David Sakmyster - The Pharos Objective

“All right, what the hell do you want?”

“I want two weeks, Caleb, just two weeks.”

“Of what?”

“Your time.” His face at the window again, beaming. “Your talents. The paper, the pencil… your visions. That’s all. Join the Morpheus Initiative again, just on a temporary basis.”

Caleb shook his head. “I’d be a waste. This is the first vision I’ve had since… since Belize.”

“It’s like riding a bike, I hear.” Waxman grinned. “You never really lose it.”

“What makes you think I can help?”

“Call it a hunch. Come on, kid. Spend some time with your mom, live in luxury on my yacht or at the five-star hotel in the city, not that dump you’ve been staying at. Just come to the sessions, try to remote view the targets, and let’s see if together we can’t solve one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world.”

Caleb held his head as the knocking sounds intensified and his temples throbbed in time to the pulsing of the boat’s engines. Again he thought of his father, surrounded by all those dusty texts; he thought of the two-story lighthouse above his childhood home, the long shadow it threw over the grass on summer days when he and Phoebe would chase each other on the hill over the bay.

“All right, I’ll help,” he whispered.

“Fantastic-”

“But not for you.”

“Fine,” Waxman said.

“And not for Mom, or even for Phoebe.” He looked up. “I’m doing this for my father. If I find it, if I help locate the entrance, the passageway or whatever it is you’re all looking for, I’ll have done it for him. For his memory.”

Waxman nodded, grinning. “Whatever works. Glad to have you back, kid.”

“Where’s Helen?” George called out when he returned to the yacht’s lounge. The motors were running, with Elliot at the wheel, turning the ship back toward the harbor as the sun started its long descent over the spires and mosques, over the scintillating glass dome of the newly completed Alexandrian library. In the lounge he found Victor and Mary watching the LCD screen, catching up on CNN. Behind the bar sat the dark-skinned Italian, Nina Osseni, with short curly hair and piercing green eyes. She wore a tank top that exposed her shoulder tattoos: Egyptian symbols, the two eyes of Horus, left and right. She leaned over in a pose at once seductive and restrained.

She was young but perfectly suited to Waxman’s needs. He had recruited her right out of Annapolis, where she had been planning for a career at the FBI. She knew seven languages besides her native Italian, including Egyptian and Saudi; she was skilled in hand-to-hand combat; proficient in most firearms, with a specialty in handguns; and to top it all, her psychic scores were off the charts.

“Haven’t seen Mrs. Crowe yet,” Nina said. “But we have another.. situation.” She showed him two small dime-shaped objects with wires sticking out of them. “Found these on the boat just after the last sweep. We must have been careless.”

Waxman bristled. “What else?”

Nina angled the silver-plated Dell laptop slightly so that only Waxman could see the screen. It displayed a familiar man, the one on the pier, in his gray suit. “I took this with the zoom lens while you were talking with the Crowe kid. He’s on shore, trying to be discreet.”

Waxman smiled. “Not too good at it. You run the facial-recognition program against our database?”‘

“Of course.”

“And?”

“It’s Wilhelm Miles.”

“Ah, Miles.” Waxman filled his drink, took a long sip. “Must be the son. The father took ill last year.”

“Died two weeks ago,” Nina said.

“Very good. So, this is indeed a lucky break. Gives us the edge.” He met Nina’s eyes. “You know what to do?”

Nina’s upper lip curled slightly and her eyes sparkled. “Looking forward to it.”

She closed the laptop, nodded to Elliot and Victor, who were busy talking about the dive, and left the room. Waxman walked outside and watched the approaching shore, keeping his focus on the waving flags over the Qaitbey fortress. He blinked, narrowed his eyes and, in the heat, imagined the Pharos, imagined it as Caleb had seen it-nearly complete, with the scaffolding tracking up along the sides, the great mirror settling into place, and Sostratus at the base, arms folded, smirking with the knowledge of a secret he alone held.

But not for much longer.

Waxman thought of his most valued passenger, down in the recompression chamber. Two thousand years was long enough. Some secrets were not meant to last.

Five hours to go.

Caleb dreaded what was to come, alone in his chamber for five more hours. Nothing to do but think. And possibly… He eyed the sketchpad. Waxman had sent the other divers out looking for the statue’s head that he’d dropped. If they could find it, or some other relic, maybe he could spend this time productively, trying to return to the vision to finish it.

Caleb sighed. He probably didn’t need the head. His visions had never been dependent on touch or proximity. The images of his father, tortured in that Iraqi cell, were proof enough of that. Although, back then he had been at home, sometimes in his father’s room, among his books, his precious books and notes and drawings. Maybe there was a connection.

He reached for the pad, pulled out one pencil. He pressed the graphite tip to the page, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and started. He would let his subconscious be the artist; and once set free, it would steer wherever it willed, wherever…

Caleb opened his eyes. His hand, pausing only for a moment, went right to work, sketching a distinctly Mayan pyramid set among roughly drawn jungles. A stone staircase, worn and chipped, leading up to a great door, a door Caleb feverishly colored in, dark.

Black.

Onyx.

He broke out in a sweat, blinked, and the drawing took on a life of its own, tugging him into it.

A humid blast of air, the scent of cocoa and papaya, the buzzing of insects, the wind through the palms.

He gasped, and his eyes rolled back in his head. “No,” he whispered, but then he realized this, too, was inevitable. He wasn’t done suffering, paying for his mistakes.

“No…”

“Yes! Come on!” Phoebe bounds up the steps ahead of him. She’s only twelve, but she is so quick. Her auburn hair is tied back in a pink scrunchy, her t-shirt stained with mud and dust, her jeans rolled up over her ankles. Caleb follows more cautiously, seeking precise footholds on the crumbling stairs. He pauses and looks back down, forty feet below, to where the jungle greedily consumes everything beyond the base of the pyramid, stretching for miles in every direction.

Back to the north, almost half a mile, is their base camp. Their mother is there with George Waxman and two others. They are all so excited; this is the first inland mission for the Morpheus Initiative. Last month they spent a week in seclusion in Mexico City while Phoebe and Caleb stayed in their room, subsisting on enchiladas and bad attempts at American hamburgers, doing nothing but playing War and Go Fish, and reading, of course. Caleb was always reading. Seven books that week, much to Phoebe’s dismay. But then it happened: Helen came in one morning, looking haggard, but excited.

“We found it!” she exclaimed, and then brought Caleb and Phoebe into the smoke-filled conference room they’d reserved, a room full of drawings, taped sequentially on the walls, all showing a pyramid and a black door. Then distant shots of landscape, and colored thumbtacks placed on geological maps.

“Found it,” she repeated, and approached Waxman where he pored over a map with a compass and a protractor.