The Magic Circle Read online

  “I figured,” said Sam. “I’ve been phoning since this morning, but I just hung up whenever somebody else answered. Now that I’ve got you, the first thing we have to do is find a clean phone line so I can fill you in right away on what’s happened.”

  “You could phone me at home,” I suggested, trying to be careful in my choice of words. I also slid my wheeled desk chair a bit farther from where Olivier, with his back to me, was still tapping away at his terminal.

  “No good; your home phone is bugged,” said Sam, who would know such things. “This office line’s clean, at least for the moment—long enough for us to work out a plan. Your car isn’t safe, either,” he added, anticipating my next question. “Someone broke into it and did a thorough search. I left those knots there to warn you. I hope you haven’t stashed anything of significant value in your car or your house: I’m sure you’re being watched by real professionals, and most of the time.”

  Real professionals? What was that supposed to mean: that I was somehow embroiled in this spy thriller, too? That was about all I needed to hear, on top of everything else I’d been through in the past twenty-four hours. And though I did wonder what Sam meant by “anything of significant value,” I had to restrict myself to: “I didn’t notice anything …” Instead of “missing” I added, “… out of order.”

  Now Olivier was standing up and stretching. When he glanced over toward me, I swiveled my chair away to face my own desk and started acting as if I were taking important technical notes on my phone conversation. The blood was still pounding in my head, but I knew I had to get Sam off the phone, and quickly. I asked him, “What do you suggest?”

  “We need to arrange a way that you and I can talk at appointed times, without letting on to those watching you that you’re trying to conceal anything. Like, no ducking into phone booths out on the street.”

  Which, in fact, had been my first idea. Scratch that.

  “On the computer?” I asked, still scribbling on my pad. I wished to God that Olivier would take a hike.

  “Computer?” said Sam. “Not safe enough. Any asshole can hack into a government computer—especially a security computer. We’d have to work out a multilayered code for protection, and we don’t have time. There’s a cowboy bar called the No-Name down the road from your office. I’ll phone you there in fifteen minutes.”

  “I have a meeting with my boss in fifteen minutes,” I told him. “I’ll see if—”

  Just then, with immaculate timing, the Pod poked his head in at the door. “Behn, I’ve cleared the decks a bit earlier than I’d expected. Come to my office as soon as you’ve finished here. We have something important to discuss.”

  “Okay, I guess you’ve gotta go,” Sam was saying in my ear. Olivier started to follow the Pod to the meeting as Sam added, “Let’s make it an hour from now instead. If you’re still tied up, I’ll just keep phoning over there every fifteen minutes or so until I reach you. And, Ariel? I’m really, really sorry about all this.” Then the line went dead.

  My hand was shaking as I put the receiver back in its cradle, and I tried to stand up on wobbly legs.

  The Pod had halted at the door and was telling Olivier, “You won’t be needed at this meeting, just Behn here. I’m borrowing her for an emergency project for a couple of weeks. A little ‘firefighting,’ helping Wolfgang Hauser of the IAEA.”

  He went out the door, and Olivier sank back to his seat with a groan.

  “What did I ever do to deserve this, my prophet Moroni?” he asked, casting his eyes toward the ceiling as if expecting to find the Mormon prophet hovering there. Then he looked at me angrily. “You do realize this means I’ve also lost the whole year’s budget for multicolored vegetable pastas from northern Italy, and my allowance for gourmet wine vinegars with herbs and spices?”

  “Oh, Olivier, I’m so sorry,” I said, patting him on the back as I went out the door in a kind of daze.

  Holy shit—this was shaping up to be an extremely interesting day.

  The Idaho site where I worked was the premier site in the world when it came to nuclear safety research: that is, we studied how accidents happened, and how they could be prevented.

  The topic in our field that had recently gained particular prominence—waste management—dovetailed, as it happened, with the exact project Olivier and I had been working on for the past five years. Olivier and I controlled the largest database in existence to identify and monitor where toxic, hazardous, and transuranic materials were stored or buried. As pioneers in the field, we felt it only right that we’d also accumulated the world’s largest stockpile of scatological humor—quips like “Other people’s waste products are our bread and butter.”

