Some squatted on the floor, quietly absorbed in games or puzzles. Two of them were playing together, their tubes entangled. A little girl with a long blond wig wandered aimlessly about the floor, chanting or talking to herself, her words inaudible.

  The Lenz Foundation.

  A few selected progeric children were invited each year to the clinic.

  No visitors were allowed.

  This was no summer camp, no retreat. The children were being treated like animals. They were, they had to be, human subjects in some sort of experiment.

  Children in the basement pickled in formaldehyde. Children being treated like dogs.

  A private sanatorium.

  This was neither a sanatorium nor, he was sure, a clinic.

  Then what was it? What kind of “science” was being done here?

  Nauseated, he turned and continued down the hall until it came to an end. To his left was a red door, locked, accessible only by key-card. Unlike most of the other hallway doors he’d seen here, this door had no window.

  The door was unmarked. He knew he had to find out what lay behind it.

  Ben inserted the guard’s key-card, but this time it did nothing. Apparently this door required a different level of access.

  Just as he turned away, the door came open.

  A man in a white coat emerged, clutching a clipboard, a stethoscope dangling out of one pocket. A doctor. The man glanced incuriously at Ben, nodded, and held the door open for him. Ben passed through the doorway.

  He was not prepared for what he saw.

  He was in a high-ceilinged room as big as a basketball court. The vaulted stone ceiling and leaded stained-glass cathedral windows appeared to be all that remained of the original architecture. The floor plan indicated that this enormous chamber had originally been a grand private chapel as big as a church. Ben wondered whether it had later been used as the main factory floor. He estimated it was more than a hundred feet long, maybe a hundred feet wide, the ceilings easily thirty feet high.

  Now it was clearly an immense medical facility. Yet at the same time it looked almost like a health club, at once well equipped and spartan.

  In one area of the room was a line of hospital beds, each separated from the other by a curtain. Some of the beds were empty; on others, maybe five or six of them, patients lay supine, connected to some sort of monitor and IV stand.

  In another area was a long row of black treadmills, each equipped with an EKG monitor. On a few of them elderly men and women were running in place, electrodes or probes sprouting from their arms and legs, necks and heads.

  Here and there were nurses’ stations, respirators, anesthesia equipment. A dozen or so doctors and nurses observed, assisted, or bustled about. All the way around the enormous room ran a catwalk, roughly twenty feet above the floor and ten feet from the ceiling.

  Ben realized that he had been standing at the room’s entrance for too long. In a guard’s uniform, he had to act as if he were on assignment. So he walked, slowly and purposefully, into the room, checking one side and then another.

  Sitting in a modern black-leather-and-steel chair was an old man. A plastic tube was attached to one arm and connected to an IV stand. The man was speaking on a phone, a folder of papers in his lap. Obviously he was a patient, but he was clearly engaged in some kind of business.

  In a few places the man’s hair had the downy look of a newborn’s. Around the sides the hair was coarser, denser, and more luxuriant, white or gray at the ends, but growing in black or dark brown.

  And the man looked familiar. His face was often on the cover of Forbes or Fortune, Ben thought. A businessman or investor, someone famous.

  Yes! It had to be Ross Cameron, the so-called “sage of Santa Fe.” One of the richest men in the world.

  Ross Cameron. There was no question about it now.

  Seated next to him was a much younger man whom Ben recognized right away. This was unquestionably Arnold Carr, the fortyish software billionaire and founder of Technocorp. Cameron and Carr were known to be friends; Cameron was sort of Carr’s mentor or guru, kind of a father-son relationship. Carr, too, was hooked up to an IV; he also was speaking on the phone, obviously conducting business, though without any papers.

  Two legendary billionaires, sitting side by side like a couple of guys.in a barbershop.

  In a “clinic” in the Austrian Alps.

  Being infused with some kind of fluid.

  Were they being studied? Treated for something? Something bizarre was taking place here, something secret and important enough to require fully armed security, important enough to kill people over.

  A third man walked over to Cameron, said a few words in greeting. Ben recognized the chairman of the Federal Reserve, now in his seventh decade and among the most revered figures in Washington.

  Nearby, a nurse adjusted a blood pressure cuff on—well, it had to be Sir Edward Downey, but he looked the way he had when he was England’s Prime Minister, three decades ago.

  Ben kept walking until he reached the treadmills, where a man and a woman were running next to each other, talking, out of breath. They each wore gray sweatpants and sweatshirts and white running shoes, and both had electrodes taped to their foreheads, the backs of their heads and necks, their arms and legs. The threadlike wires coming out of the electrodes rose neatly behind each of them, out of the way, connected to Siemens monitors that seemed to be recording their heart rates.

  Ben recognized both of them, too.

  The man was Dr. Walter Reisinger, the Yale professor turned Secretary of State. In person, Reisinger looked healthier than he seemed on TV or in photographs. His skin glowed, though that might have been a result of the running, and his hair seemed darker, though it was probably dyed.

