The Pharos Objective

by David Sakmyster

  He glared at her. “I’m not crazy. I know that man. I’ve seen him before.”

  “And that’s not crazy?”

  “No! In Alexandria. He . . . he visited me in the hospital. Gloating that we had failed.”

  Lydia looked over her shoulder at the gondola oaring away, joining three others cutting into the canals. “You can’t be serious. You think someone’s following you after all these years?”

  He glared at her over the ridge of his sunglasses. “Lydia. Tell me now. Tell me if there’s something else going on here. Believe me, I’ll find out.”

  She laughed and gave him a pinch. “Threatening me with your powers? Are you saying I’ll never be able to have an affair, because you’ll be remote viewing my every move?” She pushed back her hair, still grinning. “Guess I should have covered that in our wedding vows. Come on, my love. There’s nothing to hide.”

  She offered the bottle of Orangina and led him out of the plaza. Her fingers caressed his, but he did not return the gesture. He was thinking of Phoebe’s warning, years ago.

  A girl with green eyes . . .

  But by the time they arrived back at the hotel, he had cast the incident in a different light. He’d been hallucinating, imagining the worst. He’d been miserable all his life, and now that he had found a shred of happiness, his subconscious had to dredge up reasons for the dream to fail, to engineer his fall. He wouldn’t let it succeed.

  He had a renewed purpose. As it happened, that purpose now brought him back on the same path as his mother’s. But he planned not to tell her. Not yet.

  This time, the quest is mine, and I have a new partner.

  Victor Kowalski sat on a bench beside the fountain and pressed send on his cell phone. Careful not to look back at the departing newlyweds, he held the phone to his ear, fixed his sunglasses and pretended to stare up at the church’s extravagant architecture. He was dressed in a light blue blazer and gray sweatpants, and wore a Yankees cap. Two cameras hung around his neck, and he was chewing three sticks of strawberry gum. Typical tourist.

  The ringing stopped and he heard Waxman’s voice. “Yes?”

  “She’s made contact.”

  “In person?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then things are getting serious. They must be close.”

  “I was positioned near enough to overhear.” Kowalski snapped his gum. “She told our old friend it wouldn’t be long.”

  “So they’re headed there next?”

  “Yes, although the kid doesn’t know it yet. They’ll be in Alexandria by next week.”

  “Good work. Tail Mr. Gregory, but don’t get spotted. I prefer to have them think we’ve given up.”

  “So, no action against him until . . .?”

  “Until Caleb gets us in.”

  Victor flipped the phone closed. He stood and made his way to the pier, where he hailed a gondola.

  He might as well follow in style.

  7

  Alexandria—June

  “Our meeting in Venice was stupid. Too dangerous,” Lydia said when the man emerged from the shadows in the nightclub alley. Caleb was back at the hotel, a block away, finally resting after nearly two sleepless days of research and work on the codes. They had settled in at Alexandria a month ago, and had started to work immediately.

  “I hadn’t expected him to be so paranoid,” Nolan Gregory said.

  “He has a right to be,” said Lydia, “after your dramatic appearance in the hospital. Was that necessary?”

  “We will see, in time, what was necessary.”

  “That’s not something he’ll ever forget.”

  “All I know is that we need to keep Caleb on the path. Continue to steer his thoughts and dreams back to the Pharos. Otherwise—”

  “Yes, yes I know. Otherwise, we’ll never succeed,” Lydia said impatiently. Then, quietly, with urgency, she added, “But he’s making progress. He’s seen them—the founders! Sostratus and Demetrius. And much more.”

  “Good, good. You must now make him see the rest.”

  “Why not tell him to the truth about who he is?”

  “No. When he finds that out for himself, he’ll understand, and then he’ll lead us to the Key. Any other way could invite a disaster.” Gregory pulled his face back into the shadows. “And another millennium of darkness.”

  A cab’s horn blared into the street, and a trio of laughing young women went running out of the club to their ride.

  She sighed. “I fear I may have to do something drastic.”

