The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

Pushing these thoughts to the back of my mind, I tried to come up with a double-entendre note—something short, sweet, and to the point, yet conveying as much as possible. Recalling that Sam was calling himself Sir Richard Francis Burton these days, I came up with the following:

Dear Dr. Burton,

Thanks for your memo. Your team seems on target. I too am ahead of schedule established as of our last meeting: a whale of a job accomplished. If problems arise in my absence, contact me directly via IAEA. I depart for Russia, 5pm Vienna time today.

Best regards, Ariel Behn

Most of this should be pretty clear to Sam, I thought: I’d received his fax and had understood it. The only thing we’d “established” at our last meeting—since we didn’t know yet where Pandora’s papers were—was that I would personally try to reach Dacian Bassarides and pump him for information. So the statement that I was ahead of schedule would convey that I’d managed to do so. The whale reference—the whale being the floating repository of clan totem memory—should tell Sam I’d safely stashed the “gift” that my last fax said I was now in possession of.

Much as I’d have liked to share more, when I contemplated trying to encode in this brief time the complexities of what I’d learned about the rest of my family—not to mention sacred hallows and vanished cities and zodiacal constellations—I confess I foundered. But at least now Sam would know this much: that the game was afoot. After shredding and burning my original memo in the fireplace and scattering it among the cold ashes—better to be safe than sorry—I went outside and found Wolfgang just coming across the lawn to find me.

“We’re ready to go,” he told me. “I’ve put our luggage in the car, so we needn’t come back to the castle. We can leave directly from Melk for the airport. Claus has a key and will tidy up here when we’ve gone.”

“Who’s Claus?” I asked.

“My groundskeeper,” Wolfgang replied, opening the passenger door and handing me in. He went around back and locked the trunk, then got behind the wheel.

“I thought his name was Hans,” I said as he turned the key in the ignition and adjusted the choke.

“Whose name?” said Wolfgang. He pulled the car out from beneath the tree and crossed the lawn, navigating the drawbridge carefully.

“The guy you just called Claus,” I said. “Last night, when your groundskeeper followed us up the hill in the dark, you told me his name was Hans.” I didn’t feel it necessary to mention that all along I’d felt there was something suspicious about the fellow, anyway.

“That’s right: Hans Claus,” Wolfgang said. “It’s more customary in these parts to call such people by their family names. But perhaps last night I did otherwise.”

“You’re sure it’s not Claus Hans?” I suggested.

Wolfgang glanced over at me with one lifted eyebrow and a puzzled smile. “Is this an interrogation? I’m afraid I’m not used to that, though I may safely assure you I do know the names of my own servants.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “Then what about your own name? You never mentioned to me that there was a real person named Kaspar Hauser.”

“But I thought you already knew of him,” he said as we navigated downhill through the vineyards. “The Wild Boy of Nürnberg, as they called him. The legend of Kaspar Hauser has been a very famous one in Germany.”

“I know about it now; I’ve read up on him,” I said. “Instead, you implied you were named for one of the biblical Magi. Maybe you know more about this Kaspar Hauser than I do, but it appears his main claims to fame were his shadowy past and his unexplained murder. It seems strange that anyone would want to saddle a child with either of those associations.”

Wolfgang laughed. “But I’ve been thinking of him myself! I was astounded yesterday by Dacian Bassarides’s story of those seven hidden cities of Solomon. I suspect both Kaspar Hauser and the town of Nürnberg are related to those cities, as perhaps too are Adolf Hitler and the sacred hallows he researched at Melk. I was going to speak of it last night, but I was—somewhat distracted.” He smiled. “After listening to Dacian, what I think may connect all these things is the Hagalrune.”

“Hagalrune?” I said.

“Hagal in old German meant hail—you know, pellets of ice—one of the two important symbols of Aryan power: fire and ice,” said Wolfgang. “The swastika has since ancient times symbolized the power of fire. It was carved on many Eastern fire temples like the one Dacian mentioned. More important, Nürnberg, the town where Kaspar Hauser first appeared, is considered the absolute geomantic center of Germany: the three lines forming the Hagal rune cross from other parts of Europe and Asia, meeting at Nürnberg to form a cauldron of power.”

I felt a chill as Wolfgang, removing one hand from the steering wheel, drew a sign in the air with his finger—precisely the image that had formed across my computer screen the night Sam had begun to communicate with me in code:

My heart was pounding. I wished I could speak with Sam. I drew my coat collar up, more to still my hands than for warmth. Wolfgang didn’t seem to notice; he replaced his hand on the wheel and kept speaking as he drove.

“This placement of the Hagal rune at Nürnberg is central to everything Adolf Hitler ever said or did,” he told me. “As soon as Hitler became German chancellor, his first act was to form a college of Rutengänger—how you would say?—water diviners.”

“We call them dowsers,” I said. “It’s an old practice among Native Americans: they use Y-shaped willow or hazel switches balanced between their fingertips as they move over terrain to find underground water.”

“Yes, exactly,” Wolfgang said. “But these men of the German college didn’t only look for water, they were searching for sources of power within the earth, forces of energy the Führer could tap