The Mongol Objective

1

Phoebe Crowe spoke softly into the microphone as she watched the action on three separate laptop screens. “Okay, big brother, we’ve got the link working. We see what you see. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Itching from the heavy cotton sweater worn under her ski coat, she still battled the chill from the two-hour Sno-Cat ride from Fort Erickson. It was the longest two hours in her life, with the exception of that time spent writhing on the tomb floor in Belize. And this was the last leg of a journey that earlier featured a white-knuckle helicopter ride from the Starboard Ulysses, which was currently trawling a mile out beyond the ice shelf.

While Phoebe and Orlando Natch, her lone teammate, still shivered, the six other people in the room seemed used to the forty-degree temperature. Point Nelson’s commander, Colonel Eric Hiltmeyer, stood nearly seven feet tall. Bald, with a chiseled jaw and a scar on his left cheek as if he had taken one swipe too many from a sharp razor in a prison fight, he lurked over Phoebe’s shoulder as his staff — two scientists, a geologist, an environmental engineer and a lab assistant — spaced themselves around the table, observing as Phoebe and Orlando tracked the progress of their other team members.

Phoebe moved the microphone to her left, in front of the man — the boy really — who had made all this possible. At age nineteen, Orlando Natch was the youngest member of their psychic research group known as The Morpheus Initiative. He was their technological whiz kid who, ironically, had never been to Florida, much less Orlando. Jet black hair, curly and ragged, wild blue eyes, and a narrow elfish face, with his 150-pound frame covered with baggy jeans and a black World of Warcraft sweatshirt. Orlando had been recruited directly by Phoebe while she was a graduate assistant at the University of Rochester. Not only did he excel at applying cutting-edge technology to the study of ancient relics, but he displayed exactly the type of intuition that indicated he might be a candidate for the Morpheus Initiative.

Orlando saw things. Before they happened mostly, but sometimes, given just a little prodding with a picture or an object (or the right question), he’d drift into a trance and then wake up and rush to his iPad, wielding it like an artist, where he’d set about crafting a computer-generated rendition of his vision on one of its graphics applications.

This technique was miles ahead of the old pencil-and-sketchpad method used for years by the other remote viewers, and Phoebe was only too grateful to have him on board — as was her brother Caleb, who had leveraged the value of the group’s scanned drawings, uploading them and then interfacing with image-recognition software to find matches with photos on web-based public databases or in photo-share servers like Flikr.com.

“Lookin’ good,” Orlando said, rubbing his hands together, then directing a joystick, which now controlled the camera on Caleb’s helmet. “Just focusing… there. I see it. Holy shit, do I see it!”

Phoebe leaned in, looking from screen to screen, from the cameras mounted on their three members at the dig site a mile away. In addition to Caleb, two other Morpheus Initiative members, Andy Bellows and Ben Tillman, had volunteered for this mission. An hour ago, all three had suited up and left in a Sno-Cat with Colonel Hiltmeyer’s other newly-arrived guest, an anthropologist named Henrik Tarn.

“So you’re getting this?” Caleb’s voice crackled from the speakers. His name was on the third screen in front of Orlando. The shaking screen.

Phoebe whistled. “Yeah, but stop moving so much. You shivering or something?”

“It’s freakin’ cold, in case you didn’t know. Minus twenty and—”

“And no wind chill,” she said, aware of the hypocrisy as she snuggled in her coat. “You’re in a cave, so stop whining and stay still so we can get some clear images of that thing.”

Orlando glanced at the other screens. “Bellows and Tillman, please move around and space yourselves equally apart from Caleb. Let’s get this from all angles.”

On the screens, within the frozen cavern, emerging from the ice-shelf, were several views of something dark and huge, with sharp protrusions spiking from a rounded edge. Phoebe leaned over. “Hey Orlando, can you pull up our sketches for comparison?”

“No problem.” Orlando quickly tapped some keys and another window on the middle screen appeared, displaying a succession of scanned drawings, most of them crude and awkward, but unmistakably the same general structure as the object on the live image feed. He moved the pictures into different orientations to match the unearthed artifact.

“I still can’t believe this,” Colonel Hiltmeyer said, edging past the other group members and peering over Phoebe’s shoulder.

“What?” Phoebe asked. “That you guys found this thing in the ice at a depth equating to a geologic period of more than fifteen thousand years ago? Or that we separately drew the same thing four years before your team even set up shop here?”

He blinked at her, his dull gray eyes impassive. “Both, I guess.”

Phoebe stretched her legs, still relishing the ability to do just that. For ten years, during all of her teens, she had been in a wheelchair, her legs useless, her hip and lower vertebrae shattered after rushing into a booby-trapped tomb in Belize. But then the cure — the miraculous technique discovered in the original Hippocratus Manuscript, one of thousands of lost scrolls she and Caleb had discovered under the remains of the ancient Pharos Lighthouse in Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The miracle she’d never thought she would experience: to be able to walk again. To run. It still made her giddy, humble and grateful beyond words.

She clicked the microphone. “Okay Caleb, what do you have for us? You guys want to try to remote view it now that you’re within actual sight of the thing? Get some glimpses into its past and let us in on the big mystery?”

Colonel Hiltmeyer licked his lips. “Like how big it is.”

Orlando tapped some keys and called up a smaller window which began running a graphical projection based on the tip of the head, then extrapolated a body, arms simply at its side. “It’s about 130 feet tall, if the curvature of the head’s to scale.” He looked up, grinning. “Any other easy questions, or should we hold out for the big one?”

Her voice dropping a notch, Phoebe said, “You mean, like how the hell did it get here?”

Caleb Crowe pulled back his hood and adjusted his earpiece before resealing the polypropylene fleece hat. He was still freezing, despite the layers of a pile fiber sweater and a North Face Parka, with 550-fill down content and a two-layer HyVent waterproof/windproof fabric. His fingers were tingly and getting number by the minute, notwithstanding the thick goose-down mittens. But as Phoebe said, at least he was out of the wind.

He gave a quick thought to his nine-year-old son, Alexander, in their nice warm house on Sodus Bay in upstate New York. Hopefully he was doing his homework, or at least some light reading, which to him was something like Herodotus. But more likely the kid was just playing around the old lighthouse on the hill. Caleb’s wife, Lydia, was there with him, taking a much-needed break from her duties at the Alexandrian Library. She and her brother Robert were co-leaders of a two thousand-year-old organization called the Keepers, who just recently, with Caleb’s help, had rediscovered a secret vault below the remains of the great Pharos Lighthouse — a vault which had protected the most important writings the world had ever produced, secreted away before the original Alexandrian Library’s destruction in 391 CE. During the past five years, the Keepers, Caleb himself one of them now, had been slowly reintroducing certain manuscripts to the world, those which could benefit mankind the most, while keeping a lid on others with more explosive content until their impact could be controlled.

He envied his wife and son right now. Lydia and Alexander — warm, surrounded by familiar books, those timeless friends. And here he was, in one of the most inhospitable places in the world. And in a cave of all places. But if this find proved to be what he thought it was, everything would change. The archaeological equivalent of a meteor impact, finding evidence of an advanced civilization existing in Antarctica during prehistoric times would rock the academic world and shake the pillars of all major institutions. A civilization that could build such an immense statue, a guardian standing upon the field of an ancient city, with other monuments perhaps still preserved, frozen. And its libraries! Dare he even begin to hope? To dream that they could discover books containing all that lost knowledge?

“This could be Atlantis,” Ben Tillman said, reaching out a gloved hand to the closest thorny spike of the head’s crown. Free of ice, it was a greenish-blue color, oddly metallic. Tillman was dressed in a heavy parka and a woolen hood that all but concealed his face. Icicles hung from his mustache.

“Could be,” Andy Bellows said excitedly, rubbing his mittened hands together in the steam from his breath.

“Impossible,” Henrik Tarn said. The anthropologist who had been brought in two days ago was the tallest of the group. Almost comically tall, Caleb had thought when he first met the bony, long-armed man with a narrow face and dark, button-like eyes. “Plato was very specific about his location of the legendary submerged island: ‘beyond the pillars of Gibraltar, past the Aegean.’”

“But,” Caleb countered, gazing now in wonder at the hint of curvature, a giant eye protruding from the ice, “Plato could have been right and that’s where it was, but during a cataclysmic event, the earth’s axis flipped, the crustal plates shifted, entire continents shook free and—”

“—and Atlantis could have shifted to the South Pole,” Tarn supplied. “Yes, yes, I’ve heard that hokey theory about how the Earth’s crust is like the skin of an orange and can shift over the core. But it’s nonsense.”

“Then how do you explain this?”

Tarn shrugged, hugging his shoulders. “I’m not yet convinced. We need to dig, expose more of the structure.”

“What about sonar readings? Would they do it for you?” Caleb asked. Then louder into the microphone, “Orlando, when can we get that imaging equipment out here?”

The speaker crackled. “In the morning, I think. The colonel here said he’ll contact Fort Erickson and have them haul out the sensor equipment once the storm clears.”

Tarn grunted. “We’ll see.”

Caleb knelt closer to the head, reaching out to tentatively touch one of the spiked protrusions. “Definitely sun-worshippers. This is similar to the prevalent Greek depictions of Helios, the sun god. I’m dying to see the rest of this statue. Maybe… maybe just a touch…” He started peeling off his right mitten.

“Don’t be an idiot!” Phoebe shouted over his earpiece. “At those temperatures, your skin will fuse to it and burn right off.”

Reluctantly, feeling like he had just been scolded by a grade-school hall monitor, Caleb pulled his hand away and slipped his mitten back on.

Phoebe’s voice admonished, “You weren’t seriously about to touch it, were you?”

“Sorry, got caught up in the excitement. Thinking back to my dive under the Alexandrian harbor, where I had that psychic vision after touching one of the statue heads.”

“Well, try it without physical contact, dummy. Or else wait.”

“But we’ve already tried it,” Tillman said. “A couple trance sessions on the plane, and another in the station. Didn’t see squat.”

Tarn made a scoffing sound. “Self-induced daydreams and fanciful imaginations are no substitute for sound fieldwork.”

“Say what you’d like,” Caleb said, “but we saw this thing, exactly in this position. Orlando can tell you; he was one of the first to draw it when we started actively looking for the remnants of a past civilization.” He had to cut himself off before saying too much, indicating the real subject of their search, being the origin of the Emerald Tablet, the powerful but inscrutable tome that was once safeguarded under the Pharos. The tablet was the one artifact Caleb had kept for himself, believing its power so great that he needed to hide its existence even from his wife and the other Keepers.

Caleb thought for a moment. The questions they had asked on the plane had been broad, maybe too general. The very existence of the Emerald Tablet, hidden now in a vault under his own lighthouse back at Sodus Point, indicated that its creator, the legendary Hermes-Thoth, was a member of some pre-Egyptian, pre-Sumerian civilization, a race that not only pre-dated them, but may have actually given birth to those cultures — to their language, their myths, their very existence. One that had left no records other than those shrouded in legend.

So the latest Morpheus Initiative effort focused on just this problem: if there was an advanced civilization, one that had been eradicated in some tragic cataclysm, where could they find evidence of its existence? Where was the Emerald Tablet created? And what, really, did it do?

A number of hits popped up through the intervening years of searching through the Morpheus Initiative’s efforts, through hundreds of trances and thousands of drawings. But the most consistent and similar image perceived among its members was this vision of an enormous half-concealed statue head, lying in this very position.

And then, almost coincidentally, came the call from Nelson Point in the South Pole. A two-time veteran, Colonel Hiltmeyer had known of the CIA’s Stargate Program, which utilized remote-viewing psychics during the Cold War (and secretly beyond). But while unaware of its previous leader’s extracurricular activities, Hiltmeyer had known enough about the Morpheus Initiative to seek its services when his research team stumbled across this potentially ancient discovery.

Now, Caleb knelt in the ice and crossed his legs.

“What are you doing?” Tarn asked. He had a shovel out and was carefully digging around the eye area.

“Just give me a minute,” Caleb said. “Bellows and Tillman, if you want to give it a try too, maybe just by being in the vicinity, we’ll get clearer visions.” He held out his hands, palms outward toward the statue, then closed his eyes.

Phoebe’s voice came through his speaker. “Orlando and I will try to RV it too. Just keep still so I can focus on the statue.”

“This is nuts,” said Tarn.

“Tell that guy to zip it,” Orlando said over the earpiece. “He’s getting annoying.”

“Hang on,” Caleb whispered, feeling suddenly dizzy. “I’m getting something. I’m in…

… a warehouse. Leaded windows. Dusty floor. Scaffolding around a partial spherical construction, still with lattice-grillwork on half of it, while heavy metal plates are fitted into position.

Looking down from the ceiling, then descending and circling around the structure, seeing teams of workers toiling with the frame, hoisting the sheets and hollowing out the eyes. Workers wearing blue jumpsuits, dust-masks and goggles. A rumbling sound and suddenly a forklift drives forward, preparing to lift the partial head onto a waiting flatbed truck.

