screamed at Lenz. "You god damned son of a bitch."
She advanced, machine gun leveled. She was wearing a doctor's short white coat.
Lenz stood. His face was flushed, his silver hair mussed. "My guards will be here any second." His voice quavered.
"Don't count on it," Anna replied. "I've sealed off the entire wing, and the doors are jammed from the outside."
"You've killed that guard, I think," Lenz said, bravado returning to his voice. "I thought the United States trained its agents only to kill in selfdefense."
"Haven't you heard? I'm off duty," Anna said. "Hands away from your body. Where's your weapon?"
Lenz was indignant. "I have none."
Anna approached. "You don't mind if I look, do you? Hands away from your body, I said."
Slowly she took a step toward Lenz, slid her free hand inside his jacket. "Let's see," she said. "I sure hope I can do this without setting off the damned machine gun. I'm not too familiar with these little guys."
Lenz paled.
She produced a small handgun from inside Lenz's suit with a flourish, like a conjurer pulling a rabbit out of a top hat.
"Well, well," she said. "Pretty slick for an old man, Jurgen. Or do your friends still call you Gerhard?"
Chapter Forty-Senven
Ben gasped, "Oh, my God."
Lenz pursed his lips, and then, oddly, he smiled.
Anna pocketed Lenz's handgun. "For the longest time it baffled me," she said. "The federal ID lab ran the prints but turned up nothing, no matter how many databases they used. They tried the army intelligence files, but still nothing. Until they went back to the old ten-print cards from the war and a few years after, which haven't yet been digitized, why should they be, right? Your SS prints were included in the Army's files, I guess because you escaped."
Lenz watched her, amused.
"The techies speculated that maybe the prints on the photo I'd sent them were old, but the strange thing was, the fingerprint oil, the perspiration residue they call it, was fresh. Made no sense to them."
Ben looked at Lenz. Yes, he resembled the Gerhard Lenz who appeared in the picture with Max Hartman. Lenz in that 1945 photo was in his mid-forties. That made him, what, over a hundred years old.
/( 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