“I think it did start with that. I think it was embedded in what they stood for from the very beginning.”
“And I think it got twisted, which is more believable than a nation deciding to get evil for a dozen years and then get good again.”
She shook her head. This was like going on a blind date and learning your liberal agnosticism had been paired with a supply-side creationist. Just what were his beliefs? “I’ve heard of being open-minded, but this is ridiculous. And white guys are the tribe.”
“It’s not ridiculous. I’m a reporter, and I’m trained to look at both sides. Hey, I’m the one who saved you from the skinheads. I’m on your side. But I try to understand the other side, so I can write about them.”
“What I understand is that they blew up my car.”
“Which is why we’re moving on.”
It did feel reassuring to get away from Seattle, where all this madness had started. So did a Bloody Mary on the first flight, two martinis at LAX, and the welcoming champagne in business class. She’d fallen asleep soon after they flew over open water, and woke up somewhere mid-Pacific. It was dark, she was hungry, and Jake had saved her a bag of peanuts.
“Don’t worry, there’s another meal in an hour or two.”
She felt groggy and uncertain. The intimacy she’d shared with Jake in the mountain cabin had been overwhelmed by the roller-coaster terror of falling into the mine and then careening downhill from madwoman Delphina Clarkson and the Mohawk bow hunter. Then sending the cryptic e-mails from the airport, the new clothes paid for from the stash of cash, and flinging herself into the void. Had the destruction of her MINI Cooper really been less than two days ago? Instead of her old life they had two backpacks, more than $21,000 in cash, a swollen bank account, a bag of peanuts, and moldy seventy-year-old documents taken from a skeleton.
“Good sleep?” Jake asked, brisk as a butler. He’d bought some toiletries and looked washed, combed, and competent, though he’d left the two-day stubble for that fashionable bad-boy look that, dammit, did look good on his strong jaw. Well, she was alive, richer, and an aisle curtain snobbishly separated her from the coach-class proletariat she’d long been accustomed to. One day at a time, Rominy. Maybe Jake was the answer she’d been waiting for. At least there were no skinheads in business class.
“I need some aspirin, actually.”
“Got ’em. Picked up a vial at the airport newsstand.”
He’d given her sunglasses and a sun hat to wear at SeaTac, where she was already old news in the twenty-four-hour cycle but where her picture popped up once on airport TVs. She’d kept her head buried in People magazine, reading about celebrity calamities that seemed ridiculously trivial compared to her own. No one had looked at her with even a flicker of recognition.
Now she was stateless, groundless, history-less, suspended in midair. “Water,” she ordered from a flight attendant. “And a gin and tonic.” Maybe adventure would make her an alcoholic.
“I waited until you woke up to dig out the documents,” Barrow said. “They’re really more yours than mine, though I think they’re going to show us where to go in Tibet. I think we’re thousands of miles ahead of any pursuit now, Rominy.”
“If we get through Chinese customs.”
“You’re a missing person, not a fugitive. You won’t show up on Chinese computers.”
“What about you, Jake? What have you told your editors?”
“That I’m on the biggest story of my life and I’ll be out of touch. They cut me slack because I’m good. It’s only been a couple of days. By the time they start wondering about my clock hours, I’ll have the biggest scoop of the year and they’ll be drooling Pulitzer.”
“I’m the biggest scoop of the year?”
“No, Shambhala is.”
“Sham . . . what?”
“Actually, I did peek a little. That’s what Great-grandpa was after, Rominy—Shambhala. A mythical kingdom in Tibet, a real-life predecessor to Shangri-la.”
“How many Bloody Marys have you had?”
“The Nazis were after it, too, led by a man named Kurt Raeder. Ben Hood was in some kind of race for new powers, like the atom bomb. Captain America against Hitler. And I think they found it, or found something, according to this stuff. Maybe that’s what agent Duncan Hale was after, too. Think about it: end of the war. Atomic bombings. Soviets in Berlin. The smart ones see a new arms race. And so Mr. Hale gets wind that the reclusive Mr. Hood just might have found something that could tip the balance of power. He comes out to Washington State, tracks Great-grandpa down, snatches the secret papers, but then dies in that mine. Maybe Hood trapped him with a cave-in.”
