The Pharos Objective (37 page)

Together, he and Phoebe gazed out over the waves and listened to the roving helicopters. Cameras were flashing at their backs, video feeds running. The whole world, it seemed, held its breath. Caleb glanced back and thought he saw a face in the crowd he recognized. A man in a dark green coat, scruffy pants and black boots. Hair falling in unkempt strings over his eyes. But he looked . . . happy.

The crowd moved, surged, and the man was gone. And for a second Caleb caught a glimpse of another face he knew, a man with a bald head and dark glasses. Watching from a short distance away.

Victor Kowalski
.

“Well, big brother?” Phoebe tugged at his hand. “I bet they’re almost to the door. Want to take a peek?”

Caleb looked away from the crowd. “Should we?”

She squeezed Caleb’s hand. “Oh, yes.”

They strip off
their tanks, fins and masks and bring their gear up the stairs, past the great statues of Thoth and Seshat, and place it out of harm’s way. “Wait on the stairs,” Waxman orders as he tests the chain and harness attached to the ceiling above the third trap. The seven men climb two flights and remain there, watching impassively.

Waxman strides to the great seal, steps over the chains that he and Helen had left for the second trap. He proceeds to turn the seven symbols in the proper order, and then calmly walks back to the first block, and waits. He passes through the realms of the Below: Calcination, Dissolution, Separation, Conjunction. He is relaxed, as if he has practiced this a hundred times. He ascends through the Above: Fermentation, Distillation, and finally Coagulation.

After the seventh test, he is covered with a fine gold dust that has drifted down from a sifting stone overhead. The scent of sulfur still hangs in the smoky air, and water is heard trickling below, down the stairs and out the vent.

And the great seal opens majestically at his touch, withdrawing and allowing him inside.

“Come!” he shouts, and his men follow, igniting their lamps and flashlights, bringing their torches and gas tanks. They leave the cameras behind. There will be time enough to film another arranged descent, once the room below has been emptied of everything but ashes.

Down the stairs, twisting through the octagon section. The tramping of their feet issue pounding echoes against walls unused to anything but the silence of the centuries. Dust follows at their heels, sparring with the brilliant shafts of light.

Then, the final room. The low-hanging ceiling. The non-descript door with the symbol for Exalted Mercury.

Waxman removes the key from his belt. “Here we go, men. What we do today we do for humanity’s future. We close Pandora’s Box for good.”

He extends the key toward the hole as someone shines a light for him. “Goodbye mother,” he whispers. He inserts the key partially, and it jams. “What . . .?” is all he can say. He frowns and withdraws it with a jerk, scraping the key against the inside of the hole. A tiny spark appears, nearly lost in the flashlight’s brilliance.

Waxman lets go as the key falls, and he steps back. A multitude of sounds arise at once: something hisses, like a flame has just ignited and is heating a small tank of water; sliding noises like thin metal flaps opening along the walls and on the ceiling.

Flashlight beams whirl around, stabbing at shadows, blinding his eyes. Waxman covers his face and tries to peek through his fingers when suddenly he is struck with something hot and wet, steaming. His fingers close around it, and over the hysterical screaming of the men around him, he realizes he holds someone’s guts.

Something whistles through the air. He ducks, and a great scythe rips through the man standing behind him, cutting his head lengthwise and spilling out his brains. Another scythe, rusted and serrated, gleaming in the spastic lights, whispers across the room sideways, and two more of his men fall to the floor, in pieces, twitching, their mouths open in silent screams.

Waxman runs toward the exit. Somehow the blades have missed him. He still has a chance. This tower hasn’t killed him the last two times. Surely, he has been saved for a reason. He thought he’d learned it, had understood that patience was needed. Patience and humility. He had proven both, and had come back this time prepared.

But it still wasn’t enough.

He sees the stairs and he runs, but slips in a rising pool of blood. His other hand catches at a protruding rib cage. He looks back and, there on the floor, his mother’s head is lying along with the other grisly remains. And she’s laughing, cackling and spewing out continuous insults.

He falls to his knees and faces the door, where that symbol stares at him, scolding, reinforcing his unworthiness.

Both blades emerge again, one after the other, and retreat into their resting places with barely a sound, their purpose served once more.

Quartered, Waxman makes a sound like a wet sigh, then slides apart.

A rumble vibrates from the walls, the stairs tremble, and a rush of sea water floods into the room from above, swirling, sifting, lifting, cleansing.

The Pharos protects itself.

“They’re coming up!” someone shouted, and the crowd surged.

Shapes appeared in the water. Small, irregular forms that never really surfaced. Divers without their diving gear. The water stained red, a spreading, inky pallor, and the men kept floating up. Five, six, seven, eight . . . nine . . .

Then more.

A woman with binoculars screamed. The floating bodies were in pieces: a head here, a torso there, legs and arms jumbled together with severed chunks of flesh. The helicopters dipped, rolled and scattered. The ambulances’ engines sparked to life, followed by their sirens.

And more screams shattered the morning air.

Eighteen Keepers, each
wearing black Ray-Bans, moved through the crowd of spectators like a tide of gray death, each member keyed in on a target that, as soon as they had come into Alexandria, arriving ahead of George Waxman as his personal contingent, had been identified and secretly tagged with a chalk mark on the upper shoulder, visible only to those wearing the specially tinted sunglasses.

The Keepers moved quickly, efficiently, and with a determination borne out of not just duty, but revenge. Each of them had a metal cap on their index finger with a tiny needle that had been dipped in concentrated tarantula venom. One jab would paralyze and induce convulsions, and sometimes—if it happened, it happened—death.

Simple pinpricks. Eighteen Keepers struck with subtlety and swiftness, poisoning and then moving on, disappearing into the crowd. Only one Keeper stayed a bit longer over her victim.

