“Are you joking?” Not with Barrow, but with him?
“It’s a necessary step for the future the Fuhrer dreamed of.”
“You want me to have sex with you? My God, you’re a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty years old!”
“Which doesn’t matter. You’ll see.”
“It’s just sex, Rominy,” Jake added. “Don’t put so much meaning into it.”
“It sure as hell had no meaning to you, did it?”
He shrugged. “I enjoyed it well enough.”
“God, why don’t you just shoot me?”
“I’m afraid that isn’t part of the plan,” Jake said. “You’re to be infused with the light as Kurt was at Shambhala, and then bred. No different than on the farm.”
“No! This is crazy! Look at him, he’s hideous! And I’m no Aryan!” She was desperate. “You said yourself I’m part Tibetan and who knows what else. I’m the wrong blood! You’ve got the wrong woman!”
“No we don’t,” Raeder said calmly.
“How do you know that?”
“Because Jakob did all the DNA tests back in the United States. You’re precisely who we thought you are.”
She was sweating. The younger man had stood closer, and she longingly eyed his pistol. But then he gave it to Raeder and backed away.
“I’ll wait in the control room,” he said. “Himmler’s dream, Kurt.”
The older man nodded. “Himmler’s dream.” He watched Barrow retreat. She heard the click of a door closing. “Now you learn who you really are.”
“Who?” she asked. “Who am I, Raeder?”
“You’re my descendant, Rominy.”
Now there was a roaring in her ears. “What?”
“Benjamin Hood wasn’t your great-grandfather. I was.”
She looked at him in horror.
“I possessed Keyuri Lin on the way to Shambhala. She insisted on sex with Hood, but it was my child she had in the nunnery. That’s why she tried to kill it. But Fate intervened, in the person of Beth Calloway. It was my DNA that Jakob brought to have tested in the United States with yours to prove the match to the bankers, not that from Hood’s finger. But you and I are separated by enough generations. And now we, you and I, are going to have a child-a super-child, a master child-together.”
His eyes were bright, his skin cracked, his grin a death’s-head grimace. “One of the powers of Vril is that my sexual appetite hasn’t slackened, it’s increased.” He took a small leather folder from the breast pocket of his suit. “So have my tastes.” He flipped it open.
It held an array of bright, shiny surgical instruments, things to cut and pinch.
The whine of the machine climbed to a shriek, matching her scream.
53
Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland
October 4, Present Day
Sam had gotten the Beamer up to 200 kilometers an hour, which he calculated was somewhere north of 125 mph, faster than he’d ever driven. It was gray German autumn, the autobahn his crowded racetrack, and he’d weaved past speeding trucks as if they were standing still. The astonishing thing was that occasionally an Audi or Lotus kept pace with him. What a crazy country. He was gambling where they’d taken Rominy and hoped he got there before the Nazis found skewered Otto back in Wewelsburg, or the German police came after him with too many questions. It was dark by the time he got to Switzerland and Geneva, where he promptly got lost because he was too hurried to ask directions. That’s dude thinking, dude. He finally got straight-everybody seemed to speak some English-and now it was the middle of the night as he drove more cautiously toward CERN headquarters. He was looking for something out of the ordinary and hoped to find Rominy in the middle of it.
There was a weird globe thingy that looked like salvage from a world’s fair, and a sprawl of office buildings in generic business-park blah. Roads, parking lots, museum signs, the whole nine yards. So he was at one point in a seventeen-mile underground loop he couldn’t even see…
How was he ever going to find Rominy?
And then there was a cluster of cars and men and bobbing flashlights by some boxy building that looked about as elegant as an airplane hangar. So what was a cluster of men who looked like they were carrying assault rifles doing in the middle of the night in a science park?
He slowed. Had Rominy left a sign as he’d asked?
And then he saw it, a scrap that would be taken for insignificant garbage at any other time. It was the white of a khata scarf, the scrap Beth Calloway had used in a Cascades cabin to write a code in invisible ink.
Rominy had dropped it.
Bingo. “Mackenzie, you’re not such a bad guide after all,” he murmured.
Yep, why were the world’s top physicists hanging out in a parking lot in the wee hours of the morning unless they were up to some Nazi-no-good? So all he had to do was…
What? He had Otto’s gun but it was twenty to one, at least. How many skinhead sympathizers were there in the world, anyway? What he really needed was a bazooka, or a battery of Hawk missiles, or the ability to call in an airstrike, but he’d left his Pentagon calling card at home. While the Good Ol’ USA would have had a neon reader board thirty feet high screaming “Guns!” and a cash register line of stubble-head goobers who looked like they shouldn’t be licensed to handle screwdrivers, everything in Europe was very low-key pacifist and urban cool. Where did you get your hands on an RPG launcher when you needed one? Especially on a continent where every town looked as dandy as Disneyland?
He had to get inside and poke around for Rominy. Which meant getting in the door, which meant distracting the Nazi goons, which meant…
He let his car cruise by the cluster of crazies. They eyed him like an L.A. street gang but didn’t budge. Then buildings shielded him from view, and he looked around.
Which meant driving full-tilt into something that said Verboten and was decorated with skull and crossbones. Like those tanks behind a cyclone fence next to what looked to be some kind of laboratory.
“Double bingo.”
He needed noise. There couldn’t be that many people who’d signed on with that lunatic Raeder, which meant the more folks Sam could pull into ground zero, the more likely someone in authority would start asking the bad guys some awkward questions. And if Otto’s murderous intentions were any indication, Sam Mackenzie needed to hurry.
Plan One: suicide charge into a tank farm and hope the airbag worked and he was conscious enough to crawl out before he fried.
Bad plan.
So how about Plan Two? He parked in the shadows and popped the BMW’s trunk. He took his backpack, stuffed Rominy’s passport and cash with his own belongings, and slung it on his back. There was an emergency kit inside with road flares. There was also a doughnut spare tire, just the size for what he had in mind.
He drove the BMW to within a hundred yards of the cluster of tanks, aimed the wheels, and used the jumper cables in the rental trunk to clamp the steering wheel to the passenger door handle. That would keep his new robot car on course, he hoped. The Beamer was still rumbling, unaware of its impending sacrifice. Parking brake on. He cradled the spare tire, took it to the front seat, and leaned in.
“The rental company is going to be very, very pissed,” he whispered to himself.
He jammed the spare forward under the dash on top of the gas pedal, where it stuck, snug as a cork.
The engine screamed. Parking brake off. And as Sam sprang backward, the car howled, that beautiful Bavarian whine, and shot forward.
It was his very own cruise missile. The Beamer accelerated like a drag racer, tires smoking, and hit freeway speeds at the collision point. There was tragic beauty in how it ran straight and true. The coupe smashed through the fence and plowed into the tanks, knocking them sideways. The bang of the collision echoed in the peaceful night air, and he could see the white of the Beamer’s airbags deployed as a building alarm began to sound. There was a gush, and the air smelled like propane.