The Magic Circle (12 page)

“Oh lord, not you too?” he said, shoving back his swivel chair and rubbing his eyes. “You’ve only been back at work for a few minutes. How could you have picked up the sickness so fast? He’s like the site plague, this fellow. To date, not one woman has failed to succumb. I really thought you’d be the one to resist. I have serious money riding on you, you know. We’ve opened a table to wager the odds.”

“He’s absolutely gorgeous,” I told Olivier. “But it’s more than that. There’s some kind of—I don’t know what to call it—not really an animal magnetism—”

“Oh
no
!” cried Olivier, standing up and putting his hands on my shoulders. “It’s far worse than I imagined! Maybe I’ve lost the grocery money too!”

“You didn’t wager the exotic gourmet herbal tea budget?” I asked with a grin.

He sat down again with his head in his hands and moaned. I suddenly realized that Professor Doctor Wolfgang K. Hauser was the first thing in a week that had made me smile and forget, for an entire ten minutes, about Sam. That in itself made up for Olivier’s lost wager and a few pounds of glamorous herbal teas to boot.

Olivier jumped to his feet as the alarm system started hooting and a voice came over the loudspeaker between bursts:

“
This is a test of the emergency alarm system. We are conducting our winter fire drill. This drill is being timed both by local fire officials and federal safety officials. Please proceed in haste to your nearest emergency exit and wait in the parking lot well away from the building until the all-clear signal is blown.
”

Holy shit! During fire drills, we could only use the emergency exits. They sealed all mantraps and doors that led back into the building, where people might get trapped in a real emergency—including the door to the lobby where my coat was. The outside temperature, well below zero when I came in, would be colder by now. And a fire drill could last thirty minutes.

“Come on,” Olivier said, pulling on his parka. “Get your things—let’s go!”

“My coat’s in the lobby,” I said as I started walking briskly in his wake toward the exit across the vast floor of already vacated desks. A sea of people was flowing out the four exits into the bitter wind I could see outside.

“You’re completely insane,” he informed me. “How many times have I
told
you not to use the lobby? Now you’ll be transformed into a block of ice. I’d share my coat, but we can’t both fit inside it—it’s snug. But we can each pass it back and forth until the other starts to turn blue.”

“I have a down parka in my car, and my car keys are here in my handbag,” I told him. “I’ll sprint to the car and turn the heat on. If the drill goes on too long, I’ll go over to the cowboy bar and have some hot tea.”

“Okay, I’ll come join you,” said Olivier. “I guess if you came in the front doors, that means that you parked illegally, too?”

I grinned at him as we burst out the doors with the crowd, and we jogged around the side of the building.

When I went to unlock the car door, I saw that the button locks were already up. That was strange; I always locked my car. Maybe I was just so distraught today I’d forgotten. I crawled in, put on my parka, and turned on the ignition as Olivier got in at the other side. The engine turned over sluggishly, so it was good that I’d been forced to come out and start it. In weather like this, with little protection, the oil in your crankcase could turn into a snow cone.

And then I noticed the knot, hanging from my rearview mirror.

Sam and I as children had a pet project of learning all kinds of knots. I’d become an expert of sorts. I could tie most knots single-handed the way a sailor could. Sam said the Incas of Peru had used knots as a language: they could do mathematics or even tell a story with them. As a child I used to send knot messages to people—or even to myself, to see if I could recall later what they meant—like tying a string around your finger.

I had the habit of leaving pieces of yarn or rope in different places—like the rearview mirror. Then when I was under stress or working out a problem, I’d tie and untie them, sometimes even working up a complex macramé. And as the knot pattern was worked out, miraculously, so would be my problem. But I didn’t recall seeing this piece of yarn on my drive home, or even this afternoon coming in to work. My memory was getting pretty flaky.

I touched the knot as I felt the car warming. It was actually two knots, if you included the part wrapped around the mirror bar: a Solomon’s knot, signifying a critical decision, and a slippery hitch, meaning exactly what it sounds like. What did I have in mind when I’d put that there? I undid the yarn and started playing with it.

