the most part, we’re talking about individuals with personal involvement
in Sigma who sought to resist the inevitable. They complained that
Sigma had fallen under my sway, felt displaced by my emerging role. Oh,
all our members were treated generously…”
“Kept on a string, you mean. Given payments to fortify their
discretion.”
“As you like. But it was no longer enough, not now. What it came down
to was a failure of vision. The point remains that they declined to,
shall we say, get with the program. Then there were those who became
importunate, possibly indiscreet, had long since ceased to have anything
to offer. They were loose threads, and the time had come to snip them.
Perhaps it seems harsh, but when there’s this much at stake, you do not
simply give people a firm talking to, or spank their wrists, or put them
in ‘time-out,” yes? You take more definitive measures.”
Don’t give up, Ben told himself. Keep him engaged.
“Murdering these old men in itself seems a foolish risk, don’t you
think? The deaths were bound to attract suspicion.”
“Please. All the deaths appeared to be natural, but even if the toxin
were discovered, these were men with plenty of worldly enemies ”
Lenz heard the sound at the same moment Ben did.
A burst of machine-gun fire not far away.
And then another, even closer.
A shout.
Lenz turned toward the door, hypodermic needle in one hand. He said
something to the guard standing by the door.
The door burst open in a hail of bullets.
A scream, and the guard collapsed in a pool of his own blood.
Lenz dropped to the floor.
Anna!
Ben’s relief was enormous. She’s alive, somehow she’s alive.
“Ben!” she shouted, flinging the door shut behind her and turning the
lock. “Ben, you all right?”
“I’m all right,” he called.
“Stand up!” she screamed at Lenz. “You god damned son of a bitch.”
She advanced, machine gun leveled. She was wearing a doctor’s short
white coat.
Lenz stood. His face was flushed, his silver hair mussed. “My guards
will be here any second.” His voice quavered.
“Don’t count on it,” Anna replied. “I’ve sealed off the entire wing,
and the doors are jammed from the outside.”
“You’ve killed that guard, I think,” Lenz said, bravado returning to his
voice. “I thought the United States trained its agents only to kill in
selfdefense.”
“Haven’t you heard? I’m off duty,” Anna said. “Hands away from your
body. Where’s your weapon?”
Lenz was indignant. “I have none.”
Anna approached. “You don’t mind if I look, do you? Hands away from
your body, I said.”
Slowly she took a step toward Lenz, slid her free hand inside his
jacket. “Let’s see,” she said. “I sure hope I can do this without
setting off the damned machine gun. I’m not too familiar with these
little guys.”
Lenz paled.
She produced a small handgun from inside Lenz’s suit with a flourish,
like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a top hat.
“Well, well,” she said. “Pretty slick for an old man, Jurgen. Or do
your friends still call you Gerhard?”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN.
Ben gasped, “Oh, my God.”
Lenz pursed his lips, and then, oddly, he smiled.
Anna pocketed Lenz’s handgun. “For the longest time it baffled me,” she
said. “The federal ID lab ran the prints but turned up nothing, no
matter how many databases they used. They tried the army intelligence
files, but still nothing. Until they went back to the old ten-print
cards from the war and a few years after, which haven’t yet been
digitized, why should they be, right? Your SS prints were included in
the Army’s files, I guess because you escaped.”
Lenz watched her, amused.
“The techies speculated that maybe the prints on the photo I’d sent them
were old, but the strange thing was, the fingerprint oil, the
perspiration residue they call it, was fresh. Made no sense to them.”
Ben looked at Lenz. Yes, he resembled the Gerhard Lenz who appeared in
the picture with Max Hartman. Lenz in that 1945 photo was in his
mid-forties. That made him, what, over a hundred years old.
/( seemed impossible.
“I was my own first successful subject,” Gerhard Lenz said quietly.
“Almost twenty years ago I was for the first time able to arrest, then
reverse, my own aging. Only a few years ago did we devise a formulation
that works reliably on everyone.” He was looking off in the distance,
his gaze unfocused. “It meant that everything that Sigma stood for
could now be made secure.”
