The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  “An avalanche? On your way from the post office to work? My, things must be picking up around here in the adventure department,” Olivier said, standing up to help me solicitously to my seat. He settled my arm on the arm of the chair. “But you never came in to work all day, and when I got home last night at seven, your car was in the drive, and the whole house was dark and silent. Jason and I dined alone, wondering where you could possibly be.”

  So Jason had wangled himself two dinners—one downstairs and another from Olivier’s gourmet cat stockpile. What a little conniver. I wished he were human enough that I could put him to work on some of my problems. But I knew Olivier was waiting for an answer. I closed my eyelids and pressed my fingertips against the bandage above my throbbing eye. Then I opened them and looked at Olivier.

  “I hope you haven’t speculated with the budget for free-range chickens and farm-reared venison, too,” I commented.

  Olivier stared at me, his mouth open. “You didn’t?” he gasped. “You didn’t actually—”

  “Spend the night with Dr. Hauser? Yes, I did,” I said. “But nothing happened.”

  After all, with the kind of attention Wolfgang Hauser attracted, and in a town this size, everyone would know about it soon enough.

  “Nothing happened?!” Olivier nearly screamed. He slammed the door shut and flung himself into his chair. “Just what is that supposed to mean?”

  “The man saved my life, Olivier,” I told him. “I was injured, as you see, and he brought me home. I was unconscious, so he stayed with me.” I held my aching head.

  “I think I need a new religion,” said Olivier, standing up. “The prophet Moroni doesn’t seem too connected to the impulsive behavior of women. I’ve always admired the Jewish faith, for the power of that Hebrew word of theirs: Oy! What is the etymological derivation, do you think? Why does it feel so good, just to run around, saying: oy?” Olivier started pacing around saying “oy-oy-oy.”

  I thought it was time to intervene. “Are we going to Sun Valley this weekend?” I asked him.

  “Why else am I working late every night?” he asked me back.

  “If Wolfgang Hauser has returned from his trip by then, he’s coming with us,” I told him. “After all, I start work on his project on Monday—and he did save my life.”

  “Oy,” said Olivier, looking at the ceiling. “My prophet, you’ve really screwed up.”

  I hoped Olivier would come up with the meaning of that word oy, and soon. Because it was starting to sound like a pretty good description of my life just now.

  Earlier that morning, since I still couldn’t move my arm without tearing stitches, Wolfgang had driven me to work. I’d asked him to stop en route at the post office and keep the engine running while I went inside for a minute. I signed a postal form so George, the clerk, could hold my mail for a few days until my arm healed. I asked him to phone me at work if any large parcels arrived—not to have the route driver leave claim slips in my mailbox. Then if there was something important, I told him, I could come by the post office on my way home from work and the postal folks could load it into my car.

  “I hope you weren’t too shocked to learn about your aunt Zoe,” Wolfgang had said at home that morning as I’d wolfed down the sourcream-and-caviar omelette he’d thrown together from the bizarre fixings in my fridge. “Your aunt would very much like to know you, and have you know her. She’s a fascinating woman of great charm—though she understands why the rest of your family thinks of her as the black sheep.”

  And well she might, I thought. Most details of Zoe’s life were widely known from the did-all-schmooze-all books on herself she’d already published. For instance, her legendary vocation as one of the most famous dancers in Europe, along with her pals Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, and the Nijinskys. Or her legendary avocation as one of the most famous demimondaines in Europe, along with her role models Lola Montez, Coco Chanel, and the fictional Dame aux Caméllias. And so on, and so on.

  But until this morning’s breakfast with Wolfgang, I hadn’t heard some other details, such as the fact that during World War II my infamous aunt Zoe had been a member of the French Resistance, not to mention also acting as an informant for the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services, America’s first official international spy group.

