The Pharos Objective (26 page)

“George,” Phoebe said, nodding back to the threshold of the door. “He worked for months with the authorities, finally pulling enough strings.”

Waxman offered a weak smile. “You can thank me later.”

Phoebe squeezed Caleb’s arm. “By the way, where was my invite to my own brother’s wedding?”

“Sorry,” Caleb gulped. “It all happened so fast.”

“Even after my warning,” Phoebe said, shaking her head. “Was it her, the girl with the green eyes?”

Caleb nodded.

“I tried to tell you—”

“Shhh. Later, okay? Now’s not the time.”

She took his hand and looked at her brother with new eyes. “Come on, we have a lot to tell you. You’re going to be amazed.”

Caleb held his ground, and the wheels on her chair spun. “No, I don’t want to go with them.”

“Caleb,” Helen walked into the room. She was thin and pale, her hair cut short and dyed a California blond to cover her gray. Her eyes were lined with crow’s-feet, hooded but no less crystalline. The blue shook Caleb, and he felt an electric current spark when she touched his arm. “Jail! My poor boy. We were so worried. And they wouldn’t let me see you.”

“Hello, Mother.” He gave her a peck on the cheek. “Why are you here?”

“You shouldn’t have gone down there without us,” she scolded. Waxman sauntered over, his hands in the front pockets of his suit pants. He wore a black turtleneck under his navy blue jacket, and his hair seemed just as wild as Caleb remembered, only now flecked with gray. A lit cigarette was trapped like a worm dangling from his lips.

“Listen, I just want to go back to New York and sleep for a month.”

“You’ll want to hear this,” Waxman said.

Caleb stared at the gold band around his ring finger as he lifted his cigarette, then he looked blankly at Helen. “Speaking of not being invited to weddings . . .”

“Caleb,” Phoebe pinched his arm.

Waxman turned his head to watch a pair of hotel maids walk past in the hall. He put his arm around Helen’s shoulders. “I told you he hasn’t changed.”

Caleb slung his bag over his shoulder. “I’m going. Thanks for the jailbreak.”

“Caleb,”—Phoebe wheeled into his path—“we know where it is.”

“Where what is?”

Helen smiled. “Don’t be modest, Phoebe. Tell him how you found it.”

“Okay,” Phoebe said, beaming. “You were right, Caleb. We weren’t asking the right questions.”

“About what?”

“The scroll. Caesar’s scroll.”

“I saw it,” Phoebe said, “by refining the question. Remember when I said I kept having visions of a castle on a steep hill, and a prisoner in red robes being led up to it? Well, I decided to follow that lead. I remembered that those ancient scrolls were coveted by aristocrats in the nineteenth century, and it was considered fashionable to have one among your personal treasures, even if you could never read it.”

Caleb’s heart started to race. “Of course. But still, the possibility that just that one scroll, of all the thousands . . .”

Phoebe continued. “I decided to work from the assumption that it had been removed from the collection. I asked to be shown how Caesar’s scroll was taken from Herculaneum,
and then I saw it
.”

“Saw what?” Caleb asked. He started to feel faint.

“That man again, in long red robes and fur-lined lapels. But this time, he was standing before a series of machines. Several blackened scrolls, coated with a silvery substance, were stretched out, hanging partially unrolled and glued together where they had started to rip.”

“The Piaggio machines,” Caleb said, recognizing the description. Vatican scholar Antonio Piaggio had invented the device in an effort to stop the wanton destruction of the scrolls by other investigators. It was the only thing that worked until the 1970s, when the Norwegians came along with their gelatin solutions.

Phoebe nodded, and her eyes glazed over, as if seeing the vision all over again. “Someone came up to this red-robed man and said, ‘Welcome, Count Cagliostro, what brings such an esteemed visitor to inspect our work?’”

“Cagliostro,” Caleb whispered. “He was an alchemist, a magician of the old Egyptian mysteries. It fits. He would have been drawn to this scroll, but how did he—”

“‘A dream,’ the Count said, walking from machine to machine, ten of them with scrolls in various stages of unrolling. ‘A dream told me there was something I needed to see here.’”

