Blood of the Reich (36 page)

“A
forger
? Jake, we’re going to go to prison.”

“Not if you hang cool.” He also had two simple gold wedding bands. “I got
them
from a pawn shop and carry them in my car. Every once in a while it helps to look married when I’m on assignment.”

“What kind of assignment?”

“When I’m focusing and don’t want to flirt. It’s just less distraction.”

That seemed unlikely. “You need two?”

“They came as a pair—probably an estate sale—and I put one on a photographer once when we were nosing around in a conservative hamlet in the Idaho panhandle, getting background on a religious sect. It relaxed a few sources still living in the nineteenth century.”

“So long as your photographer was a woman.”

He laughed. “Right! And Caroline made me swear not to tell the newsroom. So keep a lid on. I still kid her about it, though.”

The marriage charade struck Rominy as almost sacrilegious, but they couldn’t afford questions at the airport. It was weird having him hand her the ring, fraudulent and yet touching.

“Just for practice,” Jake said. He actually blushed, which she liked.

Her heart hammered a little as she slipped the ring on.

At the ticket counter he paid in cash, which cost them an extra five minutes while the agent double-checked the no-fly list. And, yes, they only had carry-ons. “I won’t pay those new baggage fees,” Jake told the agent. “You guys are air pirates.”

“Business class doesn’t charge for luggage, sir.”

“It’s the principle.”

Rominy expected her to trip an alarm for an air marshal, but the agent only gave a sweet smile. “Have a pleasant flight, sir.”

In fact, Rominy expected arrest at any moment for arson, kidnapping, auto theft, or identity fraud, but none materialized. Instead, as she was trying to buy some emergency underwear in the Seattle concourse, Jake nudged her and pointed to four shaven-headed young men at a pub table, disturbingly attired in bomber jackets, combat boots, and tattoos. One of them kept glancing her way. Were they watching? So they hastily moved on, and she’d postponed her shopping until the two-hour layover in Los Angeles, buying jeans, sweater, and parka. From there they’d caught the trans-Pacific flight to Shanghai and then Chengdu, China, from which they’d fly to Lhasa.

“What is it with skinheads, anyway?” she asked as they waited to board. “Why do they want to intimidate people?”

“They just want to belong. That’s the basis of all gangs, armies, and nations. The Nazi stuff is rebellious enough to get a rise out of people, which is an improvement if you’ve been poor and ignored your whole life. And there’s a philosophy behind it, an idealism.”

“Being a Nazi?”

“Look, the Nazis lost and didn’t get to write history. Hitler told his followers to stick up for their own. That’s what skinheads believe, too. So do Jews, blacks, women. Everyone’s got a tribe, except white guys.”

“Jake, they didn’t stick up for their own. They tried to conquer the world.”

“It spiraled out of control. But in the beginning the key Nazi philosophers were reformers who believed in self-improvement, discipline, classic art, and bringing back some of the old beliefs in nature and environment. People voted for them! Did you know the SS had a research division? That’s why the Nazis were sent to Tibet. Heinrich Himmler wanted to build a kind of Vatican for the SS, a Camelot or a Valhalla, at an old castle called Wewelsburg. Just like Hitler wanted to make his hometown of Linz the art center of the world. I’m not saying they were right, but it didn’t start with panzer divisions and death camps.”

“I think it
did
start with that. I think it was embedded in what they stood for from the very beginning.”

“And I think it got twisted, which is more believable than a nation deciding to get evil for a dozen years and then get good again.”

She shook her head. This was like going on a blind date and learning your liberal agnosticism had been paired with a supply-side creationist. Just what
were
his beliefs? “I’ve heard of being open-minded, but this is ridiculous. And white guys are
the
tribe.”

“It’s not ridiculous. I’m a reporter, and I’m trained to look at both sides. Hey, I’m the one who saved you from the skinheads. I’m on
your
side. But I try to understand the other side, so I can write about them.”

“What I understand is that they blew up my car.”

