Blood of the Reich

by William Dietrich

  Would she live in fear the rest of her life?

  Rominy had seen a brief press report in the International Herald Tribune.

  GENEVA—Attempts by the European Nuclear Agency, or CERN, to reach full-power operation of its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) here were dealt a serious setback Tuesday when an electrical arc from a faulty bus bar broke a tank of liquid helium.

  The accident killed eleven CERN employees and will likely shut down the facility for months, if not longer.

  “Repairs could take a full year,” said Franklin Rutherford, the American operations manager for the international consortium operating the machine. “The damage is quite extensive and we want to make sure we identify the causes so there won’t be a repeat of this terrible industrial tragedy. As you can imagine, it’s been quite stressful for all of us at CERN.”

  A faulty connection in superconducting magnets caused a similar delay at the LHC in late 2008.

  Asked if there was a fundamental design flaw in the supercollider, Rutherford replied, “I think we’ve just had a run of bad luck. These are very complex machines, and every collider has start-up pains.”

  Witnesses said there was a surface explosion at the LHC and even reports of gunfire, but Rutherford said laymen had mistaken “an auto accident and a mechanical issue for something more dramatic. I’m afraid we’ve just had a problem with our plumbing. After a thorough safety review, we still expect to reach our goal of 7 trillion electron volts sometime next year.”

  The 27-kilometer supercollider, largest in the world, uses such energies to break apart subatomic particles. Scientists hope to learn the answers to such fundamental questions as how the universe was created and why matter exists at all.

  The story suited Rominy. The last thing she wanted was a press conference or paparazzi. She was alive and Sam was supposedly alive, and Jake and Raeder were dead. That was science miracle enough.

  The neo-Nazis had disappeared like helium mist. For the first few nights she had nightmares of them peering in her hospital window, like the skinhead Otto Nietzel. But no, not a whisper, not an arrest, not a threat. No story of a dead skinhead at Wewelsburg Castle. Even the police seemed reluctant to probe too deeply into the disruption.

  We are the police.

  When she asked to see Sam, they put her off. “When he’s better, we will discuss a visit,” doctors told her.

  And, “Before we can release you, we need more tests.”

  They took blood samples several times. Her arms and fingers ached from the punctures.

  There was an unsettling blankness about some of the physicians who looked at her, seeing her without seeing her. She was an isolated specimen: a private room, a door that automatically locked with its latch on the corridor side, and no word from America. There was no telephone. Television was set to a single French entertainment channel she asked be shut off.

  Surely she wasn’t a prisoner. Was she? “Where are my clothes?”

  “We have them in storage.”

  “Where’s the locker?”

  “In a safe place.”

  “Did you find my money or passport?”

  “Your hospital bills are being covered. Rest, please.”

  From her bed she could look out at autumn leaves blowing down from Geneva’s trees, with the gray lake beyond. She waited for release, but none came. She waited for information, but that didn’t come either.

  “Rest, rest. Tomorrow, we take more blood.”

  She felt groggy. Were they drugging her?

  Why was she always waiting for someone else to act?

  She waited for Sam.

  “He is recuperating.”

  One of the nurses carried a smartphone in her white coat pocket, pink as lipstick. Rominy finally complained of fever, the woman leaned in to take her temperature, and the phone slipped into Rominy’s slyly reaching hand, slick and palm-sized. She tucked it under a blanket.

  The nurse read the digital readout, touched Rominy’s forehead, and grunted. “No fever.” She peered at her ward suspiciously, as if impatient with malingerers.

  Rominy shrugged. “Some aspirin, s’il vous plaît?”

  “Oui.” The reply was grumpy. The nurse strode off, rubber soles squeaking.

  The hospital was listed on the nurse’s “favorites” list on the cell phone. Rominy dialed, asked for the nurses’ station, and began, “Do you speak English?”

  “Oui. Yes.”

  “Melissa Jenkins here, from the American embassy. I have some papers for patient Sam Mackenzie but he’s not on the floor where I thought. Young American?”

  “A minute.” Rustle of papers. “Five-one-seven. Is not correct?”

