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

him I’m sorry I almost drove over his foot.” Then I added, more cautiously, “Dr. Hauser and I seem to keep passing like two ships in the night. Things have gotten pretty confused, but I’m sure we’ll meet up soon enough. I did think over this project last night. I agree with what you said, that it might be the shot in the arm my career could use right now.”

I wasn’t just cranking up the Pod’s ego. Maybe my brain was getting scrambled and soggy after all this stress and hysteria, pushing me into believing everyone I’d ever known was out to get me. Maybe I did need a short retreat in the USSR to introduce me to a different reality than my own, which was starting to look pretty “virtual.” It was time for a schuss downhill to flush out my microprocesses.

I told the Pod I’d be back from the site before quitting time, and rang off. I felt relieved that Olivier was an unlikely candidate for the spy, hit man, and potential cat assassin I’d been visualizing. But I was still going to take the appropriate precautions and hide this manuscript where no one could ever find it—maybe not even me.

I had to wait half an hour for the tram to get hooked up. By the time it finally did, there were so many passengers queued up that they had to jam us in like sardines and weigh the fully laden tram before letting it take off over the deep gorges on that spindly-looking high wire. Packed in with all those restless midwesterners and Japanese tourists, my face was squashed against the windowpane by the mass of bodies, affording me a lovely view of the two-thousand-foot drop we’d experience if the load did prove too heavy for this orange crate. It would have been faster and simpler just to catch a chair lift instead. But I wasn’t sure I could locate the spot I was looking for without starting from Scylla and Charybdis.

Scylla and Charybdis were my two pet rocks: giant pinnacles of stone, side by side, that you were forced to ski between when you first came off the gondola—unless you decided to circumvent them and go into the deep powder, something I rarely did, and especially not today when I had to keep my balance on this treacherous slope with close to ten pounds of illicit manuscript strapped on my back.

The passage between the thirty-foot-high black rocks was narrow, steep, and always icy from the constant wear of many skis. It was like a blind tunnel, with light coming in only from a narrow crack at the sky. There wasn’t room inside there to brake or angle your skis, and nothing soft enough to dig your edges into for control.

Once, in high summer, I had hiked to this meadow and tried to climb up through the gap between Scylla and Charybdis. It was too steep to negotiate on foot: pitons and ropes were called for. But going down in snow was a lot simpler: all it took was nerves of stainless steel. You had to tuck down, knees locked, hands on your ankles, stay balanced, schuss through the gap, and keep praying that you hit no bad ice or rocks when you exited again into daylight.

I pried myself out of the gondola along with the rest of the sardines. From the forest of skis and poles hanging on the side of the tram I found and extracted mine. I took my time waiting beside the upper warming hut, knocking snow off my boots, clamping on my skis, de-fogging my goggles—giving my trammates, who were champing at the bit to hit the mountain, the right of way. I wanted to have a clear hill when I came out of the chute, not only to avoid dodging the bodies that were usually littering the slope beneath Scylla and Charybdis but, more important, so I could go prospecting for my hiding place without being observed.

I knew there wouldn’t be another gondola for half an hour, so when things quieted down and the crowds had vanished, I shoved off alone across the hill. The only sound was the swish of my skis on the snow as I dropped into the fall line and plunged through the gorge between the glittering and mammoth black forms of Scylla and Charybdis.

I managed to keep on track until I came out the other side, when a blast of wind hit me sideways, catching my backpack with full force. I wobbled and started to go down, but I picked up my left ski and swung my weight down into my right knee until the tips of my glove brushed the earth. Then I bounced back up and swung down again into the left knee like a skater, still plummeting with the fall line until I recovered the rhythmic center of balance.

Taking a deep breath as I skied on, I scanned the line of hills—the Grand Teton rising majestically in the distance as my marker—searching for the ridge I knew I had to drop from to find the crevasse I was seeking, and the cave. Just then, I thought I heard the soft swish of skis behind me. Odd, since I was on the highest ski slope of the mountain with no other lifts above me, and I thought I’d waited for everyone coming off the gondola.

“Your wedeln is a bit off,” said a gravelly voice with a German accent from a few yards behind me.

There were plenty of Germans prowling around ski areas, I told myself. It couldn’t be.

But it was. He skied up beside me, and again I went a little weak in the knees as I swung to a halt. He pulled off his goggles, wrapped them like a rubber band around the sleeve of his stark black jumpsuit, and smiled at me with those amazing turquoise eyes.

“Good morning, Dr. Hauser,” I managed to say. “What brings you up here for midweek