The Magic Circle (77 page)

“I could go no farther—the bank drops off in the underbrush,” he told me. “But I’ve spotted them from above. They’re downstream not far from here. I saw three heads, all floating in a small inlet that projects slightly from the river.”

“Alive?” I asked him.

“I believe so,” said Dark Bear. “But the walls are sheer and slick. We can’t get them out that way. They must be brought back up here by way of the water.”

The dropoff to the river was steeper here, the water far deeper than above. Though Dark Bear, Bambi, and I were all pretty strong swimmers, we still tied a few loose containers around each of our chests as flotation devices. She hid her gun in a bush. Then, one by one, we slipped into the dark river.

We found them less than a mile downstream, and were in for quite a surprise. Sam, treading water, was supporting not Olivier but
Wolfgang
, whose eyes were shut. Sam was holding him under the chin in a lifeguard’s grip while Olivier was bobbing around nearby, cheerful as a Hallowe’en apple in a tub!

“Men overboard!” Olivier cried when he spied our swimming flotilla’s approach. “And women and natives to the rescue!”

When we reached Olivier, I said, “Thank God you’re all alive—but I thought you couldn’t swim!”

“So did I!” he said. “Your backpack saved me. It kept me afloat, though I got swept over the falls. Pretty scary! Then I bobbed up like a soap bubble as soon as I landed.”

Of course! My huge plastic bottle that I always carried for hiking, to filter water. Filled with air, it had saved Olivier’s life.

“Are you all right, too?” I asked Sam with enormous concern.

He looked awfully ragged—but not as bad as Wolfgang, who must have lost plenty of blood, what with his cat-clawed face and Bambi-wounded hand.

“I’m pretty sure he broke his leg in the fall,” Sam told us, still treading water. “He must have passed out from the pain.”

“So. We will take him ourselves,” said Bambi. “For we must swim back.”

She helped Dark Bear take Wolfgang from Sam as I showed Olivier how to propel his now-floating self back up through the milder current beneath the falls. When we’d crawled up the bank, Dark Bear lifted the lifeless Wolfgang in his arms and we picked our way back to retrieve the Pod and the other vessels. Olivier, carrying Jason while holding Bambi’s gun trained on the Pod, marched our soon-to-be-former boss before us back to the car, as Sam, Bambi, and I carried our ever more costly treasures.

A muddy, bedraggled Sam crawled into the front seat of the Land Rover beside me, and Dark Bear drove, with Olivier, Bambi, the cylinders, and our hostages in the roomy back. I was completely exhausted. Despite all the lifeblood I’d invested in these manuscripts, I almost wished they’d actually vanished beneath the glassy but dangerous surface of the river. My imagination was so demolished by all that had happened that I couldn’t think beyond the end of my nose.

“What next?” I asked the ensemble, who seemed as battered and confused as I.

“I can tell you,” said Olivier, “that my first steps are going to be to throw all my nuclear security badges in the nearest mailbox, pull out a few of my other badges, and use them to haul these two chaps to the authorities for attempted mass murder.” He paused and added, “We’ll discuss all the other charges after that.”

“And for me,” Bambi said proudly, “as we were walking down here from the river, Dark Bear asked that Lafcadio and I use our many contacts to help select the best archaeological and academic institutions in other parts of the world to review and authenticate the original documents. I know we will be pleased to do it. As for my brother, as Lafcadio says, he has planted during all his life what he will shortly harvest.”

I myself really wasn’t yet prepared to think about the unconscious Wolfgang, lying waterlogged beside a dripping Pod on the backseat.

“But these manuscripts aren’t quite out of the woods yet,” said Sam. “Not until we’ve rounded up a few more people—including your father, and Bettina’s mother—who’d surely still leave no stone unturned to put their hands on them.” Despite my feelings toward my unrepentant father, I felt an understandable pang at how things had turned out, and I could tell from her face Bambi must feel the same. “But until we get all the culprits put out of commission,” Sam added, “it will be my continuing job to protect and decipher these documents.”

As for me, I had no idea where I went from here. I couldn’t help wondering what life would be like after these past weeks, when everything had altered so irrevocably. I had no real job, no newfound friends, no mission, and no danger.

