The Sigma Protocol (63 page)

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 un-latched 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 you…?”

“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. “
Goddammit
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, Señor 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. “
¡Ya 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 animal-like 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.