“You are home. All is one, remember? Cologne, Cleveland, Kathmandu
…”
“I don’t believe you’re as cynical as you say. You don’t live in Tibet for two years for nothing.”
He laughed. “Check my bank account, Rominy. It was for nothing.”
A Google search at the Frankfurt Airport Business Center swiftly identified the town of Wewelsburg as the site of “Himmler’s Camelot,” or the would-be spiritual home of the SS. There was nothing secret about it, thus making it seem an unlikely place to run Jake Barrow to ground. But it was only a hundred or so miles north of Frankfurt and they had no other clue. Sam threw himself into the task of driving with salacious joy, getting up to 80 mph on the autobahn and then throwing the sporty car into curves once they left the main highway. It reminded her of Jake’s freeway “escape” in the pickup truck.
Sam had lost weight hiking from Shambhala and shaved in Lhasa, and he looked good without scraggle on his chin. With Jake she’d felt a tense electricity, but with Sam there was easygoing comfort. Not so much dependability as dogged loyalty, an instinct to look after her. He was, after all, a guide.
She’d catch him glancing at her at times.
“Do you think a lot about beer, breasts, and baseball?” Rominy asked once as he drove.
“ What? ”
“It’s just something that Jake said. I’m wondering if all guys are alike.”
“Oh. No way, man. Football is king.”
She’d found, she supposed, a guy from the beer and chips aisle.
The shadow of war and Nazism seemed purged from Germany as they approached Wewelsburg. The landscape was fat, bucolic, satisfied. The villages were quaint. The cars were washed. The people looked prosperous. The politics were liberal. Hitler was dead history, wasn’t he?
Sam pulled to the side when the castle came into view. It looked a little like a blunt-bowed ship perched on a low ridge that rose above the Alme Valley, its apex pointing north. A round, low-roofed tower was at the northern end. At the other two corners were smaller towers with dome roofs, like derbies.
Sam counted. “There’s a good sixty windows just on the side we can see. For the home of the most sinister organization in world history, it doesn’t look very scary.”
“It’s not a King Arthur castle. It’s a Renaissance castle.” Rominy was reading from notes they’d made in the airport. “Himmler wanted it to be more of a church, a pagan church, than a fortress. Or a meeting lodge for a new kind of Freemasonry. They had a world globe in there so big they couldn’t bring it in the conventional way. They had to lift it through a window.”
“The better to carve up the planet, my dear. Well, what’s our plan? If Barrow sees us he’s going to go ballistic, you know.”
“There was a B and B about five klicks back. Let’s check in there and go up to the castle after dark. We can sneak around when he can’t see us.”
“Great. Unarmed. Clueless. Unable to speak the language. I like the way you think, Tomb Raider.”
“We need evidence for prosecution or to take to CERN. Jake tried to murder us, Sam. And we need to take him by surprise. Jake thinks we’re dead, or that I’m a ninny waiting for him to tell me what to do. The best defense is a good offense. Let’s start doing the unexpected.”
“What evidence is there?”
“The staff. I want it back: it belonged to my great-grandparents. I’m going to find it and steal it. Then we go to the police.”
“And tell them what?”
“That he tried to murder us in Tibet. That he stole from the nunnery.”
“And how do we prove that, exactly?”
“The staff seemed made of something I’ve never seen before. We find that, and Jake’s real identity. We show the bruises on your chest and the bullet in your iPhone. We even call the Seattle Times back home and get them to investigate this impostor.”
“We sneak, we steal, we give a news tip, and we go to the cops. Golly. D-Day wasn’t this carefully crafted.”
She ignored the sarcasm, studying the castle like a besieging general. “Sam? You don’t think the police could be in on this somehow, do you? You know, like neo-Nazis?”
He got serious. “Not in Germany. They’re pretty paranoid about that stuff. And that was three generations back. I’m guessing Jake Barrow is on his own, except for a lunatic skinhead or two.”
Rominy started. Had the bald man in the cabin window been working with Jake Barrow? Did he shoot his arrows to help them escape?
She realized how little she still knew about what was really going on.
48
Wewelsburg, Germany
October 2, Present Day
I t was near midnight when they parked a quarter mile from the castle and cautiously made their way through the outskirts of Wewelsburg, their bags in the trunk in case they had to suddenly flee. It was autumn, the days shortening, the crops in, but even at that the town seemed oddly quiet. Every curtain was drawn. They could see the glow of lights and the flicker of television in a few houses, but only occasionally did a car hiss down the village lanes. It was so quiet that the slam of a door could be heard from a hundred yards away, and the bark of a dog twice that. Their footsteps seemed loud, and Rominy had a sense of being watched. Yet no one challenged them.
They studied the castle from the shadow of trees. The building was entirely dark, shut for the night. A ramp led across a ditch to the castle entrance, but the way was barricaded with lumber and tape, signs bearing international symbols for construction. Apparently off-season remodeling was going on. Looming above, the edifice seemed somber and sad, not a Camelot at all. Did the ghosts from old SS plots, seminars, initiation ceremonies, and Aryan weddings still linger here?
“Looks like a wild-goose chase,” Sam murmured. “If the castle is closed, Barrow wouldn’t come here, would he?”
“But where else would he go?” She was frustrated.
“We’re not detectives, Rominy. We might have to hire one, or find some officials who’d believe our story and do the detective work themselves. Jake might not even be in Germany. We need Interpol, not our instincts.”
“But we don’t even have proof Jake Barrow exists, or whatever his real name is.”
“Maybe if we told our story, the Chinese police would verify it for Interpol by interviewing the nuns.”
“I’m not going to sic Communist Chinese cops on a Buddhist nunnery.”
He looked back at the quiet village. It looked Disney clean, like everything in this model railroad of a country. “What then?”
“I don’t know. Let’s look around a little more.”
“We can’t even get in the place.”
“There’s a dry moat on this side. I think that sign in German says it leads to a tower. Let’s try that. Maybe we can peek in some windows.”
“You got balls, girl.”
“I just don’t want to waste my plane ticket. And I’m angry for letting life happen to me, instead of me happening it.”
“Happening it?”
“You know what I mean. Come on, you’re the one who lost his iPhone to that maniac.”
Skirting the barricades, they made their way down into a grassy moat. A three-quarter moon floated above and gave enough light to mark their way through the mown trench. Down there the castle seemed even higher and darker, a cliff like the cliff that had barred their way to Shambhala. There were actually no windows at moat level to peer into, and Rominy was almost pleased. She’d be glad to get away from this creepy castle, but she had to do something. Her best, and then go home.
The moat led them north to the big, flat-roofed tower. The ditch ended where the castle ridge dropped toward the valley below, since no barrier was needed on that steep side. A few farm lights glittered on the plain beyond. They backed away from the tower and looked up, its crenellations picked out by the moon. Nothing…
Except that.
“Did you see it?” Rominy whispered.
“What?”