It 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 refgees, 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 on him, the Uzi still pointed.

  In another screen, a door to the children’s ward was now wide open. A nurse appeared to be waving the children out, looking around furtively.

  “So they are escaping,” Lenz said, “but for you it will not be so easy. Forty-eight security guards have been trained to shoot any intruders on sight. You will never make it outside.” He reached for a large ornate brass lamp to switch it on, and Ben snapped to attention, sure that Lenz was about to pick the lamp up to hurl or swing it, but instead Lenz tugged at a protruding section of the base and pulled out a small oblong object that he instantly pointed at Ben. It was a compact, brass-plated pistol, cleverly concealed.

  “Drop it!” Anna shouted.

  Ben was a few feet to Anna’s side, and Lenz could not cover them both. “I suggest you put down your weapon at once,” Lenz said. “That way no one will be hurt.”

  “I don’t think so,” Anna said. “We’re not exactly evenly matched.”

  Lenz, unfazed, said blandly, “But you see, if you begin to fire at me, your friend here will be killed, too. You must ask yourself how important it is to kill me—whether it’s really worth it.”

  “Drop the goddamn toy gun,” Anna said, although Ben could see it was no toy.

  “Even if you succeed in killing me, you change nothing. My work will continue even without me. But your friend Benjamin will simply be dead.”

  “No!” came a hoarse shout.

  An old man’s voice.

  Lenz spun around to look.

  “Lassen Sie ihn los! Lassen Sie meinen Sohn los! Let him go!”

  The voice came from a corner of the great room that was hidden in shadows. Lenz pointed his weapon toward the voice, then seemed to reconsider, and swung it back toward Ben.

  The voice again: “Let my son go!”

  In the dim light Ben could just make out the seated figure.

  His father. In his hand was a gun, too.

  For a moment Ben couldn’t speak.

  He thought it might be a trick of the strange oblique light, and he looked again, and knew that what he saw was real.

  Quieter now, Max’s voice: “Let them both go.”

  “Ah, Max, my friend,” Lenz called, in a loud and hearty voice. “Perhaps you can talk reason to these two.”

  “Enough of the killing,” Max said. “Enough bloodshed. It’s over now.”

  Lenz stiffened. “You are a foolish old man,” he replied.

  “You’re right,” Max said. He remained seated, but his gun was still trained on Lenz. “And I was a foolish young man, too. I was beguiled by you then, just as now. All my life I’ve lived in fear of you and your people. Your threats. Your blackmail.” His voice rose, choked with rage. “No matter what I built or what I became, you were always there.”

  “You can lower your gun, my friend,” Lenz said mildly. His weapon was still pointed at Ben, but for a split-second he turned to Max.

  I can rush him, tackle him to the floor, Ben thought. The next time his attention is diverted.

  Max continued as if he hadn’t heard, and as if there were no one in the room but Lenz. “Don’t you see I’m not afraid of you any longer?” His voice reverberated against the stone walls. “I will never forgive myself for what I did, for helping you and your butcher friends. For making my deal with the devil. Once I thought it was the right thing to do, for my family, for my future, for the world’s. But I was lying to myself. What you did to my son, my Peter—” His voice broke.

  “But you know that should never have happened!” Lenz protested. “It was the work of overzealous security people who exceeded their authority.”

  “Enough!” Max bellowed. “No more! Enough of your goddamned lies!”

  “But the project, Max. My God, man, I don’t think you understand—”

  “No, you don’t understand. You think I care about your dreams of playing God? You think I ever did?”

  “I invited you here as a favor to you, to make amends. What are you trying to tell me?” Lenz’s voice was controlled, but only barely.

  “Amends? But this is only a continuation of the horror. For you, everything and everyone were sacrificed to your dream of living forever.” A labored breath. “You’re about to take my only remaining child from me! After everything else you’ve taken from me.”

  “Then your overtures were merely a ploy. Yes, I’m beginning to see. When you joined us it was always with the intention of betraying us.”

