"It jammed, and Keyuri's carrying it. But I'll take the submachine gun of the German you just shot. I'll get the drop on them."

"Ben . . ." She was pleading.

He wearily held up his bloody hand. "I've been lucky my whole life. Rich my whole life. Catered to my whole life. And rarely had much I cared about, except shooting blue sheep and falling for both of you. Now I've fallen into something important, against a man I know better than anyone. Kurt Raeder and I have been destined to come back together ever since the death of Keyuri's husband."

Beth's faced twisted. "I don't want to lose you."

"And I need to straighten things out. It starts with Shambhala."

"This isn't Shambhala," Beth said. "Not this evil power. This isn't what the legends promise."

"Well, whatever it is, we need to button it up before all hell breaks loose in the world. I was told it wouldn't be difficult for me to kill Kurt Raeder, and I realize Duncan Hale was right. Go, seal the door until it's over. Save Keyuri."

The aviatrix shut her eyes. "Try not to lose any more fingers."

"I wish we'd kept that scotch."

"I could use a swig myself."

The nuns called down "Hurry!" in English.

"At least I've got a flashlight for you in case the lights go out." Beth handed him one and glanced at his holster. "And take my pistol."

"No, I'll have the machine gun. I can't leave you unarmed."

"You're the one going to a gunfight, and you'd better have a backup. Take it, dammit, so I can go heal your girlfriend. Meanwhile I'll fix your forty-five."

"She's not . . ." He stopped, frustrated. "Thanks." He took the revolver, a cowboy six-shooter, and jammed it in his holster.

"Don't get too grateful. There's just one bullet left. It's for you, if you get trapped in the cave."

"Oh."

"I think ahead."

He smiled, tiredly. Then he went to the body of the dead German lying in a flower of blood. Calloway was quite the crack shot with a pistol; there were three holes in the bastard. He picked up the machine gun, lighter and more practical than anything Americans had.

"Good-bye, Beth."

"We'll be waiting." She said it without conviction.

He watched as she climbed up out of sight. A stone door slid shut, fitting so tight he could barely see the joint. How many access points were there?

Then he stepped off down the tunnel to hunt Kurt Raeder.

35.

A Boeing 747, over the Pacific September 7, Present Day Rominy had never flown business class before, but Jake persuaded her that they needed the indulgence to rest before the tiring journey ahead. "And we need room to inspect Benjamin Hood's lost satchel with some measure of privacy. You want to do a treasure map in the middle seat, coach?"

Since the money she'd just inherited didn't seem real, she'd acquiesced to the surreal $5,000 one-way cost for the two of them. She was betting on Jake Barrow, despite her doubts: in for a penny, in for a pound. His sense of purpose, confidence, and journalistic mission had cast a spell. They'd raced from the Cascade River road in a stolen SUV, taken back roads to Darrington and Granite Falls, and driven to Seattle's airport without stopping. She'd asked to get fresh clothes at her apartment and he'd refused.

"Too risky. The skinheads might be watching. We'll buy a few things at the airport."

"Jake, the police are looking for me. I can't just disappear."

"You have to, for a while."

"How?"

He thought. "Your adoptive parents are retired, right?"

"In Mexico. They don't keep track of me."

"Close relatives?"

"No."

"We just need a few weeks. We're going to stop at the Business Center at the airport and set up a new e-mail account. Write your boss that you're alive. Mention something only you and he would know you're working on, so he knows it's you. Then say you quit."

"What!"

He glanced at her, gaze opaque behind sunglasses he'd found in the glove department. "You've got more than a hundred thousand dollars in the bank, a dead-end job, and the adventure of a lifetime, as they say on TV. Do you want to go back to your cubicle? An e-mail will save police the trouble of looking for you. The money gives you a year or two to look for a job. To travel, first, if you want. To see what happens between us. And if you decide to bail on me . . . they'll probably hire you back."

Probably not, but yes, a door had cracked open to freedom. It was as terrifying as it was exhilarating. She bit her lip. "All right." She considered. "That doesn't explain the MINI Cooper."

