The Pharos Objective mi-1

by David Sakmyster

“We’ve been scuba diving,” Waxman said, nodding to Victor and Elliot, “but with limited success. We’ll need to focus our energies on that front, see if any of you can find a way in from the sea.”

  “What about Qaitbey’s fortress?” Xavier Montross asked. He was in his thirties, with a thick head of orange-red hair. He was shaped like a soccer player, muscular and lean. He never smoked, drank, or consumed junk food, and always sat as far as possible from anyone else, as if he feared contamination. “Anyone check inside there? Snoop around down in the basement?”

  Something about his eyes made Caleb anxious, as if of all the psychics assembled here Xavier had something, some speck of real power, the ability to shred Caleb’s own meager gifts. He had always given Caleb the creeps. But fortunately, Xavier was the most reclusive Morpheus member, rarely speaking his mind or voicing his visions.

  Helen shook her head. “We have detailed surveys of the structure from the Alexandrian government. Looks like there’s nothing but bedrock accessible from any location. Unless there’s a hidden entrance or tunnel somewhere.”

  Caleb coughed, and his voice cracked again. “We could try sonar and see if we could locate hollow chambers?”

  “It may come to that,” Waxman said, “although getting permission to excavate the fortress or damage the foundation in any way would be extremely difficult, given the level of protection it enjoys as a Muslim historical site.”

  “So we’re back to the sea route,” Helen said. “We know from early writings that the designer of the lighthouse, a brilliant architect named Sostratus, used all sorts of advanced building techniques, including hydraulics, winches, gears and pulleys. We also believe there had to be vents in the harbor where the seawater could funnel in and out to power the internal mechanisms.”

  “Such as traps,” Caleb couldn’t help but say.

  Waxman shot him a look of caution. “Yes, there are those rumors. And maybe Caesar’s papers reveal exactly how to bypass them. If you did have a true vision, maybe Caesar found the door to the lower chambers, but either couldn’t open it… or feared springing such traps if he didn’t open it in the right way.”

  Helen stood up. “If we can find and decipher that ancient document, which miraculously may have been preserved in Vesuvius’s eruption, we might just have the key to the treasure.”

  Dennis scratched his head. “What’s this treasure again? A ton of gold or something?”

  “We don’t know, exactly,” Helen said. “It could be Alexander’s spoils from his conquests across Asia and India. Legends are vague. All we know is that whatever it is, it’s valuable enough that many have died trying to find it.”

  And, Caleb thought ruefully, recalling the father and son who had died before letting Caesar have the scroll, to keep it hidden.

  He took a deep, cleansing breath and looked down at his shoes. As the others talked and made plans for a visit to Herculaneum, he noticed a leather case resting by his feet. Waxman’s bag. It had several folding compartments, but one had been left open slightly, and inside was a folder of formal-looking typed pages. At the top right margin of one sheet was a stamped seal- an eagle’s head in profile atop a banner with a radiant sun in the middle.

  Caleb’s blood went cold as ice water. The tiny hairs stood up on the back of his neck. He looked up at Waxman. Close to Helen, he was talking and waving his hands, flicking ash into the air as she returned his enthusiasm and pointed at various drawings, making connections.

  The eagle… the sun and its rays… He had seen that image, again and again, leaving bloody trails in the nightmares of his father. Seeing it here tied his stomach into barbed-wire knots.

  Helen’s smile dropped when she saw Caleb’s face. But he had slipped out of the chair and was backing away from the table, from Waxman. He turned and stumbled out of the room, muttering that he needed to find a bathroom. Around the corner, he staggered into the men’s room, collapsed into the first stall that smelled as if it hadn’t been cleaned since Vesuvius blew its top, and his stomach heaved.

  Caleb struggled to the sink, washed his face, then looked into the mirror. Standing behind him, against the wall, was a man with long stringy hair over his face, his head down, arms at his side. He wore a faded-green khaki jacket, dirty pants and muddy boots.

