in his fists and sleeves. Then he’d pondered how he could get Otto close enough to use them.
By playing coward.
Now the arrogant skinhead was dead. And the weird thing was, it didn’t feel completely horrible. It felt good.
Shakily, Sam stood. He felt like he’d just been pummeled in a football game, but he was breathing and Otto wasn’t. He spat at the man for good measure. Rape Rominy? I don’t think so, Nazi shit.
Shuddering with release, he cracked open the door. What if more of them were out there?
Then you’re already dead, Sam, no different from five minutes ago. One step at a time, man.
But the hall was empty. He stepped out. Otto had left a pistol, a menacing black one, on a bench. Probably to make things “fair.” How thoughtful, skinhead. Above, he could hear the bang and clump of the construction workers.
Which meant there must be vehicles out there.
Sam crept up the stairs and turned to the gate that led to the crypt. Then across the basement room and out the rear door to the dry moat. If anyone saw him he’d look like some lunatic jihadist with his blood and pistol, but, no, it was still very early and the worker guys were all inside.
A plumbing van had keys.
So he drove carefully through the village, parked the vehicle behind a shed, and retrieved his BMW. He popped the trunk. Their belongings were still inside, including passports and Rominy’s remaining cash. Slowly, not wanting any attention from police, he drove out of Wewelsburg.
In a stand of trees by the river he stopped to wash, rinsing his clothes as best he could and putting them back on wet. He’d crank up the Beamer heater. He had a little cash, a pistol, and their hunch about where Kurt Raeder and Jake Barrow, or Jakob, were going. He had a young woman who didn’t deserve any of this. And he had, just maybe, a world to save.
Sam Mackenzie, necessary. Who woulda thunk it?
51
Wewelsburg, Germany
October 3, Present Day
R ominy had been given a shower, coffee, and a German pastry by a stone-faced Ursula Kalb, plus a reassuring smile that was not at all reassuring by the ghostly-looking Kurt Raeder. Then she was shoved into the backseat of a big black German Mercedes, solid as a tank and smelling of money. Apparently being a Nazi fanatic paid very well. Rominy had never been in a Mercedes before, and this one had leather seats, an engine that purred like a puma, and wood trim as shiny as a violin. She felt intimidated.
They drove south very fast, the tires taking curves in the bucolic German countryside as if they were on a train track.
“What’s going to happen to Sam?” she asked Raeder.
He was sitting next to her in the backseat, with Jake in the front passenger seat as Ursula drove. Raeder was looking straight ahead. Without turning, he said, “Do you know that I’ve been waiting for this moment since 1938?”
“If you hurt Sam, I won’t help you.”
“Sam is on his way to a plane back to the United States. Don’t worry about Sam.”
She hoped that was true but didn’t think so. Had this man killed her parents and grandmother, too? Was he really more than a century old?
“I can’t believe you’re Kurt Raeder. He must have been born near 1900. You look weird, but not like you’re one hundred and ten or something.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“And I don’t believe your liar Jakob up there intended us to escape from Tibet. He boasted that there was no way to unlock the door when he sealed us in.”
“And there wasn’t, from inside.”
She wanted to provoke some reaction beyond smug superiority. “We’re going to an atom smasher, aren’t we?”
“We are going, Rominy, to the Large Hadron Collider operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It operates a seventeen-mile circular tunnel capable of accelerating subatomic particles to 99.999999991 percent of the speed of light.” He clicked off every decimal as if taking credit for it. “Nothing like this has been achieved since the days of Shambhala. For me, it’s a homecoming. It’s a return to what I found in Tibet.”
“Why me?”
“That will become clear in due course. In the meantime, I think I’ll tell you a story. You asked last night about the body found in a cabin in America’s Cascade Mountains. Do you want to know whose body that was?”
“Yes.”
“It was Elizabeth Calloway, an aviatrix who flew Benjamin Hood from China to Tibet. Jakob tells me you’ve heard of her.”
“I thought she was my great-grandmother. But I learned in Tibet my great-grandmother was actually a nun named Keyuri Lin. She killed herself and almost killed her baby, my grandmother.”
“Ah. Keyuri is a sad story.”
“But Jake told me the body was my great-grandfather, Benjamin Hood.”
“Jakob told you a lot of things to make happen what is necessary to happen. But now that you’re with us, Rominy, much more can be explained. We can share the truth, so you come to trust me. I want to tell you what happened by telling you about me: what I was, and what I am.”
“How can you be Kurt Raeder?”
“Because I was… changed. Yes, I am more than one hundred years old, even though I have the body of a much younger man.” He glanced at her skepticism. “All right, just younger. I can only assume that such transfiguration was for a purpose, a higher purpose. Dreams that were ashes in 1945 are about to be revived.”
“Of Nazi conquest?”
“Of human transformation.”
She put her hands to her temples. “I wish I was home.”
“You are home. Hear me out.”
Jake turned in the front seat. “We do care about you, Rominy.” He sounded like an insurance salesman betting she wouldn’t die to collect.
She stuck her tongue out at him and he flushed.
“In 1938,” Raeder began, “I led a scientific expedition to Tibet. We’d heard legends of an ancient lost kingdom called Shambhala, and National Socialism took the initiative to investigate. Keyuri was a scholar who had studied old records. She agreed to act as our guide. Working together, we found a hidden valley and an underground city.”
“Where we found the lake.”
“Correct. Unfortunately, just as we were beginning our research, we were interrupted by Benjamin Hood, who came in shooting. He literally destroyed what would have been the greatest archaeological discovery of all time. Keyuri managed to escape with the staff that Jakob has since recovered for us, but my companions were all killed. And as Hood attacked he set off explosions that wrecked the valley.”
“You’re the victim here,” she said drily.
“No, we both wanted to possess Shambhala, but I hoped its secrets would yield a higher purpose, not some cheap exhibit in a dusty New York museum. Hood would have bottled Shambhala, but I wanted to harness it. In any event, there was a machine we believe was related to today’s colliders. It shattered and threw out a blinding light. And that’s the last thing I remember.”
“None of which would have happened if you hadn’t led Nazis to Shambhala.”
“I awoke thrown on the side of a mountain, my body in a state I’d never felt before. You’re familiar with the
