The Magic Circle (20 page)

So on Friday, the first day I was able to drive myself to work, I stayed until after Olivier left the office. It didn’t surprise him. We were off to Sun Valley at dawn, so any work I’d need to finish before the weekend had to be done now. As soon as he left to get his things together for the trip, I started hauling volumes of my nearby set of the Standard down from their shelves and unfastening the sliding bindings. I inserted a page of runes about every forty or fifty pages along, throughout the set.

It was ten o’clock when I’d finished. I felt lucky I hadn’t hurt my arm, hefting those heavy binders for such a long time. As I sank into my desk chair to relax for a minute and collect my thoughts, I bumped the mouse pad on my desk. The test patterns that had been revolving on the screen vanished and a clean screen came up, illuminating the half-darkened room.

I stared at it. A symbol I’d never seen, like a giant asterisk, half filled the screen.

Beneath this symbol was printed a question mark.

How did this get on my computer screen? No one here in the office could have done it; I’d been right at my desk all day.

I tapped a question mark into my terminal, for Help. The Help screen gave me a message it had never given me before, and one I felt certain it wasn’t programmed to produce: it said I should check my mail.

I called up my message file, though I’d swept it out completely only a few hours earlier this evening. Nonetheless, there was one new document out there. I pulled the message up on the screen.

It started to build across the screen slowly, as if there were a hidden hand within the tube itself drawing the picture from inside out. As the letters drew themselves magically, I watched with a kind of dazed fascination. Before it had finished I knew, of course, who had put it there. It could only be Sam.

At the laser printer beside my desk, I printed out a few copies to mess with by hand, and I studied them.

Although I knew that the first rule of security was to delete an incoming encryption from the machine as fast as possible, I also knew Sam. If Sam wanted something destroyed at once, it would have been programmed to self-destruct when printed. The fact that it was still sitting there on my screen meant there were more clues contained in it, other than the sequence of the letters themselves. In fact, I might already have received one: the asterisk.

From my desk drawer I grabbed three of those cheap transparent government pens. I wound a rubber band to hold them together, then fanned them out in a snowflake pattern, in the shape of the asterisk. I slid this across the page to see whether, along any of the three axes, acrostics could be ferreted out. No luck—though I didn’t expect any. It would be too simple a clue, and therefore too dangerous, for Sam to leave on my computer.

While scanning this page of letters, I drew back for a few seconds to get perspective. In breaking an unknown code, it’s always a huge advantage if the person who encrypted the message is
trying
to communicate with you. And clearly even more so if you happen to have been hand-trained by him, as I was by Sam.

Right now, for example, I could make some fair assumptions about the hidden message before me: Sam would never have sent it, or any message, via computer, which he hotly opposed as unsafe, unless the message itself was important or urgent or both. That is, unless it was something I vitally had to know before I left, as he knew I’d planned to, for Sun Valley on the weekend. Even so, he’d waited all week to send it—right down to the wire, almost the final hour of Friday night. Obviously he’d been unable to find another way to communicate, and was therefore forced to use a method he didn’t trust. This told me two critical things about the “personality” of the code he’d used.

First, since he believed it might be vulnerable to the snooping of others, the code would have to be many-layered, with red herrings dropped on every trail costing time and labor to anyone else also trying to decipher it.

Second, since Sam had taken a risk that must have been forced on him by time constraints and urgency, he would have to use a code simple enough for
me
to unlock quickly, accurately, and all by myself.

The combination of these two vital ingredients told me that the key to this code must be something that
only I would be likely to see
.

Using a ruler as my guide, I searched the page. The first clue popped out at once. There were two items, and only two, on this page that were
not
letters of the alphabet: the two ampersands (&) in lines twelve and sixteen. Since an ampersand is a symbol for the word “and,” perhaps they formed some connections between parts of the message. Though this could be guessed by anyone, I felt sure that was where the trails—both the false and the true trails—began: that is, in the middle. And I felt even more certain that I would find a clue “for my eyes only” that would tell me where to look for the place to branch off from the obvious path.

I wasn’t disappointed. The ampersand on line sixteen connected the words
Scylla
and
Charybdis
, and led to the complete message
Jackson Hole two p.m. Scylla
&
Charybdis
. That was a red herring, not only because it was my private nickname for those rocks—others might know that too—but rather because I’d told Sam I was going to Sun Valley this weekend, not Jackson Hole, to meet Uncle Laf. But herring or no, it
did
tell me that the message I was seeking would explain where Sam would try to meet me this weekend. Thank God.

