Blood of the Reich (38 page)

September 7, Present Day

N
o, Jake, I have not heard of Vril. Unless that’s the new cleanser that cleans the bathroom so you don’t have to.” Rominy was smart, but she didn’t spend her pretty little brain cells worrying about Nazi power sources. At least, not until now.

“It’s a fictional name, a kind of code for what German theosophists hoped might be out there somewhere.”

“German
what
?”

“Just guys who provided some of the intellectual underpinnings of National Socialism, the creed of Hitler’s party. It did have a philosophy, you know.”

“You bet. Blow up the world.”

“In the 1930s many highly educated people took race and evolutionary theories quite seriously. After Darwin, it seemed self-evident that if you wanted to improve the human species—if you wanted it to evolve—then you bred the best with the best. People do exactly that every day. They want to mate with the prettiest or the smartest or the strongest or the richest. The Nazis simply thought you could apply that common sense to the group.”

“Master race? Aryan supermen? Sore point for Jews?”

“And Vril.”

“Did I miss that
Oprah
episode?” She glanced out the window. The view over the Pacific looked exactly as it had hours ago. God, it was a long way to China.

“It sounds goofy, like looking for a way to turn lead into gold, or the legend of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. Yet for thousands of years humans believed in a much more spiritual world than we do, in which gods or ghosts manifested themselves. Then along came science, everything opposed to science was labeled superstitious heresy, and ideas of exotic power sources like Vril were dismissed. Until modern physics came along.”

“Cyclorama.”

“Cyclotron. But it’s not just particle accelerators or atom smashers. It’s our whole concept of the universe. Now some people think the Nazis were on to something. Maybe Himmler’s Lewis and Clark expedition to Tibet wasn’t so wacky after all. Maybe Vril, or whatever you care to name it, really exists.”

“And you think Benjamin Hood discovered this?”

“Maybe. You know what an atom is, Rominy?”

“Jake, I
am
literate.”

“Bear with me. It was the Greeks who came up with the term. They looked at the world and saw that big things could be made of smaller things. Buildings out of bricks. Beaches out of grains of sand. And even sand could be ground down into dust or flour. Tiny and tinier. But was there a point at which things couldn’t get any smaller? Such a fundamental particle, they proposed, could be called an atom.”

This was a moment in which women learned to humor men. You nodded as they held forth, and if you were really interested in the guy, you could smile in amazement or widen your eyes. If guys were smart, they learned that the inverse of this seduction was to pretend to listen sympathetically while the girlfriend kvetched about her day, and then rub her feet.

Barrow plunged on. “It turns out the Greeks were right. There are fundamental particles called atoms. They come in nature in about ninety-two sizes, or weights, and out of them you can build anything we see in the universe. It’s like how you can make any English-language book from just twenty-six letters, or any song from just eight notes. You take the atoms of the periodic table and you can make
anything
. But here’s the problem. By the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists knew atoms weren’t the smallest thing after all. Do you know what they believed was smallest?”

“The unholy heart of Ronnie Hoskins, my two-timing high school boyfriend?”

He laughed. “Hey, I’m being serious, here.”

“I’ll say.”

“Electrons, protons, and neutrons. Their number in an atom controls the type of atom it is. Now we’re down to everything being made from just
three
things.”

“Amazing.” She widened her eyes.

“But then they wondered what would happen if they smashed those particles together.”

“Boys do that with trains.”

“It turns out there’s smaller stuff still. Quarks, and there are at least six varieties of those. Neutrinos, muons, leptons, a whole bunch of stuff physicists call a particle zoo. There are separate families of particles, called tribes. It’s bizarre, and confusing. A quark is a thousand times smaller than the nucleus of an atom, and remember I said that’s just a pinprick of the fuzz we call atoms. More than 99.99 percent of an atom is empty space.”

“Jake, this is sweet, but why are you telling me all this?”

“Because it drives physicists crazy. They’re romantics. They believe the universe is not only simple at the tiniest level, but that it
needs
to be simple to be aesthetic and neat and religious and
right
. They want to explain the whole shebang with a single equation so short you could fit it on a T-shirt.”

“Like
E=mc
2
.”

“Exactly! That explains the relationship of energy to matter, that they’re two sides of the same coin. But then scientists have found four basic kinds of energy, too, the weak, the strong, electromagnetic, and gravity. It drives them crazy.”

“I certainly hope so.”

“At these smallest levels, everything goes woo-woo. A particle can be in two places at the same time. It can move from one spot to another instantly, without traveling through the intervening space.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Even worse is that all of the universe we can see, all that beautiful stuff that shows up in the Hubble telescope photos, isn’t everything. In fact it isn’t most things. Scientists think more than 96 percent of the stuff that makes up the universe is matter and energy we can’t see, or even detect. It’s called dark matter and dark energy.”

“Earth to Jake. What does this have to do with Nazis?”

“So. Some of the Nazis believed in an energy source called the Black Sun, buried at the center of the earth. Woo-woo, right? Except not entirely different from our ideas of dark energy, an energy so mysterious we can’t even detect it.”

“How do we know it’s there?”

“Something’s driving the universe apart faster than it should. That ‘thing’ has been labeled dark energy.”

“And you take these physicists seriously?”

“This is real! Okay, so now there’s this idea that there’s a smaller particle still, something a trillion times smaller than an atom, called a string. It’s a one-dimensional line, meaning it’s so small, this string has length, but no width.”

She groaned. “Where’s my gin and tonic?”