Caleb staggered to his feet, scrambling and slipping on the ice. He tried to back up, then toppled forward, clutching one of the protruding sun-ray spikes to break his fall.

“It’s—”

… a partial head, the exterior sealed now, set in the back of a truck as the door slams shut, and the vision wheels around to see the back of a tall, lanky man in a black silk suit, nodding and talking on a cell phone.

“It’s ready. Just as you specified. We’ll ship it to the research station tomorrow and have it transported to the cave by Thursday night. Hiltmeyer’s team is ready for it?”

The man listens, nods, then turns. His face — his too familiar face — pulls from the shadows…

“—a FAKE!” Pushing away from the statue with disgust, Caleb turned to the anthropologist.

But it was already too late.

“Damn psychics,” Henrik Tarn spat, as he pulled off a mitten and with a thin glove underneath fished out a gun from inside his coat. Aiming at Caleb, Tarn tugged at his collar and spoke into his own microphone. “We’ve got to move up the timetable.”

“What!” Caleb began, but then there came a shriek from Phoebe in his earpiece before the microphone shorted out, just as Tarn, sensing Ben Tillman foolishly rushing him, swiveled and shot him point-blank in the chest.

2

Phoebe screamed as Colonel Hiltmeyer and another one of his staff pulled out strange-looking guns, and as soon as Tarn finished speaking, they fired.

“You’ve got to be kidding me” was all Orlando could say before the red dart thunked into his chest, the toxin spread, and he immediately slumped over. Phoebe ducked below one shot from the colonel, then dodged around a desk. No point in hiding, she rose and raced for the back room when the dart struck her leg and she hit the floor.

The red dart, embedded in her thigh, would have brought her down, if not for her artificial hip, thigh and a portion of her calf — all fitted and retro-purposed with a prosthesis after that tragic fall during the Belize expedition.

A quick thought, a plan forming: Fake it!

She let her body go limp, flicked her eyelids, then closed them. She willed Hiltmeyer and his men to accept that she was now tranquilized like Orlando.

But why did they turn on us? Who was behind this? Something so elaborately staged to bring them to this frozen pit of the world? And for what — not to kill them, or they would have done it already. Her thoughts raced as she heard the scrambling activity. Laptops unplugged and packed up. Coats zippered. The thudding of heavy boots.

A door whisked open, bringing with it a blast of frigid air and a new voice, somehow familiar but not enough for Phoebe to place it.

A woman’s voice. Controlled, confident. In charge, and with a note of satisfaction.

“Set the charges for ten minutes, then head back to the chopper. Leave that laptop. I need to see what’s going on down there.”

Colonel Hiltmeyer cleared his throat. “Tarn has it in hand.”

“I heard a shot.”

“Tillman, I think — dead.”

“Fine. But still, Tarn blew it. He was to keep them from remote viewing until I was ready.”

“Caleb didn’t even touch the thing, not from what I could see.”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s too good.”

Phoebe bit her lip and peeked with one eye but could only see the newcomer’s lean legs and chiseled calves, clad in tight white thermals, with shiny boots. Who are you?

“Just go,” the woman snapped. “The chopper’s waiting. I’ll finish up here.”

“Fine. So, the tranquilizer… it’ll keep them knocked out for about an hour.”

“Your point?”

“Well, the detonators… You’re really just going to leave these two here?”

Silence.

Phoebe could almost feel Hiltmeyer shrinking away from whatever look the woman was giving him. “You know our orders. If you have a problem with them, you can stay here as well.”

“No problem, I just—”

“Then go.”

The door opened. The colonel followed his team out, and over the wind Phoebe could now hear the thrumming of the helicopter engine.

The woman turned and leaned over the desk. Phoebe inched around the leg of the table so she could get a better view, but could only see a head of short dark hair over the woman’s face as she spoke into the microphone.

Caleb stared at the red puddle steaming on the ice under Ben Tillman — Ben, the man Caleb had recruited directly from a seminar in Virginia. He had shown great promise, scoring high marks on the remote-visualization card tests, and once during a linked video conference call from over two hundred miles away he had drawn the exact sequence of symbols that Caleb had placed in a sealed envelope.

“Tarn! What are you doing?” He spread his arms, holding one hand out to Andy Bellows, warning him back. Andy was a hot-head, always impatient and full of Hollywood-like visions of tomb raiding and treasure hunting, never quite appreciating the hard work and finer points of the Morpheus Initiative’s process.

“This whole time, you and Hiltmeyer buried this thing to get us down here….” Caleb fumed. He closed his eyes, cursing his stupidity. I wasn’t asking the right questions. “You’ve got someone in our group. Or you’ve hacked our servers. Found what we were drawing, the exact image and specifications of the colossal head, and then you built it and buried it where you knew it would send us running in a hurry.”

“Sorry,” said Andy Bellows, shrugging and then lowering his hands. He slid closer to Tarn, and in a forced Italian accent said, “But they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Caleb stared weakly at Andy, then shook his head. “Damn it, kid. You don’t know what you’ve done. You don’t know who these people are.”

Then his earpiece crackled. “Hello down there, and hello Caleb. It’s been a long time, but I wonder, did you miss me?”

Under all his layers, Caleb broke out in a feverish sweat. He recalled a steamy night in Alexandria, entwined around a woman with olive skin and burning green eyes. “Nina?”

“Hi, honey.”

The air chilled, as if the wind and the cold had found a crack in the ice and rushed through to find him.

“Caleb, Caleb. How is it that you never tried to RV me after the disaster under the Pharos Lighthouse? Not even a glimpse, after all we meant to each other? Surely, with your vast abilities you would have seen me in a coma suffering the worst dreams you could possibly imagine. All the while, a part of me hoping, praying, believing that maybe you’d be my prince, that you’d come to my rescue and wake me with love’s true kiss.”

Caleb clenched his eyes shut, shaking his head. “You were in league with him, with George Waxman, all along. You killed so many of the Keepers.”

“Bygones, Caleb. Besides, I’ve watched you since then, you don’t trust your new friends either. None of the other Keepers. Even your wife.”

That point chilled his blood. His eyes snapped open. Does she know about the tablet? She had to have RV’d him, and would have seen the vault where he’d hid it away.

She knows, damn it, she knows!

“I tried to see you.” He had to stall her, think of a way out of this. “But—”

“You didn’t try, lover. Admit it. You forgot all about little old me. Let your gift languish, too wrapped up in guilt over the things it kept showing you. You let it wither until that Keeper tramp Lydia came along and fired you up again. Tell me, who was better at freeing your powers? Me, or the little missus?”

Caleb tried not to look at the gun pointed at his heart. His mind reeled. How did she survive? The first trap under the Pharos Lighthouse had released a torrential wave of water that had smashed her against a pillar, and she fell and was sucked out into the Alexandrian harbor, her body never found.

A sudden flash appeared in Caleb’s head, like the lifting of a veil, and he saw…

… a recompression chamber, a familiar one, the same he had once spent a day in. On board Waxman’s boat, only in this vision Nina was inside, motionless.

And then he was back in the icy cave with Tarn pointing the gun at him and Andy Bellows grinning. “Fine,” Caleb said. “You got me, Nina. Got us. The Morpheus Initiative. Played us, but for what? We’re here.”

“That’s it, Caleb. That’s all there is. I just wanted you to know who it was, wanted you to know that back then you shouldn’t have dropped me.”

“Nina,” he said, slumping over, “I couldn’t—”

“Goodbye, Caleb. Mr. Tarn, Mr. Bellows, thank you for your service.”

Andy looked up. “What?”

Tarn lowered the gun, said, “NO!” and in a burst of surprising speed, ran for the cave’s exit just as an enormous explosion rocked the tunnel — followed by a series of detonations above them.

Caleb looked up and didn’t even have time to cry out as the ceiling collapsed.

Phoebe held her breath. What just happened? She heard the name and remembered. Nina Osseni. A beautiful European, one of George Waxman’s first recruits for the Morpheus Initiative. She was exotic and cat-like, always seemed a little dark and mysterious around Phoebe, but she had never had much contact with the woman, especially since Phoebe was confined to that relic of a wheelchair and couldn’t go on any more globe-trotting expeditions with the team.

But then the tragedy under the Pharos. Nina and Waxman going in too strong, believing they had decoded the symbols on the door, but having them all wrong, releasing the first trap, which killed everyone in their group except for Caleb, Waxman and their mother.

And apparently, Nina.

Somehow she had survived, and then what? She had tracked Caleb ever since, hoping for some misguided revenge? Maybe revenge for Waxman, or for Caleb’s inability to save her?

After taunting Caleb and the others, Nina shut the laptop, unplugged the microphone, and pressed a button on a small device.

A distant rumbling vibrated the station, overpowering even the chopper blades. Phoebe felt the trembling under her body and she realized what Nina had done.

Nina turned and left through the door without so much as a look behind her.

Then Phoebe sprang up and looked around frantically for the explosive charges. In another moment, she heard the chopper ascending and then it was quiet outside, except for the screeching wind.

Thoughts of Caleb blown to bits—

No, can’t think that yet.

She continued looking around the room, then stuck her head under the desk. There was something there, a round device like a hockey puck, with a blinking red light. She took hold of it, but it was stuck. She was about to kick it free when she thought better of that idea.

Could she move the whole table out? No, not without disassembling it. And there had to be at least one more of these things.

Damn!

She went back, judged Orlando’s weight, and then bent down. She lifted him, grunting. “Gotta get to the gym more often.” She dragged him toward the door, then stopped to grab two heavy parkas, and, from the table, the keys to the remaining Sno-Cat.

At least we won’t freeze.

Outside, assaulted at once by the icy wind, she hauled Orlando by the ankles, the job a little easier on the slick surface. She tugged him toward the isolated garage that was only ten yards away but seemed like a mile, fell, got up and stared into the stinging blizzard, into the night’s black swirling face, to see the flickering lights of the chopper angling toward a distant red light beyond the ice barrier on the sea.

“Come on, Orlando!” She lugged his body over the threshold into the outbuilding. “Got to get—”

Just then, the station exploded into a roaring fireball. The force of the blast tore Phoebe free of Orlando’s inert form and knocked her sprawling awkwardly to the floor.

3

The lighthouse…

Caleb could see it as if his mind circled the hill from a great height, focusing on the small tower rising out of the morning fog, glinting in the sunrise.

My lighthouse, he thought. Sodus Point, looking out over the bay, the waves battering the rocky shore in the cold autumn wind. A narrow, rectangular-shaped tower, the 150-year-old lighthouse was anchored to the attached house, his house, where Alexander should be just waking up, Lydia in the kitchen in her terrycloth robe, making Armenian coffee and blueberry flapjacks.

But why am I seeing this?

As if in answer…

… a black Hummer arrives, slowly pulling up the long drive. At once, the front doors open and two black-clad men burst out. Men with guns. Then the back doors open and two other men emerge.

One, a shorter, lanky man with a full head of blond hair, wearing a long gray trench coat. The other, meticulously dressed in a blue silk suit with a power tie — crimson — matching the color of his hair, shining like fire in the sun.

Caleb shuddered with recognition.

… The red-haired man nods after the other man points to the lighthouse.

He knew the other man too.

Robert. Lydia’s brother. What is he—?

Caleb’s eyes flew open and a scream tried to explode through his nearly crushed lungs. The Emerald Tablet!

He struggled, tried to kick free, to move his arms, even an inch, in this suffocating, dark and frozen tomb. He had seen the tunnel implode just as Henrik Tarn and Andy Bellows were racing for it, still shocked at being betrayed. They disappeared, gruesomely crushed under a massive slab of the collapsing ice shelf, and then Caleb jumped for the only bit of cover — beneath the statue’s head, where the protruding crown offered some degree of protection.

But it wasn’t enough. He was still sealed up, buried alive. He couldn’t tell, with all the weight and pressure and numbness in his extremities, if anything was broken, but it seemed the statue had deflected the direct impact and left a small air pocket to save him from serious injury.

So that he could die slowly of exposure.

In spite of his predicament and the prospect of an unimaginably horrible death, all he could think of was Alexander and Lydia.

Men are coming for the tablet.

Was it a vision of the future or something happening right now? Was there anything he could do other than try to go back into the vision and see for himself?

Robert’s presence there terrified him, even more than that somehow familiar red-haired man. Robert Gregory, Caleb’s brother-in-law, had been frustrated that the Emerald Tablet, the prize the Keepers had sought in the Alexandrian Library’s collection, had been missing when Caleb beat the Pharos’s defenses and found the way inside.

Robert had never stopped looking for it, and Caleb was sure that his brother-in-law suspected the truth — that Caleb had stolen the tablet and lied about its absence. And lied again and again when Robert and Lydia had asked him and the Morpheus Initiative to remote view it, find where it might have been taken before the Pharos vault had been sealed up.

