Blood of the Reich (53 page)

“You have the right blood, Rominy. We’re going to expose you to this new light, this new science, and turn you, with me, into the first Shambhalans.”

52

Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland

October 4, Present Day

B
etween Lake Geneva and the Jura Mountains, a platter of farm and industrial land hides the largest supercollider on earth. It is built in a tunnel seventeen miles in circumference and more than 300 feet underground, split into eight arcs and interrupted by four gigantic detectors the size of dam powerhouses. These trace the invisibly small particle collisions that the device creates.

The CERN collider consumes enough electricity to power the homes of Geneva, Switzerland. It creates vacuums that in total equal in size the nave of a great cathedral. It uses liquid helium to cool its superconducting magnets that bend and accelerate the beams to nearly absolute zero. The machine’s goal is to re-create on the tiniest scale the extremes of temperature and energy at the Big Bang and thus give a peek at the origin of the universe. Its particle beam is so sensitive that the tidal pull of the moon must be taken into effect when it whirls around its gigantic racetrack.

Kurt Raeder was determined to put this achievement to his own use.

Physicists had made careful calculations to reassure the public that the Large Hadron Collider would not create earth-swallowing black holes or theorized “strange” subatomic quarks, called strangelets, that might detonate with matter. What they’d not calculated was that the vast energies the machine focuses could be used to reconstitute the lost technology of Shambhala.

Instead, a cabal of neo-Nazi physicists secretly had.

“Our Fellowship has been waiting for a long time, Rominy,” Raeder lectured as the Mercedes hummed along the lakeside boulevard in Geneva, headed toward the CERN complex west of the city. Night had fallen, and lights glinted in the lake. “Waiting for science to catch up. Waiting for the blood heir we needed, which was you. And waiting for generations of our ideological followers to graduate with physics degrees and infiltrate the subatomic fraternity. Yes, we have allies! Not just scientists but guards, administrators, public relations personnel, science writers, mechanics, custodians, and suppliers. For half a century I’ve been constructing a web of loyalists, a mafia if you will, who have been working toward this day. The Large Hadron Collider itself has been a project twenty years in the making.”

“You’re claiming that
Nazis
built the supercollider?”

“No. A few who helped are National Socialists or, in more contemporary terms, conservative visionaries. And our broader Fellowship plans to use it, to borrow it. Our members extend to the very highest ranks of government and finance. Think about it: Why are the world’s organizations spending more than six billion dollars to slap protons together? Six thousand
million
dollars? They raised this for a science project? Yes, many of those involved naively believe the supercollider is for pure science. In their ignorance they are our most valuable allies. The American physicist Leon Lederman used the term
God Particle
to explain the search for the Higgs boson, a property that could explain why matter exists at all. Scientists are very clever, and they have succeeded in capturing the public’s imagination.”

“But you’re smarter than all of them,” Rominy said sarcastically.

He smiled. “But
governments
and
business
want more out of this underground cathedral we’ve constructed. They want power for their investment. And so we promised; if they built it we would deliver magic of a kind never seen before, and turn the balance of power on its head. Northern Europe will regain its rightful role as ruler of the world. Those bureaucrats who have backed construction and development think the secret benefits will be shared, yielding discovery that will remake economies and technology. They envision an era of unparalleled prosperity. But those closest to me know that the mysteries of Shambhala must
not
be shared, that democracy is a Jewish idea that poisons society, and that these discoveries are by rightful bloodline the inheritance of the Aryan, governed by National Socialism, and will be used to establish our reign on earth. If you want to call that Nazism, so be it.”

He was obviously mad, but that didn’t mean a cabal of madmen couldn’t wreak havoc. Hadn’t that been the cause of World War II? And out of it had come the atom bomb. And now this?

“But you needed the staff hidden in Shambhala,” she clarified. “This machine wasn’t enough.”

He looked at the window at the dark lake. “Yes. We don’t really understand how the staff worked, or how to duplicate it. But if it can be made to work now, we can begin to study and replicate. Eventually we’ll have legions of staff-wielding Aryans, imposing their will by the force of their thought. They will strum the consciousness that undergirds the universe. We’ll play the cosmic music and reconfigure the world.”

“What did you mean about us becoming the first Shambhalans?”

“That you will be envied by every woman in the world. What we are about, as I explained, is human evolution. We can’t go on as advanced apes armed with atomic bombs and spewing a million tons of carbon a day. We have to evolve, to reach a higher plane. We need to reproduce selectively to accelerate mankind’s biologic destiny. So we’ve been searching for candidates.”

They sped on a boulevard. She saw an airport, hotels, office buildings, and the cozy rectangles of lighted apartment windows, a world of normality that seemed impossibly far away. What quiet domestic life was plodding along there, a pot of tea, a TV show, a book, and the silken warmth of a cat on someone’s lap? Children in their beds. A glass of wine with a loved one. All light-years away.

She’d already tried the handle of the Mercedes. Useless, like the handle of Jake Barrow’s truck. Hadn’t her mother told her never to get in a car with strangers?

How was she going to stop this if Sam didn’t come?

Then they were approaching a sculptured sphere, lit by floodlights, that rose above a lawn like a representation of . . . what? The earth? The atom? The cosmos? It was rust red. Dried-blood red.

“What the hell does that
mean
?” she pressed. “Reproduce selectively?”

“That will be explained at the moment of transfiguration. Ah, here we are.”

They were pulling into a parking lot at a complex of large, mostly windowless, blandly boxed research buildings of the kind stamped out all over the world, like pieces of a game of Risk. There was a word on one:
Atlas
. Hadn’t he held up the cosmos?

“Will you give me your hands please?”

“My hands?”

“Just lift them up.”

