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
T he 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.”
