose their precision. The depredations of time begin to rob him of what he spent half a lifetime acquiring. It’s like a bad joke. We’re Sisyphus, knowing as soon as we have rolled the boulder toward the top of the hill, it will start hurtling back down. I’m told you once taught schoolchildren. Think how much of human society is devoted simply to reproducing itself—transmitting its institutions, its knowledge and skills, the struts and gearings of civilization. It’s an extraordinary tribute to our determination to win out over time. And yet how much farther would our species have been able to advance if only its leadership, political and intellectual, had been able to focus on advancement, rather than simply self-replacement How much farther we’d all be if some of us were able to stay the course, mount the learning curve and stay there! How much farther we’d be if the best and the brightest of us could keep that boulder rolling uphill, rather than fending off the nursing home or the grave by the time the crest came into view!”
A doleful smile. “Gerhard Lenz, whatever we think of him, was a brilliant man,” Lenz went on. Ben made a mental note: was Jürgen Lenz really Gerhard’s son? “Most of his theories never amounted to anything. But he was convinced that the secret to how and why human beings age was in our cells. And this was even before Watson and Crick discovered DNA, all the way back in 1953! A remarkable man, really. So farsighted in so many ways. He knew the Nazis would lose, and Hitler would be gone, and the funds would dry up. He simply wanted to make sure his work would continue. Do you know why that was important, Benjamin? May I call you Benjamin?”
But Ben was transfixed, looking around the cavernous laboratory in stupefaction, and did not answer.
Because he was there and not there.
He was entwined with Anna, their bodies slick and warm. He was watching her cry after he’d told her about Peter.
He was sitting in a rural Swiss inn with Peter; he was standing over Peter’s blood-soaked body.
“An extraordinary undertaking required extraordinary resources. Hitler prattled about stability while contributing to its destruction, and so it went with other tyrants in other parts of the world. But Sigma really
could contribute to the pacification of the planet. Its founders knew what was necessary. They were devoted to a single creed: rationality. The remarkable advances we’d seen over the past century in technology had to be matched with advances in the management of our race—the human race. Science and politics could no longer be relegated to separate dominions.”
Gradually Ben focused. “You’re not making sense. Technology proved an aid to the madness. Totalitarianism depended on mass communication. And scientists helped make the Holocaust possible.”
“All the more reason why Sigma was necessary—as a bulwark against that sort of madness. You can understand that, can’t you? A single madman had driven Europe to the brink of anarchy. On the other side of a great land mass, a small band of agitators had turned an empire secured by Peter the Great into a seething cauldron. The insanity of the mob amplified the insanity of the individual. That’s what the century had taught us. The future of Western civilization was too important to rest in the hands of the mobs. The aftermath of the war had left a vacuum, a powerful one. Civil society was everywhere in disarray. It fell upon a small group of powerful, well-organized men to impose order. Indirect rule. The levers of power were to be manipulated, even as that manipulation would be carefully camouflaged by the official instrumentalities of governance. Enlightened leadership was necessary—leadership behind the scenes.”
“And what was to guarantee that the leadership was going to be enlightened?”
“I told you. Lenz was a farsighted man, and so were the industrialists he allied with. Again, it comes down to the marriage of science and politics: one would have to heal and strengthen the other.”
Ben shook his head. “That’s something else that doesn’t make sense. These businessmen were folk heroes, many of them. Why would they agree to consort with the likes of Strasser or Gerhard Lenz?”
“Yes, this was an extremely inclusive group. But perhaps you forget your own father’s indispensable role.”
“A Jew.”
“Doubly indispensable, one could say. Substantial sums were transferred out of the Third Reich, and to do so without detection was a challenge of mind-numbing complexity. Your father, who was quite a wizard in such financial matters, rose to the challenge. But, equally, the
fact that he was Jewish was exceedingly helpful in reassuring our counterparts in Allied nations. It helped establish the fact that this wasn’t about furthering the Führer’s insanity. This was about business. And about betterment.”
Ben gave him a frankly skeptical look. “You still haven’t explained Gerhard Lenz’s special appeal to these businessmen.”
“Lenz had something to offer them. Or, at that point, I should say that he had something to promise. The word had spread among the moguls that Lenz had made some extremely suggestive scientific breakthroughs in an area of direct personal interest to all of them. Based on some preliminary successes, Lenz had, at the time, thought he was nearer than he in fact was. He was flush with excitement, and the excitement was infectious. As things turned out, the founders didn’t survive to benefit from his researches. But all of them deserve credit for making it possible. Billions of dollars invisibly went to support the research—a level of support that made the Manhattan Project look like a high school lab class. But now we touch on matters that may lie beyond your grasp.”
