The Magic Circle

by Katherine Neville

  Wolfgang looked at me as if the answer were ridiculously obvious. Then for the second time, he motioned to the waiter for our check.

  “With respect to the contents, I only know a portion—not all—and even that will take some explaining,” he said. “But as for Pastor Dart, I had to tell him where the manuscripts were just as soon as I myself knew where you had finally hidden them—and certainly before you and I had to leave for Russia. How else would Dart have been able to retrieve them from the Austrian National Library before someone else did?”

  The word that instantly leapt to mind was Olivier’s oy. Virgilio, it seems, had followed us right from the Café Central, and as Wolfgang handed those slips out the door of our room in the Austrian National Library, he’d copied down every single book title. Actually, I couldn’t think of a word for that.

  As we walked back along the narrow street, close enough to the river to smell the damp night air, I felt like weeping.

  Wolfgang had taken my hand as if nothing were wrong, and now he squeezed it. “Let’s walk down by the river for a bit, shall we?” he suggested.

  At the end of the street I saw the glittering lights of the Île de la Cité that seemed to be underwater. What the hey? I thought in silent desperation. I could always throw myself into the drink—or drag him in too, if he didn’t start coming up with some decent answers soon. This was hardly my idea of a weekend in Paris with Wolfgang. Right now I wanted to shoot him. I’d destroyed all Sam had risked his life for, by forgetting Laf’s injunction to “resist the men, until you learn exactly in what kind of situation you are involved.”

  Well, I sure knew what kind of situation I was involved in now, though I hadn’t a clue what in God’s name to do about it. I felt like screaming my brains out. I still knew less than nothing about these bloody manuscripts! Just thinking of all they’d cost ripped me inside out. But the night was far from over, and I vowed to get some straight answers before it was up.

  We went along the quai to where we could see, across the water, the illuminated facade of Notre Dame towering above its famous wall of ancient ivy that dripped down to the rippling river.

  “Ariel,” said Wolfgang, turning my face up to his in the glittering night light. “If I lie to you, you say it makes you unhappy. But when I tell you the truth, you’re unhappy, too. I love you so much—what can I say or do that will make you happy?”

  “Wolfgang, you’ve just said that you and some mafioso and my boss Pastor Dart have manipulated me and betrayed me, that you’ve betrayed everything Sam ever stood for—what indeed he may have lost his life for—and you expect that to make me happy?” I said. “It would make me happy if you’d just tell me the truth—up front for a change—rather than forcing me to pry it out of you, or keeping me in the dark ‘for my own good.’ I want you to tell me right now exactly what you know about Pandora’s manuscripts—what they have to do with Russia and Central Asia and nuclear matters, as clearly they do, and what role you and those others play in all of the above.”

  “It seems you understand nothing I’ve just said,” Wolfgang said in frustration. “First of all, I never said Virgilio was a mafioso but that he was from a family of arms dealers—there is a difference. I said your uncle might have heard of mafia connections: those like Virgilio often must maintain contacts with such people for their own security. In my field too, if we treat every arms dealer as an enemy, then all activity goes beneath the table and we lose any measure of control over smuggling that we might have had to begin with—we close all doors.

  “But when you speak of betrayal,” he added, “there’s something you clearly don’t know. There’s a group I’m given to understand had investigated Samuel Behn for many years, since his father Earnest’s death. They’d even hired your cousin at times to work for them in order to win his trust. But in the end I believe it was they who killed him.

  “These people claimed to work for the United States government, but in fact were multinational, controlled by a man with a lengthy dossier—a man named Theron Vane. When I was absent, that week before I came to Sun Valley to find you, I learned several things about this man. The first: that he was in San Francisco the week your cousin Sam died. They were working on an assignment together. The second: that Vane went underground immediately after Sam’s death and has not resurfaced. The third—and you must believe me about this part, Ariel—is that Olivier Maxfield is, and has been ever since the day you met him, a henchman of Theron Vane. Maxfield came to Idaho, and secured his job, and also his acquaintance and friendship with you, for one reason and one reason only: because you were the only way they could think of to slip inside the defenses of your cousin Sam.”