  “You have my confidence. I trust you will know the time.”

  Turning, Lydia walked slowly east toward the hotel. Cars rumbled past, and the warm air played with her blouse and tickled her neck. Out in the harbor a few lights twinkled. Dim flickering beams cut through the night over Qaitbey’s fortress.

  Lydia took her time, walking and thinking. And fighting back her emotions.

  She put a hand to her stomach, and began to cry.

  8

  The advance from Doubleday paid for Caleb and Lydia’s hotel suite for the next month. The first book was still selling well across Europe, but only to limited success in the States, probably because they hadn’t had a chance to do any further promotions there.

  Their room overlooked the harbor. And outside, across the Boulevard de la Rosette, they could reach the causeway and walk to Qaitbey’s fortress within an hour. The museum was a short distance away, as were the Municipal Palace and the Zinzania Theater. Near the harbor, where most archaeologists believed the old library once stood, now proudly stood the Bibliotheca Alexandrina—the modern version of the historic library. With construction finishing in 2006, it comprised ten levels, four of which were built underground to further protect the contents from environmental forces. Adjacent to the library was a science museum and planetarium.

  But as exciting as all these attractions were, Caleb and Lydia had little time for sightseeing. Caleb had enlarged the photos of the great seal Phoebe had given him for Christmas years ago. He posted them on a wall and tacked up a bed sheet to cover them when he and Lydia went out. They spent hours each day analyzing every inch of the image, studying every carving, every symbol.

  He sent Lydia out repeatedly, sometimes several times a day, for journal articles or books they couldn’t access online. Most of these she had to order from contacts at the UK Doubleday offices. They acquired some rare seventeenth-century texts on alchemy—Paracelsus, Geber, Hollandus and Kircher. They consulted works by Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, Madame Blavatsky’s three-volume compendium, and so many other books of arcane knowledge. The trick, as always, was to focus on the truly inspired, those derived from the most ancient writings.

  Their hotel suite quickly began to look like Caleb’s boyhood room back in Sodus. Dog-eared copies of books were scattered about, and stacks upon stacks of heavy tomes covered the floor.

  One day late in September, while Lydia was taking a nap, face-down on the couch as several fruit flies buzzed around a plate of dates and prunes on the coffee table, Caleb sat cross-legged before the wall, considering the enlarged photographs. He imagined he was there again, before the grand staff and the entwined serpents surrounded by seven symbols.

  Those symbols were all familiar now, old friends, after fine-tuning his knowledge of alchemy, immersing himself in the subject for the better part of a year. The first four were Water, Fire, Air and Earth and their corresponding planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus. These were the principles of the denser matter, what the alchemists called the elements of the Below; while the realm of the Above hosted the intangible essences of soul and spirit. The remaining three symbols were the Moon, Mercury and, finally, the Sun, often represented as salt, quicksilver and sulfur, signifying the coming together of Above and Below into a new, immortal form of pure essence. The Gold of the soul, the Philosopher’s Stone. Quintessence.

  It took Caleb a long time to finally accept the obvious: that the sequence might be the key. But no matte
r which way around the staff he read the symbols, they were not in the right order.

  When Lydia awoke she found him staring at the sign in the lower left corner.

  “It’s a combination lock after all,” he said.

  “Great.” She yawned, then perked up. “So what’s the combination?”

  Caleb’s eyes were out of focus, and in his mind he pictured a cosmic scene of . . .

  . . . the planets of our solar system whirling about the sun in their elliptical orbits. He spoke slowly, dreamily. “Working backward from the most distant planet they could see with the naked eye, Saturn came first.”

  “Why backward?” Lydia interrupted.

  “The sun was the center of everything. The light they all aspired to.”

  She nodded, as if the truth had been obvious all along. “So then, Jupiter’s next?”

  “Yes. Then Mars. Then Venus, which is also the symbol for the material of Earth. Then Mercury, the Moon and finally the Sun.”

  “Wait, why not the Moon before Venus? It’s between Mars and Venus, right?”