  “Ah, I had it wrong. Merci.” She hung up and deleted the record of the call.

  The nurse came back with aspirin. “Have you seen my cell phone?”

  Rominy shook her head. “Did it fall out?”

  The nurse found the device under a stainless trolley. While she bent to retrieve it, Rominy tore several pages from her lab-slip tablet. The nurse straightened to glare at her patient, but the American was innocently taking aspirin. When the woman pocketed her phone and went out, Rominy jumped from the bed and caught the door just before it closed. She inserted the paper she’d stolen in the jamb, preventing the latch from locking.

  Later that night, hospital sounds a murmur, machines beeping, she slid out of bed, opened the door, checked that no one was watching, slipped into the corridor, and padded furtively down the hallway, her gown held tight around her. Peeking in rooms, she found a deserted nurses’ changing station and pilfered a uniform, bundling her hospital gown with its clipped identity tag under her arm.

  After killing her former lover with liquid helium, confiscating clothes seemed a minor sin.

  She changed into the white belted dress in a restroom stall, ascended an elevator, and took a man’s clothes from a drugged and sleeping patient, lifting them from his closet. Those would be for Sam.

  Then she set out to find Mackenzie. Maybe it was time for her to rescue him.

  57

  Geneva, Switzerland

  October 18, Present Day

  Sam was still bedridden but awake at two A.M., leaner and better-looking for it. His face had matured in a way that flattered him. He looked at her with surprised delight when she slipped in.

  “Rominy! Didn’t have the sense to ditch me, girl?” He was propped up on pillows, watching all-night French TV with the sound off.

  “Don’t you sleep?”

  “That’s all I’ve done for two weeks.”

  She glanced at the television. “How can you tell what’s going on?”

  “I just wait for the ads. They’re sexier than ours.”

  “So you are feeling better.”

  “Oh yeah. I couldn’t feel any worse, not after getting a jolt that’s the equivalent of grasping a power line.” Then he squinted at her nurse’s garb. “What the hell?”

  She put her fingers to her lips. “I’m getting us out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m tired of being poked. I don’t trust them.”

  He grasped her hand, tight as a knot. “Me neither. They ask a million questions and don’t answer a one.”

  “Are you well enough to move?”

  “Healthier than Kurt Raeder.”

  “You got him, Sam, when you broke that pipe.”

  “I’m told the proton beam is directed by magnets. When I knocked some askew, the beam went wide just long enough to slice the bastard. It was like a microscopic knife cutting through his chest. His heart exploded.”

  “The beam only persisted one second before a circuit blew.”

  “Best second of my life.”

  “Do you feel guilty?”

  “Are you kidding? The guy lived way past a hundred. I should be so lucky.”

  She shook her head. “Did you know Raeder was planning to have sex with me?”

  “You’re joking.”

  “He also told m
e DNA proved I’m his great-granddaughter.”

  “What!”

  “He raped Keyuri way back in 1938. It wasn’t Hood. It was Raeder who made the baby.”

  “Oh, Rominy. Man, I’m sorry. This is sick. Those guys were animals. And Jake, what a dirtbag. We’re not all like that, trust me.”

  She sat on his bed. “I know guys aren’t all like that, Sam. But I don’t think my grocery aisle method works very well.”

  “Your what?”

  “I’ll explain someday. I just wish it hadn’t gone so far with Jake.”

  “I heard you ended that relationship rather emphatically as well.”

  “Yes.” She looked sad. “I don’t regret it . . . but it’s not easy to kill someone, Sam.”

  “Just remember, it would have been easy for him to kill you.”

  She nodded, but she wondered if that was true. She hoped not, even after all that had happened. Emotions don’t conveniently evaporate, they just burn holes and leave scars.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Well, are we still friends?”

  “Sam, you almost died saving my life.”

  “I just half saved it. You finished off Barrow.”

  “And the staff shattered. Odd that no one mentions it.”

  “Not odd. Predictable. You can bet there’s a lot they’re not telling us, just like we’re not telling them. You don’t take over a seventeen-mile doughnut without a lot of inside help. You don’t get away with having nothing in the media unless the big dogs have all pledged not to bark. Can you spell ‘conspiracy’?”

