The Magic Circle (34 page)

By the time I’d finished the exhaustive summary, I myself had begun to see just what a pivotal role Wolfgang Hauser seemed to play in the story. But maybe that was because so far the plot had hinged on the wrong parcel. The real parcel sent by Sam remained missing. I was about to find out just how dangerous it really was.

“I can’t believe it’s still missing,” Sam said grimly, reading my thoughts. “But there’s something here that just isn’t adding up.”

I asked Sam why the contents of the missing parcel were so valuable that everyone on the planet seemed to be after it—including members of our own family who hadn’t spoken to one another in years—and so dangerous he’d had to fake his own death.

“If I knew all the answers,” said Sam with a grim smile, “we wouldn’t need to be holed up here in an isolated cabin just to speak to each other, after a week of having to mess around with secret codes.”

“Mess around!” I said in frustration. “You’re the one who’s been messing around, with your rigged funerals and biblical anagrams and secret meetings! But after what I’ve been through this past week, I want answers and I want them right now. What’s in that missing package, and why did you send it to me?”

“It’s my inheritance,” said Sam, as if it were clear. “Please listen to me, Ariel. You
must
understand everything I have to tell you. Seven years ago, just before he died, my father told me for the first time what Pandora had left him. He’d never discussed it before, he said, because by the terms of Pandora’s will he’d agreed to keep the bequest confidential. So Father put it in a box in a bank vault in San Francisco, where our family’s law firm was located. When Father died, I retrieved the box and brought it here to Idaho to study. It contained many old, rare manuscripts Pandora had collected over her lifetime. The package I sent you contained copies of these—”

“
Copies
?” I cried. “You had to fake your death—our lives are in danger—over a bunch of
duplicates
of something?”

“These are the
only
copies.” Sam spoke a bit impatiently, it seemed to me, for someone who’d taken so long to explain himself. “When I said the originals were old and rare, I should have said ancient. They were stored in a hermetically sealed box against decomposition. There are scrolls made of papyrus and linen, or of metals like copper or tin. A few are written on wooden boards or metal plates. My judgment, based on the materials and languages used—Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Sanskrit, Akkadian, Aramaic, and even Ugaritic—is that these manuscripts originated in many regions of the world and were written over a long span of time. I knew at once that what I held in my hands was incomparably valuable. But I also sensed, as my father might have, that they were somehow dangerous. Many have disintegrated badly with age, nearly crumbling into dust, and can’t be photographed easily without complicated, expensive equipment and processes. So I’ve made copies of each—myself, by hand, a labor that’s cost me many years—so I could begin to translate them. Then I put the copies in the vault and I hid the originals where I don’t believe they’ll be found. At least, certainly not until my translations into English are complete.”

“And have you been able to translate many?” I asked.

“Quite a few,” Sam replied. “But it’s all an odd ragbag of seemingly unrelated things. Letters, stories, testimonials, reports. Bureaucratic administrivia from imperial Rome. Celtic and Teutonic legends. Descriptions of Thracian festivals and dinner parties in Judea, tales of pagan gods and goddesses from northern Greece—and nowhere a thread that connects it all. Yet there
must
be something or Pandora wouldn’t have collected them to begin with.”

My mind was racing, but it was going in a circle. How could documents like these be connected to the neo-Nazi conspiracy plot I’d expected after listening to Laf and Bambi? All the events they’d described happened in this last century, while languages like Ugaritic, so far as I knew, hadn’t been spoken in millennia. I thought of the Norns in their hidden grotto inside that mountain at Nürnberg, weaving and spinning the fatal game plan for the world’s last days. But what if no one could read it when it was done?

As Sam took a swig of tepid coffee, I could sense the frustration a codebreaker as good as he must feel at removing the skin of the onion and contemplating the layers remaining to reach the core.

“If you haven’t been able to find any connection among these manuscripts of Pandora’s after years of trying,” I said, “why does everyone think they’re so valuable and dangerous? Could they be related to the objects in the Hofburg—the ones everyone says Hitler was trying to collect?”