  I wondered precisely how much of this could be true. Though such endeavors were in keeping with our part of the family tree, I found it incongruous that a group like the OSS—which broke codes, encrypted messages, and operated in an environment of presumed secrecy—would have any traffic whatever with a gushy, gossipy, world-class blabbermouth like my aunt Zoe. But on closer consideration, a reputation like hers might prove the best cover—in the long run, clearly a superior one to that of her philosophical predecessor and fellow dancer Mata Hari.

  Indeed, if current reports of Zoe were correct, now at eighty-three she was alive and kicking in Paris, swilling down champagne and living as bawdy and scandalous a life as ever. I was curious about how she’d gotten hooked up with someone like Wolfgang Hauser, a high official of the IAEA in Vienna.

  Wolfgang explained that last March, a year ago, at a fiftieth-anniversary reunion of international World War II “peacekeepers” in Vienna, he was recruited by Zoe when the two became chummy during a welcoming gathering at a local Heuriger: one of those typically Austrian garden pubs where first-picked grapes just culled and pressed are drunk. According to Wolfgang, after a few gallons of new wine Zoe trusted him enough to speak of the rune manuscript. Then she solicited his aid.

  Wolfgang said Zoe had acquired the manuscript, of which I now had a copy, decades ago—though she didn’t reveal where or how, just that it dated to the Wagnerian era before the turn of the century, when interest had sprung up in Germany and Austria in reviving the roots of their supposedly superior Teutonic culture. Societies were founded, he explained, that dashed all over Europe recording and deciphering runic inscriptions from ancient stone monuments.

  Zoe thought her document was rare and valuable, and that it might form some connection with the manuscripts Sam had inherited from Zoe’s estranged brother Earnest. It was even possible, she’d suggested to Wolfgang, that Sam might possess other runic documents, and help her identify and translate her own. But after Earnest’s death, Zoe’s efforts to find Sam and discuss this with him had proven unsuccessful.

  Because of Wolfgang’s position in the international nuclear field, Zoe hoped he might be able to get in touch with Sam through me and to discuss the thing without involving the rest of the family—though it wasn’t clear to Wolfgang why she’d chosen him, a total stranger, to confide in.

  Knowing Auntie’s reputation, her reasons seemed clear enough to me. Zoe might be eighty-three but she wasn’t stone blind. The men she’d dallied with hadn’t always been rich but they were extravagantly handsome, some as smashing as Herr Wolfgang Hauser himself. If I hadn’t actually held this fabled manuscript in my hands, I might have guessed the batty old broad cooked it up just to add Wolfgang as the last bauble to her already heavily bejeweled crown.

  Though he’d agreed to Zoe’s request to end-run our family, with whom she wasn’t on speaking terms, and to find Sam and me and sell us on this project, Wolfgang hadn’t acted at once—not until he found a legitimate reason that would bring him here to Idaho. He couldn’t know that Sam would be dead by the time he arrived—nor what my reaction would be to trafficking with one more relative among those I’d habitually avoided like the plague.

  It was pointless to explain to Wolfgang that if my cousin Sam, even for a short time, had ever possessed such a document, it already would be decoded. The only unbroken encryption system in this century was designed during the Second World War by the Navajo. Native American culture engenders a penchant for such things, and I knew Sam lived and breathed encryption too.

  But, as I had to keep vividly reminding myself, I was the only person on the planet who knew that Sam himself was still living and breathing. Now, in order to undo this
knot I’d tied around myself, all I needed was to find him.

  For the rest of the week things were frustratingly quiet. It wasn’t that I was hoping for a follow-up car chase or another avalanche to rescue me from boredom. The problem was, no package had arrived yet. Nor had I been able to contact Sam.

  I cruised by the No-Name cowboy bar, inquiring as casually as possible about phone calls. The bartender told me he’d noticed the pay phone on the wall across the room ringing a few times earlier that week. But nobody picked it up, and nothing since.

  I scanned my mail messages on the computer each day, coming up empty.

