The Sigma Protocol (36 page)

“You never saw your father again?”

“No. I saw him two or three times before his death. He came to Germany from Argentina to visit. He had a new name, a new identity. But my mother wouldn’t see him. I saw him, but I felt nothing for him. He was a stranger to me.”

“Your mother simply cut him off?”

“The next time was when she traveled to Argentina for his funeral. She did do that, as if she needed to see that he was dead. The funny thing was, she found she loved the country. It’s where she finally retired to.”

There was another silence, and then Ben said quietly but firmly, “I must say I’m impressed by all the resources you’ve devoted to shedding light on your paternal legacy. I wonder, in this connection, if you can tell me about an organization known as Sigma.” He studied Lenz’s face closely as he spoke the name.

Lenz looked at him for a good long while. Ben could hear his own heart thudding in the silence.

At last Lenz spoke. “You mention Sigma casually, but I think this may be the entire reason you have come here,” Lenz said. “Why are you here, Mr. Simon?”

Ben felt a chill. He had let himself be cornered. Now the roads diverged: now he could try to hold on to his false identity, or come out with the truth.

It was time to be direct. To draw out the quarry.

“Mr. Lenz, I’m inviting you to clarify the nature of your involvement with Sigma.”

Lenz frowned. “Why are you here, Mr. Simon? Why do you sneak into my house and lie to me?” Lenz smiled strangely, his voice quiet. “You’re CIA, Mr. ‘Simon,’ is that right?”

“What are you talking about?” Ben said, baffled and frightened.

“Who are you really, Mr. ‘Simon’?” Lenz whispered.

“Nice house,” Anna said. “Whose is it?”

She sat in the front seat of a smoke-filled blue BMW, an unmarked police vehicle. Sergeant Walter Heisler was at the wheel, a beefy, hearty-looking man in his late thirties, smoking Casablancas. He was cordial enough.

“One of our more, eh, prominent citizens,” Heisler said, taking a drag on his cigarette. “Jürgen Lenz.”

“Who is he?”

They were both looking out at a handsome villa a hundred yards or so down Adolfstorgasse. Anna saw that most of the parked cars had black license plates with white letters. Heisler explained that you had to pay to maintain such plates; it was the old, aristocratic style.

He blew out a cloud of smoke. “Lenz and his wife are active in the social circles here, the Opera Ball and so on. I guess you’d call them, how you say, philo—philanthropists? Lenz runs the family foundation. Moved here twenty-some years ago from Germany.”

“Hmmm.” Her eyes were smarting from the smoke, but she didn’t want to complain. Heisler was doing her a major favor. She rather liked sitting here in the smoke-filled cop car, one of the fellas.

“How old?”

“Fifty-seven, I believe.”

“And prominent.”

“Very.”

There were three other unmarked vehicles idling on the street, one near them, the other two a few hundred yards down the block, on the other side of Lenz’s villa. The cars were arranged in a classic box formation, so
that no matter how Hartman chose to leave the neighborhood, they would have him trapped. The officers waiting in the cars were all highly trained members of the surveillance squad. Each of them was equipped with weapons and walkie-talkies.

Anna had no weapon. It was highly unlikely, she thought, that Hartman would put up any resistance. His records showed that he’d never owned a gun or applied for a license to carry. The murders of the old men had all been done by means of poison, by syringe. He probably had no weapon with him.

In fact, there wasn’t much she knew about Hartman. But her Viennese comrades knew even less. She had told her friend Fritz Weber only that the American had left prints at the crime scene in Zurich, nothing more. Heisler, too, knew only that Hartman was wanted in Rossignol’s murder. But that was enough for the
Bundespolizei
to agree to apprehend Hartman and, at the formal request of the FBI legat in Vienna, to place him under arrest.

She wondered how much she could trust the local police.

This was no theoretical question. Hartman was in there meeting with a man who…

A thought occurred to her. “This guy, Lenz,” she said, her eyes burning from the smoke. “This may be a strange question, but does he have anything to do with the Nazis?”

Heisler stubbed out his cigarette in the car’s overflowing ashtray. “Well, this is a strange question,” he said. “His father—do you know the name Dr. Gerhard Lenz?”

“No, should I?”

