The Fire (41 page)

But as Vartan and I looked at each other in astonishment, I couldn’t bring myself to face what I’d been about to say. Even after all we’d been forced to face, it was too much to imagine.

‘What this means,’ Key informed us over her shoulder, ‘is the whole reason your mother’s been in hiding. It’s the reason she threw that party, the reason that she sent me to fetch you.

‘Your father is still alive.’

Thus, in nearly all mythologies there is a miraculous vessel. Sometimes it dispenses youth and life, at other times it possesses the power of healing, and occasionally…inspiring strength and wisdom are to be found in it. Often, especially as a cooking pot, it effects transformations; by this attribute it achieved exceptional renown as the
vas Hermetis
of alchemy.

– Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz,
The Grail Legend

Alive.

Of course.

I felt as if I’d stepped onto an unfamiliar planet whirling across time and space. And from this new perspective, even the craziest and most illogical events of these past few days – impromptu parties, mysterious packages sent from foreign lands, my mother’s vanishing act, my abduction by Key – suddenly would all make sense.

Maybe this revelation was the shock that broke the proverbial camel’s back. Otherwise, I certainly don’t know how it
was that I ever got to sleep after that. When I awakened, though, I was completely sacked out, lying in darkness in the back of the fuselage on an improvised bed of duffel bags.

But I wasn’t alone.

Beside me was something that was warm. Something breathing.

It took a moment for me to realize that the plane engine was silent. Key was nowhere to be seen. It must be well after midnight, which was when we’d deboarded at our second pit stop near Pierre, South Dakota. That was when Key had announced to us she had to catch a few z’s – and that we really all should do so – before heading up over the mountains.

At this moment, I found myself half-sprawled across the firm, prone body of Vartan Azov, who lay with one arm loosely tossed over me from behind, and his face buried in my hair. I thought of disentangling myself from this haphazard embrace, but I realized I might wake him, and I reasoned he probably needed sleep as much as I did.

Also, it felt really good.

What was it with me and Vartan? I had to ask.

And if I waited until Key returned from watering the plane, or whatever she was up to right now, that might afford me a small space to think – minus any vibrating motors or the repeated whiplash of those incoming emotional shocks – with just the peaceful sound of the rhythmic breathing of a snoozing chess player in my ear.

And I knew I had lots of thinking to do – most of it, unfortunately, trying to unravel the twisted skeins of the completely unthinkable. After all, it was only hours ago that I’d learned why my mother had been in hiding, why she’d lured everyone out of the woodwork, and yet kept all of us in the dark all this time – all of us, that is, but Nokomis Key.

But I’d figured it all out somewhere between our first stop
today at Moyaone, the ossuary fields at Piscataway, and that first refueling layover of ours in Duluth – four elapsed hours, not bad – when I had finally confronted Key, and she’d admitted to me the role she was actually playing:

That she
was
the White Queen.

‘I never said Galen was
wrong
about that
,
’ Key had protested when I’d refreshed her memory of her earlier denial in the stairwell at the Four Seasons. ‘All I said was, Just ignore him! After all, those fools have all had their chance at this Game. Now it’s somebody else’s turn to turn the tables. That’s what your mother and I intend to do.’

My mother and Nokomis Key. Though I had trouble visualizing these two joined up in this fashion, if I were to be perfectly honest with myself I’d have to admit that all along, ever since our childhoods, it was Key who had actually been the daughter that my mother had never had.

The Black Queen and the White Queen in cahoots.

I kept hearing a refrain, one of those jingles from
Alice in Wonderland
, something like:
Won’t you please be sure to come to tea, with the Red Queen, the White Queen, and me?

But jingled and jangled though I myself might be, I was grateful beyond words that my mother had decided to ‘blow the whistle,’ as Key had told me back on the first leg of our trip, and to join forces, whatever that might entail.

I no longer cared a fig why my mother had apparently cut her connections with my uncle, nor why Key had locked the hotel door on a few who might well be players on the White Team. I’d find out the reason later. Right now I was simply relieved.

