The Sigma Protocol (56 page)

Peralta’s lizard eyes were sleepy behind his perfectly round tortoiseshell glasses. A holstered pistol sat atop his gleaming bare desk, the leather holster old but lovingly cared for. He was genial and flawlessly courteous. “You know we are always eager to help in the cause of justice,” he said.

“And as my assistant explained, we at CBS find ourselves in a rather competitive situation right now,” Anna said. “The people at
Dateline
are apparently on
the verge of locating and exposing this man. If they reach him first, so be it. But I didn’t get where I am today by being a pushover. I’m working with an Argentine field producer who thinks we can get the story, with a little assistance from you.”

“In Argentina, football—soccer, I think you say—is our national sport. I gather network TV plays that role in the States.”

“You could say that.” Anna rewarded him with a wide smile, and crossed her legs. “And I’m not at all putting down my colleagues at
Dateline
. But we both know what sort of story they’ll do, because it’ll be the same old tune. Argentina as a backward country that harbors these bad, bad people. They’ll do something very exploitative, very cheap. We’re not like that. What we have in mind is much more sophisticated and I think much more accurate. We want to capture the
new
Argentina. A place where people like yourself have been seeing that justice is done. A place with modern law enforcement, yet respect for democracy”—she wiggled a hand vaguely—“and like that.” Another wide smile. “And certainly your efforts would be handsomely compensated with a consultant’s fee. So, Mr. Peralta. Can we work together?”

Peralta’s smile was thin. “Certainly if you have proof that Josef Strasser is living in Buenos Aires, you must only to tell me. Produce the evidence.” He jabbed the air with a silver Cross pen to emphasize how simple it all was. “That is all.”

“Mr. Peralta. Someone is going to do this story, whether it’s my team or the competition.” Anna’s smile faded. “The only question is how the story will be done. Whether it’s a story of one of your successes, or one of your failures. Come on, you must have a file of leads on Strasser—some sort of indication that he’s here,” Anna said. “I mean, you don’t
doubt
he’s living in Buenos Aires, do you?”

Peralta leaned back in his chair, which squeaked. “Ms. Reyes,” he said, his tone that of a man with a delicious piece of gossip to impart, “a few years ago my office received a credible tip from a woman living in Belgrano, one of our wealthiest suburbs. She had seen Alois Brunner, the SS
Hauptsturmführer
, on the street, coming out of a neighboring house. Immediately we have a round-the-clock surveillance on this man’s house. Indeed she was correct, the old man’s face matched our file photos of Brunner. We moved in on the gentleman. Indignant, he produced his old German passport, you know, imprinted with the eagles of the Third Reich—and a big J, for Jew. The man’s name was Katz.” Peralta came forward in his chair until he was upright again. “So how do you apologize to a man like this, who had been in the camps?”

“Yes,” Anna agreed equably, “that must have been terribly embarrassing. But our intelligence on Strasser is solid.
Dateline
is filming their second-unit footage—background shots—even as we speak. They must be very confident.”

“
Dateline, 60 Minutes, 20/20
—I am familiar with these investigative programs. If you people were so very sure Josef Strasser was, as you Americans like to say, alive and living in Argentina, you would have found him long ago, no?” His lizard eyes were fixed on her.

She could not tell him the truth—that her interest was not in his Nazi past, but in what he may have been involved in when he parted company with his Führer, and joined forces with the invisible architects of the postwar era. “Then where would you suggest I begin looking?”

“Impossible to answer! If we knew there was a war criminal living here, we would arrest him. But I must tell you, there
are
no more.” He dropped his pen onto his desk definitively.

“Really.” She made some meaningless marks on her yellow pad.

“Times have changed in Argentina. The bad old days, when a Josef Mengele could live openly here, under his own name, they are gone. The days of the Perón dictatorship are over. Now Argentina is a democracy. Josef Schwammberger was extradited. Erich Priebke was extradited. I cannot even recall the last time we arrested a Nazi here.”

She crossed out her doodle with a slash of her pen. “What about immigration records? Records of people who entered the country in the forties and fifties?”