“But why wouldn’t Great-grandpa share it? It’s his country, after all.”
“I don’t know. Why didn’t he go back to New York? Why didn’t he claim his family fortune? Why didn’t anybody know he was dead for months? We’re a team. We’re going to learn the answers.”
She sighed. “All right. We’d better start reading.”
The papers were not in order. There was a journal of fragmentary entries, and a collection of sketches, maps, random notes, and coordinates. There was a crude map of a valley in a bowl of mountains and a drawing of a waterfall. There were clippings and torn textbook pages on amps, volts, and equations she couldn’t make sense of, with graphs and charts. Hood had a fine, feathery hand, but she didn’t see how Duncan Hale or anyone else could make sense of this without her great-grandfather’s verbal explanation. There were sketches of some kind of machine, with things that looked like pipes, boilers, and stacks, but no indication of what it was for or how it worked. It was so incoherent that the notion he’d become eccentric at best, crazy at worst, seemed reasonable. She’d bought $5,000 in airline tickets based on this?
“I don’t know, Jake. This seems pretty vague.”
“It gives us a place to go to. No one’s had these coordinates, Rominy.”
“Coordinates to what? A mythical utopia? A waterfall?”
“To this, actually.” He pulled out one of the diagrams. She’d glanced at it before, but it had meant nothing to her—just a narrow ring, a thin doughnut. It could be a circular plaza, the orbit of some planet, or someone’s design for a wedding band.
“Which is?”
“It looks like an ancient design for a cyclotron.”
“What in the world is a cyclotron?”
“An atom smasher.” He smiled, as if his Super Bowl bet had just paid off.
“Okay, I give up. Why are we flying ten thousand miles for an atom smasher?”
“You know what they are, right?”
“They smash atoms.” She wasn’t about to admit she didn’t care, until now.
“They break them apart so we can see what’s inside.”
“Scientists already have atom smashers.”
“Now, yes—but this one looks to be hundreds or even thousands of years old. The principle behind them is very modern, very sophisticated: to accelerate atomic particles fast enough to smash them, you push them along with magnets, but it takes a long track to get up to speed, like a long ski jump. In 1929, Berkeley physicist Ernst Lawrence realized that if you could bend the beam, accelerating them in a circle, your track was essentially infinite. They just go around and around, faster and faster. With enough size and power, you could get things up to almost the speed of light.”
“So Shambhala figured this out, hundreds or thousands of years ago.”
“At a time when no one else knew atoms even existed. Imagine that, Rominy: an ancient civilization as sophisticated, or more sophisticated, than our own. There were some primitive attempts at cyclotrons in the 1930s, but we didn’t really get going on them until the 1950s. Yet the Shambhalans, if these diagrams are real, had them when we were in togas or suits of armor.”
She looked back at the diagram. “I’m sure this would thrill Indiana Jones. Why do Nazi skinheads care?”
“Ah. When you take little things apart you understand how
they work, and when you understand how they work you can begin to manipulate them. Nuclear weapons are the most obvious example. Once physicists realized that atoms could be split, and that energy is released when that happens, it was a relatively short step to a bomb, even though the details were expensive and complicated.”
“Neo-Nazis want this to make a bomb?” What was she mixed up in?
“Well, the original Nazis, the 1930s Nazis, wanted it to make something more controllable than that. Atom bombs are kind of indiscriminate. It would be nice to have such firepower that could be aimed.”
“If you’re a mad scientist.”
“If you’re trying to defend your country. When I started reading about your great-grandfather I stumbled onto all kinds of theories and legends about Tibet, Heinrich Himmler, and secret expeditions. Yet all of it was just that, stories, until I found you. Then we discovered, together, this satchel of documents. Hood was the guy who was the key, but he died and left clues only for his heirs, who have had a disturbing habit of dying off. Until you.”
