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 history 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 Jurgen Lenz one of them?" Anna asked urgently. "Lenz's son?"
"I have never met this Jurgen 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