“There.” He pointed.
It was a dusty black SUV, windows tinted, pulled off on the shoulder. Jake’s truck was out of sight, in the small trailhead parking lot.
“You think that’s their car?”
“I saw it before at Safeway.” He started toward the Explorer.
“What if somebody’s in it?”
“If they were, they’d already be out the door and in our face by now.”
He trotted up, chest heaving, and peered through the windows. Then he jiggled the handle. “Locked.”
“What are you doing? Let’s get out of here!”
“That is what I’m doing.” He began feeling the driver’s-side wheel well, and beneath the door. “Bingo.” He pulled out a magnetic case. “Hikers don’t like carrying keys.”
“You’re going to steal the Nazi’s car?”
“We’re going to steal it, because I’ve got the key for my own truck and I don’t want Mr. Bow Hunter following us any longer. This ends, now. He can walk out to Marblemount. If Delphina Clarkson hasn’t finished him.”
“We go to the police?”
He unlocked the doors, jerked open the door, and climbed in, waiting for her to join him on the passenger seat. The rig still smelled new and had every bell-and-whistle accessory that Detroit could invent. Apparently, skinhead Nazis had money. Or they’d stolen the car themselves. The engine started with a roar.
“No way.” He shook his head. “We go to Tibet.”
34
Shambhala, Tibet
October 3, 1938
Beth Calloway had shot the German while hanging upside down from an airshaft that rose from the ceiling of the tunnel. A stone door had slid aside to reveal the chimney. Now she turned, tucked her smoking pistol into her belt, and dropped lightly down onto the big pipe running to infinity. She glanced in both directions.
“Any more of them?”
“Not yet,” Hood said.
“What’s down here, anyway?”
“Deviltry.” He held up the amber staff with his mutilated hand. Blood dripped from the bandage.
“No good on your lonesome, are you? What happened?”
“We were fighting over some kind of goddamn magic wand. SS cutlery is pretty sharp. Actually, Keyuri here finished the amputation.”
“She chopped off your finger?”
“With a kiss.” He grimaced.
“No wonder you’re smitten. She’s not dead, is she?”
“Not yet. Wounded, though.”
“You’re going to have to boost her up. There’re more nuns above.”
“Nuns?”
“There’s a nunnery outside the valley with tunnels into this anthill. The abbess gave me blood to unlock the booby hatch I just dropped from. She said they use blood like a key. Can you believe that?”
“Unfortunately, yes. My surgeon has already saved my finger for that quaint custom.” He bent under the pipe. “Keyuri, help has come. We’re going to patch you up, all right?”
The young woman groaned.
Beth stooped to examine her. “Wow, that’s bad. Okay, I’m going to use my flying scarf to bandage her up. Then we’re going to boost her on top of the pipe, I’ll get in the shaft that goes upstairs, and you lift her to me.”
“You’re saving her life, Beth. You probably saved mine.”
“Damn right, Professor. So let’s move, or do you want to spoil my track record?”
He looked up the hole she’d dropped from. There were torches flickering far above, and a halo of shaven figures peering down a well at him, clad in scarlet. The women’s eyes were wide and fearful.
As gently as they could, they lifted Keyuri atop the pipe and climbed up themselves. Then Beth leaped for a handhold in the shaft, hauled herself up, swung her head and arms upside down again, and braced to lift the nun. Hood felt awkward having the two women together. He’d made love to both of them. Keyuri, however, was going into shock, and Beth seemed intent simply on escaping.
Then the earth quivered slightly.
There was a clunk, a whine, and a pale illumination came on in the tunnel below. It came from everywhere and nowhere, from the rocks and the air and the motes of dust, spangling the corridor.
Raeder was starting the machine again.
Hood called up to Calloway. “How did you find us?”
“After I put the biplane down I hiked up to that smoke we saw. Turned out to be this crazy nunnery. These nuns stand watch until the time is right, the abbess said. They were buzzing like a disturbed hive because no one had approached for centuries, and then those Nazis climbed in like human flies. When I told them you’d parachuted in, it was like announcing Herbert Hoover had snuck back into the White House. They went nuts. Then we heard this gawd-awful noise. What the hell do these Germans have? A Big Bertha cannon?”