He shrugged: naïve Americans. “One of the worst. A colleague of Josef Mengele’s who did all kinds of horrifying experiments in the camps.”

“Ah.” Another idea suggested itself. Hartman, a survivor’s son with an avenging spirit, was going after the next generation.

“His son is a good man, very different from his father. He devotes his life to undoing his father’s evil.”

She stared at Heisler, then out the windshield at Lenz’s magnificent villa. The son was anti-Nazi? Amazing. She wondered whether Hartman knew that. He might not know anything about the younger Lenz except that he was the son of Gerhard, son of a Nazi. If he were really a fanatic, he wouldn’t care if Lenz Junior could turn water into wine.

Which meant that Hartman might already have given Jürgen Lenz a lethal injection.

Jesus
, she thought, as Heisler lit another Casablanca.
Why are we just sitting here?

“Is that yours?” Heisler suddenly asked.

“Is what mine?”

“That car.” He pointed at a Peugeot that was parked across the street from Lenz’s villa. “It’s been in the area since we get here.”

“No. It’s not one of yours?”

“Absolutely not. I can tell from plates.”

“Maybe it’s a neighbor, or a friend?”

“I wonder could your American colleagues be involving in this, maybe checking on you?” Heisler said heatedly. “Because if that’s the case, I’m calling this operation off right now!”

Unsettled and defensive, she said, “It can’t be. Tom Murphy would have let me know before sending someone in.” Wouldn’t he? “Anyway, he barely seemed interested when I first told him.”

But if he were checking up on her? Was that possible?

“Well, then who is it?” Heisler demanded.

“Who are you?” Jürgen Lenz repeated, fear now showing on his face. “You are not a friend of Winston Rock-well’s.”

“Sort of,” Ben admitted. “I mean, I know him from some work I’ve done. I’m Benjamin Hartman. My father is Max Hartman.” Once more, he watched Lenz to gauge his reaction.

Lenz blenched, and then his expression softened. “Dear God,” he whispered. “I can see the resemblance. What happened to your brother was a terrible thing.”

Ben felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “What do you know?” he shouted.

The police radio crackled to life.

“
Korporal, wer ist das?
”

“
Keine Ahnung
.”

“
Keiner von uns, oder?
”

“
Richtig
.”

Now the other team wanted to know whether the Peugeot was one of theirs; Heisler confirmed he had no idea who it was. He took a night-vision monocular from the backseat and held it up to one eye. It was dark on the street now, and the unidentified car had switched off its lights. There was no street lamp nearby, so it was impossible to see the driver’s face. The night-vision scope was a good idea, Anna thought.

“He has a newspaper up before his face,” Heisler said. “A tabloid.
Die Kronen Zeitung
—I can just make it out.”

“Can’t be easy for the guy to read the paper in the dark, huh?” She thought:
Lenz Junior could be dead already, and we’re sitting here waiting
.

“I do not think he’s getting much reading done.” Heisler seemed to share her sense of humor.

“Mind if I take a look?”

He handed her the scope. All she saw was newsprint. “He’s obviously trying not to be identified,” she said. What if he really was Bureau? “Which tells us something. O.K. if I use your cell phone?”

“Not at all.” He gave her his clunky Ericsson, and she punched out the local number of the U.S. embassy.

“Tom,” she said when Murphy came on the line. “It’s Anna Navarro. You didn’t send anyone out to Hietzing, did you?”

“Hietzing? Here in Vienna?”

“My case.”

A pause. “No, you didn’t ask me to, did you?”

“Well, someone’s screwing up my stakeout. No one in your office would have taken it upon himself to check up on me without clearing it with you first?”

“They better not. Anyway, everyone’s accounted for here, far as I know.”

“Thanks.” She disconnected, handed the phone back to Heisler. “Strange.”

“Then who is in that car?” Heisler asked.

“If I may ask, why did you think I was CIA?”