“Try me.”
“No doubt your inquiries are purely disinterested, yes?” Lenz said dryly. “Like Ms. Navarro’s.”
“What have you done with her?” Ben asked again, turning toward Lenz as if coming out of a stupor. He was beyond anger now. He was in another, calmer place. He was thinking about killing Jürgen Lenz, realizing with peculiar satisfaction that he did in fact have it in him to kill another person.
And he was thinking about how he would find Anna. I’ll listen to you, you bastard. I’ll be civil and obedient and I’ll let you talk until you take me to her.
And then I’ll kill you.
Lenz looked at him, unblinking, and then continued his explanation. “I expect you’ve figured out the basic scenario. Quite simply, what his work promised was the opportunity to explore the limits of mortality. A man lives for a hundred years if he’s lucky. Mice only get two years. Galapagos tortoises can live two hundred years. Now, why in the world is that? Has nature dictated these arbitrary limits?”
Lenz had begun pacing slowly back and forth in front of Ben, his guards standing watch. “Even though my father was forced to move to South America, he continued to direct his research institute here long-distance.
Traveled back and forth several times a year. In the late fifties one of his scientists made an intriguing discovery—that every time a human cell divides, its chromosomes, those tiny spindles of DNA, become shorter! Microscopically shorter, yes, but still, measurably so. So what was it, exactly, that was getting shorter? It took years to discover the answer.” He smiled again. “Father was right. The secret really was in our cells.”
“The chromosomes,” Ben said. He was beginning to understand.
Father was right.
He had an idea now where Max had gone.
“Just one tiny part of the chromosomes, really. The very tip of them—looks a little like those plastic tips at the end of shoelaces. Way back in 1938 those little caps had been discovered, named ‘telomeres.’ Our team found that every time a cell divides, those little caps get shorter and shorter, until the cell starts to die. Our hair falls out. Our bones get brittle. Our spines curve. Our skin wrinkles and sags. We get old.”
“I saw what you’re doing to those children,” Ben said. “The progerics. I take it you’re experimenting on them.” And who else are you experimenting on? “The world believes you invite them in for a vacation. Some vacation.” No, he chided himself, must remain calm. He struggled to control his rage, keep from showing it.
Listen to him. Lead him on.
“True, it’s no vacation for them,” Lenz agreed. “But these poor children do not need vacations. They need a cure! It’s really fascinating, you know, these little young-old people. They’re born old. If you took a cell from a newborn progeric child and put it side by side, under a microscope, with one from a ninety-year-old man—why, even a molecular biologist couldn’t tell the difference! In a progeric, those little tips start out short. Short telomeres, short lives.”
“What are you doing to them?” Ben asked. He realized his jaw ached from clenching it so hard so long. A mental image flashed of the progeric children in the bottles.
Dr. Reisinger and Justice Miriam Bateman, Arnold Carr, and the others were straggling out of the room, conversing.
“Those little shoelace tips, they’re like tiny odometers. Or timing devices, say. We have a hundred trillion cells in our bodies, and each cell has ninety-two telomeres—that makes ten quadrillion little clocks telling our body when it’s time to shut down. We’re preprogrammed to die!”
Lenz seemed unable to contain his excitement. “But what if we could somehow reset the clocks, hmm? Keep them from getting shorter? Ah, that was the trick. Well, it turns out that some cells—certain brain cells, for instance—make a chemical, an enzyme, that fixes up their little telomeres, rebuilds them. All of our cells have the ability to make it, but for some reason they don’t—it’s just switched off most of the time. So … what if we could turn that switch on? Keep those little clocks ticking? So elegant, so simple. But I’d be lying to you if I said this was easy to do. Even with all the money in the world, and some of the world’s most brilliant scientists to choose from, it still took decades, and a number of scientific advances, like gene splicing.”
This was what the killings were about, wasn’t it?
A neat little irony, Ben thought. People die so that others can live far beyond their natural life span.
Keep him talking, explaining. Bury the rage. Keep sight of the goal.
“When did you make your breakthrough?” Ben asked.
“Around fifteen, twenty years ago.”
“And why hasn’t anybody else caught up with you?”