Caleb hadn’t told Lydia, knowing her convictions belonged with her brother in this case, and while she spent the better part of each year back in the new Library at Alexandria, cataloguing and studying the collection of recovered scrolls, Caleb had fashioned his own secret vault below the Sodus lighthouse, modeled after the original architect’s design, the Pharos’s creator, Sostratus of Knidos. Caleb designed a similar set of traps that he hoped someday only his son Alexander could bypass. When he was ready to be a Keeper himself. When he had learned what he needed to know. Even Caleb hadn’t spent much time with it, afraid of its power, its ability to enhance his visions and stimulate other powers. Powers he didn’t need, or want, just yet.

Until then, the tablet would wait inside.

And of course, there was the problem of its translation. What exactly was recorded? Instructions for incomparable power or eternal youth? Or a recipe for something much worse?

Caleb struggled against the ice, but it was no use. The cold was penetrating, painfully seeping through his layers, and as the darkness pressed in, he had no choice but to stop fighting.

He tried to relax, pull away from the cold and pain, from the stiffness and pressure. To draw his mind away, set it free. He had done this once before, in an Alexandrian jail where his body had all but deteriorated and wasted away until his spirit had been released, exposed to a new realm of sight, revealing what he needed to see.

So now he let go, released his hold on the flesh, and hoped that once set free, his mind — and his abilities — would discover something worth seeing.

Leaping from the chopper onto the deck of the ice-rigger, Nina Osseni pulled back her hood and lifted the satellite phone to her ear. She paused for a moment to watch the station burn along the ridge. And she smiled.

Goodbye, Phoebe.

Colonel Hiltmeyer and his team left the helicopter as the blades slowed, and they rushed past her into the cabin. Nina could feel the engines revving up, the rigger turning, heading north. She waited, feeling the snowflakes slowing, the wind then blasting them away along with the clouds. The night sky, revealed in its sparkling glory, turned the ice shoals below a crystalline blue.

She pressed the redial button on her satellite phone. After one ring, a man’s voice answered. “Is it done?”

“Yes, they’re dead. Phoebe and Caleb and the other members of the Morpheus Initiative.”

“I somehow doubt that,” returned the voice.

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just a vision I had a short time ago.”

“I had no such vision.”

“Maybe, as your old boyfriend liked to point out repeatedly, you weren’t asking the right questions. In any case, they’ll be delayed long enough for me to get what we came for.”

Nina frowned, still scanning the ice cliffs and plateaus. “Any resistance?”

“None so far, but I wasn’t expecting any. Not until we approach the vault.”

“You’ve got your drawings?”

“I do, but I don’t need them.”

Nina eyed the flickering wreckage on the shore, then glanced back to the helicopter. “If there’s a chance Caleb survived, I could go back and wait for him to show.”

Silence for a moment. “No, I don’t think it would do any good. I’ve had other visions — stronger ones — of meeting him again. It was worth a shot, but in this case I don’t think we can change fate. Go back to the rendezvous point, meet me at Saint Peter’s Castle, and I’ll join you once I have the prize.”

“Very well.” She shut off the phone, still gazing at the shore, considering her options.

How did they survive? she wondered.

But another part of her secretly tingled at the thought of another encounter, far more personal and direct, with Caleb.

Revenge just might be better the second time.

The visions flew at him like a desperate flock of ravens, plucking at his mind’s eye, showing him…

… the lighthouse on the cliff, and the main home, where Robert and the red-haired man approached the front entrance… the icy landscape above, sprinkled with stardust on the fresh snow, where the research station burned, churning fiery smoke into the sky… a Sno-Cat, racing from the wreckage on huge rolling treads… Phoebe’s face, behind the Plexiglass. Orlando Natch, unconscious in the back….

In the dark, using the only muscles he could still control, he smiled. Come on sis, don’t be too long. He saw her…

… on the CB, making a distress call to Fort Erickson… a research installation bursting with activity, men racing to Sno-Cats and snowmobiles, hooking up digging equipment and ice-breakers….

And then, as if satisfied with what they had shown him so far, the visionary black birds pecked away with renewed vigor, excited at having undivided access to his exposed senses. Look this way, they cried, and he saw his son, Alexander…

… standing outside the silver vault door, hands pressed against the reflective surface, while in the square window that mane of curly red hair, those familiar blue eyes, trapped inside, yet exuding triumph….

Caleb pushed his memory, recalling a hotel room years ago, in Alexandria, and those eyes peering at him from a crack in the door. Who…?

And then he saw new visions of…

… sprawling scenes of an arid landscape, with ruined pillars over an archaeological dig site on a hill; and then a scene of a medieval castle basking in the sun, before… again, the view of a giant green-hued metal head, a crown of spiked rays, those regal eyes… a huge underground cavern lit by sickly yellow light, and a host of cold, dead eye sockets set below helmets… an army waiting patiently in the darkness, brandishing spears, swords, bows, protecting something beyond immeasurable walls…

Caleb moaned — a sound he barely heard, his spirit soaring now, glimpsing simultaneously…

… Phoebe’s Sno-Cat, followed by the armada of rescue vehicles, arriving at the collapsed site… the Sodus Lighthouse, hurtling now down the basement stairs, through the underground passage to the vault door, over Alexander’s shoulder, through the door, inside, where that man, that familiar man kneels cross-legged, holding the artifact, the greenish-blue aura dancing from the Emerald Tablet.

His face is bathed in its kaleidoscopic hues, and he suddenly looks up, cocks his head, and his eyes lock on, staring straight into the vision’s point of view. He smiles…

… and Caleb rocked back into his body, screaming. That face! It was the person he had seen through the door in Alexandria. The Morpheus Initiative member who’d had a premonition of disaster under the Pharos and had stayed behind, had warned Caleb.

“Xavier!” he shouted, his lungs burning. “Xavier Montross!”

4

Lydia Gregory-Crowe didn’t see them coming.

One minute she had been sipping her cup of steaming Armenian coffee, the next, two armed men in black ski masks had guns to her head. She tried to call out to warn Alexander, but remembered he was back at the lighthouse, most likely prowling in its basement, playing make-believe or whatever he did down there.

Seconds later, she was led out onto the front lawn to meet the last two people coming out of a black jeep. A red-haired man with brilliant blue eyes stood first, glanced at her, smiled, then looked down to the lighthouse. Lydia started to pull herself free, struggling until she saw the next person emerge from the passenger side of the jeep, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“Hello, Lydia. Sorry to drop in like this.”

Her expression went from anger and fright to outright shock.

“Robert!”

“Can we not point guns at her?”

The man beside him sighed. “In a minute. Lydia, where’s Alexander? Where’s your son?”

“I’m not telling you — you, who the hell are you? What do you people want? Robert, did they abduct you?”

“Settle down, Lydia. I know this might look a bit like overkill, but Xavier didn’t want to take any chances. Not with something of this magnitude.” He sighed. “We’ve come for the tablet.”

Lydia’s bright green eyes sparkled. “The Emerald Tablet? What—? Wait, you think it’s here?”

Xavier Montross brushed past her, heading to the lighthouse entrance as the rising sun glinted off the mist-shrouded bay. He turned his attention to the tower. “Oh, it’s definitely here. Your husband, it appears, never quite trusted you.” He gave her a sympathetic look. “Maybe it had something to do with your not being entirely honest with him from the beginning about who you were.”

“The fact that I was a Keeper had nothing to do with my feelings for Caleb.” She held up fists, wrists still cuffed. “And you. I remember you. Skipped out on the team in Alexandria.”

“Saved myself, more like it, from their stupidity. Saved myself for more important things.”

Lydia released a long breath. “Well, I don’t believe you. Caleb didn’t take the Emerald Tablet. He couldn’t.”

“He could,” Montross said, heading to the entrance, “and he did. It’s been right under your nose, all these years.”

Robert followed, helping Lydia along after dropping his cigarette in the snow. “Your son knows too.”

“Impossible. I would know if Alex were keeping such a secret.”

Robert smiled. “A mother doesn’t know everything, not in this case, Lydia. He’s more his father’s son.”

“How can you be sure?”

Robert pointed. “Ask him. He drew it.”

Montross grinned, moving quickly now to the steel door, blazing in the rising sun. “I’ll show you my sketches later. Over a hundred of them, some drawn during the past decade, but most over twenty years ago, when I was a boy.” He blinked at her, then reached for the door. “Even then, my destiny was clear. Even then, this day was in my sights.”

Lydia shot out her bound hands, caught her brother’s collar with both hands. “Robert, you can’t allow this! If the tablet is down there, you can’t let this man — anyone other than a Keeper — get his hands on something so powerful!”

Robert held his sister’s cuffed wrists, and looked into her eyes. “Don’t worry, he’s going to give it to us. And then it will finally be where it belongs. He only needs to read a portion of it, something his visions have shown him. Don’t ask me to explain it all.”

“If you don’t know his true motivations, why would you take this risk? Our father taught us better than that.”

“Don’t bring him into this. The Emerald Tablet, and all its ancient knowledge, is our birthright. Bad enough our ancestors had to wait over two thousand years for its release, keeping the damn secret, but then to have an outsider steal it away?”

“Caleb’s not an outsider.”

“Not anymore, true, but—”

“He was a Keeper, truer to the cause than we ever were.”

“You’re softening, Lydia. Too much in his shadow, I think.”

Lydia glared at him. “You should have just come to me, I would have talked to Caleb.” She pounded his chest.

“Enough,” Montross said, then turned to his men. “You two stay up here. Keep an eye on them.”

Robert’s head snapped around. “‘Them?’ But—”

“Don’t worry, Robert. I will still give you what you want, but first, I must do this alone.” He reached into his suit coat pocket and pulled out a sheaf of pages. Unfolding them, he looked at the first page of a schematic-type drawing of the steps below the ground floor of the lighthouse, to the basement sub-cellar and storage area that decades ago had been used to store fuel for the lighthouse.

He flipped through the pages, nodded, opened the door, then closed it behind him.

At the top of the stairs, Xavier cocked his head. He glanced through his drawings again. Nothing on the pictures, except the last one — one showing his own face looking through a glass-like porthole — and what looked like the reflection of a boy’s face in the glass. He held the pages and looked down the granite staircase, the steeply withering descent, thirty-six stairs to the first bend, then around another thirty-six to the sub-cellar itself. Two lamps burning dimly, set on the walls.

He walked calmly, descending with his eyes closed as if he’d walked these stairs a thousand times before, if only in his mind. To the bend, and then around and down. On the second stairwell he stopped and flipped through the pages again, twenty of them now, and he paused at each page. He stopped at one showing a room with a door and three ledge-like shelves on either wall. Above the door were three large, emboldened Greek letters, and on the six shelves were round peg-like objects. On the shining metal door itself was a single porthole-like window.

Montross continued. At the bottom, the air was dank, musty, the floor cobbled and uneven. Reaching out along the wall, he found the light switch he knew to be there. Flicked it and said, “Hello, Alexander.”

In the light that blasted through the darkness like a sunburst, the small boy with curly dark hair kneeling before the door shielded his eyes, and then stood up.

In a cracking voice, he said, “You’re not getting inside.”

Eight thousand miles away, Caleb was being airlifted to the Fort Erickson research station to a waiting team of medics. In the helicopter, Phoebe and Orlando were by his side, Phoebe holding his weak hand while Caleb muttered about the visions still roiling in his head.

“Montross is in the vault, our vault… with Alexander.”

Alexander balled his fists, squinting, getting used to the light again after running below and then shutting off the lights, hoping to hide. Bad idea, he thought. Obviously a group of armed men showing up could only be after one thing — the artifact in the vault behind him.

Trying to sound as brave and confident as his favorite hero Dash, the boy with super speed from his favorite movie The Incredibles, he said again, “You’re not getting inside.”

Alexander’s focus cleared as the well-dressed red-haired man stepped into the light. The man had dazzling blue eyes, shamefully blue — so much that they seemed the color of a newborn’s eyes, brilliant and desperately hungry. Alexander saw something of himself reflected in them.

“Hello, Alexander. My name is Xavier Montross. I was a friend of your father’s years ago. I’ve seen this vault chamber”—he raised a sketchpad and waved it around the room—“saw it and saw you long before you were even born.”

Alexander swallowed and stepped away, his back now against the wall. Uh oh. “Great, so you’re psychic too.”

“One of the founding members of the Morpheus Initiative.”

Alexander shrugged. “Everyone else is dead. Being psychic makes people act stupid.”

Montross stifled a laugh. “But not you, right? You’re too humble.”

“I’m only nine.”

“Well, anyway, my very astute youngster, you’re definitely your father’s son. Probably reading at college levels already, right?”

He thought of his books, all those precious books lining the shelves in his room, and all those he could reach in his father’s study.

“Of course you do. Well, you should know this: I was the only one with enough sense not to go under the Pharos on that fateful trip. Because I knew.” Again he raised the sketchpad. “I saw what was going to happen.”

“Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

“I warned your dad. Might just have saved his ass so he could live long enough to father a son. Ask him about that, if he comes back.”

Alexander shivered, his eyes closed and suddenly, just for a moment, he had a jolting vision of crushing ice, of an enormous head with sad, regal eyes looking on protectively. He heard helicopter blades, and what sounded like his Aunt Phoebe’s voice.

