"But they talk about love and empathy. Wasn't that Jesus, too? Those nuns devote their lives to this cosmic . . . thing. This goodness, this grace, that unites all the great faiths. They see him, or it, or the Essence. They'd see God right now, right here, in this wilderness."

"I'm sorry, but that rock isn't God, not for me. And what Essence? Living in the Middle Ages at the edge of the world? Praying twenty million times a day? For more of the same in the next life? I've watched them for two years. It's an interesting show for tourists, but not to buy in to. I'm sorry, Rominy, but for those who find life pointless and death terrifying without religion, I just say maybe it is pointless and terrifying."

"Well, I've seen God," she said.

Now he stopped, hands on hips. "You have? And you didn't ask her for a ride?"

"Very funny. Remember when we climbed up the edge of the waterfall to the lake, saw the smoke from the nunnery, and started cutting along the mountain to get to it?"

"Yeah."

"It was so empty, so desolate, so lonely, that he, or she, filled it."

"Filled what?"

"Everything."

"If your dope was that good, I wish you'd shared it."

"It was a very odd feeling and it only lasted for a minute. As we worked our way toward the nunnery I suddenly felt completely at peace. As if I were exactly where I was supposed to be. And I felt connected. I felt connected to Jake, I felt connected to you, I felt connected to the river and the rock and the birds orbiting overhead, to the universe. I felt everything was one. And I thought, 'This must be what heaven is like.' "

He regarded her skeptically. "Brain chemicals. High altitude, sleep deprivation, faulty diet. You hallucinated, Rominy, like every prophet and guru who's gone into the desert and deliberately starved. You felt what you wanted to feel."

"But I didn't want it. In fact, for a few moments I didn't want anything."

He sighed. "Do you feel it now?"

"No."

"Will you concede it could all be a trick of the mind?"

"No."

"That maybe the Twelve Apostles were a bunch of potheads?"

"No. It was too real. It was so real that that was the reality, not"-she waved her hand at the landscape-"this. Not what I feel now. It's like I woke up, just for a second, and now I'm back asleep again, in this dream we call life."

"Wow. Whoa. Jake was just a snake, Rominy. There was no 'connection' to that Nazi-loving bastard."

"That's the weird part. He is a snake, but there was a connection. That if we could really see the essence that this staff is supposed to tap, that if we could lift the veil and get down to the fundamental that's behind everything, there was, is, a connection. It was spooky, wonderful, scary. The real Shambhala isn't lightning bolts, Sam, it's unity. That's what we lost. That's what we're looking for."

"I'm looking for a yak burger."

"Even Hitler, even though he was irretrievably lost."

"Rominy, come on. Now you're starting to sound like Jake Barrow. Is that what we're going to say to that bastard when we catch up to him? All is one, all is forgiven, now please give your stick back?"

"No. Just that he has no idea what he's really carrying. He was in a place to see, and stayed blind."

"And he locked us in a tomb. You pray, and I'll go in shooting."

It took them six days for the track to turn to a dirt road, and two more for the dirt to turn to gravel, and one more after that to reach pavement. They finally flagged down a farm truck and paid a few dollars to ride it back to the capital. Sam was apprehensive that Barrow might be laying a trap, but they saw no sign of him. So they had a blessed night in a hotel (separate rooms), a feast of the most American food they could shamelessly order, and then a flight (coach this time) to Delhi, Dubai, and Frankfurt. Sam retrieved his American passport; Rominy traveled as Lilith Anderson.

It was in Dubai during a three-hour layover that Sam wandered out of a magazine store with a Herald Tribune. "Look what I spotted."

It was an inside story, one column, from the Associated Press. "Collider to Attempt Full Power," the headline read.

"The European nuclear agency CERN will attempt soon to reach full power at its Large Hadron Collider near Geneva in hopes of testing theories about the origin of the Universe," the story began. "By smashing subatomic particles at a velocity near the speed of light, scientists hope to answer such fundamental questions as why matter exists at all. The underground cyclotron, biggest in the world, is designed to reach proton beam energies of up to 7 trillion electron volts."

"You think this has something to do with us?" Rominy asked.