  Olivier and I had to coordinate our driving schedules for a few days until I could operate my car again, and Wolfgang was still out of town. So in a way I felt lucky that the parcel didn’t arrive until I could be alone when I went to fetch it. Meanwhile I hid the rune manuscript in a place where no one could find it, right beneath ten thousand United States-government-employed noses: inside the DOD Standard.

  The Department of Defense Standard was the bible of all research and development branches of the federal government: thirty-five massive bound volumes of rules and regulations that had to be consulted in order to do anything from developing a computer system to constructing a light-water reactor. It cost the taxpayers a fortune to produce and update this key document. We had many sets around the site: one was kept on the six-foot bookshelf just outside my office. But in the whole five years I’d worked here, I’d never once seen anyone stroll idly across the floor to peek at it, much less really consult the thing for the purpose intended. To be blunt, we could have papered the latrine walls with the DOD Standard and I doubt, even then, anyone would have noticed it.

  I was the only one I knew who’d actually tried to read it—but once was enough. What I saw was less comprehensible than the revised Internal Revenue Service tax code: government service writing style, par exellence. I was sure no one would find the rune manuscript if I hid it there.

  So on Friday, the first day I was able to drive myself to work, I stayed until after Olivier left the office. It didn’t surprise him. We were off to Sun Valley at dawn, so any work I’d need to finish before the weekend had to be done now. As soon as he left to get his things together for the trip, I started hauling volumes of my nearby set of the Standard down from their shelves and unfastening the sliding bindings. I inserted a page of runes about every forty or fifty pages along, throughout the set.

  It was ten o’clock when I’d finished. I felt lucky I hadn’t hurt my arm, hefting those heavy binders for such a long time. As I sank into my desk chair to relax for a minute and collect my thoughts, I bumped the mouse pad on my desk. The test patterns that had been revolving on the screen vanished and a clean screen came up, illuminating the half-darkened room.

  I stared at it. A symbol I’d never seen, like a giant asterisk, half filled the screen.

  Beneath this symbol was printed a question mark.

  How did this get on my computer screen? No one here in the office could have done it; I’d been right at my desk all day.

  I tapped a question mark into my terminal, for Help. The Help screen gave me a message it had never given me before, and one I felt certain it wasn’t programmed to produce: it said I should check my mail.

  I called up my message file, though I’d swept it out completely only a few hours earlier this evening. Nonetheless, there was one new document out there. I pulled the message up on the screen.

  It started to build across the screen slowly, as if there were a hidden hand within the tube itself drawing the picture from inside out. As the letters drew themselves magically, I watched with a kind of dazed fascination. Before it had finished I knew, of course, who had put it there. It could only be Sam.

  At the laser printer beside my desk, I printed out a few copies to mess with by hand, and I studied them.

  Although I knew that the first rule of security was to delete an incoming encryption from the machine as fast as possible, I also knew Sam. If Sam wanted something destroyed at once, it would have been programmed to self-destruct when printed. The fact that it was still sitting there on my screen meant there were more clues contained in it, other than the sequence of the letters themselves. In fact, I might already have received one: the asterisk.

  From my desk drawer I grabbed three of those cheap transparent government pens. I wound a rubber band to hold them together, then fanned them out in a snowflake pattern, in the shape of the asterisk. I slid this across the page to see whether, along any of the three axes, acrostics could be ferreted out. No luck—though I didn’t expect any. It would be too simple a clue, and therefore too dangerous, for Sam to leave on my computer.

  While scanning this page of letters, I drew back for a few seconds to get perspective. In breaking an unknown code, it’s always a huge advantage if the person who encrypted the message is trying to communicate with you. And clearly even more so if you happen to have been hand-trained by him, as I was by Sam.

