Blood of the Reich (54 page)

It was another secret city, like Shambhala.

And somehow Kurt Raeder had penetrated this, to corrupt it. To re-create his lost ruin.

Another scientist saluted them. My God, how many physicists had signed on for this craziness? But then Raeder, if it was really Raeder, had been building toward this moment for seventy years. An incongruous thought occurred.

“Did you ever open a bank account?”

He turned. “What?”

“When you got back from Tibet. With compound interest, you might be a rich man by now if you’ve really lived all those years. Hood did that, or Beth Calloway. I inherited.”

He wasn’t sure if she was joking and for the first time looked off-balance. “I’ve spent ever pfennig, every moment, every drop of sweat and blood on this dream.”

“Too bad. You could have retired by now and left us all alone.”

Jakob, or Jake, pushed her from behind. “Pay no attention to her, Kurt. She’s an idiot who will completely waste your time.”

“
I
wasted
your
time?” But then she felt the press of a gun barrel in the small of her back.

“Shut up and do as you’re told,” her ex-lover said.

They walked a balcony, heels drumming on textured metal, walking into the technology like sperm penetrating the gigantic egg of this vast, bulky machine. Centenarian Raeder obscenely spry like an animated cadaver, Jake/Jakob robotic, Rominy mournful. If the cathedral nave was complicated, this tighter area deeper into the machine works was incomprehensible. There were steel panels, copper conduits, and brightly colored pistons, bobbins, and spools. She was making the words up because she had no idea what she was looking at. The riotous assemblage of finely machined parts reminded her of pictures of rocket engines and submarines. The barrel-shaped
thing
was as big as the cross section of a small ship. On its face, triangular pie-piece panels, each the size of an apartment, radiated out like the petals of a flower. The stamen in the middle was a narrow pipe that jutted out and ran toward a tunnel beyond.

“It reminds me of a sun wheel,” Jake said. “All worship, rightfully so, goes back to the sun. All life originates there.”

They came to a smaller gallery leading to the jutting pipe. There was an arched ceiling twenty feet overhead, with a tracked crane spanning the gallery’s width. An orange-colored hook to hoist things dangled from it. Cables and chains dropped down to a narrow pipe, little bigger than a household waterline, which ran from the center of the vast machine. This extended to a much larger pipe, the size of a sewer line with the diameter of a manhole. The big pipe was painted blue and extended into a tunnel as far as she could see.

It was like being inside a giant mechanical cocoon. A section of the silvery smaller pipe had been removed and technicians were bolting a new apparatus in its place. This new piece was about the size of a submarine torpedo and consisted of a cylindrical bundle of rods. There was space between each rod, connected with colored wires. Inside was a clear Plexiglas tube.

The bundle reminded her of the fasces that Sam had talked about.

She hoped his scheme had worked, but she suspected Otto had killed her friend by now. The sadness added to her feeling of hopelessness.

Then she noticed that there was another rod, a staff, lying horizontally in the midst of this new device. Its ends lined up with the narrow pipe.

It was the amber-colored staff Jake had stolen from the chamber below the nunnery at the edge of Shambhala. It was Kurt Raeder’s magic wand, the wizard’s staff, the gun of Vril. My God. They
were
going to recharge it.

“Hurry, before the radiation levels climb too high,” Raeder told the technicians.

They nodded. “We have our REM badges. But you can hear the machine accelerating.” And indeed the background whine was rising. There was a deeper rumble, too, of huge generators and pumps, the lungs of the whale.

Radiation? Her heart began to hammer.

“Rominy, we’re at the end of our journey and I can’t follow you any longer,” said Jake. “Not yet.” He was still pointing a pistol at her. It looked like the kind the Germans used in the old World War II movies. What were they called?

A Luger.

At least he wasn’t hanging around to have some kind of weird SS sex. With Raeder talking about spawning a new master race, she’d worried she was supposed to get it on with her kidnapper. But then that couldn’t be true, could it? She was part Asian, thanks to Great-grandma Keyuri, and mongrel American to boot.

So just what
was
she doing here?

The technicians twisted a few final bolts and stood. “That’s it. Really just a harness to hold the staff in place. The rest is up to the accelerator itself.”

“You may watch from the control room,” Raeder said. “Jakob, you’d better remove her handcuffs.”

“What if she panics?”

“There’s nowhere for her to go. I’m worried that with the electromagnetic energies involved, that much metal might trigger something we haven’t planned for. Take the tracking device, too. I don’t want the large amounts of electricity involved arcing into her body.”

“Maybe I should stay with you, Kurt.”

“It’s too much of a gamble to risk both of us on Vril’s first manifestation,” Raeder replied. “I’ve staked my life on this, but if it doesn’t work as expected, I want you to survive to carry on. Rominy must be the seed carrier.”

“The
what
carrier?” she protested.

Kurt turned to her as Jake removed the cuffs and stooped to take off the ankle bracelet. “Of the next evolution. You’re going to experience the fundamental energies of the universe as I have, Rominy. It will stun you, and frighten you, but it’s quite survivable, as you can see by looking at me. You will be transfigured, transformed. It will feel good when it’s over. You’ll absorb dark energy like a plant. You’ll have a longevity that the ones left behind will long for. And then you’re going to carry my first child. You are going to be as revered as the Virgin Mary.” He smiled, plasticky lips stretched over worn teeth, eyes sunken, skin like wax.

She looked at him with horror. “And stay a virgin, right?”

“We all know you’re no virgin and no, I’m not a god to inseminate you with my spirit. I’m afraid we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”

“Are you joking?” Not with Barrow, but with
him
?

