The Sigma Protocol (69 page)

He left the pub and stood for a moment in front of the building. A cluster of men in jeans and leather jackets strolled by, hands in pockets, speaking Russian. No sense in asking them.

A few seconds later he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was one of the men from the pub. “Em, how much will you pay for this information?”

“I’d say if the information is accurate, it’s worth a couple thousand shillings to me.”

The man glanced around furtively. “The money first, please.”

Ben regarded him for a moment, then handed him two banknotes. The man led him down the road a few meters and then pointed up toward the steep mountain. Set into the side of the snow-covered peak and surrounded by tightly packed, snow-frosted fir trees as dense as crabgrass, was an ancient medieval castle with a baroque facade and a gilded clock tower.

Semmering.

The clinic where Hitler’s science adviser, Josef Strasser, had shipped sophisticated scientific equipment decades ago.

Where Jürgen Lenz invited a few lucky children afflicted with a terrible disease.

Where—piecing together what he’d learned with what Lenz’s secretary had said—a delegation of world leaders and dignitaries had come to visit.

And where Anna might have gone. Was it possible?

Certainly it was possible; in any case, it was all he had.

The Clockworks had been there all along, hidden in plain sight, and he had seen it walking up from the train station. It was by far the biggest property visible anywhere around.

“Magnificent,” Ben said softly. “Do you know anyone who’s ever been inside?”

“No. No one is allowed. There is much security there. It is very private, you can never go in.”

“Well, they must hire local workers.”

“No. All workers are flown in by helicopter from Vienna, and they have living quarters there. There is a helipad, you can see it if you look closely.”

“What do they do there, do you know?”

“I only hear things.”

“Like what?”

“They do strange things there, people say. You see strange-looking children arriving in buses…”

“Do you know who owns it?”

“Like you say, this Lenz. His father was a Nazi.”

“How long has he owned it?”

“A long time. I think maybe his father owned it after the war. During the war the
Schloss
was used by the Nazis as a command center. It used to be called the
Schloss Zerwald—this is the old name for Semmering from the Middle Ages. It was built by one of the Esterházy princes in the seventeenth century. For a while at the end of last century it was, how you say, abandoned, then it was used for about twenty years as a clock factory. The old-timers around here still call it the
Uhrwerken
. How do you say—?”

“Clockworks.” Ben took out another thousand-shilling note. “Now, just a few more questions.”

A man was looming over her, a man in a white coat whose face kept going in and out of focus. He had gray hair and was speaking softly, even smiling. He seemed friendly, and she wished she could understand what he was saying.

She wondered what was wrong with her that she couldn’t sit up: had she been in an accident? Had a stroke? She was overtaken by a sudden panic.

She heard “
… to have to do that to you, but we really had no choice
.”

An accent, perhaps German or Swiss.

Where am I?

Then: “
dissociative tranquilizer…
”

Someone speaking English to her with some sort of Middle European accent.

And “
… as comfortable as possible while we wait for the ketamine to leave your system
.”

She began to recall things now. The place she was in was a bad place, a place she had been very curious about once but now wished she wasn’t in.

She had vague memories of a struggle, of being grabbed by several strong men, of being jabbed with something sharp. After that, nothing.

The gray-haired man, who she now felt was a very bad man, was gone, and she closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, she was alone. Her head had cleared. She felt bruised all over, and she realized that she was tied down to a bed.

She lifted her head as much as she could, which was not very far because there was a belt around her chest.

But it was enough to see the cuffs and belts in which she was locked and fastened to a hospital gurney. They were polyurethane medical restraints, the kind that also came in leather and were used in mental hospitals for their most violent and dangerous patients. They were called “humane restraints,” and she had used them herself back in her training days.

Her wrists were cuffed and locked and attached by a long chain to a waist belt that was also locked. The same for her ankles. Her arms were chafed and painful, indicating that she had struggled mightily.

