Free Blood of the Reich by William Dietrich

Meaning you.”
    “I have a great-grandfather?”
    “Everyone does, trust me.” He smiled. “You were adopted, correct?”
    “Yes. How do you know that?”
    “I told you, I’ve been investigating. It’s my job.”
    “My parents died in a car accident when I was a baby.”
    “And no other family that you knew about?”
    “There wasn’t any.”
    “But there had to be at one time, right? One’s parents have parents. Didn’t you ever wonder?”
    “Mom and Dad—my adopted parents—said they didn’t know. I haven’t dwelled on it, really. They never made me feel adopted—I was an only child, their child. We didn’t obsess on the accident. It’s not what you want to talk about, you know?”
    “Of course. Icy road. Mountain plunge. And you mysteriously found: abandoned, but bundled, in a cradle in a Forest Service campground . . .”
    “Not abandoned.” She flushed. All her old dread at the rumors, and her frustration at her adoptive parents’ evasions, was coming back. “No. Not a suicide. Something terrible must have been going on, and they left me for a moment to go get help, and the ice . . .” She felt the threat of tears again and willed them back. It didn’t make sense. It had never made sense. It annoyed her that he’d obviously looked at the old clippings. It seemed an invasion of her privacy, of a tragedy buried by time.
    “It wasn’t a suicide, Rominy, of course not.” He took a quick swallow. “So you know your name isn’t really Pickett?”
    “It is . This is what this is about? You bring this up now ? Here ?”
    “It’s your adoptive parents’ name.”
    “It’s my name, the one I’ve had as long as I can remember. And my poor dead parents were not named Hood.”
    “But your mother’s mother’s father was. I’m going to show you the genealogy, and your descent from him is on the female side. But that’s not my point. It wasn’t a suicide, I agree. But it was murder.”
    “What?”
    “By the same crazy fanatics who just tried to murder you.”
    She shook her head in bewilderment. “Skinheads killed my real parents?”
    “Not skinheads, Rominy. Nazis. Neo-Nazis.” He took out his own cell phone. “Which reminds me. I’ve got to make a call about your inheritance.”

10
    Kangra La, Sikkim
    July 28, 1938
    K urt Raeder looked back from the Himalayas to a flat world gauzed with haze, the steel of India’s great rivers faint threads of orientation. The Germans had escaped the hot, damp hell of the British Raj and were climbing toward their goal, the heaven promised by old Tibetan texts that Himmler had sent along in a steel box: Shambhala, the lost kingdom that would violently redeem the world.
    On Raeder’s neck, kept warm by his own body, was the vial that reputedly held the antique blood of Frederick Barbarossa.
    The explorer found himself lightening as they climbed. For more than a month he and his four companions had felt trapped in British India as news from Europe grew more ominous. Traveling through Calcutta and the Himalayan province of Sikkim was the quickest way to Tibet, but it was getting harder for both sides to pretend England’s relations with Germany weren’t fraying. Meanwhile, the monsoon came in full force, rain pouring down. The humidity on the Bengal plain became suffocating. Snakes slithered from drowned burrows. Mosquitoes rose in clouds. His companions chafed and quarreled. The heat, the bugs, and the sheer bureaucratic sloth of a dying empire all weighed on them. England was in decline and Calcutta was crowded and chaotic. As Hitler tried to reunite a Germany brutally disenfranchised after the Great War, the old enemies grew jealous again, seeking to hem in the Teutons. So had the German Tibetan Expedition been corralled by the arrogant, frightened English! For that, Raeder held them in contempt.
    Where, the officials in Calcutta had demanded of him, are your permits to travel to the Forbidden Kingdom of Tibet? Of course there could be no