Blood of the Reich (59 page)

Authors: William Dietrich

BOOK: Blood of the Reich

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She found some gauze from the toppled trolley and bandaged his arm. Then, straining, Rominy pulled and yanked Sam to the edge of the bed. She dragged Kalb’s unconscious body and heaved her up beside him, making an unholy couple.

“It’s just for a minute, Sam,” she whispered.

She took a breath. Then, groaning as she bent, she picked up the IV stand and wheeled it to the bed. She wasn’t sure how to find a vein, so just started jabbing in Kalb’s wrist, waiting after each stab for blood to come out. When the flow started, she inserted the tubing and let it empty into the blue bucket. The receptacle began to fill with plasma, dark and thick.

“Why wouldn’t you leave me alone?”

Rominy found a bottle of anesthesia that Kalb had brought and, shielding her own face with a towel, renewed the cloth. Then she put it back on the German’s mouth, the mere fumes making her dizzy.

The German grimaced and breathed them in.

Shuddering from adrenaline, Rominy staggered to the door, unlocked it, and peered out into the corridor. It was still deserted. Staff had been ordered to stay away. She wiped her feet on the towel she’d used to shield her face from the ether and slipped out, pistol in hand.

No one. She found a gurney and wheeled it back, awkwardly rolling Sam onto the bed. He muttered, which she took to be a good sign. Then she unclipped her hospital identification bracelet and taped it back together on Ursula’s wrist, and fastened her hospital gown tag to the Nazi’s collar. It was time to disappear.

“Rominy Pickett, rest in peace.” It might buy them a little time.

The woman’s complexion had gone chalk white, her eyes staring. Was she breathing? Rominy bent close, holding her breath against the anesthetic.

No.

She felt only cold relief.

The last dribbles of blood were pooling in the plastic pail. What kind of hideous mind would still want Rominy’s blood, after all the catastrophes it had caused?

She spread the towel out by the door so it would soak up any carnage on the gurney wheels. Sam’s hospital room looked like a slaughterhouse, the floor smeared scarlet, bullet holes in walls and ceiling, furniture toppled, blinds askew.

Then she pushed Sam into the hallway and let the door close behind her. It clicked, lock fastening. She threw a sheet over her guide to hide his identity and wheeled toward the elevator. At a desk she saw a lab coat draped on the back of a chair and put it over her own bloody clothes, sticky and stiff. She still had the male street clothes for Mackenzie, and they’d fetch replacements at his “cubbyhole” at the supercollider.

He was moaning, waking up. The elevator gonged and she pushed him in, selecting a button for the basement. She pulled the pistol out and set it on the gurney near Sam’s head, in case someone tried to stop them. “Wake up, Mackenzie!” Her voice was sharp. She slapped him, hard.

He blinked. “Rominy?”

At every floor she expected the elevator to stop, and was prepared to use the gun to bluff if she needed to. But instead the conveyance sank smoothly to the basement. A blank corridor, rumbling generators, a sign with a symbol for cars. She pushed ahead, went through double doors, spied a ramp, and with a running start pushed Sam up into a courtyard where a few privileged autos were parked. The air was sharp and tangy after the hospital stink, washed clean of all corruption.

She was trembling with excitement and exhaustion. No strangers would ever take blood from her again.

Sam hoisted his head woozily. “Where are we, girl?”

“Out. Can you sit?”

“Maybe. I feel light-headed.”

“We had to leave a lot of you behind.”

He sat up, swaying. “What happened?”

She glanced up and around, most windows dark, an archway leading to the world beyond. “We chose to be brave, I guess.” She thrust the stolen clothes at him. “Put some pants on, Sam Mackenzie. We’re going home.”

Acknowledgments

T
his novel draws from a large number of written sources. Those interested in the historical background of an actual 1938 Nazi expedition to Tibet might enjoy
Himmler’s Crusade
by Christopher Hale, first published in the United Kingdom in 2003. It was an insightful resource for my fiction. An edited photographic account is
Tibet in 1938–1939
by Isrun Englehardt. The novel that inspired later Nazi theorists was
Vril, The Power of the Coming Race
, written by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1871. I also drew on a large number of popular science books describing string theory and its overarching M-theory about the makeup of the universe.

When visiting Tibet I benefited from the insights of Tibetan guide Ugyen Kyab and traveling companions Marc Stoelinga of the Netherlands and Johan Willemse and Sherine Geusens of Belgium. The Buddhist nunnery at Sakya offered shelter from a Himalayan storm and gave new direction to my imagination.

Special thanks goes to Katie Yurkewicz, a physicist with Fermilab stationed at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, for documents, photographs, and patient exploration of ways to dispatch the bad guys. She gets credit for anything that is right; the deliberate fictions are my own.

And once again I’m indebted to the astute advice of HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham, editor Rakesh Satyal, copy editor Muriel Jorgensen, designer Renato Stanisic, publicist Heather Drucker, my agent Andrew Stuart, and first reader Holly, my wife. While I played with superstrings, they coached me to strike the right chord.

About the Author

W
ILLIAM
D
IETRICH
is the author of ten novels, including
Napoleon’s Pyramids
,
The Rosetta Key
,
The Dakota Cipher
, and
The Barbary Pirates
. Dietrich is also a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, historian, and naturalist. A winner of the PNBA Award for Nonfiction, he lives in Washington State.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by William Dietrich

FICTION

The Barbary Pirates

The Dakota Cipher

The Rosetta Key

Napoleon’s Pyramids

The Scourge of God

Hadrian’s Wall

Dark Winter

Getting Back

Ice Reich

NONFICTION

On Puget Sound

Natural Grace

Northwest Passage

The Final Forest

Credits

Jacket design by Marc J. Cohen

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

BLOOD OF THE REICH
. Copyright © 2011 by William Dietrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition July 2011 ISBN: 9780062079435

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dietrich, William (William Alan)

Blood of the Reich : a novel / William Dietrich—1st edition.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-06-198918-6

1. Nazis—Fiction. 2. Conspiracies—Fiction. 3. German Tibet Expedition (1938–1939)—Fiction. 4. European Organization for Nuclear Research—Fiction. 5. National socialism and science—Fiction. 6. National socialism and occultism—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.I367B58 2011

813'.54—dc22

2010053601

11 12 13 14 15
OV/RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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