The Magic Circle (76 page)

Unlike the famous Dead Sea Scrolls of similar antiquity, which had been closely held in the hands of a few totalitarian data-mongers these past forty years, Pandora’s and Clio’s wonderful trove of exotica would be made available for study and analysis to qualified scholars in every field. If we translated these things ourselves, we’d at least know nothing was swept under the rug. And if we did learn of something dangerous—for instance if there were spots on Mother Earth that could be manipulated, but that were sacred or vulnerable or both, like Wolfgang’s hints about Tesla’s inventions—we would make that knowledge public too, so action could be taken to protect those places.

We three formed a relay to remove the lucite tubes: Bambi handed them out through the crevice of the cave to Sam, who knotted them together with twine in three big bunches while I ascended the steep rock to the top of the cliff. Then Sam lifted the bunches, and I hauled them from above by sturdier rope. I set them beside the waterfall until the others clambered up.

Though individually each lucite tube was light as a feather, their combined weight was fairly hefty; I estimated my parcel and Bambi’s to weigh close to twenty pounds apiece, and Sam’s seemed heavier. Further, though the tubes were tightly sealed, Sam feared that, due to the delicacy of many of the items, if anything leaked or even sweated, some of their valuable contents might be destroyed.

So we carried our bundles on our backs, well above waterline, the tubes stacked horizontally from waist level to just above our shoulders. Sam secured them to our backs with a buntline hitch such as mountaineers use, in case one of us went down and had to quickly shed the pack. The awkwardness of our loads, we hoped, would be offset by weight, helping to provide a firmer grip on the river bottom against the onrush of water.

Just before I stepped into the river, I looked across at Dark Bear waiting on the opposite bank beside a tense-looking Olivier—who was wearing my backpack with Jason inside it. Then I climbed carefully down into the icy waters and we moved out into the river single file—Sam leading the procession to keep the rope taut, Bambi in the middle, and I bringing up the rear—all of us clinging tightly to the rope. I had to concentrate as hard as I could to keep my knees flexible, my body balanced, and my feet planted firmly as I felt my way along the slippery, uneven rock on the bottom of the riverbed. So I was well out into the river before I suddenly realized something was terribly wrong. Sam had stopped dead in midriver.

There on the opposite bank, at the forest’s edge, were the two very last people on earth I wanted to see: my boss Pastor Owen Dart, and Herr Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser of Krems, Österreich. Wolfgang was holding Olivier with a gun at his throat. Dark Bear, only yards away, had been firmly lashed to a tree.

How did they get here, a hundred miles into the wilderness? Then I realized that in the few minutes, back at the house, when Dark Bear had stepped inside, we’d left the cars unattended. Those few moments might have been all the time required to attach tracking devices to our vehicles. It seems Wolfgang had learned from his experience the last time he’d tailed me.

Even at this distance, I could see Wolfgang’s deep turquoise eyes riveted on the three of us out across the river—first resting briefly on Bambi and me, then burning like horrible coals into Sam, as if he couldn’t believe what he saw.

I wanted to weep. But my more immediate desire was to stay alive, a prospect that didn’t seem too awfully promising just at this moment. I suddenly noticed that the Pod held a hunting knife in his hand. Now he set his other hand firmly on the thick line of rope that was tied to the tree just beside him—the rope we were all clinging to, our total life support system out here in the rapid waters. A twinge of fear ran up my spine as I realized he was about to hack it in two! But then I saw Wolfgang shake his head and speak a few quick words to the Pod, who removed his hand from our lifeline with a nod of agreement, and glanced back at us.

Bambi and Sam and I stood there in midriver, frozen like statues, as I prayed that maybe Wolfgang had had a change of heart, maybe he’d undergone radical personality surgery in the few hours since I’d seen him. After all, I tried to reason, if their objective was to destroy all trace of these documents, leaving their team with the copy Sam himself had made as the only version in existence, then there was no reason why the Pod shouldn’t cut us all loose like bait and toss us over the falls to feed the fish.

But of course there
was
a reason, and it wasn’t long before I grasped it. If we went over the falls right now, Pandora’s manuscripts would, too—but they wouldn’t be destroyed if they floated! Dozens of ancient messages bobbing in modern little bottles, running the Salmon River hundreds of miles, to the Snake and the Columbia and out to sea. Scattered in such a manner, how could anyone ever begin to collect and destroy them all before others could find them? These messages and their bottles had to be captured or destroyed first, before destroying the messengers.