“It’s a stick that shoots fire.”
“A fire stick? We’re Indians now?”
“In our technological understanding. There’s stuff down here that looks like it’s out of Buck Rogers, Beth. Heaps of bones, too. Something went terribly wrong.”
“I’ll say. Is your pal Raeder still down there?”
“Yes, I think he just started the big machine again. I think it reloads a fire stick. A magic staff like this one.” He held it up. “I don’t think we should let a man like Kurt Raeder have it.”
“I’ll say. Well, let’s start with Keyuri. I’ll drag her up to the nuns.”
Hood lifted the groaning, half-conscious Tibetan, watching her small, dangling feet disappear up the chimney. In the dimness, it was as if she were floating skyward. Then Beth dropped back down to the hole in the roof of Hood’s tunnel, holding out an arm. “You next.”
He shook his head.
“Thanks for coming back for me, but I was sent here to put a stop to this. I think Raeder’s going to try to take another one of those thunderbolt staffs back to Adolf Hitler. I don’t think I can let him do that.”
“How you going to stop him?”
“Just two krauts left, I think.”
“Then I’m coming with you, Ben. Even odds.”
“No. This isn’t your fight.”
“The hell it isn’t! That bastard dragged my biplane to the middle of nowhere.” She looked at him expectantly. Keyuri was shot, Hood desperate. This was a way to cement their partnership.
“No.” He shook his head decisively. “I might not make it. I want you to take this staff of mine to the surface. It’s too low on juice to fight with, but I think we need to show it to the American government. War’s coming.”
“We can leave it with the nuns for a minute. We get Raeder, and then we worry about the shaft.”
“No, Beth. I want you to fly it, and Keyuri, back to Lhasa.”
“I’m flying you to Lhasa!”
“Listen. There’s only room in the biplane for two. If I don’t survive, none of this matters if we can’t report what happened. Somebody has to get out alive. Somebody has to warn the Tibetans, so they can arrest Raeder if he tries to escape overland. There’s something strange about how this place feels, like it does something corrupting. So stay clear. If I stop him, I’ll come back here. If not, Keyuri and you have to tell what happened. And Keyuri is shot. You have to make her well.”
“I’m no doctor! You make her well. Maybe we can just seal Raeder in.”
“And maybe he’ll blow his way out, if we let him play with this infernal machine long enough. Please go up and wait.”
“This is nuts.” It was the end, Beth could feel it, and it tore her in two. She liked this guy. He was an egghead, all right, but an egghead with gumption, dammit. “Leave the fanatics down here to play with their machine, Ben. If he’s got another magic wand, what chance do you have if you give this one up? Where’s your pistol?”
“It jammed, and Keyuri’s carrying it. But I’ll take the submachine gun of the German you just shot. I’ll get the drop on them.”
“Ben . . .” She was pleading.
He wearily hel
d up his bloody hand. “I’ve been lucky my whole life. Rich my whole life. Catered to my whole life. And rarely had much I cared about, except shooting blue sheep and falling for both of you. Now I’ve fallen into something important, against a man I know better than anyone. Kurt Raeder and I have been destined to come back together ever since the death of Keyuri’s husband.”
Beth’s faced twisted. “I don’t want to lose you.”
“And I need to straighten things out. It starts with Shambhala.”
“This isn’t Shambhala,” Beth said. “Not this evil power. This isn’t what the legends promise.”
“Well, whatever it is, we need to button it up before all hell breaks loose in the world. I was told it wouldn’t be difficult for me to kill Kurt Raeder, and I realize Duncan Hale was right. Go, seal the door until it’s over. Save Keyuri.”
The aviatrix shut her eyes. “Try not to lose any more fingers.”
“I wish we’d kept that scotch.”
“I could use a swig myself.”
The nuns called down “Hurry!” in English.