“Others are working in the field, of course. But we’ve got an advantage they lack.”
“Unlimited funding.” Credit Max Hartman, he thought.
“That helps, certainly. And the fact that we’ve been working on it pretty much nonstop since the forties. But that’s not the whole story. The big difference is human experimentation. Every ‘civilized’ country in the world has outlawed it. But how much can you really learn from rats or fruit flies, for God’s sake. We made our earliest advances by experimenting on children with progeria, a condition that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the animal world. And we still use progerics, as we continue to refine our understanding of the molecular pathways involved. One day we won’t need them anymore. But we still have so much to learn.”
“Human experimentation,” Ben said, scarcely concealing his revulsion. There was no difference between Jürgen Lenz and Gerhard Lenz. To them, human beings—sick children, refugees, camp inmates—were nothing more than lab rats. “Like those refugee children in their tents, fenced in out there,” Ben said. “Maybe you brought them in under the guise of ‘humanitarianism.’ But they’re expendable too, aren’t they?” He recalled words that Georges Chardin had spoken to him, and he said them aloud: “The slaughter of the innocents.”
Lenz bristled. “That’s what some of the angeli rebelli called it, but it’s a rather inflammatory description,” he said. “As such, it only impedes rational deliberation. Yes, some must die that others may live. A disquieting idea, no doubt. But put away the veil of sentimentality for one moment and face the brutal truth. These unfortunate children would otherwise be killed in war, or die from the diseases of poverty—and for what? Instead, they are saviors. They’ll change the world. Is it more ethical to bomb their homes, let them be machine-gunned down, let them die senselessly, as the ‘civilized world’ permits? Or to give them the chance, instead, to alter the course of history? You see, the form of telomerase enzyme that our treatment requires is most readily isolated from the tissues of the central nervous system—the cells of the cerebrum and cerebellum. The quantities are far richer in the young. Unfortunately, it cannot be synthesized: it’s a complex protein, and the shape, the conformation, of the protein is crucial. As with many such complex proteins, they cannot be produced by artificial means. And so … we must harvest it from human beings.”
“The slaughter of the innocents,” Ben repeated.
Lenz shrugged. “The sacrifice troubles you, but it has not unduly troubled the world at large.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve no doubt heard the statistics—the fact that twenty thousand children disappear every year. People know, and they shrug. They’ve come to accept it. Perhaps it would provide a measure of consolation to know that these children haven’t perished for no reason. It has taken us years to perfect our assays, techniques, dose levels. There was no other way. Nor will there be in the foreseeable future. We need the tissue. It must be human tissue, and it must be from juveniles. A seven-year-old’s brain—a quart and a half of quivering jelly—is hardly smaller than a grown-up’s, but its yield of telomerase enzymes is ten times as great. It is the greatest, most valuable natural resource on earth, yes? As your countrymen say, a terrible thing to waste.”
“And so you ‘disappear’ them. Every year. Thousands and thousands of children.”
“Typically from war-torn regions where their life expectancy would be paltry, anyway. This way, at least, they do not die in vain.”
“No, they don’t die in vain. They die for vanity. They die so that you and your friends can live forever, isn’t that it?” This is not a man you
argue with, Ben thought, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to contain his outrage.
Lenz scoffed, “Forever? Please, none of us will live forever. All we’re doing is arresting the aging process in some cases, reversing it in others. The enzyme enables us to repair much of the damage to the skin, the integument. Reverse the damage caused by heart disease. As yet, this therapy can only occasionally restore us to the prime of our youth. And even to give someone my age his forty-year-old body back is time-consuming …”
“These people,” Ben said, “they all come here to … to become younger.”
“Only a few of them. Most of them are public figures who can’t change their appearance drastically without attracting attention. So they come here, at my invitation, to halt their aging, maybe undo some of the damage that age has inflicted.”
“Public figures?” Ben shot back mockingly. “They’re all rich and powerful!” He was beginning to understand what Lenz was doing.
“No, Benjamin. They’re the great ones. The leaders of our society, our culture. The few who advance our civilization. The founders of Sigma came to understand this. They saw that civilization was fragile, and that there was only one way to ensure the continuity that it required. The future of the industrial state had to be protected, sheltered from the storms. Our societies would only advance if we could push back the horizon of human mortality. Year by year, Sigma used whatever tools it had at its disposal, but now the original goals can be advanced by other, more effective means—good God, we’re talking about something far more effective than throwing billions of dollars at coups and political action groups. We’re talking about the formation of a stable, lasting elite.”