The restraints were color-coded: red for the wrists, blue for the ankles. These were of more recent vintage than the leather ones she had used, but surely the lock hadn’t changed. The key, she remembered, was small and flat with no teeth on it, straight on one side, tapered on the other to a wedge-shaped point.

She remembered that hospital restraints were actually quite easy to pick if you knew how, but she would need a paper clip or something like it, a straight and rigid piece of metal wire.

She craned her head to one side and examined the bulky anesthesia machine on one side of her bed, and, on the other side, the metal cart just a few tantalizing feet away.

It had eight drawers. On top of it were scattered medical supplies, bandages and forceps, scissors, and a sterile package of safety pins.

But there was no way to reach it.

She tried to shift her body to the left, toward the gleaming cart, hoping for slack in the restraints, but
there was almost none. She shifted to the left, this time violently, a sudden hard jerk that did nothing; the only thing that moved at all was the bed itself, which had to be on wheels.

Wheels
.

She was silent for a moment, listening for approaching footsteps. Then she lurched against the restraints again and felt the wheels give what she imagined was another inch or two.

Encouraged by the movement, tiny as it was, she lurched again. The wheels moved another minuscule distance.

But the cart still looked as distant and unreachable as the mirage of a lake to a thirsty man in a desert.

She rested a moment, her neck spasming in pain.

Then she summoned her strength again and, trying to ignore how far away the cart was, she
jerked
at the restraints and gained maybe an inch.

An inch, out of several feet, felt like a single step in the New York Marathon.

She heard footsteps in the hallway and voices that grew louder, and she froze, resting her strained neck while she waited, and the voices passed.

A
lunge
to the left and the gurney gave up another couple of inches.

She did not want to think about what she would do once she reached the cart; that was another challenge entirely. She would have to take this a step at a time.

An inch at a time.

Another inch or so. Another. The cart was not much more than a foot away. She jerked again and gained another inch and the silver-haired man entered the room.

Jürgen Lenz, as he called himself. But now she knew the astonishing truth.

Jürgen-Lenz-who-was-not-Jürgen-Lenz.

At the end of Hochstrasse Ben found a sporting goods store that featured a wide variety of equipment for the tourist and sportsman. He rented a pair of cross-country skis and asked where he could rent a car.

No place for miles.

Parked at the side of the shop was a BMW motorcycle that looked old and decrepit but still functional. He struck a deal with the young man who managed the place, and owned the bike.

With the skis strapped to his back he set off across the ridge of the Semmering pass until he came to a narrow unmarked dirt road that wound steeply uphill through a ravine to the
Schloss
. The road was rutted and icy; it had evidently been used recently by trucks and other heavy vehicles.

When he had managed to climb perhaps a quarter of a mile, he came to a red sign that said
BETRETEN VERBOTEN—PRIVATBESITZ:
No Trespassing—Private Property.

Just ahead of the sign was a barrier gate whose arm was striped in yellow-and-black reflective paint. It appeared to be electronically controlled, but Ben was easily able to hop over it and then wheel the bike underneath, tipped at an angle.

Nothing happened: no Klaxon, no alarm bells.

He continued up the road, through dense snow-covered woods, and in a few minutes reached a high,
crenellated stone wall. It looked centuries old, though recently restored.

From atop the wall rose several feet of thin, horizontally strung wire. At a distance, this addition was not visible, but Ben saw it clearly now. It was probably electrified, but he did not want to scale the wall and find out the hard way.

Instead, he followed the wall for a few hundred feet until it came to what appeared to be the main gate, about six feet wide and ten feet high, constructed of ornately scrolled wrought iron. Upon closer examination, Ben realized that the fence was in fact steel painted to look like iron, entirely backed with a screen of woven wire fabric. This was certainly high-security, designed to foil intruders.

He wondered whether it was made to keep people out—or in.

Had Anna somehow gotten inside? he wondered. Was it possible? Or was she being held prisoner?

