Had an observer been keeping a close watch on Hans Vogler’s body, he might possibly have detected, amid this furious gathering of mental fortitude, the barest flicker of an eyelid, nothing more. Every physical movement would now be planned and measured out in advance, the way a man dying of thirst in a desert might ration swallows from a canteen. There would be no wasted movement.

  The Architect lived to kill. It was his area of unexampled expertise, his singular vocation. Now he would kill if only to prove that he still lived.

  “Who are you?” asked Strasser in a high-pitched, hoarse voice.

  Ben glanced from the nurse-impostor in her blood-drenched white uniform, sprawled on the floor, to the assassin who had almost killed them both, to the mysterious protectors his father had hired, both now lying murdered on the red clay tiles of the patio.

  “Herr Strasser,” Anna said, “the police will be here any moment. We have very little time.”

  Ben understood what she was saying: the Argentine police weren’t to be trusted; they couldn’t be here when the police arrived.

  They would have very little time to learn what they needed from the old German.

  Strasser’s face was deeply creased and striated, etched with countless crisscrossing lines. His liver-colored lips stretched downward in a grimace, and they were wrinkled too, like elongated prunes. Seated on either side of his creviced, wide-nostriled nose were deep-sunk dark eyes like raisins in a ball of dough. “I am not Strasser,” he protested. “You are confused.”

  “We know both your real name and your alias,” Anna said impatiently. “Now tell me: the nurse—was she your regular one?”

  “No. My usual nurse was sick this week. I have anemia and I need my shots.”

  “Where have you been for the last month or two?”

  Strasser shifted from one foot to another. “I have to sit down,” he wheezed. He moved slowly down the hallway.

  They followed him down the hall, to a large, ornate, book-lined room. It was a library, a two-story atrium with walls and shelves of burnished mahogany.

  “You live in hiding,” Anna said. “Because you’re a war criminal.”

  “I am no war criminal!” Strasser hissed. “I’m as innocent as a baby.”

  Anna smiled. “If you aren’t a war criminal,” she replied, “why are you hiding?”

  He faltered, but only for a moment. “Here it has become fashionable to expel former Nazis. And yes, I was a member of the National Socialist party. Argentina signs agreements with Israel and Germany and America—they want to change their image. Now they only care what America thinks. They’d expel me just to make the American President smile. And you know, here in Buenos Aires, tracking down Nazis is a business! For some journalists it’s a full-time job, how they make their living! But I was never a Hitler loyalist. Hitler was a ruinous madman—that was clear early in the war. He would be the destruction of all of us. Men like me knew that other accommodations had to be reached. My people sought to kill the man before he could do further damage to our industrial capacities. And our projections were correct. By the war’s end, America had three-quarters of the world’s invested capital, and two-thirds of the world’s industrial capacity.” He paused, smiled. “The man was simply bad for business.”

  “If you’d turned against Hitler, why are you still protected by the Kamaradenwerk?” Ben asked.

  “Illiterate thugs,” Strasser scoffed. “They are as ignorant of histpry as the avengers they seek to thwart.”

  “Why did you go out of town?” Anna interrupted.

  “I was staying at an estancia in Patagonia owned by my wife’s family. My late wife’s family. At the foot of the Andes, in Rio Negro province. A cattle and sheep ranch, but very luxurious.”

  “Do you go there regularly?”

  “This is the first time I go there. My wife died last year and … Why do you ask these things?”

  “That’s why they couldn’t find you to kill you,” Anna said.

  “Kill me … But who is trying to kill me?”

  Ben looked at Anna, urging her to continue speaking.

  She replied, “The company.”

  “The company?”

  “Sigma.”

  She was bluffing, Ben knew, but she did it with great conviction. Chardin’s words came to his mind, unbidden. The Western world, and much of the rest, would respond to its ministrations, and it would accept the cover stories that accompanied them.

  Now Strasser was brooding. “The new leadership. Yes, that is it. Ah, yes.” His raisin eyes gleamed.

