The Sigma Protocol (35 page)

Then the question was, where did he get the names and addresses of all these old men in hiding?

And how was his brother’s death connected—if at all?

At a little after nine o’clock in the evening she returned to the hotel and was handed a message slip by the night manager. Thomas Schmid, the homicide detective, had called.

She called him back immediately from the room. He was still in his office.

“We have some of the autopsy results back,” he said. “On that poison you asked the toxicology people to screen for?”

“Yes?”

“They found that neurotoxin in the ocular fluid, a positive match. Rossignol was indeed poisoned.”

Anna sat down in the chair beside the phone. Progress. She felt the pleasant tingle she always had when there
was a breakthrough. “Did they find an injection mark on the body?”

“Not as yet, but they say it’s very difficult to find tiny marks like that. They say they will keep looking.”

“When was he killed?”

“Apparently this morning, shortly before we got there.”

“That means Hartman may still be in Zurich. Are you on top of that?”

A pause, then Schmid said coldly, “I am on top of that.”

“Any news on the bank records?”

“The banks will cooperate, but they take their time. They also have their procedures.”

“Of course.”

“We should have Rossignol’s bank records by tomorrow—”

On her end of the line a beep interrupted Schmid. “One second, I think I’ve got another call coming in.” She pressed the “flash” button. The hotel operator told her it was a call from her office in Washington.

“Miss Navarro, this is Robert Polozzi in ID.”

“Thanks for calling. Turn up anything?”

“MasterCard security just called. Hartman used his card a few minutes ago. He made a charge at a restaurant in Vienna.”

Kent, England

At his country estate in Westerham, Kent, Sir Edward Downey, the retired Prime Minister of England, was in the middle of a game of chess in the rose garden with his grandson when the telephone rang.

“Not again,” eight-year-old Christopher groaned.

“Hold your horses, young man,” Sir Edward snapped good-naturedly.

“Sir Edward, it’s Mr. Holland,” the voice said.

“Mr. Holland, is everything all right?” Sir Edward asked, suddenly concerned. “Our meeting is still going ahead as scheduled?”

“Oh, without a doubt. But a minor matter has come up and I wondered whether you might be able to help.”

As he listened, Sir Edward gave his grandson a menacing scowl, at which Christopher giggled, as he always did. “Well, Mr. Holland, let me make a few calls and see what I can do.”

Vienna

Jürgen Lenz’s house was in an exclusive, densely wooded district in the southwest part of Vienna called Hietzing: an enclave of some of Vienna’s wealthiest residents. Lenz’s house, or, more properly, his villa, was large, modern, an intriguing and handsome mix of Tyrolean architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The element of surprise
, Ben thought.
I need it when I confront Lenz
. In part, it was a question of survival. He didn’t want Peter’s murderers to discover he was in Vienna, and, despite the seed of doubt that Hoffman had planted, the likeliest assumption was that Lenz was one of them.

Of course, he couldn’t just show up on Lenz’s doorstep and hope to gain admittance. The approach had to be more sophisticated. Ben ran through a mental list of the most prominent and influential people he knew personally who would vouch for him, even lie for him.

He remembered the head of a major American charity who had come to see him several times to ask for money. Each time the Hartman family, and the firm, had given generously.

Payback time, Ben thought.

The charity head, Winston Rockwell, was seriously
ill with hepatitis, laid up in the hospital, last Ben had heard, and impossible to reach. This was terribly unfortunate for Rockwell—but convenient for Ben.

He called Lenz’s home, asked for Jürgen Lenz, told the woman who answered the phone—Mrs. Lenz?—that he was a friend of Winston Rockwell’s and was interested in the Lenz Foundation. Code language for: I have money to give you. Even rich foundations don’t turn away contributions.

Mrs. Lenz replied in fluent English that her husband should be home by five, and would Mr. Robert Simon like to come by for a drink? Jürgen would be delighted to meet any friend of Winston Rockwell’s.

The woman who opened the door was an elegant, fineboned woman in her early fifties, wearing a gray sweater-dress, a pearl choker, and matching pearl earrings.

“Please come in,” she said. “Mr. Simon, is it? I’m Ilse Lenz. How nice to meet you!”

“Nice to meet you, too,” Ben said. “Thanks for seeing me, particularly on such short notice.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, we’re thrilled to meet anyone Winston recommends. You’re from—where, did you say?”

