“A tracking device,” Jake said. “Please don’t try to run. We have dogs and Tasers.”
Yep, that’s quite the boyfriend you picked, Rominy.
She’d felt this way only one time before, on a gurney wheeling down a sterile hospital hallway for removal of her appendix, lights passing overhead like flickering suns, doors hissing open and shutting behind her like portals to hell. She’d been ten, and terribly frightened. Now she felt numbing dread, as she realized that the last weeks had been a long, sickening plummet into an abyss.
“Six billion dollars to find a particle? Absurd,” Raeder said as they walked toward the building. “But six billion dollars to manipulate those particles, and with them the world itself? That’s a bargain. Six billion dollars of taxpayer money to seize power for yourself? To rule? To monopolize? To become unbelievably rich by reducing lesser races to slavery, their natural state? That’s why so many were persuaded to help us. Some with doubts were bribed. Others blackmailed. Any would-be heroes suffered untimely accidents. We’ve been very thorough.”
They stopped at a door. Green-uniformed guards with black berets and belts weighted with equipment were clustered there. One of them stepped forward. “We can only guarantee control of the sector until the morning shift, Reichsfuhrer,” he said, addressing Raeder. “Rennsler is still in the dark, but when he comes to work he’ll mobilize the rest of security against us. After that, it will be on the news and everything will come crashing down.”
The German nodded. “If our calculations are correct, the remaining night will be time enough. Once we demonstrate the staff, they’ll give us time to complete our mission. Key government officials will stand with us. And if not, they cannot stand against us, once we have Vril.”
The man gave a stiff-armed salute. “Fellowship!”
“Fellowship.” They passed inside. As they did, Rominy let the thing she’d held in her hands fall, kicking it against a drainpipe.
A million-to-one shot. But when there was no hope, those were good odds.
The next door was stronger, and here waited a cluster of men who looked like academics. One had the proverbial white jacket, but the others were casual in khakis or jeans. They looked nervous, but none showed any surprise at her handcuffs. White-jacket greeted Raeder and then stepped to a keypad next to the door and typed in a code. Then he put his eye to a small eyepiece above it.
“Retinal scan,” Jake said to Rominy, standing close like he was still her freaking boyfriend. Maybe he thought he still would be, once the master race had established control. She looked away and tried to psychically relay waves of revulsion at him, but if he detected her contempt, he gave no sign.
The door opened and they entered a shaft landing. Stairs led downward into gloom. Next to it was an elevator shaft. Elevator doors opened and a dozen packed in, Rominy squeezed by aspiring Nazi lunatics, her handcuffed hands held humiliatingly in front of her. Men glanced at her curiously and she wanted to spit in their face. Should she make a scene? But what could she do? She was utterly alone, at the spire of a scientific cathedral buried in the bowels of the earth.
The elevator disgorged them just one floor down. Another door, and another retinal scan, and then they passed into a control room, banks of computers and video screens taking up an otherwise bland, off-white windowless space. Industrial carpet, mesh office chairs, laminate counters. The screens showed columns of numbers, graphs, and video camera scenes of tunnels and huge machines. She assumed the videos were showing parts of the supercollider. It looked as colorful as a Tinker Toy.
Then she started. Three bodies lay facedown on the floor against one wall, with a cowl of blood around their heads and neat round holes in the backs of their skulls.
“It was easier to dispose of them than try to persuade them,” the security chief said.
Raeder nodded. “There’s no turning back. We’ll put up a plaque. Sacrifices to human evolution.”
The scientists who had ridden the elevator with them scattered to the screens. Now there was a faint whine as something was started up. A faint odor of oil and ozone. “It will take about an hour to regain full power,” one of the men said.
“Time enough to get the girl into position. Jakob? Rominy? Follow me.”
She hesitated, wondering where best to make a stand, but then the big cop guy stepped menacingly toward her. So she reluctantly followed, but took a moment to turn and stick her tongue out at the security chief, too.
He took it in, his expression not changing.
Not a good sign.
On they marched, meek little Rominy like a little lamb to the slaughter, software cubicle-ista to her newest duty, proud feminist a dutiful two steps behind.
She began trying to guess how to blow things up.
She didn’t even have chewing gum.
Down an elevator again, much farther this time, dropping three hundred feet into the bedrock of the Swiss- French border. They came out into the nave of this colossal church of physics.
An enormous room, four or five stories high, and atop it a shaft the size of a missile silo that clawed toward the surface like the spout hole of a whale. To look at the origin of the sky, the physicists had delved underground like Tolkien’s cursed dwarves. But what a wonderland they’d created. The chamber was lined with tiers of catwalks like the balconies of an opera house, plus pipes, ducts, great metal troughs crammed with cables, cranes, stairs, ladders, columns, beams, grids, tanks, levers, air conditioners, hatches… it was a cornucopia of technology. And the colors! They were taken from a crayon set. Red, green, blue, and yellow, bright as Legos, and then spotless stainless, shiny copper, burnished bronze, reflective blacks, all glinting at each other like a hall of mirrors. How had they ever conjured such magnificent complexity? It was like the riot of color she’d seen in the temples of Lhasa. It was not just science, it was art, not just instrument but beauty. It hummed and buzzed and clicked and crackled like a child’s toy and had the smell of a place entirely unnatural: concrete, paint, oil, grease, rubber, and plastic. The particle detector was scrupulously clean, absolutely sterile, and yet as sensory as a field of wildflowers. Fluorescent light cast everything in a cold, metallic glow.
It was another secret city, like Shambhala.
And somehow Kurt Raeder had penetrated this, to corrupt it. To re-create his lost ruin.
Another scientist saluted them. My God, how many physicists had signed on for this craziness? But then Raeder, if it was really Raeder, had been building toward this moment for seventy years. An incongruous thought occurred.
“Did you ever open a bank account?”
He turned. “What?”
“When you got back from Tibet. With compound interest, you might be a rich man by now if you’ve really lived all those years. Hood did that, or Beth Calloway. I inherited.”
He wasn’t sure if she was joking and for the first time looked off-balance. “I’ve spent ever pfennig, every moment, every drop of sweat and blood on this dream.”
“Too bad. You could have retired by now and left us all alone.”
Jakob, or Jake, pushed her from behind. “Pay no attention to her, Kurt. She’s an idiot who will completely waste your time.”
“ I wasted your time?” But then she felt the press of a gun barrel in the small of her back.
“Shut up and do as you’re told,” her ex-lover said.
They walked a balcony, heels drumming on textured metal, walking into the technology like sperm penetrating the gigantic egg of this vast, bulky machine. Centenarian Raeder obscenely spry like an animated cadaver, Jake/Jakob robotic, Rominy mournful. If the cathedral nave was complicated, this tighter area deeper into the machine works was incomprehensible. There were steel panels, copper conduits, and brightly colored pistons, bobbins, and spools. She was making the words up because she had no idea what she was looking at. The riotous assemblage of finely machined parts reminded her of pictures of rocket engines and submarines. The barrel-shaped thing was as big as the cross section of a small ship. On its face, triangular pie-piece panels, each the size of an apartment, radiated out like the petals of a flower. The stamen in the middle was a narrow pipe that jutted out and ran toward a tunnel beyond.
“It reminds me of a sun wheel,” Jake said. “All worship, rightfully so, goes back to the sun. All life originates there.”
They came to a smaller gallery leading to the jutting pipe. There was an arched ceiling twenty feet overhead, with a tracked crane spanning the gallery’s width. An orange-colored hook to hoist things dangled from it. Cables and chains dropped down to a narrow pipe, little bigger than a household waterline, which ran from the center of
