Blood of the Reich

51

Wewelsburg, Germany

October 3, Present Day

R ominy had been given a shower, coffee, and a German pastry by a stone-faced Ursula Kalb, plus a reassuring smile that was not at all reassuring by the ghostly-looking Kurt Raeder. Then she was shoved into the backseat of a big black German Mercedes, solid as a tank and smelling of money. Apparently being a Nazi fanatic paid very well. Rominy had never been in a Mercedes before, and this one had leather seats, an engine that purred like a puma, and wood trim as shiny as a violin. She felt intimidated.

They drove south very fast, the tires taking curves in the bucolic German countryside as if they were on a train track.

“What’s going to happen to Sam?” she asked Raeder.

He was sitting next to her in the backseat, with Jake in the front passenger seat as Ursula drove. Raeder was looking straight ahead. Without turning, he said, “Do you know that I’ve been waiting for this moment since 1938?”

“If you hurt Sam, I won’t help you.”

“Sam is on his way to a plane back to the United States. Don’t worry about Sam.”

She hoped that was true but didn’t think so. Had this man killed her parents and grandmother, too? Was he really more than a century old?

“I can’t believe you’re Kurt Raeder. He must have been born near 1900. You look weird, but not like you’re one hundred and ten or something.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“And I don’t believe your liar Jakob up there intended us to escape from Tibet. He boasted that there was no way to unlock the door when he sealed us in.”

“And there wasn’t, from inside.”

She wanted to provoke some reaction beyond smug superiority. “We’re going to an atom smasher, aren’t we?”

“We are going, Rominy, to the Large Hadron Collider operated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It operates a seventeen-mile circular tunnel capable of accelerating subatomic particles to 99.999999991 percent of the speed of light.” He clicked off every decimal as if taking credit for it. “Nothing like this has been achieved since the days of Shambhala. For me, it’s a homecoming. It’s a return to what I found in Tibet.”

“Why me?”

“That will become clear in due course. In the meantime, I think I’ll tell you a story. You asked last night about the body found in a cabin in America’s Cascade Mountains. Do you want to know whose body that was?”

“Yes.”

“It was Elizabeth Calloway, an aviatrix who flew Benjamin Hood from China to Tibet. Jakob tells me you’ve heard of her.”

“I thought she was my great-grandmother. But I learned in Tibet my great-grandmother was actually a nun named Keyuri Lin. She killed herself and almost killed her baby, my grandmother.”

“Ah. Keyuri is a sad story.”

“But Jake told me the body was my great-grandfather, Benjamin Hood.”

“Jakob told you a lot of things to make happen what is necessary to happen. But now that you’re with us, Rominy, much more can be explained. We can share the truth, so you come to trust me. I want to tell you what happened by telling you about me: what I was, and what I am.”

“How can you be Kurt Raeder?”

“Because I was… changed. Yes, I am more than one hundred years old, even though I have the body of a much younger man.” He glanced at her skepticism. “All right, just younger. I can only assume that such transfiguration was for a purpose, a higher purpose. Dreams that were ashes in 1945 are about to be revived.”

“Of Nazi conquest?”

“Of human transformation.”

She put her hands to her temples. “I wish I was home.”

“You are home. Hear me out.”

Jake turned in the front seat. “We do care about you, Rominy.” He sounded like an insurance salesman betting she wouldn’t die to collect.

She stuck her tongue out at him and he flushed.

“In 1938,” Raeder began, “I led a scientific expedition to Tibet. We’d heard legends of an ancient lost kingdom called Shambhala, and National Socialism took the initiative to investigate. Keyuri was a scholar who had studied old records. She agreed to act as our guide. Working together, we found a hidden valley and an underground city.”

“Where we found the lake.”

“Correct. Unfortunately, just as we were beginning our research, we were interrupted by Benjamin Hood, who came in shooting. He literally destroyed what would have been the greatest archaeological discovery of all time. Keyuri managed to escape with the staff that Jakob has since recovered for us, but my companions were all killed. And as Hood attacked he set off explosions that wrecked the valley.”

“You’re the victim here,” she said drily.

“No, we both wanted to possess Shambhala, but I hoped its secrets would yield a higher purpose, not some cheap exhibit in a dusty New York museum. Hood would have bottled Shambhala, but I wanted to harness it. In any event, there was a machine we believe was related to today’s colliders. It shattered and threw out a blinding light. And that’s the last thing I remember.”

“None of which would have happened if you hadn’t led Nazis to Shambhala.”