“So these are the leaders of our civilizations …”
“Precisely.”
“And you’re the man who leads the leaders.”
Lenz responded with a thin smile. “Please, Benjamin. I have no interest in boss-man theatrics. But in any organization, there must be a … coordinator.”
“And there can only be one.”
A pause. “Ultimately, yes.”
“And what of those who oppose your ‘enlightened’ regime? I suppose they’re purged from the body politic.”
“A body must purge toxins if it is to survive, Benjamin.” Lenz spoke with surprising gentleness.
“What you’re describing isn’t some utopia, Lenz. It’s a slaughterhouse.”
“Your reproach is as glib as it is vacuous,” Lenz returned. “Life is a matter of trade-offs, Benjamin. You live in a world where vastly greater sums are spent on medications for erectile dysfunction than are spent on tropical diseases that claim the lives of millions every year. And what of your own personal decisions? When you buy a bottle of Dom Perignon, you have spent a sum of money that could have vaccinated a village in Bangladesh, spared lives from the ravages of disease, yes? People will die, Benjamin, as a result of the decisions, the priorities, entailed by your purchase. I’m quite serious: Can you deny that the ninety dollars a bottle of Dom Perignon costs could have easily saved half a dozen lives, perhaps more? Think about it. The bottle will yield seven or eight glasses of wine. Each glass, we can say, represents a life lost.” His eyes were bright, a scientist having solved an equation and moved on to another one. “That is why I say that such trade-offs are inevitable. And once you understand that, you start to ask higher order questions: qualitative questions, not quantitative ones. Here we have the opportunity to vastly extend the useful life span of a great humanitarian or thinker—someone whose contribution to the commonweal is inarguable. Compared to this good, what is the life of a Serbian goatherd? Of an illiterate child who would have otherwise been destined to a life of poverty and petty criminality. Of a Gypsy girl who would otherwise spend her days picking the pockets of tourists visiting Florence, her nights picking lice out of her hair. You have been taught that lives are sacrosanct, and yet every day you make decisions signifying an awareness that some lives are more valuable than others. I mourn for those who have given their lives for the greater good. I truly do. I genuinely wish that the sacrifice they made was unnecessary. But I also know that every great achievement in the history of our species has come at the cost of human lives. ‘There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism’: a great thinker said that, a thinker who died too young.”
Ben stood blinking, speechless.
“Come,” Lenz said, “there’s someone who wants to say hello to you. An old friend of yours.”
Ben gaped. “Professor Godwin?”
“Ben.”
It was his old college mentor, long since retired. But his posture seemed straighter, his once wrinkled skin was now smooth and pink. He looked younger by several decades than his eighty-two years. John Barnes Godwin, emeritus historian of Europe in the twentieth century, was vigorous. His handshake was firm.
“Good Lord,” Ben said. If he hadn’t known Godwin, he’d have put his age in the early fifties.
Godwin was one of the elect. Of course: he was a behind-the-scenes kingmaker, he was powerful and extremely well connected.
Godwin stood before him as mind-boggling proof of Lenz’s achievement. They stood in a small antechamber off the great hall, which was comfortably furnished with couches and easy chairs, throw pillows and reading lamps, and racks of newspapers and magazines in a variety of languages.
Godwin seemed pleased at Ben’s astonishment. Jürgen Lenz beamed.
“You must not know what to make of all this,” Godwin said.
It took Ben a few seconds before he could think of a response. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“It’s extraordinary, what Dr. Lenz has achieved. We’re all deeply grateful to him. But I think we’re also aware of the significance, the gravity, of his gift. In essence, we’ve been given our lives back. Not our youth so much as—as another chance. A reprieve from death.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Is it against nature? Maybe. The way curing cancer is against nature. Emerson, remember, told us that old age is ‘the only disease.’”
His eyes gleamed. Ben listened in stunned silence.
In college, Ben had always addressed him as Professor Godwin, but now he chose not to address him by name at all. He said simply, “Why?”
“Why? On a personal level? Do you have to ask? I’ve been given another lifetime. Perhaps even another two lifetimes.”
“Will you gentlemen excuse me?” Lenz interrupted. “The first helicopter is about to leave, and I must say good-bye.” He bustled, almost sprinted, out of the room.
