Blood of the Reich

47

Tibet to Germany

September-October, Present Day

T he trek back to Lhasa was daunting, but there was peace in having to do little but walk a very long way. The nuns gave Rominy and Sam thick blankets, barley cakes, and yak butter, a gruesome but nutritious cuisine to keep them alive until they could find help and, eventually, Western food. They spent many miles discussing ideal pizza toppings.

Winter was fast approaching and traffic was infrequent even on the busiest highways, but eventually they’d encounter a vehicle when they returned to a road. In the meantime, the empty immensity was a recess from Nazis. Autumn’s line of white kept creeping down the Kunlun range, but the cold north wind was at their backs and the only mystery was how to put one foot in front of the other. Despite a chest blackened with bruises, Sam took two thirds of the weight without complaint. He was big, strong, angry, and oddly serene about their immediate predicament. But then Tibet had been home to him for two years.

“It’s not a question of if we’ll get help, just when,” he assured her. “I’d rather be lost in Tibet than Nevada. Less loopy.”

They slept together, not for love but for warmth: it was too cold to take clothes off anyway. They had no fuel to make a fire, and no tent for shelter, so they’d find a wadi or outcrop and curl together behind the windbreak, burrowed beneath blankets. She knew he wasn’t ignorant of the fact she was a woman-sometimes he moved restlessly as they nested, and at other times he looked at her with shy longing-but they were both filthy and cold, with no energy for sex and no reason yet for romantic affection. She appreciated him not talking about it. They huddled like fox kits, and when she woke up shivering he’d wrap her in his big arms and hug her until she stopped.

“Do you know all that I’ve got left of my old life?” she said one morning, after lying on her belly like an animal to drink from an icy pool.

“A Social Security number?”

She reached into a pocket inside her parka. “I took this from my great-grandfather’s cabin. It’s a Tibetan scarf he was given and somebody-Beth Calloway, I guess-wrote a code on it so we’d find an old mine. That’s it. That’s my ancestry. No journal, no satchel of maps, no car, no job.”

“You told me you stashed some of the inheritance in a Seattle account.”

“With no identification to get it.”

“The less you have, the more it means.”

“Give me a break.”

When they recrossed the low saddle that had given them their first view of the Kunlun, an enveloping snow squall robbed her of any sense of direction. Sam had retained a compass in his pack, however, and followed a bearing as if he were at sea. “Always carry the ten essentials. Compass, margarita mix, dark chocolate.” His skill was reassuring. Meanwhile, she’d been cold and hungry for so many days that discomfort had become the background buzz of existence. She knew she’d gone past the point of dieting to malnutrition, but the monotonous food did supply enough energy to keep her trudging. Her fantasies turned to yak burgers in the Shangri-la Hotel.

She didn’t dwell on their mission. She dreaded having to confront the man she’d loved and now hated, Jake Barrow. She wanted to simply go home but couldn’t. She wanted to give up but had to win. Courage, she’d decided, wasn’t bestowed, it was chosen. Her ancestors had decided to be brave.

Now it was her turn.

“Do you believe in God, Sam?” she asked at one point as they trudged.

“God?” He paused, looking about. “Nope, don’t see him. Santa Claus for grown-ups, Rominy.”

“You’re not spiritual anymore?”

“I’m not religious. There’s a difference. Take Jesus, for example: a Xerox copy of gods who preceded. He was the son of a carpenter and virgin like Krishna, born on December twenty-fifth like Mithras, heralded by a star like Horus, walked on water like Buddha, healed like Pythagoras, raised people from the dead like Elisha, was executed on a tree like Adonis and Odin, and ascended into heaven like Hercules. The religious tradition is genuine, but to pretend he’s the one and only, instead of the latest software update-no way.”

“You’re quite the theology student.”

“You don’t come to Tibet without wondering about things. I was a searcher, like everybody, but after a while I got bored with dogma. You know, the Buddhists don’t have a lot to say about God or Creation at all. They stick to what they know, which is dealing with our fucked-up heads.”

“But they talk about love and empathy. Wasn’t that Jesus, too? Those nuns devote their lives to this cosmic… thing. This goodness, this grace, that unites all the great faiths. They see him, or it, or the Essence. They’d see God right now, right here, in this wilderness.”

“I’m sorry, but that rock isn’t God, not for me. And what Essence? Living in the Middle Ages at the edge of the world? Praying twenty million times a day? For more of the same in the next life? I’ve watched them for two years. It’s an interesting show for tourists, but not to buy in to. I’m sorry, Rominy, but for those who find life pointless and death terrifying without religion, I just say maybe it is pointless and terrifying.”

