She had to be marathon girl.
But there was no end, really. She could run and run, and just get back to where she started, again and again.
With Nazis after her. Now she did begin to sob.
“Rominy!” It was Jake’s shout, far behind.
And then she saw a bicycle.
55
Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland
October 4, Present Day
For the first time Rominy felt hope. Bicycles must be how the collider staff got from detector to detector. She was pedaling madly down the endless tunnel, the Shambhala staff jutting forward from her grip like a knight’s lance. It glowed. All she had to find was some exit from which she could escape and hide in the woods. She had no idea what was happening elsewhere in the giant machine, but it was a battle she wanted no part of. She’d done enough.
Kurt Raeder was finally dead.
Jake hadn’t fired at her. She’d heard him running, shouting, but not shooting. Was there a glimmer of feeling there? Or was it too dangerous down here to shoot? In any event, there was only one bike. Now she pedaled madly away in the red glow of emergency lighting, lungs heaving, terrified and exultant, leaving him behind.
Where was everybody? Why was she the only one down here?
Then she remembered Raeder had said something about radiation, and Barrow had prudently retreated.
Was the radiation gone, now that the power had blacked out?
Or was she irreversibly poisoning herself?
I just have to live long enough to hide, Rominy thought. She’d sneak through the woods like an animal, not chancing a meeting with anyone, afraid of her own shadow, staff in hand. Then, if she could find Lake Geneva, she’d hurl the cursed thing into the deepest part and let it sink like Excalibur, drowned like the rest of Shambhala.
Then she could finally grieve, for an identity and a past in tatters.
The tunnel debouched into another large machine like the one where she’d descended, another temple of physics painted in brilliant colors. She considered ascending to the surface there. But it seemed too close to the battle behind her, and too close to Jake Barrow. Balconies led her past it and onward to the tunnel on its far side. Particle detectors seemed to be spaced every few miles. She’d try the next one.
It felt good just to pedal and flee.
The tunnel was lit the color of hell, Klaxons blaring in the distance, pipes extending to infinity. She’d entered the mythical underworld.
Mile followed mile.
She was gasping now, as weary and sore as she’d ever been, and her bicycle slowed. Surely Jake was far behind. The opposite side of the ring would be, what, nine miles away? Less as the crow flies, but any farther would just bring her around and closer to the Nazis again. Could she guess how far that was? As she rode she noticed that blue lights in red boxes gave a flash as she passed them, and they seemed spaced about every half mile. Say eight miles . . . how many had flashed? Ten, perhaps, or five miles. When she got anywhere close to sixteen and there was a way up, she’d try that.
And after Lake Geneva? She had no money, no passport, no clothes, and no friends. Sam was probably dying. The police, perhaps. But who knew how many millions of dollars of damage she and Sam had caused or deaths they’d initiated? Would the authorities be in on the conspiracy, too? Yet prison, if it came to that, seemed a snug refuge right now. Or would they just take her into a courtyard and shoot her, like in the movies?
Or put her in a cell with Nazis?
Another blue flash.
It came on only when she whizzed by.
Was her passage triggering the lights? She looked down. The bicycle had a small metal box attached with two screws to its frame. It was blinking, too.
Like a beacon. An airplane transponder. An ankle bracelet.
Oh, no.
The blue lights were tracking her.
Up on the surface, Kurt Raeder’s Mercedes screeched to a halt at the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, at the far side of the collider ring. Ursula Kalb had driven like a madwoman to let Jakob get ahead of Rominy and descend to cut the American off. Now he leaped from the passenger seat and leaned in for final instructions.
“Our second Führer is dead, but the staff has been energized. We’re going to have to start over, Ursula, but we’ll be able to demonstrate its potential for key allies. We’ll have more powerful backers than ever.”
“If you can get the staff from the girl.” Even from here they could hear sirens. The burning propane tanks threw lurid light into the sky. Police lights blinked from the Atlas complex and they could hear the rattle of gunfire. The Nazi plan had turned into a disaster, but she didn’t say that. Her life, her love, had turned into disaster, too, but she didn’t say that, either.
“The cause is not lost,” Jakob said. “Trust me, Rominy still has feelings for the man she knows as Jake. I’ll persuade her. I’ll subdue her. And when I come back to the surface with the staff we’ll go into hiding to reorganize.”
“You must kill the American girl.”
“No. She’s still a breeder.”
Kalb looked out the windshield with gloom.
“Wait for me. I won’t be long.”
“If you are, I won’t wait.”
“Understood. If I don’t return . . .”
Ursula nodded. “I have the cyanide.”
She watched him jog toward the CMS detector building. As he entered to take the elevator underground, a helicopter roared over the Mercedes, stabbing the grounds with a searchlight.
Ursula Kalb looked up. Kurt had moved too fast, with insufficient preparation, and had refused to listen to her caution. The staff’s recovery had excited him too much. She admired his keenness, but it had eroded his discipline. The night was another Stalingrad. Now, catastrophically, her lover was gone. So as soon as the door closed behind the young believer, she lowered the window and pitched out the poison pills and her Fellowship identification. She didn’t want to have to answer awkward questions if stopped.
