The Cydonia Objective (Morpheus Initiative 03) (10 page)

#

Orlando zeroed in
on the boy at once. At first he was but a shadow, a darker silhouette, like a jellyfish bobbing in the blue depths. But the motion was there, pulling at the remote-vision.

Ask the right question, get the right answer.
Orlando smiled as he dropped deeper into the trance, willing himself to see it—to follow someone outside of the shield, someone else who tracked the girl.
Come on, come to focus. Ah, there you are.

The boy, returning to the caves at night. With a knapsack full of an assortment of dried meats and a few nuts, a dirty bottle of water, an oil lamp, and a blanket. He stopped before the great sandstone cliff and gazed up at the hollow niche. He had been born after the statues' destruction, but he often came here in the starlight and used his imagination, dreaming up a magnificent protector, a wise and living god to care for the village. And especially for
Nadjee
, the one they called the Hummingbird.

He moved forward into the cave and retraced his steps from earlier. He had played in these caves all his life, searching out their deepest regions, following miles of twisting passageways, until the rebel Taliban took up residence in some of the outlying tunnels and set up traps and mines. His older cousin, Jalik, had lost a foot in one of the subterranean passages last winter and then his parents had forbade any further play or exploration within the sacred mountain.

But this was different.

He scampered inside

And Orlando followed. Unconsciously sketching the map, diagramming the layout of branching corridors, dead-end caverns and places where the boy noted spring-mines or stepped over wire-triggered explosives.

On and on he moved, cautiously, reverently as if he made his way through the winding intestines of some immense, slumbering deity.

He slowed at one point, glancing to his left into a deep shadowy recess. The darkness blurred and the boy retreated, his back against a wall.

A haze of bright blue pierced out from the shadows—an instant before obscuring the figure of a man in white robes. A kindly face, a bald head and a long beard. A hand reaching out…

What the hell? Orlando thought, grimacing in a migraine-like vise of pain.

But then it was gone—the blue
fading, fading, replaced by the dim orange glow of the oil lamp off the dusty rock cavern walls. The boy, moving again. He glances back, toward that alcove and the murky shadows. Shakes his head, then continues.

And Orlando resumes his sketching.

After another twenty minutes of winding passages, twists and turns, the boy slows. Extinguishes his lamp, and eases toward the faint glow at the end of the descending passage.

He creeps to the edge, where he hears soft voices.

It's the girl's voice, and the boy smiles, almost chokes on his gratitude for her safety. But then he hears her words…

"Don't hurt him, please don't..."

"Sorry, little one."  The Eye's voice. "He's managed to track us, and can't be allowed to live."

"No, please no, please!"

The boy freezes, then scampers back.

But he's too slow.

Armed men turn the corner and descend upon him.

The last thing he—and Orlando—hears is the swishing of blades. Quick. Painless.

Then darkness.

#

Temple shook him,
and when Orlando opened his eyes—streaming with tears—he forced himself to focus on Phoebe to help ground his dislocation.

"You're back," she said. "Back. Just relax. Take a deep breath."

"They killed him," he whispered. "Just a boy, they..."

Phoebe gripped his wrist. "The boy following the Hummingbird?"

Orlando nodded gravely. "Just killed him right there."

Temple took the pages off Orlando's shaking hands. "This it?  The way to her?"

"Yeah. I saw it all so clearly. But I'd say you have to move fast. I'm not sure how they knew the kid was coming, but if they can see him, maybe they're sensing us too."

"Maybe not," Temple said, as he used his PDA to snap digital pictures of the pages. He tapped a few keys, and the image appeared on the main screen, the pages merged. "Let's hope not at least. But with this diagram, hopefully we can get in and get her out, quick."

"There was something else," Orlando said, getting up. He touched the screen. "At this point, there was something strange. Everything got all blue again, but I swear I saw some kind of bald monk coming out of a hidden recess and touching the boy. Almost as if he knew…"

"What?" Phoebe stared hard at him.

"Knew maybe that the child was going to die. Not sure what he did, but…"

"Blue," whispered Phoebe. "So this monk guy,  he was a shield too. One of the terrorists?"

Temple shook his head. "Bald's not their style."

"Then who?"

"Not sure," he said. "But anyway, we're landing."

"Okay," Orlando said, breathing more relaxed now. "So me and Phoebe can just hang out in the plane while you guys go get her, right?"

Temple smiled devilishly. "And miss out on all the fun?  I have a feeling we're going to need your skills even more down in those tunnels."

"Come on!" Orlando said.

Phoebe grasped Orlando's hand, and when he saw her face he sighed. "Fine, I feel like I'm kind of vested in this now. And besides, I want to see that one-eyed son of a bitch pay."

