The Sigma Protocol (79 page)

His bellows became fainter as he plunged to the
Schloss
far below them.

But would the helicopter follow him down? Unlike an airplane, a helicopter that had moved beyond the limits of correct angular position would simply drop like a stone. And the rotating helicopter continued to tilt, horrifyingly, as the loss of lift became sickeningly apparent.

Regaining proper position would require both hands and feet. Ben frantically adjusted the cyclic and the
collective as his feet worked the pedals, coordinating the tail rotor with the main rotor.

“Ben!” she yelled, only just managing to latch the door. “Do something!”

“
Jesus!
” he roared over the straining rotors. “I don’t know if I can!”

The helicopter suddenly plunged, and Anna’s stomach lurched upward, but she noticed that even as it fell, it was starting to right itself.

If it righted itself in time—found the angle required for lift—they’d stand a chance.

Ben manipulated the controls with furrowed intensity. Viscerally, they knew that the rotorcraft had only seconds remaining before the descent velocity became unrecoverable: any wrong decisions would be fatal.

She felt it before she saw it—felt the lift before she saw, from the horizon line, that the helicopter had returned to even keel.

For the first time in a long while, she experienced a small but growing abatement of panic. Deftly, she tore off a piece of her blouse and pressed it to the area of Ben’s lower neck that had been attacked. The area was deeply grooved with tooth marks, but the compression wounds left very little blood, which was fortunate. No major vessels had been breached. Ben would need medical attention before too long, but it wasn’t an emergency.

Now she looked down out of the window. “Look!” she called out. Directly below them she could see the toy-model castle surrounded by its serpentine fence. And at the base of the mountain a dense crowd of people was surging, streaming.

“That’s them!” she shouted. “It looks like they got out!”

They heard an explosion from below, and a great
crater suddenly appeared in the ground next to the
Schloss
.

A small section of the ancient stone fortress nearest the blast crumbled like a fragile confection of spun sugar.

“The dynamite,” Ben said.

They were more than a thousand feet up now, cruising at 140 knots. “The idiots dynamited the mouth of the cave. Way too close to the building—look at what the explosion’s done.
Jesus!
”

She saw what looked like a white cloud forming near the summit of the mountain, rolling like dense fog down the mountainside.

A white cloud of snow, a great wave, the avalanche a cruel fact of nature in the Austrian alps.

It was a strangely beautiful sight.

Apart from scores of children who managed to flee the grounds of the
Schloss
, there were no survivors.

Thirty-seven people around the world, many of them great men and women, all of them leaders in their field, were shocked to read the obituaries of the Viennese philanthropist Jürgen Lenz, in the avalanche that buried the Alpine
Schloss
he had inherited from his father.

Thirty-seven men and women, all of whom were in remarkable health.

A gleaming throwback to a more elegant age, the Metropolis Club occupied the corner of a handsome block on East Sixty-eighth Street in Manhattan. It was a grand McKim, Mead & White building from the late nineteenth century, adorned with limestone balustrades, trimmed with intricate modillion courses. Inside, the curved wrought-iron railings of the double staircase led past marble pilasters and plaster medallions to the spacious Schuyler Hall. Three hundred chairs were now assembled on its black-and-white harlequinade floor. Ben had to admit, for all his misgivings, that it wasn’t an inappropriate venue for his father’s memorial service: Marguerite, Max Hartman’s executive assistant for twenty years, had insisted on organizing the event and her efforts were, as always, beyond reproach. Now he blinked hard and looked at the faces in front of him, until the collectivity came into focus as individuals.

Seated in all those chairs was a curious community of mourners. Ben saw the careworn faces of older men from New York’s banking community, grizzled, jowly, stoop-shouldered men who knew that banking, the profession to which they had devoted their lives, was now changing in ways that exalted technical competence over the cultivation of personal relationships. These were bankers who had made their biggest deals on the fairways—gentlemen of the green who glimpsed
that the future of their industry belonged to callow men with bad haircuts and doctorates in electrical engineering, callow men who did not know a putter from a nine iron.