“Los Angeles,” he replied.

“We were there years ago for some beastly technology conference. Jürgen should be right down—ah, here he is!”

A whippet-thin, athletic-looking man was bounding down the stairs. “Hallo, there!” Jürgen Lenz called out. In his blue blazer, gray flannel slacks, and rep tie he could have been an American chief executive, maybe an Ivy League college president. His smooth face glowed with health; his smile was sunny.

This was not at all what Ben had expected. Liesl’s gun, holstered to his shoulder inside his sport coat and
loaded with ammunition—he’d stopped at a sporting-goods shop on the Kärntner Strasse—suddenly felt bulky.

Lenz shook Ben’s hand firmly. “Any friend of Winston Rockwell’s is a friend of mine!” Then his voice became soft, tender. “How’s he doing these days?”

“Not well,” Ben said. “He’s been in the George Washington University Medical Center for weeks now, and the doctors are telling him he’s not likely to go home for at least two weeks more.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Lenz said, putting his arm around his wife’s slender waist. “What a nice fellow he is. Well, let’s not stand here. A drink, shall we? What’s the American expression—somewhere it’s got to be six o’clock, hmm?”

Trevor parked his stolen Peugeot across the street from Lenz’s house in Hietzing, switched off the engine, and sat back to wait. When the target emerged from the house, he would get out of the car, cross the street, and come close to him. He did not plan to miss.

There was no time.

Certainly no time to go through channels, Anna realized.

Hartman had just made a charge at a hotel in the first district of Vienna. It was for a small amount, the equivalent of about fifteen dollars. Did that mean he had only stopped at the hotel for a drink, a coffee, a late lunch? If so, he’d be long gone. But if he was staying there, she had him.

She could go through the FBI legat in Vienna, but by the time the office had made contact with the local police through the Austrian Justice Ministry, Benjamin Hartman could well have gone on to another city.

So she had rushed to Zurich-Kloten Airport, bought a ticket on the next Austrian Airlines flight to Vienna, and then located a pay phone.

The first call she made was to a contact of hers in the Vienna police, the
Bundespolizeidirektion
. He was Dr. Fritz Weber, chief of the
Sicherheitsbüro
, the security unit of the Vienna police specializing in violent crimes. This wasn’t exactly the section of the police she needed to reach, but she knew Weber would be happy to help.

She’d met Weber a few years earlier when she’d been sent to Vienna on a case involving a cultural attaché at the American embassy there who had become involved in a sex ring purveying somewhat underaged
Mädchen
.

Weber, an affable man and a smooth politician, had
been grateful for her help, and her discretion, in rooting out a problem that presented potential embarrassment for both countries—and had taken her out to a festive dinner before she left. Now he seemed delighted to hear from Agent Navarro and promised to get someone on the case immediately.

Her second call was to the FBI’s legat in Vienna, a man named Tom Murphy, whom she didn’t know but had heard good things about. She gave Murphy an abbreviated, sanitized rundown on why she was coming to Vienna. He asked her whether she wanted him to arrange liaison with the Vienna police, but she said no, she had her own contact there. Murphy, a real by-the-book man, did not sound happy about it but made no objection.

As soon as she arrived at Vienna’s Schwechat Airport, she placed another call to Fritz Weber, who gave her the name and phone number of the District Inspector on the surveillance squad who was now working the case.

Sergeant Walter Heisler wasn’t fluent in English, but they managed to muddle through.

“We went to the hotel where Hartman made the credit-card charge,” Heisler explained. “He is a guest at the hotel.”

The sergeant worked fast. This was promising. “Great work,” she said. “Any chance of finding the car?”

The compliment seemed to warm him up. Given that the target of investigation was an American, he also realized that the involvement of a representative of the U.S. government would eliminate most of the complicated paperwork and jurisdictional issues that an apprehension of a foreign national would normally present.

“We have already the, how you say, the tail on him,” Heisler said with some enthusiasm.

“You’re kidding. How’d you do that?”

“Well, once we found out that he is at the hotel, we put two men in newsstand in front of the place. They saw he goes in rented car, an Opel Vectra, and they follow him to part of Vienna called Hietzing.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Visiting someone, maybe. A private home. We’re trying to know who it is.”

“Amazing. Fantastic work.” She meant it.

“Thank you,” he said exuberantly. “You would like me to pick you up at airport?”

