“And he locked us in a tomb. You pray, and I’ll go in shooting.”
I t took them six days for the track to turn to a dirt road, and two more for the dirt to turn to gravel, and one more after that to reach pavement. They finally flagged down a farm truck and paid a few dollars to ride it back to the capital. Sam was apprehensive that Barrow might be laying a trap, but they saw no sign of him. So they had a blessed night in a hotel (separate rooms), a feast of the most American food they could shamelessly order, and then a flight (coach this time) to Delhi, Dubai, and Frankfurt. Sam retrieved his American passport; Rominy traveled as Lilith Anderson.
It was in Dubai during a three-hour layover that Sam wandered out of a magazine store with a Herald Tribune. “Look what I spotted.”
It was an inside story, one column, from the Associated Press. “Collider to Attempt Full Power,” the headline read.
“The European nuclear agency CERN will attempt soon to reach full power at its Large Hadron Collider near Geneva in hopes of testing theories about the origin of the Universe,” the story began. “ By smashing subatomic particles at a velocity near the speed of light, scientists hope to answer such fundamental questions as why matter exists at all. The underground cyclotron, biggest in the world, is designed to reach proton beam energies of up to 7 trillion electron volts.”
“You think this has something to do with us?” Rominy asked.
“No, I think it has something to do with rat-bag Jake Barrow and why he played you when he did. This is an atom smasher, right? Going to full power? Can you say ‘coincidence’?”
“Jake can’t have anything to do with a huge supercollider. Can he?”
“Dollars to doughnuts says he does. How, I don’t know. Is he an errand boy for some mad scientist? I just think it’s too neat not to mean something.”
“What about his SS Vatican, or whatever he called it?”
“We should start there, if we can find it. And warn this CERN outfit if we can get any evidence on the scum sucker.” He stopped to listen for an announcement. “Come on, they’re loading our plane.”
R ominy’s joy at being lifted from the twelfth century to the twenty-first in a matter of days faded when they broke through the clouds and saw the green platter of Germany.
Somewhere, they hoped, was the stolen staff. The problem would be if it came packaged with a packet of Nazis.
Sam persuaded her they needed to rent a BMW 3 Series Coupe. “If it was me it would be a Ford Fiesta,” he admitted, “but we’re secret agents now and have to keep up appearances. This is great, using your money. Maybe I am beginning to understand Jake Barrow.”
“I’ve never been so popular with men,” she said drily. “Don’t worry, we’ve almost burned through my cash. After we save the world, I just hope we’ll have enough left to buy a ticket home.”
“You are home. All is one, remember? Cologne, Cleveland, Kathmandu
…”
“I don’t believe you’re as cynical as you say. You don’t live in Tibet for two years for nothing.”
He laughed. “Check my bank account, Rominy. It was for nothing.”
A Google search at the Frankfurt Airport Business Center swiftly identified the town of Wewelsburg as the site of “Himmler’s Camelot,” or the would-be spiritual home of the SS. There was nothing secret about it, thus making it seem an unlikely place to run Jake Barrow to ground. But it was only a hundred or so miles north of Frankfurt and they had no other clue. Sam threw himself into the task of driving with salacious joy, getting up to 80 mph on the autobahn and then throwing the sporty car into curves once they left the main highway. It reminded her of Jake’s freeway “escape” in the pickup truck.
Sam had lost weight hiking from Shambhala and shaved in Lhasa, and he looked good without scraggle on his chin. With Jake she’d felt a tense electricity, but with Sam there was easygoing comfort. Not so much dependability as dogged loyalty, an instinct to look after her. He was, after all, a guide.
She’d catch him glancing at her at times.
“Do you think a lot about beer, breasts, and baseball?” Rominy asked once as he drove.
“ What? ”
“It’s just something that Jake said. I’m wondering if all guys are alike.”
“Oh. No way, man. Football is king.”
She’d found, she supposed, a guy from the beer and chips aisle.
The shadow of war and Nazism seemed purged from Germany as they approached Wewelsburg. The landscape was fat, bucolic, satisfied. The villages were quaint. The cars were washed. The people looked prosperous. The politics were liberal. Hitler was dead history, wasn’t he?
Sam pulled to the side when the castle came into view. It looked a little like a blunt-bowed ship perched on a low ridge that rose above the Alme Valley, its apex pointing north. A round, low-roofed tower was at the northern end. At the other two corners were smaller towers with dome roofs, like derbies.
Sam counted. “There’s a good sixty windows just on the side we can see. For the home of the most sinister organization in world history, it doesn’t look very scary.”
“It’s not a King Arthur castle. It’s a Renaissance castle.” Rominy was reading from notes they’d made in the airport. “Himmler wanted it to be more of a church, a pagan church, than a fortress. Or a meeting lodge for a new kind of Freemasonry. They had a world globe in there so big they couldn’t bring it in the conventional way. They had to lift it through a window.”
“The better to carve up the planet, my dear. Well, what’s our plan? If Barrow sees us he’s going to go ballistic, you know.”
“There was a B and B about five klicks back. Let’s check in there and go up to the castle after dark. We can sneak around when he can’t see us.”
“Great. Unarmed. Clueless. Unable to speak the language. I like the way you think, Tomb Raider.”
“We need evidence for prosecution or to take to CERN. Jake tried to murder us, Sam. And we need to take him by surprise. Jake thinks we’re dead, or that I’m a ninny waiting for him to tell me what to do. The best defense is a good offense. Let’s start doing the unexpected.”
“What evidence is there?”
“The staff. I want it back: it belonged to my great-grandparents. I’m going to find it and steal it. Then we go to the police.”
“And tell them what?”
“That he tried to murder us in Tibet. That he stole from the nunnery.”
“And how do we prove that, exactly?”
“The staff seemed made of something I’ve never seen before. We find that, and Jake’s real identity. We show the bruises on your chest and the bullet in your iPhone. We even call the Seattle Times back home and get them to investigate this impostor.”
“We sneak, we steal, we give a news tip, and we go to the cops. Golly. D-Day wasn’t this carefully crafted.”
She ignored the sarcasm, studying the castle like a besieging general. “Sam? You don’t think the police could be in on this somehow, do you? You know, like neo-Nazis?”
He got serious. “Not in Germany. They’re pretty paranoid about that stuff. And that was three generations back. I’m guessing Jake Barrow is on his own, except for a lunatic skinhead or two.”
Rominy started. Had the bald man in the cabin window been working with Jake Barrow? Did he shoot his arrows to help them escape?
She realized how little she still knew about what was really going on.
48
Wewelsburg, Germany
October 2, Present Day
I t was near midnight when they parked a quarter mile from the castle and cautiously made their way