"No, I think it has something to do with rat-bag Jake Barrow and why he played you when he did. This is an atom smasher, right? Going to full power? Can you say 'coincidence'?"

"Jake can't have anything to do with a huge supercollider. Can he?"

"Dollars to doughnuts says he does. How, I don't know. Is he an errand boy for some mad scientist? I just think it's too neat not to mean something."

"What about his SS Vatican, or whatever he called it?"

"We should start there, if we can find it. And warn this CERN outfit if we can get any evidence on the scum sucker." He stopped to listen for an announcement. "Come on, they're loading our plane."

Rominy's joy at being lifted from the twelfth century to the twenty-first in a matter of days faded when they broke through the clouds and saw the green platter of Germany.

Somewhere, they hoped, was the stolen staff. The problem would be if it came packaged with a packet of Nazis.

Sam persuaded her they needed to rent a BMW 3 Series Coupe. "If it was me it would be a Ford Fiesta," he admitted, "but we're secret agents now and have to keep up appearances. This is great, using your money. Maybe I am beginning to understand Jake Barrow."

"I've never been so popular with men," she said drily. "Don't worry, we've almost burned through my cash. After we save the world, I just hope we'll have enough left to buy a ticket home."

"You are home. All is one, remember? Cologne, Cleveland, Kathmandu . . ."

"I don't believe you're as cynical as you say. You don't live in Tibet for two years for nothing."

He laughed. "Check my bank account, Rominy. It was for nothing."

A Google search at the Frankfurt Airport Business Center swiftly identified the town of Wewelsburg as the site of "Himmler's Camelot," or the would-be spiritual home of the SS. There was nothing secret about it, thus making it seem an unlikely place to run Jake Barrow to ground. But it was only a hundred or so miles north of Frankfurt and they had no other clue. Sam threw himself into the task of driving with salacious joy, getting up to 80 mph on the autobahn and then throwing the sporty car into curves once they left the main highway. It reminded her of Jake's freeway "escape" in the pickup truck.

Sam had lost weight hiking from Shambhala and shaved in Lhasa, and he looked good without scraggle on his chin. With Jake she'd felt a tense electricity, but with Sam there was easygoing comfort. Not so much dependability as dogged loyalty, an instinct to look after her. He was, after all, a guide.

She'd catch him glancing at her at times.

"Do you think a lot about beer, breasts, and baseball?" Rominy asked once as he drove.

"What?"

"It's just something that Jake said. I'm wondering if all guys are alike."

"Oh. No way, man. Football is king."

She'd found, she supposed, a guy from the beer and chips aisle.

The shadow of war and Nazism seemed purged from Germany as they approached Wewelsburg. The landscape was fat, bucolic, satisfied. The villages were quaint. The cars were washed. The people looked prosperous. The politics were liberal. Hitler was dead history, wasn't he?

Sam pulled to the side when the castle came into view. It looked a little like a blunt-bowed ship perched on a low ridge that rose above the Alme Valley, its apex pointing north. A round, low-roofed tower was at the northern end. At the other two corners were smaller towers with dome roofs, like derbies.

Sam counted. "There's a good sixty windows just on the side we can see. For the home of the most sinister organization in world history, it doesn't look very scary."

"It's not a King Arthur castle. It's a Renaissance castle." Rominy was reading from notes they'd made in the airport. "Himmler wanted it to be more of a church, a pagan church, than a fortress. Or a meeting lodge for a new kind of Freemasonry. They had a world globe in there so big they couldn't bring it in the conventional way. They had to lift it through a window."

"The better to carve up the planet, my dear. Well, what's our plan? If Barrow sees us he's going to go ballistic, you know."

"There was a B and B about five klicks back. Let's check in there and go up to the castle after dark. We can sneak around when he can't see us."

"Great. Unarmed. Clueless. Unable to speak the language. I like the way you think, Tomb Raider."

"We need evidence for prosecution or to take to CERN. Jake tried to murder us, Sam. And we need to take him by surprise. Jake thinks we're dead, or that I'm a ninny waiting for him to tell me what to do. The best defense is a good offense. Let's start doing the unexpected."

"What evidence is there?"