Ben saw the elegantly attired leaders of major charitable causes. He made fleeting eye contact with the executive director of the New-York Historical Society, a woman who wore her abundant hair in a tight bun; her face looked slightly stretched, in a diagonal that ran from each corner of her mouth to an area behind each ear—the familiar sign of a recent face-lift, marks of the surgeon’s crude craft. In the row behind her, Ben recognized the white-haired, navy-suited head of the Grolier Society. The soigné president of the Metropolitan Museum. The neo-hippyish chairwoman of the Coalition for the Homeless. Elsewhere were provosts and deans of several major educational institutions, each keeping the others at a careful distance, each regarding Ben somberly. In the first row was the charismatic national director of the United Way charities, slightly rumpled, his brown basset-hound eyes looking genuinely moved.

So many faces, dissolving briefly and then resolving into particularity once more. Ben saw striving couples, tight-bodied wives and soft-bellied men, who had helped secure their position in New York society by enlisting Max Hartman’s support in their ceaseless fund-raisers for literacy, AIDS, freedom of expression, wildlife conservation. He saw neighbors from Bedford: the softball-playing magazine mogul with his trademark bold-striped shirt; the slightly tatty-looking, long-faced scion of a distinguished old family who once directed an Egyptology program at an Ivy League university; the youngish man who had launched, and sold to a conglomerate, a company that made herbal teas with colorful New Age names and progressive box-top homilies.

Worn faces, fresh faces, familiar ones and strange ones. There were the people who worked for Hartman Capital Management. Prized clients, like good old Fred McCallan, who’d dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief once or twice. Former colleagues of his from his days teaching in East New York; newer colleagues of his from the job he’d just taken at an equally poor high school in Mount Vernon. There were people who had helped him and Anna in their time of need. Above all, there was Anna, his fiancée, his friend, his lover.

Before all of these people, Ben stood before a rostrum at the raised platform at the end of the hall and tried to say something about his father. In the previous hour, a very fine string quartet—one that Max Hartman had helped sponsor—had played an adagietto by Mahler, adapted from his Fifth Symphony. Erstwhile business colleagues and beneficiaries of Max had evoked the man they knew. And now Ben found himself speaking, and wondering as he spoke, whether he was really addressing the assembled or himself.

He had to speak of the Max Hartman
he
knew, even as he wondered how much he ever did know or
could
know him. His only certainty was that it was his task to do so. He swallowed hard and continued speaking: “A child imagines that his father is all-powerful. We see the pride and the broad shoulders and the sense of mastery and it’s impossible to think that this strength has limits. Maybe maturity comes of recognizing our error.” Ben’s throat constricted, and he had to wait a few moments before resuming.

“My father was a strong man, the strongest man I’ve ever known. But the world is powerful, too, more powerful than any man, however bold and determined he may be. Max Hartman lived through the darkest years
of the twentieth century. He lived through a time when mankind revealed how very black its heart could be. In his mind, I think, the knowledge defiled him. I know that he had to live with that knowledge, and make a life and raise a family, and pray that his knowledge would not shadow our lives as it did his own. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” Again Ben paused, took a deep breath, and pressed on.

“My father was a complicated man, the most complicated man I have ever known. He lived through a history of astonishing complexity. A poet wrote:

“Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities
.

“My father liked to say that he only looked forward, never behind. That was a lie, a brave, defiant lie. History was what my father was shaped by, and what he would always struggle to overcome. A history that was anything but black and white. The eyesight of children is very sharp. It dims with age. And yet there is something that children really don’t see too well: the intermediate tones. Shades of gray. Youth is pure of heart, right? Youth is uncompromising, resolute, zealous. That is the privilege of inexperience. That is the privilege of a moral cleanliness untested and untroubled by the messiness of the real world.