“I saw this too.” Montross gazed at the walls to his left and right, nodding to himself as if in vindication of his drawings. Then he looked above Alexander’s head, over the door.

Blinking away the vision, and the certainty that his father and the others were in big trouble, Alexander stood up straight, spreading his feet to cover something on the ground, hoping—

“Don’t bother,” Montross said. “I know what’s there. Oh, your dad’s a clever guy, I give him that. Taking elements of the Pharos’s vault design and incorporating them here. Thinking he’s following in Sostratus’s footsteps, right? But I wonder, Alexander, have you figured it out yet?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sure you do, kid. You’re the sole child, the son of two Keepers. No choice really, you’re their chosen replacement. You’re being groomed, just as Keepers have done for over two thousand years. But your dad, being such an admirer of Sostratus and a stickler for the Egyptian mystery school’s technique of learning by experience, he would have you discover the truth first-hand. To prove yourself worthy and to fully understand the concepts, you must solve the puzzle and find the treasure on your own.” Montross stepped closer, carefully. “So, have you done it?”

Alexander slowly shook his head.

“Not lying to me, are you, boy? Worried that I’d threaten you, or your mom, to force you to let me in?”

“Not lying. I don’t know the way in, not yet.”

“I believe you.” Montross closed the sketchpad, tossed it aside casually, then pointed to the door. “Move aside, please.”

“No.”

“Just a step to your left, that’s all. I’m not stupid enough to try to open the door yet, but I need to confirm what letters lie under your feet.”

Alexander glared at him for another long moment, then shuffled sideways to let Montross lean in and look.

“Ah, as I thought.”

He studied the letters on the floor, and then again over the door. “So, in the Above we have the Greek letters: Theta, Omega, and Delta. And Below by your feet, reading again left to right, we have Omega, Delta, Theta.”

“You won’t figure it out,” Alexander said.

Montross only smiled, then walked to the shelves running the whole twenty-foot length of the left side of the room. He glanced over his shoulder at the opposite wall, and the three identical shelves. “I’ve already figured it out, kid.”

He touched the mahogany tracks, more like frames around a series of peg holes bored into the wall. “Three to a side. Each one with eleven peg holes. And there’s a rounded wooden pin inserted, randomly it appears, in one of the holes on each shelf.”

Alexander made a sound like a laugh.

“What?” Montross glared at him.

“Get it wrong and there are no second chances.”

“Really? Your dad would be that ruthless? Kill his own son if he made the wrong choice?”

Alexander shivered again. “He said I would know when I figured it out. And if I didn’t know for sure, I should never try it. No hunches or guesses.”

“I see. Well, then,”—Montross smiled—“I’d better get this right, for both our sakes.” He touched the peg on the top row, grasped it, and pulled it out sharply. Alexander winced, then they both looked at each other and smiled.

“Nothing’s going to happen yet, right?” Montross asked. “Not until I set everything in position. Put all the pegs where I want them, and then try the door. At that point, either it opens…”

“Or,” said Alexander, “we both get squished.”

“Squished?” He looked up at the ceiling, then the cracks along the walls. He cocked his head. “What’s he got up there? A trap ceiling? Something to crush the hapless intruders? Or do the walls close in like that garbage compactor in the first Star Wars?”

“It was actually Episode Four,” Alexander corrected.

“First for me,” Xavier said. “So, how do you know there aren’t hidden blades that might come out and slice us to pieces?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about fire? A release of natural gas and a spark? And after the inferno your mom can come down here and sweep up our ashes?”

Alexander grimaced. “I don’t know, but I’ve dreamed of stuff like that.”

“Have you now?”

“Traps just like that taking care of people like you.”

“And what kind of person am I, Alexander?”

Without pause he said, “A thief.”

Montross smiled. “You know, your Uncle Robert came here with me. Is he a thief, too?”

“I don’t believe he’s really with you, but I guess he is if he came to take something that doesn’t belong to him.”

“He did, and let this be an early life lesson for you, kid. Some people will do anything for power. Anything. And the kind of power promised by that artifact in there, it can make friends turn against friends, family against family. You just can’t trust anyone. Can’t trust your mom and dad, can’t trust them even to come home and see you again after a night out. Can’t trust the world, can’t trust God or Fate or anything. The only thing you can trust are your visions, and sometimes not even those, not until you’re really sure your head’s not fu—” He smiled, catching himself. “Your head’s not playing games with you.”

“What are you talking about?” He looked to the stairs at the other end of the room, and thought he might be able to make it if he burst into a run, sprinting with Dash-like speed, but then he was struck with the thought that if he left, the treasure would be defenseless.

He was its protector. While it was true he hadn’t quite figured it all out, he had spent more time down here in his short life than anyone else had. He was closest to it, and sometimes he felt that just by being outside of the entrance, in this testing room, he could feel its power. Feel it calling to him, feel it changing him. Making him stronger. And he could be more patient, since he knew it was there, his birthright.

“Never mind, kid. We’re going in. Sorry to cut short your lesson and interfere with your dad’s teaching plan, but I’m going to cheat and give you the answer.” He started pulling out pegs and resetting them. Alexander tried to look around his broad shoulders to see where he was inserting the pegs, to see if it made any sense.

“What have you figured out so far, my boy?” Montross said after placing the third peg in a new position on the lower shelf.

“I learned that I’m not to share what I’ve learned with thieves.”

“Very good,” Montross said, shaking his head. “But I’m guessing you at least understand the basic concepts of alchemy, one of the key tenets which is ‘As Above—’”

“‘—so Below,” Alexander whispered, completing the mantra he had learned years ago.

“Correct. All that mumbo-jumbo about recreating the heavenly aspects down on earth, in architecture as well as literature, reflecting the orientation and movements of the heavens onto the earth, but also doing the same thing spiritually. Becoming more than mortal, achieving the immortality promised by heaven.”

Alexander swallowed. “So is that what you’re here to steal? Immortality?”

Montross began work on the middle shelf. “You wouldn’t understand my motives, Alexander. Not until you’re a little — no, a lot older.” He took one peg from the middle and moved it two holes to the right, then he stood back, nodding.

“My dad,” Alexander whispered, “did you hurt him?”

Montross turned, regarding the boy quietly. “Did you see something?”

His eyes filling with emotion, Alexander nodded. “Under the ice.”

Montross turned away, lowering his head. “I think he’ll be okay. Sorry, but I needed the Morpheus Initiative out of the way, preoccupied. Needed their focus elsewhere, so they wouldn’t be tipped off about this.”

“There was a woman,” Alexander said. “She’s scary.”

“God, kid, you’re good. Maybe you’re more like me than I thought.”

Alexander withered under the man’s gaze. He felt like he was being analyzed by a crocodile looking for a hint of fear, or just the juiciest area to bite first.

Montross said, “I saw my parents killed before it even happened. It did wonders for me, let me tell you. That kind of freedom, at such a young age. I spent so many years believing that what I saw, what I drew, could have the power to kill. That it was my fault.”

“But that’s not what it does. You’re just seeing the future.”

“I know. But when I was your age, I saw the world a little differently. Thought I was so much more.” Montross looked down at his empty hands, and Alexander wondered if the thief imagined himself holding some scepter of kingship or a torch of knowledge. Whatever it was, Alexander didn’t care.

“Are you going to kill me and Mom?”

Montross turned to him and sighed. “Listen, I’m not a killer, not normally. That’s why for those times where it’s necessary, I use someone like that woman you saw, like Nina. But no, you can help me. You and your mom will be having pie and ice cream in no time, waiting for your daddy to come home. Just a nice happy family again”—he bent to the lowest shelf, took out a peg and moved it all the way to the left—“minus one Emerald Tablet, of course.”

Up at the farmhouse, Lydia sat at the kitchen table, the two mercenary types standing at the door, hands on their guns, while Robert made another pot of coffee.

“Robert,” she whispered. “It’s not too late. Call this off. Send these men out of here before someone gets hurt.”

“I’ve searched too long for that tablet, given up so much. We both have.”

“I know, but if Caleb does have it, he only has our best interests at heart. And, knowing him, he’s probably rigged the lighthouse basement with some god-awful traps, and heaven help you if Alexander is down there when they go off.”

“Montross has it figured out. Don’t worry, I trust him.”

“Like I trusted my husband?” Lydia shook her head. “Robert, this artifact is too powerful. It makes liars out of everyone. How do you know he won’t just turn around and kill us all once he’s found it?”

“He won’t.”

“He could be just like Waxman. Have you thought of that?”

“I have, and he won’t. Besides,” Robert patted his side where Lydia could see the outline a gun strapped under his heavy sweater in a shoulder harness. His face darkened and his eyes tinted with a heady sense of power she had never seen in him before. “We Keepers have our defenses.”

Lydia shook her head, eyeing the two guards. “This is insane. And my son — your nephew — might be down there.”

Robert smiled. “Something tells me Alexander can take care of himself just fine.”

“I don’t understand,” said Alexander, a little braver now that he didn’t feel like his life was in immediate danger. “I felt like I was close, but couldn’t figure it out. How do the shelves relate to the ‘As Above, So Below’ thing?”

“You’ll see.”

“I could get it if there were just two shelves — a top and bottom, above and below, but the middle one messes everything up.”

“Because you’re not seeing the full picture.”

“But the above and below puzzle at the door, it doesn’t make sense. The letters don’t match. They’re not mirror images, and it’s not even like the lower one is the reverse of the top. The letters don’t move, they’re not on blocks, you can’t—”

“Just settle down, kid.” Montross worked faster now, rearranging pegs, moving from top to bottom, then to the middle, setting them into different holes. Occasionally glancing back to the other side.

“Why are you — Oh! Wait.” Alexander looked at the left wall, then back to the right. Then back to the door, pointing to the letters. He blinked, the room’s colors shifted, and for a moment, he saw it. In his mind he saw lines of light stretching from the letters to the shelves: the above left letter, Theta, with a line angled down, concurrently with the bottom shelf on the right wall; the above right letter, Delta, highlighting a trail to the bottom shelf on the left wall. Then the lower letters doing the reverse.

“But what about the ones in the center?”

Montross turned to him, smiling. “Ah, welcome aboard. You’re close now. So close. See, isn’t it great figuring things out intuitively?” He set the last peg in place. “Course, it helps if you can cheat. Although, eight years of trying to remote view this thing I’d hardly call an easy cheat.”

“But the middle ones!” Forgetting all about the danger, Alexander ran to Montross. “I get it. Above and Below are maintained, but in the whole system, the whole room, not just the letters at the door. The Delta letter, top right, lines up with the bottom left shelf, so that’s why you put the peg in the… Hold on! The seventh hole?”

“Egyptian, boy. Think like an Egyptian. They wrote—”

“Right to left!” Alexander smacked his own head. “I would’ve gotten myself killed.”

“You can thank me later.”

“It’s the fourth letter in the Greek alphabet, so the peg goes in the fourth hole from the right.” Alexander moved closer, looking in the dim light. “And the top shelf on the left, matches up with the letter Theta on the right-most letter on the floor. The eighth letter in the alphabet, so you’ve got it.” He counted off the peg holes. “Eight holes from the right.”

“Yeah, okay, you’ve got it, kid. And I did the same on the right wall. Omega for the first hole and Theta again for the eighth.” Montross approached the door, smoothing his sweaty hands on his pants as he reached for the great bronze handle.

“But the center ones, I don’t understand those. Omega on the top… Why’d you match that up to the right wall, and Delta went to the left? I don’t see any signs, anything that could—

Montross stopped, hand inches from the door.

“Oh no,” Alexander said, looking at the back of Montross’s head. “You don’t know, do you?”

“You should go back up the stairs, Alexander. In case I’m wrong.”

“You guessed?”

Montross gave him a steady look. “I guessed.” He turned his head slightly just as his hand settled on the handle. “I spent months trying to view which way was correct, but I never saw it, never asked the right questions, maybe. But what I do know is that I saw myself — visions of myself — after this moment. So I know, I just know whatever I choose, it won’t get me killed.”

Alexander frowned, taking a step back. “That’s a little sketchy. Thought you said not to trust Fate, or your visions.”

“Touché. Call it a hunch, then. I trust those. But as I said, get on upstairs if you don’t believe me and don’t want to risk being squished flat or sliced into cubes. But I’m going in or dying a horrible death, with or without you.”

Alexander frowned, looking again at the letters above the door, then at the position of the pegs. He sighed, then stepped closer, right behind Montross.

“So you believe me?”

“It was a good hunch,” Alexander said, pointing. “The only one where you wind up with both Deltas on one side and both Omegas on the other. So if you orient the room on its side instead, you’d have the same arrangement. One Theta on top and bottom, and then two like symbols. It’s the only way that works.”

Montross smiled and rubbed his hands together. “See, you figured it out after all. Now, let’s go. Do you want to do the honors, or shall I?”

5

“No broken bones, just two sprained ribs and some nasty bruises. And some frostbite on your neck and fingers.” The medic, a middle-aged woman whose skin seemed far too tan to be in this climate, looked him over again, shaking her head. “Lucky.”

