The Magic Circle (16 page)

As usual at this time of year, the valley below was buried in thick marshlike fog formed as the warmer water of the river impacted the ice-cold air. Just before the last descent, while the road could still be seen, natives usually checked fore and aft for other cars they might collide with when they got down there in the soup. It was then that I saw it, slipping out of sight around the curve behind me—a plain grey government car with standard white plates identical to a hundred others in our fleet at the nuclear site, which any of ten thousand employees might borrow for site visits or other official business. What was it doing out here, en route to no place? There was a hefty penalty, even job probation, for using government vehicles in personal or recreational activities.

But maybe this
was
official business, I thought. Sam had said I was being watched all the time, hadn’t he? If even Olivier had his hands in the cookie jar, who knew how many others might be in it too? Though I couldn’t see the driver through the windshield, when I saw the car reappear around the last corner I was certain he was tailing me. There was nobody but me out here.

But I knew every bend and wrinkle along this road, and I knew that the best place to ditch him would be in the soup. So as soon as I reached the last steep decline, I accelerated and dove in. Behind me, I saw him pick up his pace and do likewise. Then the blanket of dense white fog closed around us, and we were isolated within its embrace. I heard only the sound of silence as my car slalomed on the sharply curving road, moving like the serpent itself through the mist.

It seemed hours that I swung through the whipcrack curves of the road, through that smothering whiteness like the inside of a pillowcase, but my car clock told me it was really only twenty minutes. I knew the road would soon come out of the fog again as it approached the pass. Up there the road would fork, giving a choice of several routes heading into Jackson. So at the first turnout sign that appeared, almost invisible in the swirling mist, I cut my wheels and pulled off the road. Then I turned off my engine and cracked open my window a bit to listen.

Less than a minute later the government car swept by. I could hear the engine and see its outline, dark silver through the mist, but that was all. I waited a full five minutes before starting again on my way.

The road was clear over the pass, so I had a brief respite enabling me to think. I wondered what this manuscript was that had fallen into my hands, why everybody wanted it, and how it was that it had come to be written in runes. It surely wasn’t any correspondence belonging to Granny Pandora or my nefarious aunt Zoe. Nor did these pages resemble mementos of any of those great and famous legends with whom they’d reportedly trafficked throughout their long lives. And though the Celtic language itself might be thousands of years old, the document on the seat beside me wasn’t even beginning to yellow: it seemed to be written in pretty fresh ink. It was quite possible, I knew, that Sam had written in a rune code himself, trying to transcribe key elements of the original, and possibly more dangerous, documents—and maybe also to give a clue where the real ones were located, in case something happened to him.

It didn’t make sense why Sam “had to get rid of” the manuscript. If his death was faked, if everyone on the planet knew I was about to inherit the goods, if journalists knew enough to demand a press conference and ask for exclusive rights, and if even my own landlord was set to spy on me, then this whole situation had been designed to flush someone out of the woodwork: someone who wanted the real manuscript for whatever reason. And I was the bait.

I also now understood exactly what it was I must do: I had to hide this document in such a difficult place that no one but me—including Sam—could find it. And I knew precisely where that was going to be.

It was lucky I’d brought my skis.

At Jackson Hole I pulled into the parking lot facing the Grand Tetons—or “big tits,” as French trappers had dubbed these showgirl-breasted mountain peaks pointing at the sky. I stuffed the manuscript into one of my dog-eared canvas knapsacks from the back, grabbed my silvery moonsuit and parka and the thermal socks and gloves I always kept there, and went inside the lodge to the powder room to transform myself into the Snow Queen. Then I bought a cup of coffee, got some change at the cafeteria, and made the de rigueur long distance call to the Pod to explain my absence on this, my first full day back at work. I wanted to be sure he hadn’t gone ballistic when, after our slight unpleasantness yesterday, I’d failed to show up this morning at the office.

“Behn, where are you?” he said as soon as his secretary put me through.

“Last night I suddenly realized that I needed to collect some data out here at the western site, where I’m phoning from,” I lied.