  His hands were trembling, his whole body shaking. A mumbling, throaty ramble came from his mouth. Caleb turned, a scream forming — and saw no one. Unable to look in the mirror again, to face either that haunting intruder or the prospect of his own insanity, Caleb crept out of the bathroom, staggered up to his room, collapsed on his bed and descended at once into a gratefully dreamless sleep.

  11

  Naples, Italy

  They arrived at the Bay of Naples on an afternoon favored by sun, warmth and the ever-present scent of olives wafting over the calm waters. The Royal Palace, its immense southern facade of red and gray, with hanging trellises and countless windows, could be seen a mile away as they stood on the front deck of the tourist-laden ferry.

  After docking, they walked down the ramp and passed through a small plaza. Waxman efficiently handled the customs procedures, then strode ahead with Helen, who only glanced back once to make sure Caleb and Nina were following. Helen’s urgency showed in the way her arms swung forward and back and the strides she took bounding up the plaza stairs.

  Her enthusiasm was catching, Caleb thought. Despite the nagging fear that Waxman had tricked him, that this was all part of a setup to get him back into the group, and despite the stationary in the briefcase-and the certainty that Waxman was more than he seemed-this was exciting. He couldn’t help but feel that unavoidable thrill, that rush of adventure scholars only fantasize about while locked away in their libraries or rectangular classrooms in front of bleary-eyed students.

  He and Nina tried to keep up, but soon decided on keeping their own pace. The other members of the team had stayed in Alexandria with instructions to continue remote viewing, focusing on the harbor and a way into the chambers under the lighthouse.

  Caleb felt more than a little awkward being around Nina; he hadn’t had a girlfriend in two years, nothing more recent than a few passing crushes from infatuated students. But compared to those innocent and naive flirtations, Nina was a lioness, a tempting and refined young woman with skin like molasses and eyes so green they blinded him to the very fact he was staring. He had been caught snatching glimpses at her more than twice during the ferry ride. She had merely smiled, amused by his fawning interest.

  “Let’s keep up,” she said in a low voice, nudging him with her elbow as she pulled ahead. She wore a summer blouse, red and white, colors that reminded him of the billowing sails of a visionary boat, and shorts that showed off her golden legs ending in high-heeled sandals. Mirrored sunglasses nestled on the soft-gelled curls of her thick black hair.

  Caleb picked up the pace, his pulse rising in time as he caught up, painfully tearing his eyes away from her body as she climbed up a marble staircase toward the palace.

  Up ahead, Helen and Waxman were talking about how to document this part of the project. “If we find what we’re looking for, the discovery will be documentation enough of our success,” Helen argued.

  They crossed the square as pigeons flew away, parting biblically before them, then resuming their settled positions after they had passed. Caleb held the door open for Nina, whose bright lips peeled back into a playful smile before she slipped through, and gave a lingering glance to the palace grounds, to the lush lawns, manicured rose bushes and polished statues on the terrace overlooking the shimmering harbor.

  Once inside the palace, Waxman directed them away from the crowd of tourists and went to a side door where a dour-faced man in a blue suit waited impatiently. When Waxman introduced himself, the man looked quite relieved.

  “Giuseppe Marcos,” he said. “Director for the Biblioteca Nazionale, the largest collection of books in Italy outside the Vatican archives, here in the Royal Palace.” Caleb took a look around, marveli
ng at the architecture and contents of this first hall alone. Apart from its great collection of Renaissance artwork and sculptures spanning several centuries, the palace also contained the Officina dei Papiri, which analyzed and preserved the ancient scrolls recovered from nearby Herculaneum.

  Despite his lack of personal charisma and his occasional stumbling over English vocabulary, Marcos had a fluid, beautiful voice; in another life he could have been a tenor in the Royal Opera. Nina seemed to adore hearing him speak, sticking close, making the man uncomfortable. Giuseppe briefly covered the palace’s construction in the early seventeenth century, begun as a suitable resort home for Spain’s King Philip III who, ironically, had promised to visit Naples but never quite got there.

  Waxman, in his usual tactless manner, cut off the history lesson and the tour. “Can we move on? We’re short on time, and we came to see the laboratory.”