“Yeah,” Caleb said, holding his side. “What do they say, better to be lucky than smart? I should have seen this, should have known it was a trap.”

“How could you?” the medic asked, and Phoebe, standing beside her brother, coughed into her hand. “Just trust us, he should have seen it.”

“We all should have,” Orlando Natch said. “And I’m a bonehead for missing it. Got too damn excited about a match on the freakin’ head. Rookie mistake that almost got us killed. Sorry boss.”

“It’s not your fault,” Caleb said. “And I’m not your boss.” Then, lower, “Nina. She’s alive.”

“I know,” Phoebe said. “Seems like a nasty bitch. Had it in for you.” She gave him a sly look. “What, did you sleep with her and not call her back?”

Orlando choked on a sip of hot chocolate. The medic raised her hands. “Sounds like a family moment. I’ve got a report to make, and my boss will want to debrief you before you leave, especially about Colonel Hiltmeyer’s actions.”

“Have you been able to contact him?” Phoebe asked.

“No, nothing.” She looked down. “Apparently he’s gone rogue. And again, I’m sorry.”

“Got to get back home. Fast. And,” Caleb added to the departing medic, “we need a phone. Please.” He turned to meet Phoebe’s look of concern. “Alexander and Lydia are in danger. This was all a diversion. They’re going for the tablet.”

Montross had a moment of fear as something hissed and huge metal bolts pulled backwards from holding the great silver vault door in place. The door opened. Reflexively, he held back an arm to shield Alexander in case something deadly came flying out of the darkness. Shame, he thought, actually starting to like the kid.

A moment later, the door opened all the way. Motionless now, Montross took a deep breath. “Inside,” he whispered, nudging the boy forward into the darkness that glimmered as oil lamps around a circular room ignited, triggered by the door’s opening.

“You first,” Alexander said, trying to twist away but held fast. He stumbled forward into the vault — at last! He was finally here, inside after all that time, wondering and dreaming about it. Reading, studying, listening to his father’s stories.

He was here.

But then he froze, staring first at the beautiful zodiac images painted on the ceiling, and then at the lone pedestal basking in the glow of four lamps, and the single object resting at its apex:

The Emerald Tablet.

“There’s a note beside it,” Alexander said, his voice cracking.

“A note?” Montross took another step in, hesitantly still, as if expecting a rack of stainless steel, poisoned-tip spikes to come plunging down through the ceiling and skewer him at any moment. “I didn’t see a note.”

“Maybe,” said Alexander, picking up the loose-leaf piece of white paper with a jagged left edge, “Dad only left it for me recently.”

“What does it say?” He glanced at the paper, frowned, then checked out the ceiling. “Looks Greek to me.”

“It is Greek.” Alexander read the words and translated to himself: Son, this is your legacy now, and that means it’s yours to protect. If you’ve been forced here against your will, and if you have the chance, tap the pedestal twice, and then…

He lowered the paper, dropped it, then inched his fingers toward the wooden outer frame. In another second, Montross had his back to him and Alexander seized the opportunity. He pressed the pedestal once, then again, and heard a click. And then he did just what the note told him to:

He ran.

Bolted straight for the door—

— just as another door, a door made of vertical steel bars, came grinding out of a slot in the ceiling, crashing down.

Alexander dropped and rolled under it into the sub-basement. The grate slammed onto the concrete floor with a force that echoed in his ears like a thunderclap.

He turned, about to try to push the outer vault door shut, when he saw Montross standing there, gripping the bars like a prisoner in a cell.

“Caught you,” Alexander said triumphantly.

Montross released the bars and stepped back as the vault door drifted nearly shut. Breathing deeply, calming himself, he turned and scrutinized the room, seeing now the grate opening in the ceiling, the notches he should have noticed in his visions.

The boy continued talking through the gap in the outer door. “Guess you didn’t see that coming, did you?”

Montross stopped, lowered his head and gave the kid a stare, considering all this. Then he pointed through the crack. “There’s my sketch book. Look at the last page.” He turned back and approached the Emerald Tablet, saw it shimmering, giving off a surprising bit of heat, its strange symbols appearing not only three-dimensional, but multi-dimensional. Layers upon layers, hundreds of levels deep.

His head spun and his stomach felt tingly, a little nauseous.

“Oh crap,” he heard the boy say, the words so distant. “You did draw it — this exact scene.” Then he looked through the window, gathered his courage and yelled, “But you’re still trapped in there!”

Montross returned, pressed his face against the thick glass porthole, let his lips pull away into a smile; and before heading back for the tablet, he said, loud enough for Alexander to hear:

“Oh, I’m not trapped.”

6

The air transport left within the hour, Caleb, Phoebe and Orlando sitting in the back with fifteen empty seats, painfully aware of the loss of two of their members, including one traitor. Wiped out again, Caleb thought, holding his head as if he could still hear their screams.

“I was responsible,” he said somberly, staring out the window at the dawn rising over the vast horizon of blue ahead of them. “We need to bring them back, their bodies. Notify Ben’s family, tell them… I don’t know.”

“It’s not your fault,” Phoebe said as Orlando worked on his iPad.

“I feel as callous as Waxman,” Caleb said as he crossed his arms over his bruised ribs, “and as selfish. But we need to get back.”

“We’ve called the police; they’re on their way to our house.”

“It’s probably already too late.”

“Hopefully you were seeing the future,” offered Orlando.

Caleb shook his head. “My visions are usually firmly rooted in the past. Can we connect with the police?”

“Trying,” said Orlando, using the VOIP voice connection on the laptop. “But they keep putting me on hold.” He looked up, and his voice trembled. “I think they’ve got a problem.”

The first officer barely got out of the cruiser before he was shot through the heart. The round had punched through the driver’s side window as he was opening the door, and he’d only had a moment to guess where the gunshot had come from before he fell back, sliding along the car and down. His partner, instead of ducking and radioing for backup, pushed his way out the passenger side, and drew his weapon.

He turned, stood up and opened fire at the front of the house, having seen movement in that direction. His bullets strafed the door, shattered four windows and exploded an outdoor light. For a brief second he allowed himself a measure of satisfaction. That got those bastards.

But then the door kicked open and a man in a ski mask, limping on his right leg, swung an HK MP5 submachine gun in his direction and let loose a hail of metallic death.

Lydia hit the deck as soon as the first man aimed out the window. “Robert, down!” she yelled as a barrage of gunfire burst through the house. Glass shattered, wood screamed, and one of the masked guards spun around, half his face a bloody mess.

Cavalry’s here, she thought, as Robert dropped beside her. Then she saw the other guard kick open the door and return fire.

“Robert.” She shook her brother. “Come on, now’s our chance. We can turn them in, and I promise, I’ll confront Caleb, get him to release the tablet, we’ll—”

Robert turned with her touch, rolled onto his back. Mouth open, blood bubbling up from his lips. A red stain spreading on his right breast.

“No…” Lydia grabbed his tie, and not knowing what else to do, fit the edge in the bullet hole, trying to stop the blood flow. “No, no, no.”

“Cops are dead,” came the voice at the door. “But we have to move, we—”

Lydia looked up and saw the man staring at his dead partner. The MP5 wavered. And then Lydia saw the outline of the gun holstered against her brother’s side. Before she knew what she was doing, she had the gun free and was standing, pointing it at the masked man.

He looked up from his partner, saw her and raised the gun, but she shot him first — a direct hit despite the recoil that knocked her back a yard. The man went down. His legs twitched once, twice, then lay still.

And Lydia gave her brother a parting glance before breaking her paralysis and rushing for the door. She had to get to Alexander.

It had been quiet for the better part of ten minutes, with Alexander waiting at the foot of the stairs. Keeping an eye on the vault door, ready to run if Montross had some explosives or something. But what could he have? He didn’t use anything to get in, and the only thing in there is the tablet!

Alexander knew it had power, but thought it was merely something along the lines of knowledge, advanced stuff like the scrolls his mom and dad had found in the old Pharos vault. And surely it was nothing that a novice, someone who might not even know how to read that ancient language, could use to free himself.

A low mumbling sound came from behind him, on the stairs, and Alexander spun, expecting — hoping — to see his mom, or better yet, his father, triumphantly returning to save him and take care of this intruder, but instead he saw what at first he thought must be a ghost, a shimmering, flickering image of him, the man trapped in the vault. But then the vision descended the stairs, into the glimmering light. The shadows peeled from his face, the fierce eyes almost glowing, making Alexander think of a movie he once saw part of on the Sci-Fi Channel, something about giant worms and desert nomads who all had spice-enhanced bright blue eyes.

Montross pointed to him and opened his mouth in a mock laugh.

“Impossible,” Alexander whispered, and when he saw Montross reaching inside his coat pocket for a gun, he turned and raced back to the vault door, the only sanctuary. He cranked the knob, turned it and tugged back the door on its hydraulically fueled hinges. Behind him, Montross shuffled forward across the basement floor, eerily. Alexander paused for a moment, wondering why the effect seemed unreal, but then he saw that gun coming out, aiming at him, and he pushed forward through and under the bars, which were now rising. He had a glance only of the tablet, still in its resting place on the pedestal. That was enough and he ran for it.

He lunged for the pedestal, planning to slam his palm against it, knowing that would bring the bars crashing down again, stopping Montross before he could get in.

But an instant before his hand touched the surface it was caught, grabbed by Montross himself, who had been crouching behind the pedestal all along.

What!

Alexander jerked his head around to look back at the door, where no one stood. The bars were up, the door swung open, and the chamber beyond was empty.

“How…?”

Montross smiled as he gripped Alexander’s wrists, and then casually tossed him toward the corner farthest from the door. “A little trick I knew the Emerald Tablet could teach me. Ask your dad about it, about what your grandpa had learned to do.”

“What are you talking about?”

Montross grabbed the tablet, hefted it as he lifted it off the pedestal. “Gotta run, sport. Thanks for your help, and hey, tell your dad if he makes it back — well, he’ll know where to find me.”

He took two steps, and suddenly, without the tablet’s weight on it anymore, the pedestal began to drop.

“Uh oh,” Alexander said, and Montross snapped his head around.

“Damn.”

Lydia raced through the backyard, her bare feet pounding on the cold ground, then she burst through the lighthouse cellar toward the open door and the stairs. Damn it, Caleb! Why couldn’t he have trusted her? And to present such a thing, a riddle for their son to solve? She had known about the vault door, but had never been inside because Caleb had told her it was just an old root cellar. It was the Keeper way, she thought grudgingly, but to leave her in the dark about what was really there, after all they’d been through, after what she’d proven to him?

Granted, things had never been the same after their reunion, after he’d learned she had faked her own death under the Pharos — partly to trigger Caleb’s psychic powers, which often emerged only through psychological trauma, but also because she had become pregnant and couldn’t let the impending birth of his son derail his mission. But even afterward, they had spent long months apart, raising Alexander like separated parents, and the rare times they were together, well, it was never like it had been before Alexandria.

She burst down the stairs, gun in hand, sure she would find the worst. And when she heard the tiny shrieks and felt the rumbling in the tower’s foundation, she threw herself down five stairs at a time, stumbling finally upon the chamber floor, where she saw the vault door closing on Montross and her son.

“No!”

The chamber began to rumble, dust falling from the constellation-covered ceiling. The sconces flickered. And through two side vents on the ground, a light oily substance poured into the chamber.

Cursing the continued surprises, Montross lunged for the door, knowing it would be pointless. At least the gate’s not falling. But the hydraulic door whirred and pulled shut as if some monstrous titan pushed on it from the other side. He was close enough to slide through, but hesitated, seeing the door accelerate and not wanting to be caught — and cut — in half. So he did the only thing he could think to do, the only thing that might save him.

Since he was closer to the door hinge than the aperture, he shoved the Emerald Tablet into the slot where the hinge was closing flush with the wall. The tablet’s width fit perfectly, just sliding into place as the door ground into it.

Montross let go and backed up, almost slipping on the slick floor and the flood of oil. The door was still open a crack, large enough for the boy to get through, and maybe himself if he really sucked in his stomach, but he was hoping for something else.

Alexander whistled. He was at his side now, staring. “It’s stopping the door.”

“Unbreakable,” Montross said, “whatever that substance is. I suggest we back up.”

The hydraulics ground and hissed, the door sputtered and ground against the tablet. Then the upper hinges popped and the edge tore away from the frame. Steam burst from the twisted metal, then another series of bolts gave way and the whole wall shook.

The tablet, unsecured now, fell to the floor and plopped into the rising pool of oil.

Alexander lunged for it, but Montross was quicker and scooped it up with one hand. And then, watching his step, he trudged through the now knee-high flood. Out of the vault, he dragged Alexander behind him, both slipping as they stepped over pieces of the broken door.

Then, sensing movement outside, Montross stopped short.

Lydia was there, crouching, aiming a gun at him.

But from behind him, something sizzled and cracked. The sconces broke apart, and the flames dropped like leaves into the waiting pool of flammable oil.