“Which is why we’re moving on.”

It
did
feel reassuring to get away from Seattle, where all this madness had started. So did a Bloody Mary on the first flight, two martinis at LAX, and the welcoming champagne in business class. She’d fallen asleep soon after they flew over open water, and woke up somewhere mid-Pacific. It was dark, she was hungry, and Jake had saved her a bag of peanuts.

“Don’t worry, there’s another meal in an hour or two.”

She felt groggy and uncertain. The intimacy she’d shared with Jake in the mountain cabin had been overwhelmed by the roller-coaster terror of falling into the mine and then careening downhill from madwoman Delphina Clarkson and the Mohawk bow hunter. Then sending the cryptic e-mails from the airport, the new clothes paid for from the stash of cash, and flinging herself into the void. Had the destruction of her MINI Cooper really been less than two days ago? Instead of her old life they had two backpacks, more than $21,000 in cash, a swollen bank account, a bag of peanuts, and moldy seventy-year-old documents taken from a skeleton.

“Good sleep?” Jake asked, brisk as a butler. He’d bought some toiletries and looked washed, combed, and competent, though he’d left the two-day stubble for that fashionable bad-boy look that, dammit, did look good on his strong jaw. Well, she was alive, richer, and an aisle curtain snobbishly separated her from the coach-class proletariat she’d long been accustomed to. One day at a time, Rominy. Maybe Jake was the answer she’d been waiting for. At least there were no skinheads in business class.

“I need some aspirin, actually.”

“Got ’em. Picked up a vial at the airport newsstand.”

He’d given her sunglasses and a sun hat to wear at SeaTac, where she was already old news in the twenty-four-hour cycle but where her picture popped up once on airport TVs. She’d kept her head buried in
People
magazine, reading about celebrity calamities that seemed ridiculously trivial compared to her own. No one had looked at her with even a flicker of recognition.

Now she was stateless, groundless, history-less, suspended in midair. “Water,” she ordered from a flight attendant. “And a gin and tonic.” Maybe adventure would make her an alcoholic.

“I waited until you woke up to dig out the documents,” Barrow said. “They’re really more yours than mine, though I think they’re going to show us where to go in Tibet. I think we’re thousands of miles ahead of any pursuit now, Rominy.”

“If we get through Chinese customs.”

“You’re a missing person, not a fugitive. You won’t show up on Chinese computers.”

“What about you, Jake? What have you told your editors?”

“That I’m on the biggest story of my life and I’ll be out of touch. They cut me slack because I’m good. It’s only been a couple of days. By the time they start wondering about my clock hours, I’ll have the biggest scoop of the year and they’ll be drooling Pulitzer.”

“I’m the biggest scoop of the year?”

“No, Shambhala is.”

“Sham . . . what?”

“Actually, I did peek a little. That’s what Great-grandpa was after, Rominy—Shambhala. A mythical kingdom in Tibet, a real-life predecessor to Shangri-la.”

“How many Bloody Marys have
you
had?”

“The Nazis were after it, too, led by a man named Kurt Raeder. Ben Hood was in some kind of race for new powers, like the atom bomb. Captain America against Hitler. And I think they found it, or found
something
, according to this stuff. Maybe that’s what agent Duncan Hale was after, too. Think about it: end of the war. Atomic bombings. Soviets in Berlin. The smart ones see a new arms race. And so Mr. Hale gets wind that the reclusive Mr. Hood just might have found something that could tip the balance of power. He comes out to Washington State, tracks Great-grandpa down, snatches the secret papers, but then dies in that mine. Maybe Hood trapped him with a cave-in.”

“But why wouldn’t Great-grandpa share it? It’s his country, after all.”

“I don’t know. Why didn’t he go back to New York? Why didn’t he claim his family fortune? Why didn’t anybody know he was dead for months? We’re a team. We’re going to learn the answers.”

She sighed. “All right. We’d better start reading.”

