The Pharos Objective

by David Sakmyster

  “Your mother—”

  “—should have known better. We lost our father, and then, as if that wasn’t enough, we lost our childhood, tramping around through bug-infested jungles and submerged wrecks, all for your cause.”

  “I won’t apologize for that. A better education you couldn’t have asked for.”

  “I didn’t ask for this. Phoebe didn’t—”

  “Caleb, enough. Listen. We’ll have to clear out of this area soon, so let’s get to the point. What did you see down there?”

  Caleb hung his head.

  “Draw it, if you like,” Waxman ordered, pointing to the paper and pencils.

  “Don’t need to,” Caleb whispered.

  “What?”

  “I don’t need to draw it. And it’s nothing. It was nothing.”

  “So, ‘nothing’ almost got you killed?”

  Caleb looked up. “Nothing that will help you. All I saw was the lighthouse. The Pharos. The day before its dedication.” Waxman was silent—a breathless silence. “And . . .”

  “And nothing. Sostratus, the architect, was there, and I was, I don’t know, somehow I was seeing through the eyes of Demetrius—”

  “The librarian?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Yeah, whatever. So Sostratus showed Demetrius around. It was . . . beautiful, majestic, soaring. But, I saw no treasure. I—”

  “But it was here, the lighthouse?”

  Caleb nodded. There had been enough speculation through the ages, since the remnants of the tower, long-wracked by earthquakes and disuse, had at last been shaken loose and crashed into the sea, as to where exactly it had stood. But Caleb’s vision had made it clear. “Yes, the view I had from the top—the orientation of the coast, the landmarks—yes, it was here, at the tip of the peninsula.”

  “Where Qaitbey’s fortress stands?”

  Caleb nodded.

  “Anything else?”

  “No. Yes. I saw the inscription. Sostratus signed the monument, then plastered over it.”

  “Ah,” Waxman grinned. “I read about that, one of the anecdotes in Heinrich Thielman’s study. So it’s true.”

  “If you believe my visions.”

  “Why should I doubt them?”

  Caleb shrugged, thinking of his father, of countless drawings of a man, possibly still alive, held captive in the mountains of Iraq. “Others have.”

  “Well, Caleb, consider me your number-one fan, then. I’m in your corner, I believe you. And I confess, now that I’ve got you here, locked in my vault for the next six hours. I don’t want to let you go, not without something in return.”

  “How about a kick in nuts when I get out of here?”

  “Really, is that all the thanks I get?”

  “Thanks,” Caleb said, turning and limping back to the cot. He lay down. “I’m going to try to sleep it off, and when this is done, I’d like to get back to my hotel. I have a plane to catch in the morning.”

  “No you don’t.” Waxman’s face disappeared. “I, uh, took the liberty of calling the university and explained the situation, explained your near-death experience—”

  “You what?”

  “—and the fact that you have nitrogen narcosis, a life-threatening condition. Air transportation is out of the question. Besides, you need rest. A minimum of two weeks. And your colleagues, they quite agreed.”

  “No, no, no.”

  “Yes, Caleb, it’s for your own good. And your mother, she’ll be here in a few hours to take care of you.”

  “Great.” Caleb sat back, fuming, but he knew Waxman was right. He’d never be able to fly in this condition. He should, by rights, be in a hospital.

  As if reading his mind, Waxman said, “The offer still stands, I can drop you off at the local infirmary and you can take your chances.”

  “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.”

  5

  “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, narro
wed 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.

  6

  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.

  “Here!” he announced. “We’ll make our approach along this trail, then plot out the course to the tomb.”

  “Tomb?” Phoebe asked, eyes brightening. She was definitely her father’s child. She loved anything ancient, especially anything that might be full of mummies and treasure.

  Now, a month later, in the heart of the darkest, deepest valley in the jungle, they’ve found the small pyramid, the tomb of the sixth-century Mayan King Nu’a Hunasco, inside of which lies the vast wealth he had entombed with himself and his wives.

  The knocking sounds of the recompression chamber thrummed in his skull. White walls bleached over the jungle hues for a moment, and Caleb tried to focus, making a half-hearted attempt to re-entangle himself in the present. Focus on the vibrations here, in this chamber, the subtle movements of the waves tugging at the hull. But it was no use. The white chipped away, layer by layer, revealing the alluring scene painted behind it, impatient to be viewed . . .

  Caleb and Phoebe wait on the stones at the top of the tomb an hour after dawn, surrounded by bugs, swarms already alert and hungry, while their mother and the others are still back in their tents, just waking up. “Bug spray’s wearing off.” Caleb slaps at plump mosquitoes with annoyance, trying to imagine some purpose to their lives, some ultimate destiny determining the course of their aerial struggles. He sighs and approaches his sister, and then they both put their hands, palms out, on the cool onyx slab that served as the door to Nu’a Hunasco’s tomb.

