“I think it did start with that. I think it was embedded in what they stood for from the very beginning.”
“And I think it got twisted, which is more believable than a nation deciding to get evil for a dozen years and then get good again.”
She shook her head. This was like going on a blind date and learning your liberal agnosticism had been paired with a supply-side creationist. Just what were his beliefs? “I’ve heard of being open-minded, but this is ridiculous. And white guys are the tribe.”
“It’s not ridiculous. I’m a reporter, and I’m trained to look at both sides. Hey, I’m the one who saved you from the skinheads. I’m on your side. But I try to understand the other side, so I can write about them.”
“What I understand is that they blew up my car.”
“Which is why we’re moving on.”
It did feel reassuring to get away from Seattle, where all this madness had started. So did a Bloody Mary on the first flight, two martinis at LAX, and the welcoming champagne in business class. She’d fallen asleep soon after they flew over open water, and woke up somewhere mid-Pacific. It was dark, she was hungry, and Jake had saved her a bag of peanuts.
“Don’t worry, there’s another meal in an hour or two.”
She felt groggy and uncertain. The intimacy she’d shared with Jake in the mountain cabin had been overwhelmed by the roller-coaster terror of falling into the mine and then careening downhill from madwoman Delphina Clarkson and the Mohawk bow hunter. Then sending the cryptic e-mails from the airport, the new clothes paid for from the stash of cash, and flinging herself into the void. Had the destruction of her MINI Cooper really been less than two days ago? Instead of her old life they had two backpacks, more than $21,000 in cash, a swollen bank account, a bag of peanuts, and moldy seventy-year-old documents taken from a skeleton.
“Good sleep?” Jake asked, brisk as a butler. He’d bought some toiletries and looked washed, combed, and competent, though he’d left the two-day stubble for that fashionable bad-boy look that, dammit, did look good on his strong jaw. Well, she was alive, richer, and an aisle curtain snobbishly separated her from the coach-class proletariat she’d long been accustomed to. One day at a time, Rominy. Maybe Jake was the answer she’d been waiting for. At least there were no skinheads in business class.
“I need some aspirin, actually.”
“Got ’em. Picked up a vial at the airport newsstand.”
He’d given her sunglasses and a sun hat to wear at SeaTac, where she was already old news in the twenty-four-hour cycle but where her picture popped up once on airport TVs. She’d kept her head buried in People magazine, reading about celebrity calamities that seemed ridiculously trivial compared to her own. No one had looked at her with even a flicker of recognition.
Now she was stateless, groundless, history-less, suspended in midair. “Water,” she ordered from a flight attendant. “And a gin and tonic.” Maybe adventure would make her an alcoholic.
“I waited until you woke up to dig out the documents,” Barrow said. “They’re really more yours than mine, though I think they’re going to show us where to go in Tibet. I think we’re thousands of miles ahead of any pursuit now, Rominy.”
“If we get through Chinese customs.”
“You’re a missing person, not a fugitive. You won’t show up on Chinese computers.”
“What about you, Jake? What have you told your editors?”
“That I’m on the biggest story of my life and I’ll be out of touch. They cut me slack because I’m good. It’s only been a couple of days. By the time they start wondering about my clock hours, I’ll have the biggest scoop of the year and they’ll be drooling Pulitzer.”
“I’m the biggest scoop of the year?”
“No, Shambhala is.”
“Sham… what?”
“Actually, I did peek a little. That’s what Great-grandpa was after, Rominy-Shambhala. A mythical kingdom in Tibet, a real-life predecessor to Shangri-la.”
“How many Bloody Marys have you had?”
“The Nazis were after it, too, led by a man named Kurt Raeder. Ben Hood was in some kind of race for new powers, like the atom bomb. Captain America against Hitler. And I think they found it, or found something, according to this stuff. Maybe that’s what agent Duncan Hale was after, too. Think about it: end of the war. Atomic bombings. Soviets in Berlin. The smart ones see a new arms race. And so Mr. Hale gets wind that the reclusive Mr. Hood just might have found something that could tip the balance of power. He comes out to Washington State, tracks Great-grandpa down, snatches the secret papers, but then dies in that mine. Maybe Hood trapped him with a cave-in.”
“But why wouldn’t Great-grandpa share it? It’s his country, after all.”
“I don’t know. Why didn’t he go back to New York? Why didn’t he claim his family fortune? Why didn’t anybody know he was dead for months? We’re a team. We’re going to learn the answers.”
She sighed. “All right. We’d better start reading.”
The papers were not in order. There was a journal of fragmentary entries, and a collection of sketches, maps, random notes, and coordinates. There was a crude map of a valley in a bowl of mountains and a drawing of a waterfall. There were clippings and torn textbook pages on amps, volts, and equations she couldn’t make sense of, with graphs and charts. Hood had a fine, feathery hand, but she didn’t see how Duncan Hale or anyone else could make sense of this without her great-grandfather’s verbal explanation. There were sketches of some kind of machine, with things that looked like pipes, boilers, and stacks, but no indication of what it was for or how it worked. It was so incoherent that the notion he’d become eccentric at best, crazy at worst, seemed reasonable. She’d bought $5,000 in airline tickets based on this?
“I don’t know, Jake. This seems pretty vague.”
“It gives us a place to go to. No one’s had these coordinates, Rominy.”
“Coordinates to what? A mythical utopia? A waterfall?”
“To this, actually.” He pulled out one of the diagrams. She’d glanced at it before, but it had meant nothing to her-just a narrow ring, a thin doughnut. It could be a circular plaza, the orbit of some planet, or someone’s design for a wedding band.
“Which is?”
“It looks like an ancient design for a cyclotron.”
“What in the world is a cyclotron?”
“An atom smasher.” He smiled, as if his Super Bowl bet had just paid off.
“Okay, I give up. Why are we flying ten thousand miles for an atom smasher?”
“You know what they are, right?”
“They smash atoms.” She wasn’t about to admit she didn’t care, until now.
“They break them apart so we can see what’s inside.”
“Scientists already have atom smashers.”
“Now, yes-but this one looks to be hundreds or even thousands of years old. The principle behind them is very modern, very sophisticated: to accelerate atomic particles fast enough to smash them, you push them along with magnets, but it takes a long track to get up to speed, like a long ski jump. In 1929, Berkeley physicist Ernst Lawrence realized that if you could bend the beam, accelerating them in a circle, your track was essentially infinite. They just go around and around, faster and faster. With enough size and power, you could get things up to almost the speed of light.”
“So Shambhala figured this out, hundreds or thousands of years ago.”
“At a time when no one else knew atoms even existed. Imagine that, Rominy: an ancient civilization as sophisticated, or more sophisticated, than our own. There were some primitive attempts at cyclotrons in the 1930s, but we didn’t really get going on them until the 1950s. Yet the Shambhalans, if these diagrams are real, had them when we were in togas or suits of armor.”
She looked back at the diagram. “I’m sure this would thrill Indiana Jones. Why do Nazi skinheads care?”
“Ah. When you take little things apart you understand how they work, and when you understand how they work you can begin to manipulate them. Nuclear weapons are the most obvious example. Once physicists realized that atoms could be split, and that energy is released when that happens, it was a relatively short step to a bomb, even though the details were expensive and complicated.”