“I thought of that, even before you mentioned it just now,” said Sam. “But more important to me was figuring out where the documents came from, how Pandora obtained them, and why she wanted them in the first place. And perhaps
most
significant was to understand why—of all people—she bequeathed them to my father.”

“I’ve wondered the same thing myself, since I learned about the documents,” I admitted. “Do you know?”

“Maybe,” said Sam. “But I want to know what you think. Before now, I’ve had nobody to discuss my theory with. It has to do with Pandora’s will. When Pandora died, my father was called to Europe for the reading of her will, as a principal heir. He was surprised. After all, she was his stepmother only while she was briefly married to Hieronymus. She hadn’t seen him since the ‘family schism’ took place. In fact, as I’m sure you’ll agree, Ariel, Uncle Laf’s story of our family must be filtered through a different prism from that of our fathers Earnest and Augustus. They could hardly have held her in such high regard, when she ran off and left them in Vienna to be raised by their father.”

Sacrée merde
, I thought, when confronted once more with my complex and bitter family history. But suddenly something occurred to me: Was it possible Pandora had actually
counted
on the deep bitterness and complexity of our family interrelations? I said as much to Sam.

“I already had more than a strong feeling,” said Sam. “But when you told me your stories just now, everything fit. I think it’s been at the root of everything from the beginning—I mean the family schism itself. Let’s look at it closely. At the start, it was Pandora who created the split at one blow by going off with Laf and Zoe. It’s been a sharp thorn in our side of the family that Pandora abandoned your father almost at birth, an act that might well explain the man’s coldblooded, self-serving demeanor today. Throughout her life she did a good deal more to
keep
things severed. Then we know she left my father these rare and ancient documents I described. And according to your friend Hauser, Zoe has the original of some sort of rune manuscript of which you now possess a copy. We don’t know what Laf may have inherited from Pandora besides the apartment overlooking the Hofburg—which in itself is probably significant—but we do know he was aware of the existence of a rune manuscript, though he seemed not to know Zoe had it.”

Sam paused and smiled at me.

“So you see, hotshot, all this points to a single question: If
you
were the one who needed to hide something, and you wanted it to stay hidden even well after your death, can you think of any better insurance than to divide it among four siblings like Lafcadio and Earnest and Zoe and Augustus, whose hostility toward one another dates back, in some instances, even to the cradle?”

Right on the mark. From the moment they believed I’d “inherited,” everyone in my family was sending emissaries hither and thither, or arriving themselves from Europe or phoning past midnight to interrogate me. Even Olivier had noted my relatives’ uncustomary behavior. And in a family like ours with ancient wounds, operating in an environment of suspicion and resentment, it was a perfect way for Pandora to divvy up that loot so no one could guess who got what.

But something else bothered me.

“What prompted you to take the drastic step of pretending you were dead?” I asked Sam. “Not just dead, but staging that high-profile funeral—the family, the military band, the important dignitaries, the press—why make so huge a splash? How did you get the government to go along with it? And why on earth would you threaten
my
life by sending me those documents and letting everyone learn you’d done it?”

“Ariel, please,” said Sam, taking my hand in both of his. “I swear on my life I wouldn’t have put you in such danger if I’d had a choice. But I’ve known for over a year now that someone was following me. Then last month in San Francisco, someone overtly tried to kill me. There can be no mistake. A bomb was planted in my car—”

“
A bomb?
” I cried.

But just as that hit, something struck me with even greater horror. I’d already asked myself, if Sam wasn’t dead,
what
was buried in that coffin at the Presidio in San Francisco. Now I asked Sam, my voice quavering, “My God, are you saying somebody else got killed in your place? Is that it?”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “someone was killed in my rental car in Chinatown.”

Sam’s eyes were flat and his tone strangely distant, as if his memory were being filtered through a screen of fog. “You must understand, Ariel, that although I’ve never worked directly for the government or military, over the years as an independent consultant I’ve trained most of their in-house cryptanalysts, and even assisted the State Department. I’ve often helped various branches of the service, too, with sensitive decryption jobs that need to be fast and clean and quiet, in-and-out. As a result, I know a great many people and a great many secrets.