“Ben, when you get to be my age, you don’t buy green bananas,”
Godwin resumed. “You don’t take on book projects you don’t think you’ll live to complete. But think of how much I can do now. Until Dr. Lenz called, I’d felt as if I’d struggled and worked and learned for decades to get where I am, to learn what I know, to gain the understanding I have—yet at any moment everything might be snatched away: ‘If youth but knew, if old age but could,’ right?”
“Even if all this is true—”
“You have eyes. You can see what’s in front of you. Look at me, for God’s sake! I used not to be able to climb the stairs at Firestone Library, and now I can run.” Godwin, Ben realized, was not just a successful experiment, he was one of them—a conspirator with Lenz. Didn’t he know about the cruelty, the murders?
“But have you seen what’s going on here—the child refugees on the lawn? Thousands of abducted children? That doesn’t bother you?”
Godwin looked visibly uncomfortable. “I’ll admit there are aspects of all this that I prefer not to know about, and I’ve always made that clear.”
“We’re talking about the ongoing murder of thousands of children!” Ben said. “The treatment requires it. Lenz calls it ‘harvesting,’ a pretty word for systematic slaughter.”
“It’s …” Godwin faltered. “Well, it’s morally complex. ‘Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona.’”
“‘For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous,’” Ben translated. “Publilius Syrus. You taught me that.”
Godwin, too. He’d gone over; he’d joined Lenz. “What’s important is that the cause has genuine merit.” He ambled over to a leather sofa. Ben sat facing him on the adjacent sofa.
“And were you involved in Sigma’s cause in the old days as well?”
“Yes, for decades. And I feel so privileged to be around for this whole new phase. Under Lenz’s leadership, things are going to be very different.”
“I gather not all your colleagues agreed.”
“Oh yes. The angeli rebelli, Lenz calls them. Rebel angels. There were a handful of people who wanted to put up a fight. Out of vanity or shortsightedness. Either they never trusted Lenz, or they felt demoted by the fact that new leadership had emerged. I guess a few of them had qualms about the … sacrifices that had to be made. Any time there’s a shift in power, you’ve got to expect some forms of resistance. But a few years ago, when Lenz allowed that his project would soon be ready for
actual trials, he made it clear the collective would have to recognize his leadership. He didn’t do it out of any sense of self-interest, either. It’s just that some difficult decisions would have to be made about who was going to be—well, admitted into the program. Inducted into the permanent elite. The risk of factionalism was too great. Lenz was the leader we needed. Most of us recognized that. A few didn’t.”
“Tell me, does your plan ultimately call for making this treatment available to everyone, to the masses? Or just what he calls ‘the great ones’?”
“Well, you raise a serious point. I was flattered that Jürgen selected me to be a kind of recruiter, as it were, for this august group of world … luminaries, I suppose. The Wiedergeborenen, as Dr. Lenz calls us—the Reborn. We’re reaching out far beyond the Sigma rump group. I brought Walter in, you know, and my old friend Miriam Bateman—Justice Miriam Bateman. I’ve been charged with helping choose those who seem deserving of it. From around the world—China, Russia, Europe, Africa—everywhere, without prejudice. Except for a prejudice in favor of greatness.”
“But Arnold Carr’s not much older than I am …”
“In fact, he’s really at the perfect age to begin these treatments. He can stay forty-two for the rest of his very, very long life, if he chooses. Or become the biological equivalent of thirty-two again.” The historian widened his eyes in wonderment. “There are forty of us by now.”
“I understand,” Ben interrupted, “but—”
“Listen to me, Ben! Good Lord, the other Supreme Court Justice we’ve chosen, a great jurist who’s also black, he’s a sharecropper’s son who’s lived through segregation and desegregation both. The wisdom he’s accumulated in his lifetime! Who could ever replace him? A painter whose work is already transforming the art world—how many more spectacular canvases might be in him? Imagine, Ben, if history’s greatest composers and writers and artists—take Shakespeare, take Mozart, take—”
Ben leaned forward. “This is insanity!” he thundered. “The rich and powerful get to live twice as long as the poor and powerless! It’s a goddamned conspiracy of the elite!”
“And what if it is?” Godwin shot back. “Plato wrote of the philosopherking, of the rule of the wise. He understood that our civilization advances and retreats, advances and retreats. We learn lessons only to forget them. History’s tragedies repeat themselves—the Holocaust, and then the genocides
that followed, as if we’d all forgotten. World wars. Dictatorships. False messiahs. Oppression of minorities. We don’t seem to evolve. But now, for the first time, we can change all that. We can transform the human species!”