  Apologizing, the guide led the way, glancing over his shoulder frequently. “This is very irregular, no? We do not get many visitors to see the papyri, or the library. They think it is, how do you Americans say… lame. ”

  “Others might,” Caleb protested, “but I’d like to see your library very much.” He was salivating at the chance to actually touch the leatherbound spines of books hundreds of years old. He pictured lonely monks working away in dusty monasteries, copying down the Classics while the world toiled in ignorance through the Dark Ages.

  Giuseppe smiled. “Well, you will get a look, sir. But I must say, Mr. Waxman and Ms…”

  “Mrs.,” Helen said. “Mrs. Crowe.”

  Caleb saw Waxman make a face Helen missed.

  “Or just Helen,” she added. “Please, Signore Marcos. I realize what we’re asking is very unorthodox, but we have good reason to believe that a certain scroll in your Herculaneum collection is of great archaeological interest to Alexandria.”

  “I respect that, Miss-eh, Helen, but I fear you may have come all this way for nothing.”

  They passed from one marble-tiled corridor into the next, where large tapestries hung side by side, presenting dull-faced members of Bourbon royalty observing the humble approach of visitors through their ancestral home.

  After stepping through a mahogany doorway, Caleb’s heart skipped a beat when he saw a wall-spanning series of bookshelves. He tried to peer around Waxman’s shoulder to see the rest of the library foyer.

  Giuseppe said, “You must understand. Of the two thousand or so scrolls recovered from the excavation at the Villa dei Papiri, we have only succeeded in opening some fifteen hundred. And that has taken two hundred years.”

  They entered the library wing. Then quickly, before Caleb had a chance to peruse the titles or even to see how deep the shelves went, they hurried after Marcos down a central staircase. Caleb grinned and followed quickly. The smell of ages past, of old, musty paper, was exhilarating to him.

  Giuseppe stopped at a brightly lit, bookshelf-lined room that reminded Caleb of his high school library. “The Officina dei Papiri,” their guide said. “Here we work on the scrolls. It is a difficult process. First, we paint the burnt exterior of the rolls with gelatina. When it dries we separate and unroll them, sometimes only millimeters at a time. This is a new process, developed recently by Norwegian papyrologists. It is much better than the previous method-a machine designed by Antonio Piaggio in 1796.”

  He made a depressing face.

  “But you must understand the situation: hundreds of scrolls were lost when the first excavators tossed them into the trash heaps. They believed the pieces carbonizzati to be lumps of coal. Also, early attempts to open the scrolls, they destroyed many. If the scroll you seek is not among those already opened, I fear your odds are not very good.”

  Caleb saw his mother’s expression fall.

  Nina sighed.

  Giuseppe pointed to where seven men and three women, all in white coats, peered into microscopes at tiny fragments. Others worked at aligning blackened shreds on a steel table. Another woman held a magnifying glass and examined some fingernail-sized fragments.

  Caleb cleared his throat. “What if we were to give you some help and tell you where this scroll had been located in Piso’s library?”

  Giuseppe made a perplexed face, as if he feared his knowledge of English had failed. “What do you mean?”

  Helen offered a weak smile. “We may be able to tell you in what part of the library this particular item was stored at the time of the eruption.”

  “That,” he said, looking at them sideways, “would be impressive indeed. I should like to know how you came by such knowledge. However, it would still do no good. All the recovered scrolls were found in great heaps, buried by five-hundred-degree mud, then compressed through time.”

  Waxman coughed. “So you’re telling us you can be of no help?”

  “I am sorry. As I said, you are welcome to look through the scrolls we have already managed to catalog. Mostly we have discovered the writings of Philodemus, a first-century philosopher. Apparently a friend of Piso-”

  “So you’ve come across nothing unusual?” Helen asked. “Maybe something astrological?”

  Giuseppe shook his head. “Regrettably, no. Such findings would be of great interest to me personally.” He spoke under his breath so the others wouldn’t hear. “To be honest, philosophy has always bored me. I spend many, many hours dreaming of finding some treasure map or magical incanta-”

  “So,” Waxman interrupted him again, pointing to a room in the back, where great shelves were stacked with the assorted chunks of what appeared to be black rock, “in there might be what we need, but your little team here won’t get to it for, what… decades?”

