The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tell Wolfgang about last night’s chat, and I resented his tone. Wasn’t it enough that I’d spent a week with little sleep, and all night with no dinner, without being confronted at breakfast by the Spanish Inquisition? So when a surly mustachioed woman arrived at our table with a tureen and a bread basket, I ladled myself some hot oatmeal, stuffed a piece of dry toast in my mouth, and made no reply. After my tummy was warm, though, I felt a bit better.

  “Wolfgang, I’m sorry, but you know how my uncle Lafcadio feels about you,” I explained. “He was truly worried, knowing you and I were alone together in Vienna. When he didn’t hear from me, he even called the office back in Idaho to try and find out what might have become of me—”

  “He called your office?” Wolfgang interrupted. “But with whom did he speak?”

  “With my landlord, Olivier Maxfield. They’ve met each other,” I reminded him. “It seems there were things Laf wanted to discuss with me. He tried first in Sun Valley, then in Vienna, but it never happened. That’s why he sent Volga to meet me here.”

  “What sorts of things?” Wolfgang asked quietly, sipping his coffee.

  “Family things,” I told him. “They’re pretty personal.”

  I looked at my bowl of porridge, already congealed. I’d learned from last night one couldn’t be sure when the next meal might be forthcoming, so I forced myself to take another mouthful. I washed it down with some of the bitter coffee. I was unsure exactly how to say what I knew I had to, so I just set it out there:

  “Wolfgang, when we get to Vienna, instead of flying directly back to Idaho, I want to make a detour—just for one day.” I paused as he looked at me. “I want you to arrange for me to meet my aunt Zoe, in Paris.”

  Wolfgang and I were picked up after breakfast, in front of the charming penal colony we now called home, by a van that resembled a tank with windows. It was equipped with a driver, as well as a fresh female Intourist “escort” to be doubly sure we got where we were supposed to go. To remind myself, I pulled out my file from the IAEA and checked the schedule and attached map.

  This morning’s first meeting was about an hour west of Leningrad, toward the Baltic: the nuclear power plant at Sosnovy Bor near the summer palace of Catherine the Great, where we were scheduled to tour what in America we’d call a commercial reactor, one that produces electricity for public consumption.

  As we went, it occurred to me that this was the first time since San Francisco I was free of drizzle, fog, ice, and snow—free to look at my surroundings. Along the river I had a sweeping view of the Hermitage, a brilliant shade of pea green, reflected upside-down in the Neva like Volga’s fabled city of Kitezh, shimmering in the depths until the Last Days when it would rise again, dripping from the waters. Fleecy clouds floated across a brilliant turquoise sky. The skeletal architecture of trees lining the road, their branches spangled with diamonds from last night’s rain, still spoke of winter, but the earth was moist with the rich aroma of newly awakening life wafting through the half-open windows of our van.

  Right off the bat that morning, as we were escorted around the vast power plant at Sosnovy Bor by a group of clean-cut engineers and physicists with names like Yuri and Boris, I learned for the first time, with enormous interest, precisely what had brought the Soviets to the pass of extending us this invitation. Just this month of April, during a visit to London, Mikhail Gorbachev—perhaps carried away by the spirit of glasnost and perestroika—had surprised everyone by announcing the USSR’s decision to cease unilaterally the production of HEU, the highly enriched uranium used in nuclear warheads, and to shut down several Soviet plutonium production reactors as well.

  That afternoon, during my first in-depth plunge into that premier Soviet think-tank, the Leningrad Nuclear Physics Institute, the story began shaping up on a very significant scale. In another of those lengthy briefings that nukes everywhere are so fond of, the institute’s director, one Yevgeny Molotov, a handsome but hatchet-faced man with an unsettling resemblance to Bela Lugosi, gave us the back story.

