“Ariel,” said Wolfgang, “can you even imagine the pain I feel when I look at you? I believed that you understood I loved you. Now, to suddenly discover that you’ve done nothing all along but tell me lies.”
I had told him lies? That, to say the very least, was something a bit more excessive than the proverbial pot calling the kettle black! Good Lord, for weeks, whatever rock I’d turned over, there was still another lie. I had confronted Wolfgang so often, only to hear more lies, only to swallow each and every one just as gullibly as the last, only to wind up back in his arms and his bed, again and again. But since his most recent point had been made over the barrel of a gun, I thought it might be the better part of valor to reserve comment.
“You knew Sam was alive, yet you concealed it!” Wolfgang spat out with great bitterness. “You lied to me all the while.”
“Wolfgang, you were trying to kill him!” I pointed out the seemingly obvious. “Would you have killed your sister, too? Were you going to kill me?”
“I love you,” he said between narrow lips, ignoring my question as another wave of pain passed over him. When he’d recovered, he said, “Of course I wasn’t going to kill any of you—don’t be mad. Do I seem like a homicidal maniac? I was only after those relics that are so important. Oh, Ariel, don’t you see? You and I could have used that information correctly. We could have accomplished so much. Through the use of those manuscripts, together, we could have created a better world.”
He paused and added carefully, “I know what you were thinking after Paris—after Zoe spoke to you. It was my question about the Gypsies, wasn’t it? I could feel it all the way back on the plane, and I should have said something then. But I was only surprised to learn of it, that’s all. Please believe it made no difference between us. It wouldn’t have mattered to me—”
“What wouldn’t have mattered to you?” I erupted in fury. “What on earth are you talking about? You mean you’d have condescended to go on sleeping with me, even though I have tainted blood? My God—what kind of person are you? Don’t you see how it makes me feel, to know it was you who tried to kill Sam with that bomb in San Francisco? You tried to murder him, Wolfgang. And all the while, you knew for a fact that Sam was your own brother!”
“No he’s not!!” Wolfgang practically screamed, his face ashen white with an agony that expressed, in one look, everything he’d left unsaid.
Olivier had glanced in alarm through the window, and he started to open the car door, but I waved my hand no. I was shaking all over with an emotion I couldn’t even begin to name. Hot tears were welling in my eyes as I turned back to Wolfgang and took a deep breath. I said, as calmly and distinctly as I could without going to pieces,
“Yes, Wolfgang. He is your brother.”
Then I turned, climbed out of the car, and closed the door behind me.
Dark Bear, one of the most astonishingly organized individuals on the planet, would have made a terrific CEO of a major corporation, if he hadn’t been so attached to the more important tasks of preserving the roots of his people and unraveling the mysteries of life. In the interim, he’d also managed to organize Sam’s and my project.
But Dark Bear considered it too dangerous to turn us loose—“go public,” as it were—until Olivier and his troops managed to round up a few more of the bad guys. Thanks once again to Dark Bear, they’d now have more ammunition to do so. Uncle Earnest’s private files—the unpleasant information Zoe said he’d ferreted out about the Behn family—had been found anonymously tucked amid a morass of old property claims from decades past, in a sturdy safe on the reservation at Lapwai.
Though Earnest might have purged the very existence of Halle and Wolfgang from his mind, as Dark Bear had told us, this new trove did include documentation on our family’s role—including my father’s—as long-hidden financiers backing their own concept of caste supremacy, and placing weapons of mass destruction in the service of their unpleasant view of the New World Order.
There were a few surprises from the more upbeat side of my family. As Sam had suspected and Dacian Bassarides now confirmed, there actually had been four parts to Pandora’s legacy, divided among the four “Behn children.” After meeting me in Vienna, it seems Dacian had arrived at a few of his own conclusions. He took it upon himself to forge a long-overdue reconciliation between Lafcadio and Zoe, sweeping aside all those decades of family bitterness that had essentially been spawned by just one man, now long dead.
Nor did Dacian have to convince Laf and Zoe that I was the one to pull all the pieces together as Pandora once had done—but that then by the terms of her will, twenty-five years ago, had again been torn apart. Uncle Laf shipped a case of Dacian’s estate-bottled wine to me, with a note from Dacian detailing that other estate, Pandora’s, which had attracted so much interest all these years. Following up on this input myself with a pertinent call to my mother and several chats with Dark Bear, I found the picture growing crystal clear.
First, there was the rune manuscript my mother had sent from San Francisco, which Olivier had then retrieved from where I’d hidden it in the DOD Standard at the nuclear site. Laf, I recalled, told me early on that Pandora had made a practice of copying runes in her own hand from standing stones all over Europe: these runes became her bequest to my father. When Jersey discovered Augustus’s involvement with her sister, she’d made her own clandestine copy of this manuscript. Though my