Phoebe blinked, and quickly focused on Caleb. “Cagliostro stopped in front of one scroll that had only been opened about an inch. He bent over, gasping as he peered at a faint symbol and a few visible letters.”

“What symbol?” Caleb asked, although he could guess.
Exalted Mercury . . .

Phoebe shrugged. “I didn’t get a clear enough glimpse of it. But anyway, he sent everyone from the room, then carefully removed the scroll from the machine, boxed it up and hid it under his robes. He took a random scroll from the hundreds on a nearby table and set it up on the machine. He began to clumsily unroll the first inch when a group of priests walked in, ushered by one of the papyri officials. Discovered in the act, he ran. Fled the library and disappeared into the shadows of the palace corridors.

“My next vision was of Cagliostro in shackles being led up an uneven rock path beside a sheer cliff to a fortress overlooking a valley. The castle, with its turrets and walls, stood against the rough winds and made me think of Qaitbey.”

She let out a deep breath and rubbed her palms together. “And that was it. I did some research and found that Cagliostro had been imprisoned at a castle, the same one I’d seen, jailed on charges of heresy.”

“He was tricked,” Caleb said, “into performing an ancient Egyptian rite of initiation on two Vatican Inquisition spies, who then arrested him. Classic entrapment.”

“So you know.”

Caleb nodded. “He was first imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, but after trying to escape, he was moved to the fortress you saw.”

“San Leo,” she said, pouting. “I spent days looking through Italian guidebooks trying to find a picture that matched, and you knew it all along!”

“Sorry, but at least you found it. The question is, what does that vision tell us about the scroll?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Helen said. “If you’ll join us, we’ve got a flight already booked. It leaves in the morning for Venice.”

“But—”

“I saw one more thing after that vision.” Phoebe wheeled closer, almost running over Caleb’s foot. “A church with Roman-style arches and a bell tower. I found it quickly, in the same guidebook, fifteen miles from San Leo Fortress, in the town of Rimini.”

“The Tempio Malatestiano,” Waxman said, pronouncing the Italian very slowly.

“What does that have to do with it?” Caleb asked.

Waxman sighed. “We think Cagliostro may have had a connection to that church. And since he knew the authorities were after him, he might have stashed the scroll somewhere inside.”

Caleb suddenly felt exhausted from it all, and actually missed the solitude of his prison cell. “What do you want from me?”

“Caleb, you have to take my place,” Phoebe pleaded, thumping her chair’s wheels. She leaned forward. “They need a good psychic to go along, one that’s more mobile than I am.”

A refusal formed, but then Caleb let out his breath. He imagined her down in that tomb, her hand reaching up, begging him not to let go. He remembered the feel of her fingers slipping away, and the dwindling of her scream before she hit the bottom.

He could not deny her this. He took a breath and glanced from her to his mother. In his mind flashed a vision of excavators in Herculaneum, chipping away at the volcanic rock and sediment, retrieving scroll after scroll. The possibility that they’d found just the one they were looking for and that it might hold the secrets of the Pharos—and the answer to Lydia’s death—proved an irresistible temptation. He saw Julius Caesar again, bathed in torchlight, standing before the defiant caduceus, the scroll in his hand.

This was a chance to discover what Caesar could not, to pass beyond, into the one place he had failed to conquer. To reveal the secrets of Alexander the Great.
And perhaps to reveal the truth about ourselves. Why my family has these powers, these visions.

Despite his transition, or perhaps because of it, his path was clear. He wanted the same things: to see whether the Pharos hid merely a treasure of gold and silver, or whether, beyond the door, lay all the secrets of the human race. The mysteries of the spirit and the soul, secrets that had survived a brutal two-thousand-year war waged upon them by the twin armies of ignorance and evil.

His mind calmed and his pulse settled. “And you’ve already booked our flight?”

