the vast machine. This extended to a much larger pipe, the size of a sewer line with the diameter of a manhole. The big pipe was painted blue and extended into a tunnel as far as she could see.
It was like being inside a giant mechanical cocoon. A section of the silvery smaller pipe had been removed and technicians were bolting a new apparatus in its place. This new piece was about the size of a submarine torpedo and consisted of a cylindrical bundle of rods. There was space between each rod, connected with colored wires. Inside was a clear Plexiglas tube.
The bundle reminded her of the fasces that Sam had talked about.
She hoped his scheme had worked, but she suspected Otto had killed her friend by now. The sadness added to her feeling of hopelessness.
Then she noticed that there was another rod, a staff, lying horizontally in the midst of this new device. Its ends lined up with the narrow pipe.
It was the amber-colored staff Jake had stolen from the chamber below the nunnery at the edge of Shambhala. It was Kurt Raeder’s magic wand, the wizard’s staff, the gun of Vril. My God. They were going to recharge it.
“Hurry, before the radiation levels climb too high,” Raeder told the technicians.
They nodded. “We have our REM badges. But you can hear the machine accelerating.” And indeed the background whine was rising. There was a deeper rumble, too, of huge generators and pumps, the lungs of the whale.
Radiation? Her heart began to hammer.
“Rominy, we’re at the end of our journey and I can’t follow you any longer,” said Jake. “Not yet.” He was still pointing a pistol at her. It looked like the kind the Germans used in the old World War II movies. What were they called?
A Luger.
At least he wasn’t hanging around to have some kind of weird SS sex. With Raeder talking about spawning a new master race, she’d worried she was supposed to get it on with her kidnapper. But then that couldn’t be true, could it? She was part Asian, thanks to Great-grandma Keyuri, and mongrel American to boot.
So just what was she doing here?
The technicians twisted a few final bolts and stood. “That’s it. Really just a harness to hold the staff in place. The rest is up to the accelerator itself.”
“You may watch from the control room,” Raeder said. “Jakob, you’d better remove her handcuffs.”
“What if she panics?”
“There’s nowhere for her to go. I’m worried that with the electromagnetic energies involved, that much metal might trigger something we haven’t planned for. Take the tracking device, too. I don’t want the large amounts of electricity involved arcing into her body.”
“Maybe I should stay with you, Kurt.”
“It’s too much of a gamble to risk both of us on Vril’s first manifestation,” Raeder replied. “I’ve staked my life on this, but if it doesn’t work as expected, I want you to survive to carry on. Rominy must be the seed carrier.”
“The what carrier?” she protested.
Kurt turned to her as Jake removed the cuffs and stooped to take off the ankle bracelet. “Of the next evolution. You’re going to experience the fundamental energies of the universe as I have, Rominy. It will stun you, and frighten you, but it’s quite survivable, as you can see by looking at me. You will be transfigured, transformed. It will feel good when it’s over. You’ll absorb dark energy like a plant. You’ll have a longevity that the ones left behind will long for. And then you’re going to carry my first child. You are going to be as revered as the Virgin Mary.” He smiled, plasticky lips stretched over worn teeth, eyes sunken, skin like wax.
She looked at him with horror. “And stay a virgin, right?”
“We all know you’re no virgin and no, I’m not a god to inseminate you with my spirit. I’m afraid we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”
“Are you joking?” Not with Barrow, but with him?
“It’s a necessary step for the future the Fuhrer dreamed of.”
“You want me to have sex with you? My God, you’re a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty years old!”
“Which doesn’t matter. You’ll see.”
“It’s just sex, Rominy,” Jake added. “Don’t put so much meaning into it.”
“It sure as hell had no meaning to you, did it?”
He shrugged. “I enjoyed it well enough.”
“God, why don’t you just shoot me?”
“I’m afraid that isn’t part of the plan,” Jake said. “You’re to be infused with the light as Kurt was at Shambhala, and then bred. No different than on the farm.”
“No! This is crazy! Look at him, he’s hideous! And I’m no Aryan!” She was desperate. “You said yourself I’m part Tibetan and who knows what else. I’m the wrong blood! You’ve got the wrong woman!”
“No we don’t,” Raeder said calmly.
“How do you know that?”
“Because Jakob did all the DNA tests back in the United States. You’re precisely who we thought you are.”
She was sweating. The younger man had stood closer, and she longingly eyed his pistol. But then he gave it to Raeder and backed away.
“I’ll wait in the control room,” he said. “Himmler’s dream, Kurt.”
The older man nodded. “Himmler’s dream.” He watched Barrow retreat. She heard the click of a door closing. “Now you learn who you really are.”
“Who?” she asked. “Who am I, Raeder?”
“You’re my descendant, Rominy.”
Now there was a roaring in her ears. “What?”
“Benjamin Hood wasn’t your great-grandfather. I was.”
She looked at him in horror.
“I possessed Keyuri Lin on the way to Shambhala. She insisted on sex with Hood, but it was my child she had in the nunnery. That’s why she tried to kill it. But Fate intervened, in the person of Beth Calloway. It was my DNA that Jakob brought to have tested in the United States with yours to prove the match to the bankers, not that from Hood’s finger. But you and I are separated by enough generations. And now we, you and I, are going to have a child-a super-child, a master child-together.”
His eyes were bright, his skin cracked, his grin a death’s-head grimace. “One of the powers of Vril is that my sexual appetite hasn’t slackened, it’s increased.” He took a small leather folder from the breast pocket of his suit. “So have my tastes.” He flipped it open.
It held an array of bright, shiny surgical instruments, things to cut and pinch.
The whine of the machine climbed to a shriek, matching her scream.
53
Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland
October 4, Present Day
Sam had gotten the Beamer up to 200 kilometers an hour, which he calculated was somewhere north of 125 mph, faster than he’d ever driven. It was gray German autumn, the autobahn his crowded racetrack, and he’d weaved past speeding trucks as if they were standing still. The astonishing thing was that occasionally an Audi or Lotus kept pace with him. What a crazy country. He was gambling where they’d taken Rominy and hoped he got there before the Nazis found skewered Otto back in Wewelsburg, or the German police came after him with too many questions. It was dark by the time he got to Switzerland and Geneva, where he promptly got lost because he was too hurried to ask directions. That’s dude thinking, dude. He finally got straight-everybody seemed to speak some English-and now it was the middle of the night as he drove more cautiously toward CERN headquarters. He
