“It was Keyuri who exclaimed about Kurt Raeder, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“She’s a scholar? A woman, in Tibet?”
“Miss Lin is an unusual young woman. Four years ago she elected to enter a Buddhist nunnery after serving on a Western research expedition.”
“The expedition was mine.”
“And both you and Kurt Raeder had been involved with her shortly after she had been widowed, she confided.”
Hood bowed his head. “Yes.”
“Her experience with Westerners had greatly troubled her. Part was their worldly ambition. Part was their ability to thrive and travel in a land so far from their own. Part was the strength of their desire: their madness, if you will. You are formidable. And restless.”
“We’re scholars too. But Raeder . . .”
Reting held up his hand. “It was Raeder who gave Keyuri the impetus to study legends of ancient Tibetan powers. She fears the West and wants my people to be ready to cope with it. So I spoke with her for many hours in private, getting her story and pondering what to do. The easiest thing would have been to turn the Germans back. But was it the wisest thing?”
“They’re Nazis, and Hitler preaches world domination.”
“Yes, but they’re skilled and unafraid of the legends that inhibit us. They’ve instruments to probe the earth that we don’t have. They are scholars of the Tibetan past and have the ability to understand technology that might elude us. So Keyuri suggested a solution. She proposed that we cooperate with these SS men.”
“But Raeder abused her!”
“Shambhala has long been rumored, but never seriously sought. We Tibetans know the difference between legend and history. Yet what if part of the legend is true? Could these ambitious Germans find it? And understand its secrets?”
“Understand only for Germany, I warn you.”
“Of course.” Reting looked mildly away, studying the paddling ducks. “Keyuri’s plan was to go with Raeder and see what he could find, learn what he could learn. She knows he’s still obsessed with her, because in the end he couldn’t have her heart. Our nun went to help the Germans and yet spy on them. To share in discovery, but bring it back to the Potala.”
“More intrigue than the Buddha taught.” Hood was wary of this game.
“These are perilous times. Will the coming storm reach my people? And if so, how will we shelter from it?”
“Maybe China can protect you.”
“China is our greatest fear of all.”
“Keyuri offered to Raeder to go along?”
“Of course not. He’d never expect her to after his treatment of her.”
Hood looked surprised.
“Yes, she showed me some of the scars,” Reting said. “We had to be cleverer than that. Instead, she betrayed the secret of his mission to the British, who immediately set out to find Shambhala for themselves, as we knew they would. Raeder also knew they would, and he arranged to ambush them north of Lhasa.”
“My God. You planned all this?”
“The British were unharmed, but their vehicles—the only ones in Lhasa capable of such a journey—were stolen. So was Keyuri, as the Tibetan with the most knowledge of what the Germans seek. So now they hunt the legend together.”
“You’re crazy! Raeder will eat her alive! You’ll never learn a thing about Shambhala the Germans don’t want you to know!”
“My nun is quite aware of this, but fortunately she has a solution.”
“Which is?”
“You.” He gave a slight smile.
“I don’t understand.”
“You’ve been confined here while we give the Germans time to find what they’re looking for. With the motorcars, they quickly outran any feasible pursuit. But we’d heard you planned to fly here, and that gave us our solution. We want you to pursue Raeder by airplane, learn what he learns, deal with the Germans in whatever way you see fit, and bring Shambhala’s secrets, and Keyuri, back to the Potala. Beth Calloway has been promised sufficient fuel to return to China in return for helping us with this task. She’s been employed patching your flying machine.”
“Me, instead of the British or your own officers? I’m not a soldier.”
“No, but you have one attribute that recommends you to the Tibetan government and persuades us that you will do the right thing, which is to return to Lhasa with what you learn.”
“What’s that?”
“That you’re still in love with Keyuri Lin.”
“She told you that?”
“You told me that, by coming this far at all.”
Hood flushed. He realized that what the Reting said was true, and that the Reting had known this truth before he had.
Now he wanted one woman he was falling in love with to take him to another.
“There’s only room for two in Beth’s plane.”
“I hope that many survive,” the Reting said calmly. “Ah.” He stood, listening. “That’s Miss Calloway’s plane now. She’ll land just outside the palace grounds, and you’ll be on your way.”
24
Eldorado Peak, Cascade Mountains
September 6, Present Day
Rominy and Jake started on a trail to Monogram Lake, took a fork toward Lookout Mountain, and climbed to the spot where it made sense to cut through the forest. This was not the most direct way—they could have plowed straight uphill from Hood’s cabin—but even the switchback misery of the Forest Service trail was better than scrambling across logs and breaking through the salal and sword fern of thick Cascade forest. Rominy wore the women’s boots Jake had provided—half a size too big, she estimated—and had cut off the oversized jeans at mid-thigh. It was nice Barrow had the gear, but after the revelation about the saliva and the Starbucks cup, Rominy was suspicious of his story. Had Jake learned her shoe size, too? Was he an investigative reporter or a stalker?
Had he deliberately disabled her cell phone?
If so, had he simply been buying enough time to sell her on this wild story? She also remembered his caresses and couldn’t believe her instincts were that wrong. Christ, he could kiss. He’d found her inheritance, too.