Only because he’d saved her life in that Safeway parking lot. “The Nazis killed my grandma and birth mother.”
“Maybe. Maybe buddies of Agent Hale killed them, because the U.S. government wanted this secret covered up. They didn’t know what Hood had hid, so they just discouraged any attempts to find out. Heck, it took me a long time to track you down. That’s why it was so awkward in the grocery store. I didn’t know how to start this conversation. ‘Hi, baby, can I talk to you about Nazis?’ ”
“But if we’ve got cyclotrons there’s no need for an old one, right?”
“Tibetan holy men have always been reputed to have magical or supernatural powers. What if those rumors have some basis in science? Our atom smashers are designed to break things apart. But this one, according to Nazi legend, was designed to put things together, to reassemble energy in a new way.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m a science nerd, like I said.” He took her hands in his. “Rominy, have you ever heard of a secret power source called Vril?”
36
Shambhala, Tibet
October 4, 1938
The noise of the great machine was growing louder, a rising whine more powerful than any sound Hood had heard before. He advanced down the tunnel cautiously, grateful it was lit but also feeling exposed. At any moment he expected another German to appear at the tunnel horizon from the other end, maybe with a bizarre staff that would fry him like the electric chair. But nobody appeared.
They were waiting in ambush for him.
No, they were preoccupied.
The circle of pipes was several miles in extent, and it took him an hour of cautious walking to get from Shambhala’s “back door” to the machine room where he’d first caught up to Raeder. At the end of the pipeline tunnel he crouched and crept, the MP-38 ready, until he had most of the big cavern in view.
At the far end was a heap of rubble where the other entrance of the circular tunnel had been caved in by Hood’s thunder stick. The main hall was still littered with rock from the blasted ceiling. Bones were tossed about like confetti. And the horribly mutilated German who’d triggered Raeder’s wrath—or at least the wrath of the weirdly diabolical staff—still sat, half-disintegrated, against one wall. Raeder and the other surviving German were at the machine, a staff reinserted in its cradle. The weapon was pulsing amber, and presumably was being charged.
The two were arguing. Shambhala did not seem to induce harmony.
Hood stepped out, submachine gun in hand, and walked toward them. Raeder had another staff in his hand, the American saw. It, too, glowed.
“Let’s try this again,” Hood said. “Drop your weapons.”
The Germans turned, momentarily disconcerted but then regaining their poise. “Ah, you found that the tunnel doesn’t go anywhere,” Raeder replied. “Yes, now we’re back as we were. Except what did you do with Keyuri?”
“Your henchman shot her.”
“Ah, too bad. And you shot him?”
“Something like that.”
“It’s gotten a little crazy, has it not, Benjamin Hood? We have here, I suspect, something more valuable than the gold of El Dorado.” He shook his staff. “And instead of rejoicing we’re fighting. Why is that?”
“Because you want to give it to a bunch of book-burning Nazi lunatics.” Hood gestured with the muzzle of the machine gun. “You’re finished, Kurt.”
“Am I? Under whose authority?”
“The Tibetan government sent me here.”
“To get this power for themselves.”
“It’s their country, isn’t it? So I repeat: Hands up!”
“And what proof do you have that you work for anyone but yourself, Hood?”
“I have the machine gun.”
“What happened to the staff you already stole?”
“It went cold.”
“Keyuri is spiriting it away, that’s what I think. We still have a destiny, she and I. And I have something entirely different from your primitive gun. Reichsführer SS Himmler called it Vril, and it makes that toy in your hand as obsolete as a stone club. I have a weapon as quick as thought itself, and just as mobile. I think, therefore I destroy.” He lifted the staff slightly. “Imagine a tool that doesn’t hammer on reality but rearranges it. That’s what I feel when I hold it, Benjamin. I’ve gotten hold of the fabric of the universe itself.”
“Don’t make me pull the trigger.”
“Will you really shoot me down like one of your museum specimens?”
“Just like you fried your own man there, hurled against the wall.”