The bald man dropped to his knees, his hand at his neck where something had just “bitten” him. Victor Kowalski felt strange; a numb sensation, bitterly cold, almost ecstatic, cascaded through his veins. Suddenly, he couldn’t move, and felt inertia pulling him sideways. People were screaming, rushing past him, pushing, trampling. He fell. Rapped his head on the flagstones, but felt no pain, just cold. So cold. Someone stomped on his arm, and still he felt nothing but a frigid arctic gale sweeping through his body, chilling his very core. His vision was stuck, looking straight up at a familiar face, someone wearing a baseball cap and gray sweatsuit, someone lording over him with a smile of retribution.

The exquisite rush sped to his heart, encasing it in ice, and the world drowned in bitter darkness.

“What do we
do now?” Phoebe asked. Emergency units roared to the water’s edge as the police herded the spectators away.

“We wait,” Caleb said, backing away. “I think a few days, maybe more. The Egyptian authorities and the Council of Antiquities will place another ban on investigating the harbor. They’ll declare that there’s nothing down there but dangerous old tunnels. And the story will rest.”

He exhaled slowly. “You can go back to Mom, if you like.”

“No,” Phoebe said. “I want to see this through. I can’t help her there, anyway.”

“Okay, then we’ll wait for this circus to die down. We’ll wait for Qaitbey to be alone again, sneak inside, and do this our way.”

6

In the end, they couldn’t wait for the causeway to empty, and the area around Qaitbey’s fort was always either too crowded or guarded late at night. So they did the next best thing, taking a lesson from Waxman, and bribed the guard to allow them inside. Caleb made up a story about this site’s importance to them. He said that he and Phoebe had been married here years ago, and they wished to recapture that feeling by spending a night inside. Maybe the guard took pity on them because of Phoebe’s condition, but for two hundred dollars he agreed that it was quite romantic. He left them alone, locked up inside, and promised to let them out in the morning. Of course, Caleb knew they wouldn’t be coming out the same way.

Beside a glowing battery-powered lantern, Phoebe waited on the stairs and looked wistfully after her brother.

“Wish you were here?” Caleb asked after the water subsided and he coughed up mouthfuls of brine.

“No thanks!” she yelled back. “Comfy right here. You go on and get all dirty.”

“It’s going to be gold, not dirt!”

“Whatever, just hurry up. These statues are creeping me out.” She stared at the spot under Thoth, where Nina had fallen years ago.

“Trying,” Caleb said, removing the chains. He quickly splashed to the next symbol, then hooked himself to the ceiling, climbed and hung suspended, waiting for the ground to fall away. After it reset he took off the harness, dropped and stepped onto the next block. Immediately it sank, leaving him in a tunnel where the earth closed in and sticky mud clung to his skin. When the block rose again, the earth had hardened and he felt as if he wore a powerful suit of armor, a joining of all the elements into one, able to ward off any physical assault.

He stepped forward onto Mercury. He opened a zip-lock bag from his pocket, sprinkled the powdered sulfur onto the lines, lit it, and waited. A noxious gas rose from cracks in the boulder, mixed with the smoke from the sulfur, and swirled around his body. The earthly coating he had taken on began to bubble and crack. Tiny sprouts of green emerged from his arms, his chest, his face. Then these fell off, dropping with huge chunks of mud.

Fermentation over, he took the next step to Distillation, to Silver and the Moon. He withdrew the 200-watt water-resistant flashlight and switched it on. After a deep breath, he shone the light forward onto the heads of the snakes on the great door. Apparently made of quartz, their eyes glowed with an eerie orange hue. They sparkled and glittered. Caleb felt lightheaded, disconnected. It must have been the gas from the previous stone; maybe it contained some kind of hallucinogenic powder. Whatever it was, Caleb saw the snakes uncoil and lift off the wall, hover in the air, rear back and open their great jaws before slithering forward and wrapping around his legs, circling up his body.

He stayed perfectly still, recognizing that this was a test. It was an illusion, of that he was
almost
completely sure. An unbelievably realistic illusion. He felt their scales, heard their hissing. His breath shortened as they coiled around his ribcage, then continued winding around his neck, encircling his head, where they met at his crown. And still, he remained motionless, breathless, waiting.

Ten heartbeats passed. His head swam, the room spun and a strange, numinous aura ignited around his vision and bathed his mind in understanding.
Here I am, the living caduceus
,
the embodiment of opposing energies:
male and female, above and below, heaven and hell, black and white, good and evil . . . all of it. From these conflicting elements come oneness. Ultimate knowledge of everything from all perspectives
.

The only thing left was to make this state of awareness permanent, to become like a stone, the Philosopher’s Stone.

Caleb stepped forward, the snakes greedily hanging on, but losing materiality as he accepted their presence no longer as a hindrance, but a strength. At the final block he dropped to both knees and spread out his arms. It had never occurred to Caleb that he needed to be in that position, and he surely hadn’t gotten any hint from the scroll or any vision. It was just something that seemed right.

He knelt and waited. The snakes hissed gently in his ears, and he imagined words in their breath, whispered greetings, welcoming praises to one who had made a long journey and had arrived home.

Gold dust began to fall from the ceiling, a light coat clinging to his glistening skin, sticking to the residue of fermentation and distillation. It coated his head, his upturned face, neck, shoulders, arms and hands. It fell like a blissful spring rain. He even smelled flowers and fresh mountain air. The scent of jasmine floated by, and he thought of Lydia, then he smelled the bay back home in Sodus, and the trace of old books permeating his little bedroom.

When it stopped, all too soon, Caleb opened his eyes. Standing, afraid to move too quickly and shake free any dust, he took the one remaining step to the door. The snakes had returned to their rightful posts, looking on with passive interest.