The Sigma Protocol (68 page)

“I’d love to talk to a child who’s been there.”
And find out what’s really going on
.

“Mr. Adams,” she said somberly, “the children who are invited are usually at the very end of their brief lives. Frankly, I don’t know of any who might still be living. But I’m sure one of the parents wouldn’t mind talking to you about Mr. Lenz’s generosity.”

The man’s apartment was a fourth-floor walk-up in a dismal apartment building in Vienna’s twelfth district, a small and dark place that smelled of stale cigarette smoke and cooking grease.

After the death of their beloved son at the age of eleven, the man explained, he and his wife had divorced. Their marriage had not survived the stress of their son’s
illness and death. Prominently displayed next to the sofa was a large color photograph of their boy, Christoph. It was hard to tell his age; he could have been eight or eighty. He was completely bald, with a receding chin, a large head with a small face, bulging eyes, the wizened countenance of a very old man.

“My son died at the sanatorium,” the man said. He had a full gray beard, bifocal glasses, a scraggly fringe around a bald pate. His eyes were filled with tears. “But at least he was happy at the end of his life. Dr. Lenz is a most generous man. I’m glad Christoph could die happy.”

“Did you ever visit Christoph there, at the Clockworks?” Ben asked.

“No, parents are not permitted. It’s a place only for children. All of the children’s medical problems are taken care of by an expert medical staff. But he sent me postcards.” He got up and returned a few minutes later with a picture postcard. The handwriting was a large, childish scrawl. Ben turned the card over and saw the color photograph of an alpine mountain. The caption beneath the photograph said
SEMMERING
.

Lenz’s widow had mentioned Semmering.

Strasser had talked about Gerhard Lenz’s research clinic in the Austrian Alps.

Could it be the same place?

Semmering.

He had to find Anna immediately, get this information to her.

He looked up from the card and saw the father weeping silently. In a minute the man was able to speak. “This is what I always tell myself. My Christoph died happy.”

They had arranged to meet back at the hotel no later than seven o’clock that evening.

If she was unable to return by then, Anna said, she’d
call. If for some reason she was unable to call, or thought it was unsafe to do so, she had specified a fall-back meeting place: nine o’clock at the Schweizerhaus in the Prater.

By eight o’clock she hadn’t returned to the hotel, and there was no message.

She’d been gone for almost the entire day. Even if Lenz had agreed to see her, Ben couldn’t figure out how she could spend more than an hour or two at the foundation. But she’d been gone almost twelve hours.

Twelve hours.

He was beginning to worry.

At eight-thirty, when she still hadn’t called, he left for the Schweizerhaus, on Strasse des Ersten Mai 2. By now he was beyond nervous; he was fearful that something had happened to her. He asked himself,
Am I overreacting?
She doesn’t have to account for her whereabouts at all times.

Still…

It was a lively place, renowned for its roasted pork hocks served with mustard and horseradish sauce. Ben sat alone at a table for two, waiting, nursing a Czech Budweiser beer.

Waiting.

The beer didn’t calm his nerves. All he could think about was Anna, and what might have become of her.

By ten o’clock there was still no sign of her. He called the hotel, but she had neither arrived nor left a message. He repeatedly checked his phone to make sure it was on so she could reach him if she tried.

He ordered dinner for two, but by the time the food arrived he’d lost his appetite.

Around midnight he returned to the empty hotel room. He tried to read for a while but was unable to concentrate.

The sandpaper of Chardin’s voice:
Wheels within wheels—that was the way we worked
.… Strasser:
a cabal within a cabal… Lenz said he was doing work that would change the world
.

He fell asleep on top of the bed, in his clothes, with all the room lights on, and slept fitfully.

He and Peter were strapped to two gurneys, side by side; above them was Dr. Gerhard Lenz, gowned and masked in full surgical garb. His light eyes, however, unmistakable. “We will make the two of them one,” he was saying to a hatchet-faced assistant. “We will connect their organs so that neither will be viable without the other. Together, both will survive—or together, both will die.” A gloved hand wielded a scalpel like a violin bow, pressing it against flesh in bold, confident strokes. The pain was beyond endurance
.