“The man who was killed in that car explosion was a friend, a high-level government official I’ve worked with for years. His name was Theron Vane. At my request a year ago, Theron assigned an agent in his employ to try to learn who was following me, and why. Last month Theron asked me to come at once to San Francisco: the agent he’d assigned to my case had died mysteriously. The agency had sealed off the small rented apartment he’d used as an undercover office. It’s government policy to clean out such places anyway, to collect or destroy records before they fall into anyone’s hands. But in this case, Theron thought whatever we found might be related to me as well as to the agent’s death. We went over the place carefully. I broke everything, including what was inside the computer, and then destroyed the data.

“Based on what we’d learned, we agreed it would be faster and less conspicuous if I went on foot to the next stop and Theron took my car around the block to pick me up. But once outside, at the top of the steep flight of steps from the apartment house, I paused, as Theron had asked, to check the mailbox and be certain no new mail had arrived while we’d been inside. I was halfway down the steps when Theron started the car below, and it exploded.…”

Sam paused to put a hand over his eyes and rub his temples. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t move till he took his hand down and looked at me in pain.

“Ariel, I can’t explain how awful it was,” he said. “I’d known Theron Vane for nearly ten years; he’d been a true friend. But I knew that bomb was really meant for me, so I had to leave him there as if it
was
me, splattered in pieces across the pavement for others to come and collect in bags like refuse. You can’t imagine how that felt.”

I could imagine it so vividly that I myself was quaking like an aspen. But unlike two weeks ago, when I’d believed it was Sam who was dead, the danger to us both suddenly came home to me in force. This was no faked funeral we were talking about—not even an accident—but a real murder, a violent death that was meant to have been Sam’s. And if Sam’s late mentor was a high-level official, clearly in the intelligence community, he must have known how to protect himself better than
I
did. Now it was plain that the many precautions Sam had taken were hardly overkill—so to speak.

“What made you sure the bomb was intended for you?” I asked.

“I found in the computer in that apartment a number that, until that moment, I’d believed I alone knew: the number of a vault located in a bank only a few blocks away,” said Sam. “Clearly, whoever tried to kill me had already learned where I’d hidden the copied manuscripts in that Chinatown bank, and felt confident he could obtain them—perhaps even with greater ease if I were dead.

“When the bomb went off as I was headed for that very bank to retrieve the manuscripts, the coincidence was too great. I fled to my bank, got the manuscripts and a big padded mailing pouch from them, then slapped on postage from a stamp machine and tossed it into the nearest mailbox to send to the only person I knew I could trust with absolute certainty: you. Then from a pay phone I called Theron’s superior and reported the whole story. It was the government’s decision that we go on pretending I was dead. Indeed, I’ve broken both my word and my cover by contacting anyone—especially you, a member of the family.” Sam looked at me with strangely veiled eyes.

“The family?” I said. “What does this have to do with the family?” I was again beginning to feel certain I really didn’t want to know.

“There’s only one thing that links this puzzle together, and also links it to our family,” Sam said. “And to my mind, it’s still Pandora’s will. Since we’ve already agreed that she probably bequeathed something important to three of our relations, the question remains—what did she leave to the fourth, her only child?”

I choked a little and felt myself turn slightly green.

“To Augustus? My father?” I said. “Why would she leave him anything? After all, she abandoned him at birth, didn’t she?”

“Well, sweetheart,” said Sam with an ironic smile, “he’s the only one in the family except you and me that we haven’t discussed. I was only four and you weren’t yet born when Pandora died, so I’d like to put a few things into perspective. Doesn’t it seem odd that my father, Earnest, the
eldest
child of Hieronymus Behn, inherited only the Idaho mining interests—while yours, the youngest, wound up with a worldwide empire of mineral and manufacturing concessions—”