The car’s front end had accordioned, steam erupting, but nothing else had happened yet. Sam ran as close as he dared, snapped a highway flare to light it, and threw. Then he dashed away.
Night flashed into day. A fireball erupted skyward, pieces of tank and car arcing outward like meteors. Then another explosion, and another. He could feel the heat and punches of air.
Wow, better than the Fourth of July.
Sam ducked into the shadows. The swarm of men outside the hangarlike building had broken and were running toward the fire he’d set, shouting in German and French and waving guns.
In the distance he could hear sirens. The concussions from the explosions had set off car alarms.
“Well, it’s a start.”
He glanced about and spied a utility pipe grating. Lifting it, he saw metal rungs. He jammed the pack behind them for temporary safekeeping. Then he trotted in the shadows toward his goal.
“I’m coming, Rominy.”
There was still a sprawl of cars and vans around the entrance but most of the Nazi goons, if that’s what they were, had been drawn off to investigate. Two remained at the door, holding wicked-looking rifles. Sam didn’t hesitate; if he did, his nerve would fail him. He knew something awful was about to happen to the young woman he’d come to like so much. Sam had Otto’s automatic tucked in the small of his back and a second or two of surprise. He walked forward like he belonged. The men raised their guns.
“Raeder?” Sam demanded.
They hesitated, one giving a nod inside and then thinking better of it.
Triple bingo.
The Nazi bastard was here all right, which meant Sam’s spectacular arson and Wewelsburg killing just might be justifiable to the authorities, in the unlikely event slacker Mackenzie survived this night. He strode for the door, trying to look as important as the VIPs waved through the velvet rope at a nightclub, rather than the cheap Third World tourist guide he was. Attitude, man.
The goons hesitated, and Sam guessed these weren’t hired paramilitary but just weekend Nazis told to keep watch while the big dogs worked inside. They shouted some German crap.
“Stoppen. Wer sind sie?”
So he pulled the pistol and shot one of them in the leg. Necessity made you one motherfucker of invention, didn’t it? The man yelped in surprise and fell, writhing. Before the other could lift his assault rifle Sam was on top of him, his barrel pressed against the man’s left eye. “Droppen, you Nazi dick. I’m tired of this shit.” As the man’s gun fell he shoved him through the door, slamming and locking it behind them. “ Schnell, schnell,” he ordered, pushing the man down a short corridor. “Yeah, I’ve seen the war movies.”
A fusillade of shots stuttered through the door he’d just locked. The wounded man didn’t care for being wounded, apparently, and was venting his frustration. The bullet holes popped through the metal like expressions of surprise.
That was okay. The noise would bring more police.
There was another door with a keypad next to it. “Open it!”
His prisoner shook his head, his courage back after the surprise attack.
So Sam shot him in the foot.
He yelled and hopped, Sam grabbing his shoulder and pistol-whipping his face. “Open it!” he screamed. He shook his gun. “Or I kill you! Verstehen? ” Yeah, he understood.
Shaking, the guard tapped some numbers. Nothing happened.
Sam lifted his pistol to the man’s temple. “One.”
The man was sweating, but frozen.
“Two…” Surely this bastard knew how to count to three in English? “Three is the last word you’re going to hear, Fritz.” Nothing. “Thre…” He tightened on the trigger.
The guard lurched forward, blood gushing from his foot, mouth bruised, and put his eye up against some kind of reader. Now there were shouts outside and more shots. With a bang, the outer lock disintegrated. Damn. The Nazi rescue posse had arrived. They’d probably gotten tired of watching his car burn.
But now the door Sam needed to get through was opening.
He brought down his pistol as heavily as he could on the guard’s head, and with a crack the sentry went down. Then the American stepped through and the door slid shut. As he did so he could see men bursting through the outer entrance and spying him. They raised their guns.
Sam’s door hissed to a close just as another volley of bullets hit it. None penetrated.
“Good Swiss engineering.” Sam shot a keypad on his side, hoping that would disable the opening mechanism, and looked around. There was an elevator-a box to be trapped in, he feared-and flights of stairs.
Sam started down the stairs.
54
Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland
October 4, Present Day
You’re too young to fully understand the intellectual marathon I required to get to this point,” Raeder said to Rominy. He regarded her with disappointment. “You’re shaking.”
“Please don’t hurt me.”
“I’m going to pleasure you. You’ll see. Pain is exquisite.”
What could she use as a weapon? Everything was bolted, wired, fused. There were danger signs and voltage warnings.
“When we found Shambhala,” Raeder went on, “it had a machine much like this one, but we were like cavemen contemplating a computer. We had no idea, really, what it was for, except that it seemed capable of energizing quite marvelous staffs. Then a blizzard of inventions. Radar. Television. Atomic bombs. Microwave ovens. Laser disks. And more than these toys, this incredible creation story being spun out by physicists. A big bang. A divorce between energy and matter. Thirteen billion years of galactic evolution. And even a microscopic wonderland of particles too tiny to ever see, which didn’t even seem to follow the laws of nature. Or rather, we had the laws all wrong at the most fundamental level. Moreover, new kinds of energy and matter we can’t even detect that nonetheless dominate the universe. I began to understand what had infused and powered me, and had infused and powered Shambhala. The legends of the Vril Society were based on truth! So I began to seek out key young physicists who wanted to do more than just watch protons collide. Men and women with ambition. Vision. A sense of history.”
“German scientists.”
“Some, but not all.”
“People of ruthless greed.”
“The ideals of National Socialism have universal appeal.”
“Nobody told you that you look embalmed?”
Some color actually came into his cheeks. “Invigorated, given my age. Potent, as you’ll see.”
She closed her eyes. “That’s the last thing I want to see.”
“Eventually I realized that Shambhala had been a supercollider. We began to theorize the staff’s properties. We didn’t have one to study, and no technology to make it, but bright young men could calculate a molecular structure that might carry messages from the string realm and its curled dimensions to our own. Eventually we realized that the energy levels achieved by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN might be enough, if properly diverted, to activate a dark energy flow, if it ran at full power. What we needed was an actual staff, and to get that we needed an actual heir. And if you helped us, how to reward you? By making you mother of the new master race.”
“I don’t want to be the mother of your damn race! Your stupid lectures are not seductive!”
The whine was growing louder. “It’s destiny, Rominy. Accept your fate. We’re locked together by blood.” He raised his pistol to aim at her face, his arm rock steady. “There will be a flash of illuminating light such as you’ve never felt before, and it will irradiate every cell in your body. Do not fear. It will only purify, not kill.”
“Will it hurt?” Her voice broke, and she was struggling not to cry.
“Yes.”
Lights flickered. The sound of the machines kept rising, like a building hurricane. Inside its fascist cage, the staff of Shambhala began to glow.