Hesitantly she did so, keeping balled in her fist something she’d held tightly as a teddy bear since Wewelsburg. Raeder smoothly reached out and snapped handcuffs on her wrists. “Just so you won’t hurt anything, or yourself. Routine precaution.” Then the sedan doors opened and strong, military hands pulled her out into the chilly air.

Someone snapped something on her ankle.

“A tracking device,” Jake said. “Please don’t try to run. We have dogs and Tasers.”

Yep, that’s quite the boyfriend you picked, Rominy.

She’d felt this way only one time before, on a gurney wheeling down a sterile hospital hallway for removal of her appendix, lights passing overhead like flickering suns, doors hissing open and shutting behind her like portals to hell. She’d been ten, and terribly frightened. Now she felt numbing dread, as she realized that the last weeks had been a long, sickening plummet into an abyss.

“Six billion dollars to find a particle? Absurd,” Raeder said as they walked toward the building. “But six billion dollars to
manipulate
those particles, and with them the world itself?
That’s
a bargain. Six billion dollars of taxpayer money to seize power for yourself? To rule? To monopolize? To become unbelievably rich by reducing lesser races to slavery, their natural state? That’s why so many were persuaded to help us. Some with doubts were bribed. Others blackmailed. Any would-be heroes suffered untimely accidents. We’ve been very thorough.”

They stopped at a door. Green-uniformed guards with black berets and belts weighted with equipment were clustered there. One of them stepped forward. “We can only guarantee control of the sector until the morning shift,
Reichsführer
,” he said, addressing Raeder. “Rennsler is still in the dark, but when he comes to work he’ll mobilize the rest of security against us. After that, it will be on the news and everything will come crashing down.”

The German nodded. “If our calculations are correct, the remaining night will be time enough. Once we demonstrate the staff, they’ll give us time to complete our mission. Key government officials will stand with us. And if not, they cannot stand against us, once we have Vril.”

The man gave a stiff-armed salute. “Fellowship!”

“Fellowship.” They passed inside. As they did, Rominy let the thing she’d held in her hands fall, kicking it against a drainpipe.

A million-to-one shot. But when there was no hope, those were good odds.

The next door was stronger, and here waited a cluster of men who looked like academics. One had the proverbial white jacket, but the others were casual in khakis or jeans. They looked nervous, but none showed any surprise at her handcuffs. White-jacket greeted Raeder and then stepped to a keypad next to the door and typed in a code. Then he put his eye to a small eyepiece above it.

“Retinal scan,” Jake said to Rominy, standing close like he was still her freaking boyfriend. Maybe he thought he still would be, once the master race had established control. She looked away and tried to psychically relay waves of revulsion at him, but if he detected her contempt, he gave no sign.

The door opened and they entered a shaft landing. Stairs led downward into gloom. Next to it was an elevator shaft. Elevator doors opened and a dozen packed in, Rominy squeezed by aspiring Nazi lunatics, her handcuffed hands held humiliatingly in front of her. Men glanced at her curiously and she wanted to spit in their face. Should she make a scene? But what could she do? She was utterly alone, at the spire of a scientific cathedral buried in the bowels of the earth.

The elevator disgorged them just one floor down. Another door, and another retinal scan, and then they passed into a control room, banks of computers and video screens taking up an otherwise bland, off-white windowless space. Industrial carpet, mesh office chairs, laminate counters. The screens showed columns of numbers, graphs, and video camera scenes of tunnels and huge machines. She assumed the videos were showing parts of the supercollider. It looked as colorful as a Tinker Toy.

Then she started. Three bodies lay facedown on the floor against one wall, with a cowl of blood around their heads and neat round holes in the backs of their skulls.

“It was easier to dispose of them than try to persuade them,” the security chief said.

Raeder nodded. “There’s no turning back. We’ll put up a plaque. Sacrifices to human evolution.”

The scientists who had ridden the elevator with them scattered to the screens. Now there was a faint whine as something was started up. A faint odor of oil and ozone. “It will take about an hour to regain full power,” one of the men said.

“Time enough to get the girl into position. Jakob? Rominy? Follow me.”

She hesitated, wondering where best to make a stand, but then the big cop guy stepped menacingly toward her. So she reluctantly followed, but took a moment to turn and stick her tongue out at the security chief, too.

He took it in, his expression not changing.

Not a good sign.

On they marched, meek little Rominy like a little lamb to the slaughter, software cubicle-ista to her newest duty, proud feminist a dutiful two steps behind.

She began trying to guess how to blow things up.

She didn’t even have chewing gum.

Down an elevator again, much farther this time, dropping three hundred feet into the bedrock of the Swiss-French border. They came out into the nave of this colossal church of physics.

An enormous room, four or five stories high, and atop it a shaft the size of a missile silo that clawed toward the surface like the spout hole of a whale. To look at the origin of the sky, the physicists had delved underground like Tolkien’s cursed dwarves. But what a wonderland they’d created. The chamber was lined with tiers of catwalks like the balconies of an opera house, plus pipes, ducts, great metal troughs crammed with cables, cranes, stairs, ladders, columns, beams, grids, tanks, levers, air conditioners, hatches . . . it was a cornucopia of technology. And the colors! They were taken from a crayon set. Red, green, blue, and yellow, bright as Legos, and then spotless stainless, shiny copper, burnished bronze, reflective blacks, all glinting at each other like a hall of mirrors. How had they ever conjured such magnificent complexity? It was like the riot of color she’d seen in the temples of Lhasa. It was not just science, it was art, not just instrument but beauty. It hummed and buzzed and clicked and crackled like a child’s toy and had the smell of a place entirely unnatural: concrete, paint, oil, grease, rubber, and plastic. The particle detector was scrupulously clean, absolutely sterile, and yet as sensory as a field of wildflowers. Fluorescent light cast everything in a cold, metallic glow.