“How? Your numbers are tiny.” Ben folded his arms on his chest. “That’s another problem with elites.”
Godwin stared at Ben for a moment, then chuckled. “‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’—yes, it all sounds hopelessly inadequate to the grand tasks, right? But humanity doesn’t progress through some process of collective enlightenment. We progress because an individual or small team somewhere makes a breakthrough, and everyone else benefits. Three centuries ago, in a region with a very high rate of illiteracy, one man discovers calculus, or two men do—and the course of our species is changed forever. A century ago, one man discovers relativity, and nothing is ever the same. Tell me, Ben, do you know exactly how an internal combustion engine works—could you assemble one even if I gave you the parts? Do you know how to vulcanize rubber? Of course not, but you benefit from the existence of the automobile all the same. That’s how it works. In the primitive world—I know we’re not supposed to use those words anymore but indulge me—there’s no great chasm between what one tribesman knows and another. Not so in the Western world. The division of labor is the very mark of civilization: the higher the degree of division of labor, the more advanced the society. And the most important division of labor is the intellectual division of labor. A minuscule number of people worked on the Manhattan Project—and yet the planet was changed by it forever. In the past decade, you had a few small teams decoding the human genome. Never mind that most of humanity can’t remember the difference between Nyquil and niacin—they’ll benefit all the same. People everywhere are using personal computers—people who couldn’t understand a scrap of computer code, don’t know the first thing about integrated circuitry. The mastery belongs to the happy few, and yet the multitudes benefit. The way our species advances isn’t through vast, collective exertions—the Jews building the Pyramids. It’s through individuals, through very small elites, who discover fire, the wheel, or the central processing unit, and thereby change the very landscape of our lives. And what’s true in science and technology can be true of politics, as well. Except the learning curve here takes place over a far longer period of time. Which means that by the time we’ve
learned from our errors, we’ve been replaced by younger upstarts who make those errors all over again. We don’t learn enough, because we’re not around long enough. The people who founded Sigma recognized this as an inherent limitation, one that our species would eventually have to overcome if we were to survive. Are you starting to see, Ben?”
“Keep going,” Ben said, like a hesitant student.
“The efforts of Sigma—our attempt to moderate the politics of the postwar era—were only the beginning. Now we can change the face of the planet! Ensure universal peace, prosperity, and security, through the wise management and marketing of the planet’s resources. If that’s what you call a conspiracy of the elite—well, is it really such a bad thing? If a few miserable war refugees have to meet their maker ahead of schedule in order to save the world, is that really such a tragedy?”
“It’s only for the ones you judge worthy, right?” Ben said. “You want to keep it from everyone else? There will be two classes of human being.”
“The ruled and the rulers. But that’s inevitable, Ben. There will be the Wise Men and the ruled masses. That’s the only way to engineer a viable society. The world’s already overpopulated. Much of Africa doesn’t even have clean drinking water. If everyone lives twice or three times longer, think of what this will do! The world would collapse! That’s why, in his wisdom, Lenz knows it must only be available to the few.”
“And what happens to democracy? The rule of the people?”
Godwin’s cheeks colored. “Spare me the sentimental rhetoric, Ben. The history of man’s inhumanity to man has been history itself: mobs destroying what the nobility had painstakingly constructed. The main task in politics has always been saving the people from themselves. This wouldn’t go down well with the undergraduates, but the principle of aristocracy was always correct: aristos, kratos—rule of the best. The problem was that aristocracy often didn’t give you the best. But imagine if for the first time in human history, you could rationalize the system, create a hidden aristocracy based on merit—with Wiedergeborenen serving as the custodians of civilization.”
Ben stood up and paced. His head spun. Goodwin, spinning his giddy justifications, had been hooked by the irresistible lure of near-immortality.
“Ben, you’re what, thirty-five, thirty-six? You imagine you will live forever. I know I did at your age. But I want you to imagine being eighty-five, ninety, God willing you live so long. You have a family, you have
children and grandchildren. You’ve had a happy life, your work is meaningful, and although you have all the normal afflictions of old age—”
“I’ll want to die,” Ben said curtly.