Lydia was about to shout for Alexander to duck so she could get a clear shot at Montross, but she saw a river of some kind of liquid pooling out from behind the shattered door, rolling all the way to her feet. She saw the tablet in Montross’s free hand, saw it shimmering hypnotically in that green-hued aura.

At last, I’ve seen it, actually seen it.

Then she smelled oil and saw flames spreading from the vault.

“Run!” she shouted as the next chamber exploded into a blinding fireball, which then burst out into the next, where Lydia stood. She had a glimpse of Montross scooping up her son and dodging to the side before the inferno roared straight into her.

She had a sudden flashback to another vault, standing before a far more ancient door ten years ago and deliberately setting off a trap that had turned the room into a storm of fire. A trap she had prepared for, a trap she had been able to avoid.

Then, she was ready.

Today, she was not.

“Mom!” she heard, and turned toward the sound before the fiery tsunami fell upon her. She tried to cry out to him, tried to say something meaningful in that moment. What could she possibly say in her final seconds to the son who would grow up, grow into a man and live his entire life without her?

Instead, she just clasped her burning hands together, lowered her head, and met her fate.

Caleb, now it’s up to you.

Halfway across South America, cruising at top speed, Caleb woke with a scream that ripped Phoebe and Orlando from their trances. They stared at him wordlessly.

His mouth was dry as a desert, his lips cracked, splitting. “Did you see it?”

Phoebe reached for him. “No, I didn’t get a clear view. The vault room, a fire…”

“Yeah,” Orlando said, “and some crazy red-haired dude, his clothes smoking, dragging a boy up the stairs.”

“Lydia. I saw her consumed in the explosion. My trap.” Caleb held his head. “What have I done?”

Phoebe was there, holding his hands. “Don’t jump to any conclusions. Remember, this could be anything. A future glimpse, or maybe you were just seeing the past again. The Pharos trap and—”

Caleb met her gaze with pained and desperate eyes as he shook his head. “No, she’s gone. I felt her reaching out to me. Begging for me to save Alexander.”

“He’s got him,” Orlando said. “I was pretty sure about that.”

“Alive?”

“I think so. But I had the sense that he was protected somehow, and maybe holding your boy, it saved him too?”

Caleb nodded slowly, and closed his eyes.

“He’s got the tablet.”

7

Alexander watched from the prow of Old Rusty as Xavier Montross piloted the boat out into Sodus Bay and around the bend into Lake Ontario before the legion of police and fire engines descended upon his house. He watched as the dawn lifted out of the mist, the clouds swallowed up the roiling black smoke, and his lighthouse burned like a biblical pillar of flame.

Mom. He wanted to dive overboard, to brave the icy currents, to swim back to her, or to run over the water itself, back home, to join her in the cleansing fire. But then he thought of his father and his Aunt Phoebe.

They needed him.

He sensed footsteps behind him, a shadow over his shoulder. Silent, the winds stealing even his breath, Alexander wiped away tears that wouldn’t stop flowing. He turned and tried to sound strong as he faced Montross. “What are you going to do with the tablet?”

A silhouette before the rising sun, Montross stood quietly a long time considering him. “The better question, I think, is what am I going to do with you?”

“Let me go?”

“That was my original plan, but now, I think you may be useful.”

“Why? You gonna ransom me?”

“Not at all. I have plenty of money. But since I’m fairly certain your father survived, and since the regrettable incident in your lighthouse basement, I fear he will be after me with a vengeance now. So, it would be prudent to have some leverage.”

“They’re going to look for the boat,” Alexander said. “My dad knows I know where the key is hidden, that you made me tell you how to start it. They’ll come after us with helicopters, jets, satellite stuff. And of course they’re psychic. There’s nowhere to hide.”

Montross walked back toward the cabin. “I’m not worried about that. I avoided their detection for years.”

“How?”

He smiled to himself. “I’ve got something. Something I found after the Pharos incident. It’s old. And it has the side benefit of blocking the user from certain prying eyes.”

“I don’t understand,” Alexander said. “But — how old?”

“Never mind. In any case, we’re not going to be on your precious boat much longer. Maybe this was my escape route all the time.”

Montross cut the engines and they drifted into a choppy area of the lake. A moment of calm, and then suddenly Alexander had to hold on tight, feeling his stomach lurch. Just then, a big wave caught them and they rose higher than he could have imagined, then slammed back down.

Wiping spray from his face, Alexander looked over the side at the sleek black thing rising from the lake, the thing at first he took to be some fanciful lake monster. But then he saw the hump wasn’t a hump at all, especially when a door in its base opened.

“Come on,” Montross said. “Our sub is here.”

Five hours after the rogue submarine and its small crew made its way into the Atlantic Ocean, Caleb, Phoebe and Orlando arrived at Sodus Point, jumped out of the car and passed through the crowd of neighbors, firemen and police. They walked to the edge of the caution tape, where they stared in silence at the smoldering wreckage of the house that had been in the Crowe family for four generations.

The lighthouse alone stood above the ruins, just its brick and concrete façade remaining, up to the scorched glass cupola. The intense heat had turned it black, and now it stood lording above the smoking ruins, like one of Sauron’s towers.

“All gone,” Caleb whispered, with Phoebe at his side as the police approached.

“Your books…”

He held out his hand, seeing black body bags lying in one section of the lawn. “Wait, we need to be sure Alexander wasn’t inside.”

“He wasn’t,” she voiced hopefully.

“Mr. Crowe?” The first officer took off his hat. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your wife…”

The FBI agent arrived an hour later.

She found Caleb with a blackened book in his hands, the pages crumbling, the cover brittle. He held the book, and without a word remaining on its cover, he knew it was the first book he had written, The Life and Times of the Alexandrian Library. Not only that, it was the one he had signed for Lydia. The day they met, at his first book signing.

He trembled as the images rolled through his mind like a tender wave, picking up the shells and stones and sand with the flotsam of his memories. Not psychic visions, just clear, pure memories. Their memories, together. Like a kaleidoscopic light show, Lydia and her jade eyes, her scent of cinnamon perfume, cascaded through this vision.

“Caleb?”

At first, the word mingled with Lydia’s voice, speaking close to his ear. Caleb, goodbye.

“Caleb Crowe?”

A tremor shook him and he let the book drop. He blinked, then glanced up into a woman’s face. Short auburn hair, brown, not-unsympathetic eyes that were darting around a little too fast for him to follow. Grey suit. She held out a hand, helped him up, then pulled away. “Renée Wagner, FBI.”

Caleb forced his eyes to focus. “FBI?”

She nodded curtly. “The police chief called us as soon as it was clear that in addition to arson and murder, this involves a kidnapping, with evidence that the perpetrators have fled to international waters. I’m so sorry for your loss, but time is of the essence. We really have to—”

“You know,” Caleb said softly, looking at the brittle book at his feet, “there’s a theory beloved by bibliophiles everywhere, one that suggests that the way to keep alive, to stave off death itself, is to constantly read. If you’re reading many books at once, perpetually awaiting the resolution of cliffhanger moments, you’ll be unable to rest until you know it all works out. All the mysteries, plot twists and turns, everything that keeps you guessing — and turning pages — all of that will keep you striving to live another day.”

“That’s interesting,” Renée said, frowning. “But we really need to start a workup on who did this and what they want. We’ve got agents canvassing the vicinity, checking satellite photos, police logs, all concentrated on finding your son and his abductor.”

Caleb looked away from her, toward the sea and the missing boat. “I’m pretty sure I know how we can find them.”

Renée followed his line of sight. “Ah yes, the lightship. Sorry, but the Coast Guard found it deserted about thirty miles out. Seems they jumped ship. Any other ideas?”

Caleb shook his head. “No, I just need some time.”

“Any idea who did this?” Renée looked around. “Or who the two other bodies we’re still trying to identify are?”

He nodded. “Robert Gregory is one of them. My wife’s brother.”

She glanced at him suspiciously. “How do you know that?”

“I just do.”

“I see. So, you’re involved with parapsychology, research and remote viewing.”

Caleb stared at her.

“Unusual line of work, Mr. Crowe, but I understand your group has had some successes. Located sunken wrecks. Salvage, treasure—”

“I know what you’re getting at,” he said. “Wondering if we had enemies.”

“Or just jealous followers.”

“Look, Agent Wagner—”

“Renée.”

“—I’ll help in any way I can, but please, give me and my sister some time. An hour maybe, at one of our neighbors’ homes. We need to sort things out.”

She looked at him steadily, and Caleb had the sense that red lights were lighting up inside her skeptical brain. Facts and figures, percentages. Wasn’t the husband the perp in something like seventy percent of these cases? Right now she was probably running scenarios and creating a follow-up checklist: see how he and Lydia got along, whether he’d wanted full custody, what unsavory friends he might have contracted for arson and murder…

“All right,” she said at last. “I’ll continue working the scene here, and I’ll call on you in an hour.”

“Thank you.”

“But Mr. Crowe.”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever you find out, promise you’ll share with me.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

She smiled. “Let’s just say, Caleb, that I’m open-minded about what you do here, and in what you’re about to do.”

He considered her for a long time. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but would you like to watch?”

Phoebe and Orlando were off to the side, sitting on a bench overlooking the lake.

“I’m sorry about Lydia,” Orlando said. His hand hovered around her shoulder uselessly, not sure whether to touch her or not. He had felt something close to a connection with Phoebe ever since interning for her class four years ago. Although only a few years older than he, she had a way of making him feel like an awkward teenager. “I know you were close.”

She gave an attempt at a shrug, trying to appear stoic despite her tears. “Sometimes, she could be like a sister to me. When she wasn’t being all Keeperly.” Her voice cracked. “And Robert… Are they sure it’s him in there?”

“Two other men with Lydia. Everyone was so burned up, though. Still have to do the dental records.”

“You really think he teamed up with Montross?”

“I gotta believe he never trusted Caleb, or me. Obsessed with the tablet twenty-four-seven.”

Orlando scratched the back of his neck, then stood up. “So, the FBI. What’s Caleb going to say to her?”

“Probably going to try to get rid of her,” Phoebe said. “So we can track Alexander without all the dead weight. We should probably start. Come on, we can go to the Hurleys’ house, use their basement. Kids down there have hundreds of pencils, markers and paper. We’ll find him.”

A minute later, when Caleb was alone again, they approached him. Phoebe gave him a hug, then backed away, searching his eyes. “You going to be all right? I can’t believe she’s gone.”

“Not now,” Caleb said, clenching his eyes shut, drawing Phoebe back into a crushing hug, not wanting to let go. “I’ve got to focus on Alexander. Nothing else until he’s safe.”

Sniffling, Phoebe nodded. “You told that agent about Xavier, didn’t you?”

He nodded. “Thought I’d give them something to work on. Maybe they’ll dig up a clue from another angle while we try it our way. She’s got her people checking on Montross, but she wants to be in on our session.”

“What!” Phoebe asked at once. “Are you nuts?”

“Well,” Orlando said, “she is cute”. He craned his neck to watch the agent as Phoebe glared at him.

Caleb cleared his throat. “We’re going to need federal assistance with this. Travel arrangements, security, weapons. We’re lucky we drew an agent with an open mind.”

“Yeah,” said Phoebe. “Lucky, or something else.”

“We are talking about the government here,” Orlando said in a suddenly refrained voice. “They screwed you over last time.”

“We won’t make the same mistake again,” Caleb voiced.

“No we won’t.” Phoebe crossed her arms. “I’ll RV her while you guys focus on Alexander.”

“No,” Orlando said. “You’re closer to your nephew, you’ll get a better hit. I’ll spy on the FBI chick.”

Phoebe glowered at him. “Perv.”

“Anyway, I’m surprised that we haven’t gotten a call.”

“Oh crap.” Caleb dug into his jacket pocket. “My phone battery was dying, so I turned it off.”

“I’ll call your voicemail,” Orlando said, grabbing his phone before Phoebe got hers.

In a moment, Orlando handed over the phone and Caleb entered his code.

Caleb held up a hand, signaling to Agent Wagner. “It’s him.”

Renée walked over, and Caleb gave her the phone after he listened to the message. “You may want to have your people run that through their analytics. See if they can pinpoint a location.”

“What did Xavier say?” Phoebe asked.

“He said I’d know where to meet him. But to come alone.”

“Or he kills Alexander.”

“Of course,” said Orlando. “Got to be dramatic.”

“Come where?” Renée asked.

“He said I’d remember, the place where he last told me I’d see him again.”

“When was this?”

“In Alexandria. Twelve years ago. He backed out of a project we were working on. Then said he’d see me again.” Caleb closed his eyes, remembering. “At the mausoleum.”

“Mausoleum?” Renée asked. “In a cemetery somewhere?”

“I’m not sure,” Caleb answered. “But I have a thought.”

“Care to share?”

“After,” he said, pointing to the neighbors’ house. “Now we need to get to work.”

The Hurleys brought coffee for Renée, green tea for Phoebe and Caleb, and located a can of Red Bull for Orlando. “Drink of champions and psychics everywhere,” he proclaimed, grinning at Renée who just frowned and sipped at her coffee.