  Right now, for example, I could make some fair assumptions about the hidden message before me: Sam would never have sent it, or any message, via computer, which he hotly opposed as unsafe, unless the message itself was important or urgent or both. That is, unless it was something I vitally had to know before I left, as he knew I’d planned to, for Sun Valley on the weekend. Even so, he’d waited all week to send it—right down to the wire, almost the final hour of Friday night. Obviously he’d been unable to find another way to communicate, and was therefore forced to use a method he didn’t trust. This told me two critical things about the “personality” of the code he’d used.

  First, since he believed it might be vulnerable to the snooping of others, the code would have to be many-layered, with red herrings dropped on every trail costing time and labor to anyone else also trying to decipher it.

  Second, since Sam had taken a risk that must have been forced on him by time constraints and urgency, he would have to use a code simple enough for me to unlock quickly, accurately, and all by myself.

  The combination of these two vital ingredients told me that the key to this code must be something that only I would be likely to see.

  Using a ruler as my guide, I searched the page. The first clue popped out at once. There were two items, and only two, on this page that were not letters of the alphabet: the two ampersands (&) in lines twelve and sixteen. Since an ampersand is a symbol for the word “and,” perhaps they formed some connections between parts of the message. Though this could be guessed by anyone, I felt sure that was where the trails—both the false and the true trails—began: that is, in the middle. And I felt even more certain that I would find a clue “for my eyes only” that would tell me where to look for the place to branch off from the obvious path.

  I wasn’t disappointed. The ampersand on line sixteen connected the words Scylla and Charybdis, and led to the complete message Jackson Hole two p.m. Scylla & Charybdis. That was a red herring, not only because it was my private nickname for those rocks—others might know that too—but rather because I’d told Sam I was going to Sun Valley this weekend, not Jackson Hole, to meet Uncle Laf. But herring or no, it did tell me that the message I was seeking would explain where Sam would try to meet me this weekend. Thank God.

  There were a few other scattered messages that leapt from the page, like the one starting with Grand on line fourteen, saying he’d meet me Sunday at Grand Targhee, lift three, at four P.M.

  But I thought it far more likely that Sam’s real message would be buried in the crop of conflicting messages that branched from the other ampersand. And all of those dealt with places at Sun Valley.

  The ampersand on line twelve connected the two words valley and day. Backing up, it read from southeast to due north: Sun Valley & (Sun)day. Then the bifurcations began, and were difficult to follow.

  One said noon, after which I got lost in the maze. After a while I found a backwards ten and followed it around in a circle, reading: ten a.m. room thirty-seven. Fat
chance Sam would be so complex, just to deliver so simple a message. More complex by far was the word eve that I finally found branching up from the ampersand. Its message danced all over the page: Sunday eve at lodge dining room eight p.m. wear yellow scarf—as if I needed to be identified by a flag. Hmm.

  Besides, though Sun Valley lay near three towns, two mountain ranges, and miles of open, skiable tundra where we might meet, I was sure Sam had said we should meet on Baldy, the ski mountain itself, because we both knew it so well. Given my armload of stitches and my current physical condition, I wasn’t too anxious to clamp on my Alpines again. But it seemed I might have little choice.

  I was sure I hadn’t encountered the right message yet. It had to be the one following the word noon—so where did it lead? I found the word met, which connected with a long passage that seemed part of a bigger picture, but the word didn’t lead contextually into that sentence. I looked again. I found on, beside which were in and to. My eyes began to cross, even though I was now using my finger to trace the labyrinth of letters on the page before me.

  Just then, I found a real word: Toussaint. It went north from the word on and turned east, then south again. Toussaint—All Saints’ Day—though that was where my limited religious expertise ended. Having attended churches in my youth only when Jersey was booked to perform at one, I couldn’t recall whether that was near All Souls’ Day or Carnival—neither of which fell within spitting distance of this coming Sunday, anyway. And though all ski slopes have names, there wasn’t a run at Sun Valley named either Hallowe’en or Mardi Gras. As it happened, however, most of the slopes on Baldy were named for festive occasions: Holiday, Easter, Mayday, Christmas. Probably no coincidence.