Ursula didn’t think Jakob would emerge. Police were converging. So she put the car in gear and began driving, at the exact speed limit, away from the collider. She had prepared a safe house on the Amalfi coast and by dawn she could be in Italy. She touched the leather. It was a very fine Mercedes.
But Ursula Kalb did not intend to leave Geneva just yet. There was a blood debt to be answered.
R ominy realized the Nazis knew where she was.
She slowed the bicycle, wondering what to do. And then, as she coasted toward the next junction point, someone was standing in her way. The figure was still but alert, poised, like a gunfighter. She felt sick, stupid, trapped.
It was Jake. Somehow he’d gotten ahead of her.
Her concentration lost, her bike wheel wobbled. It glanced off the pipe in the narrow walkway and suddenly she lost control. Her tire hit a flange and she cartwheeled over the handlebars, landing hard and skinning her knees.
Just like in the Safeway parking lot.
The staff clattered down next to her.
Wincing, she boosted herself up on her arms, glaring ahead at Jake. This was the bastard who’d arranged to have her MINI Cooper, thirty-nine payments still outstanding, blown into scrap metal. Who’d lied to her, imprisoned her, handcuffed her, and seduced her with his remorseless cunning. And now he was smiling in triumph.
“It’s over, Rominy,” he called. “My men are behind you, too. You can’t escape, because we still need that shaft. This isn’t what we wanted to happen for you or Kurt. But now we’re left to carry on the quest. You and me.”
“For the master race.”
“For world harmony, with all pollutants finally eradicated.” He aimed a pistol at her. “I’d hoped you’d be our queen by now.”
“You are so sick.”
He shook his head. “Idealistic. Give me the shaft.” He stayed a cautious thirty feet away, the automatic pointed. “I will shoot you if I have to.”
“You think you can hide from the police after this fiasco?”
“Rominy, we are the police.”
She rocked back on her heels and painfully stood up. “At least I don’t have to be raped by my great- grandfather.”
“Yes, we’ll have to find another Adam and Eve. The shaft, please.”
She picked it up. The material was smooth and warm, a cross between plastic and carbon fiber, and she wondered what it was made of. It tingled when she touched it, vibrating slightly, and the glow it gave off was weirdly beautiful, even hypnotic. “I was really falling in love with you, Jake.”
He nodded. “It was for your own good.”
Just beyond him, near where the tunnel joined the next connector point and detector, there was a small blue tank. Hoses led to a white pipe that ran next to the tunnel’s large blue pipe, and more pipes connected the two. Couplings were white with frost. Something very cold was in there. Lettering on the tank said HE.
He? Who? But no, what did that mean? Something tickled from chemistry course work with the periodic table. Rominy retained more science than this man gave her credit for, and she longed for something terrible to match her own coldness.
Liquid helium, she recalled, was very, very cold.
She pointed the staff at Jake Barrow.
“Careful with that!” Jake warned. “Don’t make me shoot you.” She realized he was nervous. She finally had a weapon. Had it received enough charge from the… what had Raeder called it? A proton beam? She took courage from Jake’s fright.
“Don’t make me shoot you. Put your pistol down, Jake.”
“Rominy, we don’t have time for this.”
“Let’s take time with the authorities. Your police and mine. Let’s talk this out in an interrogation room somewhere.”
“I know you’re rattled. It’s understandable. But what you’re holding is very, very dangerous. Please lower the tip before you hurt yourself.”
“If you lower the gun, Jake.”
He hesitated, thinking. “How can I trust you?”
She gasped. “How can you trust me?”
He lowered his pistol barrel slightly. “Okay, I’m moving my aim. You do the same. We need to talk, Rominy. Talk and think about the future.”
She began aiming the shaft to one side. “Keep your gun down, Jake. I’m very jumpy.”
“Me, too. Don’t point that rod at me.”
“It’s aimed at the wall.” Aimed at that tank that said HE. How did her weapon work? How could it work? There was no trigger, no switch.
“We’re pioneers of science,” Jake said. “Right here. Right now.”
How she longed that the Vril staff would zap that creepy bastard! So she poured all of her hatred of Jake Barrow into the core of her being, infusing her very soul, and let it pour down her arm and into her hand, and from her hand to the shaft. She wished, with her consciousness, for it to destroy that helium tank.
“It’s not too late for you and me to make utopia,” Jake tried.
Suddenly she experienced unity, but not the warm feeling of brotherhood she’d experienced on a Kunlun mountain. This was a link to something vastly darker and frighteningly powerful, terrifying and wonderful, a momentary glimpse of a universe of strange matter and different energies that had always been invisible. Rominy saw.
“It’s not too late to join us. Join me.”
And with that something leaped with her thoughts to the helium tank, like a subatomic particle jumping from one point to another with no intervening travel.
There was an explosion, a corona of sparks, and electricity arced into a mini-sun that dazzled her. The tank blew apart.
Air flashed into snow.
The staff hurt! It kicked her hand and arm so hard that she lost her grip and flew backward. As if with a mind of its own, the staff recoiled in the other direction, toward Barrow and the haze rushing from the pipes. Rominy fell to the floor and skidded, simultaneously fearing his gun, the sparks, the cold, and the vast energies she’d glimpsed. She watched, horrified, as the staff came near him. But, no, he’d been paralyzed by the burst of helium as the liquid flashed to gas, and obscured by the bits of ice suddenly filling the wickedly frigid air, every droplet of water vapor in the tunnel having instantly turned to ice. Liquid helium with a temperature at nearly absolute zero erupted from the broken tank and turned to a fog that rolled along the ceiling.
Rominy crawled in terror, trying to hold her breath. The cold punched her, puffing past, so empty that her lungs ached. But at floor level she could gasp a feeble breath. She looked back to watch as the shaft fell through the fog of expanding helium.
Thirty feet away, Jake was looking at her in disbelief. The helium had displaced the oxygen in the air and all he could suck into his lungs was frigid gas. There was nothing he could breathe. His eyes were wide and desperate. His hands had hooked into claws, instantly frostbitten. His joints had gone rigid.
His lungs flash froze and cracked.
It was as if he’d become a statue, a man turned to stone.
And then the staff of Shambhala, its light gone now since Rominy’s explosive thought, fell through the freezing fog and turned brittle. When it hit the concrete floor, it shattered.
The rod disintegrated into a thousand pieces of dusty glass.
Jake toppled, his eyes wide and sorrowful.
And the mist swirled on, snow falling, walls coated with frost. Rominy was covered with rime, too. She slithered on her belly to get away.
There was a box ahead with an oxygen mask.
More alarms were going off, and there were shouts. Then she reached, grabbed rubber, and pulled it to her