“Correct. If you’re in the condition of most people at that age. But you don’t ever have to be ninety. If you begin this therapy now, you’ll always be in your prime, in your mid-thirties—God, what I’d give to be your age! Please don’t tell me you have some ethical objection to it.”
“I’m not sure what to think at this point,” Ben said, watching Godwin closely.
Godwin seemed to believe him.
“Good. You’re being open-minded. I want you to join us. Join the Wiedergeborenen.”
Ben sank his head into his arms. “It’s certainly a tempting offer.” His voice was muffled. “You make some very good points—”
“Are you still here, John?” interrupted Lenz’s voice, loud and enthusiastic. “The last helicopter’s about to leave!”
Godwin rose swiftly. “I need to catch the shuttle,” he apologized. “I want you to think about what we discussed.”
Lenz entered with his arm around a stoop-shouldered old man.
Jakob Sonnenfeld.
“Did you have a good talk?” Lenz inquired.
No. Not him, too. “You—” Ben blurted out to the old Nazi hunter, revolted.
“I think we may have a new recruit,” Godwin said somberly, and gave Lenz a brief but significant look.
Ben turned to face Sonnenfeld. “They knew where I was going in Buenos Aires because of you, isn’t that right?”
Sonnenfeld looked pained. He averted his eyes. “There are times in life when one must choose sides,” he said. “When my treatment begins—”
“Come, gentlemen,” Lenz interrupted again. “We must hurry.”
Ben could hear the roar of a helicopter outside, as Godwin and Sonnenfeld moved toward the exit.
“Benjamin,” Lenz said without turning around. “Please stay right there. I’m so glad to hear you may be interested in our project. So now you and I must have a little talk.”
Ben felt something slam him from behind, and steel clamped against his wrist.
Handcuffs.
There was no way out.
The guards dragged him through the great hall, past the exercise equipment and the medical monitoring stations.
He screamed at the top of his lungs and let himself go limp. If any of the Wiedergeborenen remained, they’d see him being abducted, and surely they’d object. These were not evil people.
But none of them remained, at least no one he could see.
.A third guard took his upper arm and joined the others. His legs and knees slid painfully against the stone floor, the abrasions excruciating. He kicked and struggled. A fourth arrived, and now they were able to hold Ben by each limb, though he torqued himself back and forth to make it as difficult for them as possible, and he kept shouting.
They trundled him into an elevator. A guard pressed the second-floor button. In seconds the elevator opened on to a stark white corridor. As the guards carried him out—he’d ceased resisting; what was the point?—a passing nurse gaped at him, then looked away quickly.
They brought him into what looked like a modified operating room and hoisted him onto a bed. An orderly who appeared to have been expecting him—had the guards radioed ahead?—fastened colored restraints to his ankles and wrists, and then, once he was secured to the table, removed the handcuffs.
Exhausted, he lay flat, his limbs immobile. All of the guards but one filed out of the room, their work done. The remaining guard stood watch by the closed door, an Uzi across his chest.
The door opened, and Jürgen Lenz entered. “I admire your cleverness,” he said. “I’d been assured that the old cave was sealed or at least impassable, so I thank you for pointing out the security risk. I’ve already ordered the entrance dynamited.”
Ben wondered: Did Godwin really invite him to join them? Or was his old mentor simply trying to neutralize him? Lenz was far too suspicious to trust him anyway.
Or was he?
“Godwin asked me to join the project,” Ben said.
Lenz wheeled a metal cart over next to the bed and busied himself with a hypodermic needle.
“Godwin trusts you,” Lenz said, turning around. “I myself do not.”
Ben watched his face. “Trusts me about what?”
“About respecting our need for confidentiality. About who you or your investigative friend might have already talked to.”
Here was his vulnerability! “If you release her unharmed, you and I can strike a bargain,” Ben said. “We each get what we want.”
“And, of course, I can trust you to keep your word.”
“It’d be in my own best interests,” Ben said.
“People do not always act in their own self-interest. If I were ever to forget it, the angeli rebelli were there to remind me.”
“Let’s keep it simple. My interest is in having you release Anna Navarro. Yours is to keep your project secret. We have a mutual interest in striking a deal.”
“Well,” Lenz said dubiously. “Perhaps. But first I’ll need a little chemically inspired honesty, in case you don’t come by it naturally.”
Ben tried to suppress the wave of panic. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing harmful. A pleasant experience, in fact.”
“I don’t think you have time for this. Especially with law-enforcement agents due to arrive at any second. This is your last chance to deal.”