  But Olivier and I were small fare. The real bread and butter of the research done here in Idaho consisted of the wide-ranging tests on meltdowns and other types of accidents at our reactors out in the lava desert. Though it wasn’t surprising that the International Atomic Energy Agency, watchdog to the world, would send a representative like Wolfgang Hauser to Idaho to share ideas on such topics, I was unprepared for what the Pod was now telling me about this forthcoming mission.

  “Ariel, you’re aware of the problems going on just now in the Soviet Union” were his first words when I was seated in his office and he’d shut the door.

  “Um—well, of course. I mean, it’s on the six o’clock news every night,” I replied. Gorbachev had hell to pay, introducing freedom to a country that had imprisoned or slaughtered millions of people just to keep them from discussing it over tea.

  “The IAEA is concerned,” the Pod went on, “that the Soviet Union might lose control of some of its republics—permanently lose control, that is—that there might be large stockpiles of nuclear weapons and materials in these places, not to mention the breeder reactors they’re so fond of, many of which are antique with inadequate control systems. All that falling into the hands of untrained provincials with no centralized authority, nothing to lose, and everything to gain by the situation.”

  “Holy … Moly,” I said. “So what can I do to help out?”

  He threw back his head and laughed, a surprisingly warm and open laugh. Despite his well-deserved reputation, much of the time I couldn’t help but genuinely like Pastor Owen Dart. A wiry, rugged former army boxing champ and Vietnam vet, he wore his shaggy bronze hair and leathery, battered face as badges of his inner nature. Though he was barely taller than I, the Pod was a scrappy fighter who only did better coming out of tight corners. But I was still relieved that I’d never had to cross him. Unfortunately for me, all that was about to change.

  “Your assignment, you mean?” the Pod was saying. “I’ll leave that to Wolf Hauser, when he returns. Had I known you were back already, I would have detained him long enough to meet you, but he’s out doing field work for the rest of this week. I can tell you this much, though not for publication: Your involvement will require that you accompany Dr. Hauser to Russia in a few weeks. The arrangements are already under way.”

  Russia? I couldn’t go flitting off to Russia. Not with Sam newly resurrected from the grave, dodging a squad of hit men from God knew where, and lurking only a few yards from here in the parking lot leaving messages for me on bits of string. Sam and I thought we were having trouble communicating now, but as far as I knew, they didn’t even have working phones in the Soviet Union! Much as I fancied the idea of an intimate foreign boondoggle with the gorgeous, pine-scented Dr. Wolfgang Hauser, I knew I must put a stop to this at once.

  “I’m grateful for the opportunity, sir,” I told the Pod, “but frankly I don’t see how I can help with this project. I’ve never been to Russia, and I don’t speak the language. I’m not a Ph.D. chemist or physicist, so I wouldn’t know what I was classifying if it walked up and bit me. My job has always been security—tagging and tracking what other people have already dug up and identified. Besides, you told Olivier Maxfield this job would only last a few weeks and wouldn’t take me away from our own project.” />
  I was out of breath from this back-paddling, but it seemed my canoe was going nowhere.

  “Don’t worry,” the Pod assured me in a non-reassuring voice. “I had to tell Maxfield something, or he would have wondered why he wasn’t included in this. After all, you’re codirectors on your project.”

  I wanted to ask why, indeed, Olivier had not been included. But the Pod’s voice had taken on that detached tone he often used with those whose funeral oration he had already prepared. He was on his feet and seeing me out. I felt a chill in my bones at what I still had to do.

  “The fact is,” he added before we reached the door, “the IAEA handpicked you months ago, based on your record and my recommendation. It’s been discussed fully, and finalized. And frankly, Behn, you should leap at this chance. It’s really a plum assignment. You ought to be kissing my hand for ensuring that you got it.”

  I was reeling from the number of blows that had been delivered just since lunchtime. As he opened the office door, I blurted, “Besides, I don’t even have a Russian visa!”