7.

After they left Xavier, Caleb led Alexander along the side passage he had viewed before saying goodbye to his half-brother.

"We'll see him again," Alexander said, his voice hushed in the gloom of the narrowing passageway. Caleb felt a cool breeze brushing across his face from ahead, and knew somewhere up there was an opening to a deeper chasm, some abyss that tapped into the water table far below, with caverns and small tunnels leading to the surface, most of them too small for humans to fit through, but which provided enough ventilation to breathe. At one point, he had seen a glimpse—in the far past, or more recently, he wasn't sure—of a line of robed figures carrying torches, descending along a narrow ledge towards a sunless sea. A dock, and Egyptian-styled boats moored against the port, waiting to take passengers to some mythical destination.

"I hope you're right," Caleb said, shining his light ahead, and keeping his free hand on Alexander's shoulder, keeping him close. He couldn't lose Alexander again. Not after finding him, not after what the boy had been through. How he'd been forced to grow up in a hurry. He thought of Genghis Khan's tomb, and what Alexander had needed to do.

"Son…"

"Dad, don't worry. I'm fine."

"You know what I want to talk about. Now that Xavier's not here, I-"

Alexander looked up at him, and the shadows draped over his face, covering his eyes. "Which thing do you want to talk about?  The fact that I have two brothers I didn't know of, that I saw Mom die, or that I… killed a man?"

Caleb stopped moving, turned toward him and dropped to a knee. He lowered the light and in the soft reddish glow off the confining sandstone walls, he looked into Alexander's eyes, even as his own were welling with tears.

"I'm so sorry. About all this. Your mother..."

Alexander suddenly lunged forward and threw his arms around Caleb's neck, crushing him in a desperate hug. And Caleb realized he hadn't had a moment to grieve. Neither of them. Not since a week ago when this all began, when the fire took Lydia, and Alexander and the Tablet both were snatched from his lighthouse.

They held each other for a long time, neither saying a word until the light started to dim; Alexander pulled away, wiping the dust and the tears from his face. "Come on Dad, we've got to help him."

Caleb nodded. "You're okay?"

Alexander tried to smile. "No. But hey, we're
Keepers
, right?  Comes with the job."

"It's why they pay us the big bucks."  Caleb stood, rubbing Alexander's hair. "But soon, we'll talk. About her. About Xavier and those twins. About everything."

"How are you, Dad?"

"What?"

"Well, you just found out your old girlfriend's still alive. And she's pissed at you, and you've both got twins you didn't know you had. Doesn't that change things?"

"It does. And I can't… Can't even imagine what Nina's going through now. To know they took her children, kept them from her."

"From you too."

Caleb squeezed the flashlight tighter. "But that's it. I don't know what they did to them. How they were raised. What they're like."

"I think I do," Alexander said. "I've seen them a lot. Thought they were just part of my imagination. Imaginary friends to help when I was lonely. But these playmates, they were always mean to me, even in my dreams. They're not nice."

Caleb lowered his head. "I know. But they're young. They haven't been with their real parents yet."

Alexander started walking down the shadowy corridor. "Well," he said, "you better hope you get to make an impression before they meet their mom. Then, it's all over."

#

"Where are we?" 

Alexander shined his light around like a light saber, trying to ward off the darkness. He couldn't tell how large this chamber was, but it had to be huge. Couldn't see the walls anymore, and the ceiling—if there was one, was way up high, beyond the reach of his beam that just faded into the hungry darkness. There was something in the center of the room, another massive block or pillar of some kind. Caleb was shining a light at it, inside a square-shaped opening in which there was something that looked like a chair. Carvings and symbols far stranger than mere hieroglyphics adorned the sides.

Caleb moved forward into the structure. He turned and gently sat in the stone chair.

"Dad, wait."

"It's ok. It's not trapped."  Caleb looked around, and Alexander had the impression that his dad was sitting in a cockpit of sorts. Except there was nothing else in there except a slot, a groove in the arm of the chair, by his right hand.

"Its…  different," Caleb said. "I believe we're directly under the main pyramid. And this…"  He looked up, then shined his light up there, and Alexander understood. The interior of the pillar, or shaft, was hollow.

"What do you see?"

"Nothing. It just goes up straight."  He turned off his flashlight, closed his eyes. "Hold on, I'm getting something, seeing more of it…"

Alexander closed his eyes, reached out into the darkness as if to pluck his father's vision like a piece of fruit. Absently, he switched off his own flashlight. And now in complete darkness, a new light sparked behind his eyes.