“Ms. Navarro is here on her own,” Lenz said. “She hasn’t called in anyone else. She told me so herself.” He held up the hypodermic. “And I assure you she was speaking the truth.”
Keep conversing. Keep him diverted.
“How do you know you can trust the scientists on your team?”
“I don’t. Everything, all the materials, the computers, the sequencers, the slides, the formulas for the infusions—they’re all here.”
Ben pressed. “You’re still vulnerable. Somebody could get access to whatever offsite storage arrangements you’ve got for the data files. And no encryption is unbreakable.”
“Which is precisely why there is no offsite storage,” Lenz said, with evident satisfaction in demonstrating the fallacies in Ben’s suppositions. “That represents a risk I cannot afford. In all honesty, I did not get where I am by placing excessive trust in my fellow man.”
“As long as we’re both being honest, let me ask you something.”
“Yes?” Lenz tapped Ben’s left forearm until a vein popped up.
“I’d like to know why you had my brother killed.”
Lenz jabbed a needle into the vein with what seemed unnecessary force. “It should never have happened. It was done by fanatics among
my security people, and it’s something I deeply regret. A terrible mistake. They were concerned that his discovery of Sigma’s original board would imperil our work.”
Ben’s heart thudded, and again he fought to control himself. “And my father? Did your ‘fanatics’ kill him, too?”
“Max?” Lenz looked surprised. “Max is a genius. I very much admire the man. Oh no, I wouldn’t harm a hair on his head.”
“Then where is he?”
“Did he go somewhere?” Lenz asked innocently.
Move on.
“Then why kill all those other old men … ?”
There was a slight twitch under Lenz’s left eye. “Housecleaning. For the most part, we’re talking about individuals with personal involvement in Sigma who sought to resist the inevitable. They complained that Sigma had fallen under my sway, felt displaced by my emerging role. Oh, all our members were treated generously …”
“Kept on a string, you mean. Given payments to fortify their discretion.”
“As you like. But it was no longer enough, not now. What it came’ down to was a failure of vision. The point remains that they declined to, shall we say, get with the program. Then there were those who became importunate, possibly indiscreet, had long since ceased to have anything to offer. They were loose threads, and the time had come to snip them. Perhaps it seems harsh, but when there’s this much at stake, you do not simply give people a firm talking to, or spank their wrists, or put them in ‘time-out,’ yes? You take more definitive measures.”
Don’t give up, Ben told himself. Keep him engaged.
“Murdering these old men in itself seems a foolish risk, don’t you think? The deaths were bound to attract suspicion.”
“Please. All the deaths appeared to be natural, but even if the toxin were discovered, these were men with plenty of worldly enemies—”
Lenz heard the sound at the same moment Ben did.
A burst of machine-gun fire not far away.
And then another, even closer.
A shout.
Lenz turned toward the door, hypodermic needle in one hand. He said something to the guard standing by the door.
The door burst open in a hail of bullets.
A scream, and the guard collapsed in a pool of his own blood.
Lenz dropped to the floor.
Anna!
Ben’s relief was enormous. She’s alive, somehow she’s alive.
“Ben!” she shouted, flinging the door shut behind her and turning the lock. “Ben, you all right?”
“I’m all right,” he called.
“Stand up!” she screamed at Lenz. “You goddamned son of a bitch.”
She advanced, machine gun leveled. She was wearing a doctor’s short white coat.
Lenz stood. His face was flushed, his silver hair mussed. “My guards will be here any second.” His voice quavered.
“Don’t count on it,” Anna replied. “I’ve sealed off the entire wing, and the doors are jammed from the outside.”
“You’ve killed that guard, I think,” Lenz said, bravado returning to his voice. “I thought the United States trained its agents only to kill in self-defense.”
“Haven’t you heard? I’m off duty,” Anna said. “Hands away from your body. Where’s your weapon?”
Lenz was indignant. “I have none.”
Anna approached. “You don’t mind if I look, do you? Hands away from your body, I said.”
Slowly she took a step toward Lenz, slid her free hand inside his jacket. “Let’s see,” she said. “I sure hope I can do this without setting off the damned machine gun. I’m not too familiar with these little guys.”
Lenz paled.
She produced a small handgun from inside Lenz’s suit with a flourish, like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a top hat.
“Well, well,” she said. “Pretty slick for an old man, Jürgen. Or do your friends still call you Gerhard?”