"E-mail a friend that you've met a guy who's changed your life and you're on a journey of self-discovery. That's true, isn't it? I torched your car for the insurance to get some cash to travel with. You never thought it would be on the news, but don't worry, you're safe and happy."

She blinked at the audacity. "You're quite the liar, Jake Barrow."

"Some is true. I'm expedient."

"You think the cops will buy it?"

"No, but they get reports about a hundred runaways and messed-up chicks a day. It reduces the crime to insurance fraud, a low priority. And even if my truck was spotted at Safeway and they find it abandoned up by Eldorado, we'll be in Asia. We go cold case. Then we come back with the story, all will be explained, and it's book-and-movie-deal time."

"Movie deal?"

"Think who you want to play you. This is big."

It was crazy. Thrilling. Absurd. Hypnotic. "If you get the story."

"If we get the story."

To cut all ties and vault halfway around the world? Liberating. Irresponsible. Irresistible. "I feel like Bonnie and Clyde, not Woodward and Bernstein."

"I'm hoping it's more like Pierre and Marie Curie, discoverers of radium. There's a couple of things I have to tell you on the plane."

"I'm losing my old life, Jake."

"And gaining a new one."

He'd parked the stolen car in the half-empty lot of a discount store-"Leaving it here may confuse the police more than the airport garage, until we're out of the country"-and called a cab to take them to the terminal. To her objections that she had no passport, he produced two proclaiming them Mr. and Mrs. Robert Anderson (her first name listed as Lilith, of all things) along with the requisite permits to fly to China, of which Tibet was now a part. "I was hoping the story would take us this far," he said, "so I got these from a forger I met on the crime beat."

"A forger? Jake, we're going to go to prison."

"Not if you hang cool." He also had two simple gold wedding bands. "I got them from a pawn shop and carry them in my car. Every once in a while it helps to look married when I'm on assignment."

"What kind of assignment?"

"When I'm focusing and don't want to flirt. It's just less distraction."

That seemed unlikely. "You need two?"

"They came as a pair-probably an estate sale-and I put one on a photographer once when we were nosing around in a conservative hamlet in the Idaho panhandle, getting background on a religious sect. It relaxed a few sources still living in the nineteenth century."

"So long as your photographer was a woman."

He laughed. "Right! And Caroline made me swear not to tell the newsroom. So keep a lid on. I still kid her about it, though."

The marriage charade struck Rominy as almost sacrilegious, but they couldn't afford questions at the airport. It was weird having him hand her the ring, fraudulent and yet touching.

"Just for practice," Jake said. He actually blushed, which she liked.

Her heart hammered a little as she slipped the ring on.

At the ticket counter he paid in cash, which cost them an extra five minutes while the agent double-checked the no-fly list. And, yes, they only had carry-ons. "I won't pay those new baggage fees," Jake told the agent. "You guys are air pirates."

"Business class doesn't charge for luggage, sir."

"It's the principle."

Rominy expected her to trip an alarm for an air marshal, but the agent only gave a sweet smile. "Have a pleasant flight, sir."

In fact, Rominy expected arrest at any moment for arson, kidnapping, auto theft, or identity fraud, but none materialized. Instead, as she was trying to buy some emergency underwear in the Seattle concourse, Jake nudged her and pointed to four shaven-headed young men at a pub table, disturbingly attired in bomber jackets, combat boots, and tattoos. One of them kept glancing her way. Were they watching? So they hastily moved on, and she'd postponed her shopping until the two-hour layover in Los Angeles, buying jeans, sweater, and parka. From there they'd caught the trans-Pacific flight to Shanghai and then Chengdu, China, from which they'd fly to Lhasa.

"What is it with skinheads, anyway?" she asked as they waited to board. "Why do they want to intimidate people?"

"They just want to belong. That's the basis of all gangs, armies, and nations. The Nazi stuff is rebellious enough to get a rise out of people, which is an improvement if you've been poor and ignored your whole life. And there's a philosophy behind it, an idealism."

"Being a Nazi?"

"Look, the Nazis lost and didn't get to write history. Hitler told his followers to stick up for their own. That's what skinheads believe, too. So do Jews, blacks, women. Everyone's got a tribe, except white guys."