“I awoke thrown on the side of a mountain, my body in a state I’d never felt before. You’re familiar with the process of photosynthesis, by which plants absorb and use the sun’s energy? I felt I was absorbing energy, too, but from a new and wondrous source. It’s not just that my flesh tingled, it felt like I was aware of every cell, every capillary, ever corpuscle. I saw the world I was familiar with, and at the same time a different world of shimmering force fields. A veil had been lifted. The blind had been given sight. It’s impossible to accurately describe, but if you think of the aurora borealis, or the galactic clouds of gas photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope, you have some idea of the beauty of what’s all around us, all the time, that we’re ignorant of. I thought I’d died and become a ghost.”

“And in a way, you had,” said Jake.

“Yes. I was still alive, and hungry, and susceptible to heat and cold and all our other environmental burdens, but I’d somehow been infused with new dimensions of power as well. I was enormously confused, of course, but over the decades I’ve come to suspect I’d broken into a part of our universe we can’t yet perceive. We Nazis called it Vril. Modern physicists talk of dark energy and dark matter. We can’t see it, but we can see its effects on the universe we do see. It helps hold galaxies together, and accelerates the expansion of the cosmos. It’s rather like a child recognizing the reality of air, or watching a bending tree from inside a house and realizing it’s windy outside.”

“Kurt had become a Shambhalan,” Jake said. “A new man, like the superman dreamed of by German theorists. The next step in evolution.”

“The master race,” Rominy said.

“That term has been besmirched by history, but yes,” said Raeder. “Hominids became human. Neanderthals gave way to Homo sapiens. Are humans never to evolve again? Or is there a higher destiny? We’d no time to determine where Shambhala came from. Was it simply an act of early human genius that somehow ran afoul of some calamity? Was it a work by space visitors who subsequently left? Was it the product of early gods from other dimensions, whom we’ve squeezed out in our narrow perception of existence? I’ve considered all these things. What if satyrs and dryads and Minotaurs were once real?”

“What if whatever the Shambhalans found killed them?” Rominy asked. “The notes we found talked of bones.”

Raeder shrugged. “Or transformed them, transfigured them, for escape and elevation? If not for Hood, we might have answered such things. Instead I’ve been wandering for decades, waiting for our own science to catch up to that of the Shambhalans. I’ve become a very patient man.”

“Why did my great-grandfather die and you didn’t?”

“I wasn’t at all sure he did die. I awoke to total disorientation. I was no longer at Shambhala. I’d been displaced, like a subatomic particle, to a spot some distance away. It was as if the entire experience had been a dream, or Shambhala had vanished. I wouldn’t learn about the nunnery and Beth Calloway until much later. I wouldn’t hear rumors that the staff Hood stole had survived until much later, when gold and terror persuaded some fallen nuns. I wouldn’t learn about the lake until Jakob here returned from Tibet. So I set off on foot, weary but buoyed by this curious new energy. Knowing the British would likely try to capture and torture me for what I knew, I made my way west through the Hindu Kush, begging, working, and stealing. I survived blizzards and bandits in Afghanistan. I was briefly enslaved in Kandahar. I finally came to Persia. There I contacted German embassy personnel and was eventually flown to Berlin. By then, alas, the war had started and travel back to Tibet became impossible. I’d been exiled like Adam and Eve from Eden.”

“You’re not Adam, and that’s no Eden.”

He paid her no mind.

“No one knew what to make of me. My appearance had changed, not as drastically as you see now, but people responded to me as an oddity, a freak: the Yellow Ghost. I seemed infused with light, and babbling nonsense. My superiors kept me out of the way in obscure research work. Then came Barbarossa.” He paused.

“What’s that?” Rominy finally asked. She’d heard the name but had no idea what it meant.

“The code word for the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Barbarossa was a medieval German hero, a Crusader king, and the world assumed the code word was simply taken from history. A few of us knew better. It was the blood of Frederick Barbarossa that won us admittance to Shambhala, and I was determined to return. It was the one thing that could win the war. Barbarossa was not just to conquer Russia. It was to reopen the way to Tibet.”

“But you didn’t conquer it.”

