He was obviously mad, but that didn’t mean a cabal of madmen couldn’t wreak havoc. Hadn’t that been the cause of World War II? And out of it had come the atom bomb. And now this?
“But you needed the staff hidden in Shambhala,” she clarified. “This machine wasn’t enough.”
He looked at the window at the dark lake. “Yes. We don’t really understand how the staff worked, or how to duplicate it. But if it can be made to work now, we can begin to study and replicate. Eventually we’ll have legions of staff-wielding Aryans, imposing their will by the force of their thought. They will strum the consciousness that undergirds the universe. We’ll play the cosmic music and reconfigure the world.”
“What did you mean about us becoming the first Shambhalans?”
“That you will be envied by every woman in the world. What we are about, as I explained, is human evolution. We can’t go on as advanced apes armed with atomic bombs and spewing a million tons of carbon a day. We have to evolve, to reach a higher plane. We need to reproduce selectively to accelerate mankind’s biologic destiny. So we’ve been searching for candidates.”
They sped on a boulevard. She saw an airport, hotels, office buildings, and the cozy rectangles of lighted apartment windows, a world of normality that seemed impossibly far away. What quiet domestic life was plodding along there, a pot of tea, a TV show, a book, and the silken warmth of a cat on someone’s lap? Children in their beds. A glass of wine with a loved one. All light-years away.
She’d already tried the handle of the Mercedes. Useless, like the handle of Jake Barrow’s truck. Hadn’t her mother told her never to get in a car with strangers?
How was she going to stop this if Sam didn’t come?
Then they were approaching a sculptured sphere, lit by floodlights, that rose above a lawn like a representation of… what? The earth? The atom? The cosmos? It was rust red. Dried-blood red.
“What the hell does that mean?” she pressed. “Reproduce selectively?”
“That will be explained at the moment of transfiguration. Ah, here we are.”
They were pulling into a parking lot at a complex of large, mostly windowless, blandly boxed research buildings of the kind stamped out all over the world, like pieces of a game of Risk. There was a word on one: Atlas. Hadn’t he held up the cosmos?
“Will you give me your hands please?”
“My hands?”
“Just lift them up.”
Hesitantly she did so, keeping balled in her fist something she’d held tightly as a teddy bear since Wewelsburg. Raeder smoothly reached out and snapped handcuffs on her wrists. “Just so you won’t hurt anything, or yourself. Routine precaution.” Then the sedan doors opened and strong, military hands pulled her out into the chilly air.
Someone snapped something on her ankle.
“A tracking device,” Jake said. “Please don’t try to run. We have dogs and Tasers.”
Yep, that’s quite the boyfriend you picked, Rominy.
She’d felt this way only one time before, on a gurney wheeling down a sterile hospital hallway for removal of her appendix, lights passing overhead like flickering suns, doors hissing open and shutting behind her like portals to hell. She’d been ten, and terribly frightened. Now she felt numbing dread, as she realized that the last weeks had been a long, sickening plummet into an abyss.
“Six billion dollars to find a particle? Absurd,” Raeder said as they walked toward the building. “But six billion dollars to manipulate those particles, and with them the world itself? That’s a bargain. Six billion dollars of taxpayer money to seize power for yourself? To rule? To monopolize? To become unbelievably rich by reducing lesser races to slavery, their natural state? That’s why so many were persuaded to help us. Some with doubts were bribed. Others blackmailed. Any would-be heroes suffered untimely accidents. We’ve been very thorough.”
They stopped at a door. Green-uniformed guards with black berets and belts weighted with equipment were clustered there. One of them stepped forward. “We can only guarantee control of the sector until the morning shift, Reichsfuhrer,” he said, addressing Raeder. “Rennsler is still in the dark, but when he comes to work he’ll mobilize the rest of security against us. After that, it will be on the news and everything will come crashing down.”
The German nodded. “If our calculations are correct, the remaining night will be time enough. Once we demonstrate the staff, they’ll give us time to complete our mission. Key government officials will stand with us. And if not, they cannot stand against us, once we have Vril.”
The man gave a stiff-armed salute. “Fellowship!”
“Fellowship.” They passed inside. As they did, Rominy let the thing she’d held in her hands fall, kicking it against a drainpipe.
A million-to-one shot. But when there was no hope, those were good odds.
The next door was stronger, and here waited a cluster of men who looked like academics. One had the proverbial white jacket, but the others were casual in khakis or jeans. They looked nervous, but none showed any surprise at her handcuffs. White-jacket greeted Raeder and then stepped to a keypad next to the door and typed in a code. Then he put his eye to a small eyepiece above it.
“Retinal scan,” Jake said to Rominy, standing close like he was still her freaking boyfriend. Maybe he thought he still would be, once the master race had established control. She looked away and tried to psychically relay waves of revulsion at him, but if he detected her contempt, he gave no sign.
The door opened and they entered a shaft landing. Stairs led downward into gloom. Next to it was an elevator shaft. Elevator doors opened and a dozen packed in, Rominy squeezed by aspiring Nazi lunatics, her handcuffed hands held humiliatingly in front of her. Men glanced at her curiously and she wanted to spit in their face. Should she make a scene? But what could she do? She was utterly alone, at the spire of a scientific cathedral buried in the bowels of the earth.
The elevator disgorged them just one floor down. Another door, and another retinal scan, and then they passed into a control room, banks of computers and video screens taking up an otherwise bland, off-white windowless space. Industrial carpet, mesh office chairs, laminate counters. The screens showed columns of numbers, graphs, and video camera scenes of tunnels and huge machines. She assumed the videos were showing parts of the supercollider. It looked as colorful as a Tinker Toy.
Then she started. Three bodies lay facedown on the floor against one wall, with a cowl of blood around their heads and neat round holes in the backs of their skulls.
“It was easier to dispose of them than try to persuade them,” the security chief said.
Raeder nodded. “There’s no turning back. We’ll put up a plaque. Sacrifices to human evolution.”
The scientists who had ridden the elevator with them scattered to the screens. Now there was a faint whine as something was started up. A faint odor of oil and ozone. “It will take about an hour to regain full power,” one of the men said.
“Time enough to get the girl into position. Jakob? Rominy? Follow me.”
She hesitated, wondering where best to make a stand, but then the big cop guy stepped menacingly toward her. So she reluctantly followed, but took a moment to turn and stick her tongue out at the security chief, too.