The nuclear site at Arco out in the high desert, where the government’s fifty-two experimental reactors were located, was a three-hour drive in the opposite direction, past town and the post office I’d so hastily quitted. But the Pod’s next words made my lie seem absurdly unnecessary.

“I’ve had Maxfield beating the bushes for you since he first came in this morning. Wolf Hauser unexpectedly came back to town and dropped in here quite early. He was overjoyed to hear you’d be joining his project and wanted to meet you at once, since he was about to depart again on out-of-town business. We phoned you at home, but you’d already left. So I had Maxfield dash over to try to catch you at the post office—”

“The—post office?” I interjected, in what I hoped was a casual tone, though my ears were ringing and my head had started pounding again. Why on earth the post office? I pulled my psychological cards close to the chest to take a peek: Was the Pod in on this, too? I was beginning to trust no one, a prescription that hardly seemed the antidote to paranoia. But he was still speaking.

“After you left work yesterday I got a call from someone representing the
Washington Post,
” he explained. “She said she’d been trying to reach you for several days about some valuable papers she learned at a press conference were en route to you; that the
Post
urgently wanted to speak with you about acquiring them. I said I’d be sure to have you phone her today.

“Then when Hauser came through in such a rush this morning, it occurred to me that you might be over picking up mail—especially if you were expecting important documents. So I sent Maxfield at once. But when he found you—well, he’s told me the most astounding tale of your behavior.”

I knew what was coming next: how I drove off with some of Olivier’s body parts still attached to my car, and nearly glued the rest of him to the pavement. I looked like a fool, and worse. Yet though this seemed straightforward enough, there were a few things dangling here. For instance, whether it was the Pod’s idea or Olivier’s to try to pick up that package. But I could think of no way to ask, without letting the Pod know that the parcel was now actually in my possession.

“All this trouble just because I missed Dr. Hauser again,” I told him apologetically. “Well, it couldn’t be helped. I was in a big hurry too, so I didn’t realize Olivier was standing so close to my car. Tell him I’m sorry I almost drove over his foot.” Then I added, more cautiously, “Dr. Hauser and I seem to keep passing like two ships in the night. Things have gotten pretty confused, but I’m sure we’ll meet up soon enough. I did think over this project last night. I agree with what you said, that it might be the shot in the arm my career could use right now.”

I wasn’t just cranking up the Pod’s ego. Maybe my brain
was
getting scrambled and soggy after all this stress and hysteria, pushing me into believing everyone I’d ever known was out to get me. Maybe I
did
need a short retreat in the USSR to introduce me to a different reality than my own, which was starting to look pretty “virtual.” It was time for a
schuss
downhill to flush out my microprocesses.

I told the Pod I’d be back from the site before quitting time, and rang off. I felt relieved that Olivier was an unlikely candidate for the spy, hit man, and potential cat assassin I’d been visualizing. But I was still going to take the appropriate precautions and hide this manuscript where no one could ever find it—maybe not even me.

I had to wait half an hour for the tram to get hooked up. By the time it finally did, there were so many passengers queued up that they had to jam us in like sardines and weigh the fully laden tram before letting it take off over the deep gorges on that spindly-looking high wire. Packed in with all those restless midwesterners and Japanese tourists, my face was squashed against the windowpane by the mass of bodies, affording me a lovely view of the two-thousand-foot drop we’d experience if the load did prove too heavy for this orange crate. It would have been faster and simpler just to catch a chair lift instead. But I wasn’t sure I could locate the spot I was looking for without starting from Scylla and Charybdis.

Scylla and Charybdis were my two pet rocks: giant pinnacles of stone, side by side, that you were forced to ski between when you first came off the gondola—unless you decided to circumvent them and go into the deep powder, something I rarely did, and especially not today when I had to keep my balance on this treacherous slope with close to ten pounds of illicit manuscript strapped on my back.

The passage between the thirty-foot-high black rocks was narrow, steep, and always icy from the constant wear of many skis. It was like a blind tunnel, with light coming in only from a narrow crack at the sky. There wasn’t room inside there to brake or angle your skis, and nothing soft enough to dig your edges into for control.

