The Sigma Protocol (74 page)

“I’m not following.”

“We human beings are singularly ill-designed in one respect. Of all the species on the planet, we require the longest period of gestation and childhood—of development. And really, we must think about intellectual as well as physical development. Two decades for complete physical maturation, often another decade or more to attain full professional mastery in our area of specialization. Somebody with a highly involved craft, such as a surgeon, may be well into his fourth decade before he has achieved full competence at his vocation. The process of learning and progressive mastery continues—and then, just as he reaches its height, what happens? His eyes begin to dim, his fingers to lose their precision. The depredations of time begin to rob him of what he spent half a lifetime acquiring. It’s like a bad joke. We’re Sisyphus, knowing as soon as we have rolled the boulder toward the top of the hill, it will start hurtling back down. I’m told you once taught schoolchildren. Think how much of human society is devoted simply to reproducing itself—transmitting its institutions, its knowledge and skills, the struts and gearings of civilization. It’s an extraordinary tribute to
our determination to win out over time. And yet how much farther would our species have been able to advance if only its leadership, political and intellectual, had been able to focus on advancement, rather than simply self-replacement! How much farther we’d all be if some of us were able to stay the course, mount the learning curve and stay there! How much farther we’d be if the best and the brightest of us could keep that boulder rolling uphill, rather than fending off the nursing home or the grave by the time the crest came into view!”

A doleful smile. “Gerhard Lenz, whatever we think of him, was a brilliant man,” Lenz went on. Ben made a mental note: was Jürgen Lenz really Gerhard’s son? “Most of his theories never amounted to anything. But he was convinced that the secret to how and why human beings age was in our cells. And this was even before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, all the way back in 1953! A remarkable man, really. So farsighted in so many ways. He knew the Nazis would lose, and Hitler would be gone, and the funds would dry up. He simply wanted to make sure his work would continue. Do you know why that was important, Benjamin? May I call you Benjamin?”

But Ben was transfixed, looking around the cavernous laboratory in stupefaction, and did not answer.

Because he was there and not there.

He was entwined with Anna, their bodies slick and warm. He was watching her cry after he’d told her about Peter.

He was sitting in a rural Swiss inn with Peter; he was standing over Peter’s blood-soaked body.

“An extraordinary undertaking required extraordinary resources. Hitler prattled about stability while contributing to its destruction, and so it went with other tyrants in other parts of the world. But Sigma really
could contribute to the pacification of the planet. Its founders knew what was necessary. They were devoted to a single creed: rationality. The remarkable advances we’d seen over the past century in technology had to be matched with advances in the management of our race—the
human
race. Science and politics could no longer be relegated to separate dominions.”

Gradually Ben focused. “You’re not making sense. Technology proved an
aid
to the madness. Totalitarianism depended on mass communication. And scientists helped make the Holocaust possible.”

“All the more reason why Sigma was necessary—as a bulwark against that sort of madness. You can understand that, can’t you? A single madman had driven Europe to the brink of anarchy. On the other side of a great land mass, a small band of agitators had turned an empire secured by Peter the Great into a seething cauldron. The insanity of the mob amplified the insanity of the individual. That’s what the century had taught us. The future of Western civilization was too important to rest in the hands of the mobs. The aftermath of the war had left a vacuum, a powerful one. Civil society was everywhere in disarray. It fell upon a small group of powerful, well-organized men to impose order. Indirect rule. The levers of power were to be manipulated, even as that manipulation would be carefully camouflaged by the official instrumentalities of governance. Enlightened leadership was necessary—leadership behind the scenes.”

“And what was to guarantee that the leadership was going to be enlightened?”

“I told you. Lenz was a farsighted man, and so were the industrialists he allied with. Again, it comes down to the marriage of science and politics: one would have to heal and strengthen the other.”

Ben shook his head. “That’s something else that
doesn’t make sense. These businessmen were folk heroes, many of them. Why would they agree to consort with the likes of Strasser or Gerhard Lenz?”

“Yes, this was an extremely inclusive group. But perhaps you forget your own father’s indispensable role.”

“A Jew.”