Yes, they would start again. But not with a damned American girl bred to Kurt Raeder.
Ursula didn’t think Jakob would emerge. Police were converging. So she put the car in gear and began driving, at the exact speed limit, away from the collider. She had prepared a safe house on the Amalfi coast and by dawn she could be in Italy. She touched the leather. It was a very fine Mercedes.
But Ursula Kalb did not intend to leave Geneva just yet. There was a blood debt to be answered.
Rominy realized the Nazis knew where she was.
She slowed the bicycle, wondering what to do. And then, as she coasted toward the next junction point, someone was standing in her way. The figure was still but alert, poised, like a gunfighter. She felt sick, stupid, trapped.
It was Jake. Somehow he’d gotten ahead of her.
Her concentration lost, her bike wheel wobbled. It glanced off the pipe in the narrow walkway and suddenly she lost control. Her tire hit a flange and she cartwheeled over the handlebars, landing hard and skinning her knees.
Just like in the Safeway parking lot.
The staff clattered down next to her.
Wincing, she boosted herself up on her arms, glaring ahead at Jake. This was the bastard who’d arranged to have her MINI Cooper, thirty-nine payments still outstanding, blown into scrap metal. Who’d lied to her, imprisoned her, handcuffed her, and seduced her with his remorseless cunning. And now he was smiling in triumph.
“It’s over, Rominy,” he called. “My men are behind you, too. You can’t escape, because we still need that shaft. This isn’t what we wanted to happen for you or Kurt. But now we’re left to carry on the quest. You and me.”
“For the master race.”
“For world harmony, with all pollutants finally eradicated.” He aimed a pistol at her. “I’d hoped you’d be our queen by now.”
“You are so sick.”
He shook his head. “Idealistic. Give me the shaft.” He stayed a cautious thi
rty feet away, the automatic pointed. “I will shoot you if I have to.”
“You think you can hide from the police after this fiasco?”
“Rominy, we are the police.”
She rocked back on her heels and painfully stood up. “At least I don’t have to be raped by my great-grandfather.”
“Yes, we’ll have to find another Adam and Eve. The shaft, please.”
She picked it up. The material was smooth and warm, a cross between plastic and carbon fiber, and she wondered what it was made of. It tingled when she touched it, vibrating slightly, and the glow it gave off was weirdly beautiful, even hypnotic. “I was really falling in love with you, Jake.”
He nodded. “It was for your own good.”
Just beyond him, near where the tunnel joined the next connector point and detector, there was a small blue tank. Hoses led to a white pipe that ran next to the tunnel’s large blue pipe, and more pipes connected the two. Couplings were white with frost. Something very cold was in there. Lettering on the tank said HE.
He? Who? But no, what did that mean? Something tickled from chemistry course work with the periodic table. Rominy retained more science than this man gave her credit for, and she longed for something terrible to match her own coldness.
Liquid helium, she recalled, was very, very cold.
She pointed the staff at Jake Barrow.
“Careful with that!” Jake warned. “Don’t make me shoot you.” She realized he was nervous. She finally had a weapon. Had it received enough charge from the . . . what had Raeder called it? A proton beam? She took courage from Jake’s fright.
“Don’t make me shoot you. Put your pistol down, Jake.”
“Rominy, we don’t have time for this.”
“Let’s take time with the authorities. Your police and mine. Let’s talk this out in an interrogation room somewhere.”
“I know you’re rattled. It’s understandable. But what you’re holding is very, very dangerous. Please lower the tip before you hurt yourself.”
“If you lower the gun, Jake.”
He hesitated, thinking. “How can I trust you?”
She gasped. “How can you trust me?”
He lowered his pistol barrel slightly. “Okay, I’m moving my aim. You do the same. We need to talk, Rominy. Talk and think about the future.”
She began aiming the shaft to one side. “Keep your gun down, Jake. I’m very jumpy.”
“Me, too. Don’t point that rod at me.”
“It’s aimed at the wall.” Aimed at that tank that said HE. How did her weapon work? How could it work? There was no trigger, no switch.
“We’re pioneers of science,” Jake said. “Right here. Right now.”
How she longed that the Vril staff would zap that creepy bastard! So she poured all of her hatred of Jake Barrow into the core of her being, infusing her very soul, and let it pour down her arm and into her hand, and from her hand to the shaft. She wished, with her consciousness, for it to destroy that helium tank.
“It’s not too late for you and me to make utopia,” Jake tried.
Suddenly she experienced unity, but not the warm feeling of brotherhood she’d experienced on a Kunlun mountain. This was a link to something vastly darker and frighteningly powerful, terrifying and wonderful, a momentary glimpse of a universe of strange matter and different energies that had always been invisible. Rominy saw.
“It’s not too late to join us. Join me.”
And with that something leaped with her thoughts to the helium tank, like a subatomic particle jumping from one point to another with no intervening travel.
There was an explosion, a corona of sparks, and electricity arced into a mini-sun that dazzled her. The tank blew apart.
Air flashed into snow.
