The Pharos Objective (4 page)

Hugging his knees, he’d stared out over Sodus Bay until the sun finally burrowed beneath the horizon and hid itself for another night.

And now, all these years later, in a rush of frothing bubbles, Caleb burst from the depths of Alexandria’s Eastern Harbor, expelling a lungful of acrid water, coughing as the other divers rushed him to the waiting yacht. He briefly regained consciousness and gasped when he perceived the grand lighthouse as it stood over two thousand years ago, leaning over as if to inspect his condition for itself. And at the very top, at the apex, Caleb imagined he could see someone gripping the railing and peering over the side, a man who looked, not surprisingly, like his father.

2

At the first bend on the promontory, just above a jumble of boulders and red stone rocks rising out of the sea, a man stood, watching. He wore a black tie and Ray-Ban sunglasses. His hair, trimmed short, had gray streaks that flecked his temples, matching the color of his just-pressed Armani suit. He held a paper bag full of stale bread crumbs, handfuls of which he tossed absently into the frothing sea while he stole glances at the scene in the harbor.

“It’s happening,” he said into the wind. Then he cocked his head, listening to the answer returned to a tiny plastic receiver in his left ear.

He tossed a few more crumbs out to birds that warily kept their distance. “Yes, I’m sure,” he said. “The young professor from Columbia. They just pulled him out of the harbor. Probably ascended too fast . . . No, Waxman’s yacht is right there, and my guess is he’ll have Caleb in the recompression chamber in minutes . . . If you recall, when we learned Crowe would be diving, a few us felt this possibility was not unexpected, yet our warnings were overruled.” The man paused, listening, then shook his head. “No. I can’t get closer, not without risk.” Another handful of bread crumbs launched into the wind blew back onto his starched pants and his polished leather shoes. “Yes, we have a microphone on the yacht as ordered. Fortunately, it’s in the same room with the hyperbaric oxygen chamber.” He made a scowling face. “Well, at least we did that right.” He nodded, coughed and then tossed the bag, crumbs and all, into the sea. “All right. I’ll wait here and listen in, but I won’t risk exposure. If Crowe has that kind of talent, and he happens to sense something . . .”

The wind kicked up and whipped his jacket open, flinging his tie over his shoulder. Head down, he walked behind two tourists snapping pictures. He opened a pack of cigarettes and spent some time and difficulty lighting one as he walked toward the fortress.

He switched the channel on his earphone’s receiver, and while he waited for the sounds from the boat, he kicked at a rock, sending it off the edge and into the sea. He walked along the breakwater stones toward the vacant citadel, pretending to admire its immense sandstone walls, its grand colonnades, gates and towers.

As if this decrepit hovel could compare with the Pharos.

He risked a backward glance. The activity on the yacht continued, with the other divers surfacing, climbing up to check on their team member.
All aboard
, he mused, smiling as he adjusted his glasses. Then he tapped his ear, increasing the volume. He listened, hearing the tension in their voices, the conflict between the members of the Morpheus Initiative and their leader, George Waxman.
Conflict is good
, he thought.
Might even be in our best interest to get them working at odds, coming at this from different angles
. God knew it was going to be hard enough as it was.

For two thousand years the Keepers had waited, but patience was running thin. He and his fellow Keepers were convinced that the time for passivity had long since passed. A combination of dedicated research and luck had finally led them to the
Key
. And now, knowing it was only a matter of time—time measured in years, not centuries—plans were set in motion.

The Key
.

Several reliable sources had confirmed that it was clos
e:
one of the members of the Morpheus Initiative had it. Now, it was only a matter of finding out which one and answering the larger question of determining if whoever had it even knew what it was.

He turned and looked out across the sea, his gaze sweeping the harbor like a lighthouse beacon. Two millennia. Indeed, patience was running out. But still, they had to be careful.

The Pharos protects itself
.

3

The yacht waited above the dive site, more or less, depending on the drift and the currents that had buffeted Caleb and the other four members of the group that had gone down with him. They had sailed out just a short distance from the promontory at the edge of the Ras el-Tin peninsula, and had anchored just beyond the shadow of the sandstone towers and imposing walls of Sultan Qaitbey’s fifteenth-century fortress—the castle some claimed had been built on the foundation of the Pharos Lighthouse.

And some, like George Waxman, believed the Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, had crumbled and plunged into the sea at this very spot. And here it remained—or at least, its pieces—preserved in the muck on the earthquake-rattled seafloor, inviting discovery for those with the resources to get past the Egyptian authorities and brave the currents, the treacherous reef’s minimal visibility, and pollution.

Holding a tumbler of hundred-fifty-year-old Grand Marnier, George Waxman watched from the railing as they hauled Caleb up over the side.

“Recompression chamber!” Elliot James yelled up to him.

Waxman stifled the urge to celebrate.
Is this it?
“What happened?”

“He touched something,” Elliot said, ripping off Caleb’s mask, pulling off the fins, the weight belt and the buoyancy vest. Elliot was a forty-two-year-old diver from St. Thomas, with a scar on the right side of his neck—a souvenir from a brush with a school of young tiger sharks.

