The Magic Circle (73 page)

URANUS

I would like at this time to touch upon the greatest spiritual event which has taken place … the release of atomic energy.… I would call your attention to the words “liberation of energy.” It is liberation which is the keynote of the new era, just as it has always been with the spiritually oriented aspirant. This liberation has started by the release of an aspect of matter and the freeing of some of the soul forces within the atom.… For matter itself, a great and potent initiation paralleling those initiations which liberate or release the souls of men …
The hour of the saving force has now arrived.

—
Externalization of the Hierarchy
,

“DK the Tibetan,” channeled by Alice Bailey, August 9, 1945

The Uranus cycle begins when the planet reaches its north node … the last heliocentric passage of Uranus over its north node occurred most significantly on July 20, 1945, four days after the first atomic explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico, which indeed ushered in a new era
—
for better or worse.… Events do not happen to us; we happen to events
.

—Dane Rudhyar,
Astrological Timing

The most important thing in the life of any man is to discover the secret purpose of his incarnation and follow it with wariness as well as passion … the Uranus in us is the Sacred Lance of the Legend. In the hands of the Holy King it built the Temple of the Grail; in those of Klingsor the Garden of Evil Enchantments.… Uranus is the royal Uraeus Serpent in Egyptian Symbolism, slow yet sudden Lord of life and death. It takes a great deal to move him; but once in motion he is irresistible.… If you do not allow him to create, he will devour
.

—Aleister Crowley,
Uranus

Before I could formulate any real plan of action, I knew I had to find Sam. Terrible as it might be to face him and reveal my many disastrous failures—not least of all, fiddling with Wolfgang while Rome burned—I’d suddenly grasped the fact that, thanks to me, Sam might be in worse danger than when I’d left, if anyone learned he was alive.

Wolfgang was uncharacteristically quiet for the balance of the trip, which suited me fine. By the time we landed in Idaho, we’d agreed he would go directly to the office and let the Pod, who’d be back from Vienna by now, know we were back safely, too. I would briefly run by my house to drop off my things before coming in to work. The only weapon left in my diminished arsenal was that Wolfgang didn’t yet suspect that I suspected
him
, so I’d have to act quickly.

I knew Olivier would be at the office, too, by this time—already ten
A.M
.—so I thought I could phone Sam’s grandfather, Dark Bear, from home. Though my line might still be bugged, I could at least try to get a message passed to Sam that I was back in town.

As I came up the road, I saw Olivier’s car in the drive and another car parked up on the road not far from the mailboxes, a compact with rental plates. Since the house nearest ours was some way down the road, it was a safe bet Olivier had company—the very last thing I wanted or needed right now. I had pulled into the drive to turn around and try a new plan when Olivier himself popped his head from the rear door with a slightly wild expression, his dark curly hair more disheveled than usual. He hooked his hand toward me, gesturing me to come inside fast. Against my better judgment I switched off the ignition and got out, dragging my coat and shoulder bag. But before I could speak, Olivier came out and took me firmly by the arm.

“Where in God’s name have you been?” he hissed, sounding slightly hysterical. “You haven’t returned a single message of mine in two whole weeks! Have you any idea what’s been going on around here?”

“Not a clue,” I admitted, starting to feel more than frightened. I motioned to the car parked on the road. “Who’s your guest?”

“
Your
guest, my dear,” Olivier informed me. “She drove in from Salt Lake late last night and stayed upstairs at my place, where there’s heat. I’ve put her down in your flat just a moment ago, with the little argonaut for company.” She? “As we cowpokes say,” Olivier added glumly as he followed me down the steep steps to my apartment, “I’m afraid we’re all up Shit Creek without a paddle, thanks to you.”

When I stepped into the living room of my vast root cellar, more than a surprise was in store. At the far corner table was the new half sister I’d spoken to only two days ago from a phone booth at the Vienna airport, Bettina Brunhilde von Hauser.