Struggling against the restraints, he turned to see his brother’s face, staring, frozen in horror
.

“Peter!” he called out
.

His brother’s mouth gaped open, and under the harsh overhead lights, Ben could see that Peter’s tongue had been removed. The heavy smell of ether filled the air, and a black mask was forcibly placed over Ben’s face. But it didn’t produce unconsciousness; if anything, he grew more alert, more aware of the horrors being done to him
.

He awoke at three in the morning.

And still Anna hadn’t returned.

A long, sleepless night followed.

He tried to doze but was unable to. He hated not having anyone to call, or anything he could do to locate her.

He sat, tried to read, couldn’t focus. He could think only of Anna.

Oh, God, he loved her so
.

At seven, groggy and disoriented, he called down to the front desk, for the fifth time, to see whether Anna might have called from somewhere in the middle of the night.

No message.

He took a shower, shaved, ordered a room service breakfast.

He knew something had happened to Anna; he was certain of it. There was no way in the world she would have voluntarily gone off someplace without calling in.

Something had happened to her.

He drank several cups of the strong black coffee, then forced himself to eat a hard roll.

He was terrified.

In Währinger Strasse, there was an “Internet café,” one of several such places listed in the Vienna telephone book. This one called itself an Internet Bar/Kaffehaus and turned out to be a garishly fluorescent-lit room with a few iMacs on little round Formica tables, and an espresso machine. The floor was sticky and the place smelled of beer. It charged fifty Austrian shillings for thirty minutes of Internet access time.

He typed the word
Semmering
in several different search engines and came up with the same entries each time: home pages for ski resorts, hotels, and general chamber-of-commerce-type descriptions of a village and ski resort in the Austrian Alps about ninety kilometers from Vienna.

Desperate, knowing he could be making a terrible mistake, he found a public telephone and called the Lenz Foundation. This was the last place he knew she’d gone. It was crazy, almost pointless, to ask there, but what else was there to do?

He asked for Jürgen Lenz’s office, and then asked
Lenz’s executive assistant whether a woman named Anna Navarro had been in.

She seemed to know Anna’s name immediately, without hesitation. But instead of answering his question, she demanded to know his name.

Ben identified himself as being an “attaché” from the U.S. embassy.

“Who is this calling?” the woman demanded to know.

He supplied a false name.

“Dr. Lenz has asked me to take a number, and he’ll call you back.”

“Actually, I’m going to be out of the office the whole day. Let me talk to Dr. Lenz, if I could,” he said.

“Dr. Lenz is not available.”

“Well, do you have any idea when he’ll be free to talk? It’s important that we speak.”

“Dr. Lenz is out of the office,” she said coldly.

“All right, I’ve got his home phone number, I’ll try him there.”

The secretary hesitated. “Dr. Lenz is not in Vienna,” she offered.

Not in Vienna
. Smoothly: “It’s just that the ambassador himself asked me to speak to him. A matter of great urgency.”

“Dr. Lenz is with a special delegation from the International Children’s Health Forum—he’s taken them on a private tour of some of our facilities. That’s no secret. Did the ambassador want to join them? If so, I’m afraid it’s too late.”

Too late
.

After a pause, the secretary said, “You must be reachable at the U.S. embassy general telephone number, yes?”

He hung up.

The train to Semmering left Vienna’s Südbahnhof at a few minutes after nine. Ben had left Vienna without checking out of the hotel.

He was wearing jeans and sneakers and his warmest ski parka. The ninety-kilometer journey would be brief, much faster than renting a car and driving along the twisting alpine roads.

The train cut through the dense terrain, plunged into long tunnels and skirted high above steep mountain passes. It passed gently rolling green farmland, whitewashed stone buildings with red roofs, the iron-gray mountains rising up behind; then it climbed slowly, over narrow viaducts, and sliced through breathtaking limestone gorges.

The train compartment was mostly empty, its interior amber-lit, the high-backed seats upholstered in ugly orange twill. He thought about Anna Navarro. She was in some kind of peril. He was sure of it.

