The Pharos Objective mi-1

by David Sakmyster

  “-above and below.”

  “Exactly.” He calmed down and gently picked a glass shard out of his left palm. “The door only opened a fraction, and for two millennia afterwards, the Church and the armies of man have valiantly done their best to slam that door shut again. But once opened, the stubborn influences are hard to put back.”

  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.

  2

  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.”

  “Pity, hatred, fear-whatever you feel about
me-I don’t care, so long as you give me what I need.”

  Caleb struggled again, then gave up and looked around. “So he was here for how long?”

  Waxman made a dismissive motion with his hand. “Seven, eight years? And he was convinced he was in Iraq. We had film on the walls, sand everywhere, we pumped in the sounds of the desert, battle. Brought in Middle Eastern men to perform the beatings and torture, it was all perfect.”

  “But he was my dad,” Caleb whispered, and a smile formed out of his rage. “He knew, and he tried to tell me, but I was too young to understand.” I wasn’t ready. Caleb thought again of his last vision of the sea and the waves, and a boat forever on the move. And suddenly, with a chill, he understood. “So, you knew all along. Knew it wasn’t Alexander’s gold.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then, my father knew…” Again Caleb saw that boat from his most recent vision and the father talking to his son. In a flash, he saw another boat, then a ship, then a galley, then a swift clipper-a succession of maritime vessels down through the centuries, all with some form of white and red coloring, at different ports, on different seas. Sometimes at night, with burning lanterns on their masts, lighting the way, always moving, always afloat.

  “You’re sure slow, kid.”

  Caleb’s heart was thundering, his flesh crawling. He was slow. How had he missed it? With all the focus on his mother, and caring for Phoebe, he didn’t realize what the visions were showing him.

  “It’s me,” Caleb said at last. “You wanted me, after Dad died.”

  Waxman’s voice shifted lower. “Unfortunate that he couldn’t survive… the stresses.”

  “Or did he make you mad?” Caleb asked. “Maybe give you the wrong sequence for the codes?”

  Waxman ignored him, and by his refusal to respond, Caleb knew he was right.

  Good for you, Dad!

  Finally, Waxman spoke. “For a time I’d hoped your father had chosen Phoebe. She would have been much easier to deal with, and just as capable-”

  “-of keeping the secret,” Caleb finished. I can’t believe it. Dad left me all his work, all those documents, maps and drawings. And the stories, all those stories. “It’s us,” he said at last. “We’re the Keepers. The true Keepers. The descendents of Metreisse.”

  “Your grandfather was one,” Waxman said. “Then he passed the secret on to your Dad, and he should have given it to you.”

  “But he didn’t.” Caleb tried to glare through the light. “You took him too soon, and he didn’t have time.”

  “Sorry about that, but I wasn’t getting any younger, and your Dad resisted too much. Something I hope you won’t do, for your sake, and for your sister’s.”

  There it was. The threat he had been anticipating, but dreading. His time in the Alexandrian prison had been sufficient preparation for anything, he thought, and he was confident he could coax his consciousness from his body to escape whatever physical agony Waxman could inflict for as long as necessary. But he couldn’t protect Phoebe. And he had to. He couldn’t let her be hurt again.

  “So, kid. What’s it going to be?”

  Caleb made up his mind. Dad’s shown me the way. He would trust in fate. He would trust in the lighthouse. Smiling, he told Waxman he knew where the eighth key was, and he would take him to it. All the while, he kept repeating to himself the one mantra he could now call his own.

  The Pharos protects itself.

  3

  Sodus Bay — December 17

  Hide the secret in plain sight.

  Caleb stood on the hill overlooking the bay at dawn. The small farmhouse lay covered in a thin layer of snow, and icicles hung from the lighthouse railing, forty feet up. Phoebe sat in her chair in the kitchen, and Caleb could see her through the open door, watching carefully. Two men stood at her sides, wearing dark glasses. Caleb got the message, loud and clear.

  “Your dad never spoke of a ship,” Waxman said, squinting through his own dark glasses down the hill to the ice-covered bay glinting with sunlight, sparkling in the frosty air.

  “Maybe,” Caleb said, his lips curling up, “you never asked him the right questions.”

  Waxman turned his head and glowered. “Well? Are we going?”

  Old Rusty creaked and groaned as Caleb set foot upon her deck, treading carefully on the icy surface, with Waxman following. His breath cascaded around his face, and his hands shivered in his coat pockets. But his soul was soaring despite the threat to Phoebe. And he smiled.