Olivier was right: her presence here couldn’t be good news. But I didn’t have to hold my breath. Bambi rose and came across the room. She was wearing another of those amazing jumpsuits, this one a tawny
biscotti
shade that made her look as if she’d taken a full-body plunge into a caramel vat. Jason trotted by and disdainfully ignored me. I hung my coat and shoulder bag out of reach on the coat rack.

“Fräulein Behn—I mean Ariel,” Bambi began, quickly correcting herself. “Your
Onkel
sent me here as soon as he understood how urgent the situation had become.”

She glanced at Olivier with those gold-flecked eyes, and he flushed a little pink.

“I guess that’s my cue to make myself scarce,” he said.

“What for?” I asked him, adding, “Don’t you have my apartment bugged as well as my phone? Or why’s your boss kept you here, spying on me all this time?”

“I think you should tell her,” Bambi surprised me by informing Olivier. “Tell her what you told me last night. Then I will explain the rest as well as I can.”

“The group I work for sent me here five years ago, when the Pod first hired you,” Olivier told me. “We weren’t at all certain then which of your family was involved in this complex affair—but we knew plenty about Pastor Dart and his cohorts. We were keeping a very close eye on them. We found it suspicious that Dart would hire you right out of school as a direct report to himself, with so few credentials. Except, of course, the important one: that you were so close with your cousin Sam.”

Worse and worse. So the Pod was every bit the villain that I’d feared, and that his nickname Prince of Darkness had always proclaimed. But I had one big question:

“Did Sam know you were spying on me? Or were you spying on him, too, even though he often worked for your boss, Theron Vane?”

“We’re not spies,” said Olivier. “We’re an international agency along the lines of Interpol, which cooperates across national boundaries in tracking illicit activities—especially the smuggling of space-age weapons. We’ve learned that many of the people
engaged
in such activities have managed to infiltrate, at very high levels, institutions responsible for
controlling
them. High on the list are national drug traffickers, and even the KGB and CIA themselves. We fear they may soon be selling “hot products”—including atomic materials—on the open market, just as they’re currently selling off their
own
undercover agents to the highest bidder!”

That was the longest speech I’d ever heard from Olivier, and the most serious, but he still hadn’t answered my question.

“If you weren’t spying, why was my phone bugged?” I said. “Why were you working undercover? Why did you try to grab the rune manuscript from the post office before I got there?”

“I was sent here to protect you, as soon as we learned what they were after,” Olivier told me. “Though most often, I’ve wound up protecting you from yourself.”

Shades of Herr Wolfgang, I thought.

“Once I saw that rune manuscript through the window of your car, I knew those weren’t the documents your cousin had described to our people. When you stayed to work late at the office, I watched until I saw where you planned to hide it—in the Department of Defense Standard, a marvelous choice! I’ve retrieved it, of course, and made copies, so as not to lose it forever. Bambi says Lafcadio is afraid the other documents, those that belonged to your cousin, have already fallen into her brother’s hands.”

I actually felt relieved that at least one document, the rune manuscript, existed in more than just the hands of my own family. And also that Olivier had, as I’d hoped, been on my side. But my preoccupation with truth had led to a key observation—that the real danger in these documents might come from another quarter.

I couldn’t forget what Sam told me after describing how Theron Vane had been killed in his place by that bomb, an idea he’d repeated when warning me not to be obvious about haunting the post office or the mailbox. He said once anyone knew how and where to get their hands on a copy of these manuscripts, it might be easier if one of
us
were dead. I now understood that his cautionary reserve wasn’t because the parcel he’d mailed me was the only extant version of these documents—but rather because Sam was the only person who knew where Pandora’s originals were hidden. This strongly suggested to me that the folks who were after the documents didn’t just want to know their contents—
but to be certain no one else did
. So those documents now in the hands of Wolfgang and the Pod
would
be the unique version—if Sam were dead. It didn’t take much to figure out what came next in the scenario. For once, I tried not to shut my eyes.

“The Pod’s in cahoots. Your telegram warned me, but I got it too late,” I told Olivier. “Wolfgang has the manuscripts, though you both tried to warn me of him, too.”

