at Barrow. “You really got the hots for Hitler, don’t you?”
“I just think he was complicated, like everyone, and interesting, like everyone.”
“Complicated? That’s an interesting way to put it.”
“What if he was an idealist in his own way, driven into wars he didn’t want?”
“That’s not how I heard it went down, bro.”
“Yes, get real, Jake,” Rominy chimed in. “Don’t be provocative just to be provocative.”
“A lot of people followed him for some reason.” Barrow sounded defensive. “I’m just saying, if you want to make sense of history, let’s understand what it was, not parrot cowboy-and-Indian dogma about who was right and who was wrong.”
“Sorry, amigo, I saw the movie. The Nazis were wrong.”
“That’s my point. All you’ve seen is the movie.”
Holy-moley. “ Hey, you want a picture of some yaks?” Sam pointed. Time to change the subject before he got too steamed.
Rominy was in the backseat, trying to ignore the debate of the men while sifting through the satchel documents again. The more she read them, the more she came to believe that Benjamin Hood hadn’t written them. The script was in a feminine hand, and the maps and diagrams had a vagueness that might come from someone getting the information secondhand, from memory. There were no measurements or dimensions, no logical depiction of a machine with interlocking parts. The entire packet was impressionistic.
Could that mean it was myth, that they were chasing a fairy tale?
Or did it mean that someone like the woman pilot in the picture had befriended Ben and taken his dictation or descriptions? Beth Calloway, 1938. A good deal of the journal seemed incoherent, more a collection of notes than a narrative or diary. There were names: Kurt, Keyuri, Beth, Ben. Was her great-grandmother’s name Beth? Rominy considered. Maybe Calloway and Hood pursued the Nazis together, Beth flying a plane. So they get back to the Cascade Mountains, and Beth tries to make sense of it all. Maybe Hood was disabled. But the journal was riddled with question marks, arrows, and blanks, as if it were a jigsaw puzzle only half put together.
Maybe Rominy could put it together here in Tibet.
Maybe she was supposed to finish what her great-grandmother started.
Maybe the journal would make sense in Shambhala.
40
Concrete, United States
September 7, 1945
S o this is where the elusive Benjamin Hood has gone to ground, thought Duncan Hale, special agent of the Office of Strategic Services. His agency had been created in the cauldron of the recently concluded World War II and had absorbed his old Army Corps of Intelligence Police.
I’ve arrived, Hale thought. Backwater, USA.
It wasn’t until the end of the war that Hale had realized the necessity to start tracking the man he’d sent to Tibet eight years before. Rumors of Hood’s discoveries had been fantastical, and his disappearance perplexing. The millionaire had gone mad, most thought, and withdrawn like a hermit crab somewhere into the American wilderness.
Then, with the wartime explosion of science, the fantastic had become commonplace. The German V2s. Jet fighters. The atomic bomb. And suddenly an anonymous letter had arrived that made the strange rumors more compelling. Just what had Benjamin Hood discovered in the nether reaches of Tibet? And would any of it be of use in this new, uneasy embrace with the bearlike Soviet Union?
With the help of the FBI, banking records had led Hale to this tiny burg at the edge of the known universe, the aptly named Concrete, Washington. Now, as he stood on the train station platform near the junction of the Skagit and Baker rivers, Hale could look uphill to a one-block downtown that slumbered under a haze of morning mist and coal smoke. With gas rationing still in effect, not much moved on the roads. The war had ended only three weeks before. But a new, more dangerous war, the OSS believed, was just beginning: with the Red Hordes of the Soviet Union. It was time to learn what Ben Hood knew and make sure nobody else could learn it.
Hale, burdened only with a briefcase, walked uphill to State Bank of Concrete. Flags and bunting from the recent VJ Day celebration still hung from houses, and no service personnel were back home yet. Yet the sense of relief, after a bad Depression and worse war, seemed as palpable as the sweet smell of the surrounding forest. The bomb had ended the thing and ushered in a whole new world. There were even rumors of turning the OSS into some new kind of permanent intelligence outfit, he’d heard. The Russians were throwing their weight around just like the Nazis had, and America was going to have to respond.
Hale knew he might be wasting his time on Benjamin Hood. The guy was a crank, giving up a family fortune to live like a recluse on some stump ranch. Hood’s trip back in ’38 had cost the government next to nothing (it irked Hale that he’d never gotten much credit for yoking the playboy for all the heavy lifting) and nothing had come of the Nazi expedition, near as he could tell. It was as if Tibet had swallowed the whole lot. Hood’s disappearance had been small brew in a world hurtling toward total war. So Hale hadn’t thought much of it-he had a war to win!-but when the Japs threw in the towel after Nagasaki, the old mystery came back. He’d received an anonymous letter raising all kinds of interesting questions. Had Hood perished in central Asia? Or had he gone to ground like some crazy hillbilly, hiding out like some kind of goddamned draft dodger to let the others do the fighting for him?
More important, had the curator found something that could be important in the coming struggle? Was Hood trying to hide some terrible secret?
Terrible secrets were what Duncan Hale liked to find.
Picking up Hood’s faded trail hadn’t been easy. The American Museum of Natural History had no contact since ’38. His family assumed him dead, and his inheritance had passed to his brothers. There’d been brief talk of giving Hood a posthumous medal, so the department could take credit for another secret mission… except no one was quite sure what the mission was or what it had accomplished. The Germans were no help either, their archives silent on Tibet except for some enigmatic hints from people like Goebbels. Himmler was dead, a suicide, after trying to sneak by the Allies in disguise. So was most of the SS. Ancient history.
Except Duncan Hale never forgot anything.
He tried military records first, then Social Security, and then voter registration and Census data. No Ben Hood. It finally occurred to him to try banking records. That was a needle in a haystack, except the FBI had required reporting of abnormally large deposits to keep tabs on spies during the war. Tucked in a card drawer from late 1938 was a deposit of $10,000, a tidy sum at the time. The depositor’s name was Calloway, but there was a cross- reference noted to a Caucasian whose former address was Lhasa. On a hunch, he’d called up the bank.
The deposit had been made in another name: Benjamin Hood.
Bingo.
So now he’d come out to the moss-shrouded ass of the earth to find the happy hunter himself. Hood had gone from a corner office overlooking Central Park to a shack in the armpit of the Cascade Mountains. This when you had enough sitting in the bank to buy a nice house, and an inheritance back home worthy of a Rockefeller. It didn’t make sense, and Duncan Hale didn’t like things that didn’t make sense.
He showed his credentials to a teller. “I need the address of one of your depositors.”
The bank president, a fellow named Henderson, came out to confer. A visit from a G-man to Concrete was unusual indeed.
“This Hood, he live around here?” Hale asked.
“Upriver quite a few miles. Cascade River, I understand. We never see him.”
“What do you mean you never see him? Isn’t this his bank?”
“He’s a hermit, except there’s a woman living up there, too, and a child-none of it sanctified by marriage, I’m afraid. Maybe he doesn’t want us judging him. In any event, he never comes downriver. We see Miss Calloway once in a while, shopping for groceries and supplies.”
“And who is Miss Calloway?”
“His… housekeeper. Girlfriend. They have joint custody of the account.”