“All right,” Anna interrupted. “Give me the key to the restraints.”
“I don’t have the key. The orderly–”
“Forget it.” She shifted the machine gun to her right hand, pulled a
straightened paper clip out of a jacket pocket, and freed Ben, handing
him a long plastic object, which he glanced at and understood at once.
“Don’t move a muscle,” Anna shouted, thrusting the Uzi in Lenz’s
direction. “Ben, take those restraints and lock this bastard to
something immobile.” She quickly looked around. “We’ve got to get out
of here as fast as possible, and–”
“No,” Ben said, steely.
She turned, startled. “What are you–?”
“He’s holding prisoners here–young people in tents outside, sick kids
in at least one of the wards. We’ve got to let them out first!”
Anna understood immediately. She nodded. “Fastest way is to shut down
the security system. De-electrify the fences, unlock…” She turned to
Lenz, adjusted the machine gun in her hands. “There’s a master control
panel, an override, in your office. We’re taking a little walk.”
Lenz looked phlegmatic. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking
about. All security for the clinic is controlled from the central guard
station on the first level.”
“Sorry,” Anna said. “I’ve already ‘debriefed’ one of your guards.” She
pointed with the Uzi toward a closed door, not the one through which
they’d entered. “Let’s go.”
Lenz’s office was immense, dark, cathedral-like.
Glimmers of pale light filtered in through slot windows cut into the
stone walls high above their heads. Most of the room was in shadows,
except for a small circle of light from a green-glass-shaded library
lamp in the middle of Lenz’s massive walnut desk.
“I assume you don’t object to my putting on the lights so I can see what
I’m doing,” Lenz said.
“Sorry,” Anna said. “We don’t need it. Just go around to the other
side of your desk and push the button that raises the control panel.
Let’s make this easy.”
Lenz hesitated but a moment, then followed her directions. “This is a
pointless exercise,” he said with weary contempt as he walked around to
his side of the desk. She followed, sidling, the weapon always leveled
at him.
Ben came just behind her. A second set of eyes in case Lenz attempted
something, as he was sure Lenz would do.
Lenz pushed a recessed button at the front edge of the desk. There was
a mechanical rumble, and a long, flat section arose from the middle of
the desktop like a horizontal tombstone: a brushed-steel instrument
panel, strange-looking atop the Gothic desk.
Set into the steel was what appeared to be a flat plasma screen, on
which nine small squares, glowing ice blue, were arranged in rows of
three. Each square display showed a different view of the interior and
exterior of the Schloss. Below the screen was an array of silver toggle
switches.
In one display the progeric children played, tethered to their poles; in
another, refugees milled about around their tents on the snow, smoking.
Guards stood by various entrances. Other guards patrolled the grounds.
Winking red lights every few feet along the electrified fences atop the
ancient stone walls, presumably showing that the system was still
operational.
“Move it,” Anna commanded.
Lenz bowed his head indulgently, and began toggling each switch off in
order from left to right. Nothing happened, no sign of the security
system shutting down. “We will find other progerics,” Lenz said as he
switched them off, “and there’s an endless supply of youthful war
refugees, displaced children the world doesn’t miss there always seems
to be a war somewhere.” This thought seemed to amuse him.
The winking red lights had gone out. A cluster of refugee children was
playing a game near one of the tall iron gates. One of them pointed
noticing that the red power lights had stopped blinking?
Another of them ran up to the gate, tugged at it.
The gate slowly came open.
Tentatively the child walked through the gate, looking back at the
others, beckoning. Slowly another joined him, passing through the gate
to freedom. They appeared to be shouting to the others, though there
was no sound.
Then a few more of the children. A bedraggled-looking girl with matted
curly hair. Another young boy.
More children.
Frenetic movement. The children began to scramble out, pushing and
shoving.
Lenz watched, his expression inscrutable. Anna’s attention was riveted