  “That’s been arranged,” the Pod said coolly. “Your visa will be handled by the Soviet consulate in New York.”

  Curses, foiled again. Well, at least I had learned the bad news before my private phone chat with Sam. Maybe he could figure out something—along with everything else we had to unravel—to bail me out of this trip.

  “By the way,” the Pod added in a more conciliatory tone as I was about to take my leave, “I understand that the reason you were absent last week was to attend a family funeral. No one really close, I hope?”

  “Closer than I can say, just now,” I replied with a noncommittal expression. I touched the Pod’s arm. “But thanks for asking.”

  As I went off down the hall, I glanced at my watch and wondered exactly how close to this spot Sam actually was. Then I went to put on my thermal gear and headed for the No-Name cowboy bar.

  The dark wood-paneled interior was steeped in beer and smoke: The jukebox was playing. I arrived about twenty-five minutes early, sat at a table near the wall phone, ordered a Virgin Mary, and waited. Finally the phone jingled. I was on my feet and grabbing it by the end of the first ring.

  “Ariel.” Sam’s voice sounded relieved when I answered the phone. “I’ve been crazy since the funeral, wanting to explain everything, to let you know what’s happened, what this is all about. But first—are you all right?”

  “I think I’m recovering,” I told him. “I don’t know whether I want to laugh or cry. I’m hysterical with joy that you’re alive, but I’m furious that you put all of us—especially me—through all that shit. Right now, I have to take your word for it that you really had to pretend you were dead. Who else knows about this but me?”

  “Nobody can know about me, just now, but you,” said Sam, his voice tight as a guitar string. “We’re in tremendous danger if anyone else learns I’m alive.”

  “What’s this we, paleface?” I quoted Tonto’s reply to the Lone Ranger when they found themselves surrounded by hostile Apache.

  “Ariel, I’m serious. You’re in more danger right now than I am myself. I was so afraid you wouldn’t come directly back to Idaho—that you’d go off somewhere to be alone and you wouldn’t get the package. After I found out your phone was tapped and your car had been ransacked, I kept praying that you’d had the presence of mind to put it somewhere safe.…”

  The waitress was scooping her tip from the table and raising her eyebrows to inquire if I wanted a refill.

  I shook my head and said to Sam on the other end, “I don’t understand.” I was afraid I did, though. When the waitress was out of earshot, I added in a hoarse whisper, “What package?”

  The line was stony silent for a moment. I could feel the tension over the line. When Sam finally did speak, his voice was trembling.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t get it, Ariel,” he said. “Please God, don’t tell me that. I had to get rid of it, and fast, before the funeral. You were the only one I could think of that I could rely on completely. I tossed it in a mailbox, addressed to you. I sent it third class parcel post. I was sure no one would ever imagine anything as overt or baldfaced as that: sending it by common mail. I hoped you’d get back just after it arrived, that it would be waiting in the post office for you. How could you not have received it, unless … maybe you haven’t gone yet to pick up your mail?”

  “Holy shit, Sam,” I whispered. “What have you done to me? What did you send me in the mail? Not my ‘inheritance,’ I hope?”

  “Did anyone mention it during the funeral?” he asked, whispering back as if someone were listening on the line.

  “Anyone?!!” I had to throttle my voice. “It was read aloud in the will. Augustus and Grace gave a press conference! The news media have been telephoning trying to find it! Uncle Laf is flying here from Austria! Are those enough anyones for you?”

  My throat was getting raw from this full-blast wind-tunnel whispering. I couldn’t believe what had happened to my recently calm, well-organized life, which now looked like confetti. I couldn’t believe Sam was alive and that I wanted to kill him.

  “Ariel, please,” said Sam. His voice sounded as if he were pulling his hair. “Did you pick up your mail, or not? Is there any possible explanation we can think of, why you haven’t”—he choked a little—“seen the package?”

  I felt sick to my stomach. It hadn’t taken much to guess what must be in that parcel: Pandora’s manuscripts. The manuscripts everyone was so hot to get hold of. The manuscripts I had believed had gotten Sam killed.