“There are some old-timers in that community who have rather taken against me,” Lenz said, shrugging. “Do you know about Project Paper Clip?” They had graduated to vodka. Ilse Lenz had still not returned to the sitting room, more than an hour after she had so abruptly left. “Perhaps not by that name. You’re aware that immediately after the war, the U.S. government—the OSS, as the CIA’s predecessor was called—smuggled some of Nazi Germany’s leading scientists to America, yes? Paper Clip was the code name for this plan. The Americans sanitized the Germans’ records, falsified their backgrounds. Covered up the fact that these were mass-murderers. You see,
because as soon as the war was over, America turned its attention to a new war—the Cold War. Suddenly all that counted was fighting the Soviet Union. America had spent four years and countless lives battling the Nazis and suddenly the Nazis were their friends—so long as they could help in the struggle against the Communists. Help build weapons and such for America. These scientists were brilliant men, the brains behind the Third Reich’s enormous scientific accomplishments.”

“And war criminals.”

“Precisely. Some of them responsible for the torture and murder of thousands upon thousands of concentration-camp inmates. Some, like Wernher von Braun and Dr. Hubertus Strughold, had invented many of the Nazis’ weapons of war. Arthur Rudolph, who helped murder twenty thousand innocent people at Nordhausen, was awarded NASA’s highest civilian honor!”

Twilight settled. Lenz got up and switched on lamps around the sitting room. “The Americans brought in the man who was in charge of death camps in Poland. One Nazi scientist they gave asylum to had conducted the freezing experiments at Dachau—he ended up at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, a distinguished professor of space medicine. The CIA people who arranged all this, those few who survive, have been less than appreciative of my efforts to shed light on this episode.”

“Your efforts?”

“Yes, and those of my foundation. It is not an insignificant part of the research that we sponsor.”

“But what threat could the CIA pose?”

“The CIA, I understand, did not exist until a few years after the war, but they inherited operational control of these agents. There are aspects of history that
some old-guard types in the CIA prefer to have left undisturbed. Some of them will go to quite extraordinary lengths to ensure this.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t believe that. The CIA doesn’t go around killing people.”

“No, not anymore,” Lenz conceded, a note of sarcasm in his voice. “Not since they killed Allende in Chile, Lumumba in the Belgian Congo, tried to assassinate Castro. No, they’re prohibited by law from doing such things. So now they ‘outsource,’ as you American businessmen like to say. They hire freelancers, mercenaries, through chains of front organizations, so the hit men can never be connected with the U.S. government.” He broke off. “The world is more complicated than you seem to think.”

“But that’s all ancient, irrelevant history!”

“Scarcely irrelevant if you’re one of the ancient men who may be implicated,” Lenz pressed on inexorably. “I speak of elder statesmen, retired diplomats, former dignitaries who did a stint with the Office of Strategic Services in their youth. As they putter around their libraries and write their memoirs, they cannot avoid a certain unease.” He gazed into the clear fluid in his glass as if seeing something there. “These are men accustomed to power, and deference. They would not look forward to revelations that would darken their golden years. Oh, of course, they’ll tell themselves that what they do is for the good of the country, sparing the good name of the United States. So much of the wickedness men do is in the name of the commonweal. This, Mr. Hartman, I know. Frail old dogs can be the most dangerous. Calls can be made, favors called in. Mentors drawing on the loyalty of protégés. Frightened old men determined to die with at least their good names intact. I wish I could discount this scenario. But I know what
these men are like. I have seen too much of human nature.”

Ilse reappeared, carrying a small leather-bound book; on its spine Ben made out the name Hölderlin, lettered in gilt. “I see you gentlemen are still at it,” she said.

“You understand, don’t you, why we can be slightly on edge?” Lenz told Ben smoothly. “We have many enemies.”

“There have been many threats against my husband,” Ilse said. “There are fanatics on the right who view him, somehow, as a turncoat, as the man who betrayed his father’s legacy.” She smiled without warmth and repaired to the adjoining room.

“They worry me less, to be frank, than the self-interested, ostensibly rational souls who simply don’t understand why we can’t let sleeping dogs lie.” Lenz’s eyes were alert. “And whose friends, as I say, may be tempted to take rather extreme measures to ensure that their golden years remain golden. But I go on. You had certain questions about the postwar period, questions you hoped I might be able to answer.”

Jürgen Lenz examined the photograph, gripping it in both hands. His face was tense. “That’s my father,” he said. “Yes.”

“You look just like him,” Ben said.

“Quite the legacy, hmm?” Lenz said ruefully. No longer was he the charming, affable host. Now he peered intently at the rest of the photograph. “Dear God, no. It can’t be.” He sank into his chair, his face ashen.