Just then, Sam motioned behind his back for Bambi and me to move closer. When we’d closed ranks, Sam glanced over his shoulder at me—and he winked! What in God’s name was
that
supposed to mean?

About thirty paces ahead, Wolfgang was wading down into the water in his shoes and stockings, without bothering to roll his pants. He held Olivier in front of him, gun to his head, as a shield. The Pod followed just behind, holding a gun in one hand, his knife in the other. I had to hand it to Wolfgang: he must be well acquainted with his kid sister Bettina’s flair with a pistol, and was taking no chances. But I couldn’t help being depressed over Olivier, and not only because I liked him. If we three
did
try to jump the others, whom we outnumbered by two to one, it might cost Olivier’s life, since he couldn’t swim.

Though it was hard to be cheery in such circumstances, I tried to focus on what Sam might have meant by that wink. It was clear there was something up his sleeve. Knowing Sam, I knew the moment he decided to act we’d all have to think on our feet and take quick action too. But when it happened, it wasn’t what I would have thought of.

Wolfgang and the Pod moved cautiously along the rope, on the upstream side, as we were, using it as a buffer—which would soon prove their big mistake. I could witness their progress by craning left, as Bambi just behind Sam leaned right for a better view.

When they reached midstream, Wolfgang, still with a throttlehold on Olivier, stepped aside from the rope in the rushing waters so the Pod could get past to reach Sam. As Wolfgang moved slightly upstream, holding the white and sick-looking Olivier at gunpoint, Dart inched forward toward Sam’s load of cylinders, still foolishly wielding his knife and gun.

Then casually, almost as if providing assistance to the Pod, Sam lightly flirted the rope that secured his tight parcel of tubes to his back—and before anyone grasped what he was about to do, he’d spilled the buntline hitch and snapped his securing rope free. The haul of hollow lucite tubes started to slip swiftly downstream, headed for the falls.

If memory serves, it was just about then that all hell broke loose.

Pastor Dart dropped his knife in the water and lurched forward across the waist-level rope to grab at the iceberg floating away. But at that instant, Sam shoved the rope deep into the water so the Pod, expecting it higher, lost his balance and flipped forward on his face into the ever rushing waters. Then Sam yanked the rope back up with a snap so it snagged the Pod, hanging him up like a bundle of wet laundry.

As the Pod floundered trying to get off the rope, Wolfgang shoved Olivier to one side for a clean shot at the swiftly retreating mass before it went over the side. But just as he did, an angry black bundle of fur, too long restrained in Olivier’s backpack, exploded right in Wolfgang’s face! I never knew Jason had that many claws, or could deploy them with such rapid-fire, razor-sharp precision.

When Wolfgang threw up his arms to cover his face, Jason track-cleated over them, then over his head, and disappeared behind him. Wolfgang’s gun flew into midair—thanks to a fast-acting Browning and a very resourceful Bambi. Wolfgang screamed curses over the rush of falls, but it didn’t stop him. Holding his bleeding hand, he leapt over the heavy rope to tear after the disappearing mass of tubes, just as Sam barreled into him sideways and they went down together. I glanced around fast, trying to reconnoiter for Olivier—but he’d vanished as swiftly as my cat:

All this happened in seconds. I finally wrestled free my own incapacitating pack of tubes and quickly lashed them to the strong, thick rope to secure them. Then I grabbed the Pod, whose gun had vanished, too, as he was pulling himself upright in the churning waters. As Bambi covered him with her weapon, I stripped off his necktie and tied him tightly by his wrists to the hefty rope, alongside the pack.

Bambi was pulling free her own pack as I climbed across the rope and moved toward Wolfgang and Sam, still churning together in the water. Over my shoulder, Bambi let out a piercing scream. I whipped around to follow her gaze, and I saw Olivier’s body, partly submerged and thrashing but well downstream of us—maybe sixty feet—headed straight for the falls.

I was trying to figure out what in God’s name to do, when just up ahead I saw Wolfgang drag Sam from the water, slug him hard in the jaw, drop him back in the drink again, and plunge off on foot toward the swiftly vanishing object of his desire.

