Blood of the Reich

53

Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland

October 4, Present Day

Sam had gotten the Beamer up to 200 kilometers an hour, which he calculated was somewhere north of 125 mph, faster than he’d ever driven. It was gray German autumn, the autobahn his crowded racetrack, and he’d weaved past speeding trucks as if they were standing still. The astonishing thing was that occasionally an Audi or Lotus kept pace with him. What a crazy country. He was gambling where they’d taken Rominy and hoped he got there before the Nazis found skewered Otto back in Wewelsburg, or the German police came after him with too many questions. It was dark by the time he got to Switzerland and Geneva, where he promptly got lost because he was too hurried to ask directions. That’s dude thinking, dude. He finally got straight-everybody seemed to speak some English-and now it was the middle of the night as he drove more cautiously toward CERN headquarters. He was looking for something out of the ordinary and hoped to find Rominy in the middle of it.

There was a weird globe thingy that looked like salvage from a world’s fair, and a sprawl of office buildings in generic business-park blah. Roads, parking lots, museum signs, the whole nine yards. So he was at one point in a seventeen-mile underground loop he couldn’t even see…

How was he ever going to find Rominy?

And then there was a cluster of cars and men and bobbing flashlights by some boxy building that looked about as elegant as an airplane hangar. So what was a cluster of men who looked like they were carrying assault rifles doing in the middle of the night in a science park?

He slowed. Had Rominy left a sign as he’d asked?

And then he saw it, a scrap that would be taken for insignificant garbage at any other time. It was the white of a khata scarf, the scrap Beth Calloway had used in a Cascades cabin to write a code in invisible ink.

Rominy had dropped it.

Bingo. “Mackenzie, you’re not such a bad guide after all,” he murmured.

Yep, why were the world’s top physicists hanging out in a parking lot in the wee hours of the morning unless they were up to some Nazi-no-good? So all he had to do was…

What? He had Otto’s gun but it was twenty to one, at least. How many skinhead sympathizers were there in the world, anyway? What he really needed was a bazooka, or a battery of Hawk missiles, or the ability to call in an airstrike, but he’d left his Pentagon calling card at home. While the Good Ol’ USA would have had a neon reader board thirty feet high screaming “Guns!” and a cash register line of stubble-head goobers who looked like they shouldn’t be licensed to handle screwdrivers, everything in Europe was very low-key pacifist and urban cool. Where did you get your hands on an RPG launcher when you needed one? Especially on a continent where every town looked as dandy as Disneyland?

He had to get inside and poke around for Rominy. Which meant getting in the door, which meant distracting the Nazi goons, which meant…

He let his car cruise by the cluster of crazies. They eyed him like an L.A. street gang but didn’t budge. Then buildings shielded him from view, and he looked around.

Which meant driving full-tilt into something that said Verboten and was decorated with skull and crossbones. Like those tanks behind a cyclone fence next to what looked to be some kind of laboratory.

“Double bingo.”

He needed noise. There couldn’t be that many people who’d signed on with that lunatic Raeder, which meant the more folks Sam could pull into ground zero, the more likely someone in authority would start asking the bad guys some awkward questions. And if Otto’s murderous intentions were any indication, Sam Mackenzie needed to hurry.

Plan One: suicide charge into a tank farm and hope the airbag worked and he was conscious enough to crawl out before he fried.

Bad plan.

So how about Plan Two? He parked in the shadows and popped the BMW’s trunk. He took his backpack, stuffed Rominy’s passport and cash with his own belongings, and slung it on his back. There was an emergency kit inside with road flares. There was also a doughnut spare tire, just the size for what he had in mind.

He drove the BMW to within a hundred yards of the cluster of tanks, aimed the wheels, and used the jumper cables in the rental trunk to clamp the steering wheel to the passenger door handle. That would keep his new robot car on course, he hoped. The Beamer was still rumbling, unaware of its impending sacrifice. Parking brake on. He cradled the spare tire, took it to the front seat, and leaned in.

“The rental company is going to be very, very pissed,” he whispered to himself.

He jammed the spare forward under the dash on top of the gas pedal, where it stuck, snug as a cork.

The engine screamed. Parking brake off. And as Sam sprang backward, the car howled, that beautiful Bavarian whine, and shot forward.

