The Magic Circle, Katherine Neville [parable of the sower read online .TXT] 📗

“You’re in nuclear security, not premises security; that’s why you don’t know,” she retorted with a sneer, as if my field were some kind of primitive throwback compared with her own.

I yanked the paper out from beneath her mauve lacquered fingernails before she knew what was happening. She grabbed at it, but too late. I’d already read his name:

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser; IAEA; Krems, Österreich

I hadn’t the vaguest where Krems, Austria, was located. But IAEA was the International Atomic Energy Agency, the group that patroled this industry worldwide—not that it gave them very much to do in recent years. Austria itself was a nuclear-free country. Nevertheless, it trained some of the top nuclear experts in the world. I was more than interested in having a serious look at the curriculum vitae of Professor Dr. Wolfgang K. Hauser. And that wasn’t all.

I smiled at Bella and scratched my name on the log. “I have an emergency appointment with my boss, Pastor Dart. He asked me to get over from the other building as quickly as possible,” I told her as I took off my wraps and hung them on the lobby coatrack.

“That’s a lie. Dr. Dart’s still out to lunch with some visitors from Washington,” Bella informed me with a snotty expression on her face. “I know, because he signed out here with them over an hour ago. You can see for yourself—”

“Gee, so I guess the log isn’t confidential to management anymore,” I told her with a grin, and I swept through the inner doors.

Olivier was sitting in the office we shared in this building, playing with his computer terminal. We were the project directors in charge of locating, recovering, and managing “hot waste” such as fuel rods and other transuranic materials: that is, materials that had an atomic number higher than that of uranium. These were tracked by programs designed to our requirements and developed by our computer group.

“Who is Professor Doctor Wolfgang K. Hauser of the IAEA in Austria?” I asked when Olivier glanced up from his machine.

“Oh lord, not you too?” he said, shoving back his swivel chair and rubbing his eyes. “You’ve only been back at work for a few minutes. How could you have picked up the sickness so fast? He’s like the site plague, this fellow. To date, not one woman has failed to succumb. I really thought you’d be the one to resist. I have serious money riding on you, you know. We’ve opened a table to wager the odds.”

“He’s absolutely gorgeous,” I told Olivier. “But it’s more than that. There’s some kind of—I don’t know what to call it—not really an animal magnetism—”

“Oh no!” cried Olivier, standing up and putting his hands on my shoulders. “It’s far worse than I imagined! Maybe I’ve lost the grocery money too!”

“You didn’t wager the exotic gourmet herbal tea budget?” I asked with a grin.

He sat down again with his head in his hands and moaned. I suddenly realized that Professor Doctor Wolfgang K. Hauser was the first thing in a week that had made me smile and forget, for an entire ten minutes, about Sam. That in itself made up for Olivier’s lost wager and a few pounds of glamorous herbal teas to boot.

Olivier jumped to his feet as the alarm system started hooting and a voice came over the loudspeaker between bursts:

“

This is a test of the emergency alarm system. We are conducting our winter fire drill. This drill is being timed both by local fire officials and federal safety officials. Please proceed in haste to your nearest emergency exit and wait in the parking lot well away from the building until the all-clear signal is blown.

”

Holy shit! During fire drills, we could only use the emergency exits. They sealed all mantraps and doors that led back into the building, where people might get trapped in a real emergency—including the door to the lobby where my coat was. The outside temperature, well below zero when I came in, would be colder by now. And a fire drill could last thirty minutes.

“Come on,” Olivier said, pulling on his parka. “Get your things—let’s go!”

“My coat’s in the lobby,” I said as I started walking briskly in his wake toward the exit across the vast floor of already vacated desks. A sea of people was flowing out the four exits into the bitter wind I could see outside.

“You’re completely insane,” he informed me. “How many times have I told you not to use the lobby? Now you’ll be transformed into a block of ice. I’d share my coat, but we can’t both fit inside it—it’s snug. But we can each pass it back and forth until the other starts to turn blue.”

“I have a down parka in my car, and my car keys are here in my handbag,” I told him. “I’ll sprint to the car and turn the heat on. If the drill goes on too long, I’ll go over to the cowboy bar and have some hot tea.”

“Okay, I’ll come join you,” said Olivier. “I guess if you came in the front doors, that means that you parked illegally, too?”

I grinned at him as we burst out the doors with the crowd, and we jogged around the side of the building.

When I went to unlock the car door, I saw that the button locks were already up. That was strange; I always locked my car. Maybe I was just so distraught today I’d forgotten. I crawled in, put on my parka, and turned on the ignition as Olivier got in at the other side. The engine turned over sluggishly, so it was good that I’d been forced to come out and start it. In weather like this, with little protection, the oil in your crankcase could turn into a snow cone.

And then I noticed the knot, hanging from my rearview mirror.

Sam and I as children had a pet project of learning all kinds of knots. I’d become an expert of sorts. I