  “So now what?”

  Phoebe grins. “We both saw it, right?”

  “I saw something,” Caleb admits. “You were the one that drew it.” He looks around, checking the vine-consumed alcoves, the shadows deep with mystery.

  “There, I think.” Phoebe points to the uppermost stone on the left side of the door—an octagonal block, coated with moss. Caleb pulls out his pocket knife and tries to reach it.

  “Too high.”

  “Let me get on your shoulders.”

  Caleb sighs. “All right, but hurry. I don’t want Mom and George to find out we’re gone.”

  “Having second thoughts?” He bends down and she climbs on his shoulders.

  “About stealing the glory from George? Not at all. But Mom . . .”

  “She’ll be pissed.”

  “Yeah, but she’ll get over it if we find the treasure.”

  “We’ll find it, you and me. We’re a great team. And we’ll show them we’re just as good, that we saw it when they couldn’t.”

  “We did.” Caleb wobbles, trying to keep her stead. “Jeez, you got heavy.”

  “Shut up, I’m in a growth spurt.”

  “Too many Doritos, if you ask me.”

  “What else are we going to eat down here? Now, hold still, I think I’ve got it.”

  Caleb tries to look up into the shadows where her hands are fumbling around the octagonal stone. Then he has the sudden fear that something bad is about to happen—that Phoebe is going to trigger some trap, like in the Indiana Jones movies, and spring-loaded darts will riddle their flesh before a giant boulder pulverizes their bones.

  “Got it!” she shouts, and Caleb hears something above turn with a grating sound that releases a cascade of dust. Coughing, Caleb lets Phoebe down and drops to his knees, just as the stone slab shakes and slides sideways into a thick groove in the stone wall.

  Phoebe quickly pulls out two flashlights from her backpack and hands the bigger one to Caleb. “Ready, big brother?”

  Caleb glances back, expecting a horde of spear-wielding Mayans to burst from the thicket at any moment, but the trees sway and the cicadas sing and the sun glares with blind ferocity that all but pushes him inside the sheltering darkness after Phoebe.

  They descend a straight, narrow staircase, stepping carefully around rubble where the jungle has found its way inside. Vines and roots hug the walls and smother the ceiling. Further down, the steps seem to grow steeper, and Caleb and Phoebe take their time with their footing, shining their lights ahead and, occasionally, back.

  “Thinking about Dad?”

  Caleb looks up, surprised. She rarely mentions Dad, and barely even remembers him. He was shot down when she was only three, but Phoebe has been watching Caleb intently over the past couple years, sympathetic to the internal conflict her older brother has been struggling with. He continues following, then pulls ahead, shining his light into the gloom, adding his brilliance to Phoebe’s steady beam. “Let me lead.”

 
; “I think I’ve seen him too.” Phoebe touches his shoulder.

  He pauses. The cool air is musty, a little rank, full of dust, and the walls are cracked where brown vines protrude. The back of Caleb’s neck breaks out in a cold sweat. He turns, shines the light on her face.

  “When?”

  She chews on her lower lip and it reminds him of how, as a baby with two new teeth, she used to nibble on a piece of cheese. “Sometimes I feel, I don’t know, dizzy, and I sit and the world kind of disappears and then I see this bright white room, and this Middle Eastern man walks in, carrying something shiny and I scream . . .”

  Phoebe’s eyes glaze over.

  “. . . and the walls change color. And suddenly I’m in a desert, and there’s a man in a rusty cage and a dirty dish filled with little white worms and there are scorpions and then . . .”

  Caleb’s mouth is dry as sand. He tries to reach for her but can’t move. “What then?”

  She shrugs, blinks. “I don’t know. Sometimes it all just vanishes and I’m back in the present. Other times I look up and I see the sun, except on top of it there’s this bird’s head and a beak and tiny brown eyes looking down at me.”

  Caleb’s fingers go to his mouth. “The eagle and the sun! The same thing I’ve seen, that I’ve drawn! And Dad . . . tortured in that place.” He wants to run screaming to anyone who will listen—to the police, to the American embassy, to anyone but his mother, who won’t hear of it. But then he tells himself to relax. Maybe Phoebe has just been influenced by his vivid descriptions, and subconsciously she has begun experiencing the same things.

  She squints. “I don’t get this vision often, and it’s not very strong. Mom says it’s nothing. You’ll outgrow it, too, she says, eventually.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will.” Phoebe gives him a nudge back down the stairs. “And Mom says someday you’ll learn to separate the . . . the objective dreams from the others.”

  Caleb scowls. “You even sound like Mom.”

  She shrugs. “You’re my big brother, and even though you’re a real nerd sometimes, I still like you.” She stares at her shoes. “I don’t want you to hate me, too.”