“Except for killing millions of innocent people.”
Raeder looked disapproving. “Then came news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-far more indiscriminate than anything Germany had done-and inspiration came. Here was terrifying new atomic energy that would change the course of power politics. What if there was another, rival energy? What if there was Vril? I wrote Hale an anonymous letter, explaining that the American naturalist Benjamin Hood had found just such a power and was in hiding somewhere in the United States. Why look for my rival when your government would do it for me? I didn’t have to follow Hood, I only had to follow Hale. Which I did. Much to my surprise, he traveled to Seattle, the very city I’d used to enter the United States. And then north to the area where you and Jakob visited the cabin. I bribed people to alert me where Hale might be going.”
A practical consideration had occurred to Rominy. “Didn’t you have to work? How did you get the time and money to do all this?”
“There was still a network of Nazi sympathizers in the United States. The FBI thought they’d caught all our agents, but they hadn’t. I looked up members of the old German-American Bund and was eventually put into contact. I had a team following Hale.”
“To Concrete and Cascade River?”
“Yes. Our plan was for Hale to confront Hood, have him seize whatever the zoologist had or knew, and then ambush them both in the cabin. It was too late for Hitler, but if we could return to Germany with a secret as potent as the atomic bomb, a secret revival could begin.”
“The Fourth Reich,” said Jake. “Purer and better than the Third.”
“Hitler made mistakes,” Raeder conceded.
“Which this time we’ll avoid,” Jake amended.
“Unfortunately,” Raeder went on, “it was at the cabin that the real mystery began. We didn’t find Hood, we found Beth Calloway, dead of a gunshot wound. Nor could we find Duncan Hale.”
“Until Jake and I found his corpse in that mine.”
“My guess is there was some kind of showdown between Hale and Beth,” Jake said. “Gunshots, a mine cave-in… we won’t ever have the whole story, but in 1945 the secret seemed lost.”
“And moot,” Raeder said. “Shambhala was closed off, and the staff I’d had was shattered in the explosions. The legend was lost. And yet I couldn’t let it go. I snuck back into Tibet in the turbulent 1950s and heard rumors that a surviving relic had been locked away by Keyuri Lin, who was gone. There were also stories of a child, taken to America. I began to put two and two together. I guessed there was another blood lock, meaning the only one who could open it was the missing child, your half-Tibetan grandmother. But even if we found a surviving staff, what would we do with it? The machine to energize it had been destroyed. So I decided to wait.”
“Immortality gives you patience,” said Jake.
“You’re immortal?” Rominy asked Raeder.
Raeder’s smile was stretched, like rubber, over those worn teeth. “Unfortunately not. Just extended. Vril does not end the aging process, as we hoped, but it has prolonged it by halting the natural aging process in the telomeres of my cells. We have a fuse that burns down, but in my case the fuse got snuffed. I get sick, I feel pain, but I persist. Which meant that no one followed the progress of subatomic physics more avidly than I. This, I realized, was the answer. So I began to recruit promising young scientists and encouraged them to enter the field. We are a fraternity within a scientific fraternity, with political goals as well as scientific ones.”
“To bring back Nazi barbarism.”
“To resurrect the Aryan and with it a new Germany, a Germany of the kind envisioned by National Socialism but better, firmer, truer. Pure, evolved, cleansed, the leader of mankind. A race as superior to the rest of our species as Homo sapiens were to Neanderthals. It will start with Vril, Rominy, this secret energy I was the first to find. With Vril, and with you.”
“I’m not cooperating with any of this!”
“You have the right blood, Rominy. We’re going to expose you to this new light, this new science, and turn you, with me, into the first Shambhalans.”
52
Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland
October 4, Present Day
B etween Lake Geneva and the Jura Mountains, a platter of farm and industrial land hides the largest supercollider on earth. It is built in a tunnel seventeen miles in circumference and more than 300 feet underground, split into eight arcs and interrupted by four gigantic detectors the size of dam powerhouses. These trace the invisibly small particle collisions that the device creates.
The CERN collider consumes enough electricity to power the homes of Geneva, Switzerland. It creates vacuums that in total equal in size the nave of a great cathedral. It uses liquid helium to cool its superconducting magnets that bend and accelerate the beams to nearly absolute zero. The machine’s goal is to re-create on the tiniest scale the extremes of temperature and energy at the Big Bang and thus give a peek at the origin of the universe. Its particle beam is so sensitive that the tidal pull of the moon must be taken into effect when it whirls around its gigantic racetrack.
Kurt Raeder was determined to put this achievement to his own use.
Physicists had made careful calculations to reassure the public that the Large Hadron Collider would not create earth-swallowing black holes or theorized “strange” subatomic quarks, called strangelets, that might detonate with matter. What they’d not calculated was that the vast energies the machine focuses could be used to reconstitute the lost technology of Shambhala.
Instead, a cabal of neo-Nazi physicists secretly had.
“Our Fellowship has been waiting for a long time, Rominy,” Raeder lectured as the Mercedes hummed along the lakeside boulevard in Geneva, headed toward the CERN complex west of the city. Night had fallen, and lights glinted in the lake. “Waiting for science to catch up. Waiting for the blood heir we needed, which was you. And waiting for generations of our ideological followers to graduate with physics degrees and infiltrate the subatomic fraternity. Yes, we have allies! Not just scientists but guards, administrators, public relations personnel, science writers, mechanics, custodians, and suppliers. For half a century I’ve been constructing a web of loyalists, a mafia if you will, who have been working toward this day. The Large Hadron Collider itself has been a project twenty years in the making.”
“You’re claiming that Nazis built the supercollider?”
“No. A few who helped are National Socialists or, in more contemporary terms, conservative visionaries. And our broader Fellowship plans to use it, to borrow it. Our members extend to the very highest ranks of government and finance. Think about it: Why are the world’s organizations spending more than six billion dollars to slap protons together? Six thousand million dollars? They raised this for a science project? Yes, many of those involved naively believe the supercollider is for pure science. In their ignorance they are our most valuable allies. The American physicist Leon Lederman used the term God Particle to explain the search for the Higgs boson, a property that could explain why matter exists at all. Scientists are very clever, and they have succeeded in capturing the public’s imagination.”
“But you’re smarter than all of them,” Rominy said sarcastically.
He smiled. “But governments and business want more out of this underground cathedral we’ve constructed. They want power for their investment. And so we promised; if they built it we would deliver magic of a kind never seen before, and turn the balance of power on its head. Northern Europe will regain its rightful role as ruler of the world. Those bureaucrats who have backed construction and development think the secret benefits will be shared, yielding discovery that will remake economies and technology. They envision an era of unparalleled prosperity. But those closest to me know that the mysteries of Shambhala must not be shared, that democracy is a Jewish idea that poisons society, and that these discoveries are by rightful bloodline the inheritance of the Aryan, governed by National Socialism, and will be used to establish our reign on earth. If you want to call that Nazism, so be it.”