The staff hurt! It kicked her hand and arm so hard that she lost her grip and flew backward. As if with a mind of its own, the staff recoiled in the other direction, toward Barrow and the haze rushing from the pipes. Rominy fell to the floor and skidded, simultaneously fearing his gun, the sparks, the cold, and the vast energies she’d glimpsed. She watched, horrified, as the staff came near him. But, no, he’d been paralyzed by the burst of helium as the liquid flashed to gas, and obscured by the bits of ice suddenly filling the wickedly frigid air, every droplet of water vapor in the tunnel having instantly turned to ice. Liquid helium with a temperature at nearly absolute zero erupted from the broken tank and turned to a fog that rolled along the ceiling.
Rominy crawled in terror, trying to hold her breath. The cold punched her, puffing past, so empty that her lungs ached. But at floor level she could gasp a feeble breath. She looked back to watch as the shaft fell through the fog of expanding helium.
Thirty feet away, Jake was looking at her in disbelief. The helium had displaced the oxygen in the air and all he could suck into his lungs was frigid gas. There was nothing he could breathe. His eyes were wide and desperate. His hands had hooked into claws, instantly frostbitten. His joints had gone rigid.
His lungs flash froze and cracked.
It was as if he’d become a statue, a man turned to stone.
And then the staff of Shambhala, its light gone now since Rominy’s explosive thought, fell through the freezing fog and turned brittle. When it hit the concrete floor, it shattered.
The rod disintegrated into a thousand pieces of dusty glass.
Jake toppled, his eyes wide and sorrowful.
And the mist swirled on, snow falling, walls coated with frost. Rominy was covered with rime, too. She slithered on her belly to get away.
There was a box ahead with an oxygen mask.
More alarms were going off, and there were shouts. Then she reached, grabbed rubber, and pulled it to her face. She shuddered from the icy envelopment.
And blacked out.
56
Geneva, Switzerland
October 17, Present Day
The Cantonal Hospital of the University of Geneva kept Rominy and Sam apart for two weeks. She healed from cold burns and bruises, and he battled for his life. Tests were run, questions asked. Police, American embassy personnel, officials from CERN, and physicists all interviewed her, some coaxing, some cruel, some sympathetic, and all suspicious. The neo-Nazis had apparently died or disappeared. So, officials asked, what were they after? Why had they taken over a particle accelerator? How had they taken over?
Rominy put the same questions back to her interrogators.
She trusted no one anymore. We are the police. She told the authorities that she and Sam were dumb tourists who’d stumbled onto a group of fanatics at Wewelsburg Castle while trying to poke about the SS shrine after hours. It had been a foolish lark that resulted in being taken hostage. Sam had gotten away and helped rescue her. There hadn’t been time to call the police, so he’d heroically started a fire and nearly died fighting her captor.
“And how did you and Mr. Mackenzie meet, miss?”
“In Tibet. He was a guide. We hit it off.”
“Chinese records show you had permits to go toward the Kunlun Mountains. That’s a very unusual destination at the beginning of autumn.”
“It was silly. We never got there.”
“But you were with another gentleman, a Mr. Barrow? Traveling under a false passport as Mr. and Mrs. Anderson?”
“He was in a hurry to get to China. Jake and I broke up.”
“And what became of Mr. Barrow?”
“I have no idea.”
“And you turned to Mr. Mackenzie?”
“As a friend. The Tibetan tourist season was ending. We decided Europe would be restful.” She laughed, and then coughed. The damage to her lungs would heal with time, doctors said.
“Was Sam Mackenzie your lover?”
“That’s a rather personal question, isn’t it?”
“He seemed unusually motivated to rescue you.”
“We rescued each other.”
“We’re just trying to understand, Ms. Pickett.”
“Am
I under arrest or something?”
“No.”
“Then I think I’ll keep my love life to myself.”
Once she’d woken in the hospital she realized no one would tell her the entirety of what had happened at the supercollider or who the conspirators were. They didn’t want the world to know Nazis had invaded a scientific temple. They didn’t want to reveal—or perhaps they didn’t know—what The Fellowship was after.
So she began to piece together where she was and what had happened from memory, comments from her interrogators, and snippets of news, while guarding what she remembered like a Chinese gold coin. How could she be certain what side anybody was on?
There was another reason for being coy: she was tired of this madness and simply wanted to disappear, as Beth Calloway had disappeared three generations before. The helium breach? No idea how it occurred. The frozen corpse? No idea who the victim was; she’d been fleeing the chaos when a man appeared and an explosion occurred. The oddly aged old man cut almost in two by a beam of subatomic protons before the collider shut down? Another Nazi nut, she guessed. He’d certainly looked strange.
Her own presence at CERN?
“They said I’d be a bargaining chip in case they got cornered. I don’t remember much else. I was terrified and confused.” That was true enough.
“You have a nasty scar on the palm of your hand.”
“A pocket-knife accident. We were camping in Tibet.”
And the glassy staff fragments on the tunnel floor? Intriguingly, no one mentioned them. She didn’t either. But she wondered if somewhere, somehow, laboratory tests were being done.
Or if some janitor had swept them into a dustbin, sending the secret texture of the universe to a landfill.
Would authorities eventually find the same old records on her family that Jake Barrow had? Would somebody, someday, come after her again?
Blood of the Reich Page 40