“No.” Raeder looked sad, lost in memory. “I accompanied the panzers driving toward the Caucasus but we were turned back, and then trapped at Stalingrad. I was captured when Paulus surrendered, and transported east to a Soviet prison camp. Yet Shambhala was as far away as ever. I had unusual powers-I could see what other men can’t, and sometimes disable men with my will-but my capability wasn’t mastered or consistent. I couldn’t walk through the Soviet Union to Tibet. Instead I took an opportunity to escape and head northeast into the Siberian wilderness toward its junction with Alaska. I waited until autumn knocked down the blackflies and froze the worst of the mud and then raced the onset of winter. The natives recognized me as something strange, and gave me a skin boat to get rid of me. I paddled across the Bering Sea and made my way to Alaska, pretending to be a wrecked merchant seaman suffering from amnesia. Eventually I reached Seattle, was given the necessary American papers I claimed I’d lost, and took the train to New York. I wanted to track down Benjamin Hood. But at the Museum of American History I was told he’d never returned from Tibet. Even more mysteriously, his office papers had been shipped, at the request of the United States government, to a federal agent named Duncan Hale. And there the trail ended. I had no way to effectively hunt for Hood in a foreign country. As a German national I was wary of approaching Hale and being arrested as a spy. By now it was 1945 and clear that the end was near. Finally the Fuhrer died and the Mongol hordes seized Berlin. Everything we’d dreamed of had crumbled.”

“Except for killing millions of innocent people.”

Raeder looked disapproving. “Then came news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-far more indiscriminate than anything Germany had done-and inspiration came. Here was terrifying new atomic energy that would change the course of power politics. What if there was another, rival energy? What if there was Vril? I wrote Hale an anonymous letter, explaining that the American naturalist Benjamin Hood had found just such a power and was in hiding somewhere in the United States. Why look for my rival when your government would do it for me? I didn’t have to follow Hood, I only had to follow Hale. Which I did. Much to my surprise, he traveled to Seattle, the very city I’d used to enter the United States. And then north to the area where you and Jakob visited the cabin. I bribed people to alert me where Hale might be going.”

A practical consideration had occurred to Rominy. “Didn’t you have to work? How did you get the time and money to do all this?”

“There was still a network of Nazi sympathizers in the United States. The FBI thought they’d caught all our agents, but they hadn’t. I looked up members of the old German-American Bund and was eventually put into contact. I had a team following Hale.”

“To Concrete and Cascade River?”

“Yes. Our plan was for Hale to confront Hood, have him seize whatever the zoologist had or knew, and then ambush them both in the cabin. It was too late for Hitler, but if we could return to Germany with a secret as potent as the atomic bomb, a secret revival could begin.”

“The Fourth Reich,” said Jake. “Purer and better than the Third.”

“Hitler made mistakes,” Raeder conceded.

“Which this time we’ll avoid,” Jake amended.

“Unfortunately,” Raeder went on, “it was at the cabin that the real mystery began. We didn’t find Hood, we found Beth Calloway, dead of a gunshot wound. Nor could we find Duncan Hale.”

“Until Jake and I found his corpse in that mine.”

“My guess is there was some kind of showdown between Hale and Beth,” Jake said. “Gunshots, a mine cave-in… we won’t ever have the whole story, but in 1945 the secret seemed lost.”

“And moot,” Raeder said. “Shambhala was closed off, and the staff I’d had was shattered in the explosions. The legend was lost. And yet I couldn’t let it go. I snuck back into Tibet in the turbulent 1950s and heard rumors that a surviving relic had been locked away by Keyuri Lin, who was gone. There were also stories of a child, taken to America. I began to put two and two together. I guessed there was another blood lock, meaning the only one who could open it was the missing child, your half-Tibetan grandmother. But even if we found a surviving staff, what would we do with it? The machine to energize it had been destroyed. So I decided to wait.”

“Immortality gives you patience,” said Jake.

“You’re immortal?” Rominy asked Raeder.

Raeder’s smile was stretched, like rubber, over those worn teeth. “Unfortunately not. Just extended. Vril does not end the aging process, as we hoped, but it has prolonged it by halting the natural aging process in the telomeres of my cells. We have a fuse that burns down, but in my case the fuse got snuffed. I get sick, I feel pain, but I persist. Which meant that no one followed the progress of subatomic physics more avidly than I. This, I realized, was the answer. So I began to recruit promising young scientists and encouraged them to enter the field. We are a fraternity within a scientific fraternity, with political goals as well as scientific ones.”

“To bring back Nazi barbarism.”

“To resurrect the Aryan and with it a new Germany, a Germany of the kind envisioned by National Socialism but better, firmer, truer. Pure, evolved, cleansed, the leader of mankind. A race as superior to the rest of our species as Homo sapiens were to Neanderthals. It will start with Vril, Rominy, this secret energy I was the first to find. With Vril, and with you.”

“I’m not cooperating with any of this!”

“You have the right blood, Rominy. We’re going to expose you to this new light, this new science, and turn you, with me, into the first Shambhalans.”