“At least I’ve got a flashlight for you in case the lights go out.” Beth handed him one and glanced at his holster. “And take my pistol.”
“No, I’ll have the machine gun. I can’t leave you unarmed.”
“You’re the one going to a gunfight, and you’d better have a backup. Take it, dammit, so I can go heal your girlfriend. Meanwhile I’ll fix your forty-five.”
“She’s not . . .” He stopped, frustrated. “Thanks.” He took the revolver, a cowboy six-shooter, and jammed it in his holster.
“Don’t get too grateful. There’s just one bullet left. It’s for you, if you get trapped in the cave.”
“Oh.”
“I think ahead.”
He smiled, tiredly. Then he went to the body of the dead German lying in a flower of blood. Calloway was quite the crack shot with a pistol; there were three holes in the bastard. He picked up the machine gun, lighter and more practical than anything Americans had.
“Good-bye, Beth.”
“We’ll be waiting.” She said it without conviction.
He watched as she climbed up out of sight. A stone door slid shut, fitting so tight he could barely see the joint. How many access points were there?
Then he stepped off down the tunnel to hunt Kurt Raeder.
35
A Boeing 747, over the Pacific
September 7, Present Day
Rominy had never flown business class before, but Jake persuaded her that they needed the indulgence to rest before the tiring journey ahead. “And we need room to inspect Benjamin Hood’s lost satchel with some measure of privacy. You want to do a treasure map in the middle seat, coach?”
Since the money she’d just inherited didn’t seem real, she’d acquiesced to the surreal $5,000 one-way cost for the two of them. She was betting on Jake Barrow, despite her doubts: in for a penny, in for a pound. His sense of purpose, confidence, and journalistic mission had cast a spell. They’d raced from the Cascade River road in a stolen SUV, taken back roads to Darrington and Granite Falls, and driven to Seattle’s airport without stopping. She’d asked to get fresh clothes at her apartment and he’d refused.
“Too risky. The skinheads might be watching. We’ll buy a few things at the airport.”
“Jake, the police are looking for me. I can’t just disappear.”
“You have to, for a while.”
“How?”
He thought. “Your adoptive parents are retired, right?”
“In Mexico. They don’t keep track of me.”
“Close relatives?”
“No.”
“We just need a few weeks. We’re going to stop at the Business Center at the airport and set up a new e-mail account. Write your boss that you’re alive. Mention something only you and he would know you’re working on, so he knows it’s you. Then say you quit.”
“What!”
He glanced at her, gaze opaque behind sunglasses he’d found in the glove department. “You’ve got more than a hundred thousand dollars in the bank, a dead-end job, and the adventure of a lifetime, as they say on TV. Do you want to go back to your cubicle? An e-mail will save police the trouble of looking for you. The money gives you a year or two to look for a job. To travel, first, if you want. To see what happens between us. And if you decide to bail on me . . . they’ll probably hire you back.”
Probably not, but yes, a door had cracked open to freedom. It was as terrifying as it was exhilarating. She bit her lip. “All right.” She considered. “That doesn’t explain the MINI Cooper.”
“E-mail a friend that you’ve met a guy who’s changed your life and you’re on a journey of self-discovery. That’s true, isn’t it? I torched your car for the insurance to get some cash to travel with. You never thought it would be on the news, but don’t worry, you’re safe and happy.”
She blinked at the audacity. “You’re quite the liar, Jake Barrow.”
“Some is true. I’m expedient.”
“You think the cops will buy it?”
“No, but they get reports about a hundred runaways and messed-up chicks a day. It reduces the crime to insurance fraud, a low priority. And even if my truck was spotted at Safeway and they find it abandoned up by Eldorado, we’ll be in Asia. We go cold case. Then we come back with the story, all will be explained, and it’s book-and-movie-deal time.”
“Movie deal?”
“Think who you want to play you. This is big.”
It was crazy. Thrilling. Absurd. Hypnotic. “If you get the story.”
“If we get the story.”
