Blood of the Reich

52

Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland

October 4, Present Day

B etween Lake Geneva and the Jura Mountains, a platter of farm and industrial land hides the largest supercollider on earth. It is built in a tunnel seventeen miles in circumference and more than 300 feet underground, split into eight arcs and interrupted by four gigantic detectors the size of dam powerhouses. These trace the invisibly small particle collisions that the device creates.

The CERN collider consumes enough electricity to power the homes of Geneva, Switzerland. It creates vacuums that in total equal in size the nave of a great cathedral. It uses liquid helium to cool its superconducting magnets that bend and accelerate the beams to nearly absolute zero. The machine’s goal is to re-create on the tiniest scale the extremes of temperature and energy at the Big Bang and thus give a peek at the origin of the universe. Its particle beam is so sensitive that the tidal pull of the moon must be taken into effect when it whirls around its gigantic racetrack.

Kurt Raeder was determined to put this achievement to his own use.

Physicists had made careful calculations to reassure the public that the Large Hadron Collider would not create earth-swallowing black holes or theorized “strange” subatomic quarks, called strangelets, that might detonate with matter. What they’d not calculated was that the vast energies the machine focuses could be used to reconstitute the lost technology of Shambhala.

Instead, a cabal of neo-Nazi physicists secretly had.

“Our Fellowship has been waiting for a long time, Rominy,” Raeder lectured as the Mercedes hummed along the lakeside boulevard in Geneva, headed toward the CERN complex west of the city. Night had fallen, and lights glinted in the lake. “Waiting for science to catch up. Waiting for the blood heir we needed, which was you. And waiting for generations of our ideological followers to graduate with physics degrees and infiltrate the subatomic fraternity. Yes, we have allies! Not just scientists but guards, administrators, public relations personnel, science writers, mechanics, custodians, and suppliers. For half a century I’ve been constructing a web of loyalists, a mafia if you will, who have been working toward this day. The Large Hadron Collider itself has been a project twenty years in the making.”

“You’re claiming that Nazis built the supercollider?”

“No. A few who helped are National Socialists or, in more contemporary terms, conservative visionaries. And our broader Fellowship plans to use it, to borrow it. Our members extend to the very highest ranks of government and finance. Think about it: Why are the world’s organizations spending more than six billion dollars to slap protons together? Six thousand million dollars? They raised this for a science project? Yes, many of those involved naively believe the supercollider is for pure science. In their ignorance they are our most valuable allies. The American physicist Leon Lederman used the term God Particle to explain the search for the Higgs boson, a property that could explain why matter exists at all. Scientists are very clever, and they have succeeded in capturing the public’s imagination.”

“But you’re smarter than all of them,” Rominy said sarcastically.

He smiled. “But governments and business want more out of this underground cathedral we’ve constructed. They want power for their investment. And so we promised; if they built it we would deliver magic of a kind never seen before, and turn the balance of power on its head. Northern Europe will regain its rightful role as ruler of the world. Those bureaucrats who have backed construction and development think the secret benefits will be shared, yielding discovery that will remake economies and technology. They envision an era of unparalleled prosperity. But those closest to me know that the mysteries of Shambhala must not be shared, that democracy is a Jewish idea that poisons society, and that these discoveries are by rightful bloodline the inheritance of the Aryan, governed by National Socialism, and will be used to establish our reign on earth. If you want to call that Nazism, so be it.”

He was obviously mad, but that didn’t mean a cabal of madmen couldn’t wreak havoc. Hadn’t that been the cause of World War II? And out of it had come the atom bomb. And now this?

“But you needed the staff hidden in Shambhala,” she clarified. “This machine wasn’t enough.”

He looked at the window at the dark lake. “Yes. We don’t really understand how the staff worked, or how to duplicate it. But if it can be made to work now, we can begin to study and replicate. Eventually we’ll have legions of staff-wielding Aryans, imposing their will by the force of their thought. They will strum the consciousness that undergirds the universe. We’ll play the cosmic music and reconfigure the world.”

“What did you mean about us becoming the first Shambhalans?”

“That you will be envied by every woman in the world. What we are about, as I explained, is human evolution. We can’t go on as advanced apes armed with atomic bombs and spewing a million tons of carbon a day. We have to evolve, to reach a higher plane. We need to reproduce selectively to accelerate mankind’s biologic destiny. So we’ve been searching for candidates.”

They sped on a boulevard. She saw an airport, hotels, office buildings, and the cozy rectangles of lighted apartment windows, a world of normality that seemed impossibly far away. What quiet domestic life was plodding along there, a pot of tea, a TV show, a book, and the silken warmth of a cat on someone’s lap? Children in their beds. A glass of wine with a loved one. All light-years away.

She’d already tried the handle of the Mercedes. Useless, like the handle of Jake Barrow’s truck. Hadn’t her mother told her never to get in a car with strangers?