  It began with the same struggle Volga Dragonoff had alluded to only last night, a contest waged for the past two millennia which still seemed to be under way today. The part of the world involved—once again, Central Asia—had lost little of its mystery in the process. The British, along with the Russians and others, had engaged in this tug-of-war for the past five hundred years, and coined a name for it. They called it the Great Game.

  THE GREAT GAME

  Throughout the history of human knowledge, there have been two conceptions concerning the law of development of the universe, the metaphysical [idealist] conception and the dialectical [materialist], which form two opposing world outlooks. [In dialectical materialism] the fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal, it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing itself.

  —Mao Tse-tung

  East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  The East will help us to conquer the West.

  —Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)

  Ivan III of Russia, a descendant of Alexander Nevsky, shook things up for the first time in a quarter millennium when he refused, in the year 1480, to pay tribute to the Golden Horde. Ivan married Zoe, the only niece of the last Christian Byzantine emperor. When Constantinople fell to the Turks, he arrogated to himself the spiritual crown of head of the Eastern church and Defender of the Faith.

  This politically astute wedding of church and state took place at what would be an important historical moment for western Europe: the year 1492, when “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and Ferdinand and Isabella evicted the Moors and Jews from Spain, severing the seven-hundred-year infusion of southern and eastern cultures and pointing the face of Europe to the west. It marked the beginning of the end for the feudal system and lit the fuse of nationalism, with the subsequent rush for colonial expansion that that would entail.

  An island to the north was rather late at jumping into this land-grabbing game. The East India Company was officially chartered by Queen Elizabeth I of England only on December 31, 1600. It was established to compete with the Dutch who, themselves already in competition with the Spanish and Portuguese, had still managed to corner a virtual monopoly on the spice trade in Malaysia and the Spice Islands. Within fifty years, chartered East India trading companies had also blossomed in Denmark, France, Sweden, and Scotland. The “jewel in the crown” of England was India with her vast troves of wealth, seemingly inexhaustible natural resources, and warm-water ports.

  But the Russians by now had noticed these attributes, too.

  Until the many reforms of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century, the Russian peoples themselves had appeared more Asiatic than European, with their long flowing robes, uncut hair and beards, sequestered women, and exotic church rites. Yet with their paranoiac fear of being surrounded again as they had been during the “lost centuries” of Mongol domination, these formerly backward feudal fiefdoms managed to expand their borders at the truly impressive rate of 20,000 square miles per year. In the two centuries from Peter’s death in 1725, they absorbed nearly all the vastly diverse cultures in a several thousand-mile swath surrounding them, pushing to the east through Siberia all the way to the Bering Sea, and to the west grabbing all or sizeable portions of Lithuania, Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Livonia, Karelia, Lapland.

  A panicky Britain extended its influence north and eastward into the Punjab and Kashmir, annexing Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, and Baluchistan, and making serious runs on Afghanistan and Tibet. Egypt and Cyprus were occupied, the East India Company was dissolved, and Victoria, crowned Empress of India, had an empire where the sun never set.

  As a countermove, by the beginning of the First World War, Russia expanded south and west and seized possession of Ukraine, the Caucasus, Crimea, and western Turkestan—today Central Asia—right down to the Indian-Persian border. Now two empir
es that once had been separated by thousands of miles had borders, in some places, within only a few miles of each other.

  Nor did Russian expansionism end with the Russian Revolution. When Lenin called for a world uprising of the masses against colonial oppressors, he focused specifically on India, encouraging the colonized to throw off the (British) yoke of imperial slavery. But the Bolsheviks themselves, it soon proved, had little intention of offering autonomy to the colonial possessions Russia had acquired throughout four centuries of imperialism. Those regions attempting to break away during the ensuing civil wars and peasant uprisings were quickly brought to heel.

  When the USSR was created in 1922, it consisted of the republics of Byelorussia (White Russia), Transcaucasia (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan), Ukraine, and the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic, which included just about everything else. Only later, when the principally Islamic former Turkestan requested to become a separate and independent republic, were artificial boundaries drawn dividing it into not one but five states based on “ethnic nationalities.” That decision was taken in 1924, the year Lenin died and Joseph Stalin succeeded him, to remain for the next thirty years the steel fist of the Communist Party.