He felt he knew her well enough to be certain that she’d never simply vanish of her own accord. Either she’d abruptly gone somewhere from which she couldn’t call, or she’d been forcibly
taken
somewhere.

But where?

After they’d rejoined each other in the Vienna hotel, they had spent a long time discussing Lenz. Ben recalled what Gerhard Lenz’s widow had blurted out—
why does Lenz send you? You come here from Semmering?
And
Strasser had told them of having electron microscopes shipped to an old clinic in the Austrian Alps known as the Clockworks.

But what was in Semmering now that the old woman was so afraid of? Obviously something ongoing, perhaps connected to the string of murders.

Anna was determined to locate that clinic in the Alps. She was convinced she’d find answers there.

Which suggested that she might have gone looking for the Clockworks. And if he were wrong—if she wasn’t there—then at least maybe he’d be a step closer to finding her.

He studied the Freytag & Berndt map of the Semmering-Rax-Schneeberg region he’d picked up in Vienna before he left, and tried to devise a plan. Without knowing where the clinic or research facility was, though, he had no idea how to get inside.

The Semmering station was a modest two-story structure in front of which stood only a green bench and a Coke machine. As soon as he stepped off the train he was hit by an icy wind; the climate difference between Vienna and the Austrian Alps to the south was striking. Here it was bracingly cold. After a few minutes of hiking up the steep, winding road into the town, his ears and cheeks stung from the chill.

And as he walked he began to feel misgivings.
What am I doing?
he asked himself.
What if Anna’s not here, then what?

The village of Semmering was tiny. It was one street, Hochstrasse, lined with
Gasthauses
and inns, set into the south face of a mountain, above it a couple of sprawling luxury resort hotels and sanatoriums. To the north was Höllental, Hell’s Valley, a deep gorge carved out by the Schwarza River.

Above the bank on Hochstrasse was a small tourist office presided over by a plain young woman.

Ben explained that he was interested in hiking around the Semmering region and asked for a more detailed
Wanderkarte
. The woman, who clearly had nothing else to do, provided one and spent a good deal of time pointing out particularly scenic trails. “You can go, if you want, along the historic Semmering Railway—there is a panoramic vista where you can watch the train go through the Weinzettlwand Tunnel. There is also a wonderful place to stop where they took the picture for the old twenty-shilling banknote. And a magnificent view of the ruins of the castle of Klamm.”

“Really,” Ben said, feigning interest, and then added casually, “I’m told there is some sort of famous private clinic around here in an old
Schloss
. The Clockworks, I think it’s called.”

“The Clockworks?” she said blankly. “
Uhrwerken?
”

“A private clinic—maybe more of a research facility, a scientific institute, a sanatorium for sick children.”

There seemed to be a quick flash of recognition in the woman’s eyes—or did he imagine it?—but she shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir, I’m sorry.”

“I think someone said this clinic was owned by Dr. Jürgen Lenz…?”

“I am sorry,” she repeated, too quickly. She had suddenly turned sullen. “There is no such clinic.”

He continued down Hochstrasse until he came to what appeared to be a combination
Gasthaus
and pub. In front was a tall black chalkboard topped with a green placard for Wieninger Bier and an invitation on a painted scroll beneath it: “
Herzlich Willkommen
”—A Hearty Welcome. The day’s specials were advertised in bold white chalk letters.

It was dark inside and smelled of beer. Although it was not yet noon, three portly men were sitting at a
small wooden table drinking from glass steins of beer. Ben approached them.

“I’m looking for an old
Schloss
around here that houses a research clinic owned by a man named Jürgen Lenz. The old Clockworks.”

The men gazed up at him suspiciously. One of them muttered something to the others, who murmured back. Ben heard “Lenz” and “
Klinik
.” “No, nothing here.”

Again, Ben sensed unmistakable antagonism. He was certain that these men were concealing something, and slipped several thousand-shilling notes on the table, toying with them idly. No time for subtlety. “All right, thank you,” he said, turning halfway to leave. Then, as if he’d forgotten something, he turned back. “Listen, if any of you guys have any friends who might know something about this clinic, tell them I’ll pay for the information. I’m an American entrepreneur looking for some investment opportunities.”