“I haven’t a clue what I’m supposed to do,” I admitted to everyone in general.

“Oh, you’re about to have the biggest job of all,” said Sam with a muddy grin, as I sat there waiting for the other moccasin to drop.

“You’re going to learn to dance,” he said.

THE DANCE

Mandala
means “circle,” more especially a magic circle
.… I
have come across cases of women who did not draw mandalas but danced them instead. In India [this has] a special name.…
mandala nrithya,
the mandala dance
.

—Carl G. Jung

In the ecstasy of dance man bridges the chasm between this and the other world.… We may assume that the circle dance was already a permanent possession of the Paleolithic culture, the first perceptible stage of human civilization
.

—Curt Sachs,
World History of the Dance

The oldest dance form seems to be the
Reigen,
or circle dance [which] really symbolizes a most important reality in the life of primitive men—the sacred realm, the magic circle.… In the magic circle, all daemonic powers are loosed
.

—Susanne K. Langer,
Feeling and Form

So we’d come full circle—but my dancing days hadn’t quite begun. Olivier arranged, by pay phone from the road, that the Feds send a deputation from Boise to rendezvous with us back in town, pick up the Pod and Wolfgang, and put them on ice. The goods he had on them—including treason, international espionage, fraternizing with known foreign arms dealers and nuclear smugglers, attempted multiple homicides in a river, and the assassination of the high-level government operative Theron Vane—seemed pale, in my perception, compared with what Wolfgang had done: the attempted murder of his own half brother, Sam.

In town, Olivier scribbled on a clipboard resting against the side of Dark Bear’s Land Rover, filling out the required forms for transfer of both his captives. The Pod, due to his lofty position as head of the nuclear site, was moved first by the Feds to their armored vehicle for immediate transfer to a federal prison, for detention awaiting trial.

Meanwhile Wolfgang, bound and harmless but sitting up now on the backseat, requested a word alone with me inside the car. So the others got out and milled around as I turned over my shoulder to look into his face, a mass of cat-tracks, and Wolfgang glared back at me in barely suppressed pain. It seemed to run deeper than something triggered by a wounded hand or fractured leg. Those dark turquoise eyes, that had only recently left me weak in the knees, now left me feeling isolated and frightened by everything that had passed between us since we’d met.

“Ariel,” said Wolfgang, “can you even imagine the pain I feel when I look at you? I believed that you understood I loved you. Now, to suddenly discover that you’ve done nothing all along but tell me lies.”

I
had told
him
lies? That, to say the very least, was something a bit more excessive than the proverbial pot calling the kettle black! Good Lord, for weeks, whatever rock I’d turned over, there was still another lie. I had confronted Wolfgang so often, only to hear more lies, only to swallow each and every one just as gullibly as the last, only to wind up back in his arms and his bed, again and again. But since his most recent point had been made over the barrel of a gun, I thought it might be the better part of valor to reserve comment.

“You
knew
Sam was alive, yet you concealed it!” Wolfgang spat out with great bitterness. “You lied to me all the while.”

“Wolfgang, you were trying to
kill
him!” I pointed out the seemingly obvious. “Would you have killed your sister, too? Were you going to kill me?”

“I love you,” he said between narrow lips, ignoring my question as another wave of pain passed over him. When he’d recovered, he said, “Of course I wasn’t going to kill any of you—don’t be mad. Do I seem like a homicidal maniac? I was only after those relics that are so important. Oh, Ariel, don’t you see? You and I could have used that information correctly. We could have accomplished so much. Through the use of those manuscripts, together, we could have created a better world.”

He paused and added carefully, “I know what you were thinking after Paris—after Zoe spoke to you. It was my question about the Gypsies, wasn’t it? I could feel it all the way back on the plane, and I should have said something then. But I was only surprised to learn of it, that’s all. Please believe it made no difference between us. It wouldn’t have mattered to me—”

“
What
wouldn’t have mattered to you?” I erupted in fury. “What on earth are you talking about? You mean you’d have condescended to go on sleeping with me, even though I have tainted blood? My God—what kind of person
are
you? Don’t you see how it makes me feel, to know it was
you
who tried to kill Sam with that bomb in San Francisco? You tried to murder him, Wolfgang. And all the while, you
knew
for a fact that Sam was your own brother!”