  Beginning in 1939, the USSR “pacified and absorbed” all or part of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, the Baltic states of Latvia and Lithuania and Estonia, and portions of Germany and Japan.

  I hardly needed Yevgeny Molotov of the Leningrad Nuclear Physics Institute to fill me in on the rest of the picture. After World War II, the name of the game had changed but the players remained the same: now it was called the Cold War. The new toy possessed by all key players was a nuclear “device.” Diplomatic strategy was patterned on the game of Chicken where two cars are driven straight at one another, accelerators to the floor. The driver who turns away first to avoid collision is the loser, the chicken. And the USA had been accelerating faster than anyone. The only difference I could see between the automotive and Cold War versions of this game was that, with the former, there was the off-chance somebody might win.

  In our week of scheduled meetings, Wolfgang and I traversed a broad swath of central Russia, visiting facilities and meeting with groups and individuals that worked in various capacities within the nuclear field, and I discovered the Soviet government’s gravest worry wasn’t the operational safety of their power plants but something I myself might be uniquely placed to deal with: the security of nuclear materials, especially those recycled from fuels and weaponry. Much of these, in the case of the Soviet Union, happened to be located outside the Russian Federal Republic proper. That’s where I came into the picture.

  For almost five years, Olivier and I had been constructing a database designed to locate, classify, and monitor toxic, hazardous, and transuranic waste that had been produced by segments of the U.S. government and related industries. The project involved many groups around the country and the world, and we all shared expertise in our own Yankee version of glasnost-perestroika. We interfaced with the IAEA, and with databases from Monterey to Massachusetts that monitored trade in nuclear materials, equipment, and technology. But our efforts were just beginning to explore the surface of a very deep wound.

  The secrecy and mistrust of the now waning Cold War period, I soon found, had left scars that were hard to erase—especially on Mother Earth. The horror stories were many: for years the motto in the nuclear field had been: The left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth. The military shoved waste into landfill where housing subdivisions were later built; liquid waste from reactors was injected into the aquifers of rivers and such. But our Western military-industrial predecessors seemed lily white, I learned, compared with their counterparts in Russia these past forty years.

  While we’d long wrangled over how to locate and dig up waste—not to mention what to do with it once we found it—I learned, in my week of traveling Russia, that the Soviets had Satan ICBMs and Bear H bombers and thousands of stockpiled strategic warheads. They had numerous storage facilities for spent fuel assemblies; gaseous diffusion and laser isotope plants for uranium enrichment; open pit and slurry mines and in situ leaching of deep-seated uranium deposits. Dumping in the Arctic and Pacific of tritium and zirconium, it seems, had been going on for decades.

  There were roughly 900,000 people employed in—and at least ten cities solely dedicated to—the Soviet nuclear industry. There were more than 150 sites where fissile materials were used or produced, and plans on the books to double the number of commercial reactors within the next twenty years. And that was only the beginning.

  The problem that proved the biggest burr under the saddle, as Olivier might say, was Central Asia—the area called, in the Turkic tongues of the region, Ortya Asya—which included the five largely Islamic republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. When Karl Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses, he forgot how deeply the drug coursed in the veins of humanity—and that rhetoric had never proven any antidote. Russia’s ten-year war of aggression against her Islamic neighbor Afghanistan, “the Russian Vietnam,” had only exacerbated this age-old spiritual-material schism.

  To further fuel the fundamentalist fire, the Russian name for this same region, Sredniya Aziya, referred to only four of the republics—excluding Kazakhstan, which, with its large ethnic Russian population, they considered part of Russia. The Soviet Union’s nuclear test sites were located in Kazakhstan, which shared a border with Xinjiang—the former Chinese Turkestan, with its own Islamic population—where China’s nuclear testing had taken place, at Lop Nur in the high desert, since 1964. The whole area was a powder keg.