He frowned. “Maybe there are records of entries, arrivals. The National Registry, the Migrations Department—it is index cards, everything entered by hand. But our coastline is thousands of kilometers long. Who knows how many tugboats and rowboats and fishing trawlers landed decades ago at one of the hundreds of
estancias
—the ranches—and were never detected? Hundreds of kilometers of coastline in Patagonia, no one is there to see.”

He again jabbed the air. “And then in 1949, Perón issued a blanket amnesty for anyone who had entered the country under a false name. So it is unlikely there will be any immigration record of Josef Strasser even if he really is here. Maybe you can go down to Bariloche, the ski resort, and ask around. The Germans love Bariloche. It reminds them of their beloved Bavaria. But I would not hold out much hope. I am terribly sorry to disappoint you.”

Anna Navarro was not gone from Miguel Antonio Peralta’s office two minutes before the Interpol man picked up his telephone. “Mauricio,” he said. “I’ve just had a most interesting visitor.”

In a modern office building in Vienna, a bland-looking middle-aged man watched without interest as the plasterboard walls that had enclosed a carpeted “reception area” and “conference room” were dismantled and wheeled away toward a freight elevator by a team of construction workers. Next came a Formica conference table, a plain metal desk, and assorted office equipment including a dummy telephone system and a working computer.

The bespectacled man was an American who for the last decade or so had been engaged to perform a variety of services around the world, the significance of which was invariably obscure to him. He had never even met the company’s chief, had no idea who he was. All he knew was that the mysterious head of the firm was a business associate of this building’s owner, who’d been happy to lend use of the eleventh floor.

It was like watching a stage set being struck. “Hey,” called out the bespectacled American, “someone’s gotta take down the sign in the lobby. And leave that U.S. seal with me, will ya? We might need it again.”

New York

Dr. Walter Reisinger, the former Secretary of State, took the call in the back of his limousine as it inched through morning rush-hour traffic on Manhattan’s East Side.

Dr. Reisinger disliked the telephone, which was unfortunate, since these days he spent virtually every waking moment on the phone. His international consulting firm, Reisinger Associates, was keeping him even busier than his days at State.

Secretly he had been afraid that, after retiring from the government and writing his memoirs, he’d be gradually marginalized, treated as an éminence grise,
invited to appear on
Nightline
once in a while, and to write the occasional thumb-sucker for the
New York Times
Op-Ed page.

Instead, he had become more famous, and certainly far richer. He found himself globe-hopping more now than during his shuttle-diplomacy days in the Middle East.

He pressed the speaker button. “Yes?”

“Dr. Reisinger,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, “this is Mr. Holland.”

“Ah, good morning, Mr. Holland,” Reisinger said jovially. The two men chatted for a minute or so, and then Reisinger said, “This shouldn’t be a problem. I have good friends in just about every government in the world—but I think the most direct route would be to go right to Interpol. Do you know its Secretary-General? A most interesting man. Let me give him a call.”

Patient Eighteen lay on a hospital bed with his eyes closed, an IV feeding tube in his left arm. He was shaking, as he had done constantly since the treatments began. He was also nauseated, and periodically retched into a bedpan placed beside the bed. A nurse and a technician stood watch nearby.

A doctor, whose name was Löfquist, came into the examination room and went up to the nurse. “How is the fever?” he asked. They spoke in English, because his English was still better than his German, even after working here in the clinic for seven years.

“It hasn’t broken,” the nurse replied tensely.

“And the nausea?”

“He’s been vomiting regularly.”

Dr. Löfquist raised his voice to address Patient Eighteen. “How’re you feeling?”

The patient moaned. “My goddamned
eyes
hurt.”

“Yes, that’s normal,” Dr. Löfquist said. “Your body is trying to fight it off. We see this all the time.”

Patient Eighteen gagged, leaned over to the bedpan, and was sick. The nurse wiped his mouth and chin with a damp washcloth.

“The first week is always the most difficult,” Dr. Löfquist said cheerily. “You’re doing wonderfully well.”

Our Lady of Mercy, Nuestra Señora de la Merced, was an Italianate basilica perched on the swarming Calle Defensa, across from a disconcertingly contemporary branch office of the Banco de Galicia. The church’s granite facade was crumbling. A wrought-iron fence enclosed a forecourt paved with worn and cracked black-and-white harlequin stone tiles, where a Gypsy mother and her brood begged for alms.