Because one thing had finally dawned on me: why Key had worn that ironic smile and why she had made those cryptic remarks about the burial place at Piscataway. And indeed, why we had visited that ossuary field at Moyaone
in the first place.
All the bones and all the secrets,
she’d said.

Because I now understood that if my father was alive, as Key said, and if Mother had learned of it, then it was clear that all this time it hadn’t been
me
Mother was protecting, nor even herself. It had been my father, all along, who’d been the one in clear and present danger.

And now I also knew why my mother had been so afraid all these years, even before Zagorsk: She was the one who’d put him there. The secrets of the Montglane Service weren’t buried with the bones at Piscataway, any more than the pieces were.

They were buried in my father’s mind.

Aleksandr Solarin was the only one, of all those who’d ever been involved in this Game, who knew where those pieces were located. If he was alive – and I was sure that Key and my mother must be right about that – then we had to find him before anyone else did.

I only prayed that we wouldn’t be too late.

Key hadn’t been kidding when she’d asked me, back on the parkway, if I had the ‘vaguest clue’ how hard it had been to orchestrate my closet abduction. As the sky seeped lavender, we revved up the little Bonanza and hopped over the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore, headed for the Rockies. And she elaborated a few of those technicalities. She’d come in a plane not licensed to her, and had not filed a flight plan so it would be hard to follow us – or even to guess where we might be headed.

As long as the staff at the private airports knew you, she explained, it wasn’t much of a problem. She had only put down for refueling in places where she was sure she could radio ahead for someone she knew to be on-site, even at night, when the airfield staff were gone – like her friend,
the mechanic from the Sioux Reservation who’d refueled us last night at Pierre so we could be sure to take off before dawn.

Now, bundled up in our thermal gear that she’d brought in the duffel bags, we were cruising atop the world.

‘Dawn!’ Key called down to the mountains. ‘What an eye-opener! The better to see you with!’

Sailing at fifteen thousand feet over the Rockies in a small plane just after dawn was always breathtaking. The mountains were only a thousand feet beneath us. With the sun rising behind us, gilding our wings, the little plane cut through shreds of pink cloud like a skyborne raptor. We could see everything below in detail – the craggy, purplish rock veined with silver snow; the steep slopes thick with pine and spruce; the brilliant turquoise skies.

Though I’d done mountain trips like this dozens of times with Key, I never got tired of them. Vartan was practically slobbering on the window, looking out at the astonishing view. God’s country, the locals called it.

Landing at Jackson Hole four hours later was something else again. Key cut like an arrow through the passes, with mountains looming, almost within spitting distance, on either side. It was always unnerving. Then she dropped to the valley floor with precision. Actually, precision was a prerequisite when landing a plane in the bottomless ‘Hole.’

It was already mid-morning by the time we touched down, so we grabbed the duffels, loaded them in the Land Rover she always kept at the airport, and by unspoken agreement, went to get some chow.

Loading up with eggs and bacon, toast and marmalade, fried potatoes, sliced fruit, juice, and tons of black java, I suddenly realized that this was the first time I had eaten since yesterday’s breakfast compliments of my uncle Slava.

I really needed to stop bingeing once a day like this.

‘Where’s our friend meeting us?’ I asked Key when we’d paid our fare and left the restaurant. ‘At the condo?’

‘You’ll see,’ she replied.

Key kept a pad at the Racquet Club for her stopover flights, so her bush pilots who were headed into the North Country would always have a bath and bed. I’d stayed there myself a few times. It was designed by a custom shipbuilder for maximal use of space and it was comfy and regal at the same time. There were even ball courts of several kinds and a workout room for those who might be athletically obsessed.

My mother wasn’t there. Key told us to drop the duffel bags. Then, after sizing up Vartan’s height, she pulled three lightweight, thermal jumpsuits from the closet and told us to put them on, along with some waterproof zippered snow-booties, and we went back to the car. She headed up the road without giving us further information.

But after about half an hour, when we’d passed the entrance to Teton Village and Lake Moran, I knew we were running out of what might be called civilization, so I couldn’t help but be nervous.