“Well, I’ve seen God,” she said.

Now he stopped, hands on hips. “You have? And you didn’t ask her for a ride?”

“Very funny. Remember when we climbed up the edge of the waterfall to the lake, saw the smoke from the nunnery, and started cutting along the mountain to get to it?”

“Yeah.”

“It was so empty, so desolate, so lonely, that he, or she, filled it.”

“Filled what?”

“Everything.”

“If your dope was that good, I wish you’d shared it.”

“It was a very odd feeling and it only lasted for a minute. As we worked our way toward the nunnery I suddenly felt completely at peace. As if I were exactly where I was supposed to be. And I felt connected . I felt connected to Jake, I felt connected to you, I felt connected to the river and the rock and the birds orbiting overhead, to the universe. I felt everything was one. And I thought, ‘This must be what heaven is like.’ ”

He regarded her skeptically. “Brain chemicals. High altitude, sleep deprivation, faulty diet. You hallucinated, Rominy, like every prophet and guru who’s gone into the desert and deliberately starved. You felt what you wanted to feel.”

“But I didn’t want it. In fact, for a few moments I didn’t want anything.”

He sighed. “Do you feel it now?”

“No.”

“Will you concede it could all be a trick of the mind?”

“No.”

“That maybe the Twelve Apostles were a bunch of potheads?”

“No. It was too real. It was so real that that was the reality, not”-she waved her hand at the landscape-“this. Not what I feel now. It’s like I woke up, just for a second, and now I’m back asleep again, in this dream we call life.”

“Wow. Whoa. Jake was just a snake, Rominy. There was no ‘connection’ to that Nazi-loving bastard.”

“That’s the weird part. He is a snake, but there was a connection. That if we could really see the essence that this staff is supposed to tap, that if we could lift the veil and get down to the fundamental that’s behind everything, there was, is, a connection. It was spooky, wonderful, scary. The real Shambhala isn’t lightning bolts, Sam, it’s unity. That’s what we lost. That’s what we’re looking for.”

“I’m looking for a yak burger.”

“Even Hitler, even though he was irretrievably lost.”

“Rominy, come on. Now you’re starting to sound like Jake Barrow. Is that what we’re going to say to that bastard when we catch up to him? All is one, all is forgiven, now please give your stick back?”

“No. Just that he has no idea what he’s really carrying. He was in a place to see, and stayed blind.”

“And he locked us in a tomb. You pray, and I’ll go in shooting.”

I t took them six days for the track to turn to a dirt road, and two more for the dirt to turn to gravel, and one more after that to reach pavement. They finally flagged down a farm truck and paid a few dollars to ride it back to the capital. Sam was apprehensive that Barrow might be laying a trap, but they saw no sign of him. So they had a blessed night in a hotel (separate rooms), a feast of the most American food they could shamelessly order, and then a flight (coach this time) to Delhi, Dubai, and Frankfurt. Sam retrieved his American passport; Rominy traveled as Lilith Anderson.

It was in Dubai during a three-hour layover that Sam wandered out of a magazine store with a Herald Tribune. “Look what I spotted.”

It was an inside story, one column, from the Associated Press. “Collider to Attempt Full Power,” the headline read.

“The European nuclear agency CERN will attempt soon to reach full power at its Large Hadron Collider near Geneva in hopes of testing theories about the origin of the Universe,” the story began. “ By smashing subatomic particles at a velocity near the speed of light, scientists hope to answer such fundamental questions as why matter exists at all. The underground cyclotron, biggest in the world, is designed to reach proton beam energies of up to 7 trillion electron volts.”

“You think this has something to do with us?” Rominy asked.

“No, I think it has something to do with rat-bag Jake Barrow and why he played you when he did. This is an atom smasher, right? Going to full power? Can you say ‘coincidence’?”

“Jake can’t have anything to do with a huge supercollider. Can he?”

“Dollars to doughnuts says he does. How, I don’t know. Is he an errand boy for some mad scientist? I just think it’s too neat not to mean something.”

“What about his SS Vatican, or whatever he called it?”

“We should start there, if we can find it. And warn this CERN outfit if we can get any evidence on the scum sucker.” He stopped to listen for an announcement. “Come on, they’re loading our plane.”

R ominy’s joy at being lifted from the twelfth century to the twenty-first in a matter of days faded when they broke through the clouds and saw the green platter of Germany.

Somewhere, they hoped, was the stolen staff. The problem would be if it came packaged with a packet of Nazis.

