The Sigma Protocol

by Robert Ludlum

  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.

  “You never saw your father again?”

  “No. I saw him two or three times before his death. He came to Germany from Argentina to visit. He had a new name, a new identity. But my mother wouldn’t see him. I saw him, but I felt nothing for him. He was a stranger to me.”

  “Your mother simply cut him off?”

  “The next time was when she traveled to Argentina for his funeral. She did do that, as if she needed to see that he was dead. The funny thing
was, she found she loved the country. It’s where she finally retired to.”

  There was another silence, and then Ben said quietly but firmly, “I must say I’m impressed by all the resources you’ve devoted to shedding light on your paternal legacy. I wonder, in this connection, if you can tell me about an organization known as Sigma.” He studied Lenz’s face closely as he spoke the name.

  Lenz looked at him for a good long while. Ben could hear his own heart thudding in the silence.

  At last Lenz spoke. “You mention Sigma casually, but I think this may be the entire reason you have come here,” Lenz said. “Why are you here, Mr. Simon?”

  Ben felt a chill. He had let himself be cornered. Now the roads diverged: now he could try to hold on to his false identity, or come out with the truth.

  It was time to be direct. To draw out the quarry.

  “Mr. Lenz, I’m inviting you to clarify the nature of your involvement with Sigma.”

  Lenz frowned. “Why are you here, Mr. Simon? Why do you sneak into my house and lie to me?” Lenz smiled strangely, his voice quiet. “You’re CIA, Mr. ‘Simon,’ is that right?”

  “What are you talking about?” Ben said, baffled and frightened.

  “Who are you really, Mr. ‘Simon’?” Lenz whispered.

  “Nice house,” Anna said. “Whose is it?”

  She sat in the front seat of a smoke-filled blue BMW, an unmarked police vehicle. Sergeant Walter Heisler was at the wheel, a beefy, hearty-looking man in his late thirties, smoking Casablancas. He was cordial enough.

  “One of our more, eh, prominent citizens,” Heisler said, taking a drag on his cigarette. “Jürgen Lenz.”

  “Who is he?”

  They were both looking out at a handsome villa a hundred yards or so down Adolfstorgasse. Anna saw that most of the parked cars had black license plates with white letters. Heisler explained that you had to pay to maintain such plates; it was the old, aristocratic style.

  He blew out a cloud of smoke. “Lenz and his wife are active in the social circles here, the Opera Ball and so on. I guess you’d call them, how you say, philo—philanthropists? Lenz runs the family foundation. Moved here twenty-some years ago from Germany.”

  “Hmmm.” Her eyes were smarting from the smoke, but she didn’t want to complain. Heisler was doing her a major favor. She rather liked sitting here in the smoke-filled cop car, one of the fellas.

  “How old?”

  “Fifty-seven, I believe.”

  “And prominent.”

  “Very.”

  There were three other unmarked vehicles idling on the street, one near them, the other two a few hundred yards down the block, on the other side of Lenz’s villa. The cars were arranged in a classic box formation, so that no matter how Hartman chose to leave the neighborhood, they would have him trapped. The officers waiting in the cars were all highly trained members of the surveillance squad. Each of them was equipped with weapons and walkie-talkies.

  Anna had no weapon. It was highly unlikely, she thought, that Hartman would put up any resistance. His records showed that he’d never owned a gun or applied for a license to carry. The murders of the old men had all been done by means of poison, by syringe. He probably had no weapon with him.

  In fact, there wasn’t much she knew about Hartman. But her Viennese comrades knew even less. She had told her friend Fritz Weber only that the American had left prints at the crime scene in Zurich, nothing more. Heisler, too, knew only that Hartman was wanted in Rossignol’s murder. But that was enough for the Bundespolizei to agree to apprehend Hartman and, at the formal request of the FBI legat in Vienna, to place him under arrest.

  She wondered how much she could trust the local police.

  This was no theoretical question. Hartman was in there meeting with a man who…

  A thought occurred to her. “This guy, Lenz,” she said, her eyes burning from the smoke. “This may be a strange question, but does he have anything to do with the Nazis?”

  Heisler stubbed out his cigarette in the car’s overflowing ashtray. “Well, this is a strange question,” he said. “His father—do you know the name Dr. Gerhard Lenz?”

  “No, should I?”

  He shrugged: naïve Americans. “One of the worst. A colleague of Josef Mengele’s who did all kinds of horrifying experiments in the camps.”

  “Ah.” Another idea suggested itself. Hartman, a survivor’s son with an avenging spirit, was going after the next generation.

  “His son is a good man, very different from his father. He devotes his life to undoing his father’s evil.”

  She stared at Heisler, then out the windshield at Lenz’s magnificent villa. The son was anti-Nazi? Amazing. She wondered whether Hartman knew that. He might not know anything about the younger Lenz except that he was the son of Gerhard, son of a Nazi. If he were really a fanatic, he wouldn’t care if Lenz Junior could turn water into wine.

