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

Indeed, if current reports of Zoe were correct, now at eighty-three she was alive and kicking in Paris, swilling down champagne and living as bawdy and scandalous a life as ever. I was curious about how she’d gotten hooked up with someone like Wolfgang Hauser, a high official of the IAEA in Vienna.

Wolfgang explained that last March, a year ago, at a fiftieth-anniversary reunion of international World War II “peacekeepers” in Vienna, he was recruited by Zoe when the two became chummy during a welcoming gathering at a local Heuriger: one of those typically Austrian garden pubs where first-picked grapes just culled and pressed are drunk. According to Wolfgang, after a few gallons of new wine Zoe trusted him enough to speak of the rune manuscript. Then she solicited his aid.

Wolfgang said Zoe had acquired the manuscript, of which I now had a copy, decades ago—though she didn’t reveal where or how, just that it dated to the Wagnerian era before the turn of the century, when interest had sprung up in Germany and Austria in reviving the roots of their supposedly superior Teutonic culture. Societies were founded, he explained, that dashed all over Europe recording and deciphering runic inscriptions from ancient stone monuments.

Zoe thought her document was rare and valuable, and that it might form some connection with the manuscripts Sam had inherited from Zoe’s estranged brother Earnest. It was even possible, she’d suggested to Wolfgang, that Sam might possess other runic documents, and help her identify and translate her own. But after Earnest’s death, Zoe’s efforts to find Sam and discuss this with him had proven unsuccessful.

Because of Wolfgang’s position in the international nuclear field, Zoe hoped he might be able to get in touch with Sam through me and to discuss the thing without involving the rest of the family—though it wasn’t clear to Wolfgang why she’d chosen him, a total stranger, to confide in.

Knowing Auntie’s reputation, her reasons seemed clear enough to me. Zoe might be eighty-three but she wasn’t stone blind. The men she’d dallied with hadn’t always been rich but they were extravagantly handsome, some as smashing as Herr Wolfgang Hauser himself. If I hadn’t actually held this fabled manuscript in my hands, I might have guessed the batty old broad cooked it up just to add Wolfgang as the last bauble to her already heavily bejeweled crown.

Though he’d agreed to Zoe’s request to end-run our family, with whom she wasn’t on speaking terms, and to find Sam and me and sell us on this project, Wolfgang hadn’t acted at once—not until he found a legitimate reason that would bring him here to Idaho. He couldn’t know that Sam would be dead by the time he arrived—nor what my reaction would be to trafficking with one more relative among those I’d habitually avoided like the plague.

It was pointless to explain to Wolfgang that if my cousin Sam, even for a short time, had ever possessed such a document, it already would be decoded. The only unbroken encryption system in this century was designed during the Second World War by the Navajo. Native American culture engenders a penchant for such things, and I knew Sam lived and breathed encryption too.

But, as I had to keep vividly reminding myself, I was the only person on the planet who knew that Sam himself was still living and breathing. Now, in order to undo this knot I’d tied around myself, all I needed was to find him.

For the rest of the week things were frustratingly quiet. It wasn’t that I was hoping for a follow-up car chase or another avalanche to rescue me from boredom. The problem was, no package had arrived yet. Nor had I been able to contact Sam.

I cruised by the No-Name cowboy bar, inquiring as casually as possible about phone calls. The bartender told me he’d noticed the pay phone on the wall across the room ringing a few times earlier that week. But nobody picked it up, and nothing since.

I scanned my mail messages on the computer each day, coming up empty.

Olivier and I had to coordinate our driving schedules for a few days until I could operate my car again, and Wolfgang was still out of town. So in a way I felt lucky that the parcel didn’t arrive until I could be alone when I went to fetch it. Meanwhile I hid the rune manuscript in a place where no one could find it, right beneath ten thousand United States-government-employed noses: inside the DOD Standard.

The Department of Defense Standard was the bible of all research and development branches of the federal government: thirty-five massive bound volumes of rules and regulations that had to be consulted in order to do anything from developing a computer system to constructing a light-water reactor. It cost the taxpayers a fortune to produce and update this key document. We had many sets around the site: one was kept on the six-foot bookshelf just outside my office. But in the whole five years I’d worked here, I’d never once seen anyone stroll idly across the floor to peek at it, much less really consult the thing for the purpose intended. To be blunt, we could have papered the latrine walls with the DOD Standard and I doubt, even then, anyone would have noticed it.

I was the only one I knew who’d actually tried to read it—but once was enough. What I saw was less comprehensible than the revised Internal Revenue Service tax code: government service writing style, par exellence. I was sure no one would find the rune manuscript if I hid it there.

So on Friday, the first day I was able to drive myself to work, I stayed until after Olivier left the office. It didn’t surprise him. We were off to Sun Valley at dawn, so any work I’d need to finish before the weekend had to be done now. As soon