It was his very own cruise missile. The Beamer accelerated like a drag racer, tires smoking, and hit freeway speeds at the collision point. There was tragic beauty in how it ran straight and true. The coupe smashed through the fence and plowed into the tanks, knocking them sideways. The bang of the collision echoed in the peaceful night air, and he could see the white of the Beamer’s airbags deployed as a building alarm began to sound. There was a gush, and the air smelled like propane.

The car’s front end had accordioned, steam erupting, but nothing else had happened yet. Sam ran as close as he dared, snapped a highway flare to light it, and threw. Then he dashed away.

Night flashed into day. A fireball erupted skyward, pieces of tank and car arcing outward like meteors. Then another explosion, and another. He could feel the heat and punches of air.

Wow, better than the Fourth of July.

Sam ducked into the shadows. The swarm of men outside the hangarlike building had broken and were running toward the fire he’d set, shouting in German and French and waving guns.

In the distance he could hear sirens. The concussions from the explosions had set off car alarms.

“Well, it’s a start.”

He glanced about and spied a utility pipe grating. Lifting it, he saw metal rungs. He jammed the pack behind them for temporary safekeeping. Then he trotted in the shadows toward his goal.

“I’m coming, Rominy.”

There was still a sprawl of cars and vans around the entrance but most of the Nazi goons, if that’s what they were, had been drawn off to investigate. Two remained at the door, holding wicked-looking rifles. Sam didn’t hesitate; if he did, his nerve would fail him. He knew something awful was about to happen to the young woman he’d come to like so much. Sam had Otto’s automatic tucked in the small of his back and a second or two of surprise. He walked forward like he belonged. The men raised their guns.

“Raeder?” Sam demanded.

They hesitated, one giving a nod inside and then thinking better of it.

Triple bingo.

The Nazi bastard was here all right, which meant Sam’s spectacular arson and Wewelsburg killing just might be justifiable to the authorities, in the unlikely event slacker Mackenzie survived this night. He strode for the door, trying to look as important as the VIPs waved through the velvet rope at a nightclub, rather than the cheap Third World tourist guide he was. Attitude, man.

The goons hesitated, and Sam guessed these weren’t hired paramilitary but just weekend Nazis told to keep watch while the big dogs worked inside. They shouted some German crap.

“Stoppen. Wer sind sie?”

So he pulled the pistol and shot one of them in the leg. Necessity made you one motherfucker of invention, didn’t it? The man yelped in surprise and fell, writhing. Before the other could lift his assault rifle Sam was on top of him, his barrel pressed against the man’s left eye. “Droppen, you Nazi dick. I’m tired of this shit.” As the man’s gun fell he shoved him through the door, slamming and locking it behind them. “ Schnell, schnell,” he ordered, pushing the man down a short corridor. “Yeah, I’ve seen the war movies.”

A fusillade of shots stuttered through the door he’d just locked. The wounded man didn’t care for being wounded, apparently, and was venting his frustration. The bullet holes popped through the metal like expressions of surprise.

That was okay. The noise would bring more police.

There was another door with a keypad next to it. “Open it!”

His prisoner shook his head, his courage back after the surprise attack.

So Sam shot him in the foot.

He yelled and hopped, Sam grabbing his shoulder and pistol-whipping his face. “Open it!” he screamed. He shook his gun. “Or I kill you! Verstehen? ” Yeah, he understood.

Shaking, the guard tapped some numbers. Nothing happened.

Sam lifted his pistol to the man’s temple. “One.”

The man was sweating, but frozen.

“Two…” Surely this bastard knew how to count to three in English? “Three is the last word you’re going to hear, Fritz.” Nothing. “Thre…” He tightened on the trigger.

The guard lurched forward, blood gushing from his foot, mouth bruised, and put his eye up against some kind of reader. Now there were shouts outside and more shots. With a bang, the outer lock disintegrated. Damn. The Nazi rescue posse had arrived. They’d probably gotten tired of watching his car burn.

But now the door Sam needed to get through was opening.

He brought down his pistol as heavily as he could on the guard’s head, and with a crack the sentry went down. Then the American stepped through and the door slid shut. As he did so he could see men bursting through the outer entrance and spying him. They raised their guns.

Sam’s door hissed to a close just as another volley of bullets hit it. None penetrated.

“Good Swiss engineering.” Sam shot a keypad on his side, hoping that would disable the opening mechanism, and looked around. There was an elevator-a box to be trapped in, he feared-and flights of stairs.

Sam started down the stairs.