“It’s a necessary step for the future the
Führer
dreamed of.”

“You want me to have
sex
with you? My God, you’re a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty years old!”

“Which doesn’t matter. You’ll see.”

“It’s just sex, Rominy,” Jake added. “Don’t put so much meaning into it.”

“It sure as hell had no meaning to
you
, did it?”

He shrugged. “I enjoyed it well enough.”

“God, why don’t you just shoot me?”

“I’m afraid that isn’t part of the plan,” Jake said. “You’re to be infused with the light as Kurt was at Shambhala, and then bred. No different than on the farm.”

“No! This is crazy! Look at him, he’s hideous! And I’m no Aryan!” She was desperate. “You said yourself I’m part Tibetan and who knows what else. I’m the wrong blood! You’ve got the wrong woman!”

“No we don’t,” Raeder said calmly.

“How do you
know
that?”

“Because Jakob did all the DNA tests back in the United States. You’re precisely who we thought you are.”

She was sweating. The younger man had stood closer, and she longingly eyed his pistol. But then he gave it to Raeder and backed away.

“I’ll wait in the control room,” he said. “Himmler’s dream, Kurt.”

The older man nodded. “Himmler’s dream.” He watched Barrow retreat. She heard the click of a door closing. “Now you learn who you really are.”

“Who?” she asked. “Who am I, Raeder?”

“You’re my descendant, Rominy.”

Now there was a roaring in her ears. “What?”

“Benjamin Hood wasn’t your great-grandfather. I was.”

She looked at him in horror.

“I possessed Keyuri Lin on the way to Shambhala. She insisted on sex with Hood, but it was
my
child she had in the nunnery. That’s why she tried to kill it. But Fate intervened, in the person of Beth Calloway. It was
my
DNA that Jakob brought to have tested in the United States with yours to prove the match to the bankers, not that from Hood’s finger. But you and I
are
separated by enough generations. And now we, you and I, are going to have a child—a super-child, a master child—together.”

His eyes were bright, his skin cracked, his grin a death’s-head grimace. “One of the powers of Vril is that my sexual appetite hasn’t slackened, it’s increased.” He took a small leather folder from the breast pocket of his suit. “So have my
tastes
.” He flipped it open.

It held an array of bright, shiny surgical instruments, things to cut and pinch.

The whine of the machine climbed to a shriek, matching her scream.

53

Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland

October 4, Present Day

S
am had gotten the Beamer up to 200 kilometers an hour, which he calculated was somewhere north of 125 mph, faster than he’d ever driven. It was gray German autumn, the autobahn his crowded racetrack, and he’d weaved past speeding trucks as if they were standing still. The astonishing thing was that occasionally an Audi or Lotus kept pace with him. What a crazy country. He was gambling where they’d taken Rominy and hoped he got there before the Nazis found skewered Otto back in Wewelsburg, or the German police came after him with too many questions. It was dark by the time he got to Switzerland and Geneva, where he promptly got lost because he was too hurried to ask directions.
That’s dude thinking, dude.
He finally got straight—everybody seemed to speak some English—and now it was the middle of the night as he drove more cautiously toward CERN headquarters. He was looking for something out of the ordinary and hoped to find Rominy in the middle of it.

There was a weird globe thingy that looked like salvage from a world’s fair, and a sprawl of office buildings in generic business-park blah. Roads, parking lots, museum signs, the whole nine yards. So he was at one point in a seventeen-mile underground loop he couldn’t even see . . .

How was he ever going to find Rominy?

And then there was a cluster of cars and men and bobbing flashlights by some boxy building that looked about as elegant as an airplane hangar. So what was a cluster of men who looked like they were carrying assault rifles doing in the middle of the night in a science park?

He slowed. Had Rominy left a sign as he’d asked?

And then he saw it, a scrap that would be taken for insignificant garbage at any other time. It was the white of a
khata
scarf, the scrap Beth Calloway had used in a Cascades cabin to write a code in invisible ink.

Rominy had dropped it.

Bingo. “Mackenzie, you’re not such a bad guide after all,” he murmured.

Yep, why were the world’s top physicists hanging out in a parking lot in the wee hours of the morning unless they were up to some Nazi-no-good? So all he had to do was . . .

What? He had Otto’s gun but it was twenty to one, at least. How many skinhead sympathizers were there in the world, anyway? What he really needed was a bazooka, or a battery of Hawk missiles, or the ability to call in an airstrike, but he’d left his Pentagon calling card at home. While the Good Ol’ USA would have had a neon reader board thirty feet high screaming “Guns!” and a cash register line of stubble-head goobers who looked like they shouldn’t be licensed to handle screwdrivers, everything in Europe was very low-key pacifist and urban cool. Where did you get your hands on an RPG launcher when you needed one? Especially on a continent where every town looked as dandy as Disneyland?

He had to get inside and poke around for Rominy. Which meant getting in the door, which meant distracting the Nazi goons, which meant . . .

He let his car cruise by the cluster of crazies. They eyed him like an L.A. street gang but didn’t budge. Then buildings shielded him from view, and he looked around.

Which
meant
driving full-tilt into something that said
Verboten
and was decorated with skull and crossbones. Like those tanks behind a cyclone fence next to what looked to be some kind of laboratory.

“Double bingo.”

He needed noise. There couldn’t be
that
many people who’d signed on with that lunatic Raeder, which meant the more folks Sam could pull into ground zero, the more likely someone in authority would start asking the bad guys some awkward questions. And if Otto’s murderous intentions were any indication, Sam Mackenzie needed to hurry.