“A candle. It moved. Someone’s inside.” She shivered from both excitement and dread.
“This isn’t one of your wacky ‘I see God’ moments, is it?”
“No, there was a light, I swear it.” She pointed. “It was up where the main floor of the tower would be.”
“A janitor with a flashlight.”
“Or someone sneaking around inside.”
“In that case, let’s call the cops.”
“We can’t. It might just be a janitor with a flashlight.”
“Rominy…”
“Look, there are some stairs leading down from the base of the tower into a well with a basement door. Maybe we can get in there.”
“You’re going to break into a Nazi castle in the middle of Germany? And then make our case to the police?”
“We need proof.” She sounded a lot braver than she felt. “It probably is just a janitor.”
“I’m not even getting paid anymore.”
“I let you rent the BMW. Or should I go by myself?”
“No, you need adult supervision. Lacking that, you get me.”
They descended the stairwell to a wooden door with an old-fashioned iron handle and latch. “How are your lock-picking skills?” Sam whispered.
She grasped the latch. It lifted. “Perfect. It’s unlocked.”
He put his hand on her arm. “That’s not necessarily a good sign.”
“Sam, we have to peek. We don’t know what else to do.”
“Vin Diesel and Schwarzenegger would go in shooting.”
“Come on.”
It was pitch-black inside. They shuffled into the basement of the tower carefully, wary of unseen steps. Then they halted. Only the palest radiance came from the open door they’d crept through. They could see nothing.
“Light the candle,” she whispered.
They’d found one in the bed-and-breakfast they’d checked into, provided either as insurance against power outages or to let guests cast a romantic mood. Now Sam pulled it out and used the hostel’s matches to light it. The sudden illumination threw back the shadows and revealed a round, stark, gloomy room.
It was the basement of the tower. The roof was a stone dome.
“Oh my God, look at that!” Rominy hissed.
At the dome’s apex was a stone swastika, each arm extended with additional turns. Despite countless war movies it looked, in its geometric intricacy, oddly compelling.
“I’ve seen that kind in Tibet,” Sam muttered. “Sometimes it’s called a sun wheel.”
Their feet were at the edge of a sunken circle in the room, like a shallow pool. Directly below the swastika was a circle within this circle, a depression that sank a few inches deeper. Its purpose was unclear.
Arranged around the room were twelve squat round stone pedestals, like the bases of pillars. Placed on each one was a bronze sculpture.
“The signs of the zodiac,” Rominy said. “What could this be for?”
“Pagan cosmology,” said Sam. “Twelve is an ancient sacred number, like seven. The ancients believed the gods were aligned with the planets, and the Web site said Himmler planned an observatory here. Maybe the Nazis came down here to cast the future.”
“Must have been disheartening if it worked.”
“Maybe they still come down. The sculptures look bright and new, and they’re not all aligned evenly, like someone just set them up.”
“Very perceptive, Mr. Mackenzie!” a new voice said.
The door through which they’d entered closed with a boom, and they whirled. There was a figure in the shadows.
“It’s actually Valhalla,” a woman’s voice said with a crisp German accent. A flashlight blazed, freezing them like deer in its beam. “A Hall of the Dead.” The woman shining the light was standing next to the door, wearing a business suit and pumps and holding a wicked-looking assault rifle. “There are tours that explain all this when the castle is open. Which it is not.”
“The door was unlocked,” Sam tried.
“Convenient, don’t you think?” The light danced on them, making sure they had no weapons.
“You know Jake Barrow?” Rominy asked, her voice trembling despite her best effort to be brave. Why not get to the point?
“Silly girl. Of course I do.”
The woman came closer, the beam lowering so they could see.
And Rominy almost fainted.
Her hair was coiffed, her teeth were perfect, her makeup carefully applied, and her look a generation younger. But holding the gun was Delphina Clarkson, Rominy’s backwoods neighbor from the Cascade Mountains.
49
Wewelsburg, Germany
October 2, Present Day
H immler built it as a hall for the dead of the SS elite,” Clarkson said, letting the beam bounce around the chamber for a moment. “What the pedestals were designed for isn’t entirely clear. Statues? Urns? The twelve comes of course from the twelve signs of the zodiac, so we decorate accordingly when we meet.”
“Nazis decorate?” Sam asked.
“She isn’t a Nazi, she’s my neighbor. Aren’t you?” But why was Delphina dressed up and talking with a German accent? Why was she here ?
“And you’re supposed to be dead, Rominy. Aren’t you?” Her smile was sly.
“You look different.” She sounded one step behind again, naive and dimwitted, which was precisely what she didn’t want to be.
“No, Rominy, it was Mrs. Clarkson who looked different. I usually look exactly like this.”
The perfection of the disguise, the Tar Heel accent, the language, the age… was stupefying. Was anyone who they said they were?
“The castle entrance is closed for construction,” Sam said.
“It is closed for us,” Clarkson corrected. “Remodeling is a cover. This is a special time, and we wanted a special place, with special privacy, with special uninvited guests. We watched you approach.”
“Who’s ‘us’?” Sam asked.
She motioned with the wicked-looking weapon. “Upstairs.”
It was an order. They passed through an interior doorway with a gate of iron bars and ascended to the room above the crypt. This was circular, too, with twelve pillars and twelve arches at its periphery, and a round medieval-style chandelier overhead with twelve bulbs. The lights weren’t lit, and the only dim illumination came from a couple of desk lamps sitting on the floor against the walls. Whoever was here did not seem anxious to advertise their presence to the village outside. On the marble floor beneath the chandelier was another design that played off the wheeling swastika. Rominy had a jolt of recognition.
“It’s the sun wheel you saw on my shoulder,” said a voice from the shadows. And out stepped Jake Barrow, or the man who’d claimed to be Jake. He was dressed in a black business suit with white shirt and silk tie of maroon, like a politician or CEO. The tie’s subtle pattern was runic lightning bolts. Jake’s left wrist glinted with an expensive gold watch. And his right held an automatic pistol, black and deadly, its dark mouth aimed waist high. There were, Rominy decided, entirely too many guns in the world.
“Thought we’d catch you in storm trooper drag, Barrow,” Sam said.
“And I thought you might try to improve on slacker-slob apparel should you ever make it to Europe, but apparently not,” Jake responded. “The clean chin is a start, however. Trying to impress Rominy, Sam?”
“Just airport security.”
“We of The Fellowship don’t wear the clothes of three generations ago. National Socialism is about ideas, not uniforms.”
“Yeah, genocide. Conquest. Looting. Book burning. And attempted murder of a woman you claimed you loved.”
“Not murder, but simply a delay so we had time to prepare things. I’d no doubt the nuns would get you out sooner or later, no doubt that you’d follow me here. I deliberately aimed for your mobile phone so you’d survive to help deliver her. I deliberately gave Rominy clues. So welcome, we’ve been impatiently expecting you, and now the final act in our little play can finally begin.”
“Play?” Rominy asked.
“Surely Ursula Kalb’s performance as an American hick deserves an Academy Award.” Jake gestured toward the woman she thought of as Delphina.