Sam clambered upright, took one look downstream, and caught sight of Olivier. Before I had time to think, he’d dived into the same fast water that was swiftly dragging Olivier toward the falls. Some distance beyond him, Wolfgang—still on his feet and nearly within reach of the iceberg—made a grab for it, missed, lost balance. He went down, and the water grabbed him too.

Bambi had managed to get her pack off and lashed down, while keeping her powder dry. Still holding the gun, she picked her way the short distance to where I stood, a few yards downstream beyond the rope, and she hollered in my ear:

“My God! Can’t we
do
something? They will all be killed!”

I had to admit it sure looked that way. Nor for the life of me could I imagine what might prevent it. Even if I could get to one end of the heavy rope stretched across the river and free it to toss as a lifeline, I was sure it wouldn’t be long enough to reach that far downstream. We watched in horror as the ghastly scene unfolded before us: three men and a crystal iceberg all drawn by the dark, glassy waters inexorably toward the cliff. I couldn’t breathe.

Bambi shifted her gun to her right hand, her cellist’s bowing hand, and took mine in her left as we saw the pile of crystalline tubes containing Pandora’s deadly manuscripts moving in slow motion to the brink of the abyss, where they twisted gracefully once, like a ballet dancer, then slipped silently over the edge. A moment later, Wolfgang’s dark head followed just as silently after.

We saw Sam, with swift strokes, catch up to Olivier’s possibly already lifeless body—too late for either of them to be extricated from the terrible undertow. Bambi and I, with the water’s roar in our ears, watched in silence as we saw the rest of our generation, except us two, slip swiftly over the edge of the abyss into oblivion.

As I stood there in those cold, rushing waters I had no tears, either of forgiveness or remorse. I felt nothing at all for those who’d created or perpetuated this swamp of treachery—most of whom, as it turned out, were members of my own horrid family. But I did have something I still clung to, as I’d clung to that lifeline of rope, something that might keep me alive in the face of such overwhelming odds. It was the one thing that remained at the bottom of Pandora’s box when all else had flown the coop: that thing called hope.

I turned to leave the river, but Bambi was clutching my hand.

“What shall we do now?” she asked over the sound of the rushing waters—the waters I had just watched carry away everything I’d ever cared for in my life.

“The first thing we have to do,” I told her just as loudly, “is to find my cat!”

Bambi tied our cylinders together and floated them back to the shore, while I dragged the body of the dreadful Pod on his back through the waters and deposited him unceremoniously on the riverbank. She held the gun on him as I went to untie Sam’s grandfather Dark Bear, who helped us lash Pastor Dart to the tree in his place: tit for tat, asshole. Then the three of us hiked downstream to hunt for Jason.

I’ll never understand exactly how I knew Jason was the key to the solution, or that he might still be alive and afloat. But I knew Jason’s psyche as well as one could grasp the psyche of a cat. His natural instincts, naturally, were those of the mythological hero he was named for: he took like an argonaut to water.

Even if he’d never before gone over a waterfall the height and breadth of this one—maybe forty feet high by a hundred feet wide—still, you couldn’t keep him out of the water chute rides at amusement parks that were higher than that, and he was well used to swimming in fast water along the Snake. The water below the falls here would be slower and far more tranquil, so if Jason had indeed made the drop without breaking any bones, I was pretty sure we’d find him down there alive.

And Jason loved retrieving things, whether a rubber ball in the stream or a yellow post office slip in the snow. So why not locate an iceberg of lucite tubes containing valuable manuscripts? Not to mention the bodies of Olivier, Sam, or Wolfgang, whether dead or alive.

We found Jason first, “happy as a clam at high tide,” as Olivier might say, paddling in a calm pool just below the falls. The object he was paddling around with a certain pride was the floating pile of plastic tubes, their rope snagged on a rock. A few tubes had broken loose and were floating nearby in the pool looking little the worse for wear.

Since Bambi and I were already soaked to the skin, we climbed down the bank to the pool and pulled them out—along with Jason—while Dark Bear went on along the riverbank as far as he found it still passable on foot. By the time we’d hauled the cylinders up to a ledge, he had returned.