The Pharos Objective (12 page)

“Maybe,” Caleb said, remembering the all-too brief glimpse he’d had while nearly drowning, and his gaze grew distant.

Nina absently scuffed the sole of her sandal over the thin layer of gravel on the flagstones. “What are you thinking about now?” she asked.

Caleb blinked, smiled. “Actually, thinking about Dad still. How he’d take us out to see the other landmark historic property on our land: ‘Old Rusty.’”

“Old what?”

“Rusty, it was my sister’s favorite thing. An ancient, rusted lightship. You know, the kind they used to send out in the foggiest of nights, with lanterns on its masts, to guide ships into the harbors. Phoebe loved the sound its hull made when we threw stones against it, and then we’d run before anyone could catch us. We used to sneak aboard, make up stories and pretend to be in great sea battles, captain and first mate, raiding the high seas.”

Nina sighed. “Sounds like you had a one-of-a-kind childhood. But you’re right, you should have been allowed to grow up there without racing all over the world with your mother.”

Caleb smiled. “Well, too late now.”

Nina closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun and breathed in its warmth, then looked back to where Helen and Waxman were still arguing. “Do you think we’ll find the way in to the lighthouse vault?”

“Nope. I think old Sostratus hid it too well.”

Nina looked depressed. “Then they better accept defeat soon.”

“They won’t. My mother won’t, either. She’s obsessed.”

“So was your father.”

Caleb winced as if she had reached over and smacked him across the face. He thought for a moment, remembering his father’s eyes, the tenderness in his voice, the way he would crack open a book, spread out its spine, and sometimes take a deep sniff of the pages, savoring the old smell of the paper. “Yes,” Caleb said, “but for a different reason. He didn’t want the treasure, didn’t care about money.” Caleb was getting excited, and felt a strange energy fueling his cells. “Dad just wanted knowledge. He loved everything about ancient Alexandria, and he wanted to understand the lighthouse completely. Just as he was intrigued with the library and . . .” A strange connection tugged at him—a spark of a great inferno waiting to be ignited. Suddenly he was certain that his father had known more than he’d let on.

The sun ducked behind a cloud and the courtyard flickered into shadow. In mid-thought, nearly at a revelation, he noticed someone watching them, standing in the opposite section from Helen and Waxman, beside a pillar in the deeper shadows.

Who is that? How long has he been there?

He waited, narrow and trembling, with long arms and ragged hair, so out of place amidst the tourists who just walked by, snapping their pictures, ignoring him.

Caleb’s blood went cold and the hair on his arms stood on end. He shuddered.

“Caleb?”

“Do you see him?” he tried to raise his arm to point but couldn’t.

“See who?” Nina asked, whipping her head around.

The sun reappeared, dazzling off the stone tiles and the limestone pillars. Caleb blinked and the figure was gone.

Someone’s throat cleared. Caleb looked up and saw Waxman with Helen standing beside him. “Let’s go,” he said. “We’ll see if the team has fared any better.”

When he walked past, Caleb looked at his mother and saw that she had taken off her glasses and was staring across the courtyard, squinting.

“What?” he asked.

She shook her head, blinked and put her glasses back on. “Nothing, come on.” She took one last look around. “I still think what you saw in your dream is the key, Caleb.”

“You do?”

She nodded. “But it’s just so frustrating. The Pharos is taunting us from the past, giving us scraps and keeping the larger secrets to itself.”

Caleb looked warily at Nina. “Maybe,” he urged, “we should let it keep them.”

Helen chuckled and pushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “You’ve got a bad attitude, you know that? What would your father say?” She rubbed his head in a rare display of affection, and then followed after Waxman.

Caleb gave Nina an “are you coming or what?” look, to which she smiled and followed after Helen and Waxman. He couldn’t help but take her in once more before he threw a tentative glance over his shoulder to where the figure had stood, watching.

Before they boarded the ferry, Waxman used the payphone to call the other Morpheus members who had remained at Alexandria. When he hung up, he was smiling.

“They’ve found the entrance!”

12

Nina asked Caleb to wait for her by the pier with Waxman and Helen, telling them that since they had another half hour before the boat left she wanted to get a few more pictures first.

Quickly returning to the palace, Nina entered the south stairwell and, pretending to admire tapestries and framed royal crests, she blended in with the tourists, murmuring to a group of Americans about her favorite exhibits and commenting on the grandeur of the palace and the grounds. Eventually she made her way back to the lower levels, where she waited for her target to emerge from the lab.

Only a few minutes had passed before he appeared. Gregor Ullman. She sized him up in an instant: bald, hawk-faced and slightly overweight, rolled-up white sleeves and a new pair of Levi’s. He had a Bic pen behind his ear and a toothpick in his mouth. Nina smiled, but she was no one to judge. She only carried out the sentences.

“
Scusa, signore?
” She stepped into his path, interrupting what was either a trip to the restroom or his chance to call and update his colleagues.

“
Si?
” He stopped and smiled, admiring the frisky young woman moving in so close.

Nina licked her lips and set a hand on his chest, while her other hand swept up and around and plunged a hypodermic needle into his neck. Ullman staggered, gasped and shot her a look of dawning recognition. He tried to call out, but only whispered something indistinct, and collapsed at her feet. With a quick glance around to make sure no one was in sight, Nina took his legs and dragged him around the corner into a storage room.

Gregor Ullman awoke
to find his wrists secured with duct tape, and the barrel of a Beretta pointed at his left eye. A dull pain registered in his legs, but in the drug’s aftereffects, he couldn’t quite place the source.

