William Dietrich: Blood of the Reich

And the glassy staff fragments on the tunnel floor? Intriguingly, no one mentioned them. She didn’t either. But she wondered if somewhere, somehow, laboratory tests were being done.

Or if some janitor had swept them into a dustbin, sending the secret texture of the universe to a landfill.

Would authorities eventually find the same old records on her family that Jake Barrow had? Would somebody, someday, come after her again?

Would she live in fear the rest of her life?

Rominy had seen a brief press report in the International Herald Tribune. GENEVA-Attempts by the European Nuclear Agency, or CERN, to reach full-power operation of its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) here were dealt a serious setback Tuesday when an electrical arc from a faulty bus bar broke a tank of liquid helium. The accident killed eleven CERN employees and will likely shut down the facility for months, if not longer. “Repairs could take a full year,” said Franklin Rutherford, the American operations manager for the international consortium operating the machine. “The damage is quite extensive and we want to make sure we identify the causes so there won’t be a repeat of this terrible industrial tragedy. As you can imagine, it’s been quite stressful for all of us at CERN.” A faulty connection in superconducting magnets caused a similar delay at the LHC in late 2008. Asked if there was a fundamental design flaw in the supercollider, Rutherford replied, “I think we’ve just had a run of bad luck. These are very complex machines, and every collider has start-up pains.” Witnesses said there was a surface explosion at the LHC and even reports of gunfire, but Rutherford said laymen had mistaken “an auto accident and a mechanical issue for something more dramatic. I’m afraid we’ve just had a problem with our plumbing. After a thorough safety review, we still expect to reach our goal of 7 trillion electron volts sometime next year.” The 27-kilometer supercollider, largest in the world, uses such energies to break apart subatomic particles. Scientists hope to learn the answers to such fundamental questions as how the universe was created and why matter exists at all.

The story suited Rominy. The last thing she wanted was a press conference or paparazzi. She was alive and Sam was supposedly alive, and Jake and Raeder were dead. That was science miracle enough.

The neo-Nazis had disappeared like helium mist. For the first few nights she had nightmares of them peering in her hospital window, like the skinhead Otto Nietzel. But no, not a whisper, not an arrest, not a threat. No story of a dead skinhead at Wewelsburg Castle. Even the police seemed reluctant to probe too deeply into the disruption.

We are the police.

When she asked to see Sam, they put her off. “When he’s better, we will discuss a visit,” doctors told her.

And, “Before we can release you, we need more tests.”

They took blood samples several times. Her arms and fingers ached from the punctures.

There was an unsettling blankness about some of the physicians who looked at her, seeing her without seeing her. She was an isolated specimen: a private room, a door that automatically locked with its latch on the corridor side, and no word from America. There was no telephone. Television was set to a single French entertainment channel she asked be shut off.

Surely she wasn’t a prisoner. Was she? “Where are my clothes?”

“We have them in storage.”

“Where’s the locker?”

“In a safe place.”

“Did you find my money or passport?”

“Your hospital bills are being covered. Rest, please.”

From her bed she could look out at autumn leaves blowing down from Geneva’s trees, with the gray lake beyond. She waited for release, but none came. She waited for information, but that didn’t come either.

“Rest, rest. Tomorrow, we take more blood.”

She felt groggy. Were they drugging her?

Why was she always waiting for someone else to act?

She waited for Sam.

“He is recuperating.”

One of the nurses carried a smartphone in her white coat pocket, pink as lipstick. Rominy finally complained of fever, the woman leaned in to take her temperature, and the phone slipped into Rominy’s slyly reaching hand, slick and palm-sized. She tucked it under a blanket.

The nurse read the digital readout, touched Rominy’s forehead, and grunted. “No fever.” She peered at her ward suspiciously, as if impatient with malingerers.

Rominy shrugged. “Some aspirin, s’il vous plait?”

“Oui.” The reply was grumpy. The nurse strode off, rubber soles squeaking.

The hospital was listed on the nurse’s “favorites” list on the cell phone. Rominy dialed, asked for the nurses’ station, and began, “Do you speak English?”

“Oui. Yes.”

“Melissa Jenkins here, from the American embassy. I have some papers for patient Sam Mackenzie but he’s not on the floor where I thought. Young American?”

“A minute.” Rustle of papers. “Five-one-seven. Is not correct?”

“Ah, I had it wrong. Merci. ” She hung up and deleted the record of the call.

The nurse came back with aspirin. “Have you seen my cell phone?”

Rominy shook her head. “Did it fall out?”

The nurse found the device under a stainless trolley. While she bent to retrieve it, Rominy tore several pages from her lab-slip tablet. The nurse straightened to glare at her patient, but the American was innocently taking aspirin. When the woman pocketed her phone and went out, Rominy jumped from the bed and caught the door just before it closed. She inserted the paper she’d stolen in the jamb, preventing the latch from locking.

Later that night, hospital sounds a murmur, machines beeping, she slid out of bed, opened the door, checked that no one was watching, slipped into the corridor, and padded furtively down the hallway, her gown held tight around her. Peeking in rooms, she found a deserted nurses’ changing station and pilfered a uniform, bundling her hospital gown with its clipped identity tag under her arm.

After killing her former lover with liquid helium, confiscating clothes seemed a minor sin.

She changed into the white belted dress in a restroom stall, ascended an elevator, and took a man’s clothes from a drugged and sleeping patient, lifting them from his closet. Those would be for Sam.

Then she set out to find Mackenzie. Maybe it was time for her to rescue him.

Geneva, Switzerland

October 18, Present Day

Sam was still bedridden but awake at two A.M., leaner and better-looking for it. His face had matured in a way that flattered him. He looked at her with surprised delight when she slipped in.

“Rominy! Didn’t have the sense to ditch me, girl?” He was propped up on pillows, watching all-night French TV with the sound off.

“Don’t you sleep?”

“That’s all I’ve done for two weeks.”

She glanced at the television. “How can you tell what’s going on?”

“I just wait for the ads. They’re sexier than ours.”

“So you are feeling better.”

“Oh yeah. I couldn’t feel any worse, not after getting a jolt that’s the equivalent of grasping a power line.” Then he squinted at her nurse’s garb. “What the hell?”

She put her fingers to her lips. “I’m getting us out of here.”

“Why?”

“I’m tired of being poked. I don’t trust them.”

He grasped her hand, tight as a knot. “Me neither. They ask a million questions and don’t answer a one.”

“Are you well enough to move?”

“Healthier than Kurt Raeder.”

“You got him, Sam, when you broke that pipe.”

“I’m told the proton beam is directed by magnets. When I knocked some askew, the beam went wide just long enough to slice the bastard. It was like a microscopic knife cutting through his chest. His heart exploded.”