  Which meant that Hartman might already have given Jürgen Lenz a lethal injection.

  Jesus, she thought, as Heisler lit another Casablanca. Why are we just sitting here?

  “Is that yours?” Heisler suddenly asked.

  “Is what mine?”

  “That car.” He pointed at a Peugeot that was parked across the street from Lenz’s villa. “It’s been in the area since we get here.”

  “No. It’s not one of yours?”

  “Absolutely not. I can tell from plates.”

  “Maybe it’s a neighbor, or a friend?”

  “I wonder could your American colleagues be involving in this, maybe checking on you?” Heisler said heatedly. “Because if that’s the case, I’m calling this operation off right now!”

  Unsettled and defensive, she said, “It can’t be. Tom Murphy would have let me know before sending someone in.” Wouldn’t he? “Anyway, he barely seemed interested when I first told him.”

  But if he were checking up on her? Was that possible?

  “Well, then who is it?” Heisler demanded.

  “Who are you?” Jürgen Lenz repeated, fear now showing on his face. “You are not a friend of Winston Rock-well’s.”

  “Sort of,” Ben admitted. “I mean, I know him from some work I’ve done. I’m Benjamin Hartman. My father is Max Hartman.” Once more, he watched Lenz to gauge his reaction.

  Lenz blenched, and then his expression softened. “Dear God,” he whispered. “I can see the resemblance. What happened to your brother was a terrible thing.”

  Ben felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “What do you know?” he shouted.

  The police radio crackled to life.

  “Korporal, wer ist das?”

  “Keine Ahnung.”

  “Keiner von uns, oder?”

  “Richtig.”

  Now the other team wanted to know whether the Peugeot was one of theirs; Heisler confirmed he had no idea who it was. He took a night-vision monocular from the backseat and held it up to one eye. It was dark on the street now, and the unidentified car had switched off its lights. There was no street lamp nearby, so it was impossible to see the driver’s face. The night-vision scope was a good idea, Anna thought.

  “He has a newspaper up before his face,” Heisler said. “A tabloid. Die Kronen Zeitung—I can just make it out.”

  “Can’t be easy for the guy to read the paper in the dark, huh?” She thought: Lenz Junior could be dead already, and we’re sitting here waiting.

  “I do not think he’s getting much reading done.” Heisler seemed to share her sense of humor.

  “Mind if I take a look?”

  He handed her the scope. All she saw was newsprint. “He’s obviously trying not to be identified,” she said. What if he really was Bureau? “Which tells us something. O.K. if I use your cell phone?”

  “Not at all.” He gave her his clunky Ericsson, and she punched out the local number of the U.S. embassy.

  “Tom,” she said when Murphy came on the line. “It’s Anna Navarro. You didn’t send anyone out to Hietz
ing, did you?”

  “Hietzing? Here in Vienna?”

  “My case.”

  A pause. “No, you didn’t ask me to, did you?”

  “Well, someone’s screwing up my stakeout. No one in your office would have taken it upon himself to check up on me without clearing it with you first?”

  “They better not. Anyway, everyone’s accounted for here, far as I know.”

  “Thanks.” She disconnected, handed the phone back to Heisler. “Strange.”

  “Then who is in that car?” Heisler asked.

  “If I may ask, why did you think I was CIA?”

  “There are some old-timers in that community who have rather taken against me,” Lenz said, shrugging. “Do you know about Project Paper Clip?” They had graduated to vodka. Ilse Lenz had still not returned to the sitting room, more than an hour after she had so abruptly left. “Perhaps not by that name. You’re aware that immediately after the war, the U.S. government—the OSS, as the CIA’s predecessor was called—smuggled some of Nazi Germany’s leading scientists to America, yes? Paper Clip was the code name for this plan. The Americans sanitized the Germans’ records, falsified their backgrounds. Covered up the fact that these were mass-murderers. You see, because as soon as the war was over, America turned its attention to a new war—the Cold War. Suddenly all that counted was fighting the Soviet Union. America had spent four years and countless lives battling the Nazis and suddenly the Nazis were their friends—so long as they could help in the struggle against the Communists. Help build weapons and such for America. These scientists were brilliant men, the brains behind the Third Reich’s enormous scientific accomplishments.”

  “And war criminals.”

  “Precisely. Some of them responsible for the torture and murder of thousands upon thousands of concentration-camp inmates. Some, like Wernher von Braun and Dr. Hubertus Strughold, had invented many of the Nazis’ weapons of war. Arthur Rudolph, who helped murder twenty thousand innocent people at Nordhausen, was awarded NASA’s highest civilian honor!”

  Twilight settled. Lenz got up and switched on lamps around the sitting room. “The Americans brought in the man who was in charge of death camps in Poland. One Nazi scientist they gave asylum to had conducted the freezing experiments at Dachau—he ended up at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, a distinguished professor of space medicine. The CIA people who arranged all this, those few who survive, have been less than appreciative of my efforts to shed light on this episode.”