  I stood there absolutely stunned. I knew from Sam that he had worked with Theron Vane for over ten years. The man must have hired him out of college, just as the Pod had done with me. I also knew Theron Vane was there when Sam had “died” because, according to Sam, the man was killed in his place! And in that cryptic message Olivier had left with Laf, he too admitted he worked for Theron Vane.

  In hindsight, it did seem odd for Olivier’s credentials to have matched mine so perfectly that from day one, five years ago, we’d been assigned codirection of the same project. Not to mention how he’d lured me to my tenancy in his basement apartment by providing cheap rent, designer meals, the willingness to cat-sit in a pinch—and by conjuring up that weird dream about me as the Virgin Mary beating the Mormon prophet Moroni at a game of pinball!

  Indeed, all Wolfgang had said, if taken from a slightly different perspective, might present as accurate a picture. Theron Vane might have deceived Sam about who he was really working for. Somebody might have been out to get Theron Vane, not Sam. And Wolfgang and the Pod could simply have been trying to provide the documents more protection than Sam and I, in our bumbling attempts, had been able to do on our own.

  I was so bloody confused: I had a million questions that were still unanswered. But Wolfgang took me into his arms there beside the river and he tenderly kissed my hair. Then he held me away and regarded me with a serious expression.

  “I will tell you the answer to everything you’ve asked—that is, if I know the answers,” he said. “But it’s after two in the morning, and though we don’t meet Zoe until eleven tomorrow, I must confess I’d like to spend at least some of tonight making up for all the unhappiness it seems I’ve caused you.” He smiled wryly and added, “Not to say what it’s cost me, to spend all those nights alone in that Russian barracks!”

  We headed along the quai where the fuzzy new leaves draped on the chestnuts, illuminated by little lights from below, were like gauzy shrouds of dangling caterpillars. The air was laden with the moisture of spring. I felt as if I were drowning and I knew I had to snap out of it.

  “Why don’t you start with Russia?” I suggested.

  “First of all,” Wolfgang began, taking my hand once more, “perhaps you found it odd, as I did, that during our entire stay in the Soviet Union—and despite our extensive discussion on the topic of security and cleanup of nuclear waste—not a single mention was made of the ‘accident’ at Kyshtym?”

  In the 1957 disaster at Kyshtym, a nuclear waste dump had gone critical, like a live reactor minus control rods, and spewed waste over an estimated four hundred square miles—roughly the size of Manhattan, Jersey City, Brooklyn, Yonkers, the Bronx, and Queens—an area possessing a population of around 150,000.

  The Soviets had successfully covered up this “mistake” for nearly twenty years, despite the fact that they’d had to clear population from the region, divert a river around it, and shut down all roads. It wasn’t until an expatriate Soviet scientist in the 1970s had blown the whistle that it all came out. But with today’s new atmosphere of cooperative atomic glasnost, one did have to wonder why, when they’d made a clean breast of everything else, Kyshtym was never broached throughout our week of intensive dialogue. It suddenly occurred to me that Wolfgang had an important point.

  “You mean, you b
elieve that the Kyshtym ‘accident’ was really no accident?” I asked.

  Wolfgang stopped and smiled down at me in the almost surrealistic night light of the unfolding Parisian spring.

  “Excellent,” he said, nodding his head. “But even those who finally did expose the mishap may never have guessed the awful truth. Kyshtym is located in the Urals, not far from Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk, two sites that are still today actively engaged in design and assembly of nuclear warheads—and where you and I, of course, for security reasons were not invited to visit. But what if Kyshtym had not actually been a waste dump for these two sites? What if it didn’t go critical by accident, as everyone believes? What if, instead, the incident was the result of a controlled experiment that turned out very differently than planned?”

  “You can’t possibly imagine that even in the days of darkest repression, the Soviets would ever have performed a nuclear test in a populated area?” I said. “They’d have had to be completely insane!”