  “What is the ‘new leadership’?” Ben prompted.

  “Yes, of course,” Strasser went on as if he hadn’t heard Ben. “They are afraid I know things.”

  “Who?” Ben shouted.

  Strasser looked up at him, startled. “I helped them set it up. Alford Kittredge, Siebert, Aldridge, Holleran, Conover—all those crowned heads of corporate empires. They had contempt for me, but they needed me, didn’t they? They needed my contacts high up in the German government. If the venture wasn’t properly multinational, it had no hope of succeeding. I had the trust of the men at the very top. They knew I had done things for them that forever placed me beyond the pale of ordinary humanity. They knew I had made that ultimate sacrifice for them. I was a go-between trusted by all sides. And now that trust has been betrayed, exposed for the charade it always was. Now it has become clear that they were using me for their own ends.”

  “You talked about the new leaders—is Jürgen Lenz one of them?” Anna asked urgently. “Lenz’s son?”

  “I have never met this Jürgen Lenz. I didn’t know Lenz had a son, but then I wasn’t an intimate of his.”

  “But you were both scientists,” Ben said. “In fact, you invented Zyklon-B, didn’t you?”

  “I was one of a team that invented Zyklon-B,” he replied. He pulled at his shabby blue bathrobe, adjusted it at the neck. “Now all the apologists attack me for my role in this, but they do not consider how elegant was this gas.”

  “Elegant?” Ben repeated. For a second he thought he’d misheard. Elegant. The man was loathsome.

  “Before Zyklon-B, the soldiers had to shoot every prisoner,” Strasser said. “Terrible bloodbaths. Gas was so clean and simple and elegant. And you know, gassing the Jews actually spared them.”

  Ben echoed: “Spared them.” Ben was sickened.

  “Yes! There were so many deadly diseases that went around those camps, they would have suffered much longer, much more painfully. Gassing them was the most humanitarian option.”

  Humanitarian. I’m looking in the face of evil, Ben thought. An old man in a bathrobe uttering pieties.

  “How nice,” Ben said.

  “This is why we called it ‘special treatment.’”

  “Your euphemism for extermination.”

  “If you wish.” He shrugged. “But you know, I didn’t hand-pick victims for the gas chambers like Dr. Mengele or Dr. Lenz. They call Mengele the Angel of Death, but Lenz was the real one. The real Angel of Death.”

  “But not you,” Ben said. “You were a scientist.”

  Strasser sensed the sarcasm. “What do you know of science?” he spat. “Are you a scientist? Do you have any idea how far ahead of the rest of the world we Nazi scientists were? Do you have any idea?” He spoke in a high tremulous voice. Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth. “They criticize Mengele’s twin studies, yet his findings are still cited by the world’s leading geneticists! The Dachau experiments in freezing human beings—those data are still used! What they learned at Ravensbrück about what happens to the female menstrual cycle under stress—when the women learned they were about to be executed—scientifically this was a breakthrough! Or Dr. Lenz’s experiments on aging. The famine experiments on Soviet prisoners of war, the limb transplants—I could go on and on. Maybe it’s not polite to talk about it, but you still use our science. You’d rather not think about how the experiments were done, but don’t you realize that one of the main reasons we were so advanced was precisely because we were able to experiment on live human beings?”

  Strasser’s creased face had gotten even paler as he spoke, and now it was chalk-white. He had grown short of breath. “You Americans are disgusted by how we did our research, but you use fetal tissue from abortions for your transplants, yes? This is acceptable?”

  Anna was pacing back and forth. “Ben, don’t debate with this monster.”

  But Strasser would not stop. “Of course, there were many crackpot ideas. Trying to make girls into boys and boys into girls.” He chortled. “Or trying to create Siamese twins by connecting the vital organs of the twins, a total failure, we lost many twins that way—”

  “And after Sigma was established, did you continue to keep in touch with Lenz?” Anna asked, cutting him off.

  Strasser turned, seemingly perturbed at the interruption. “Certainly. Lenz relied on me for my expertise and my contacts.”