“Doubly indispensable, one could say. Substantial sums were transferred out of the Third Reich, and to do so without detection was a challenge of mind-numbing complexity. Your father, who was quite a wizard in such financial matters, rose to the challenge. But, equally, the fact that he was Jewish was exceedingly helpful in reassuring our counterparts in Allied nations. It helped establish the fact that this wasn’t about furthering the Führer’s insanity. This was about business. And about betterment.”

Ben gave him a frankly skeptical look. “You still haven’t explained Gerhard Lenz’s special appeal to these businessmen.”

“Lenz had something to offer them. Or, at that point, I should say that he had something to
promise
. The word had spread among the moguls that Lenz had made some extremely suggestive scientific breakthroughs in an area of direct personal interest to all of them. Based on some preliminary successes, Lenz had, at the time, thought he was nearer than he in fact was. He was flush with excitement, and the excitement was infectious. As things turned out, the founders didn’t survive to benefit from his researches. But all of them deserve credit for making it possible. Billions of dollars invisibly went to support the research—a level of support that made the Manhattan Project look like a high school lab class. But now we touch on matters that may lie beyond your grasp.”

“Try me.”

“No doubt your inquiries are purely disinterested, yes?” Lenz said dryly. “Like Ms. Navarro’s.”

“What have you done with her?” Ben asked again, turning toward Lenz as if coming out of a stupor. He was beyond anger now. He was in another, calmer place. He was thinking about killing Jürgen Lenz, realizing with peculiar satisfaction that he did in fact have it in him to kill another person.

And he was thinking about how he would find Anna.
I’ll listen to you, you bastard. I’ll be civil and obedient and I’ll let you talk until you take me to her
.

And then I’ll kill you
.

Lenz looked at him, unblinking, and then continued his explanation. “I expect you’ve figured out the basic scenario. Quite simply, what his work promised was the opportunity to explore the limits of mortality. A man lives for a hundred years if he’s lucky. Mice only get two years. Galápagos tortoises can live
two hundred
years. Now, why in the world is that? Has nature dictated these arbitrary limits?”

Lenz had begun pacing slowly back and forth in front of Ben, his guards standing watch. “Even though my father was forced to move to South America, he continued to direct his research institute here long-distance. Traveled back and forth several times a year. In the late fifties one of his scientists made an intriguing discovery—that every time a human cell divides, its chromosomes, those tiny spindles of DNA, become shorter! Microscopically shorter, yes, but still, measurably so. So what
was
it, exactly, that was getting shorter? It took years to discover the answer.” He smiled again. “Father was right. The secret really was in our cells.”

“The chromosomes,” Ben said. He was beginning to understand.

Father was right
.

He had an idea now where Max had gone.

“Just one tiny part of the chromosomes, really. The very tip of them—looks a little like those plastic tips at the end of shoelaces. Way back in 1938 those little caps had been discovered, named ‘telomeres.’ Our team found that every time a cell divides, those little caps get shorter and shorter, until the cell starts to die. Our hair falls out. Our bones get brittle. Our spines curve. Our skin wrinkles and sags. We get old.”

“I saw what you’re doing to those children,” Ben said. “The progerics. I take it you’re experimenting on them.”
And who else are you experimenting on?
“The world believes you invite them in for a vacation. Some vacation.” No, he chided himself, must remain calm. He struggled to control his rage, keep from showing it.

Listen
to him. Lead him on.

“True, it’s no vacation for them,” Lenz agreed. “But these poor children do not need vacations. They need a cure! It’s really fascinating, you know, these little young-old people. They’re
born
old. If you took a cell from a newborn progeric child and put it side by side, under a microscope, with one from a ninety-year-old man—why, even a molecular biologist couldn’t tell the difference! In a progeric, those little tips start out short. Short telomeres, short lives.”

“What are you
doing
to them?” Ben asked. He realized his jaw ached from clenching it so hard so long. A mental image flashed of the progeric children in the bottles.

Dr. Reisinger and Justice Miriam Bateman, Arnold Carr, and the others were straggling out of the room, conversing.

