The Magic Circle (61 page)

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 from 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—”

“That’s enough, Gavroche,” Laf snapped over the line in a tone wholly unlike him. “I know this Virgilio Santorini; he’s a very dangerous man, as you may live long enough to discover for yourself. As for the other—this ‘grandfather’ of yours—I pray only that he came to you as a friend. You must say no more—we cannot discuss it now, for you have made so many bad and foolish choices since we parted from one another in Idaho, I cannot think what to do. Though you have failed in all you’ve promised so far, you must swear to me one thing: that you will phone your mother first, before meeting with the person you plan to visit in Paris. It is of the utmost importance, no matter what else you may foolishly choose to do or not to do.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I admit, I was chagrined; I’d never heard Laf so upset. But just then I heard the first call in German for our plane.

“I’m really sorry, Laf,” I whispered under the background noise of the public address. “I’ll phone Jersey the minute I get off the plane in Paris—I swear.”

There was a silence on the phone as the racket went on, the call for our plane first repeated in French, then in English. Wolfgang popped his head out the glass doors of the waiting area, gesturing frantically to me—but just then another voice came on the phone. It was Bambi.

“Fräulein Behn,” she said, “your
Onkel
is so unhappy by your conversation, I think he forgets some messages he was planning to give you. One is a computer mail for you, sent over here to us from Wolfgang’s office. The other is from your colleague Herr Maxfield. He has telephoned many times this week; he says you have never called him back, as he asked. He has a most important message for you. He sent a telegram.”

“But quickly,” I said. “Our plane is about to go.”

“I shall read them both to you myself: they’re very small,” she told me. “The first is from a place called Four Corners in America, and says, ‘Research phase completed. Take extreme care in handling K file. Data are suspect.’”

I knew the only thing in Four Corners, that remote spot in the high desert of the Southwest, would be the ruins of ancient Anasazi Indian dwellings. So this message was Sam’s way of telling me, based on what he’d learned from his researches in Utah, that I should beware of any “data” issuing from Wolfgang “K” Hauser. This seemed bad enough. But Olivier’s telegram was worse. It said:

The Pod took the next plane after yours to Vienna; he’s still there. Maybe you lost more than I did on our lottery. Jason’s doing great and sends his regards. My boss Theron sends his, too.
Love, Olivier

That packed a wallop: The only good news was that my cat was doing well. It was definitely
not
good that my boss the Pod had followed me to Vienna. This raised the specter of something that, for the entire past week in Russia, had been hovering at the back of my mind. Sam’s warning only seemed to confirm it.

Wolfgang
was
telling the truth in admitting I’d seen Father Virgilio earlier, before meeting him at the monastery of Melk. As he’d pointed out, I had seen Virgilio the day before, in the restaurant where the padre was disguised as a busboy, keeping an eye on me all afternoon with Dacian Bassarides. Seeing Virgilio as a fleeting busboy might explain why, later, he would have seemed familiar to me—but not
that
familiar. Then I recalled Wolfgang’s evasive replies to my questions about his mysterious servant Hans Claus, whose name kept changing. It was there that I found the lie.

How
relieved
he must have been when I believed it was Father Virgilio I had recognized from the back that night in the vineyard. But I realized now that the figure I’d seen moving away from me in the moonlight was not Virgilio but a figure I had often followed through the corridors of the nuclear site back in Idaho—a wiry figure that moved with the spry step of a trained boxer and Vietnam vet. I knew, with not the shadow of a doubt, that the man who’d met Wolfgang so clandestinely in the vineyard above Krems had been none other than my own boss, Pastor Owen Dart.

In the wake of that came a flood of thoughts about just what such a connection might mean. For starters, I couldn’t overlook that it was Dart who’d hired me into the nuclear field right out of college, with no experience, then put me on this assignment with Wolfgang just after my return from Sam’s funeral. Now in hindsight, given everything else in the picture, that seemed more than exceptional timing.

Then it was again Dart who’d supposedly spoken with the
Washington Post
about my “inheritance,” and whose idea it had been to send Olivier quickly to the post office to
retrieve my package
. It was Pastor Dart, too, who’d sent Wolfgang chasing after me across two states to Jackson Hole, and who’d gone up against even federal security to make sure I was on that plane with Wolfgang. What else could it possibly mean, if the Pod himself had jumped on the very next flight to Vienna? Furthermore, his secret night meeting with Wolfgang, just after we’d hidden the manuscripts, coupled with Olivier’s message that the Pod was
still there
in Vienna seemed to have obvious implications—though there was bloody little I could do about them by myself, tonight.