Once, in high summer, I had hiked to this meadow and tried to climb up through the gap between Scylla and Charybdis. It was too steep to negotiate on foot: pitons and ropes were called for. But going down in snow was a lot simpler: all it took was nerves of stainless steel. You had to tuck down, knees locked, hands on your ankles, stay balanced,
schuss
through the gap, and keep praying that you hit no bad ice or rocks when you exited again into daylight.

I pried myself out of the gondola along with the rest of the sardines. From the forest of skis and poles hanging on the side of the tram I found and extracted mine. I took my time waiting beside the upper warming hut, knocking snow off my boots, clamping on my skis, de-fogging my goggles—giving my trammates, who were champing at the bit to hit the mountain, the right of way. I wanted to have a clear hill when I came out of the chute, not only to avoid dodging the bodies that were usually littering the slope beneath Scylla and Charybdis but, more important, so I could go prospecting for my hiding place without being observed.

I knew there wouldn’t be another gondola for half an hour, so when things quieted down and the crowds had vanished, I shoved off alone across the hill. The only sound was the swish of my skis on the snow as I dropped into the fall line and plunged through the gorge between the glittering and mammoth black forms of Scylla and Charybdis.

I managed to keep on track until I came out the other side, when a blast of wind hit me sideways, catching my backpack with full force. I wobbled and started to go down, but I picked up my left ski and swung my weight down into my right knee until the tips of my glove brushed the earth. Then I bounced back up and swung down again into the left knee like a skater, still plummeting with the fall line until I recovered the rhythmic center of balance.

Taking a deep breath as I skied on, I scanned the line of hills—the Grand Teton rising majestically in the distance as my marker—searching for the ridge I knew I had to drop from to find the crevasse I was seeking, and the cave. Just then, I thought I heard the soft swish of skis behind me. Odd, since I was on the highest ski slope of the mountain with no other lifts above me, and I thought I’d waited for everyone coming off the gondola.

“Your
wedeln
is a bit off,” said a gravelly voice with a German accent from a few yards behind me.

There were plenty of Germans prowling around ski areas, I told myself. It couldn’t be.

But it was. He skied up beside me, and again I went a little weak in the knees as I swung to a halt. He pulled off his goggles, wrapped them like a rubber band around the sleeve of his stark black jumpsuit, and smiled at me with those amazing turquoise eyes.

“Good morning, Dr. Hauser,” I managed to say. “What brings you up here for midweek skiing?” Then I pulled myself together. After all, this could hardly be a coincidence. Which meant it might be dangerous. So I took off again down the slope.

“I might ask you the same question, Mademoiselle Behn,” he called out behind me as he double-timed to catch up. “I
do
have an extremely important project. But
you
seem to be what is holding things up.”

Glancing over, I thought how beautiful his mouth was, and those cheekbones …

We pulled our eyes away from each other just in time, only seconds before we would have hit a mogul. We split up around the bump, and when we swept together again Dr. Hauser was laughing. We floated on down the hill, side by side in perfect rhythm. Suddenly, with a strength and agility that took me by surprise, he planted his poles as we ran, lifted both skis in midair, and hopped over a fallen tree in the path. It didn’t seem to faze him; he was still moving like flowing water over the sea of billowing moguls.

It was simple to explain how he’d recognized me on sight. After all, as the Pod had said, he’d reviewed my files, so he’d seen not only my vital statistics but my security photos as well. Still that didn’t explain what he was doing here on this mountain, one hundred miles from town. As if tracking these thoughts, he skidded to a halt where the trails forked, throwing up a spray of snow, and turned to me.

“I’ve already followed you across two states and up this mountain. That’s quite enough for one morning. What if we go to the ski lodge just downhill from here, the upper
Schloss
, where I can buy you a nice hot lunch. Then perhaps we can talk, get to know one another a bit. Unless,” he added, “you’ve already brought a lunch for yourself in your backpack there?”