And with that something leaped with her thoughts to the helium tank, like a subatomic particle jumping from one point to another with no intervening travel.
There was an explosion, a corona of sparks, and electricity arced into a mini-sun that dazzled her. The tank blew apart.
Air flashed into snow.
The staff hurt! It kicked her hand and arm so hard that she lost her grip and flew backward. As if with a mind of its own, the staff recoiled in the other direction, toward Barrow and the haze rushing from the pipes. Rominy fell to the floor and skidded, simultaneously fearing his gun, the sparks, the cold, and the vast energies she’d glimpsed. She watched, horrified, as the staff came near him. But, no, he’d been paralyzed by the burst of helium as the liquid flashed to gas, and obscured by the bits of ice suddenly filling the wickedly frigid air, every droplet of water vapor in the tunnel having instantly turned to ice. Liquid helium with a temperature at nearly absolute zero erupted from the broken tank and turned to a fog that rolled along the ceiling.
Rominy crawled in terror, trying to hold her breath. The cold punched her, puffing past, so empty that her lungs ached. But at floor level she could gasp a feeble breath. She looked back to watch as the shaft fell through the fog of expanding helium.
Thirty feet away, Jake was looking at her in disbelief. The helium had displaced the oxygen in the air and all he could suck into his lungs was frigid gas. There was nothing he could breathe. His eyes were wide and desperate. His hands had hooked into claws, instantly frostbitten. His joints had gone rigid.
His lungs flash froze and cracked.
It was as if he’d become a statue, a man turned to stone.
And then the staff of Shambhala, its light gone now since Rominy’s explosive thought, fell through the freezing fog and turned brittle. When it hit the concrete floor, it shattered.
The rod disintegrated into a thousand pieces of dusty glass.
Jake toppled, his eyes wide and sorrowful.
And the mist swirled on, snow falling, walls coated with frost. Rominy was covered with rime, too. She slithered on her belly to get away.
There was a box ahead with an oxygen mask.
More alarms were going off, and there were shouts. Then she reached, grabbed rubber, and pulled it to her face. She shuddered from the icy envelopment.
And blacked out.
56
Geneva, Switzerland
October 17, Present Day
The Cantonal Hospital of the University of Geneva kept Rominy and Sam apart for two weeks. She healed from cold burns and bruises, and he battled for his life. Tests were run, questions asked. Police, American embassy personnel, officials from CERN, and physicists all interviewed her, some coaxing, some cruel, some sympathetic, and all suspicious. The neo-Nazis had apparently died or disappeared. So, officials asked, what were they after? Why had they taken over a particle accelerator? How had they taken over?
Rominy put the same questions back to her interrogators.
She trusted no one anymore. We are the police. She told the authorities that she and Sam were dumb tourists who’d stumbled onto a group of fanatics at Wewelsburg Castle while trying to poke about the SS shrine after hours. It had been a foolish lark that resulted in being taken hostage. Sam had gotten away and helped rescue her. There hadn’t been time to call the police, so he’d heroically started a fire and nearly died fighting her captor.
“And how did you and Mr. Mackenzie meet, miss?”
“In Tibet. He was a guide. We hit it off.”
“Chinese records show you had permits to go toward the Kunlun Mountains. That’s a very unusual destination at the beginning of autumn.”
“It was silly. We never got there.”
“But you were with another gentleman, a Mr. Barrow? Traveling under a false passport as Mr. and Mrs. Anderson?”
“He was in a hurry to get to China. Jake and I broke up.”
“And what became of Mr. Barrow?”
“I have no idea.”
“And you turned to Mr. Mackenzie?”
“As a friend. The Tibetan tourist season was ending. We decided Europe would be restful.” She laughed, and then coughed. The damage to her lungs would heal with time, doctors said.
“Was Sam Mackenzie your lover?”
“That’s a rather personal question, isn’t it?”
“He seemed unusually motivated to rescue you.”
“We rescued each other.”
“We’re just trying to understand, Ms. Pickett.”
“Am I under arrest or something?”
“No.”
“Then I think I’ll keep my love life to myself.”
Once she’d woken in the hospital she realized no one would tell her the entirety of what had happened at the supercollider or who the conspirators were. They didn’t want the world to know Nazis had invaded a scientific temple. They didn’t want to reveal-or perhaps they didn’t know-what The Fellowship was after.
So she began to piece together where she was and what had happened from memory, comments from her interrogators, and snippets of news, while guarding what she remembered like a Chinese gold coin. How could she be certain what side anybody was on?
There was another reason for being coy: she was tired of this madness and simply wanted to disappear, as Beth Calloway had disappeared three generations before. The helium breach? No idea how it occurred. The frozen corpse? No idea who the victim was; she’d been fleeing the chaos when a man appeared and an explosion occurred. The oddly aged old man cut almost in two by a beam of subatomic protons before the collider shut down? Another Nazi nut, she guessed. He’d certainly looked strange.
Her own presence at CERN?
“They said I’d be a bargaining chip in case they got cornered. I don’t remember much else. I was terrified and confused.” That was true enough.
“You have a nasty scar on the palm of your hand.”
“A pocket-knife accident. We were camping in Tibet.”
And the glassy staff fragments on the tunnel floor? Intriguingly, no one mentioned them. She didn’t either. But she wondered if somewhere, somehow, laboratory tests were being done.
Or if some janitor had swept them into a dustbin, sending the secret texture of the universe to a landfill.
Would authorities eventually find the same old records on her family that Jake Barrow had? Would somebody, someday, come after her again?
Would she live in fear the rest of her life?
Rominy had seen a brief press report in the International Herald Tribune. GENEVA-Attempts by the European Nuclear Agency, or CERN, to reach full-power operation of its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) here were dealt a serious setback Tuesday when an electrical arc from a faulty bus bar broke a tank of liquid helium. The accident killed eleven CERN employees and will likely shut down the facility for months, if not longer. “Repairs could take a full year,” said Franklin Rutherford, the American operations manager for the international consortium operating the machine. “The damage is quite extensive and we want to make sure we identify the causes so there won’t be a repeat of this terrible industrial tragedy. As you can imagine, it’s been quite stressful for all of us at CERN.” A faulty connection in superconducting magnets caused a similar delay at the LHC in late 2008. Asked if there was a fundamental design flaw in the supercollider, Rutherford replied, “I think we’ve just had a run of bad luck. These are very complex machines, and every collider has start-up pains.” Witnesses said there was a surface explosion at the LHC and even reports of gunfire, but Rutherford said laymen had mistaken “an auto accident and a mechanical issue for something more dramatic. I’m afraid we’ve just had a problem with our plumbing. After a thorough safety review, we still expect to reach our goal of 7 trillion electron volts sometime next year.” The 27-kilometer supercollider, largest in the world, uses such energies to break apart subatomic particles. Scientists hope to learn the answers to such fundamental questions as how the universe was created and why matter exists at all.