They were all seated around a ping pong table. The basement was furnished with a circular rug over the concrete floor, a dusty basketball game in the corner next to an equally dusty stair machine and a 20-inch TV.

“Now I’m not so sure about this,” Renée said. She held up a pad of blank white paper and a pencil. “Really, I can just observe and check on my colleagues, see how the search is going for this Xavier Montross.”

“They won’t find him,” Caleb said.

“We’ll have a dossier on the guy in an hour, everything from his favorite TV shows to how often he wet the bed as a kid. We’ve got his picture at all the airports, borders, etc. Anything he does, down to the color of socks he wears, we’ll know.”

“That’ll help,” Orlando said, “if we ever get our laundry mixed up with this nut, but my guess is that if he doesn’t want to be found, then the only chance of finding him is our way.”

“And,” said Phoebe, “we tried to find him for years after he left our group. And sorry, but we had better tools than you, and we couldn’t even get a glimpse. It’s like he was a ghost.”

“Or he had some help,” said Caleb.

“What do you mean?” Renée asked.

“Never mind. It’s just a thought. There may be things, or people, who are able to block what we can do, where we can see. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence about it, but I thought that it was more like an excuse for failure. But maybe there’s something to it.”

“Anyway,” Phoebe cut in, “come on, Agent Wagner. Try it. You might have a knack for it. We’ve had successes with the most skeptical of volunteers.”

Renée sipped her coffee. “I don’t think I’ll have any—”

“That’s okay,” Caleb said, his voice wracked with suffering and pain just below the surface. “It’s fine if nothing happens. We normally work as a team, but our team, well, I’m sure you know all about what happened in Antarctica.”

“I know what was on the report, but as far as exactly what the hell happened down there I have no idea. Forgive me for asking this bluntly, but what are you people caught up in?”

“Just research,” Orlando said, hands raised defensively.

Caleb started to answer, but Renée was quicker. “And does ‘just research’ involve globe-trotting adventures into booby-trapped tombs, underwater shipwrecks and other Indiana-Jones-type shenanigans?”

Phoebe and Orlando grinned in spite of themselves and said at almost the same time: “Sometimes.”

Twenty minutes later they were drawing. Caleb had given them instructions, what he felt were vague enough so as not to lead anybody, but also give enough direction to focus them on where he thought Xavier might be.

I hope I’m wrong, he thought, after having them visualize Alexander, where he was now, and where he was headed. To focus on the destination, a place with a tomb.

That was all. To say any more might influence the process too much. What he had given them was enough.

He trusted Orlando and Phoebe, the best of the Morpheus Initiative members, to come up with the right answer, to remote view their destination and confirm his thinking. But for himself, he would attempt a different visionary destination. If he could, if it was at all possible. He was going to focus on Xavier himself. On Montross, the man, the psychic. The FBI might have their methods, but Caleb needed something more direct.

He needed a first-hand experience, a psychic get-to-know-you of his adversary. His wife’s murderer, his child’s abductor.

He wanted to see the man he was going to kill.

Phoebe finished her sketch first, then stared at it before turning her attention to her brother. Caleb was in a meditative pose, hands on his knees, eyes closed, brow furrowed in frustration. Orlando was drawing on his iPad, shading in what looked like a pillared structure on a hill.

“I still get weirded out,” she said, turning her sketch pad his way, “when we have the same damn visions.”

“Copycat,” Orlando said with a smirk.

Renée looked over from the other side of the table. “So, is this what it’s like?”

“More or less,” said Orlando. “Though usually we have a few more people here, and we can cross-reference details and see what elements get the most hits.”

Renée turned her pad around. “See, I don’t have any talent. I drew some kind of horse and buggy thing.” On her pad was a crude sketch of two horses pulling a cart with two people inside. “Guess my mind was just wandering, but that’s all I saw.”

“Interesting,” Phoebe noted. “You drew crowns on their heads.”

“I knew it.”

Phoebe looked up. Her brother’s eyes were open, with failure written over his face. But he managed a smile as he looked over Renée’s drawing. “She does have some talent.”

Renée stood up, backing away, still looking at her horses. “What are you talking about? I—”

Suddenly her cell phone rang. “Hang on, just a second.”

She put her ear to the iPhone. “Yeah, what do you got? Okay, I see. Hang on, I’ll call you back, we may have something here that can confirm that.”

She hung up. “NSA traced a coded satellite phone call from Antarctica shortly after the explosion at Fort Erickson. They couldn’t get much after decoding the call, but they confirmed a man’s voice — that of your very own Xavier Montross.”

“Did they get anything else?” Phoebe asked.

“Only a name. He was telling someone where to meet.” Renée looked at them steadily. “‘St. Peter’s’ was all they got.”

Caleb thought for a moment, nodding to himself. Then he pointed to Orlando. “We could do an online photo search match in various databases, comparing those drawings with other pictures, but it would take far too long. Adding the detail of the ‘horse and cart’ would help, but again, we don’t have the time. Orlando, just go to good old Wikipedia.”

“Cop-out,” Orlando said as he opened the tablet and used the keyboard.

“Look up ‘Mausoleum.’”

“Where is this going?” Renée asked, her face showing complete confusion.

Phoebe chuckled, shaking her head. “Don’t worry, you get used to Caleb’s roundabout way of getting us all to confirm what he already knows.” She moved back, then whispered to Caleb, “What’s wrong? Didn’t you get anything?”

Keeping his voice low, he said, “I couldn’t even bring about the start of anything. Something’s wrong.” His eyes were bloodshot, his face pale. Lowering his voice still further, he added, “I tried to see Xavier, went at it a couple different ways, with different questions, all focused. I should have seen something, but not a damn thing came up. Just a flickering green haze around a center of darkness.”

Phoebe frowned. “Do you think you’re being blocked? Maybe by the tablet?”

“Maybe, but I fear it’s something worse.”

“What’s worse?”

“Remember when we were kids? Remember Dad? What happened after he was gone, after I thought maybe it was my fault we couldn’t save him?”

“Yeah,” Phoebe said. “Your visions, they didn’t come again for years.”

Caleb sighed. “I need to try again. With a different target, something besides Xavier. Something I should be able to see. If I can’t,”—he met her stare, and she nearly cried seeing the loss, the guilt, so familiar, bubbling inside of his expression—“if I still can’t, then it’s her. It’s Lydia. I killed her, and this is my penance.”

“No, Caleb.”

Orlando cleared his throat, interrupting and bringing them back to the moment. “Ah, this is what he’s talking about.” He turned the screen so the others could all crowd around and see it. “Mausoleum. The word derives from the tomb of King Mausolus, the Persian satrap of Caria, whose large tomb, completed in 350 BCE, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. And there’s a picture.”

Renée bent forward to stare at it. “It’s almost the same as what you’ve both drawn.”

They looked at the photo Orlando just enlarged: a huge structure set on a hill overlooking a bayside city, with it had a pyramidal step structure on top of a larger base and two more tiers surrounded by immense white columns and statues.

“And,” said Caleb, “check out the roof.”

“A chariot,” Renée whispered. “Four horses. Two people inside, wearing crowns.”

“Mausolus and his queen, Artemesia,” Caleb said. “He died early into his reign. And Artemesia, so in love and desperate to immortalize her husband, spared no expense for his tomb, bringing in the greatest architects and sculptors in all the world. It was a tourist attraction for centuries, but unfortunately, by the twelfth century, the tomb was destroyed, like the Pharos, in a series of earthquakes.”

“Wonderfully tragic,” said Phoebe. “So we’ve all drawn a tomb that no longer exists. Why? What does this have to do with some castle in Rome?”

“It’s not in Italy,” Caleb answered.

“Turkey,” Orlando said, cutting him off, scrolling down the text. “Come on, let me do something useful here. It says here nothing’s left of it except the foundation, in the town of Bodrum, Turkey, but—”

“—but there’s a castle nearby,” said Caleb, letting a smile form. “Built by the Knights Hospitaller in the fifteenth century.”

“Construction started during the Crusades in 1402,” Orlando clarified. “Knights from four different countries helped build this castle, using many of the blocks and pillars from our friend Mausolus’s tomb. It wasn’t finished until around 1480. And they called it the Petroneum.” He looked up, eyes shining. “Or the Castle of St. Peter.”

Caleb steeled his jaw, closed his eyes, and felt a tingle — a familiar stirring at the base of his spine, one that would often shoot upwards, triggering a flood of visions. But this time, it fizzled, leaving greenish sunspots in the corner of his eyes. He had to focus, had to keep trying, but not now. Now, he would have to rely on his sister and Orlando, and on the skills of the FBI. They had to find Alexander.

“That,” he said, pointing to the castle on the screen, “is where he’s taken my son.”

8

Alexander woke to a feeling of his ears popping. He sat up in his tiny bunk, the sole cot in a room no bigger than the old downstairs bathroom in his house. The dream had returned, smashing at the inside of his skull like a nightmare trying to get out. The smell of burnt hair and flesh, sulfur and death. Mom… He leapt out of bed, wobbled unsteadily on his feet, then went for the door.

Locked.

After a moment, he remembered the submarine. Being herded down the tight stairwell, his battered Nikes thumping along behind the shoes and boots of the other men ushering Xavier Montross down into the sub’s metal belly. Two men had locked him in this room, after first giving him “something.” Alexander didn’t even consider that they might have drugged the glass of water they left for him, but within ten minutes of submerging, feeling queasy enough from the descent, he fell onto the cot and was fast asleep.

It felt like the craft was surfacing. He wished he had a porthole window, or access to the periscope, to see where he was. He got up, fought a dizzy spell, then tried the door. Still locked.

Again he thought of the Incredibles. If only he could be like Dash.

Just as he was thinking about creating a diversion to get the door open, like setting something on fire and tripping the alarms, then running out in a blaze of speed, something clicked and the door pulled outward.

A pretty, dark-skinned woman in a black suit stood there. She crossed her arms. Looked him up and down. “I guess you look like your father. Come on.” She moved aside and motioned him out. “I’ve been sent to collect you.”

Alexander blinked at her as if she were some kind of mirage. “Where are we?”

“Where we need to be. Now, move it.”

Alexander stepped out into the night and immediately felt the difference: the humidity and the glare of the city streets, the boats twinkling in the bay, the lit-up stucco and red-tiled houses on the hills, and the blaring, techno-beat music from a nearby disco. But the imposing sight straight over his shoulder that made him turn and gasp was something out of a fairy tale book.

A castle.

Huge reinforced walls were lit with multi-colored lights that made it look like a model on a movie set. Three square towers were visible, equally bright, presiding over the rocky shore and the small armada of boats tethered to the piers.

Impressed with the sight of the medieval castle, Alexander almost didn’t see Montross at the prow, a pack over his shoulder. He was dressed all in black, blending into the night, except for his exposed head of red hair.

“Ah,” he said, “Nina and our little guest. How did you sleep, kid?”

Alexander felt his attention wavering back to the castle. “Bad dreams.” Then he had a thought, a flicker of a memory that grew into something bigger. Something he remembered all of a sudden about his dreams. “A nightmare, about my mom dying. But you know all about what that’s like, don’t you?”

Montross flinched, and suddenly Nina’s hand shot out and spun Alexander around by the shoulder. She was kneeling now, her eyes swallowing his vision as if they were miniature black holes. “What did you see?”

Grimacing, trying to be strong and not cry out, Alexander wriggled in her grasp. Bad idea, he thought. Should have kept that to myself. “Just a wreck, a car crash.” His eyes glazed over and suddenly he was there. “A woman…”

… reaching for the man at the wheel, the man holding his chest and staring at her as if she had just wounded him.

“How did you keep this from me? You bitch. You little lying bitch.”

And then he turns the wheel — hard — toward an oncoming truck, just as his eyes lose all emotion and the woman screams…

Alexander rocked back to the moment, and now Xavier loomed over him. Scooped him up by the front of his shirt so he was dangling in the air.

“What did you see?” he screamed.

“Nothing.” He cringed, biting his lip, withering under the intensity of Montross’s stare.

Alexander dropped, fell back into Nina’s grasp as Xavier lowered his hands, breathed deeply and continued staring. “Bring him.”

“Are we going inside the castle?” Alexander asked, with a dose of hope.

Montross ignored him, turning to Nina. “Is everything set inside? Did you find what we need?”

She nodded, a smile curling at her lips.

Montross turned back to Alexander. “We’ve left a present in there for your father — that is, if he’s heading here as I expect.”

“We aren’t going inside?” Alexander asked.

Montross straightened. “I’m sorry, we’ll be going somewhere else. Somewhere far less hospitable.”

9

Inside the government jet, Phoebe, Caleb and Orlando sat with Renée and two other agents, both working their laptops. Orlando eyed them occasionally, with more than a hint of interest. Earlier, he had probed Renée’s past and questioned her involvement here. The hits were vague, but the visions and impressions concrete enough. Definitely she was legit, but there was something else. Something murky at the corners of his sight. Something of interest and, perhaps, something she was hiding. He needed more time, and some peace and quiet.