‘I thought you said we were headed to pick up my mother, so we could help find my father,’ I told her. ‘But this road only leads to Yellowstone National Park.’

‘Right,’ Key assured me, with her usual sarcastic glance. ‘But to pick up your mom, first we have to find her. She’s in
hiding,
as you may recall.’

Once I’d had a moment to think things through clearly, I confess, I had to hand it to Key. Her mapping of this mission had been impeccable through and through. I myself couldn’t have concocted a better spot where one might have stashed my mother, to ensure minimum visibility, than winter in Yellowstone National Park. And it
was
winter here, no matter
how the official calendar might mislead one into imagining otherwise.

Back in Washington, D.C., early April might be Cherry Blossom Festival and tourist season. But here in northern Wyoming, the twelve-foot-high, red-and-yellow snow marking poles had been placed along the roadside since mid-September. And it might
stay
winter in these parts for another two months yet. Camping wouldn’t even begin until June.

The park was always closed to all but Snowcoach and snowmobile traffic – and even those, by reservation only – from November 1 through the middle of May. By next winter, even snowmobiles would be verboten, through a new federal edict, in this, our historic and first-ever national park. Even now, the main road itself – Grand Loop, a 140-mile twisted loop in a figure eight pattern – would be closed throughout much of its northern reaches.

But nothing was completely off-limits to the park rangers and scientific staffers like Key, some of whom conducted their most important research at this time of the year. That was what was so brilliant about her whole clandestine operation, though I confess, I still hadn’t seen the Big Picture, as she would put it.

When we reached the park entrance, Key picked up three tickets with her park pass, and we all hopped onto the Snowcoach, a kind of Econoline van with tank treads instead of wheels, and with what looked a lot like water skis stuck to the front to keep us from sinking into the snow.

A number of folks, who seemed to be of the same party, were already on board – all
ooh
ing and
ahh
ing as our chatty and informative tour guide pointed out a few of the park’s ten thousand geothermal features, ‘just here to the left and right of us,’ and peppered everyone like a spray gun with little-known western history involving the early days of the park.

Vartan seemed truly fascinated. But by the time the guide started regaling us with statistics on Old Faithful’s burst ratios

– how a two-minute eruption of 120 feet meant a shorter interval of maybe fifty-five minutes till the next eruption, while a five-minute eruption averaging 123 feet meant an interval of maybe seventy-eight minutes to the next – I could see people’s eyes beginning to glaze over, and Key had gotten that hard, firm set around her mouth.

We jumped off the coach when we reached the Old Faithful Inn. There, Key picked up two snowmobiles that were marked as exclusively reserved for park rangers, as well as three pairs of lightweight snowshoes that could clamp onto our footgear in a pinch if we should break down.

She climbed onto one snowmobile with me just behind her, and Vartan climbed onto the other and followed us. As we headed north, you could hear our guide and the tourists counting loudly: ‘
Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…’

When we got to the top of the hill, Key pulled off the road for a minute and pointed behind us. Vartan pulled up beside us and looked back as Old Faithful blew his cork and shot steaming water more than a hundred feet into the stark winter sky.

‘It explodes, even like this, in the cold?’ he asked her in amazement.

‘They’re heated, many miles below the surface of the earth, to more than six hundred degrees,’ said Key. ‘By the time they get back up here again, they don’t care
what
the weather’s like. It’s just a relief to get out-of-doors again.’

‘What heats them?’ said Vartan.

‘Aye, there’s the rub,’ Key told him. ‘We’re sitting atop the biggest volcanic cauldron known to the world. It might shoot off and destroy the entire North American continent just about any millionth year now. We’re not sure quite
when
she may blow. And she’s not the only one we need to worry about.

‘We used to think that Yellowstone Caldera was unique. But now we think it’s possible that this cauldron may actually be connected across Idaho to Mount St Helen’s and the Pacific region – to that bigger circle of faults around the Pacific Rim, the Ring of Fire.’

Vartan looked at her for a moment. It may have been my imagination, but it was almost as if some silent understanding passed between them, something they were debating whether to share with me.

But in the next instant, the look was gone.