Sam persuaded her they needed to rent a BMW 3 Series Coupe. “If it was me it would be a Ford Fiesta,” he admitted, “but we’re secret agents now and have to keep up appearances. This is great, using your money. Maybe I am beginning to understand Jake Barrow.”

“I’ve never been so popular with men,” she said drily. “Don’t worry, we’ve almost burned through my cash. After we save the world, I just hope we’ll have enough left to buy a ticket home.”

“You are home. All is one, remember? Cologne, Cleveland, Kathmandu

…”

“I don’t believe you’re as cynical as you say. You don’t live in Tibet for two years for nothing.”

He laughed. “Check my bank account, Rominy. It was for nothing.”

A Google search at the Frankfurt Airport Business Center swiftly identified the town of Wewelsburg as the site of “Himmler’s Camelot,” or the would-be spiritual home of the SS. There was nothing secret about it, thus making it seem an unlikely place to run Jake Barrow to ground. But it was only a hundred or so miles north of Frankfurt and they had no other clue. Sam threw himself into the task of driving with salacious joy, getting up to 80 mph on the autobahn and then throwing the sporty car into curves once they left the main highway. It reminded her of Jake’s freeway “escape” in the pickup truck.

Sam had lost weight hiking from Shambhala and shaved in Lhasa, and he looked good without scraggle on his chin. With Jake she’d felt a tense electricity, but with Sam there was easygoing comfort. Not so much dependability as dogged loyalty, an instinct to look after her. He was, after all, a guide.

She’d catch him glancing at her at times.

“Do you think a lot about beer, breasts, and baseball?” Rominy asked once as he drove.

“ What? ”

“It’s just something that Jake said. I’m wondering if all guys are alike.”

“Oh. No way, man. Football is king.”

She’d found, she supposed, a guy from the beer and chips aisle.

The shadow of war and Nazism seemed purged from Germany as they approached Wewelsburg. The landscape was fat, bucolic, satisfied. The villages were quaint. The cars were washed. The people looked prosperous. The politics were liberal. Hitler was dead history, wasn’t he?

Sam pulled to the side when the castle came into view. It looked a little like a blunt-bowed ship perched on a low ridge that rose above the Alme Valley, its apex pointing north. A round, low-roofed tower was at the northern end. At the other two corners were smaller towers with dome roofs, like derbies.

Sam counted. “There’s a good sixty windows just on the side we can see. For the home of the most sinister organization in world history, it doesn’t look very scary.”

“It’s not a King Arthur castle. It’s a Renaissance castle.” Rominy was reading from notes they’d made in the airport. “Himmler wanted it to be more of a church, a pagan church, than a fortress. Or a meeting lodge for a new kind of Freemasonry. They had a world globe in there so big they couldn’t bring it in the conventional way. They had to lift it through a window.”

“The better to carve up the planet, my dear. Well, what’s our plan? If Barrow sees us he’s going to go ballistic, you know.”

“There was a B and B about five klicks back. Let’s check in there and go up to the castle after dark. We can sneak around when he can’t see us.”

“Great. Unarmed. Clueless. Unable to speak the language. I like the way you think, Tomb Raider.”

“We need evidence for prosecution or to take to CERN. Jake tried to murder us, Sam. And we need to take him by surprise. Jake thinks we’re dead, or that I’m a ninny waiting for him to tell me what to do. The best defense is a good offense. Let’s start doing the unexpected.”

“What evidence is there?”

“The staff. I want it back: it belonged to my great-grandparents. I’m going to find it and steal it. Then we go to the police.”

“And tell them what?”

“That he tried to murder us in Tibet. That he stole from the nunnery.”

“And how do we prove that, exactly?”

“The staff seemed made of something I’ve never seen before. We find that, and Jake’s real identity. We show the bruises on your chest and the bullet in your iPhone. We even call the Seattle Times back home and get them to investigate this impostor.”

“We sneak, we steal, we give a news tip, and we go to the cops. Golly. D-Day wasn’t this carefully crafted.”

She ignored the sarcasm, studying the castle like a besieging general. “Sam? You don’t think the police could be in on this somehow, do you? You know, like neo-Nazis?”

He got serious. “Not in Germany. They’re pretty paranoid about that stuff. And that was three generations back. I’m guessing Jake Barrow is on his own, except for a lunatic skinhead or two.”

Rominy started. Had the bald man in the cabin window been working with Jake Barrow? Did he shoot his arrows to help them escape?

She realized how little she still knew about what was really going on.