How was she going to stop this if Sam didn’t come?

Then they were approaching a sculptured sphere, lit by floodlights, that rose above a lawn like a representation of… what? The earth? The atom? The cosmos? It was rust red. Dried-blood red.

“What the hell does that mean?” she pressed. “Reproduce selectively?”

“That will be explained at the moment of transfiguration. Ah, here we are.”

They were pulling into a parking lot at a complex of large, mostly windowless, blandly boxed research buildings of the kind stamped out all over the world, like pieces of a game of Risk. There was a word on one: Atlas. Hadn’t he held up the cosmos?

“Will you give me your hands please?”

“My hands?”

“Just lift them up.”

Hesitantly she did so, keeping balled in her fist something she’d held tightly as a teddy bear since Wewelsburg. Raeder smoothly reached out and snapped handcuffs on her wrists. “Just so you won’t hurt anything, or yourself. Routine precaution.” Then the sedan doors opened and strong, military hands pulled her out into the chilly air.

Someone snapped something on her ankle.

“A tracking device,” Jake said. “Please don’t try to run. We have dogs and Tasers.”

Yep, that’s quite the boyfriend you picked, Rominy.

She’d felt this way only one time before, on a gurney wheeling down a sterile hospital hallway for removal of her appendix, lights passing overhead like flickering suns, doors hissing open and shutting behind her like portals to hell. She’d been ten, and terribly frightened. Now she felt numbing dread, as she realized that the last weeks had been a long, sickening plummet into an abyss.

“Six billion dollars to find a particle? Absurd,” Raeder said as they walked toward the building. “But six billion dollars to manipulate those particles, and with them the world itself? That’s a bargain. Six billion dollars of taxpayer money to seize power for yourself? To rule? To monopolize? To become unbelievably rich by reducing lesser races to slavery, their natural state? That’s why so many were persuaded to help us. Some with doubts were bribed. Others blackmailed. Any would-be heroes suffered untimely accidents. We’ve been very thorough.”

They stopped at a door. Green-uniformed guards with black berets and belts weighted with equipment were clustered there. One of them stepped forward. “We can only guarantee control of the sector until the morning shift, Reichsfuhrer,” he said, addressing Raeder. “Rennsler is still in the dark, but when he comes to work he’ll mobilize the rest of security against us. After that, it will be on the news and everything will come crashing down.”

The German nodded. “If our calculations are correct, the remaining night will be time enough. Once we demonstrate the staff, they’ll give us time to complete our mission. Key government officials will stand with us. And if not, they cannot stand against us, once we have Vril.”

The man gave a stiff-armed salute. “Fellowship!”

“Fellowship.” They passed inside. As they did, Rominy let the thing she’d held in her hands fall, kicking it against a drainpipe.

A million-to-one shot. But when there was no hope, those were good odds.

The next door was stronger, and here waited a cluster of men who looked like academics. One had the proverbial white jacket, but the others were casual in khakis or jeans. They looked nervous, but none showed any surprise at her handcuffs. White-jacket greeted Raeder and then stepped to a keypad next to the door and typed in a code. Then he put his eye to a small eyepiece above it.

“Retinal scan,” Jake said to Rominy, standing close like he was still her freaking boyfriend. Maybe he thought he still would be, once the master race had established control. She looked away and tried to psychically relay waves of revulsion at him, but if he detected her contempt, he gave no sign.

The door opened and they entered a shaft landing. Stairs led downward into gloom. Next to it was an elevator shaft. Elevator doors opened and a dozen packed in, Rominy squeezed by aspiring Nazi lunatics, her handcuffed hands held humiliatingly in front of her. Men glanced at her curiously and she wanted to spit in their face. Should she make a scene? But what could she do? She was utterly alone, at the spire of a scientific cathedral buried in the bowels of the earth.

The elevator disgorged them just one floor down. Another door, and another retinal scan, and then they passed into a control room, banks of computers and video screens taking up an otherwise bland, off-white windowless space. Industrial carpet, mesh office chairs, laminate counters. The screens showed columns of numbers, graphs, and video camera scenes of tunnels and huge machines. She assumed the videos were showing parts of the supercollider. It looked as colorful as a Tinker Toy.

Then she started. Three bodies lay facedown on the floor against one wall, with a cowl of blood around their heads and neat round holes in the backs of their skulls.

“It was easier to dispose of them than try to persuade them,” the security chief said.

Raeder nodded. “There’s no turning back. We’ll put up a plaque. Sacrifices to human evolution.”

The scientists who had ridden the elevator with them scattered to the screens. Now there was a faint whine as something was started up. A faint odor of oil and ozone. “It will take about an hour to regain full power,” one of the men said.

“Time enough to get the girl into position. Jakob? Rominy? Follow me.”