  “They don’t believe me any more than I believe them.”

  “Then that’s it.” He took her other hand. “Over. Fini. Kaput. We beat the bad guys, Rominy, at least the ones we could identify. End of story, for us. The cops say they can’t find any surviving neo-Nazis. Yeah, right. The physicists claim everyone on their team is clean. It’s like the whole thing never happened.”

  “Almost.” She looked away from him, staring at nothing. “I had to play-act to find you. I broke out of my room. Snuck through corridors. Are we prisoners?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  “What if Nazis are still out there?”

  “There’s no magic staff. There’s no Shambhala, unless we spill the beans and somebody drains that lake. No Vril, unless scientists rediscover it on their own. No more blood locks, unless there’s one nobody told us about. Nobody needs us anymore. This is where we live happily after. Right?”

  “I hope.”

  He looked at her worriedly. “What’s bugging you, girl? I want to go home with you, and maybe finish my degree.”

  She knew he wanted to be more than just friends someday after all they’d gone through together. And so she shivered, remembering the tender touch of Jake Barrow. And the warning of Delphina Clarkson, or was it Ursula Kalb? Stay away from men, that’s my advice.

  No woman’s body had been reported among the casualties.

  So Rominy was taking relationship advice from a Nazi now?

  “I hope we really can get away, Sam. Stolen clothes, no passports, no money.”

  “Trust your tourist guide. It just so happens I stashed our spare clothes, papers, and cash in a cubbyhole. If we can sneak out to the collider site before dawn, we can retrieve enough stuff from a manhole to keep going. We’ll look for a red-eye to America, with cheap seats and cranky stews.”

  She smiled. Hope came from action. “Will it work?”

  “If we hurry.”

  And then came a rap on the door. “Herr Mackenzie? Medication time.”

  “Ah, crap,” he muttered. “Now? I’m already dopier than a big league ballplayer.”

  “She’ll report me!” Rominy hissed.

  He pointed. “Get under the bed.”

  She slid under on slick linoleum, feeling absurd, and peered out as a German-speaking nurse entered. There was a clack of heels, not rubber soles. No blaze of room light. Just a click, like a door locking. Footsteps to the window to close the blinds. A blue plastic bucket set on the floor.

  Rominy listened to them talk.

  “I’m not scheduled for medication, nurse.”

  “I heard talking. You alone, Herr Mackenzie?”

  “You heard the TV.”

  “I help you sleep, I think.”

  “I sleep too much already.”

  “Doctor orders.”

  Her voice was oddly muffled. Rominy felt trapped.

  “What’s the bucket for?” Sam asked. “And why the face mask?”

  “I have cold. Here, antiseptic cloth.”

  “It stinks. Hey!” He jerked.

  “Relax, no? Take away pain.”

  Sam thrashed, then slowly stilled. Silence. The nurse seemed to be waiting, bent over the bed. No one else had entered the room. What was going on? If Rominy revealed herself, there’d be an uproar. She’d just have to wait it out. Of all the bad luck.

  Or was it bad luck? Why had this nurse come in the middle of the night, right after Rominy had entered Sam’s room for the first time in two weeks? Had this medical worker been waiting for Rominy to come? The American had finally left the protection of her own locked room. Slipped through the hospital without escort. Not encountered another soul. Had someone followed? And locked her in here? Closing the blinds, leaving the lights dim?

  The silent TV strobed with dim light.

  Rominy peered out. An IV pole being wheeled to Sam’s bed. Mackenzie had gone silent, which was hardly characteristic. Was he drugged?

  “It’s all about blood,” the nurse murmured. A loop of plastic tubing drooped.

  Twisting, Rominy looked out at the nurse’s ankles.

  She was wearing low leather pumps.

  The American’s heart began hammering. Liquid began pattering into the plastic bucket. She twisted to see. Now the tube was red.

  “We keep, just in case,” the nurse murmured.

  Keep it for what? Lost cities and secret doors? Something was terribly wrong. Could she bolt for the door? She shifted to crawl out from the far side of the bed.