"The staff. I want it back: it belonged to my great-grandparents. I'm going to find it and steal it. Then we go to the police."

"And tell them what?"

"That he tried to murder us in Tibet. That he stole from the nunnery."

"And how do we prove that, exactly?"

"The staff seemed made of something I've never seen before. We find that, and Jake's real identity. We show the bruises on your chest and the bullet in your iPhone. We even call the Seattle Times back home and get them to investigate this impostor."

"We sneak, we steal, we give a news tip, and we go to the cops. Golly. D-Day wasn't this carefully crafted."

She ignored the sarcasm, studying the castle like a besieging general. "Sam? You don't think the police could be in on this somehow, do you? You know, like neo-Nazis?"

He got serious. "Not in Germany. They're pretty paranoid about that stuff. And that was three generations back. I'm guessing Jake Barrow is on his own, except for a lunatic skinhead or two."

Rominy started. Had the bald man in the cabin window been working with Jake Barrow? Did he shoot his arrows to help them escape?

She realized how little she still knew about what was really going on.

48.

Wewelsburg, Germany October 2, Present Day It was near midnight when they parked a quarter mile from the castle and cautiously made their way through the outskirts of Wewelsburg, their bags in the trunk in case they had to suddenly flee. It was autumn, the days shortening, the crops in, but even at that the town seemed oddly quiet. Every curtain was drawn. They could see the glow of lights and the flicker of television in a few houses, but only occasionally did a car hiss down the village lanes. It was so quiet that the slam of a door could be heard from a hundred yards away, and the bark of a dog twice that. Their footsteps seemed loud, and Rominy had a sense of being watched. Yet no one challenged them.

They studied the castle from the shadow of trees. The building was entirely dark, shut for the night. A ramp led across a ditch to the castle entrance, but the way was barricaded with lumber and tape, signs bearing international symbols for construction. Apparently off-season remodeling was going on. Looming above, the edifice seemed somber and sad, not a Camelot at all. Did the ghosts from old SS plots, seminars, initiation ceremonies, and Aryan weddings still linger here?

"Looks like a wild-goose chase," Sam murmured. "If the castle is closed, Barrow wouldn't come here, would he?"

"But where else would he go?" She was frustrated.

"We're not detectives, Rominy. We might have to hire one, or find some officials who'd believe our story and do the detective work themselves. Jake might not even be in Germany. We need Interpol, not our instincts."

"But we don't even have proof Jake Barrow exists, or whatever his real name is."

"Maybe if we told our story, the Chinese police would verify it for Interpol by interviewing the nuns."

"I'm not going to sic Communist Chinese cops on a Buddhist nunnery."

He looked back at the quiet village. It looked Disney clean, like everything in this model railroad of a country. "What then?"

"I don't know. Let's look around a little more."

"We can't even get in the place."

"There's a dry moat on this side. I think that sign in German says it leads to a tower. Let's try that. Maybe we can peek in some windows."

"You got balls, girl."

"I just don't want to waste my plane ticket. And I'm angry for letting life happen to me, instead of me happening it."

"Happening it?"

"You know what I mean. Come on, you're the one who lost his iPhone to that maniac."

Skirting the barricades, they made their way down into a grassy moat. A three-quarter moon floated above and gave enough light to mark their way through the mown trench. Down there the castle seemed even higher and darker, a cliff like the cliff that had barred their way to Shambhala. There were actually no windows at moat level to peer into, and Rominy was almost pleased. She'd be glad to get away from this creepy castle, but she had to do something. Her best, and then go home.

The moat led them north to the big, flat-roofed tower. The ditch ended where the castle ridge dropped toward the valley below, since no barrier was needed on that steep side. A few farm lights glittered on the plain beyond. They backed away from the tower and looked up, its crenellations picked out by the moon. Nothing . . .

Except that.

"Did you see it?" Rominy whispered.

"What?"

"A candle. It moved. Someone's inside." She shivered from both excitement and dread.

"This isn't one of your wacky 'I see God' moments, is it?"

"No, there was a light, I swear it." She pointed. "It was up where the main floor of the tower would be."

"A janitor with a flashlight."

"Or someone sneaking around inside."