She hesitated, wondering where best to make a stand, but then the big cop guy stepped menacingly toward her. So she reluctantly followed, but took a moment to turn and stick her tongue out at the security chief, too.

He took it in, his expression not changing.

Not a good sign.

On they marched, meek little Rominy like a little lamb to the slaughter, software cubicle-ista to her newest duty, proud feminist a dutiful two steps behind.

She began trying to guess how to blow things up.

She didn’t even have chewing gum.

Down an elevator again, much farther this time, dropping three hundred feet into the bedrock of the Swiss-French border. They came out into the nave of this colossal church of physics.

An enormous room, four or five stories high, and atop it a shaft the size of a missile silo that clawed toward the surface like the spout hole of a whale. To look at the origin of the sky, the physicists had delved underground like Tolkien’s cursed dwarves. But what a wonderland they’d created. The chamber was lined with tiers of catwalks like the balconies of an opera house, plus pipes, ducts, great metal troughs crammed with cables, cranes, stairs, ladders, columns, beams, grids, tanks, levers, air conditioners, hatches… it was a cornucopia of technology. And the colors! They were taken from a crayon set. Red, green, blue, and yellow, bright as Legos, and then spotless stainless, shiny copper, burnished bronze, reflective blacks, all glinting at each other like a hall of mirrors. How had they ever conjured such magnificent complexity? It was like the riot of color she’d seen in the temples of Lhasa. It was not just science, it was art, not just instrument but beauty. It hummed and buzzed and clicked and crackled like a child’s toy and had the smell of a place entirely unnatural: concrete, paint, oil, grease, rubber, and plastic. The particle detector was scrupulously clean, absolutely sterile, and yet as sensory as a field of wildflowers. Fluorescent light cast everything in a cold, metallic glow.

It was another secret city, like Shambhala.

And somehow Kurt Raeder had penetrated this, to corrupt it. To re-create his lost ruin.

Another scientist saluted them. My God, how many physicists had signed on for this craziness? But then Raeder, if it was really Raeder, had been building toward this moment for seventy years. An incongruous thought occurred.

“Did you ever open a bank account?”

He turned. “What?”

“When you got back from Tibet. With compound interest, you might be a rich man by now if you’ve really lived all those years. Hood did that, or Beth Calloway. I inherited.”

He wasn’t sure if she was joking and for the first time looked off-balance. “I’ve spent ever pfennig, every moment, every drop of sweat and blood on this dream.”

“Too bad. You could have retired by now and left us all alone.”

Jakob, or Jake, pushed her from behind. “Pay no attention to her, Kurt. She’s an idiot who will completely waste your time.”

“ I wasted your time?” But then she felt the press of a gun barrel in the small of her back.

“Shut up and do as you’re told,” her ex-lover said.

They walked a balcony, heels drumming on textured metal, walking into the technology like sperm penetrating the gigantic egg of this vast, bulky machine. Centenarian Raeder obscenely spry like an animated cadaver, Jake/Jakob robotic, Rominy mournful. If the cathedral nave was complicated, this tighter area deeper into the machine works was incomprehensible. There were steel panels, copper conduits, and brightly colored pistons, bobbins, and spools. She was making the words up because she had no idea what she was looking at. The riotous assemblage of finely machined parts reminded her of pictures of rocket engines and submarines. The barrel-shaped thing was as big as the cross section of a small ship. On its face, triangular pie-piece panels, each the size of an apartment, radiated out like the petals of a flower. The stamen in the middle was a narrow pipe that jutted out and ran toward a tunnel beyond.

“It reminds me of a sun wheel,” Jake said. “All worship, rightfully so, goes back to the sun. All life originates there.”

They came to a smaller gallery leading to the jutting pipe. There was an arched ceiling twenty feet overhead, with a tracked crane spanning the gallery’s width. An orange-colored hook to hoist things dangled from it. Cables and chains dropped down to a narrow pipe, little bigger than a household waterline, which ran from the center of the vast machine. This extended to a much larger pipe, the size of a sewer line with the diameter of a manhole. The big pipe was painted blue and extended into a tunnel as far as she could see.

It was like being inside a giant mechanical cocoon. A section of the silvery smaller pipe had been removed and technicians were bolting a new apparatus in its place. This new piece was about the size of a submarine torpedo and consisted of a cylindrical bundle of rods. There was space between each rod, connected with colored wires. Inside was a clear Plexiglas tube.

The bundle reminded her of the fasces that Sam had talked about.

She hoped his scheme had worked, but she suspected Otto had killed her friend by now. The sadness added to her feeling of hopelessness.

Then she noticed that there was another rod, a staff, lying horizontally in the midst of this new device. Its ends lined up with the narrow pipe.

