“Immortality gives you patience,” said Jake.
“You’re immortal?” Rominy asked Raeder.
Raeder’s smile was stretched, like rubber, over those worn teeth. “Unfortunately not. Just extended. Vril does not end the aging process, as we hoped, but it has prolonged it by halting the natural aging process in the telomeres of my cells. We have a fuse that burns down, but in my case the fuse got snuffed. I get sick, I feel pain, but I persist. Which meant that no one followed the progress of subatomic physics more avidly than I. This, I realized, was the answer. So I began to recruit promising young scientists and encouraged them to enter the field. We are a fraternity within a scientific fraternity, with political goals as well as scientific ones.”
“To bring back Nazi barbarism.”
“To resurrect the Aryan and with it a new Germany, a Germany of the kind envisioned by National Socialism but better, firmer, truer. Pure, evolved, cleansed, the leader of mankind. A race as superior to the rest of our species as Homo sapiens were to Neanderthals. It will start with Vril, Rominy, this secret energy I was the first to find. With Vril, and with you.”
“I’m not cooperating with any of this!”
“You have the right blood, Rominy. We’re going to expose you to this new light, this new science, and turn you, with me, into the first Shambhalans.”
52
Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland
October 4, Present Day
B etween Lake Geneva and the Jura Mountains, a platter of farm and industrial land hides the largest supercollider on earth. It is built in a tunnel seventeen miles in circumference and more than 300 feet underground, split into eight arcs and interrupted by four gigantic detectors the size of dam powerhouses. These trace the invisibly small particle collisions that the device creates.
The CERN collider consumes enough electricity to power the homes of Geneva, Switzerland. It creates vacuums that in total equal in size the nave of a great cathedral. It uses liquid helium to cool its superconducting magnets that bend and accelerate the beams to nearly absolute zero. The machine’s goal is to re-create on the tiniest scale the extremes of temperature and energy at the Big Bang and thus give a peek at the origin of the universe. Its particle beam is so sensitive that the tidal pull of the moon must be taken into effect when it whirls around its gigantic racetrack.
Kurt Raeder was determined to put this achievement to his own use.
Physicists had made careful calculations to reassure the public that the Large Hadron Collider would not create earth-swallowing black holes or theorized “strange” subatomic quarks, called strangelets, that might detonate with matter. What they’d not calculated was that the vast energies the machine focuses could be used to reconstitute the lost technology of Shambhala.
Instead, a cabal of neo-Nazi physicists secretly had.
“Our Fellowship has been waiting for a long time, Rominy,” Raeder lectured as the Mercedes hummed along the lakeside boulevard in Geneva, headed toward the CERN complex west of the city. Night had fallen, and lights glinted in the lake. “Waiting for science to catch up. Waiting for the blood heir we needed, which was you. And waiting for generations of our ideological followers to graduate with physics degrees and infiltrate the subatomic fraternity. Yes, we have allies! Not just scientists but guards, administrators, public relations personnel, science writers, mechanics, custodians, and suppliers. For half a century I’ve been constructing a web of loyalists, a mafia if you will, who have been working toward this day. The Large Hadron Collider itself has been a project twenty years in the making.”
“You’re claiming that Nazis built the supercollider?”
“No. A few who helped are National Socialists or, in more contemporary terms, conservative visionaries. And our broader Fellowship plans to use it, to borrow it. Our members extend to the very highest ranks of government and finance. Think about it: Why are the world’s organizations spending more than six billion dollars to slap protons together? Six thousand million dollars? They raised this for a science project? Yes, many of those involved naively believe the supercollider is for pure science. In their ignorance they are our most valuable allies. The American physicist Leon Lederman used the term God Particle to explain the search for the Higgs boson, a property that could explain why matter exists at all. Scientists are very clever, and they have succeeded in capturing the public’s imagination.”
“But you’re smarter than all of them,” Rominy said sarcastically.
He smiled. “But governments and business want more out of this underground cathedral we’ve constructed. They want power for their investment. And so we promised; if they built it we would deliver magic of a kind never seen before, and turn the balance of power on its head. Northern Europe will regain its rightful role as ruler of the world. Those bureaucrats who have backed construction and development think the secret benefits will be shared, yielding discovery that will remake economies and technology. They envision an era of unparalleled prosperity. But those closest to me know that the mysteries of Shambhala must not be shared, that democracy is a Jewish idea that poisons society, and that these discoveries are by rightful bloodline the inheritance of the Aryan, governed by National Socialism, and will be used to establish our reign on earth. If you want to call that Nazism, so be it.”
He was obviously mad, but that didn’t mean a cabal of madmen couldn’t wreak havoc. Hadn’t that been the cause of World War II? And out of it had come the atom bomb. And now this?
“But you needed the staff hidden in Shambhala,” she clarified. “This machine wasn’t enough.”
He looked at the window at the dark lake. “Yes. We don’t really understand how the staff worked, or how to duplicate it. But if it can be made to work now, we can begin to study and replicate. Eventually we’ll have legions of staff-wielding Aryans, imposing their will by the force of their thought. They will strum the consciousness that undergirds the universe. We’ll play the cosmic music and reconfigure the world.”
“What did you mean about us becoming the first Shambhalans?”
“That you will be envied by every woman in the world. What we are about, as I explained, is human evolution. We can’t go on as advanced apes armed with atomic bombs and spewing a million tons of carbon a day. We have to evolve, to reach a higher plane. We need to reproduce selectively to accelerate mankind’s biologic destiny. So we’ve been searching for candidates.”
They sped on a boulevard. She saw an airport, hotels, office buildings, and the cozy rectangles of lighted apartment windows, a world of normality that seemed impossibly far away. What quiet domestic life was plodding along there, a pot of tea, a TV show, a book, and the silken warmth of a cat on someone’s lap? Children in their beds. A glass of wine with a loved one. All light-years away.
She’d already tried the handle of the Mercedes. Useless, like the handle of Jake Barrow’s truck. Hadn’t her mother told her never to get in a car with strangers?
How was she going to stop this if Sam didn’t come?
Then they were approaching a sculptured sphere, lit by floodlights, that rose above a lawn like a representation of… what? The earth? The atom? The cosmos? It was rust red. Dried-blood red.
“What the hell does that mean?” she pressed. “Reproduce selectively?”
“That will be explained at the moment of transfiguration. Ah, here we are.”
They were pulling into a parking lot at a complex of large, mostly windowless, blandly boxed research buildings of the kind stamped out all over the world, like pieces of a game of Risk. There was a word on one: Atlas. Hadn’t he held up the cosmos?
“Will you give me your hands please?”
“My hands?”
“Just lift them up.”
Hesitantly she did so, keeping balled in her fist something she’d held tightly as a teddy bear since Wewelsburg. Raeder smoothly reached out and snapped handcuffs on her wrists. “Just so you won’t hurt anything, or yourself. Routine precaution.” Then the sedan doors opened and strong, military hands pulled her out into the chilly air.
Someone snapped something on her ankle.