  “Meaning what?” Ben said.

  The old man shrugged. “He said he was doing work, doing research—molecular research—that would change the world.”

  “Did he tell you what it was, this research?”

  “No, not me. Lenz was a private, secretive man. But I remember he said once, ‘You simply cannot fathom what I’m working on.’ He asked me to procure sophisticated electron microscopes, very hard to get in those days. They had just been invented. Also, he wanted various chemicals. Many things that were embargoed because of the war. He wanted everything crated and sent to a private clinic he had set up in an old Schloss, a castle, he had seized during the invasion of Austria.”

  “Where in Austria?” Anna asked.

  “The Austrian Alps.”

  “Where in the Alps? What town or village, do you remember?” Anna persisted.

  “How can I possibly remember this, after all these years? Maybe he never told me. I only remember Lenz called it ‘the Clockworks’—because it had once been some kind of clock factory.”

  A scientific project of Lenz’s. “A laboratory, then? Why?”

  Strasser’s lips pulled down. He sighed reproachfully. “To continue the research.”

  “What research?” he said.

  Strasser fell silent, as if lost in thought.

  “Come on!” Anna said. “What research?”

  “I don’t know. There was much important research that began during the Reich. Gerhard Lenz’s work.”

  Gerhard Lenz: what was it Sonnenfeld had said about Lenz’s horrific experiments in the camps? Human experimentation … but what?

  “And you don’t know the nature of this work?”

  “Not today. Science and politics—it was all the same to these people. Sigma was, from the beginning, a means of funneling support to certain political organizations, subverting others. The men we’re talking about—these were already men of enormous influence in the world. Sigma showed them that if they pooled their influence, the whole could be far, far greater than the sum of its parts. Collectively, there was very little they couldn’t affect, direct, orchestrate. But, you know, Sigma was a living thing. And like living things, it evolved.”

  “Yes,” Anna said. “With funds provided by the largest corporations in the world, along with funds stolen from the state Reichsbank. We know who the founding board members were. You’re the last living member of that original board. But who are your successors?”

  Strasser looked down the hall, but he seemed to be staring at nothing.

  “Who controls it now? Give us names!” Ben shouted.

  “I don’t know!” Strasser’s voice cracked. “They kept people like me quiet by sending us money regularly. We were lackeys, finally excluded from the inner councils of power. We should all be billionaires many, many times over. They send us millions, but it is crumbs, table scraps.” Strasser’s lips curled up in a repellent smile. “They give me table scraps, and now they wish to cut me off. They want to kill me because they don’t want to pay me anymore. They’re greedy, and they’re ashamed. After all I did for them, they regard me as an embarrassment. And a danger, because even though the doors have been shut to me for years, they still think I know too much. For making possible everything they do, how am I repaid? With contempt!” A growing sense of rage—the pent-up grievance of years—made his words hard, metallic. “They act as if I am a poor relation, a black sheep, a foul-smelling derelict. The swells gather in their fancy-dress forum, and their biggest fear is that I will crash their party, like a skunk at a kaffeeklatsch. I know where they gather. I am not such a fool, such an ignoramus. I would not join them in Austria had they asked me to.”

  Austria.

  “What are you talking about?” Ben demanded. “Where are they gathering? Tell me.”

  Strasser gave him a look that combined wariness and defiance. It was clear that he would say no more.

  “Goddammit, answer me!”

  “You are all the same,” Strasser spat. “You would think somebody my age would be treated with respect! I have nothing more to say to you.”

  Anna was suddenly alert. “I hear sirens. This is it, Ben. We’re out of here.”

  Ben stood directly in front of Strasser. “Herr Strasser, do you know who I am?”

  “Who you are … ?” Strasser stammered.

  “My father is Max Hartman. I’m sure you remember the name.”

  Strasser squinted. “Max Hartman … the Jew, our treasurer … ?”

  “That’s right. And he was an SS officer as well, I’m told.” But Sonnenfeld had said that would merely have been a cover, a ruse. His heart was pounding, he dreaded hearing Strasser’s confirmation of Max’s ugly past.