To cut all ties and vault halfway around the world? Liberating. Irresponsible. Irresistible. “I feel like Bonnie and Clyde, not Woodward and Bernstein.”
“I’m hoping it’s more like Pierre and Marie Curie, discoverers of radium. There’s a couple of things I have to tell you on the plane.”
“I’m losing my old life, Jake.”
“And gaining a new one.”
He’d parked the stolen car in the half-empty lot of a discount store—“Leaving it here may confuse the police more than the airport garage, until we’re out of the country”—and called a cab to take them to the terminal. To her objections that she had no passport, he produced two proclaiming them Mr. and Mrs. Robert Anderson (her first name listed as Lilith, of all things) along with the requisite permits to fly to China, of which Tibet was now a part. “I was hoping the story would take us this far,” he said, “so I got these from a forger I met on the crime beat.”
“A forger? Jake, we’re going to go to prison.”
“Not if you hang cool.” He also had two simple gold wedding bands. “I got them from a pawn shop and carry them in my car. Every once in a while it helps to look married when I’m on assignment.”
“What kind of assignment?”
“When I’m focusing and don’t want to flirt. It’s just less distraction.”
That seemed unlikely. “You need two?”
“They came as a pair—probably an estate sale—and I put one on a photographer once when we were nosing around in a conservative hamlet in the Idaho panhandle, getting background on a religious sect. It relaxed a few sources still living in the nineteenth century.”
“So long as your photographer was a woman.”
He laughed. “Right! And Caroline made me swear not to tell the newsroom. So keep a lid on. I still kid her about it, though.”
The marriage charade struck Rominy as almost sacrilegious, but they couldn’t afford questions at the airport. It was weird having him hand her the ring, fraudulent and yet touching.
“Just for practice,” Jake said. He actually blushed, which she liked.
Her heart hammered a little as she slipped the ring on.
At the ticket counter he paid in cash, which cost them an extra five minutes while the agent double-checked the no-fly list. And, yes, they only had carry-ons. “I won’t pay those new baggage fees,” Ja
ke told the agent. “You guys are air pirates.”
“Business class doesn’t charge for luggage, sir.”
“It’s the principle.”
Rominy expected her to trip an alarm for an air marshal, but the agent only gave a sweet smile. “Have a pleasant flight, sir.”
In fact, Rominy expected arrest at any moment for arson, kidnapping, auto theft, or identity fraud, but none materialized. Instead, as she was trying to buy some emergency underwear in the Seattle concourse, Jake nudged her and pointed to four shaven-headed young men at a pub table, disturbingly attired in bomber jackets, combat boots, and tattoos. One of them kept glancing her way. Were they watching? So they hastily moved on, and she’d postponed her shopping until the two-hour layover in Los Angeles, buying jeans, sweater, and parka. From there they’d caught the trans-Pacific flight to Shanghai and then Chengdu, China, from which they’d fly to Lhasa.
“What is it with skinheads, anyway?” she asked as they waited to board. “Why do they want to intimidate people?”
“They just want to belong. That’s the basis of all gangs, armies, and nations. The Nazi stuff is rebellious enough to get a rise out of people, which is an improvement if you’ve been poor and ignored your whole life. And there’s a philosophy behind it, an idealism.”
“Being a Nazi?”
“Look, the Nazis lost and didn’t get to write history. Hitler told his followers to stick up for their own. That’s what skinheads believe, too. So do Jews, blacks, women. Everyone’s got a tribe, except white guys.”
“Jake, they didn’t stick up for their own. They tried to conquer the world.”
“It spiraled out of control. But in the beginning the key Nazi philosophers were reformers who believed in self-improvement, discipline, classic art, and bringing back some of the old beliefs in nature and environment. People voted for them! Did you know the SS had a research division? That’s why the Nazis were sent to Tibet. Heinrich Himmler wanted to build a kind of Vatican for the SS, a Camelot or a Valhalla, at an old castle called Wewelsburg. Just like Hitler wanted to make his hometown of Linz the art center of the world. I’m not saying they were right, but it didn’t start with panzer divisions and death camps.”
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