"Jake, they didn't stick up for their own. They tried to conquer the world."

"It spiraled out of control. But in the beginning the key Nazi philosophers were reformers who believed in self-improvement, discipline, classic art, and bringing back some of the old beliefs in nature and environment. People voted for them! Did you know the SS had a research division? That's why the Nazis were sent to Tibet. Heinrich Himmler wanted to build a kind of Vatican for the SS, a Camelot or a Valhalla, at an old castle called Wewelsburg. Just like Hitler wanted to make his hometown of Linz the art center of the world. I'm not saying they were right, but it didn't start with panzer divisions and death camps."

"I think it did start with that. I think it was embedded in what they stood for from the very beginning."

"And I think it got twisted, which is more believable than a nation deciding to get evil for a dozen years and then get good again."

She shook her head. This was like going on a blind date and learning your liberal agnosticism had been paired with a supply-side creationist. Just what were his beliefs? "I've heard of being open-minded, but this is ridiculous. And white guys are the tribe."

"It's not ridiculous. I'm a reporter, and I'm trained to look at both sides. Hey, I'm the one who saved you from the skinheads. I'm on your side. But I try to understand the other side, so I can write about them."

"What I understand is that they blew up my car."

"Which is why we're moving on."

It did feel reassuring to get away from Seattle, where all this madness had started. So did a Bloody Mary on the first flight, two martinis at LAX, and the welcoming champagne in business class. She'd fallen asleep soon after they flew over open water, and woke up somewhere mid-Pacific. It was dark, she was hungry, and Jake had saved her a bag of peanuts.

"Don't worry, there's another meal in an hour or two."

She felt groggy and uncertain. The intimacy she'd shared with Jake in the mountain cabin had been overwhelmed by the roller-coaster terror of falling into the mine and then careening downhill from madwoman Delphina Clarkson and the Mohawk bow hunter. Then sending the cryptic e-mails from the airport, the new clothes paid for from the stash of cash, and flinging herself into the void. Had the destruction of her MINI Cooper really been less than two days ago? Instead of her old life they had two backpacks, more than $21,000 in cash, a swollen bank account, a bag of peanuts, and moldy seventy-year-old documents taken from a skeleton.

"Good sleep?" Jake asked, brisk as a butler. He'd bought some toiletries and looked washed, combed, and competent, though he'd left the two-day stubble for that fashionable bad-boy look that, dammit, did look good on his strong jaw. Well, she was alive, richer, and an aisle curtain snobbishly separated her from the coach-class proletariat she'd long been accustomed to. One day at a time, Rominy. Maybe Jake was the answer she'd been waiting for. At least there were no skinheads in business class.

"I need some aspirin, actually."

"Got 'em. Picked up a vial at the airport newsstand."

He'd given her sunglasses and a sun hat to wear at SeaTac, where she was already old news in the twenty-four-hour cycle but where her picture popped up once on airport TVs. She'd kept her head buried in People magazine, reading about celebrity calamities that seemed ridiculously trivial compared to her own. No one had looked at her with even a flicker of recognition.

Now she was stateless, groundless, history-less, suspended in midair. "Water," she ordered from a flight attendant. "And a gin and tonic." Maybe adventure would make her an alcoholic.

"I waited until you woke up to dig out the documents," Barrow said. "They're really more yours than mine, though I think they're going to show us where to go in Tibet. I think we're thousands of miles ahead of any pursuit now, Rominy."

"If we get through Chinese customs."

"You're a missing person, not a fugitive. You won't show up on Chinese computers."

"What about you, Jake? What have you told your editors?"

"That I'm on the biggest story of my life and I'll be out of touch. They cut me slack because I'm good. It's only been a couple of days. By the time they start wondering about my clock hours, I'll have the biggest scoop of the year and they'll be drooling Pulitzer."

"I'm the biggest scoop of the year?"

"No, Shambhala is."

"Sham . . . what?"

"Actually, I did peek a little. That's what Great-grandpa was after, Rominy-Shambhala. A mythical kingdom in Tibet, a real-life predecessor to Shangri-la."