The papers were not in order. There was a journal of fragmentary entries, and a collection of sketches, maps, random notes, and coordinates. There was a crude map of a valley in a bowl of mountains and a drawing of a waterfall. There were clippings and torn textbook pages on amps, volts, and equations she couldn’t make sense of, with graphs and charts. Hood had a fine, feathery hand, but she didn’t see how Duncan Hale or anyone else could make sense of this without her great-grandfather’s verbal explanation. There were sketches of some kind of machine, with things that looked like pipes, boilers, and stacks, but no indication of what it was for or how it worked. It was so incoherent that the notion he’d become eccentric at best, crazy at worst, seemed reasonable. She’d bought $5,000 in airline tickets based on
this
?

“I don’t know, Jake. This seems pretty vague.”

“It gives us a place to go to. No one’s had these coordinates, Rominy.”

“Coordinates to
what
? A mythical utopia? A waterfall?”

“To this, actually.” He pulled out one of the diagrams. She’d glanced at it before, but it had meant nothing to her—just a narrow ring, a thin doughnut. It could be a circular plaza, the orbit of some planet, or someone’s design for a wedding band.

“Which is?”

“It looks like an ancient design for a cyclotron.”

“What in the world is a cyclotron?”

“An atom smasher.” He smiled, as if his Super Bowl bet had just paid off.

“Okay, I give up. Why are we flying ten thousand miles for an atom smasher?”

“You know what they are, right?”

“They smash atoms.” She wasn’t about to admit she didn’t care, until now.

“They break them apart so we can see what’s inside.”

“Scientists already have atom smashers.”

“Now
, yes—but this one looks to be hundreds or even thousands of years old. The principle behind them is very modern, very sophisticated: to accelerate atomic particles fast enough to smash them, you push them along with magnets, but it takes a long track to get up to speed, like a long ski jump. In 1929, Berkeley physicist Ernst Lawrence realized that if you could bend the beam, accelerating them in a circle, your track was essentially infinite. They just go around and around, faster and faster. With enough size and power, you could get things up to almost the speed of light.”

“So Shambhala figured this out, hundreds or thousands of years ago.”

“At a time when no one else knew atoms even existed. Imagine that, Rominy: an ancient civilization as sophisticated, or more sophisticated, than our own. There were some primitive attempts at cyclotrons in the 1930s, but we didn’t really get going on them until the 1950s. Yet the Shambhalans, if these diagrams are real, had them when we were in togas or suits of armor.”

She looked back at the diagram. “I’m sure this would thrill Indiana Jones. Why do Nazi skinheads care?”

“Ah. When you take little things apart you understand how they work, and when you understand how they work you can begin to manipulate them. Nuclear weapons are the most obvious example. Once physicists realized that atoms could be split, and that energy is released when that happens, it was a relatively short step to a bomb, even though the details were expensive and complicated.”

“Neo-Nazis want this to make a bomb?” What was she mixed up in?

“Well, the original Nazis, the 1930s Nazis, wanted it to make something more controllable than that. Atom bombs are kind of indiscriminate. It would be nice to have such firepower that could be aimed.”

“If you’re a mad scientist.”

“If you’re trying to defend your country. When I started reading about your great-grandfather I stumbled onto all kinds of theories and legends about Tibet, Heinrich Himmler, and secret expeditions. Yet all of it was just that, stories, until I found you. Then we discovered, together, this satchel of documents. Hood was the guy who was the key, but he died and left clues only for his heirs, who have had a disturbing habit of dying off. Until you.”

Only because he’d saved her life in that Safeway parking lot. “The Nazis killed my grandma and birth mother.”

“Maybe. Maybe buddies of Agent Hale killed them, because the U.S. government wanted this secret covered up. They didn’t know what Hood had hid, so they just discouraged any attempts to find out. Heck, it took me a long time to track you down. That’s why it was so awkward in the grocery store. I didn’t know how to start this conversation. ‘Hi, baby, can I talk to you about Nazis?’ ”