  Giuseppe nodded. “Manpower is short, and the process is-”

  “Difficult,” Helen said with a sigh. “So you said.”

  “ Mi dispiace.” Giuseppe shrugged and sighed. “There is always hope that new techniques will aid our search. Some new application of MRI technology perhaps? But until then, this is the way we must work. We know there is also another section of the library still buried, and we are waiting for permission to excavate. Maybe we find thousands more scrolls.”

  Caleb hung his head so he didn’t have to see the expression on his mother’s face.

  “But it is ironic, no?” Giuseppe smiled, and he seemed surprised that his guests didn’t join in the joke. “Don’t you see? Vesuvius, the very event that caused such destruction, also preserved these scrolls. They exist far beyond the normal lifespan of papyrus and ink. Frozen in time, just waiting”-he motioned to the lab and the shelves and the people all diligently poking and teasing the material free with tweezers-“waiting here for future generations to give new life to history.”

  Caleb lifted his head, and gave him a smile. “Just like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts were preserved in caves or underground.”

  “Yes, yes. These scrolls are like… who is it, Rip Van Winkle? They go to sleep for a long time and wake up to a different world. And best of all, they escape the elements and the persecutions, the fanatismo of book burning and intolerance of the Dark Ages.”

  Caleb thought for a minute, and was about to give away their real purpose. He was about to say how the same thing applied to the lighthouse: if there really was some kind of treasure down there, the earthquakes had sealed it in and prevented intrusion by another ten centuries of curiosity-seekers and treasure hunters. Sealed it in, possibly, until technology-or our developing psychic powers-could offer a way inside. Maybe that time was now. As much as he hated to admit it, he was starting to feel the contagious sting of his mother’s obsession.

  Waxman pulled Helen out by the elbow. In the stairwell he said, loud enough for Caleb to hear, “A wasted trip, then, unless we can RV the exact scroll and then wait for these guys to unroll it and hope we can actually read something of what’s left.”

  “I know. But there has to be another way.” Helen looked away from him and met Caleb’s eyes. “We’ll review the scrolls they’ve already
translated-”

  “But it doesn’t sound like they’ve found it.” Waxman shook his head at Caleb as he walked past. “Thanks for the wild goose chase.”

  After they all went back up the stairs, Caleb returned to the library. He thanked Giuseppe and shook his hand. Then he lingered for a moment, looking about the room with envy. Every one of those scholars in there, peering into the creases of time… he wanted to join them, wanted to pull up a microscope and hunker down for hours, days and weeks, sifting through the past. But that dream would have to wait.

  He found Nina in a courtyard, standing between the paws of a massive marble lion. Sunlight danced among the ferns and tomato plants, and a large iron fountain bubbled nearby. The scent of espresso carried on the breeze from a street-side cafe. They were surrounded by three-story walls lined with gorgeous balconies and doorways beckoning into splendid rooms. Through two archways in the western wall Caleb could see the colorful sails of the pleasure boats basking in the glittering Bay of Naples.

  Helen and Waxman were standing in the shadows under the east section, engaged in a heated discussion. Helen waved her hands, at times pointing in their direction, then to the ground. Her bright shawl made her stand out, even among the European tourists in their colorful outfits and wide-brimmed hats.

  Nina playfully put her hand into the stone lion’s mouth to feel its teeth. “So what do you think they’re talking about?”

  Caleb shrugged. “Probably blaming me for slowing down their project.”

  “Probably,” she said, laughing and petting the lion’s head. “Sorry Caleb. Just kidding. You know, your mother thinks you’re the most powerful psychic she’s ever seen.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true.” Nina tilted her head, resting it against the lion’s mane as she stared around the courtyard with a contented eye, as if she imagined herself a princess and this whole palace was hers. “It’s true. I heard them talking earlier, on the boat. She told Waxman that you seem to pick up things without even trying, unlike the others. Visions just come to you.”