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 fallback 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 Wahringer Strasse, there is an “Internet cafe,” 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 Semtnering 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 Jurgen 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 “attache” 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.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE.
The train to Semmering left Vienna’s Sudbahnhof 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.