“Looked like the head of a sphinx, or a goddess,” said the other diver, Victor Kowalski. Victor was a New Orleans native, bald and black as night, a veteran Navy Seal, and not without a bit of clairvoyant talent himself. Waxman had found him quite valuable over the years, in more ways than one. Everyone on his team had their talents.

Victor and Elliot had solid scuba expertise and physical strengths to complement their psychic abilities, while the other team members that comprised the Morpheus Initiative—Nina Osseni, Amelia Gaines, Xavier Montross, Tom Ellis, Dennis Benford and Mary Novaka—were all powerful remote viewers. But the members Waxman really had his eye on were the Crowes. Caleb and his mother, Helen, were here while Caleb’s younger sister, Phoebe, the final member of the Initiative, remained back at their home in Sodus, confined to a wheelchair after an unfortunate accident several years earlier. Even so, she managed to be somewhat useful. At times.

A whole family of psychics. Talented remote viewers. Just as he had expected when he first recruited them for the Initiative almost fifteen years ago. He had brought in Helen first, knowing that she would only come with her children. And if either child had any hereditary powers, Waxman would be able to discern that along the way. But after the tragic incident in Belize, everything changed. Helen was still more than willing, but Caleb . . . he blamed himself for Phoebe’s injury. Promptly at eighteen, he’d left the Morpheus team and gone his own way.

Bright kid, scholarship to anywhere he wanted, Waxman recalled. Cruised through Columbia. Teaching now—a professorship in Ancient History. At least he kept that interest alive. And he was here, wasn’t he?

Of course, that was partly a result of Waxman’s doing. He had pulled some strings with Columbia’s Board, then maneuvered Caleb into a slot on a research dive in Alexandria during the same time the Morpheus Initiative would begin phase two of their Pharos Project. Once he’d arrived, Helen had been more than persuasive and convinced Caleb to at least take advantage of Waxman’s offer to use his boat and resources to conduct his own research. Together again. And if Waxman got his way, it would just be the start. He needed Caleb, but he wasn’t about to let on just how much.

Waxman finished his drink and headed down into the lower level, where Victor and Elliot were just closing the door, sealing the tank and setting the dials on the recompression chamber. They stepped away, breathing heavily, and dripping all over his hardwood floors. Scowling, Waxman handed Victor his empty glass. “Fill that.” He approached the chamber and peered inside at Caleb’s twisted body on the cot. The kid’s eyelids were flickering.

Still dreaming? Still seeing visions?
“We need to know what he saw. How long is he going to be in there?”

“Six hours at least today,” said Elliot. “And probably a few hours each for the next couple days until—”

Waxman waved away the details. “He can hear me?”

“Yep, just hit the intercom switch.”

He moved in closer, then turned back. “Oh and Victor, when you return with my drink, bring Caleb a pad of paper and a box of pencils.”

Waxman pulled up a chair and yelled over his shoulder, “And find me that statue’s head!”

4

Caleb awoke with a wheezing, breathless gasp and immediately sat up but reeled suddenly as his head spun in flaring pain. He was in what looked like the inside of a space capsule
:
all white and padded, one narrow cot to sleep on, and a tiny porthole window. A pad of paper, thick, with about a hundred sheets, lay on the floor next to his uncomfortable sleeping accommodations along with a dozen sharpened pencils, all bundled together with a rubber band.

The he heard it:
knock, click, knock, click
. He looked up and nearly blacked out again. He put his head back down and groaned. The air was thin, pure, almost cold.

“That’s right,” came a voice he recognized only too well from the small intercom speaker on the wall. “Concentrated oxygen to go with the pressure treatment.”

Caleb grunted. “Hi, George.” His voice sounded nasally, cartoonish, a by-product of the oxygen inhalation.

“Hello Caleb. Sorry about your predicament. Lucky I was here, and lucky I brought my own recompression chamber. Saved you a trip to the local hospital, where you’d be more likely to die from something other than what got you there in the first place.”

“Yeah, I’m so lucky.”

“Why’d you rise so fast, Caleb? Did you
see
something?”

Caleb rubbed his temples.
A flash of light, the burning Egyptian sky suddenly turning dark as he stepped into the shadow of the Pharos
. He blinked. “Where’s my mother?”

“In talks with the Egyptian Council of Authorities, trying to secure access to the catacombs along the old Canopic Way. Assuring dive permits—”

“A little late for that.”

“We used yours,” Waxman said. Caleb now noticed the face leering in at him from the porthole window. Hair the color of rock salt, wavy and slicked back over a high, triangular forehead; narrow cheekbones and a hard, pointed jaw set below pencil-thin lips. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and from the tip hung a long spindle of ash about to fall. Tendrils of smoke coiled around his face, obscuring his eyes and fogging the window. “Remind me,” Waxman continued, “to thank Columbia for their assistance in our little quest.”

“
Your
quest,” Caleb corrected, trying to sit up as the pressure chamber did its work. “I opted out of the Morpheus Initiative four years ago. Remember?”

“I seem to recall something about that,” Waxman said with a grin. “And again, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

“Tell it to Phoebe.”

“I did. I do . . . every time I see her.”

Caleb narrowed his eyes. “When do you—?”