“Hello, Mr. Ullman.” Nina sat on an upside-down plastic bucket, with her legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. “You know me, I’m told, so I’ll skip the introductions and get down to it.”

Ullman grunted and coughed as a cloud of smoke rolled into his face.
She didn’t tie my legs
, he realized, and at once he sprang at the chance to escape. With a shout he tried to lunge forward, but only collapsed, howling in sudden, blinding pain. He rolled onto his back and looked down in horror to see the bright red slashes through the back of his pants.

She had severed his hamstrings.

Nina sighed. She hated this part of the job, and really didn’t like the sight of blood. At times like this, she reminded herself of the importance of the mission, the nobility of the cause. What they were doing, what she was a part of, would help preserve everything she cared about, everything she loved. All her life she had sought a way to stem the advance of time, to hang onto beauty and the perfection of youth; and when she had been singled out for this opportunity she knew it was her chance: an opportunity for a different sort of immortality.

Of course she had lied to Caleb, tossing him a sympathetic tale about her childhood home and orchards, a story to snare him in her web. It was a secondary mission, but in all likelihood the most important. Caleb, after all, was the key, and she and Waxman had to get him to realize it. They had to prod him, guide him, get him to see, truly
see.
But it had to be soon. And it would be, if she played her part perfectly.

She bent down and looked into Ullman’s straining eyes. “The morphine I mixed with your tranquilizer will help, but only for a few more minutes. I need you calm and able to answer questions.” She stood up and stepped toward him. “Tell me what I need to know, Keeper, and I’ll call for an ambulance on my way out.”

Ullman groaned and turned his face toward the cold floor. “What do you want?”

“Tell me,” she whispered, bending down and putting out her cigarette right in front of his face, “if Water is the first symbol.”

“What?”

“You heard me, and you know what I’m asking. Water. Is it the first symbol?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re mad.”

“And you’re dead if you don’t tell me the truth.” She stood and placed her spiked heel against his neck. “Is it Water? Or Fire?” Nina held her breath. She needed him to confirm the first symbol to validate what their other informant had given up. Torture was never perfectly reliable, but in that case her boss had felt reasonably certain of the information they had elicited.
But not certain enough
. He wanted a second confirmation.

“The first code . . .” she repeated, pushing down on his neck, “is it Fire? Is it Air? Earth?”

Ullman coughed. His legs twitched, his arms flayed about in his pooling blood. “I told you, I don’t—”

She increased the weight on his neck.

“Aaaaaah—all right, all right!” he hissed, bringing his hand to his throat as Nina eased the stifling pressure. “It’s Water . . . Water! But you won’t get in. You don’t know the rest of the sequence. No one does.”

“Don’t be coy,” Nina said. “Of course you know the sequence. What you don’t know is how to bypass the defenses.”

“And you do?”

“We will, soon.”
Very soon
, if Morpheus’s remote viewers continued with their hits, or if Caleb found his sight. But she guessed that the Keepers were in the same boat as far as the scroll’s recovery—hoping for a miracle. She tapped the barrel of her Beretta on the floor in front of his nose. “So you say it’s Water. What if I said I don’t believe you?”

“I would say I don’t care. I already know my fate.”

“Such pessimism.” Nina sat down again. “How long have you been here in Naples, Mr. Ullman? Well, not you, but you know what I mean—the Keepers. How long have you known?”

“About the scroll?” Ullman gave a wheezing chuckle. “Be serious. As soon as the Villa was rediscovered, we put a man on the inside.”

“All that time,” she clucked, “and nothing to show for it.” She sighed and shook her head in disappointment. Caleb probably had gotten closer to it in his one lifetime than six generations of Keepers. She checked her watch. “Well, Mr. Ullman, it’s been a pleasure. Your leader claims each of you has a successor lined up. In your case, I hope you haven’t delayed that obligation.”

Ullman laughed again as he looked up at her with a bland grimace. “See you soon.”

Nina frowned, tightened the silencer on her gun, aimed and fired, punching a hole through his forehead. She stood and contemplated the body, replaying the conversation, weighing his words, his gestures, debating whether his answer was reliable. In the end, she decided it didn’t matter. She was thorough in these matters of life and death. If a second independent confirmation was insufficient, she would simply seek another.

13

They returned to Alexandria just before midnight. Exhausted, the others retired upstairs to their rooms. Caleb fully intended to do the same, but there was something he had to do first. Today, after all, was the
anniversary.

Phoebe.

Eight years ago.

Looking ahead at the others, Caleb saw his mother who, if she had even thought of today’s importance, had given no indication. She was in the thick of the group, Waxman at her side, still talking, going over plans and relating visions.

Caleb headed to the hotel’s lounge, where subdued techno music droned in contrast to an elegant mahogany-walled interior lit with evenly spaced blue-flamed oil lamps. He wanted to call his sister, needed to hear her voice, wanted to apologize, again. He checked his cell phone; the battery was almost dead. There might be enough juice, but in his head whirled an uncompromising swarm of thoughts about Alexandria, the Pharos, Caesar and Herculaneum; the impossibility of their task of recovering a vulcanized scroll from the ashes of a two-thousand-year-old library; and discovering the entrance to something that may never have even existed, except in legend.

He reached the bar, a smooth black surface that reminded him of the tomb door back in Belize. He stood before it, staring at the surface as if paralyzed.