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

almost at birth, an act that might well explain the man’s coldblooded, self-serving demeanor today. Throughout her life she did a good deal more to keep things severed. Then we know she left my father these rare and ancient documents I described. And according to your friend Hauser, Zoe has the original of some sort of rune manuscript of which you now possess a copy. We don’t know what Laf may have inherited from Pandora besides the apartment overlooking the Hofburg—which in itself is probably significant—but we do know he was aware of the existence of a rune manuscript, though he seemed not to know Zoe had it.”

Sam paused and smiled at me.

“So you see, hotshot, all this points to a single question: If you were the one who needed to hide something, and you wanted it to stay hidden even well after your death, can you think of any better insurance than to divide it among four siblings like Lafcadio and Earnest and Zoe and Augustus, whose hostility toward one another dates back, in some instances, even to the cradle?”

Right on the mark. From the moment they believed I’d “inherited,” everyone in my family was sending emissaries hither and thither, or arriving themselves from Europe or phoning past midnight to interrogate me. Even Olivier had noted my relatives’ uncustomary behavior. And in a family like ours with ancient wounds, operating in an environment of suspicion and resentment, it was a perfect way for Pandora to divvy up that loot so no one could guess who got what.

But something else bothered me.

“What prompted you to take the drastic step of pretending you were dead?” I asked Sam. “Not just dead, but staging that high-profile funeral—the family, the military band, the important dignitaries, the press—why make so huge a splash? How did you get the government to go along with it? And why on earth would you threaten my life by sending me those documents and letting everyone learn you’d done it?”

“Ariel, please,” said Sam, taking my hand in both of his. “I swear on my life I wouldn’t have put you in such danger if I’d had a choice. But I’ve known for over a year now that someone was following me. Then last month in San Francisco, someone overtly tried to kill me. There can be no mistake. A bomb was planted in my car—”

“A bomb?” I cried.

But just as that hit, something struck me with even greater horror. I’d already asked myself, if Sam wasn’t dead, what was buried in that coffin at the Presidio in San Francisco. Now I asked Sam, my voice quavering, “My God, are you saying somebody else got killed in your place? Is that it?”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “someone was killed in my rental car in Chinatown.”

Sam’s eyes were flat and his tone strangely distant, as if his memory were being filtered through a screen of fog. “You must understand, Ariel, that although I’ve never worked directly for the government or military, over the years as an independent consultant I’ve trained most of their in-house cryptanalysts, and even assisted the State Department. I’ve often helped various branches of the service, too, with sensitive decryption jobs that need to be fast and clean and quiet, in-and-out. As a result, I know a great many people and a great many secrets.

“The man who was killed in that car explosion was a friend, a high-level government official I’ve worked with for years. His name was Theron Vane. At my request a year ago, Theron assigned an agent in his employ to try to learn who was following me, and why. Last month Theron asked me to come at once to San Francisco: the agent he’d assigned to my case had died mysteriously. The agency had sealed off the small rented apartment he’d used as an undercover office. It’s government policy to clean out such places anyway, to collect or destroy records before they fall into anyone’s hands. But in this case, Theron thought whatever we found might be related to me as well as to the agent’s death. We went over the place carefully. I broke everything, including what was inside the computer, and then destroyed the data.

“Based on what we’d learned, we agreed it would be faster and less conspicuous if I went on foot to the next stop and Theron took my car around the block to pick me up. But once outside, at the top of the steep flight of steps from the apartment house, I paused, as Theron had asked, to check the mailbox and be certain no new mail had arrived while we’d been inside. I was halfway down the steps when Theron started the car below, and it exploded.…”

Sam paused to put a hand over his eyes and rub his temples. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t move till he took his hand down and looked at me in pain.

“Ariel, I can’t explain how awful it was,” he said. “I’d known Theron Vane for nearly ten years; he’d been a true friend. But I knew that bomb was really meant for me, so I had to leave him there as if it was me, splattered in pieces across the pavement for others to come and collect in bags like refuse. You can’t imagine how that felt.”

I could imagine it so vividly that I myself was quaking like an aspen. But unlike two weeks ago, when I’d believed it was Sam who was dead, the danger to us both suddenly came home to me in force. This was no faked funeral we were talking about—not even an accident—but a real murder, a violent death that was meant to have been Sam’s. And if Sam’s late mentor was a high-level official, clearly in the intelligence community, he must have known how to protect himself better than I did. Now it was plain that the many precautions Sam had taken were hardly overkill—so to speak.

“What made you sure the bomb was