  “I forgot to stop my mail,” I told Sam. I heard his sharp intake of breath at the other end, so I added irritably, “I was a bit distraught! I had to attend the funeral of someone very close to me. I just forgot.”

  “So, if it was in your mailbox all this time,” said Sam, still whispering, “then where is it now?”

  Terrific. It was in a pile of mush on my living room floor—or maybe buried in a seven-foot snowdrift. Then the image came back of my sinking in snow and tossing my mail up onto the road beneath my car.

  “I pulled all the mail out of my mailbox when I got home last night,” I told Sam, “and I threw it inside on the floor. I didn’t go through it last night. It’s still lying there.”

  “My God,” said Sam. “If your line was bugged even before you got home, then it’s positive that the place has been searched thoroughly by now—maybe more than once, but surely again since you left to come to work today. Ariel, I nearly got killed for that package, and your only insurance is if they believe you haven’t received it yet. But I didn’t think of your danger when I sent it to you.”

  “How sweet,” I told him. “Sort of like a chain letter, where you’re cursed with a thunderbolt and eternal damnation if you don’t pass it on?”

  “You don’t understand—we will be cursed,” said Sam. I’d never heard this note of despair from him. His voice sank, and when he spoke it was as if he were at the bottom of a well. “It’s so important, Ariel, not to let this fall into the wrong hands. It’s more important than we are—more important than your life or mine—”

  “Pardon me?” I said. “Have you gone completely bonkers? What are you trying to tell me? I should put my life on the line for something I’ve never even seen? For something I don’t even want to know about?”

  “It is part of you, and you are part of it,” said Sam, for the first time becoming testy. “And although I am very, very sorry I involved you in this, Ariel, what has been done cannot be undone. You are the only one who can find this parcel—and I’m telling you that you must. If you fail, the lives at stake won’t just be ours, I assure you.”

  I had no idea what to do. I just wanted it all to go away. I wanted to hide under the bed and suck my thumb. But I tried to pull myself together.

  “Okay, let’s start from scratch. What did this parcel look like?” I asked Sam.

  He seemed to be trying to focus his own thoughts. His words were brittle. �
��It was about the size of a couple of reams of paper,” he said.

  “Wow, that’s great! There was nothing like that in my mailbox.” I knew, because I’d been holding all my mail in one hand when I’d started drowning in snow, and I was able to toss everything up on the road as I sank. “There’s only one explanation,” I told Sam. “The parcel hasn’t arrived yet.”

  “That gives us some kind of reprieve, but not for long,” said Sam gloomily. “It may come today, and you’re not at home. But very likely they are—or at least they’ll be keeping an eye on the house.”

  I longed to know who “they” were, but I wanted to get the basics down first.

  “I could stop the mail now, today—” I began, but Sam interrupted.

  “Too suspicious. Then they’d know it was coming by post. As I said, it’s my opinion they won’t touch you until they’re positive you have the parcel—or they have it themselves, or they know for sure how it’s going to arrive—so for the moment you’re okay. I suggest you go home at the normal time and check the mail casually, the way you usually would. I’ll try to get a message to you somehow. But to be on the safe side, I’ll phone you here again tomorrow, at the same time.”

  “Roger,” I said. “But if you need to reach me quicker, my computer address is ABehn@Nukesite. You can encrypt the message any way you want. Just give me a clue, in another message, what it might be, okay? And, Sam? Uncle Laf is flying in this weekend. I’m going to meet him at the Sun Valley Lodge. He said he was going to tell me the history of … my inheritance.”

  “That should be extremely interesting, coming from Laf. Take good notes,” Sam said. “My father was always pretty closemouthed about family history, same as yours was. Then too, if you’re staying at the Lodge, maybe we can shake your watchers and meet up on the mountain. We both know it like our palms.”

  “That’s a great idea. I’m afraid my roommate and my cat are coming too,” I told him, “but no matter what, we’ll figure a way. Assuming we live that long. God, Sam, I’m happy you’re—um, around.” I seemed unable to yank myself from this umbilical connection of sound, though I saw the waitress approaching my table again, and knew I must.