William Dietrich - Blood of the Reich

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.

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.