  The woman he was talking to on the next treadmill resembled Supreme Court Justice Miriam Bateman. But Justice Bateman was known to be nearly crippled with arthritis. During State of the Union addresses, when the Supreme Court filed in, Justice Bateman was always the slowest, walking with a cane.

  This woman—this Justice Bateman—was running like an Olympic athlete in training.

  Were these people look-alikes of famous world figures? Ben wondered. Doubles? Yet that wouldn’t explain the infusions, the training.

  Something else.

  He heard the Dr. Reisinger clone voice saying something to the Justice Bateman clone about “the Court’s decision.”

  This was no clone. This had to be Justice Miriam Bateman.

  So then what was this place? Was this some sort of health spa for the rich and famous?

  Ben had heard of such places, in Arizona or New Mexico or California, sometimes Switzerland or France. Places where the elite went to recover from plastic surgery, from alcoholism or drug dependency, to lose ten or twenty pounds.

  But this—?

  The electrodes, the IV tubes, the EKG screens … ?

  These famous people—all, except Arnold Carr, old—were being closely monitored, but what for?

  Ben came upon a row of StairMasters, on one of which an ancient man was moving up and down at top speed, just as Ben regularly did at his health club. This man, too—no one Ben recognized—was clad in gray sweats. The front of his sweatshirt was darkened with sweat.

  Ben knew young athletes in their twenties who couldn’t sustain such a grueling pace for more than a few minutes. How in the world was this old man, with his wrinkled face and liver-spotted hands, able to do it?

  “He’s ninety-six years old,” a man’s voice boomed. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”

  Ben looked around, then up. The person speaking was standing on the catwalk, just above Ben.

  It was Jürgen Lenz.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  A soft, low chime filled the air, melodic and sedate. Jürgen Lenz, resplendent in a charcoal suit, blue shirt, and silver tie, under a neatly pressed white doctor’s coat, strolled down wrought-iron stairs to the main floor. He glanced over at the treadmills and StairMasters. The Supreme Court Justice and the former Secretary of State and most of the others were beginning to finish their exercise sessions, dismount from the machines, nurses removing the wires from their bodies.

  “That’s the signal for the next helicopter shuttle to Vienna,” he explained to Ben. “Time to return to the International Children’s Health Forum they were so kind as to depart. Needless to say, they’re busy people despite their age. In fact, I’d say because of their age. They all have much to give the world—which is why I’ve selected them.”

  He made a subtle hand gesture. Both of Ben’s arms were suddenly grabbed from behind. Two guards held him while another expertly frisked him, removing all three weapons.

  Lenz waited impatiently as the weapons were confiscated, like a dinner-table raconteur whose tale has been interrupted by the serving of the salad course.

  “What have you done with Anna?” Ben asked, his voice steely.

  “I was about to ask you the very same thing,” Lenz replied. “She insisted on inspecting the clinic, and of course I couldn’t refuse. But somehow, along the way, we lost her. Apparently she knows something about evading security systems.”

  Ben studied Lenz, trying to determine how much of this was truth. Was that his way of stalling, of refusing to bring him to her? Was he negotiating? Ben felt a surge of panic.

  Is he lying? Fabricating a story he knows that I’ll believe, that I’ll want to believe?

  Have you killed her, you lying bastard?

  Then again, that Anna might have disappeared to investigate what was happening in the clinic was plausible. Ben said, “Let me warn you right now, if anything happens to her—”

  “But nothing will, Benjamin. Nothing will.” Lenz put his hands in his pockets, head bowed. “We are in a clinic, after all, that is devoted to life.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve already seen too much to believe that.”

  “How much do you really understand of whatever you’ve seen?” Lenz said. “I’m sure that once you truly grasp the work we’re doing, you’ll appreciate its importance.” He motioned for the guards to let Ben go. “This is the culmination of a lifetime’s work.”

  Ben said nothing. Escaping was out of the question. But in fact he wanted to remain here.

  You killed my brother.

  And Anna? Have you killed her, too?

  He became aware that Lenz was speaking. “It was Adolf Hitler’s great obsession, you know. The Thousand-Year Reich, and all that nonsense—though it lasted, what, twelve years? He had a theory that the bloodlines of the Aryans had been polluted, adulterated, because of interbreeding. Once the so-called ‘master race’ was purified it would be extremely long-lived. Rubbish, of course. But I’ll give the old madman credit. He was determined to discover how he and the Reich’s leaders could live longer, and so he gave a handful of his brightest scientists free rein. Unlimited funds. Do your experiments on concentration-camp prisoners. Whatever you like.”

  “Made possible by the generous sponsorship of the greatest monster of the twentieth century,” Ben said, biting off his words.