But the cash had been put in his heavier backpack, not hers.
Rominy had thought of trying to sneak the old .45 into her own pack for protection, but it was as inconspicuous as an anvil and she was doubtful it would even fire. Her Safeway skirt was packed away, her purse was in the truck, her identity stripped. Jake said he was taking the money for safekeeping. “Better than risk it lying around the cabin, just in case you did see someone,” which was not exactly reassuring. “Don’t worry, I’m trustworthy as a bank.”
“Like that’s reassuring, after the Wall Street meltdown.”
He laughed.
The money was in a zipper pocket of his backpack, about as fat as the other one that carried energy bars. Rominy thought about demanding to carry the cash, but he’d found the inheritance and she didn’t want an argument to break the mood of partnership. Instead she quietly did take one secret scrap along for herself, just so she did something Jake didn’t know about. She tucked the old Tibetan scarf with its invisible writing in her bra between her breasts. It wasn’t much, but it was something she did, not Mr. Reporter. She needed to regain a measure of control.
But she also wanted to get to the bottom of this crazy mystery, and so far they’d made a great team. So she’d play along, learn about her ancestor, and then if necessary run screaming for the cops.
Well, it was a plan.
Barrow was certainly fit. Not unusual in this part of the nation, but he soon had her panting as he chugged up the trail with the determination of the Little Engine That Could. Rominy had done her share of hiking—guys saw it as a cheap date—but her idea of alpine adventure was driving to the parking lot at Paradise on Mount Rainier and meandering with the mob through the wildflower meadows until pavement ended. If God had wanted people to walk on dirt trails, why had he provided asphalt? This path see
med to be made of equal parts mud, rock, roots, and brush, and was empty for good reason. There was no view, just monotonously steep forest rising above the Cascade River Valley. It was shadowy and still. Few birds lived in these deep woods.
“Did you bring a flashlight?” she finally remembered to ask.
“I’ve got two, plus GPS, working compass, climbing rope, Swiss army knife, and food for two days. We could invade Afghanistan.”
“You seem awfully prepared.”
“I was an Eagle Scout, remember.”
“Why aren’t I surprised?”
“Ski Patrol, lifeguard training, CPR, and ballroom dancing.”
She didn’t know if he was kidding. “Ballroom dancing, really?”
“I took some lessons.”
Intriguing. “I thought newspaper reporters hung around bars and stayed up late and ate bad food.”
“I do eat bad food. Haven’t you noticed?”
“But you know about wine and you have all this outdoor gear.”
“I’m a backpacker and camper, and I knew about Hood’s cabin. I just couldn’t get to it without your help. I’ve been preparing this for a long time, Rominy. I didn’t expect the car bomb. Or how clever you’d be.”
“I don’t feel clever. I feel bewildered.”
“Or how pretty.”
Male bullshit, but she liked it. Even now, huffing and sweaty, she felt a kind of satisfied tingle from their lovemaking. Why wasn’t anything ever simple? “What do you think we’ll really find? Did Hood come back from Tibet with some kind of treasure? Is that why he hid out here?”
“I hope so. Not for the money but for the story. I’ve already got a good story, of course: you, the bomb, the ancestor, and the safety deposit box. But I’ve got a hunch I still don’t have the whole story. And why are those skinhead goons after you? What happened to your relatives? Why did Ben Hood make this a game of Clue? I hope we’re hiking up to all the answers.”
“Each answer just seems like it poses new questions.”
“Kind of like life, isn’t it? Too many questions, and then you die.”
After two hours of steady climbing, Jake took a reading from his GPS, consulted his contour map, and announced it was time to leave the trail and strike due east—still up—on their own.
“Just make sure we can find our way back.”
“I’ve got a satellite to guide me. But if worse comes to worst, just head downhill. Eventually you should hit the Cascade River Road, if you don’t starve or get eaten by a cougar or a bear.”
“Thanks for that, Jake.”
Fortunately, the trees had already shrunk in size at a mile in altitude, so the downed logs were more hurdles than walls. It was slow going through huckleberry and silver fir, Jake shouting once in a while to warn any bears away from their plowing. Slowly they broke out into heather meadows with a view to higher peaks. Rominy caught her breath. A great rampart of rock and snow, glaciers hanging, loomed above a densely forested valley. Alpine meadows were a bright Irish green between the dark trees and the snow.
Jake looked from his Survey map to the horizon. “Dorado Needle, Triad, Mount Torment, Forbidden Peak.”
“Cheery.”
“And that one is Eldorado. Appropriate when looking for a gold mine, no?”
“Except El Dorado didn’t exist.”
“Or Oz, Shangri-la, or Camelot. Or did they?” He smiled, fetchingly.
“Lead on, Dorothy.”
Jake would stop periodically to take readings from his GPS and then plot their position on their two maps, his USGS green contour one and Hood’s fingerprint chart. They steadily closed in on their target. The entire idea of using satellites in outer space to plot their position in the Cascade Mountains struck Rominy as little less than magic, and using clues from a petrified finger as little more than weird. The entire day was fantastical, the air crisp, the sun bright, the distant glaciers gleaming, and this new man beside her who’d come out of nowhere and seemed able to do anything and everything. Her heart beat faster just watching him move. His mystery made him frightening and fascinating.
