The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

“I found in the computer in that apartment a number that, until that moment, I’d believed I alone knew: the number of a vault located in a bank only a few blocks away,” said Sam. “Clearly, whoever tried to kill me had already learned where I’d hidden the copied manuscripts in that Chinatown bank, and felt confident he could obtain them—perhaps even with greater ease if I were dead.

“When the bomb went off as I was headed for that very bank to retrieve the manuscripts, the coincidence was too great. I fled to my bank, got the manuscripts and a big padded mailing pouch from them, then slapped on postage from a stamp machine and tossed it into the nearest mailbox to send to the only person I knew I could trust with absolute certainty: you. Then from a pay phone I called Theron’s superior and reported the whole story. It was the government’s decision that we go on pretending I was dead. Indeed, I’ve broken both my word and my cover by contacting anyone—especially you, a member of the family.” Sam looked at me with strangely veiled eyes.

“The family?” I said. “What does this have to do with the family?” I was again beginning to feel certain I really didn’t want to know.

“There’s only one thing that links this puzzle together, and also links it to our family,” Sam said. “And to my mind, it’s still Pandora’s will. Since we’ve already agreed that she probably bequeathed something important to three of our relations, the question remains—what did she leave to the fourth, her only child?”

I choked a little and felt myself turn slightly green.

“To Augustus? My father?” I said. “Why would she leave him anything? After all, she abandoned him at birth, didn’t she?”

“Well, sweetheart,” said Sam with an ironic smile, “he’s the only one in the family except you and me that we haven’t discussed. I was only four and you weren’t yet born when Pandora died, so I’d like to put a few things into perspective. Doesn’t it seem odd that my father, Earnest, the eldest child of Hieronymus Behn, inherited only the Idaho mining interests—while yours, the youngest, wound up with a worldwide empire of mineral and manufacturing concessions—”

“Are you trying to tell me you think my father has something to do with all this?” I said in disbelief, withdrawing my hand. When I stood up, Sam remained seated, still watching me closely. My mind was reeling, but he wasn’t quite through.

He said, “I think you need to come up with some answers—if only for yourself. Why do you imagine, the moment he thought I was dead, Augustus contacted my estate executor, as you told me, to learn what I’d left you? Why did he hold a press conference in San Francisco to drag out in public the contents of my will? Why did Augustus phone you in Idaho for days and days, and once he reached you, why did he alert you to the fact that you should alert him the moment you received the manuscripts from my trust? How did Augustus come to know anything whatever about any manuscripts?”

“But we all knew about them!” I cried. “They were mentioned in your …”

I had started to say “… in your will.” Then I suddenly realized, with a cold and horrible shock, that throughout the reading of the will nothing whatever had been mentioned about the specifics of any such papers in the inheritance, only that I was to be sole heir. But this item raised an even bigger specter. If I was Sam’s sole heir, why was Augustus present at the reading of the will? Why did he hold a press conference? And since my father hadn’t seen Sam in years, nor his own brother for many years before Earnest’s death, why was Augustus even at Sam’s funeral?

Sam was sitting there nodding—but he was no longer smiling.

“So now, based on your observation of his behavior during and after the funeral, have you guessed why it was so important that everyone in our family, especially your father, believe I was really dead?” Sam asked me. He got to his feet and looked me right in the eye.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “Okay, I admit Augustus is an asshole and his behavior needs some explaining. But you can’t really imagine he’d hunt you down and try to kill you for those manuscripts, regardless of what he might think they’re worth. Even wildly assuming what you suggest is true, that Augustus were capable of such a thing, why wouldn’t he have acted sooner to lay hands on the manuscripts? After all, Earnest inherited them decades ago and had them for nearly twenty years.”

“Maybe Augustus never realized my father had them,” said Sam. “No one seemed to know I did, until one year ago when I started being followed myself.…”

One year ago. One year ago someone started following Sam. One year ago Sam contacted his friend in the government and, possibly because of that, two of their employees were now dead. But what other important event had happened just one year ago? It was right at the edge of my mind. I racked my brain. Then all at once I knew—and a few more things got hammered into place as neatly as nails in a coffin.

The event that happened exactly one year ago, in March of 1988, was that Wolfgang Hauser met my aunt Zoe at an Anschluss reunion in Vienna. And Zoe revealed that she possessed another manuscript—a manuscript written in runes!

So Sam was right about one thing: If my father had inherited something from Pandora twenty-five years ago, and then somehow learned Zoe had inherited something too, it wouldn’t take much to figure out—as Sam and I had just done—that there was more than one piece to this puzzle. Or to arrive at the conclusion that other pieces, likewise, had passed through Pandora’s will to various members of our family.

Augustus had actually told