It was the amber-colored staff Jake had stolen from the chamber below the nunnery at the edge of Shambhala. It was Kurt Raeder’s magic wand, the wizard’s staff, the gun of Vril. My God. They were going to recharge it.

“Hurry, before the radiation levels climb too high,” Raeder told the technicians.

They nodded. “We have our REM badges. But you can hear the machine accelerating.” And indeed the background whine was rising. There was a deeper rumble, too, of huge generators and pumps, the lungs of the whale.

Radiation? Her heart began to hammer.

“Rominy, we’re at the end of our journey and I can’t follow you any longer,” said Jake. “Not yet.” He was still pointing a pistol at her. It looked like the kind the Germans used in the old World War II movies. What were they called?

A Luger.

At least he wasn’t hanging around to have some kind of weird SS sex. With Raeder talking about spawning a new master race, she’d worried she was supposed to get it on with her kidnapper. But then that couldn’t be true, could it? She was part Asian, thanks to Great-grandma Keyuri, and mongrel American to boot.

So just what was she doing here?

The technicians twisted a few final bolts and stood. “That’s it. Really just a harness to hold the staff in place. The rest is up to the accelerator itself.”

“You may watch from the control room,” Raeder said. “Jakob, you’d better remove her handcuffs.”

“What if she panics?”

“There’s nowhere for her to go. I’m worried that with the electromagnetic energies involved, that much metal might trigger something we haven’t planned for. Take the tracking device, too. I don’t want the large amounts of electricity involved arcing into her body.”

“Maybe I should stay with you, Kurt.”

“It’s too much of a gamble to risk both of us on Vril’s first manifestation,” Raeder replied. “I’ve staked my life on this, but if it doesn’t work as expected, I want you to survive to carry on. Rominy must be the seed carrier.”

“The what carrier?” she protested.

Kurt turned to her as Jake removed the cuffs and stooped to take off the ankle bracelet. “Of the next evolution. You’re going to experience the fundamental energies of the universe as I have, Rominy. It will stun you, and frighten you, but it’s quite survivable, as you can see by looking at me. You will be transfigured, transformed. It will feel good when it’s over. You’ll absorb dark energy like a plant. You’ll have a longevity that the ones left behind will long for. And then you’re going to carry my first child. You are going to be as revered as the Virgin Mary.” He smiled, plasticky lips stretched over worn teeth, eyes sunken, skin like wax.

She looked at him with horror. “And stay a virgin, right?”

“We all know you’re no virgin and no, I’m not a god to inseminate you with my spirit. I’m afraid we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.”

“Are you joking?” Not with Barrow, but with him?

“It’s a necessary step for the future the Fuhrer dreamed of.”

“You want me to have sex with you? My God, you’re a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty years old!”

“Which doesn’t matter. You’ll see.”

“It’s just sex, Rominy,” Jake added. “Don’t put so much meaning into it.”

“It sure as hell had no meaning to you, did it?”

He shrugged. “I enjoyed it well enough.”

“God, why don’t you just shoot me?”

“I’m afraid that isn’t part of the plan,” Jake said. “You’re to be infused with the light as Kurt was at Shambhala, and then bred. No different than on the farm.”

“No! This is crazy! Look at him, he’s hideous! And I’m no Aryan!” She was desperate. “You said yourself I’m part Tibetan and who knows what else. I’m the wrong blood! You’ve got the wrong woman!”

“No we don’t,” Raeder said calmly.

“How do you know that?”

“Because Jakob did all the DNA tests back in the United States. You’re precisely who we thought you are.”

She was sweating. The younger man had stood closer, and she longingly eyed his pistol. But then he gave it to Raeder and backed away.

“I’ll wait in the control room,” he said. “Himmler’s dream, Kurt.”

The older man nodded. “Himmler’s dream.” He watched Barrow retreat. She heard the click of a door closing. “Now you learn who you really are.”

“Who?” she asked. “Who am I, Raeder?”

“You’re my descendant, Rominy.”

Now there was a roaring in her ears. “What?”

“Benjamin Hood wasn’t your great-grandfather. I was.”

She looked at him in horror.

“I possessed Keyuri Lin on the way to Shambhala. She insisted on sex with Hood, but it was my child she had in the nunnery. That’s why she tried to kill it. But Fate intervened, in the person of Beth Calloway. It was my DNA that Jakob brought to have tested in the United States with yours to prove the match to the bankers, not that from Hood’s finger. But you and I are separated by enough generations. And now we, you and I, are going to have a child-a super-child, a master child-together.”

His eyes were bright, his skin cracked, his grin a death’s-head grimace. “One of the powers of Vril is that my sexual appetite hasn’t slackened, it’s increased.” He took a small leather folder from the breast pocket of his suit. “So have my tastes.” He flipped it open.

It held an array of bright, shiny surgical instruments, things to cut and pinch.

The whine of the machine climbed to a shriek, matching her scream.