“Those little shoelace tips, they’re like tiny odometers. Or timing devices, say. We have a hundred trillion cells in our bodies, and each cell has ninety-two telomeres—that makes ten
quadrillion
little clocks telling our body
when it’s time to shut down. We’re
preprogrammed
to die!” Lenz seemed unable to contain his excitement. “But what if we could somehow reset the clocks, hmm? Keep them from getting shorter? Ah, that was the trick. Well, it turns out that some cells—certain brain cells, for instance—make a chemical, an enzyme, that fixes up their little telomeres, rebuilds them. All of our cells have the ability to make it, but for some reason they don’t—it’s just switched off most of the time. So… what if
we
could turn that switch on? Keep those little clocks ticking? So elegant, so simple. But I’d be lying to you if I said this was easy to do. Even with all the money in the world, and some of the world’s most brilliant scientists to choose from, it still took decades, and a number of scientific advances, like gene splicing.”

This was what the killings were about, wasn’t it?

A neat little irony, Ben thought. People die so that others can live far beyond their natural life span.

Keep him talking, explaining. Bury the rage. Keep sight of the goal.

“When did you make your breakthrough?” Ben asked.

“Around fifteen, twenty years ago.”

“And why hasn’t anybody else caught up with you?”

“Others are working in the field, of course. But we’ve got an advantage they lack.”

“Unlimited funding.” Credit Max Hartman, he thought.

“That helps, certainly. And the fact that we’ve been working on it pretty much nonstop since the forties. But that’s not the whole story. The big difference is human experimentation. Every ‘civilized’ country in the world has outlawed it. But how much can you really learn from rats or fruit flies, for God’s sake? We made our earliest advances by experimenting on children with progeria, a condition that doesn’t exist elsewhere
in the animal world. And we still use progerics, as we continue to refine our understanding of the molecular pathways involved. One day we won’t need them anymore. But we still have so much to learn.”

“Human experimentation,” Ben said, scarcely concealing his revulsion. There was no difference between Jürgen Lenz and Gerhard Lenz. To them, human beings—sick children, refugees, camp inmates—were nothing more than lab rats. “Like those refugee children in their tents, fenced in out there,” Ben said. “Maybe you brought them in under the guise of ‘humanitarianism.’ But they’re expendable too, aren’t they?” He recalled words that Georges Chardin had spoken to him, and he said them aloud: “The slaughter of the innocents.”

Lenz bristled. “That’s what some of the
angeli rebelli
called it, but it’s a rather inflammatory description,” he said. “As such, it only impedes rational deliberation. Yes, some must die that others may live. A disquieting idea, no doubt. But put away the veil of sentimentality for one moment and face the brutal truth. These unfortunate children would otherwise be killed in war, or die from the diseases of poverty—and for what? Instead, they are
saviors
. They’ll change the world. Is it more ethical to bomb their homes, let them be machine-gunned down, let them die senselessly, as the ‘civilized world’ permits? Or to give them the chance, instead, to alter the course of history? You see, the form of telomerase enzyme that our treatment requires is most readily isolated from the tissues of the central nervous system—the cells of the cerebrum and cerebellum. The quantities are far richer in the young. Unfortunately, it cannot be synthesized: it’s a complex protein, and the shape, the conformation, of the protein is crucial. As with many such complex proteins, they cannot be produced by artificial means. And so… we must harvest it from human beings.”

“The slaughter of the innocents,” Ben repeated.

Lenz shrugged. “The sacrifice troubles you, but it has not unduly troubled the world at large.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve no doubt heard the statistics—the fact that twenty thousand children disappear every year. People know, and they shrug. They’ve come to accept it. Perhaps it would provide a measure of consolation to know that these children haven’t perished for no reason. It has taken us years to perfect our assays, techniques, dose levels.
There was no other way
. Nor will there be in the foreseeable future. We need the tissue. It must be human tissue, and it must be from juveniles. A seven-year-old’s brain—a quart and a half of quivering jelly—is hardly smaller than a grown-up’s, but its yield of telomerase enzymes is ten times as great. It is the greatest, most valuable natural resource on earth, yes? As your countrymen say, a terrible thing to waste.”