“
No he’s not!!
” Wolfgang practically screamed, his face ashen white with an agony that expressed, in one look, everything he’d left unsaid.

Olivier had glanced in alarm through the window, and he started to open the car door, but I waved my hand no. I was shaking all over with an emotion I couldn’t even begin to name. Hot tears were welling in my eyes as I turned back to Wolfgang and took a deep breath. I said, as calmly and distinctly as I could without going to pieces,

“Yes, Wolfgang. He is your brother.”

Then I turned, climbed out of the car, and closed the door behind me.

Dark Bear, one of the most astonishingly organized individuals on the planet, would have made a terrific CEO of a major corporation, if he hadn’t been so attached to the more important tasks of preserving the roots of his people and unraveling the mysteries of life. In the interim, he’d also managed to organize Sam’s and my project.

But Dark Bear considered it too dangerous to turn us loose—“go public,” as it were—until Olivier and his troops managed to round up a few more of the bad guys. Thanks once again to Dark Bear, they’d now have more ammunition to do so. Uncle Earnest’s private files—the unpleasant information Zoe said he’d ferreted out about the Behn family—had been found anonymously tucked amid a morass of old property claims from decades past, in a sturdy safe on the reservation at Lapwai.

Though Earnest might have purged the very existence of Halle and Wolfgang from his mind, as Dark Bear had told us, this new trove did include documentation on our family’s role—including my father’s—as long-hidden financiers backing their own concept of caste supremacy, and placing weapons of mass destruction in the service of their unpleasant view of the New World Order.

There were a few surprises from the more upbeat side of my family. As Sam had suspected and Dacian Bassarides now confirmed, there actually had been four parts to Pandora’s legacy, divided among the four “Behn children.” After meeting me in Vienna, it seems Dacian had arrived at a few of his own conclusions. He took it upon himself to forge a long-overdue reconciliation between Lafcadio and Zoe, sweeping aside all those decades of family bitterness that had essentially been spawned by just one man, now long dead.

Nor did Dacian have to convince Laf and Zoe that I was the one to pull all the pieces together as Pandora once had done—but that then by the terms of her will, twenty-five years ago, had again been torn apart. Uncle Laf shipped a case of Dacian’s estate-bottled wine to me, with a note from Dacian detailing that other estate, Pandora’s, which had attracted so much interest all these years. Following up on this input myself with a pertinent call to my mother and several chats with Dark Bear, I found the picture growing crystal clear.

First, there was the rune manuscript my mother had sent from San Francisco, which Olivier had then retrieved from where I’d hidden it in the DOD Standard at the nuclear site. Laf, I recalled, told me early on that Pandora had made a practice of copying runes in her own hand from standing stones all over Europe: these runes became her bequest to my father. When Jersey discovered Augustus’s involvement with her sister, she’d made her own clandestine copy of this manuscript. Though my father still had the original copy, Earnest later advised Jersey to save her copy to give to me when I was grown, just as he’d saved his own part of Pandora’s legacy for Sam.

That brought me to the second set, inherited by Earnest and left by him to Sam. These were the rare and crumbly scrolls, boards, and cloths we’d rescued at so much peril from the crystal cave, the set everybody was so hot to get that they’d even plunged after them down the dark path of murder and mayhem. It wasn’t hard to guess Wolfgang’s private motive, of course, given what seemed his obsessive preoccupation: that his father had abandoned
him
and left his entire estate—including these relics—to his younger, and Native American, son Sam.

As Dacian Bassarides had pointed out in Vienna, one quarter of a jigsaw puzzle, even half, was of little value without the other parts. And as Volga Dragonoff had explained during our midnight chat in an icy Soviet dormitory, even with
all
the pieces heaped together in a pile, you’d still need someone who was initiated into the right way of thinking—as he’d claimed he believed
I
was—to assemble the whole puzzle.