Olivier had turned on the radio and located some of the awful, twangy cowboy music he loved so much. I regretted inviting him to share my vehicle retreat; after all, we spent ninety percent of our lives under the same roof, as it was. But then I recalled that I’d seen no traces of Olivier’s entry and exit, or, indeed, anyone’s snowprints when I’d pulled up last night—correction, this morning—before the house. Though the snows and winds might well have been constant and heavy, there should have been
some
thing to show he was there. Indeed, why hadn’t he brought in any of my mail if he’d been in residence the whole time? The plot thickened.

“Olivier—where were you while I was gone?”

Olivier looked at me with dark eyes, and he kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Darling, I must confess,” he told me, “I met a cowgirl I just couldn’t resist.”

“You passed the blizzard with a cowgirl?” I said, surprised, for Olivier had never been the overnight-pickup type. “Fill in the blanks. Is she pretty? Is she a Latter-day Saint like yourself? And where was my
cat
while all this was going on?”

“I left the little argonaut with a large bowl of food; he fixes drinks on his own, after all. As to the lady, the past tense would best describe our relationship. It melted away along with the snow; by now, I’m afraid it’s as frozen as the ice outside.”

Very poetic.

“I have to go to Sun Valley next weekend,” I said. “Are you going to desert Jason in that frigid basement again, or should I take him with me?”

“Going skiing?” said Olivier. “Why don’t you take us
both
with you? I was just trying to figure out where to go to catch this new snow. In Sun Valley they have forty inches of base on the slopes, and in the bowls sixty inches of powder.” Olivier was an excellent skier and floated like a feather in the powder. I could never get the hang of powder myself, but I loved to watch him from afar.

“Well,” I said, “I probably won’t be able to be on the slopes much. My uncle’s coming to visit. He wants to discuss family matters.”

“I should imagine!” Olivier agreed. “You seem to be getting plenty of attention from your formerly absent family, now that you’re an heiress.” Then he suddenly looked sorry for having mentioned it at all.

“It’s okay,” I told Olivier. “I’m getting over it. Besides, my uncle’s very wealthy himself. He’s a famous violinist and conductor in—”

“Not Lafcadio Behn? Is that your uncle?” said Olivier. “With so few Behns in the world, I always wondered if you were related to any of the famous ones.”

“Probably to all of them,” I said with a grimace. “It’s the
Behn
of my existence.”

The all-clear signal blew just as I was telling Olivier he could come along this weekend if he liked. Reluctantly I turned off the warm engine to go back out into the bitter cold again. As I was locking the car door, I remembered that I
had
locked it on my way into the lobby. It wasn’t my imagination—someone had broken into my car.

I looked in the hatchback where the backseat was folded down. Everything I usually had was still there, but it was slightly rearranged. Someone had searched the car, too. I locked the door anyway, a kind of reflex action. I followed Olivier around to the back entrance, almost bumping into my boss, Pastor Dart, as he was going in.

“Behn—you’re back!” he said, a grin crossing that pugnacious face of his. “Come to my office in about half an hour, when I’m free. If I’d known you were coming back today I’d have cleared the decks. There’s a lot I need to discuss with you.”

Bella the security guard, filing back in just in front of us, turned and smirked over her shoulder. I told the Pod I’d be there, and went back to my office just as the phone started ringing.

“You get it,” Olivier said. “I forgot: Before you came, a lady from a newspaper phoned about some documents she said you’d inherited. But the rest of the morning, every time I answered the phone they just hung up. Probably some crank.”

I picked up the phone on the fourth ring. “Ariel Behn, Waste Management,” I answered.

“Hi, hotshot,” said that soft, familiar voice—a voice I’d believed I would never hear again except in a dream. “I’m sorry. Really, truly sorry that it had to be done this way—but I’m not dead,” Sam said. “However, I might be, soon, unless you can help me. And fast.”

THE RUNE

MARSYAS:

Black, black, intolerably black!

Go, spectre of the ages, go!

Suffice it that I passed beyond
.

I found the secret of the bond

Of thought to thought through countless years
,

Through many lives, in many spheres
,

Brought to a point the dark design

Of this existence that is mine
.

