David Sakmyster - The Pharos Objective

“Anything else?”

“Yes. I don’t know what it means, but I kept hearing a baby crying. Wailing actually. The whole time while she was drowning you.”

“A baby?”

“Yeah. Like I said, weird.” She gave a wistful smile. “Probably I was getting your visions mixed up with my dreams.”

He reached for her. “Oh, sis, I’m so-”

“I know.” She sniffed, then pushed Caleb away. “So anyway, are we going to do this? Because if we are, you should prepare to get outmatched by your baby sister again.”

Later, Phoebe would say she hadn’t seen anything. Only a confused jumble of scenery, with no people. A land of hills, forests and rivers. And rain, lots of rain. She lingered too long in the setting, and when Caleb shook her, after what had seemed like hours, it was over.

Caleb’s vision began at once, as if it had been waiting there, expecting him to join…

… eighteen men and two women standing under the stars in a clearing, surrounded by a stone circle made of immense blocks. They are all wearing gray robes with planets and stars stitched onto the black fabric. Seven torches burn in a straight line toward a smaller stone to the northeast, upon which a large burning brazier sends its smoke into the air. Overhead, the moonless night is clear, the stars bold and close, peering down through the terrestrial curtain to watch the spectacle.

One of the elders steps forward. He is a white-bearded, hunched-over man, but with a surprising vigor about him. “We are here to discuss how to handle Metreisse. I had hoped he would honor tradition and come to our gathering, but it seems he has fled.”

“Kill him,” says one in the back of the crowd.

“Find him first,” says a woman leaning on a twisted staff entwined with ivy. “Find him and see if he’s the one.”

“We know he’s the one,” says the first speaker. “Who else could have learned the way past the traps?”

“Are we sure someone did?”

“Yes. Our watchmen reported seeing a cloaked figure enter the ruins of the Pharos last month during the lunar eclipse. This intruder was underneath the structure for many hours. When he emerged, my spies say he sought them out, called them from their hiding places, then gave them something to tell us. ‘Tell your masters that I have found the final Key,’ he said. ‘And I will hide it for all time, as long as your interests diverge from our original purpose. I have not entered the vault, and no one else shall until it is time.’”

“How dare he?” someone in the front mutters.

“He dares,” says the other female, “because he believes he follows the will of Sostratus.”

“Sostratus lied,” a new voice speaks up. “We all know this. Once, Sostratus did the world a favor and protected the great works from the centuries of coming darkness. But he did not intend us to wait this long!”

“And wait for what?” asks the first female.

“It is decided, then.” The elder steps into the center of the circle and raises his arms. “We are to seek him out. As long as it takes. Seek, and retrieve this key, whatever it is. Determine how to use it.”

“Do we have any idea where he went?”

“Only that he sailed east into the Mediterranean aboard a galley.”

“Then that is where we shall start.”

One man who has been silent up until now steps forward. “And if we fail to find him in our lifetime?”

The elder sighs and looks wearily at his feet. “Then the search will continue in the next.”

When Caleb came back into the present, it was with calm, relaxed breaths. His eyes fluttered, and he blinked in the somber light. Phoebe sat in front of him, chewing on a Snickers bar.

“How is it that you’re not fat?” he asked.

She grinned and made a muscle in her right arm. “Tennis, remember? What did you see?”

He told her.

“So, someone had figured out the puzzles, found a way past the traps.”

“Someone with the gift,” Caleb said. “We know Metreisse could remote view, or at least he claimed to have that power.”

“And yet, if he found the treasure, did he really leave it there?”

“Seems like it. Or maybe, having viewed the way past the traps, he never actually opened the door. It sounds like he considered himself bound by his ancestors’ pledge to keep the treasure safe.”

“So how do we use this information? And what did Gregory mean by it?”

“I don’t know,” Caleb said. “It has something to do with me, though. And… what?”

Phoebe was gaping at her laptop screen. “Something just happened. My screen flickered like it does whenever a new program starts up. Weird.”

She bent over the keyboard and moved to a new program. “Just checking something… Oh no!”

“What?” he stood behind her and looked down.

She pointed to the first item on the list. “The file. I had saved all the scanned photos in one big file, and someone just accessed it and deleted it. It’s gone.”

“Where?”

“Checking…” Phoebe pulled up a couple files, checked her emails, then threw up her hands. “I don’t know. It’s not even in the temp folder any more. I could scan everything back in, but-”

“But someone else has it.” Caleb leaned in. “Did they get it all?”

“Yep.”

He cursed. “Who has access to your computer?”

“I don’t know. I was online, so either someone came snooping and grabbed this file, or I had a virus put on my laptop at some point, a virus that let someone else spy in on me and steal what they wanted.”

“That’s just freakin’ great!” he said, throwing his pencil. “The Keepers have it.”

“Maybe,” Phoebe said, frowning.

“What do you mean, ‘maybe’? Who else could it be?”

“I don’t know. But I’m worried that it could be someone in the Morpheus Initiative.”

“Come on, those guys? They…” Caleb stopped and looked at her closely. “But you’re not suspecting them.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You know who I’m thinking about.”

He stood up and grabbed his things.

“Waxman.”

After several attempts to reach them and getting only voicemail, Caleb wheeled Phoebe out to the street and a waiting cab. The sixty-mile drive back to Sodus took two and a half hours. The roads were slick. The rain had turned back to snow, and there were cars in the ditches every few miles. Fortunately the cab driver had a four-wheel drive and a strong sense of self-preservation. Even so, they skidded several times and fishtailed twice into traffic, barely missing oncoming cars.

When the cab pulled up to the house, Caleb got Phoebe out of the cab and into her chair, then helped push her through the snow up the driveway.

“No cars,” Caleb observed. “And no lights on inside.”

“Shit,” Phoebe said.

The house was empty.

“I don’t believe this,” Phoebe said once they were inside. “Not Mom too! She wouldn’t just leave us.”

“Unless she believed it was in our best interest not to come along.” He continued looking around the kitchen and the living room, where new drawings hung on the walls and lay scattered about the tables. “I don’t need to RV the scene. I can imagine Waxman telling her that it’s best they go on their own and get a head start without us. I bet he reminded her about what happened in Belize.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Phoebe said. “We’re different now, and besides, look at my condition! For all of Sostratus’s genius, I doubt he was progressive enough to include a handicapped access ramp for me.”

Caleb continued digging through papers, scrutinizing the drawings. Everything lined up for the first six puzzles. “I don’t see anything about the Sun, about that final block. You didn’t-”