  “A mad despot, let us agree. And his talk of a thousand-year Reich was laughable—a deeply unstable man, promising an epoch of lasting stability. But his pairing of the two desiderata—longevity and stability—was not ill-founded.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “We human beings are singularly ill-designed in one respect. Of all the species on the planet, we require the longest period of gestation and childhood—of development. And really, we must think about intellectual as well as physical development. Two decades for complete physical maturation, often another decade or more to attain full professional mastery in our area of specialization. Somebody with a highly involved craft, such as a surgeon, may be well into his fourth decade before he has achieved full competence at his vocation. The process of learning and progressive mastery continues—and then, just as he reaches its height, what happens? His eyes begin to dim, his fingers to lose their precision. The depredations of time begin to rob him of what he spent half a lifetime acquiring. It’s like a bad joke. We’re Sisyphus, knowing as soon as we have rolled the boulder toward the top of the hill, it will start hurtling back down. I’m told you once taught schoolchildren. Think how much of human society is devoted simply to reproducing itself—transmitting its institutions, its knowledge and skills, the struts and gearings of civilization. It’s an extraordinary tribute to our determination to win out over time. And yet how much farther would our species have been able to advance if only its leadership, political and intellectual, had been able to focus on advancement, rather than simply self-replacement How much farther we’d all be if some of us were able to stay the course, mount the learning curve and stay there! How much farther we’d be if the best and the brightest of us could keep that boulder rolling uphill, rather than fending off the nursing home or the grave by the time the crest came into view!”

  A doleful smile. “Gerhard Lenz, whatever we think of him, was a brilliant man,” Lenz went on. Ben made a mental note: was Jürgen Lenz really Gerhard’s son? “Most of his theories never amounted to anything. But he was convinced that the secret to how and why human beings age was in our cells. And this was even before Watson and Crick discovered DNA, all the way back in 1953! A remarkable man, really. So farsighted in so many ways. He knew the Nazis would lose, and Hitler would be gone, and the funds would dry up. He simply wanted to make sure his work would continue. Do you know why that was important, Benjamin? May I call you Benjamin?”

  But Ben was transfixed, looking around the cavernous laboratory in stupefaction, and did not answer.

  Because he was there and not there.

  He was entwined with Anna, their bodies slick and warm. He was watching her cry after he’d told her about Peter.

  He was sitting in a rural Swiss inn with Peter; he was standing over Peter’s blood-soaked body.

  “An extraordinary undertaking required extraordinary resources. Hitler prattled about stability while contributing to its destruction, and so it went with other tyrants in other parts of the world. But Sigma really could contribute to the pacification of the planet. Its founders knew what was necessary. They were devoted to a single creed: rationality. The remarkable advances we’d seen over the past century in technology had to be matched with advances in the management of our race—the human race. Science and politics could no longer be relegated to separate dominions.”

  Gradually Ben focused. “You’re not making sense. Technology proved an aid to the madness. Totalitarianism depended on mass communication. And scientists helped make the Holocaust possible.”

  “All the more reason why Sigma was necessary—as a bulwark against that sort of madness. You can understand that, can’t you? A single madman had driven Europe to the brink of anarchy. On the other side of a great land mass, a small band of agitators had turned an empire secured by Peter the Great into a seething cauldron. The insanity of the mob amplified the insanity of the individual. That’s what the century had taught us. The future of Western civilization was too important to rest in the hands of the mobs. The aftermath of the war had left a vacuum, a powerful one. Civil society was everywhere in disarray. It fell upon a small group of powerful, well-organized men to impose order. Indirect rule. The levers of power were to be manipulated, even as that manipulation would be carefully camouflaged by the official instrumentalities of governance. Enlightened leadership was necessary—leadership behind the scenes.”

  “And what was to guarantee that the leadership was going to be enlightened?”

  “I told you. Lenz was a farsighted man, and so were the industrialists he allied with. Again, it comes down to the marriage of science and politics: one would have to heal and strengthen the other.”

  Ben shook his head. “That’s something else that doesn’t make sense. These businessmen were folk heroes, many of them. Why would they agree to consort with the likes of Strasser or Gerhard Lenz?”

  “Yes, this was an extremely inclusive group. But perhaps you forget your own father’s indispensable role.”

  “A Jew.”

  “Doubly indispensable, one could say. Substantial sums were transferred out of the Third Reich, and to do so without detection was a challenge of mind-numbing complexity. Your father, who was quite a wizard in such financial matters, rose to the challenge. But, equally, the fact that he was Jewish was exceedingly helpful in reassuring our counterparts in Allied nations. It helped establish the fact that this wasn’t about furthering the Führer’s insanity. This was about business. And about betterment.”

  Ben gave him a frankly skeptical look. “You still haven’t explained Gerhard Lenz’s special appeal to these businessmen.”

  “Lenz had something to offer them. Or, at that point, I should say that he had something to promise. The word had spread among the moguls that Lenz had made some extremely suggestive scientific breakthroughs in an area of direct personal interest to all of them. Based on some preliminary successes, Lenz had, at the time, thought he was nearer than he in fact was. He was flush with excitement, and the excitement was infectious. As things turned out, the founders didn’t survive to benefit from his researches. But all of them deserve credit for making it possible. Billions of dollars invisibly went to support the research—a level of support that made the Manhattan Project look like a high school lab class. But now we touch on matters that may lie beyond your grasp.”

  “Try me.”

  “No doubt your inquiries are purely disinterested, yes?” Lenz said dryly. “Like Ms. Navarro’s.”