There was some small talk for a few minutes, which was stressful, since Ben’s cover was only half thought out. The mythical Robert Simon ran a successful financial management firm based in L.A.—Ben figured that if he kept it close to the truth, there’d be less chance of a serious gaffe—and handled the assets of movie stars, real estate tycoons, Silicon Valley IPO paper billionaires. Ben apologized that his client list had to remain confidential, though he didn’t mind mentioning a name or two they’d no doubt heard of.

And all the while he wondered: Who is this man? The sole heir of Gerhard Lenz—the notorious scientist and a principal in something called Sigma.

As he and the Lenzes chatted, all three of them drinking Armagnac, Ben furtively inspected the sitting room. It was furnished comfortably, with English and French antiques. Paintings of the Old Master school were framed in gilt, each one perfectly lighted. On a table beside the couch he noticed silver-framed photographs of what he assumed were family. Conspicuously absent was any picture of Lenz’s father.

“But enough about my work,” Ben said. “I wanted to ask you about the Lenz Foundation. I understand its main purpose is to promote study of the Holocaust.”

“We fund historical scholarship, yes, and we give to Israeli libraries,” Jürgen Lenz explained. “We give a lot of money to combat hatred. We think it’s extremely important that Austrian schoolchildren study the crimes of the Nazis. Don’t forget, many of the Austrians welcomed the Nazis. When Hitler came here in the thirties and gave a speech from the balcony of the Imperial, he attracted enormous crowds, women weeping at the sight of such a great man.” Lenz sighed. “An abomination.”

“But your father… if you don’t mind my saying…” Ben began.

“History knows that my father was inhuman,” Lenz said. “Yes, he certainly was. He performed the most gruesome, the most unspeakable experiments on prisoners in Auschwitz, on children—”

“Will you excuse me, please?” Ilse Lenz said, rising to her feet. “I can’t hear about his father,” she murmured. She walked from the room.

“Darling, I’m sorry,” Lenz called after her. He turned to Ben, anguished. “I can’t blame her. She didn’t have to live with this legacy. Her father was killed in the war when she was a child.”

“I’m sorry to have brought it up,” Ben said.

“Please, not at all. It is a perfectly natural question. I’m sure it strikes Americans as strange that the son of the notorious Gerhard Lenz devotes his life to giving away money to study the crimes of his father. But you must understand, those of us who, by the accident of birth, have had to struggle with this—we, the children of the most important Nazis—we each react in very different ways. There are those, like Rudolph Hess’s son Wolf, who spend their lives trying to clear their fathers’ names. And there are those who grow up confused, struggling to make some sense of it all. I was born too late to have retained any personal memories of my
father, but there are many who knew their fathers only as they were at home, not as Hitler’s men.”

Jürgen Lenz grew steadily more impassioned as he spoke. “We grew up in privileged homes. We drove through the Warsaw ghetto in the back of a limousine, not understanding why the children out there looked so sad. We watched our fathers’ eyes light up when the Führer himself called to wish the family a merry Christmas. And some of us, as soon as we were old enough to think, learned to loathe our fathers and everything they stood for. To despise them with every fiber of our being.”

Lenz’s surprisingly youthful face was flushed. “I don’t think of my father as my father, you see. He’s like someone else to me, a stranger. Shortly after the war ended, he escaped to Argentina, I’m sure you know, smuggled out of Germany with false papers. He left my mother and me penniless, living in a military detention camp.” He paused. “So you see, I’ve never had any doubts or conflicts about the Nazis. Creating this foundation was the very least I could do.”

The room was silent for a moment.

“I came to Austria to study medicine,” Lenz continued. “In some ways it was a relief to leave Germany. I loved it here—I was born here—and I stayed, practicing medicine, keeping as anonymous as I could. After I met Ilse, the love of my life, we discussed what we could do with the family money she’d inherited—her father had made a fortune publishing religious books and hymnals—and we decided I’d give up medicine and devote my life to fighting against what my father fought for. Nothing can ever efface the darkness that was the Third Reich, but I’ve devoted myself to trying, in my own small way, to be a force of human betterment.” Lenz’s speech seemed a little too polished, too rehearsed, as if he’d delivered it a thousand times
before. No doubt he had. Yet there didn’t seem to be a false note. Beneath the calm assuredness, Lenz was clearly a tormented man.