The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (13 inch ebook reader .TXT) 📗

let go. I glanced at his face for one instant before I took off down the street. He was staring through the glass at the manuscript!

Now that I was out on the street driving, and I knew Olivier was really after the manuscript, and I knew he knew I had it, I was becoming even more hysterical. The chances of hiding it anywhere in town, at this point, were absolutely nil. I knew I had only one choice, and that was to get it somewhere out of town to hide it. But where?

Olivier knew I was meeting my uncle at Sun Valley this weekend, so that was too obvious. I had to get on a road in some direction—and fast, before he got back to his car to follow me. The absolutely worst thing that could happen was for me to get trapped with this manuscript in my car.

With no time to think, and with no thoughts leaking into my brain anyway, I headed full speed down the road to Swan Valley, to run over the Teton Pass into Jackson Hole.

THE SNAKE

THE SERPENT:

The serpent never dies.

Some day you shall see me come out of this beautiful skin,

a new snake with a new and lovelier skin. That is birth.

EVE:

I have seen that. It is wonderful.

THE SERPENT:

If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very subtle.

When you and Adam talk, I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’

You see things, and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things

that never were, and I say ‘Why not?’

—George Bernard Shaw,

Back to Methuselah

It would be a good two-hour haul, with winter road conditions what they were, across the Idaho border and into Wyoming. But it would be my first chance to think things through since my return from San Francisco—was it only yesterday morning?

I had a job I’d already been absent from for more than a week, and a boss who wasn’t too happy just now because I had cold feet about leaving for Russia. If I went AWOL at work on my second day back, I might not have a job. Then too, there was my critical arrangement to wait by the phone at the No-Name cowboy bar this afternoon. But now, with this unexpected loop, I had no idea how I’d ever contact Sam again. The final disaster struck my beleaguered mind just before I reached the end of the valley: I couldn’t leave my cat in the same house with a villain—especially a villain I still owed for this month’s rent!

At the end of the valley, the road spiraled down like a corkscrew to meet and follow the curving sweep of a river that seemed to appear from nowhere out of the dense undergrowth. I knew every twist and turn by heart. I took the dips like a slalom course. Dropping beneath the crashing two-tiered waterfall, I descended to the chain-linked valleys carved out by the rushing waters of the Snake.

The Snake is one of the most beautiful rivers in North America. Unlike the broad, complacent rivers that water the Midwest, the Snake behaves more like its namesake: a dark, mysterious reptile that only feels at home in wild and inaccessible crevasses of the mountains. It winds in a narrow zigzag for most of the thousand-mile meander from Yellowstone in Wyoming through Idaho, Oregon, and Washington State, where it joins the massive Columbia in its headlong sweep to the ocean. But the glassy sheen of most of the river’s surface hides the underlying serpentine treachery, which strikes swiftly and often lethally. These waters are so rapid, the current so strong, the hidden pools so deep, that few of the bodies swept away are ever found. Indeed, even whole automobiles have been swallowed and never recovered. This may explain the rumors of the enormous water beast lurking there, who devours everything he drags to his underwater lair.

As usual at this time of year, the valley below was buried in thick marshlike fog formed as the warmer water of the river impacted the ice-cold air. Just before the last descent, while the road could still be seen, natives usually checked fore and aft for other cars they might collide with when they got down there in the soup. It was then that I saw it, slipping out of sight around the curve behind me—a plain grey government car with standard white plates identical to a hundred others in our fleet at the nuclear site, which any of ten thousand employees might borrow for site visits or other official business. What was it doing out here, en route to no place? There was a hefty penalty, even job probation, for using government vehicles in personal or recreational activities.

But maybe this was official business, I thought. Sam had said I was being watched all the time, hadn’t he? If even Olivier had his hands in the cookie jar, who knew how many others might be in it too? Though I couldn’t see the driver through the windshield, when I saw the car reappear around the last corner I was certain he was tailing me. There was nobody but me out here.

But I knew every bend and wrinkle along this road, and I knew that the best place to ditch him would be in the soup. So as soon as I reached the last steep decline, I accelerated and dove in. Behind me, I saw him pick up his pace and do likewise. Then the blanket of dense white fog closed around us, and we were isolated within its embrace. I heard only the sound of silence as my car slalomed on the sharply curving road, moving like the serpent itself through the mist.

It seemed hours that I swung through the whipcrack curves of the road, through that smothering whiteness like the inside of a pillowcase, but my car clock told me it was really only twenty minutes. I knew the road would soon come