  And suddenly a grip as hard as Prussian iron seized Rominy’s ankle and she was jerked out from under Sam’s mattress like a rag doll, spinning on the floor. The strength and violence of it was shocking, yet sickeningly familiar. A woman in a nurse’s dress similar to Rominy’s clamped the ankle of the American like a vise, eyes malevolent, mouth covered by a gauze mask.

  “You think I let you go, little mouse?” the nurse said. “I listened to your breathing like a cat.”

  The woman had a cloth in her hand that smelled of some kind of ether or chloroform. Rominy twisted and kicked, flopping like a fish.

  “I have been waiting. Waiting for reunion.” It was the voice of Delphina Clarkson, or rather Ursula Kalb. “You think you can have your blood if we can’t, American witch?”

  For one terrible moment, Rominy felt paralyzed. Fear froze her. Panic turned her mind blank. Then that voice again, that ghost she’d heard at the supercollider. So what have you learned?

  Fight!

  Rominy lashed out with her other leg and struck the side of the woman’s knee. Kalb shrieked as the leg bent and then toppled, cursing in German. The Nazi scrabbled toward her, mask askew, and tried to get a cloth to Rominy’s face. The American pivoted on the floor like a demented break-dancer, kicking and punching. She hit the blue pail and it went over, spilling blood that made a crimson fan across the linoleum. Ursula fumbled under her jacket and brought out a gun with a sausage-fat silencer. “Stay still!” she hissed. “Or I shoot!”

  Rominy seized the base of the IV pole and hurled it at their tormentor. On the bed one of Sam’s arms jerked as an IV needle pulled out, the needle and its medical tape writhing at the end of its tubing. There was an arc of blood spatter across the walls of the room, while the crimson on the floor spread like an oil slick. A phhttt as a silenced bullet went by, whapping into a wall, but the distraction of the fallen pole had worked to make the Nazi miss. Kalb reared up on on
e leg to take better aim. Rominy flung the bucket at her and lunged.

  The German shrieked as she was peppered with droplets of Sam’s blood, slapping the bucket away. “Filth!” she roared.

  Then Rominy dove into her as the German fired again, the bullet shredding air next to the American’s ear. Ursula fell hard, grunting, her gauze mask ripped away. They rolled in the blood, the German’s eyes wide with terror and hatred. A trolley and a chair crashed. They lurched upright, clawing, and wrestled against the window and its blinds. Then they slipped in blood and went down again with grunts.

  “You killed my lover!” Ursula screamed.

  My God, which one? Jake, or the hideous Kurt Raeder?

  “He wanted your genes! Now I kill you!”

  They were fighting for the gun. Another shot, somewhere into the ceiling. Would anyone ever come? Or had hospital personnel agreed to leave the corridor outside Sam’s room empty while The Fellowship struck back? How deep was the conspiracy?

  The German woman was immensely strong. She was twisting her gun wrist out of Rominy’s grasp, getting ready for a final shot.

  “So we’ll get your blood this way! I’ll drain you into that pail!”

  Rominy’s other hand was scrabbling. It closed on a cloth and she realized it must be the anesthetic. She swung and slapped it over Ursula’s mouth.

  The German writhed like a snake as Rominy clamped her nose. More shots thudded into the wallboard, each puncture puffing a geyser of powder. Ursula kicked, her yells muffled. The women twisted across the floor in demented embrace, soaked and straining.

  Finally, the pistol fell with a thud. Kalb’s movements slowed, becoming feeble. Then, she stilled completely.

  The monster was unconscious.

  Rominy shakily stood, leaving the cloth over the German’s mouth. She scooped up the pistol, trembling but efficient, functioning now with grim determination. The pistol was an automatic with trigger, hammer, and a safety, she saw. Should she shoot? A quick execution of an impostor and murderess?

  No. There was more fitting revenge.

  Rominy tucked the weapon in the white belt of her bloody uniform. Who knew when some skinheads might burst through the door? She wouldn’t hesitate to fire if they did. Her days of being squeamish about firearms were over.