“What if you have no choice but to deal with evil in order to fight evil? Do you save those you love, those you can, or do keep yourself pure and unsullied? I know I never had to make that call. And I know something else. A hero’s hands are chapped, scuffed, chafed and calloused,
and only rarely are they clean. My father’s were not. He lived with the sense that, in fighting the enemy, he had also done work that served their purposes. In the end, his broad shoulders would be bowed with a sense of guilt that none of his good deeds could ever erase. He could never forget that he had survived when so many he had cherished did not. Again: After such knowledge what forgiveness? The effect was that he redoubled his efforts to do what was right. Only recently have I come to understand that I was never truer to him and his own sense of mission than when I thought I was rebelling against him, and his expectations for me. A father wants, above all, to keep his children safe. But that is the one thing that no father can do.”

Ben’s eyes met Anna’s for a long, lingering moment, and he found solace in the steady, answering gaze of her liquid brown eyes.

“One day, God willing, I will be a father, and no doubt I will forget this lesson and have to relearn it. Max Hartman was a philanthropist—in the root sense of the word, he loved people—and yet he was not an easy man to love. Every day, his children would ask themselves whether they made him proud or ashamed. Now I see that he was burdened by this question, too: would he make us, his children, proud or ashamed?

“Peter, above all else, I wish you were here with me at this very moment, to listen and to talk.” Now his eyes welled. “But, Peter, this you’ve got to file under ‘strange but true,’ as you used to say. Dad lived in fear of
our
judgment.”

Ben bowed his head for a moment. “I say my father lived in fear that I would judge him—and yet it seems incredible. He feared that a child bred of luxury and indolence would judge a man who had to endure the annihilation of everything he held dear.”

Ben squared his shoulders, and, his voice hoarse and thickened with sadness, spoke a little louder. “He lived in fear that I would judge him.
And I do
. I judge him mortal. I judge him imperfect. I judge him a man who was mulish and complicated and hard to love and forever scarred by a history that left its mark on everything it touched.

“And I judge him a hero.

“I judge him a good man.

“And because he was hard to love, I loved him all the harder…”

Ben broke off, the words strangled in his throat. He could say no more, and perhaps there was nothing more that needed to be said. He looked at Anna’s face, saw her cheeks glistening with tears, saw her weeping for them both, and he slowly walked away from the rostrum, and toward the back of the hall. Soon Anna joined him, standing by his side while countless guests shook his hand as they filed out through the hall and talked among themselves in an adjoining room. There were words of condolence and of affectionate reminiscence. Kindly old men squeezed his shoulder, clearly remembering him as a child, one half of the adorable Hartman twins. Ben steadily regained his composure. He’d felt wrung out, but part of what had been wrung out of him was the heaviness of grief.

Ten minutes later, when someone—the head of the tax division at HCM—told a fond, funny anecdote about his father, Ben found himself laughing out loud. Somehow he felt lighter than he had in weeks, maybe years. As the crowd thinned, a tall, square-jawed, sandy-haired man clasped his hand.

“We’ve never properly met,” the man said, and then he glanced at Anna.

“Ben, this is someone who has been a good friend to us both,” Anna said warmly. “I’d like you to meet
the new director of the Internal Compliance Unit, at Justice—David Denneen.”

Ben shook his hand vigorously. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said. “And can I say thanks for saving our ass? Or is that just part of your job description?” Ben knew that Denneen had been chiefly responsible for clearing Anna’s name; the word had been artfully “leaked” that she’d been working for a sting operation, those reports of her misdeeds faked in order to draw out some genuine malefactors. Anna had even received an official governmental letter of thanks for her “dedicated service and valor,” although the letter discreetly left the circumstances of that valor unspecified. Still, it served a turn in helping her land a job as vice president in charge of risk-avoidance at Knapp Incorporated.

Now Denneen bent down and kissed Anna on the cheek. “The debt runs the other way,” he said, turning back to Ben. “As you very well know. Anyway, these days at the ICU I’m in the downsizing business. Someday, when my mother asks me what I do for a living, I’d like to be able to tell her.”