  “It was the only way I could gain entrance to a walled city. The only way I could hope to monitor from within.”

  Lenz spoke as if to himself. “My mistake is always to imagine that others are as philanthropic as I am—as concerned with the greater good. How you disappoint me. And after all we’ve been through together, Max.”

  “Ach! You pretend to be interested in human progress,” Max shouted. “And you call me a foolish old man! You talk of others as subhuman, but you are yourself not human.”

  Lenz briefly turned his gaze toward Max, seated in the dim corner, and at the same instant that Ben coiled to spring forward, he heard the hollow pop, the retort of a small-caliber pistol, and Lenz looked more surprised than stricken as a small but widening red circle appeared on the breast pocket of his white lab coat near his right shoulder. Aiming in Max’s general direction, Lenz squeezed the trigger three times, returning fire wildly.

  Then a second blotch of red appeared on Lenz’s chest. His right arm dangled uselessly at his side as his pistol clanked to the floor.

  Anna lowered the Uzi slightly, watched him.

  Suddenly Lenz lunged at Anna, knocking her to the floor, the Uzi clattering.

  His hand was at her throat, squeezing her larynx in an iron clutch. She tried to rear up, but he slammed her head back against the floor with an audible crack.

  Again he slammed her head against the stone, and then Ben, enraged, leaped on top of Lenz, gripping the plastic cylinder she’d handed him earlier. Ben roared with exertion and fury as he swung his right hand up and jabbed the hypodermic needle directly into Lenz’s neck.

  Lenz howled in pain. Ben had hit the internal jugular vein, he could tell, or had at least come very close to it, and he depressed the plunger.

  Lenz’s expression of horror seemed frozen on his face. His hands flew to his neck, found the syringe, yanked it out, and he saw the label. “Verdammt nochmal! Scheiss Jesus Christus!”

  A bubble of saliva formed at his mouth. Suddenly he fell backward like an upended statue. His mouth opened and shut as if he were trying to scream, but instead he only gasped for air.

  Then he went rigid.

  Lenz’s eyes stared in fury, but the pupils were fixed and dilated.

  “I think he’s dead,” Ben gasped, short of breath.

  “I know he’s dead,” Anna said. “That’s the most potent opioid there is. They keep some pretty powerful stuff in their locked medicine cabinets. Now let’s get out of here!” She glanced at Max Hartman. “All of us.”

  “Go,” Ben’s father whispered from his chair. “Leave me here, but you two must go now, the guards—”

  “No,” Ben said. “You’re coming with us.”

  “Dammit,” Anna said to Ben. “I heard the helicopter taking off, so that’s out. How did you get in, anyway?”

  “A cave—under the property—opens into the basement. But they’ve found it.”

  “Lenz was right, we’re done for, there’s no way out—”

  “But there is a way,” Max said, his voice faint.

  Ben ran over to him, stricken by what he saw.

  Max, dressed in a pale blue hospital johnny, was feebly holding his hands to the base of his throat, where, as Ben now realized, a bullet had lodged. Blood was spreading insistently beneath his trembling fingers. The thin cotton garment was stenciled with the black numeral eighteen.

  “No!” Ben shouted.

  The man had taken a bullet in order to kill Lenz—and protect his only surviving son.

  “Lenz’s private helicopter,” Max whispered. “You reach the bay through the back passage on the far left …” He murmured instructions for a few moments longer. Finally he said, “Tell me you understand.” Max’s eyes were imploring. In a voice barely audible he repeated the words: “Tell me you understand.”

  “Yes,” Ben said, hardly able to speak himself. Tell me you understand—his father meant the instructions to the bay, of course, but Ben couldn’t help thinking that he meant something more, too. Tell me you understand: tell me you understand the difficult decisions I made in life, however mistaken.

  Tell me you understand them. Tell me you understand who I really am.