“And then when this string vibrates, it creates everything—
everything—
the way a vibrating violin string creates music.”

“Music isn’t
stuff
.”

“This music is. It’s all the stuff, all the energy.”

“Why can’t I hear it?”

“It’s not
real
music, Rominy. We’re talking metaphor. But you
can
hear it, too, since if these vibrations make everything—if they’re really the fundamental building blocks of atoms—then they made this jet and your ears and the air the engine noise travels through. It’s like the music of the spheres. The music of the cosmos.”

She shifted in her seat, feeling something hard in her pocket poke her in the thigh. “And Nazis wanted the music.”

“In essence, yes. What if you had a violin bow that could play these tiny, tiny strings and in so doing manipulate reality in ways we could barely imagine? I’m not talking just lead into gold. I’m talking matter into energy, and consciousness into action, and space into time and time into space. I’m talking extra dimensions, because string theorists think there may be a dozen or so we’re not even aware of, besides the usual four. I’m talking about walking through walls and teleportation and, well, magic. The Tibetans believe in
tulpa
s, or beings created by conscious thought: that we can
think
things into existence if we understand how the universe really works. I’m talking about extraordinary abilities that the smartest people in the world searched for over many centuries. Wizards, alchemists, priests, and kings. It would be like the bow of God.” He looked at her expectantly.

“Adolf Hitler wanted to play these strings?”

“No, Hitler and the Nazis had no idea they existed. There were these legends of Vril, but no one in Germany had an idea what it really was or how it might be controlled. But since then we’ve had all these amazing discoveries in physics and suddenly this crazy 1930s idea sounds more plausible. What if an ancient civilization somehow figured this out centuries ago? Or some alien civilization came down to earth? What if Shambhala was a research center? Think about it—Tibet is the highest plateau on earth, the closest to angels and aliens, a natural landing point for a visiting civilization. What if someone, at some time, figured out how to play the music of the cosmos, to draw a bow across the fundamental strings?”

“You think this is what my ancestor and the Nazis were after?”

“Yes.”

She thought. “These strings are really small, right? I mean, we’re talking about tiny violins.”

“Teeny-tiny.”

“So this is a tiny bow? Like, I’m not going to pick it up with my fingers?”

“I don’t know. My suspicion is that they forged a great big bow that could play very little strings. You know, what’s come down to us in legends and stories is the idea of a stick—a magic wand, or a wizard’s staff—with magical powers.”

“Like Gandalf.”

“Exactly. And not just fictional wizards. Cardinal Richelieu carried a wand of gold and ivory his enemies thought had special powers. Newton was entranced not just by science but by alchemy and magic, and hunted for ways to transcend normal material boundaries. Nikola Tesla thought there was a connection between the mental and physical planes—mind over matter, if you will. What
I
think is that these legends have some basis in reality, that Shambhala devised very big tools—compared to subatomic particles—that could play this subatomic music and control the natural world with what we would call magic. What if they really existed? What if they
still
exist—in a hidden city that your great-grandfather found?”

“Jake, this is starting to sound a little bigger than a newspaper scoop. A little scarier, too. And a whole lot crazier.”

“Conceded. But maybe my weirdness makes a little more sense to you now. I seemed crazy because the story seemed crazy, until your car blew up. That’s when I knew this was real, and you had to be protected.”

“I can protect myself,” she said automatically, even though the idea of a protector was not entirely unappealing.

“Sorry. I mean you needed a partner. A friend.”

She glanced down at the sheaf of diagrams. “You think the
skinheads
are after these staffs of Shambhala?”

“Yes. Or at least after the idea that there’s
something
to the Shambhala legend.”

Rominy sat back, thinking. She didn’t know if she was sitting next to a lunatic or Einstein. But then a thought occurred. She knew what had poked her thigh—the empty bullet cartridge she’d found on the floor of Jake’s pickup, behind the seats. Its meaning hadn’t been clear, but all this talk of big things and microscopic things had jarred her memory. She let her fingers touch it, next to her leg, but decided against pulling it out. Instead, she remembered its size. It was small, smaller than she imagined most bullet shells to be.

In fact, the shell was the right size to hold a bullet that would make a small hole just like the one in Barrow’s rear window when they were being chased on the freeway.

What was the shell from such a bullet doing
inside
Jake’s cab?

Had that gunshot come from assailants she never saw as she was mashed down on the seat? Or from Jake Barrow himself?

Should she challenge him on it?

“Okay, but I still don’t get it, Jake. You got me to go along, get the safety deposit box, find the mine, and retrieve the satchel. That’s my part as the heir, right? Why do you need me now?”

He smiled, putting his hand on hers, covering where that gold ring burned on her finger. “Can’t you tell? I’ve fallen in love with you.”

38

Lhasa, Tibet

September 10, Present Day

L
hasa gave Rominy a headache, but then it gave almost all first-time visitors a headache. At nearly twelve thousand feet, it was one of the highest cities in the world. Yet its dizzyingly perched airport was still tucked in the valley of the infant Brahmaputra River, the runway surmounted by taller mountains that glowed like green felt. The sky was a deep blue and clouds drifted overhead like galleons. The topography was so steep that she and Jake had to take a tunnel to get to Lhasa’s neighboring valley. Golden willows and cottonwoods bordered gravelly rivers. Lines with flapping prayer flags were stitched from tree to tree like cloth graffiti, telegraphing prayers to the eternal. Buddhas peered down from niches in cliffs. Painted ladders symbolized ascension through reincarnation toward the final grace of nirvana.