  At last Caleb arrived, standing on his legacy. He couldn’t help laughing, and wanted to spin and leap about like a young boy. He longed for those days chasing Phoebe around the deck, hiding behind the red-and-white-striped masts, ducking into the wooden deckhouse. So many memories. And then Dad, urging us to play here. He knew it would stick in our minds. He had talked this ship up as their property, a member of the family, even though it had been decommissioned and docked for good. Its red hull was streaked with barnacles and muck, the paint chipped, the steel rusted. The masts were bent and covered with seagull excrement. Old Rusty had sat here all this time, waiting patiently.

  “What’s its name?” Waxman asked, and for a moment Caleb shuddered.

  “Don’t know,” he said truthfully. “Old Rusty is all we ever called her. And boats are feminine, George. She’s not an ‘it.’”

  “Shut up and take me to the key.”

  Caleb bowed and swept his arms toward the door to the deckhouse. “After you.”

  Following Waxman, Caleb glanced up the hill, and could see the tiny figures in the kitchen. Phoebe watched nervously. He waved to her.

  She’ll understand, he hoped.

  “There it is,” Caleb said, pointing to the large gold-plated key, about six inches long, hanging over the cast-iron stove. The deckhouse interior was a mess. After they had closed down the museum, the items in here just collected dust. The windows were grimy, caked with dirt and sand, and now ice. The compass over the steering wheel was shattered, the tiny bunk bed cots brown and molded.

  I used to nap there, he thought with disgust. Phoebe on the top. After playing all morning, they would make hot chocolate and sip their drinks and tell each other grand stories about their naval conquests in the East Indies or some exotic port, and then they would snooze for an hour before running back up the hill for dinner.

  Waxman warily pulled the key from the wall, as if expecting a booby trap, some vicious metal contraption to slice off his hands. Caleb was surprised he didn’t make him take it down.

  Waxman slipped the key into his pocket, after first looking it over. “Doesn’t look that old,” he said.

  “Probably re-cast several times,” Caleb said. “Although I wouldn’t know. I only just figured this out. Thanks to you.”

  Waxman frowned, unsure if Caleb was complimenting him or still hiding something.

  Go on, Caleb thought. Take your prize and go.

  “Phoebe dies if you’re lying to me,” he promised.

  “I know.”

  Waxman eyed Caleb carefully. “I still don’t trust you.”

  “Sorry. What more can I do? This ship is the legacy Dad left me. There’s the key.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” he said, tapping the gun in his other pocket, “you and your sister are coming with me.”

  Before they left, Caleb said goodbye to his mother. Elsa sat cowering in the corner, but he convinced her everything would be fine. They would be back soon, and if she could just continue to care for Mom, he would be grateful.

  So he knelt by his mother’s bed and he kissed her forehead, ignoring Waxman clearing his throat in the doorway. “We’ll be home soon,” Caleb whispered. “I love you.”

  When he stood, he thought he saw a flicker of awareness. But her hands didn’t move, and her chest barely rose.

  Caleb turned and walked out, but stopped and looked first at a picture of his grandfather and his Dad, shaking hands while Old Ru
sty lay in pristine condition, sparkling in the background.

  4

  Alexandria

  Phoebe and Caleb stood on the pier outside the entrance to Qaitbey and watched the frenzy of activity in the water and all around the causeway. Helicopters circled overhead, news trucks stood idling with camera crews filming scenes of the fort and the shoreline, running their pre-segments. They pointed out the new Alexandrian library, its brilliant steel-reinforced glass rooftop blazing in the sun. They spoke of its predecessor and lamented the loss of knowledge, but hoped this new building could regain some of that former glory. Emergency vehicles stood off to the side, ready if necessary. Four police cars and two ambulances were in position.

  “It’s all a sham,” Phoebe said, wrapped in a black shawl and trembling in the morning winds. “Waxman has it all planned out.”

  Caleb nodded and recalled Waxman’s words from an hour earlier, just before he’d gone into the sea with his team of six divers. They had chosen the underwater route, going in through the ascending passage so as not to give away the Qaitbey entrance and encourage future investigations. Waxman had announced to the public that his team of archaeologists had reached a breakthrough and discovered an entrance point that seemed to fit with the legends.

  “This is going to end the controversy before it even begins,” Waxman had told Caleb, with his mask hanging around his neck. “There won’t be any more Alex Prouts running around claiming conspiracies.” And there it was, confirmation of Caleb’s suspicion that it hadn’t been the Keepers who had killed Prout.

  “We’ll film our dive, and then we’ll document the dramatic descent to the final door, and inside…” Waxman made a grinning, devilish face. “Just like Capone’s vault, that televised fiasco back in the eighties? I’m going to take the fall on this one. I’ll be the laughing stock,” he said, thumping his chest like a primitive. “There will, of course, be nothing inside.”

  “Because you will have already removed and destroyed everything.”