The story suited Rominy. The last thing she wanted was a press conference or paparazzi. She was alive and Sam was supposedly alive, and Jake and Raeder were dead. That was science miracle enough.
The neo-Nazis had disappeared like helium mist. For the first few nights she had nightmares of them peering in her hospital window, like the skinhead Otto Nietzel. But no, not a whisper, not an arrest, not a threat. No story of a dead skinhead at Wewelsburg Castle. Even the police seemed reluctant to probe too deeply into the disruption.
We are the police.
When she asked to see Sam, they put her off. “When he’s better, we will discuss a visit,” doctors told her.
And, “Before we can release you, we need more tests.”
They took blood samples several times. Her arms and fingers ached from the punctures.
There was an unsettling blankness about some of the physicians who looked at her, seeing her without seeing her. She was an isolated specimen: a private room, a door that automatically locked with its latch on the corridor side, and no word from America. There was no telephone. Television was set to a single French entertainment channel she asked be shut off.
Surely she wasn’t a prisoner. Was she? “Where are my clothes?”
“We have them in storage.”
“Where’s the locker?”
“In a safe place.”
“Did you find my money or passport?”
“Your hospital bills are being covered. Rest, please.”
From her bed she could look out at autumn leaves blowing down from Geneva’s trees, with the gray lake beyond. She waited for release, but none came. She waited for information, but that didn’t come either.
“Rest, rest. Tomorrow, we take more blood.”
She felt groggy. Were they drugging her?
Why was she always waiting for someone else to act?
She waited for Sam.
“He is recuperating.”
One of the nurses carried a smartphone in her white coat pocket, pink as lipstick. Rominy finally complained of fever, the woman leaned in to take her temperature, and the phone slipped into Rominy’s slyly reaching hand, slick and palm-sized. She tucked it under a blanket.
The nurse read the digital readout, touched Rominy’s forehead, and grunted. “No fever.” She peered at her ward suspiciously, as if impatient with malingerers.
Rominy shrugged. “Some aspirin, s’il vous plait?”
“Oui.” The reply was grumpy. The nurse strode off, rubber soles squeaking.
The hospital was listed on the nurse’s “favorites” list on the cell phone. Rominy dialed, asked for the nurses’ station, and began, “Do you speak English?”
“Oui. Yes.”
“Melissa Jenkins here, from the American embassy. I have some papers for patient Sam Mackenzie but he’s not on the floor where I thought. Young American?”
“A minute.” Rustle of papers. “Five-one-seven. Is not correct?”
“Ah, I had it wrong. Merci. ” She hung up and deleted the record of the call.
The nurse came back with aspirin. “Have you seen my cell phone?”
Rominy shook her head. “Did it fall out?”
The nurse found the device under a stainless trolley. While she bent to retrieve it, Rominy tore several pages from her lab-slip tablet. The nurse straightened to glare at her patient, but the American was innocently taking aspirin. When the woman pocketed her phone and went out, Rominy jumped from the bed and caught the door just before it closed. She inserted the paper she’d stolen in the jamb, preventing the latch from locking.
Later that night, hospital sounds a murmur, machines beeping, she slid out of bed, opened the door, checked that no one was watching, slipped into the corridor, and padded furtively down the hallway, her gown held tight around her. Peeking in rooms, she found a deserted nurses’ changing station and pilfered a uniform, bundling her hospital gown with its clipped identity tag under her arm.
After killing her former lover with liquid helium, confiscating clothes seemed a minor sin.
She changed into the white belted dress in a restroom stall, ascended an elevator, and took a man’s clothes from a drugged and sleeping patient, lifting them from his closet. Those would be for Sam.
Then she set out to find Mackenzie. Maybe it was time for her to rescue him.
57
Geneva, Switzerland
October 18, Present Day
Sam was still bedridden but awake at two A.M., leaner and better-looking for it. His face had matured in a way that flattered him. He looked at her with surprised delight when she slipped in.
“Rominy! Didn’t have the sense to ditch me, girl?” He was propped up on pillows, watching all-night French TV with the sound off.
“Don’t you sleep?”
“That’s all I’ve done for two weeks.”
She glanced at the television. “How can you tell what’s going on?”
“I just wait for the ads. They’re sexier than ours.”
“So you are feeling better.”
“Oh yeah. I couldn’t feel any worse, not after getting a jolt that’s the equivalent of grasping a power line.” Then he squinted at her nurse’s garb. “What the hell?”
She put her fingers to her lips. “I’m getting us out of here.”
“Why?”
“I’m tired of being poked. I don’t trust them.”
He grasped her hand, tight as a knot. “Me neither. They ask a million questions and don’t answer a one.”
“Are you well enough to move?”
“Healthier than Kurt Raeder.”
“You got him, Sam, when you broke that pipe.”
“I’m told the proton beam is directed by magnets. When I knocked some askew, the beam went wide just long enough to slice the bastard. It was like a microscopic knife cutting through his chest. His heart exploded.”
“The beam only persisted one second before a circuit blew.”
“Best second of my life.”
“Do you feel guilty?”
“Are you kidding? The guy lived way past a hundred. I should be so lucky.”
She shook her head. “Did you know Raeder was planning to have sex with me?”
“You’re joking.”
“He also told me DNA proved I’m his great-granddaughter.”
“What!”
“He raped Keyuri way back in 1938. It wasn’t Hood. It was Raeder who made the baby.”
“Oh, Rominy. Man, I’m sorry. This is sick. Those guys were animals. And Jake, what a dirtbag. We’re not all like that, trust me.”
She sat on his bed. “I know guys aren’t all like that, Sam. But I don’t think my grocery aisle method works very well.”
“Your what?”
“I’ll explain someday. I just wish it hadn’t gone so far with Jake.”
“I heard you ended that relationship rather emphatically as well.”
“Yes.” She looked sad. “I don’t regret it… but it’s not easy to kill someone, Sam.”
“Just remember, it would have been easy for him to kill you.”
She nodded, but she wondered if that was true. She hoped not, even after all that had happened. Emotions don’t conveniently evaporate, they just burn holes and leave scars.
He raised an eyebrow. “Well, are we still friends?”
“Sam, you almost died saving my life.”
“I just half saved it. You finished off Barrow.”
“And the staff shattered. Odd that no one mentions it.”
“Not odd. Predictable. You can bet there’s a lot they’re not telling us, just like we’re not telling them. You don’t take over a seventeen-mile doughnut without a lot of inside help. You don’t get away with having nothing in the media unless the big dogs have all pledged not to bark. Can you spell ‘conspiracy’?”
“They don’t believe me any more than I believe them.”
“Then that’s it.” He took her other hand. “Over. Fini. Kaput. We beat the bad guys, Rominy, at least the ones we could identify. End of story, for us. The cops say they can’t find any surviving neo-Nazis. Yeah, right. The physicists claim everyone on their team is clean. It’s like the whole thing never happened.”