Ben watched the mother in her jeans, black hair tied back, sitting on the steps against the ruins of a column’s pedestal, kids spilling out of her lap and at her feet. Deeper into the courtyard an old man in coat and tie dozed, one arm locked in a crutch, the top of his bald pate tanned.

At one-fifteen exactly, as instructed, Ben entered the church’s foyer, and walked through swinging wooden doors into the loamy darkness of the narthex, which smelled of beeswax candles and sweat. The interior, once his eyes accustomed to the dark, was immense, daunting, and shabby. The Romanesque ceilings were high and vaulted, the floor paved with ancient encaustic tiles, beautifully inlaid. A priest’s singsong Latin chant, electronically amplified, echoed in the cavern, and the congregants responded dutifully. Call and response. All rise.

One o’clock weekday Mass and it was, impressively, almost half full.
But then Argentina is a Catholic
country
, Ben thought. Here and there the trilling of cell phones. He oriented himself, spotted the chapel on the right.

A few rows of benches were arrayed before a glassed-in tabernacle containing the bloodied figure of Christ and bearing the words
HUMILIDAD Y PACIENCIA
. To its left, another statue of Jesus, this one in the open, beneath the words
SAGRADO CORAZÓN EN VOS CONFIO
. Ben sat on the front bench, also as instructed, and waited.

A priest in his vestments sat praying by a bottle-blond young woman in miniskirt and high heels. The swinging doors squeaked and slammed, and when they opened, the throaty blare of a motorcycle intruded. Each time Ben turned to look: Which one was it? A businessman with a cell phone entered the narthex, crossed himself, then turned into the alcove—was it him?—but then touched the figure of Jesus, closed his eyes, and prayed. More unison chanting, more electronically amplified Latin, and still Ben waited.

He was afraid but determined not to show it.

A few hours earlier he’d dialed a number he’d pilfered from Sonnenfeld’s files, one that had, so it appeared, once belonged to Lenz’s widow.

It still did.

The woman obviously wasn’t in hiding, but she hadn’t come to the phone herself. A brusque, hostile baritone answered: her son, he’d said. Lenz’s brother? Half brother?

Ben had identified himself as a trusts-and-estates lawyer from New York, come to Buenos Aires to settle a huge bequest. No, he could not identify the deceased. He would only say that Vera Lenz had been left a good deal of money, but he would first have to meet with her.

A long silence ensued while the son decided what to do. Ben interjected one more piece of irrelevant-seeming
information, which probably turned out to be the deciding one. “I’ve just come from Austria,” he said. No names, no mention of her son—nothing specific to hang on to or object to. Less said the better.

“I don’t know you,” the son at last replied.

“Nor I you,” Ben came back smoothly. “If this is inconvenient for you or for your mother…”

“No,” he said hastily. He would meet Ben—“Mr. Johnson”—at a church, in a certain chapel, a certain bench.

Now he sat with his back to the entrance, turning with each squeak of the doors, each gust of noise from the outside.

Half an hour went by.

Was this a setup? The priest looked at him, word-lessly offered a couple of beeswax candles to light. “No, thanks,” Ben said, turning back to the door.

A group of tourists with cameras and green guides. He turned back to Jesus in his display case and saw the priest move close to him. He was swarthy, tall, and strong-looking, fiftyish, balding, barrel-chested.

He spoke to Ben in a hushed baritone. “Come with me, Mr. Johnson.”

Ben rose, followed him out of the chapel and down the nave, then a sharp right across an empty row to a narrow passage that ran parallel to the nave, along a stone wall, until they were almost at the apse.

A small, almost concealed wooden door. The priest opened it. The room was pitch-black, dank and musty. The priest flicked a switch and a wan yellow light illuminated what appeared to be a dressing room. A coa-track with priestly garb. A few scuffed wooden chairs.

The priest was pointing a gun.

Ben felt a jolt of fear.

“Do you have anything on you?” the priest asked
with unexpected courtesy. “Weapon of any kind, any electronic devices?”

Fear gave way to anger. “Just my cell phone, if you consider that a deadly weapon.”