  Russian operations outside the USSR looked no better. There were weapons arsenals and mining and fuel production centers in Czechoslovakia and Poland. From the 1970s, Russia had supplied nuclear fuel to countries like Egypt, India, Argentina, and Vietnam, as well as highly enriched uranium to research reactors in Libya, Iraq, and North Korea. Yet there wasn’t a single customs post in the entire USSR set up to measure the radiation level of shipments on a regular basis.

  Given this picture, it didn’t take a stretch of the imagination to figure out why the Russians were hopping on coals. Clearly, Western expertise hadn’t arrived a moment too soon. But when it came to sandbagging dikes, my philosophy had always been better late than never.

  The mythical Pandora had opened her fabled box so long ago, the moral of her tale seemed lost. She might have released on the world all the evils a vengeful Zeus could dream up. But as Sam said, maybe we’d been reading the maps wrong. After all, one thing had still stuck in the box that never escaped: hope. Looking at the picture from a different perspective, maybe hope really was still waiting for us inside the box. At least, so I hoped.

  We agreed with our Soviet fellow nukes to enter into the new spirit of problem-sharing. What with the recent atmosphere of openness and cooperation, Soviet scientists were lately permitted to travel outside the Iron Curtain as never in the past. Before Wolfgang and I left the country, we made dates for follow-up contacts—and I’d even collected a bagful of those new elitist items that had been pressed on me all week: business cards.

  The Vienna airport was nearly deserted by the time our plane arrived late. We’d already had a close connection and thought we might miss our flight. But the last plane to Paris was held for minor repairs and hadn’t been boarded, so we checked in. While Wolfgang waited with the others for the bus to the landing strip, I went to phone Laf as I’d promised. Wolfgang said not to talk long, as we might board at any moment.

  I was hoping it wasn’t too late to call, but I really wasn’t expecting the barrage I got, when the servant who’d answered found Laf and put him on the phone:

  “Gavroche, for heaven’s sake—where are you? Where have you been?” said Laf, sounding in a tizzy. “We’ve been looking for you all the week. That note you sent with Volga—what were you doing at the monastery of Melk? Why couldn’t you phone me while you were in Vienna, or even fro
m Leningrad? Where are you right now?”

  “I’m here at the Vienna airport,” I told him. “But I’m on a flight to Paris that’s leaving at any moment—”

  “Paris? Gavroche, I am extremely worried about you,” Laf said, and he certainly sounded it. “Why go to Paris—only because of what Volga told you? Have you spoken with your mother first about any of this?”

  “Jersey didn’t see fit to mention anything to me, these past twenty-five years,” I pointed out. “But if you think it’s important, of course I’ll let her know.”

  “You must speak with her before you speak with anyone in Paris,” said Laf. “Otherwise, how will you know what to believe?”

  “Since I no longer believe anyone or anything I hear,” I said sarcastically, “what difference does it make whether I deceive myself in Idaho, Vienna, Leningrad, or Paris?”

  “It makes a good deal of difference,” said Laf, sounding genuinely angry for the first time. “Gavroche, I am trying only to look after you, and your mother as well. She had excellent reasons not to speak of these matters earlier—it was really for your own protection. But now that Earnest and your cousin Sam are both dead …” Laf paused as if he’d just thought of something. “Whom exactly were you with at Melk, Gavroche? Was it Wolfgang Hauser?” he asked. “And did you happen to meet anyone else while you were here in Vienna? Other than your business associates, I mean?”

  I wasn’t sure just how much I should say to Laf, much less over a public phone. But I was so sick of all this secrecy and conspiracy, even among my own family—especially among my own family—that I decided to have an end to it.

  “Wolfgang and I spent the morning at Melk with a guy named Father Virgilio,” I said. When the line remained pregnant with silence, I added, “The prior afternoon, I had lunch with a handsome devil who claimed he was my grandfather—”