David Sakmyster - The Pharos Objective

He kept talking, eyes glazing over and seeing beyond Caleb and the plane itself. “I believe a few intelligent men, kings and priests, understood the threat and tried their best to destroy these elements, or at least alter them so the rest of us wouldn’t be tempted. Witchcraft, demonism, occultism-these were the names given to any study of the esoteric, any attempt to link the two realms and travel from ours to theirs or vice versa. We punished these crimes by torture, death and enslavement, but still the sickness remained, refusing to be eradicated. Secret societies continued the forbidden practices, and kept the fragile link operating, only barely.” He gave a look of disgust. “In time the defenses were weakened, and now we have Ouija boards, seances, crystals, psychic hotlines and palm readings, New Age movements. And people are moving back towards such beliefs.”

Caleb shook his head. “And the sacred texts under the Pharos.. ”

“If released, they will only lead people to eternalmisery and damnation.”

“So what will you do?” Caleb asked, already fearing he knew the answer.

Waxman leaned forward, with unblinking eyes boring right into Caleb’s soul. “Destroy them all. Every tablet, every scroll. Every single letter of every word.”

Caleb couldn’t breathe.

“Do you see? Do you, Caleb? What’s a single terrorist hiding out in the hills? What’s another bombing compared to the widespread, wholesale change in consciousness that will come if these books are released? Our entire way of life will be torn apart. There will be no privacy, no place to hide. And good, honest people will be eternally plagued by the shades of the other world, every day, every hour… every minute. Their pasts will be their present, and their sins can never be left behind.”

Caleb found his voice, and decided now was the time to play his trump card. A glimpse he had seen, a flash of something, more like a peek behind a stage curtain just before the change of a set. “What is it you see, George?” He forced himself to smile. “Weren’t you a good child? Mama’s little boy?”

What happened next happened too fast. There was a primal scream, a flash of white hot light as Waxman rocked out of the chair, and suddenly Caleb tasted blood and felt a rush of flaring pain up the side of his face.

Then his world went dark.

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

When Caleb awoke, he was lying in something that looked like a dentist’s chair, all stainless steel, with leather straps cinched around his arms and legs and neck. Four silver lamps on coiled stands surrounded the chair. They looked like the mechanical eyes from The War of the Worlds, and just as menacing. He struggled briefly and then relaxed.

“Welcome back,” said a voice from the glare. Caleb squinted, but could only see a pair of black shoes pacing on a white floor. He smelled cigarettes. Menthols.

“Thanks,” he muttered. “Did I miss the in-flight movie?”

“Cute. Listen, Caleb. You know where you are?”

“Not really. It’s a little too bright to see.”

“Don’t give me that. You have other eyes.”

“Yes, but they don’t always work.”

“Lucky for you.” He paced some more. “You’re in my lab at Langley. The only remaining office of the Stargate program. You and I are going to get to work very shortly. I don’t expect this will take long.”

“It’s good to have realistic goals,” Caleb whispered, straining his neck muscles. His head throbbed and he felt sick to his stomach.

“It’s a simple goal,” Waxman said. “An easy target.”

“The last door,” he said.

“It had that crazy symbol on it, and what looked like a keyhole. Nothing else in the room. Nothing on the walls, ceiling or floor.” Waxman paused. “But then again, I’m guessing you already saw it. Am I right?”

“Yes.” He thought now wasn’t the time to be difficult. Not yet. He had to think, to see a way out of this. Unfortunately every scenario he imagined came up with him dead and Waxman entering that vault as a bringer of destruction. Caleb imagined the firemen of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 coming with flamethrowers to incinerate all the forbidden knowledge of the ages.

His success, my failure, will be the final triumph of darkness over light, of ignorance squashing truth, he thought. It would be the last surrender of a noble plan designed to protect the one great secret, the answer to every aspect of our suffering and all our earthly yearning.

“So what’s it going to be?” Waxman asked. “Help me willingly, or do I do what I’m best at?”

Caleb swallowed, and for an instant, a drawing popped into his thoughts: one of his earlier ones, of his dad in a cage, poked at with blood-red spears, while that symbol hung overhead.

And then he got it.

Finally. Completely. He understood.

With an agonized cry, twenty years of emotion erupted at once. His chest heaved, his muscles strained. He kicked and struggled and screamed and howled into the void.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Waxman shouted. “I haven’t even touched you yet.”

“Dad,” Caleb whispered, choking on the sobs. “Dad. You were here.”

And the room fell silent. The pacing stopped. Even the humming of the electric lights seemed to fade into a soundless abyss.

Finally, Waxman spoke. “I thought I had that covered. He had no idea.”

Caleb forced himself to breathe, to calm down, to concentrate, to go with the clue Waxman had just left him. “Dad never went to Iraq!” Caleb knew he was right. “You brought him here, but tried to convince him-what, that he had been shot down?”

After a full minute of silence, Waxman let out a deep sigh, like it contained a painful secret he had been dying to tell for years. “One of my many subjects in the early years was a man named Howard Platt. Worthless as a seer, he never followed directions and never located a single target. But one time, when I asked him about the greatest threat to our security, he spoke of the Pharos Lighthouse, something I hadn’t even known about at the time. His ramblings were strange, but just a little too detailed to pass over. I had to follow up on it.”

Waxman lit up another smoke and puffed out a thick cloud that filtered into the bright light. “My team of analysts rounded up all the information on the subject, and what came back as a possible hit was a certain thesis written by one Philip Crowe.”

Caleb could only watch and listen.

“And that is how I came into your life, Caleb. At first, I had no idea of your father’s psychic talents. I only wanted his knowledge of the lighthouse. Then I learned what he could do, and how he could be used. But first, he spilled his guts. He told me of Sostratus, of the library. Of the Keepers, and most importantly, the existence of the traps.”

“But not how to bypass them.” Caleb said, already admiring his father and thinking of ways he might be able to follow his lead, ways to give Waxman only enough rope to hang himself. Certainly Dad hadn’t revealed the right order of the first seven traps. Or maybe he had deliberately misled him and said Water was first, hoping Waxman would try it and be killed in the process. If Dad had managed to keep that secret, then surely he hadn’t mentioned the eighth puzzle, the final key.

Waxman grunted. “Philip was tough, I give him that. But he broke when I needed him to. He gave me the purpose I had been looking for, the way out of my personal hell. And he showed me the way to redemption-the redemption of the whole human race. Platt’s ramblings led me to your father, and your father led me to the Pharos. And by God, I will destroy those books and save us all.”

Caleb had to laugh. “I pity you.”