  Caleb shook his head. “I’m guessing that would stump, or kill, most people who thought they’d figured it out and dared to try. No, in the tradition of alchemy, the Moon occupies an elevated station. It’s the second largest object in the sky, dwarfed only by the Sun. Its influence, while subtle, is just as indispensible to life on our planet. And, as if we needed more confirmation, in the alchemical process of turning something into gold, the Moon represents Silver, the stage just before achieving perfection.”

  Lydia smiled thoughtfully. “Okay, so if we spin the seven symbols in the proper order, we can open the door without releasing the water?”

  Caleb considered that for a while, but it still didn’t make sense. He thought about the alchemist’s instructions, the order for transmuting imperfect material into perfection. And finally something clicked into place.

  “That’s the wrong question.”

  “What?”

  “Trying to avoid the water trap—avoiding any of the traps—seems like the wrong way to look at this.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Bear with me a moment. First, let’s consider how the water trap was sprung. Waxman set it off when he turned the Water symbol.” Caleb focused on the symbol for.

  “He started with Water,” Lydia whispered, “but that’s wrong.”

  Caleb nodded. “Saturn is farther away from the Sun than Jupiter.”

  “So it needs to be Saturn first, or Fire, then Water.”

  “Calcination, then dissolution.” His scalp broke out in a sweat. Could it be that simple? As long as you know the right sequence of the visible planets? “The problem,” he said, “is that we know that when the door opens, a devastating flood is released. For that much water to emerge so quickly, the opposite chamber has to be already filled up, waiting for the doors to open.”

  “What chance does that give us, then?”

  “Maybe we’ve overlooked something.” Caleb scanned the photos again and came back to something he had puzzled over earlier. “There,” he said, pointing, “all by itself above the left edge of the seal. It looks like a ring set in the limestone about eight feet above the ground, with a crescent moon symbol above it.”

  “So?” Lydia reached for the bowl of fruit on the table and popped a fig into her mouth.

  Caleb stroked the ragged stubble on his chin. “So why is it there? And is there another one somewhere? I can’t see the other side of the door, but maybe I didn’t photograph far enough. The crescent moon, it’s a symbol for Seshat, Thoth’s wife.”

  Lydia nodded. “She’s the goddess of libraries and writing, I know that. But—”

  “She was also the mapmaker and the designer of the king’s cities, his temples, and so on. One of her symbols is the rope, and in certain Egyptian hymns she was praised for ‘stretching the cord,’ or measuring out distances in the king’s temples and palaces.”

  Lydia looked from Caleb to the photo. “So we get a rope?”

  He nodded.

  “But why? What do we do with it?”

  “The first task of the true alchemist is to purify himself, to burn away and dissolve his ego. To blast away the imperfections.”

  “You mean . . .” Lydia drew in a sharp breath and beamed. “We’re not supposed to avoid the traps.”

  “Like I said.”

  Caleb stood and started pacing. “Think about it . . . the water trap is an effective defense because of its sheer violence. A million gallons of water rush through the door at once and batter around everything that’s not weighted down. The room fills with water, but drains quickly. My guess is, if you’re secured well enough you can withstand it—hold your breath until it drains, and then you’re fine.”

  “But why?” Lydia asked. “Why build the trap that way? Surely there has to be an easier way past the seal?”

  “Yes, but you have to think like they did. Egyptian mystery schools had a different way of teaching—through intuition and experience, symbolism and reason. Imagine an initiate going through this ordeal. Surviving such a watery onslaught would be a transformative, cleansing experience. It would prepare him for the next stage in the process of enlightenment. Think of people who survive a tsunami, clinging to trees, watching their lives, their whole history, wash away. They can’t help but to be transformed by it.”

  Lydia licked her lips. “Only the worthy,” she murmured. “So what comes first?”

  “I hate to say this, but I bet there’s a fire-oriented trap we need to prepare for. Remember the legend about the Muslims who were tricked into almost destroying the lighthouse? The Arab treasure hunters released the tide of seawater and were swept into the harbor, but the few survivors described other horrors: fire, the floor falling away . . .” He thought about it. “I’m sure they didn’t even try the symbols; they just attempted to break down the door.”