“I believe that my brother has genuinely fallen in love with you,” said Bambi. “Had he met you earlier, this love might have forced him to reconsider his values and have saved him. Wolfgang is an educated person with high ideals, if the wrong ones. I think it surprised him to find he also has strong passions. But it’s far too late for salvation, or even for talk. Where is my brother right now?”

“He went to the office from the airport,” I said. “I was to meet him there shortly—”

“Then we must act at once,” Bambi said. “If he’s discovered that Olivier is not there either, he may come directly here. If he believes that
you
know where your cousin hid the original manuscripts, then you’ll be in terrible danger. My brother must be stopped before he kills anyone again.”

I stared at her in horror as Olivier put his hand gently on my arm. What in God’s name was she saying? But of course I knew. I suppose, somehow, I always must have known.

“We were never quite sure,” Olivier was telling Bambi.

I heard a slight buzzing in my ears as if I might black out. Then I heard Bambi’s voice off somewhere in the distance.

“Yes, I’m certain of it. My brother Wolfgang murdered Samuel Behn.”

The man with whom I’d passed those nights of tempestuous love-making was a cold-blooded killer who, all the while I was in his arms, had believed he’d murdered Sam. I felt like taking a big slug of absinthe laced with opium, or even some of that hemlock that carried Socrates off to nirvana—though it might be more propitious right now to take to the road. But to where?

Olivier seemed about to make a suggestion when we heard a strange sound. We looked at each other for an instant before realizing what it was: our rarely used front doorbell at the far side of the house. Since the front door was separated from the road by a ninety-degree dropoff “front yard,” most people came to the rear door, off the drive.

We rushed to the high dormer windows surrounding my potato-cellar living room and peeked out. We could see only the road, not the person who was standing on the front stoop. A large Land Rover with Idaho plates was parked up there behind Bambi’s car. It had the profile of a standing grizzly bear stenciled on the front fender. I smiled. Maybe things were finally starting to look up, after all.

“Do you recognize it?” Olivier asked me.

“Not the car—just the bear. You get the door,” I told him, “while Bambi and I round up Jason and grab some decent coats and shoes for all of us. We may be headed up-country for a while.”

“But who is it?” asked Olivier. “We can hardly afford to open the door at this point, unless you’re absolutely sure who it is.”

“I’m sure,” I told him. “It’s a bear who drove here all the way from Lapwai—five hundred miles. He’s an emissary of my dear, late cousin Sam.”

Bambi and Olivier both seemed a little taken aback by Dark Bear’s appearance. Like most Nez Percé, Dark Bear was an extraordinarily handsome man, with his straight nose, cleft chin, strong features, long legs and broad shoulders, his braids of dark hair ribboned with white, and those silvery eyes beneath dark brows that, like Sam’s, seemed like bright crystals that could see into the heart of time.

He was wearing a fringed, beaded jacket with a blanket tossed over one shoulder. He crossed to me and took my hand firmly but warmly in his.

As I’ve said, Dark Bear was never a huge fan of mine, due in large part to my strange side of the family. But this handshake was clearly intended to communicate his understanding and appreciation that I was helping Sam. Of course, neither he nor Sam yet knew how royally I’d already screwed up. I introduced Dark Bear to the others.

Dark Bear, never one to mince words, told me, “He has heard your heart and knows what decision you have taken. He approves. He asks you to come.”

Sam had somehow read my mind from afar. I wasn’t surprised: Sam had always been able to tap into my mind long-distance. And hadn’t I felt him walking in my psychological moccasin prints these past weeks?

“There was no mention of others,” Dark Bear added, motioning to Olivier and Bambi. “I was to bring only you.”

This put me in a quandary. Here were two people who were ready to tell me the truth—a truth that might prove instrumental not only to my safety but to Sam’s as well.

“Who does he mean by ‘he’?” asked Olivier. “Where’s he taking you, and why doesn’t he want us to come along?”