face. She shuddered from the icy envelopment.
And blacked out.
56
Geneva, Switzerland
October 17, Present Day
The Cantonal Hospital of the University of Geneva kept Rominy and Sam apart for two weeks. She healed from cold burns and bruises, and he battled for his life. Tests were run, questions asked. Police, American embassy personnel, officials from CERN, and physicists all interviewed her, some coaxing, some cruel, some sympathetic, and all suspicious. The neo-Nazis had apparently died or disappeared. So, officials asked, what were they after? Why had they taken over a particle accelerator? How had they taken over?
Rominy put the same questions back to her interrogators.
She trusted no one anymore. We are the police. She told the authorities that she and Sam were dumb tourists who’d stumbled onto a group of fanatics at Wewelsburg Castle while trying to poke about the SS shrine after hours. It had been a foolish lark that resulted in being taken hostage. Sam had gotten away and helped rescue her. There hadn’t been time to call the police, so he’d heroically started a fire and nearly died fighting her captor.
“And how did you and Mr. Mackenzie meet, miss?”
“In Tibet. He was a guide. We hit it off.”
“Chinese records show you had permits to go toward the Kunlun Mountains. That’s a very unusual destination at the beginning of autumn.”
“It was silly. We never got there.”
“But you were with another gentleman, a Mr. Barrow? Traveling under a false passport as Mr. and Mrs. Anderson?”
“He was in a hurry to get to China. Jake and I broke up.”
“And what became of Mr. Barrow?”
“I have no idea.”
“And you turned to Mr. Mackenzie?”
“As a friend. The Tibetan tourist season was ending. We decided Europe would be restful.” She laughed, and then coughed. The damage to her lungs would heal with time, doctors said.
“Was Sam Mackenzie your lover?”
“That’s a rather personal question, isn’t it?”
“He seemed unusually motivated to rescue you.”
“We rescued each other.”
“We’re just trying to understand, Ms. Pickett.”
“Am I under arrest or something?”
“No.”
“Then I think I’ll keep my love life to myself.”
Once she’d woken in the hospital she realized no one would tell her the entirety of what had happened at the supercollider or who the conspirators were. They didn’t want the world to know Nazis had invaded a scientific temple. They didn’t want to reveal-or perhaps they didn’t know-what The Fellowship was after.
So she began to piece together where she was and what had happened from memory, comments from her interrogators, and snippets of news, while guarding what she remembered like a Chinese gold coin. How could she be certain what side anybody was on?
There was another reason for being coy: she was tired of this madness and simply wanted to disappear, as Beth Calloway had disappeared three generations before. The helium breach? No idea how it occurred. The frozen corpse? No idea who the victim was; she’d been fleeing the chaos when a man appeared and an explosion occurred. The oddly aged old man cut almost in two by a beam of subatomic protons before the collider shut down? Another Nazi nut, she guessed. He’d certainly looked strange.
Her own presence at CERN?
“They said I’d be a bargaining chip in case they got cornered. I don’t remember much else. I was terrified and confused.” That was true enough.
“You have a nasty scar on the palm of your hand.”
“A pocket-knife accident. We were camping in Tibet.”
And the glassy staff fragments on the tunnel floor? Intriguingly, no one mentioned them. She didn’t either. But she wondered if somewhere, somehow, laboratory tests were being done.
Or if some janitor had swept them into a dustbin, sending the secret texture of the universe to a landfill.
Would authorities eventually find the same old records on her family that Jake Barrow had? Would somebody, someday, come after her again?
Would she live in fear the rest of her life?
Rominy had seen a brief press report in the International Herald Tribune. GENEVA-Attempts by the European Nuclear Agency, or CERN, to reach full-power operation of its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) here were dealt a serious setback Tuesday when an electrical arc from a faulty bus bar broke a tank of liquid helium. The accident killed eleven CERN employees and will likely shut down the facility for months, if not longer. “Repairs could take a full year,” said Franklin Rutherford, the American operations manager for the international consortium operating the machine. “The damage is quite extensive and we want to make sure we identify the causes so there won’t be a repeat of this terrible industrial tragedy. As you can imagine, it’s been quite stressful for all of us at CERN.” A faulty connection in superconducting magnets caused a similar delay at the LHC in late 2008. Asked if there was a fundamental design flaw in the supercollider, Rutherford replied, “I think we’ve just had a run of bad luck. These are very complex machines, and every collider has start-up pains.” Witnesses said there was a surface explosion at the LHC and even reports of gunfire, but Rutherford said laymen had mistaken “an auto accident and a mechanical issue for something more dramatic. I’m afraid we’ve just had a problem with our plumbing. After a thorough safety review, we still expect to reach our goal of 7 trillion electron volts sometime next year.” The 27-kilometer supercollider, largest in the world, uses such energies to break apart subatomic particles. Scientists hope to learn the answers to such fundamental questions as how the universe was created and why matter exists at all.
The story suited Rominy. The last thing she wanted was a press conference or paparazzi. She was alive and Sam was supposedly alive, and Jake and Raeder were dead. That was science miracle enough.
The neo-Nazis had disappeared like helium mist. For the first few nights she had nightmares of them peering in her hospital window, like the skinhead Otto Nietzel. But no, not a whisper, not an arrest, not a threat. No story of a dead skinhead at Wewelsburg Castle. Even the police seemed reluctant to probe too deeply into the disruption.
We are the police.
When she asked to see Sam, they put her off. “When he’s better, we will discuss a visit,” doctors told her.
And, “Before we can release you, we need more tests.”
They took blood samples several times. Her arms and fingers ached from the punctures.
There was an unsettling blankness about some of the physicians who looked at her, seeing her without seeing her. She was an isolated specimen: a private room, a door that automatically locked with its latch on the corridor side, and no word from America. There was no telephone. Television was set to a single French entertainment channel she asked be shut off.
Surely she wasn’t a prisoner. Was she? “Where are my clothes?”
“We have them in storage.”
“Where’s the locker?”
“In a safe place.”
“Did you find my money or passport?”
“Your hospital bills are being covered. Rest, please.”