The dirt road came to an end another few hundred meters from the gate. Beyond it was glistening virgin snow. He parked the motorcycle, put on his skis, and set off across the snow, staying close to the wall.

His idea was to survey the entire perimeter of the property, or at least as much as was possible to examine, in hopes of discovering any holes in the security, any possible points of entry. But it did not look promising.

The snow was soft and deep, so he sank into the powder, and the even deeper drifts and dunes made maneuvering difficult. It was no easier once he got the hang of it, because the terrain became steeper, the skiing ever more arduous.

The ground next to the wall became higher, and pretty soon Ben could see over it.

Glare coming off the snow forced him to squint, but
he could now make out the
Schloss
, a great rambling stone structure, more horizontal than vertical. At first glance this could have been a tourist attraction, but then he saw a couple of guards in military-style tunics, carrying submachine guns, patrolling the property.

Whatever was happening inside these walls was not simple research.

What he saw next was a profound shock. He didn’t understand it, but within the enclosed area were children, dozens and dozens of ragged-looking children, milling outside, in the cold. He peered again, squinting against the snow glare.

Who were they?

And why were they there?

This was no sanatorium, that was for sure; he wondered whether they were prisoners.

He skied uphill a short distance, close enough to get a better look, but not so close that he lost his line of sight behind the high stone wall.

Inside, next to the wall, was a fenced-in area the size of a city block. Within it were several large military-style tents jammed with children. It seemed to be a makeshift shantytown, a tent city, its inhabitants youth from some Eastern European country. The steel fence that enclosed it was topped with coils of razor wire.

It was a strange vision. Ben shook his head as if to clear it of an optical illusion, then looked again. Yes. They were children, some toddlers, some teenagers, un-shaven and rough-looking, smoking and shouting to one another; girls in headscarves, shabby peasant dresses, and tattered coats, children swarming all around.

He had seen news footage of people like this. Whoever they were, wherever they were from, they had that unmistakable look of impoverished youth driven out of their homes by war—Bosnian refugees, escapees from
the conflicts in Kosovo and Macedonia, ethnic Albanians, perhaps.

Was Lenz sheltering war refugees here, on the grounds of his clinic?

Jürgen Lenz, humanitarian, giving shelter to refugees and ailing children?

Unlikely.

For this was hardly a shelter. These peasant children were packed into their tent city, inadequately dressed, freezing in the cold. And there were the armed guards. This looked like some kind of internment camp.

Then he heard a shout from the encampment, an adolescent boy’s voice. Someone within had spotted him. The shout was soon joined by others, the wretched inmates suddenly waving at him, beckoning to him, calling to him. He understood at once what they wanted.

They wanted to be released.

They wanted his help. They saw him as a savior, someone outside who could help them escape. His stomach turned, he shivered, and not from the cold.

What was being done to them?

Suddenly a shout arose from another direction, and one of the guards pointed his weapon toward Ben. Now several of the guards were shouting at him, waving him away.

The threat was clear: get off the private property or we’ll shoot.

He heard a blast of gunfire and turned to see a fusillade of bullets pock the snow a few feet to his left.

They weren’t kidding, and they weren’t patient.

The refugee children were prisoners here. And Anna?

Was Anna inside there too?

Please, God, I hope she’s all right. I hope she’s alive
.

He didn’t know whether to wish she was inside—or to pray she wasn’t.

Ben turned around and headed back down the mountainside.

“Well, I see you’re more aware now,” Lenz said, smiling brightly. He stopped at the foot of her bed and clasped his hands in front of him. “Perhaps now you’d like to say to whom you’ve told my real identity.”

“Screw you,” she said.

“I thought not,” he said equably. “Once the ketamine has worn off”—he glanced at his gold watch—“which will be in no more than another half an hour, certainly, you’ll be infused intravenously with about five milligrams of a powerful opioid called Versed. You have had this before? During surgery, perhaps?”