She didn’t dwell on their mission. She dreaded having to confront the man she’d loved and now hated, Jake Barrow. She wanted to simply go home but couldn’t. She wanted to give up but had to win. Courage, she’d decided, wasn’t bestowed, it was chosen. Her ancestors had decided to be brave.
Now it was her turn.
“Do you believe in God, Sam?” she asked at one point as they trudged.
“God?” He paused, looking about. “Nope, don’t see him. Santa Claus for grown-ups, Rominy.”
“You’re not spiritual anymore?”
“I’m not religious. There’s a difference. Take Jesus, for example: a Xerox copy of gods who preceded. He was the son of a carpenter and virgin like Krishna, born on December twenty-fifth like Mithras, heralded by a star like Horus, walked on water like Buddha, healed like Pythagoras, raised people from the dead like Elisha, was executed on a tree like Adonis and Odin, and ascended into heaven like Hercules. The religious tradition is genuine, but to pretend he’s the one and only, instead of the latest software update-no way.”
“You’re quite the theology student.”
“You don’t come to Tibet without wondering about things. I was a searcher, like everybody, but after a while I got bored with dogma. You know, the Buddhists don’t have a lot to say about God or Creation at all. They stick to what they know, which is dealing with our fucked-up heads.”
“But they talk about love and empathy. Wasn’t that Jesus, too? Those nuns devote their lives to this cosmic… thing. This goodness, this grace, that unites all the great faiths. They see him, or it, or the Essence. They’d see God right now, right here, in this wilderness.”
“I’m sorry, but that rock isn’t God, not for me. And what Essence? Living in the Middle Ages at the edge of the world? Praying twenty million times a day? For more of the same in the next life? I’ve watched them for two years. It’s an interesting show for tourists, but not to buy in to. I’m sorry, Rominy, but for those who find life pointless and death terrifying without religion, I just say maybe it is pointless and terrifying.”
“Well, I’ve seen God,” she said.
Now he stopped, hands on hips. “You have? And you didn’t ask her for a ride?”
“Very funny. Remember when we climbed up the edge of the waterfall to the lake, saw the smoke from the nunnery, and started cutting along the mountain to get to it?”
“Yeah.”
“It was so empty, so desolate, so lonely, that he, or she, filled it.”
“Filled what?”
“Everything.”
“If your dope was that good, I wish you’d shared it.”
“It was a very odd feeling and it only lasted for a minute. As we worked our way toward the nunnery I suddenly felt completely at peace. As if I were exactly where I was supposed to be. And I felt connected . I felt connected to Jake, I felt connected to you, I felt connected to the river and the rock and the birds orbiting overhead, to the universe. I felt everything was one. And I thought, ‘This must be what heaven is like.’ ”
He regarded her skeptically. “Brain chemicals. High altitude, sleep deprivation, faulty diet. You hallucinated, Rominy, like every prophet and guru who’s gone into the desert and deliberately starved. You felt what you wanted to feel.”
“But I didn’t want it. In fact, for a few moments I didn’t want anything.”
He sighed. “Do you feel it now?”
“No.”
“Will you concede it could all be a trick of the mind?”
“No.”
“That maybe the Twelve Apostles were a bunch of potheads?”
“No. It was too real. It was so real that that was the reality, not”-she waved her hand at the landscape-“this. Not what I feel now. It’s like I woke up, just for a second, and now I’m back asleep again, in this dream we call life.”
“Wow. Whoa. Jake was just a snake, Rominy. There was no ‘connection’ to that Nazi-loving bastard.”
“That’s the weird part. He is a snake, but there was a connection. That if we could really see the essence that this staff is supposed to tap, that if we could lift the veil and get down to the fundamental that’s behind everything, there was, is, a connection. It was spooky, wonderful, scary. The real Shambhala isn’t lightning bolts, Sam, it’s unity. That’s what we lost. That’s what we’re looking for.”
“I’m looking for a yak burger.”
“Even Hitler, even though he was irretrievably lost.”
“Rominy, come on. Now you’re starting to sound like Jake Barrow. Is that what we’re going to say to that bastard when we catch up to him? All is one, all is forgiven, now please give your stick back?”
“No. Just that he has no idea what he’s really carrying. He was in a place to see, and stayed blind.”
“And he locked us in a tomb. You pray, and I’ll go in shooting.”
I t took them six days for the track to turn to a dirt road, and two more for the dirt to turn to gravel, and one more after that to reach pavement. They finally flagged down a farm truck and paid a few dollars to ride it back to the capital. Sam was apprehensive that Barrow might be laying a trap, but they saw no sign of him. So they had a blessed night in a hotel (separate rooms), a feast of the most American food they could shamelessly order, and then a flight (coach this time) to Delhi, Dubai, and Frankfurt. Sam retrieved his American passport; Rominy traveled as Lilith Anderson.
It was in Dubai during a three-hour layover that Sam wandered out of a magazine store with a Herald Tribune. “Look what I spotted.”
It was an inside story, one column, from the Associated Press. “Collider to Attempt Full Power,” the headline read.
“The European nuclear agency CERN will attempt soon to reach full power at its Large Hadron Collider near Geneva in hopes of testing theories about the origin of the Universe,” the story began. “ By smashing subatomic particles at a velocity near the speed of light, scientists hope to answer such fundamental questions as why matter exists at all. The underground cyclotron, biggest in the world, is designed to reach proton beam energies of up to 7 trillion electron volts.”
“You think this has something to do with us?” Rominy asked.
“No, I think it has something to do with rat-bag Jake Barrow and why he played you when he did. This is an atom smasher, right? Going to full power? Can you say ‘coincidence’?”
“Jake can’t have anything to do with a huge supercollider. Can he?”
“Dollars to doughnuts says he does. How, I don’t know. Is he an errand boy for some mad scientist? I just think it’s too neat not to mean something.”
“What about his SS Vatican, or whatever he called it?”
“We should start there, if we can find it. And warn this CERN outfit if we can get any evidence on the scum sucker.” He stopped to listen for an announcement. “Come on, they’re loading our plane.”
R ominy’s joy at being lifted from the twelfth century to the twenty-first in a matter of days faded when they broke through the clouds and saw the green platter of Germany.
Somewhere, they hoped, was the stolen staff. The problem would be if it came packaged with a packet of Nazis.
Sam persuaded her they needed to rent a BMW 3 Series Coupe. “If it was me it would be a Ford Fiesta,” he admitted, “but we’re secret agents now and have to keep up appearances. This is great, using your money. Maybe I am beginning to understand Jake Barrow.”
“I’ve never been so popular with men,” she said drily. “Don’t worry, we’ve almost burned through my cash. After we save the world, I just hope we’ll have enough left to buy a ticket home.”