The other German looked at Raeder nervously.
Raeder ignored him. “Who really sent you? The Chinese? The Americans? What faith they have, dispatching you all by yourself!”
“We’re both scientists, Kurt. They sent me as a fellow scientist.”
“To steal discovery. Alas, I got here first.” And he raised the staff to point it.
So Hood fired.
The M-38 spat, the barrel climbing slightly as he fought to control the unfamiliar weapon. It stuttered like the guns in the gangster movies, shells flying like flung coins. Raeder should have been cut down.
Instead there was a blinding flash, a boom as loud as bells in the belfry of a cathedral, and the whine of angry hornets.
Hood’s bullets flew all around the room, anywhere but at Raeder, having been deflected by the force in his crystal staff. The American, meanwhile, was cuffed backward by power like hurricane wind, flying off his feet and skidding on his back against the pipes.
The sound of Raeder’s shot gonged off the walls before rolling away into a throaty rumble. The air crackled as if there’d been a bolt of lightning. It tasted like ozone. More rock rained down from the ceiling and bounced off the floor, the other German wincing.
“I’ve no idea how it works,” Raeder called, “or what it can really do. If it hadn’t had to deflect the energy of your bullets, I’d guess you’d be dead by now. So let’s just finish what I started and bring the curtain down.”
Hood scrambled for cover in the tunnel. Raeder aimed the weapon at the tunnel mouth. A thunderbolt flashed again and the cave quaked, the tunnel ceiling shattering and rock dropping down as Hood rolled under the pipes. It smashed onto the second entrance of the tunnel, burying it. Stray fragments bounced out across the floor of the main chamber and a cloud of dust shot out. The great machine itself seemed to shift gears and whine higher.
“Oh, I do enjoy that energy, even if it hurts. Hood? Have I killed you?”
“For God’s sake, Kurt, let’s go,” the other German urged.
“Silence, Hans. Do you realize that at this moment I’m the most powerful man in the world?”
Diels lifted his own staff. “No, you’re not. This one is charged, too. We both have Vril.”
“Then go make sure he’s finished. None of this slaughter would have happened without the interference of th
at damnable hack scientist and his nun. Keyuri Lin has my comrades’ blood on her hands.”
The German archaeologist walked warily into the cloud of dust. The Vril staff throbbed in his hand, casting light, but everything was obscured by the fog of the explosions. “I don’t see him,” Diels called.
“Escaped?”
“Buried, or trapped in the tunnel.”
“Then help me puzzle out this machine. It’s running higher and higher, and I’m worried it will race and break. With the tunnels sealed, we can work in peace.”
Diels turned. “We’ve buried the piping at both ends. Maybe it’s running too hot.”
“Then let’s try inserting another staff to absorb its power.”
“We don’t know what we’re doing, Kurt. We should walk away.”
“From godlike power?”
Then there was the bark of a heavy pistol and Diels’s forearm shattered. He screamed, clutched it, and dropped his staff.
A figure rose out of dust and rubble, emerging from a pocket under the pipes. Hood was gray with cave dust, rock scratches bleeding, the submachine gun ruined beneath the rocks. He hurled Beth Calloway’s now-empty revolver over Diels’s head at Raeder, who instinctively ducked instead of lifting his Vril staff.
Hood charged and dove for the other one. Diels grasped, too, screaming as the American rolled onto his injured arm.
Raeder couldn’t use his staff without incinerating them both.
Then the other German was knocked away, Hood rising to his knees, his captured staff swinging around.
Twin thunderbolts met.
The world went white. It was like a twin star exploding, two radiating coronas of energy. There was a shriek from Diels as its fury caught and dissolved the SS man, shredding him and throwing the spray of his body against the walls. What Hood and Raeder felt, encased in the energy of their own staffs, was far different. A pulse of dark energy punched through their bodies but lit them with a glow that was a transfiguration that infected every cell and corpuscle. Their air was sucked out, then punched back in. They were blind from the flash, and yet could feel the granular texture of time and space itself.
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