Waxman smiled. “I may not be as good a psychic as any of the Crowes, but I did foresee you’d be coming with us. We leave in the morning.”

So they had
one night to rest, but unfortunately there was little time for it. A deep breath of stale hotel air filled his lungs as Caleb rejoined the others in the main suite. They were discussing the scroll.

“If we can get our hands on it,” Helen said, “and unroll the remainder . . . there’s a new technique out of BYU that has been successful in restoring damaged ancient scrolls. And our University of Rochester is getting in on the act, with Xerox and Kodak contributing equipment and funds for analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

“The cameras are there if we need them,” Phoebe said. “We can photograph the scrolls at various wavelengths—say, ultraviolet at 200 nanometers or infrared at 1100—to see which will best differentiate the ink from the background.”

“That’s all assuming you can still manage to open the scroll.”

“True.”

“After we return from Italy, why not come back with us?” Helen asked. “Everything’s ready back home. We’ve got the house set up for research, a quiet room for introspection and drawing. The Morpheus team comes over twice a week, so we can use their skills as well.”

Caleb groaned. “I thought the Initiative was disbanded.”

“New members,” Waxman said, puffing on his cigarette.

“Come on,” Phoebe urged. “You can get the pleasure of joining me aboard Old Rusty. The museum is closed again, but you can still see the exhibit.”

He blinked at her. “It was turned into a museum?”

“Didn’t you read my letters?”

“I was a little busy. Anyway, no, I’m not going back there with you.”

Still that voice from his dreams . . .
Go home
. . .

“I told you,” Waxman said under his breath. “Useless as ever.”

“No,” both his mother and sister said at once. Helen moved over and looked into Caleb’s eyes. She scrutinized his face, every line and crevice, and he started to turn away when he noticed her eyes were filling with tears.

“You look like him,” she said, and brought her hand to Caleb’s chin. Her eyes held his, and her lips moved, just barely. “I miss your father,” she whispered so only Caleb could hear. “And I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean?” The room dimmed slightly, as if the lights flickered, and the air shimmered and everything seemed less tangible, less real.

“You know. I—” Suddenly she stopped and frowned, and her face took on the look of a hunted animal. Her eyes darted around and finally settled on a corner, near the television.

Caleb followed her gaze, and for just an instant Caleb saw him, the tall man in the green jacket, matted hair over his face. Just standing there, trembling in the shadows. And then, he was gone.

“Did you—?”

Helen snapped her head back and stared wide-eyed at Caleb.

Waxman moved in between them, pulling her aside. “Listen, kid. We need to show you something, something about your late wife. After that, if you still want to bail on us, that’s your call. Just see what we’ve discovered.”

Phoebe wheeled herself to one side of a rectangular oak table where Waxman sat in front of a black laptop. Helen leaned in over his shoulder and turned the screen in Caleb’s direction. On the monitor was a blurry black and white image, a photograph taken of a group of people standing between the forepaws of the Great Sphinx.

“This picture,” Waxman said, “came from an unpublished book called
Keepers of Nothing
. It was written by a man named Alex Prout, an author known for his paranoid, disjointed and unconvincing beliefs in all manner of nutty ideas.”

Phoebe cleared her throat. “His first book was titled
George Bush and How America Collaborated in the Upcoming Alien Conquest
.”

Helen smiled at Caleb. “Anyway, you get the drift. In this latest book, however, Prout seems to have hit on some actual facts.”

Waxman tapped the monitor. “After we learned of your incarceration and the charges against you, we started looking into the background of Lydia Jones.”

“How much did you know about her past,” Phoebe asked, “before you up and married her?”

“Not much,” Caleb admitted. “I didn’t want to share my history with her, so it somehow felt wrong probing into hers.”

Looking away, Helen said, “We found her credits as a publicist, and that got us started. One of the books she had marketed was written by a respected Egyptology professor from the American University at Cairo. When we took a chance and dug into his history, we came across some serious criticisms of his work, all coming from the website of Alex Prout.” She raised her eyebrows. “Seems this professor was a regular target of his.”