I knew my secret. All I was … all I am
.

The rune’s complete when all I shall be flashes by

Like a shadow on the sky.…

OLYMPAS:

Through life, through death, by land and sea

Most surely will I follow thee
.

—Aleister Crowley,
AHA

I had to sit down, and fast. The blood drained from my brain like the vortex in a sink, as I dropped like a rock into my chair. I ducked my head until my forehead was grazing my knees, to keep from blacking out.

Sam was alive. Alive.

He
was
alive, wasn’t he? Or maybe I was dreaming. Things like that happened sometimes in dreams—things that could seem very real. But Sam’s voice was still there, humming in my ear, though I’d just returned from his funeral. It was clearly time for a sanity check.

“Are you there, Ariel?” Sam sounded worried. “I can’t hear you breathing.”

It was true: I had stopped breathing. It required conscious effort to begin again, to jump-start even this most basic autopilot function. I swallowed hard, gripped the arm of my chair, straightened up, and forced myself to squeak out a reply.

“Hi,” I said into the mouthpiece. I sounded ridiculous, but what on earth was I
supposed
to say?

“I’m sorry. I know what you must be going through right now, Ariel,” Sam said: the understatement of the century. “But please don’t ask questions until I can explain. In fact, it’s dangerous for you to say anything at all unless you’re completely alone.”

“I’m not,” I told him quickly. All the while, I was still trying to harness my runaway brain and bring my biorhythms under some semblance of control.

“I figured,” said Sam. “I’ve been phoning since this morning, but I just hung up whenever somebody else answered. Now that I’ve got you, the first thing we have to do is find a clean phone line so I can fill you in right away on what’s happened.”

“You could phone me at home,” I suggested, trying to be careful in my choice of words. I also slid my wheeled desk chair a bit farther from where Olivier, with his back to me, was still tapping away at his terminal.

“No good; your home phone is bugged,” said Sam, who would know such things. “This office line’s clean, at least for the moment—long enough for us to work out a plan. Your car isn’t safe, either,” he added, anticipating my next question. “Someone broke into it and did a thorough search. I left those knots there to warn you. I hope you haven’t stashed anything of significant value in your car or your house: I’m sure you’re being watched by real professionals, and most of the time.”

Real professionals?
What was that supposed to mean: that
I
was somehow embroiled in this spy thriller, too? That was about all I needed to hear, on top of everything else I’d been through in the past twenty-four hours. And though I did wonder what Sam meant by “anything of significant value,” I had to restrict myself to: “I didn’t notice anything …” Instead of “missing” I added, “… out of order.”

Now Olivier was standing up and stretching. When he glanced over toward me, I swiveled my chair away to face my own desk and started acting as if I were taking important technical notes on my phone conversation. The blood was still pounding in my head, but I knew I had to get Sam off the phone, and quickly. I asked him, “What do you suggest?”

“We need to arrange a way that you and I can talk at appointed times, without letting on to those watching you that you’re trying to conceal anything. Like, no ducking into phone booths out on the street.”

Which, in fact, had been my first idea. Scratch that.

“On the computer?” I asked, still scribbling on my pad. I wished to God that Olivier would take a hike.

“Computer?” said Sam. “Not safe enough. Any asshole can hack into a government computer—especially a
security
computer. We’d have to work out a multilayered code for protection, and we don’t have time. There’s a cowboy bar called the No-Name down the road from your office. I’ll phone you there in fifteen minutes.”

“I have a meeting with my boss in fifteen minutes,” I told him. “I’ll see if—”

Just then, with immaculate timing, the Pod poked his head in at the door. “Behn, I’ve cleared the decks a bit earlier than I’d expected. Come to my office as soon as you’ve finished here. We have something important to discuss.”

“Okay, I guess you’ve gotta go,” Sam was saying in my ear. Olivier started to follow the Pod to the meeting as Sam added, “Let’s make it an hour from now instead. If you’re still tied up, I’ll just keep phoning over there every fifteen minutes or so until I reach you. And, Ariel? I’m really, really sorry about all this.” Then the line went dead.