What wasn’t magical is how the coordinates forced them to work in and out of ravines, scramble across downed timber, and get clawed at by underbrush. The morning dragged into hard work, only the excitement of a treasure hunt preventing the bushwhacking from getting dispiriting.
And then they were there, supposedly.
It was a steep mountainside in a stand of alpine firs twenty to thirty feet high, dropping off below to a cliff that fell down to the forested gulf between them and Eldorado. There was no striking outcrop, no “X marks the spot,” no gleam of gold or skull. The spot seemed utterly unremarkable.
“I don’t get it,” Rominy said.
Jake squatted, studying his GPS and his maps. “If we guessed right in the cabin, we should be here.” He peered up at the sky as if the satellites might give him a different answer. “Maybe we figured the clues wrong.”
“Great.” She looked around with her hands on her hips. “All that sweat for nothing.” She felt dirty and uneasy.
“Maybe your great-grandfather miscalculated a little. He didn’t have our instruments, after all.”
“Maybe my great-grandfather was crazy as a loon. Well, let’s check around. Could be we’re just off by a hundred yards, though it looks to me it’s more likely a hundred miles. You go back up, I’ll go down.”
“Just don’t step off that cliff.”
They began scouting in opposite directions. It was just more trees and brush. Rominy grazed on huckleberries as she moved cautiously down the slope. She and Jake would shout, “Hey, bear!” once in a while to keep each other in earshot.
Suddenly she slipped on something slick, soil or wood, and fell on her butt, sliding down. She panicked a moment because it was in the direction of the lip of the cliff, but heather and huckleberries quickly braked her. Now all she could see was leaves. She stood up to look back toward Jake but he was hidden. She was in some kind of hollow. More important, she wasn’t near him, and he had the maps, GPS, and compass. Not to mention her money. “Jake?”
No answer.
“Jake!”
“What?” He sounded too far away, and she wanted him closer.
“I think I found something!”
After a while she could hear him thrashing toward her. Meanwhile she inspected her position, since she’d have to justify calling him over. It was a depression, like an old crater, about a dozen feet wide and three feet deep.
“What is it?” Jake looked down at her from the lip of the hollow, poking up out of the huckleberries like a bear himself. He was sweaty.
“It’s a kind of pit, like where people dug.”
He looked skeptical but clambered down to join her. “Maybe just a hole where a tree went over, its root ball pulling out of the ground.”
“Trees don’t grow that big up here, and where’s the log?”
“True.” He looked around, considering.
And then, with an ominous crack, the ground around them split and the hollow caved in.
They spilled down into darkness.
25
Shambhala Canyon, Tibet
October 3, 1938
If Shambhala Canyon was a gate to paradise, it was designed to discourage all but the boldest. No sun penetrated the rift from which the disappearing river exploded. The canyon walls were coated with great tapestries of icicles as dramatic as the limestone drapery of a cave. Its end was hidden.
Raeder’s party had to climb the waterfall cliff first. This precipice actually leaned out, the curtain of water allowing an icy backstage behind, and the climb was impossible for all but the most experienced mountaineers. The Germans were alpinists, however, survivors of the Eiger. They had to leave their scientific instruments behind—too bad, because Muller couldn’t measure for underground cavities—but among the goods they’d carted since abandoning the truck were pitons and rope. They also shouldered their rifles and the submachine
gun and crammed their pockets with bullets.
“If you have to choose between food and ammunition, take ammunition,” Raeder instructed. “Food we can seize from the Shambhalans on the other side.”
They strung a route next to the roaring cataract, the climbing line taut enough so that even Keyuri could haul herself up the cliff. Her small booted feet scrabbled for purchase on the slippery face.
Raeder, Muller, and Diels went first and pulled themselves up to a ledge above the brow of the falls, their perch not much bigger than Himmler’s old desk in Berlin. The shelf was slick with frost and tilted outward, as precarious as greased glass, but it connected with the trail Raeder had spied with his binoculars. This path was hewn into the western cliff in a seven-foot-high groove that led into the darkness of the canyon. The roof of the groove leaned out over the trail, its eave draped with ice. The overhang had the advantage of keeping the worst moisture off the path. The cliff trail itself was just two feet wide. Below was the river, white and roaring, a mad slurry of racing foam. If they fell in they’d be hurled into space by the force of the waterfall, and then drop a hundred feet to their deaths.
The canyon bent slightly so they still had no idea what lay on its far side. Raeder, however, was exultant. He put his hand to his chest, where a vial of blood from the legendary Frederick Barbarossa stayed warm near his beating heart.
“Someone built this!” he shouted above the roar of the river to Muller.
“Madmen,” the geophysicist muttered. “We can’t get through that, Kurt. We can’t haul our supplies. We’ll slip into the river.”
“We can carry what we need. Get Keyuri up here.”
The woman was dragged up, her hair streaming, a coat of frost on her clothes.
“This canyon,” Raeder demanded. “What’s on the other side?”
Blood of the Reich Page 18