  “And maybe that sets off all the traps in sequence?” She walked up behind Caleb and slid her hands around his waist. She pressed her lips to his neck and he smelled figs, along with a hint of her ever-present jasmine perfume. His skin danced with excitement, both from this new revelation and from Lydia’s touch. “Can’t you try to RV the chamber? See the fire defense?”

  Caleb’s throat tightened as if choking on a thick crust of bread. “No, I don’t think so.” It was one thing for visions to visit directly, but quite another to actually invite them in. It wasn’t a step he wanted to take just yet.

  “So we’ll just chance it?” Lydia asked. “Get a rope, or a bungee or something, a harness. And then just pray we’re worthy enough?”

  “I’d rather do this by myself,” Caleb said. “I don’t know if two of us can make it through, and . . .”

  “And,” Lydia gave him a gentle squeeze, “you haven’t forgiven yourself yet for Phoebe.”

  Or Nina.

  Or any of the others.

  Caleb tried to pull away but she held him close. “It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered. “And now’s your chance to make it up to her. We’ll get through that door, you and I. But you’ll need my help. I’ll bring cameras and flashlights, and you’ll have another set of eyes to catch anything you might miss, and—”

  “And it will be twice the danger,” Caleb said, relenting. “But I know you won’t give up. Besides, I don’t really want to go alone.”

  She smiled with him. “So what are we waiting for?”

  “Nightfall.” From his occasional visits after a walk about the city, he knew Qaitbey had become a major tourist site of late, and guards patrolled regularly during the day. At night it was lit up from all angles to provide a visible backdrop of its imposing strength, but Caleb figured they could still slip into the courtyard, hug the shadows and get in to the mosque if they were careful. But they had no special connections this time, so they would have to use bolt cutters on the padlock.

  “Good,” Lydia said. “Then we have time.” She pulled him away from the wall, toward th
e bed.

  It was a moonless night, the air still thick with humidity, resisting the Mediterranean breezes. The stars shone fiercely above the waves, and as Caleb and Lydia crept through the arch in the sandstone wall, Caleb glanced up at the constellations, imagining for a moment he was a Roman soldier storming the great lighthouse, marveling at its flaming beacon thirty stories overhead. He could picture dozens of statues and winged creatures perched on ledges and atop windows punctured into the face of the great tower. And the simple, cunning dedication greeting visitors: Sostratus of Cnidos dedicates this lighthouse to the Savior Gods.

  As silently as possible, he and Lydia stayed in the shadows and ran along the wall to the inner citadel. Four silent cannons observed their approach, and Caleb could almost hear their muffled explosions, subdued echoes from the conflicts of a bygone age. At the back gate, he rummaged through his bag for the bolt cutters, but paused as Lydia knelt by the padlock and told him to give her some light. “We don’t want them posting a guard in case we need to get back down there in the future.” A few twists and gentle stabs with two pins held in her nimble fingers, and the lock clicked open.

  “Where did you learn that?” Caleb asked.

  She merely smiled and winked.

  He heard a noise—a soft, padded footfall—and his heart lurched. Pausing at the threshold, he looked back but saw nothing moving in the starlight-speckled courtyard.

  “Come on,” Lydia said, and glided through the sandstone halls with a purpose, like this was all second nature. Caleb’s sense of unease returned. First, the incident in St. Mark’s Square, then the lock-picking, and now this feeling that somehow she’d been here before.

  “Are you seeing someone? A girl with green eyes . . . ?”

  He put his imagination behind him and followed Lydia’s flashlight beam, which steadily led the way. She climbed to the second floor, and when he joined her he peered out the arched, barred window to see the sparkling lights of the city and the brilliant floodlights around the new library. After a moment’s reflection, they made their way to the great mosque. The heavy waterproof backpack, stocked with all their supplies weighed him down, and when he switched shoulders, he saw something white fluttering above, against the red brick dome.