  “I’m not referring to a nuclear weapons test,” said Wolfgang cryptically, gazing out across the river. He stretched one arm toward the flowing black waters of the Seine.

  “More than a hundred years ago,” he said, “at this very spot in the river, young Nikola Tesla used to go swimming. He’d come to Paris from Croatia in 1882 to work for Continental Edison, then continued on to New York to work for Edison himself, with whom he soon quarrelled bitterly.

  “As I’m sure you know,” Wolfgang added as we walked on, “Tesla held original patents on many inventions for which others later took all the credit and profit. He was first to conceive, design, and often even to construct inventions like the wireless radio, bladeless turbine, telephone amplifier, transatlantic cable, remote control, solar energy techniques, to name only a few. Some say, too, that he invented ‘anti-gravity’ devices that had the superconductive properties known today—as well as a most controversial ‘death ray’ that could shoot planes from the skies using only sound. And in his famous secret experiments at Colorado Springs in 1899, it’s said he was able to change even patterns of weather.”

  “I’ve heard the story,” I assured Wolfgang dryly. It was the endless debate between “hands-on” engineers, who credited the self-propagandizing Tesla with inventing techniques for everything from raising the dead to walking on water, and “conceptual” physicists, who pointed out that the self-educated Tesla had rejected most modern theory, from relativity to quantum physics. Your basic rehash of spirit-matter polarity.

  “But Tesla died before the atomic bomb was invented,” I pointed out. “And he refused to believe that even if you succeeded in splitting an atom, the released energy could ever be successfully harnessed. So how can you imagine, as you seem to, that the awful disaster at Kyshtym in the fifties was some kind of botched version of a Tesla experiment?” I asked in disbelief.

  “I am not alone in imagining it,” said Wolfgang. “Tesla established a new science called telegeodynamics. Its goal was to develop a source of unlimited free energy by harnessing natural forces latent within the earth. He believed he could send information underground, around the globe. He applied for very few patents in this particular field—unlike all his other discoveries—nor did he give away any but the broadest descriptions of how such inventions might work. But he experimented extensively with harmonics, inventing oscillators so tiny they could be carried in a pocket, yet whose vibrations, when applied to a structure like the Brooklyn Bridge or Empire State Building, could cause it to sway and break to bits in a matter of minutes.”

  “So let’s get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying the Soviets might have attempted a controlled chain reaction, trying to somehow invoke this Tesla-type force in 1957—and then it went haywire? But if Tesla didn’t write anything about it, how would they know what to do?”

  “I said he didn’t publish—not that he didn’t write,” said Wolfgang. “In fact, it’s possible such specifications were among his papers, many of which mysteriously disappeared when he died in New York at the age of eighty-seven—significantly in 1943, at the height of the Second World War, when the race was on for a new kind of weapon. Indeed, Hitler announced just thereafter, to his intimate confidants, that scientists were on the brink of developing a fabulous new ‘superweapon’ which would shortly end the war in Germany’s favor.”

  My mind was flooded with unbidden thoughts: Nikola Tesla from Yugoslavia, Virgilio from Trieste, Volga Dragonoff who was given his name by Pandora for the “dragon forces” of the earth and who hailed from the Caucasus.

  “What does all this have to do with Pandora and her manuscripts?” I asked—wondering if even at this late date I was really prepared for the answer.

  But Wolfgang had stopped dead on the walk to gaze through the mist rising from the Champs de Mars to where the Eiffel Tower loomed like an apparition before us. Looped up its sides a message in neon letters was spelled out. Deux Cent Ans—two hundred years.

  Good lord! I glanced quickly at Wolfgang, who’d started laughing.

  “Though I mentioned it myself to you only last week, I’d already forgotten,” he told me. “This year, 1989, is the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. But 1789 was also the year the new element uranium was discovered by Klaproth in Saxony. He named it after the planet Uranus that another German, Herschel, had discovered with his sister at their observatory in England not ten years earlier. These three events marked the beginning of the destruction of the old aeon your grandfather was speaking of, and Uranus became regarded as the planet governing the new age—the age of Aquarius. I think that’s what Pandora’s manuscripts are all about. Do you see the connection?”