  As if in resignation, Max pulled his hands from his throat, and blood began to spurt, with the slow, regular pulse of his heartbeat.

  Tell me you understand.

  Yes, Ben had told him, and just then, at least, he did. I understand.

  Within a few moments, his father slumped backward, lifeless.

  Lifeless, and yet the picture of health. Blinking away tears, Ben could see that his father looked decades younger, his hair beginning to grow in glossy and dark, his skin smooth, firm, toned.

  In death, Max Hartman had never looked more alive.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Ben and Anna raced down the corridor, gunfire audible all around. The bandolier swung against the barrel of her Uzi as she ran, producing a dull rattle. At any moment, they could be set upon, but the guards realized they were heavily armed, would have to approach with caution. Anna knew that no paid sentry, however loyal, would endanger his life needlessly.

  Max’s directions had been clear and accurate.

  Another right turn brought them to a stairwell.

  Ben opened the steel-plated door, and Anna directed a burst of gunfire into the landing area: anyone present would instinctively dive for cover. As they entered, there was a deafening return burst: a guard located on the level below, shooting in the narrow space between the stairs. It was not an angle that afforded any accuracy; the biggest danger was being hit by a ricochet.

  “Run upstairs,” Anna whispered to Ben.

  “But Max said the bay level is downstairs,” Ben protested in a low voice.

  “Do what I say. Start running upstairs. Loudly.”

  He immediately understood, and did so, making sure that his shoes thundered against the stairs as he mounted them.

  Anna flattened herself against the wall, just out of the sight line from the lower landing. Within a few moments, she detected the guard’s movements: hearing Ben’s ascent, he was scrambling to catch up with his quarry.

  The seconds became hours. Anna could picture the guard bounding up to the lower landing: she’d have to work with a mental image, assembled from sounds of the man’s movements. Once she was visible to the guard, she would have no advantage over him other than swiftness. She would keep out of sight until the last possible moment; and then her reflexes would have to be instantaneous.

  Now she leaped into the air and fired where she pictured the guard in her mind, squeezing the trigger even as she was at last able to confirm his position visually.

  The guard had a submachine gun aimed directly at her. Victory or defeat would be measured in milliseconds. Had she waited until she could see him before firing, the advantage would have been his.

  Instead, she watched as his tunic erupted into blood and his weapon fired harmlessly above her, then fell noisily down the stairs.

  “Anna?” Ben called out.

  “Now!” she replied, and he sprinted down the two flights of stairs, joining her at the bay level, at a gate-latch door, also of gray-painted steel, which pushed out.

  As they entered Bay Number 7, they felt a gust of cold, and there it was—the helicopter glinting in the waning light, a great gleaming metallic creature. It was a large, sleek, black Agusta 109, brand new. Italian-made, with wheels instead of skids.

  “Can you really fly this thing?” Anna asked, after they’d both clambered into it.

  Ben, seated in the cockpit, grunted assent. In truth he had flown a helicopter only once before, a training vehicle, with a licensed pilot at the twin set of controls. He had flown planes many times, but this was entirely different, counterintuitive. He scanned the dim cockpit for the controls.

  For an instant, the complexities of the instrument panel dissolved into a blur. The image of his father’s crumpled body seemed to hover before his eyes. He flashed on a Max Hartman just young enough that he could glimpse how he once must have looked. He could glimpse the youthful financier who found the country around him erupting into a lethal blaze of hatred. Who raced around, entering into loathsome accommodations with a loathsome regime in order to save as many families as he could. A man accustomed to mastery turned into a pawn.

  He could glimpse the man—an émigré, a harrowed man, a man with secrets—whom his mother met and fell in love with. Max Hartman, his father.

  Ben shook his head hard. He had to focus.

  He had to focus or they would both be dead. And everything would be for nothing.

  The bay was open to the elements. Outside the gunfire seemed to be coming closer.

  “Anna, I want you ready with the Uzi in case any of the guards try to shoot us down,” Ben said.