There were a few other scattered messages that leapt from the page, like the one starting with
Grand
on line fourteen, saying he’d meet me Sunday at Grand Targhee, lift three, at four
P.M
.

But I thought it far more likely that Sam’s real message would be buried in the crop of conflicting messages that branched from the other ampersand. And all of those dealt with places at Sun Valley.

The ampersand on line twelve connected the two words
valley
and
day
. Backing up, it read from southeast to due north:
Sun Valley
&
(Sun)day
. Then the bifurcations began, and were difficult to follow.

One said
noon
, after which I got lost in the maze. After a while I found a backwards
ten
and followed it around in a circle, reading:
ten a.m. room thirty-seven
. Fat chance Sam would be so complex, just to deliver so simple a message. More complex by far was the word
eve
that I finally found branching up from the ampersand. Its message danced all over the page:
Sunday eve at lodge dining room eight p.m. wear yellow scarf
—as if I needed to be identified by a flag. Hmm.

Besides, though Sun Valley lay near three towns, two mountain ranges, and miles of open, skiable tundra where we might meet, I was sure Sam had said we should meet on Baldy, the ski mountain itself, because we both knew it so well. Given my armload of stitches and my current physical condition, I wasn’t too anxious to clamp on my Alpines again. But it seemed I might have little choice.

I was sure I hadn’t encountered the right message yet. It had to be the one following the word
noon
—so where did it lead? I found the word
met
, which connected with a long passage that seemed part of a bigger picture, but the word didn’t lead contextually into that sentence. I looked again. I found
on
, beside which were
in
and
to
. My eyes began to cross, even though I was now using my finger to trace the labyrinth of letters on the page before me.

Just then, I found a real word:
Toussaint
. It went north from the word
on
and turned east, then south again. Toussaint—All Saints’ Day—though that was where my limited religious expertise ended. Having attended churches in my youth only when Jersey was booked to perform at one, I couldn’t recall whether that was near All Souls’ Day or Carnival—neither of which fell within spitting distance of this coming Sunday, anyway. And though all ski slopes have names, there wasn’t a run at Sun Valley named either Hallowe’en or Mardi Gras. As it happened, however, most of the slopes on Baldy
were
named for festive occasions: Holiday, Easter, Mayday, Christmas. Probably no coincidence.

I squinted and studied the grid again. I’d now spent an hour on this eye-crossing puzzle, and my starting-to-heal arm throbbed and itched like crazy. I was able to connect the word
Toussaint
with some words I’d found earlier, such as
go
and
through
, but then I was lost again. Damn it, Sam!
Get to Toussaint, go through
—go through
what?

There were dozens of trails and lower slopes branching off those four I’d mentioned. But I took a deep breath, closed my bleary eyes, and tried to visualize the three-dimensional layout of the mountain. For instance, if you came off the top of the chair lift at Lookout, which fed onto three of the aforementioned slopes—all but Mayday—and if you then skied down around behind the lift, you’d be following a path that from a bird’s-eye view would very much resemble the way the letters that formed this message were laid out on the page! Indeed, even if I backtracked to the very beginning of the message, the words
Sun Valley
were placed on the page, if memory served me, at the same angle as the ski lift itself was laid out on the mountain!

I knew I was on to something, so I kept my mind focused on the mountain. When you came off the lift, you dropped over a small ledge, then went through a wide mogul field. I opened my eyes and searched for the word
mogul
near where the field would actually be. It took a minute, but I found it—a zigzag pattern, exactly the way you’d have to ski it—with the word
field
just after. My heart started pounding.

There was still some deciphering to be done, though.

I had found the word
down
just after
field
, but I knew there were five other slopes branching off that mogul field, and I couldn’t recall their names any more than I would have recalled the first bunch if I hadn’t found
Toussaint
. All I ever recalled were geographical features, lift numbers and where the lifts took you, and the levels of difficulty marked on each run: green, blue, or black; circle, square, or diamond. None of these seemed to help here.

I reminded myself how well Sam knew me. Just after the word
down
, I saw the letter
b
and traced it through a sharp switchback pattern that formed two words:
black diamond
. The black diamond run below the mogul field emptied out at the base of another lift. If I took that I would arrive atop the next slope. I followed the words on the page just there. They read
then follow this path through
, and the word then going north was
woods
. Since the end of a word at an edge of a page meant “exit,” I assumed this was the end of the message. And that it marked the spot where I’d meet Sam at noon on Sunday.