  I began to say I didn’t get it—but all at once, I thought I did.

  “Prometheus?” I said.

  Wolfgang snapped his eyes from the neon lights and stared at me in surprise.

  “That’s correct,” he said. “In the myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to men—just as in the coming age, as Dacian Bassarides said, the water-bearer pours out a great life force for mankind. Such gifts often turn out to be curses as much as blessings. In the Prometheus myth, Zeus turned around and gave us Pandora. She opened a box—a jar, actually—and released all the evils into the world. But there are those who don’t think the story of Prometheus and Pandora was totally a myth. I suspect your grandmother Pandora must have been among them.”

  “You think the manuscripts Pandora collected told how to make a nuclear pile? Or how to tap into the earth’s energy forces?” I said. “But I understood that her documents were ancient—or at least much older than any modern technology or inventions.”

  “Most inventions would be better termed discoveries—or even rediscoveries,” said Wolfgang. “I don’t know if the ancients had such knowledge, but I do know that there are places on the planet where the components of sustainable chain reactions—radioactive materials, heavy water, other ingredients—exist together naturally. It has often been commented that the Bible and other early texts describe scenes very much resembling atomic explosions—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is only one—just as there are indeed specific spots on the earth’s surface most conducive to Tesla’s power vortices, artificial creation of thunderstorms and ball lightning, and harmonic oscillations. In most of these places, we know that the ancients built monuments, raised standing stones, or left shamanistically significant cave art—well before recorded history.”

  “But even if all Pandora’s documents were collected, translated, decoded, deciphered, and understood—what would someone be able to do with the knowledge?” I said in frustration. “Why would it be dangerous?”

  “Since I’ve only just glimpsed the documents for a few moments myself, clearly I don’t know all the answers,” Wolfgang said. “But I do know two things. First: the early philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato believed the earth was a sphere suspended in space through equilibrium, and attuned to the music of the spheres. But the details of the
power sources themselves were always kept veiled, since they were believed to be a key element of the Mysteries.

  “On his deathbed, just before Socrates drank hemlock, he told his disciples that the earth, if viewed from above, resembles ‘one of those balls made of twelve pieces of skin in different colors.’ That is the description not of a sphere but of the largest Pythagorean polygon—the dodecahedron, a figure of twelve sides where each face is a pentagon. This was the most sacred form to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. They conceived of the earth as a gigantic crystal—today we’d say a ‘crystal set’—a transmitter that harnessed energy from the heavens or the depths of the earth. They thought it could even be used for psychic control on a broad scale if one manipulated these key pressure points. And further, they imagined that the forces within the earth, if properly ‘tuned,’ would vibrate like a tuning fork to harmonic correspondences in the sky.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s say the earth really is a gigantic energy grid, as everyone seems to think. Then I could certainly understand why people who were after power would want to get their hands on that hidden map of trigger points. But when it comes to ‘mysteries,’ let’s not forget that Socrates and Pythagoras, despite all the secrets they knew, or maybe because of them, got wiped out by popular demand. Whatever ‘hidden knowledge’ they had certainly didn’t save them in the end.

  “Anyway,” I added, “you said there were two things you knew about Pandora’s documents. What’s the second?”

  “The second is what Nikola Tesla believed—which wasn’t such a very different picture from what I’ve just described,” said Wolfgang. “He thought the earth contained a form of alternating current that was continually expanding and contracting—at a rate that was difficult but not impossible to measure—rather like the rhythm of breathing, or of a heartbeat. He said that by placing a load of TNT in the right place at the right time—just when a contraction was beginning—he could split the earth itself in pieces ‘as a boy would split an apple.’ And by tapping into this current, this energy grid, he could harness unlimited power. ‘For the first time in man’s history,’ Tesla said, ‘he has the knowledge with which he may interfere with cosmic processes.’”