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

map had gradually become the map of earth—which in turn would connect the geography below with the archetypal meaning of the constellations above: totems and altars and gods.

I saw something else too, though I had only three hours to sleep before learning what all this had to do with the Soviet Union, nuclear energy, and Central Asia. For once, I’d actually begun to feel the warp and woof were twined into a pattern.

Wolfgang rang me on the house phone in time for the two of us to have a brief tête-à-tête over breakfast before our nine o’clock meeting with the Soviet nukes. I found him alone in a corner of the dining hall where I’d met Volga only hours earlier, seated at the end of one of the long tables, his back to the wall.

I passed down the rows of Russian businessmen in ill-fitting black suits, huddled together eating bowls of thick hot porridge and sipping their black coffee in silence. When Wolfgang saw me approach, he put his napkin on the table and stood to seat me beside him, then poured me some hot java. But his tone, when he spoke, was surprisingly chilly.

“I don’t think you quite understand the position we are in, here inside Russia,” he told me. “It’s rare for Westerners to be invited in for open discussion on so sensitive a topic, and I explained that our behavior would be watched. What on earth were you thinking, to conduct a secret late-night meeting with someone right here in the hotel? Who was he?”

“It was a surprise to me too, when he showed up. I was already in my pajamas,” I assured him. “It was my uncle’s valet, Volga. Laf was worried that I never even phoned him in Vienna. I should have called.”

“His valet?” said Wolfgang in disbelief. “But I was told you were together for hours—until nearly dawn! What did he say that could possibly have taken so long?”

I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tell Wolfgang about last night’s chat, and I resented his tone. Wasn’t it enough that I’d spent a week with little sleep, and all night with no dinner, without being confronted at breakfast by the Spanish Inquisition? So when a surly mustachioed woman arrived at our table with a tureen and a bread basket, I ladled myself some hot oatmeal, stuffed a piece of dry toast in my mouth, and made no reply. After my tummy was warm, though, I felt a bit better.

“Wolfgang, I’m sorry, but you know how my uncle Lafcadio feels about you,” I explained. “He was truly worried, knowing you and I were alone together in Vienna. When he didn’t hear from me, he even called the office back in Idaho to try and find out what might have become of me—”

“He called your office?” Wolfgang interrupted. “But with whom did he speak?”

“With my landlord, Olivier Maxfield. They’ve met each other,” I reminded him. “It seems there were things Laf wanted to discuss with me. He tried first in Sun Valley, then in Vienna, but it never happened. That’s why he sent Volga to meet me here.”

“What sorts of things?” Wolfgang asked quietly, sipping his coffee.

“Family things,” I told him. “They’re pretty personal.”

I looked at my bowl of porridge, already congealed. I’d learned from last night one couldn’t be sure when the next meal might be forthcoming, so I forced myself to take another mouthful. I washed it down with some of the bitter coffee. I was unsure exactly how to say what I knew I had to, so I just set it out there:

“Wolfgang, when we get to Vienna, instead of flying directly back to Idaho, I want to make a detour—just for one day.” I paused as he looked at me. “I want you to arrange for me to meet my aunt Zoe, in Paris.”

Wolfgang and I were picked up after breakfast, in front of the charming penal colony we now called home, by a van that resembled a tank with windows. It was equipped with a driver, as well as a fresh female Intourist “escort” to be doubly sure we got where we were supposed to go. To remind myself, I pulled out my file from the IAEA and checked the schedule and attached map.

This morning’s first meeting was about an hour west of Leningrad, toward the Baltic: the nuclear power plant at Sosnovy Bor near the summer palace of Catherine the Great, where we were scheduled to tour what in America we’d call a commercial reactor, one that produces electricity for public consumption.

As we went, it occurred to me that this was the first time since San Francisco I was free of drizzle, fog, ice, and snow—free to look at my surroundings. Along the river I had a sweeping view of the Hermitage, a brilliant shade of pea green, reflected upside-down in the Neva like Volga’s fabled city of Kitezh, shimmering in the depths until the Last Days when it would rise again, dripping from the waters. Fleecy clouds floated across a brilliant turquoise sky. The skeletal architecture of trees lining the road, their branches spangled with diamonds from last night’s rain, still spoke of winter, but the earth was moist with the rich aroma of newly awakening life wafting through the half-open windows of our van.

Right off the bat that morning, as we were escorted around the vast power plant at Sosnovy Bor by a group of clean-cut engineers and physicists with names like Yuri and Boris, I learned for the first time, with enormous interest, precisely what had brought the Soviets to the pass of extending us this invitation. Just this month of April, during a visit to London, Mikhail Gorbachev—perhaps carried away by the spirit of glasnost and perestroika—had surprised everyone by announcing the USSR’s decision to cease unilaterally the production of HEU, the highly enriched uranium used in nuclear warheads, and to shut down several Soviet plutonium production reactors as well.

That afternoon, during my