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

kidnapping at infancy led to upheavals in the political order. The encyclopedia hinted the entire story was “humbug,” dismissing its historical facts as “in any case in complete confusion.”

But I was confused about why Wolfgang K. Hauser—who was from Nürnberg like his namesake—would give the misleading impression that his middle name was related to the biblical Magi, with no mention of an historical figure sufficiently well known to deserve a full-page entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. As for further connection with a boy who’d been raised like an animal—didn’t the name Wolfgang translate as “one who runs with the wolves”?

I glanced across the room and spotted Jason there, sniffing my bags beside the door. He could tell from two packed bags that I was going away longer than just a weekend trip—so I was afraid he might flagrantly piss on them, as he’d done in the past when he guessed he would not be coming along.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” I said. Scooping him up, I grabbed the bubbling Glühwein from the stove and trotted back upstairs to Olivier’s warm kitchen. “Olivier, you’d better keep an eye on my roommate here when I’m gone,” I told him. “I think he’s nursing a grudge about my leaving, and you know what that means.”

“He can stay up here in my place,” Olivier said, slathering a toast point with mousse and feeding it to Jason. “It will save on the heating bill downstairs. And what about your mail?” he added. “Will you have time to go stop it tomorrow yourself? Or would you prefer that I—what’s the matter?”

Bloody damned hell! I knew I had forgotten something! I opened my mouth for the proffered mousse point and chewed it so I couldn’t speak. I poured the steaming wine into mugs for us and swallowed a stiff slug of it as my brain did loop-the-loops trying to figure out this disaster fast.

“It’s okay,” I finally told Olivier. “I suddenly thought of something I forgot to pack, that’s all. But I’ll have time tomorrow to handle all that, and to stop my mail, and to run by the office, too.”

Thank the merciful heavens it was actually true—the post office opened at nine o’clock, and I didn’t have to be at the airport to board my flight until nine-thirty. But it might have been otherwise, in which case I would have been in deep and serious trouble, with another two weeks of mail piling up while I was cavorting around in Soviet Russia. What in God’s name had I been thinking?

When we finished eating and I went back downstairs, I cursed myself colorfully for having had the presence of mind to pack an alarm clock and pajamas—while again nearly forgetting the one thing that might have gotten Sam and me both killed. What good was it to possess a photographic memory for trivia, I thought, when all the important stuff ended up getting squeezed out of your brain?

I went to the office at eight-thirty the next morning, bags and passport stashed in the back of the car. This time I parked at the far side of the building and went through the mantraps for site employees. I didn’t plan to get stuck outside again, with my warm coat inside, when I was about to take off for Soviet Russia. But when I got through the first set of doors and placed my badge on the monitor, there was no click to indicate that the security guard at the entrance across the building had opened my next set of doors. I was freezing. I swiveled to look up at the seeing-eye camera and yelled: “Is anybody there?” The damned guards were supposed to be on duty around the clock.

I heard a scratchy sound, then Bella’s voice coming through the intercom. “I can’t see you well enough to ID you against your badge,” she informed me in that snotty official tone. “You have to turn to the camera: you know the rules.”

“For Christ’s sake, Bella, you know who I am,” I said. “It’s freezing out here!”

“Turn your face the proper way and keep your badge flat on the monitor so I can complete my identification—or you’re not getting in,” her voice insisted.

Damned bitch. I contorted myself to “assume the pose.” Bella was undoubtedly one of those who’d learned that I’d been off skiing at Jackson Hole with Wolfgang Hauser last week, and was getting even by delaying me here. She sure took her time to complete the identification of somebody she saw every single day. When I heard the door click at last, I yanked it open. But as I went through, I smiled back at the camera and flipped my middle finger right into the camera’s eye. I heard Bella gasp; she was babbling hysterically behind me until the glass doors shut out her voice.

There was little she could do, as I knew. Premises security officers couldn’t leave a post until their shift ended. If she was on duty now, she’d be stuck at her post until ten A.M., when I’d already be in the air.

I went to my office and checked the mail messages. As I had hoped, there was one from Sam—“Great Bear Enterprises”—followed by a phone number with an Idaho area code, probably somewhere between Sun Valley and the reservation at Lapwai. I committed it to memory, deleted it from the computer, and was about to go visit the Pod to say goodbye when he popped his head in with a puzzled expression.

“Behn, I’ve just received a call from security asking me to send you to the director’s office at once,” he told me. “I’m surprised to see you here at all. Aren’t you supposed to be leaving with Wolf Hauser on the ten o’clock flight? But the director says there’s an infraction of some sort. Maybe you can tell me what this is all about?”

“I … yes, I’m on my way to the airport,” I said with a sinking feeling. “I just dropped in