  Strasser laughed, flashing his ruined brown teeth. “SS!” he laughed. “He was no SS. We gave him fake SS papers so ODESSA would smuggle him out of Germany into Switzerland, with no questions asked. That was the deal.”

  Blood roared in Ben’s ears. He felt a wave of relief, a physical sensation.

  “Bormann chose him personally for the German delegation,” Strasser went on. “Not just because he was skilled at moving money around, but because we needed a … a false head—”

  “A figurehead.”

  “Yes. The industrialists from American and elsewhere were not so comfortable with what the Nazis had done. A Jewish participant was necessary to provide legitimacy—to show that we weren’t the wrong kind of Germans, to show that we were not zealots, not Hitler disciples. For his part, your father got for himself a good deal—he got his family out of the camps, and a lot of other Jewish families as well, and he was given forty million Swiss francs—almost a million dollars U.S. A lot of money.” A horrible smile. “Now he calls himself ‘rags to riches story.’ Is a million dollars rags? I don’t think.”

  “Ben!” Anna shouted. Quickly she flashed the leather wallet that held her Department of Justice credentials. “Now you want to know who I am, Herr Strasser? I’m here on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations. I’m sure you know who they are.”

  “Oh ho,” Strasser said. “Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m an Argentine citizen and I don’t recognize your authority.”

  The sirens were louder, just a few blocks away it seemed.

  Anna turned back to him. “So I guess we’ll see how serious the Argentine government is about extraditing war criminals. Out the back way, Ben.”

  Strasser’s face flashed with rage. “Hartman,” he said hoarsely.

  “Come on, Ben!”

  Strasser crooked a finger at Ben, beckoning him. Ben could not resist. The old man began to whisper. Ben knelt down to listen.

  “Hartman, do you know your father was a weak little man?” Strasser said. “A man without a spine. A coward and a fraud who pretends to be a victim.” Strasser’s lips were inches from Ben’s ear. His voice was singsong. “And you are the fraud’s son, that’s all. That is all you are to me.”

  Ben closed his eyes, fought to control his anger.

  The fraud’s son.

  Was this true? Was Strasser right?

  Strasser was clearly enjoying Ben’s discomfort.

  “Oh, you’d like to kill me right now, isn’t that right, Hartman?” Strasser said. “Yet you don’t. Because you’re a coward, like your father.”

  Ben saw Anna starting down the hall.

  “No,” he said. “Because I’d much rather you spend your remaining life in a stinking jail cell in Jerusalem. I’d like your last days to be as unpleasant as possible. Killing you is a waste of a bullet.”

  He ran down the corridor, following Anna to the back of the house, as the sirens grew louder.

  Crawl, don’t walk. The Architect knew that the effort to maintain orthostatic blood pressure in his head would be made much more difficult by standing erect, when there was as yet no absolute need to do so. It was a rational decision, and his ability to make it was almost as reassuring as the Glock he had retained in an ankle holster.

  The front door was open, the hallway deserted. He crawled, in a standard infantry crawl, indifferent to the wide smear of blood he was leaving as his shirtfront draped against the blond flooring. Every yard seemed like a mile to him. But he would not be deterred.

  You’re the best. He was seventeen, and the drill instructor told him so, in front of the entire battalion. You’re the best. He was twenty-three, and his commanding officer at Stasi had said so in an official report that he showed young Hans before forwarding it to his superior. You’re the best. These words from the head of his Stasi directorate: he had just returned from a “hunting trip” in West Berlin, having dispatched four physicists—members of an internationally distinguished team from the University of Leipzig—who had defected the day before. You’re the best: a top-level Sigma official, a white-haired American in flesh-toned glasses, had spoken those words to him. It was after he had stage-managed the death of a prominent Italian leftist, shooting him from across the street while the man was in the throes of passion with a fifteen-year-old Somali whore. But he would hear those words again. And again. Because they were true.