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 Ravensbruck 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 tunneling 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