Renée was analyzing the castle’s layout on her laptop screen. “We can post agents at all the exits, and we’ve got four snipers covering all the angles and any blind spots they can’t hit. Here, and on this chapel rooftop, on this hill, and at the minaret here.” She looked up, took a breath. “So what do you think this guy wants? Money?”

Caleb shook his head. “Despite our treasure-hunting exploits, we really don’t have that much in the way of money. No, the only true item of value I had Montross just stole. I can’t imagine what else he wants from me. What did you turn up?”

She clicked a few keys, then read aloud: “Xavier Montross, Born in New Orleans, 1978. Parents killed in a car accident when he was six. Raised by a succession of foster parents.” She looked up. “Seems he frequently wore out his welcome.”

“Maybe,” said Phoebe, “something he did, or drew, freaked them out.”

“We can find out. Interview some of the foster parents. But it might take some time. Anyway, he joined the Marines in 1997. Served with Special Ops, decorated in Iraq, then was discharged after refusing direct orders — orders which, ironically, got the rest of his unit killed in a helicopter training accident.”

Caleb scratched his head. “So, he dodged another bullet there. He might have had a premonition of his death.”

“Seems to be his specialty,” Phoebe said.

“Then,” continued Renée, “he was hand-picked to join The Morpheus Initiative in 2002 by—”

“George Waxman,” Caleb said. “Who must have been alerted to his talents by his unusual behavior in the Corps. And then we know the rest, up until he disappeared in Alexandria.”

Renée nodded. “That’s all we’ve got. Except for his travel visas. Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, Mexico. Don’t know what he did or why he went to those places. And”—she shuffled some papers—“this is interesting. His image was just flagged as a possible match to an unresolved case of a break-in and murder at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington ten years ago.”

Caleb perked up. “What did he get?”

Renée shook her head. “No details of a theft. At least, nothing the officials cared to elaborate on. Can you use your remote viewing, clairvoyance or whatever to find out?”

“Possibly, but it works best if we focus our efforts. We need to know what to look for, and it helps to ask ourselves the right questions.”

“Then what are the right questions?”

“Well, let’s think like Montross, get inside his head. What do we know?”

“That he swiped our tablet,” Phoebe pointed out.

Killed my wife and kidnapped my son, Caleb thought. “Right, but why?”

“What is this tablet thing? What does it do?” Renée asked. Her voice cracked a little, and when Caleb’s eyes darted to her she glanced away. Hm. Again, he wondered whether she was hiding something.

He shook away the thought. Too much paranoia lately, after the elaborate trick in the Antarctic. He was leaping at shadows, certain they all contained monsters. But still, his impotence at being able to RV her past was frustrating.

The others waited for Caleb to decide whether or not to tell her. “You won’t believe it,” he said finally, “but you’ll have to trust me that mere rumors of its powers were enough to inspire great quests and conquests to seek it throughout the ages. And a dedicated brotherhood was created to hide it so it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands.”

“What powers are we talking here?”

“Thoth, the Egyptian god, or enhanced man — the jury’s still out on that one — was believed to have created the tablet, and inscribed on it certain spells. Ancient knowledge. We’re not entirely sure what that knowledge was, but by simply reading it initiates could gain access to powers and abilities.”

Orlando looked up, grinning. “Abilities that would make what we’re doing here look like the difference between the Space Invaders and Halo 3.”

Phoebe rolled her eyes.

“There are all kinds of stories,” Caleb continued, “about how the early master magicians, people around the time of Noah and the great Pharaohs, had such powers. The ability to live for centuries, cure diseases, be in many places at once. And they could foretell the future, like the coming of the Great Flood.”

“My Bible’s a little rusty,” Renée said, “but even my four-year-old niece knows that God warned Noah directly, before He wiped out everybody else on the planet.”

Phoebe cleared her throat, eager to get in on the discussion. “Well, the theory here goes that the language used by Noah to speak to God was more indirect. Noah was using these kinds of powers, abilities like prophecy, clairvoyance. These were the same as ‘talking to God.’”

Renée nodded. “So, Noah saw what was coming.”

“And,” said Caleb, “these learned men, people with abilities, wrote down their knowledge and stored it away in safe locations.”

“But you found this tablet,” Renée said, staring at Phoebe, Orlando and Caleb in turn, as if half-expecting them to pull off their outer garments to reveal superhero costumes underneath. “Have you used it?”

“Nope,” said Phoebe, glancing first at her brother for approval. “But not from lack of effort. Actually, we haven’t quite been able to read it.”

“The language,” Caleb admitted, “is a little mind-blowing. It’s not like anything ever seen before. I’ve tried cross-referencing it for years, sent partial scripts to etymologists, but so far, nothing.”

Phoebe smiled. “It also hurts to look at the letters. They’re somehow multi-dimensional. It’s the only word I can use. It’s kind of like watching a 3D movie without the glasses, and in Chinese subtitles. After you’ve been drinking.”

“Or smoking weed,” Orlando said, then wiped the silly grim from his face, glancing at the agents.

Renée frowned at him. “So you can’t translate it, but Montross believes he can?”

Caleb clasped his hands together, held them in front of his face. “There’s a theory. Yes, I know, another one. One we’ve been pursuing during our RV sessions.”

“The Books of Thoth,” Phoebe said. “Other writings. We’re not sure if they’re scrolls or tablets, pillars, or what, but supposedly after Thoth created the Emerald Tablet, his followers deciphered it and wrote the translation of all that knowledge.”

“Theoretically,” Orlando said, “we only need to find one of those to get what we need.”

“A Rosetta Stone,” Caleb finished. “A translation of just a part of the Emerald Tablet, in any language, and we can use that as a cipher to decode the rest.”

Renée rubbed her eyes. “So, these books or whatever, where are they supposed to be?”

“Lots of theories there too,” said Caleb. “The most common being that they’re kept together in a sealed, unbreakable box in the Hall of Records.”

“In Washington?” Renée asked, hopeful.

“No, the Hall of Records referred to was a mythical storehouse of ancient wisdom, much like the library of Alexandria. Legends relate several possible locations, the most credible being that it’s under the Giza Plateau, beneath the Great Pyramid or the Sphinx.”

“Ah,” said Renée, shaking her head. “Of course.”

Caleb felt sorry for her, knowing the agent must be way out of her element now. “There have been studies of the ground in that area, sonar and satellite radar images showing potential pockets, caverns and tunnels under both the Sphinx and the Pyramid complex. The psychic Edgar Cayce predicted a chamber would be found below the Sphinx, and Herodotus relates tales about a staircase leading down between the paws, down to a great door that led into a labyrinth of serpentine passages and chambers. And somewhere down there is this lockbox containing the books. But,” Caleb pointed out, “that’s not what concerns us now. Because now, what I think Xavier Montross might be after, are the keys to that box.”

“The keys?” Renée frowned. “Plural? How many are there?”

“Three, according to the legends. Spread out across the earth at ancient sites, or buried with the dead rulers who might have had the means to construct elaborately defended resting places. Hidden, some maintain, by men related to the ancient order of Thoth. Followers like Noah and Ziusudra and all the rest.”

“Magicians and prophets?” Renée noted.

“Psychics,” Phoebe whispered.

Renée stood and started pacing, gripping her cell phone like a pointer. The plane dipped and she reached for a chair to steady herself. “So Montross broke into your lighthouse, stole this Emerald Tablet which, if I hear you right, is likely an Egyptian archaeological artifact, and its theft is a serious breach of international law, but never mind that now. Montross then kidnapped your son and is now off seeking three legendary keys, all of which he’ll need in order to gain access to a chamber under the Sphinx and open a box which contains a translation of the text?”

Caleb shrugged. “Sounds about right. I know it’s less than convincing, but that’s the only rationale I’ve got right now.”

“So why St. Peter’s?”

“The Mausoleum,” Phoebe said. “He must’ve RV’d the keys, found that one might have been hidden there. Mausolus must have found one, recognized it as something special, and Artemesia had it entombed with him in his mausoleum.”

“It fits,” Caleb said, “with the tenet of alchemy which maintains that secrets are best hidden ‘in plain sight.’ The Mausoleum was a huge, ostentatious structure. Alexander the Great would have been well aware of it, as Mausolus was a contemporary, and Alexander went on to conquer Halicarnassus a decade later. My guess is wherever the key was, Alexander couldn’t find it. But he posted guards to keep the mausoleum safe from trespassers before putting his best philosophers to work at analyzing its construction to find potential secret compartments.”

Renée rubbed her eyes. “So what about the other locations?”

Caleb sighed. “I didn’t know about Mausolus until now, but I believe one of the keys may have been at the tomb of another charismatic and powerful leader. Cyrus the Great, the first great conqueror. He was a Persian in the sixth century BCE who created the largest empire the world had ever seen, a feat unrivaled until Alexander came along. And what’s more, we know that two centuries after Cyrus’s death, Alexander invaded Persia, and in what is now modern-day Iran he found and entered Cyrus’s tomb, looking for something in particular.”

“Did he find it?” Renée asked.

“Well, we’re not entirely sure what he found.” Caleb took a sip of tea, blowing at the smoke first. “We tried to RV the event and got a lot of jumbled images, but nothing definitive came out of those sessions.” He thought back to the candle-lit room at home, the ten people madly scribbling on their pads, day after day, trying to see. What had become of Cyrus’s possessions? People had drawn things ranging from snow-capped peaks to marvelous palaces to a remote desert landscape and a cavern underground, but nothing consistent.

Phoebe leaned in. “We’ve been going on the theory that Alexander the Great found Cyrus’s key, and that maybe he himself discovered, or was handed, another key in the desert at Sais, at the Egyptian oracle where he was heralded as king, given the mandate of Heaven, and promised a marvelous destiny.”

Caleb continued. “So Alexander had two of the three keys, at least, and was likely searching for the third. We believe he died before finding it and achieving that destiny, although history still reveres him as one of the greatest rulers of the world, and responsible for the spread of democracy and knowledge. He was most likely buried with those two keys, and we may need to focus our efforts to find his body to verify that, but more likely we weren’t asking the right questions to define our search. I’m starting to think that maybe someone took the keys from his tomb before it was hidden.”

“But we doubt anyone has managed to collect all three,” Phoebe said, “since we’re pretty sure the lockbox is still unopened.”

Caleb put down his cup. “It’s more likely that someone else, someone very powerful, must have found and dug up Alexander. And now those keys are hidden somewhere else. But as for the third key, we’ve tried remote viewing it before, but only came up with vague, unreferenced and uncorrelated images — which made us go all the way back and try to view the creation of the Emerald Tablet again. Who actually created it and where.”

“And what did you see at those sessions?” Renée asked.

“Not much.”

“Except for the head,” Orlando pointed out. “The damn head.”

“The what?” Renée asked.

Caleb stretched out his legs. “It was just something else we’d been drawing a lot, the only consistent image our members came up with in connection to questions about the origin and meaning of the Emerald Tablet. Don’t know what it means yet, but because of a spy in our group, Montross knew about it, and used it to get us as far away as possible so he could steal the Emerald Tablet.”

“But now,” said Renée, “you think one of these keys is at the Mausoleum, or this castle now in Bodrum?”

“Almost sure of it,” Caleb said. “If for no other reason than that Montross is heading there.”

The plane lurched, then started on a descent.

“Well,” said Renée, “I guess we’re about to find out.”

10

Caleb and Renée entered Bodrum Castle through the museum’s main entrance, pushing past a line of caution tape.

“Police and museum officials are cooperating,” Renée said. “Giving us two hours. They’re telling the tourists and workers that the site is undergoing a minor repair and will reopen shortly. So we’ve got to get in and out quickly.”

Caleb considered the massive medieval architecture, the conglomeration of turrets and courtyards, crenellated walls, the statues and heraldry marking the approach.

He whistled, touching a few eroded birdlike figurines as they passed under the gate and into the main courtyard. Here and there he saw larger granite blocks, some tinted green, denoting their volcanic origin. “Stones from the Mausoleum,” he whispered, then stopped before the main hallway. “Okay, I go in alone from here.”

“But there’s no one inside,” Renée said. “Turkish police have searched the whole place, and we’ve got agents on boats in the harbor, snipers where we talked—”

“Alone,” he said again. “I think you’re right. He’s not here, but he could still be watching. Seeing if I disobey orders. I don’t want to risk anything happening to Alexander.” It had occurred to him, of course, that this could be a trap, another chance to kill him after failing in Antarctica. Maybe that was all this was. Xavier and Nina wanted him dead the Morpheus Initiative gone.

But why? Just so they wouldn’t stand in Xavier’s way? See his plans, cut him off and recapture the tablet? Caleb held his head. It was too much, like trying to understand a time travel paradox. It was impossible to outsmart someone who could see the future, someone who could change the rules during the middle of the game.

“I’ll see you soon,” he said to Renée, patting his cell phone. “We’re just a phone call away.”

“Be careful,” she said, touching his arm for just a moment before pulling back, and then he was gone, heading off into the darkness toward the first gallery.

The castle had been converted to a museum for maritime archaeology, showcasing some of the region’s magnificent relics recovered from a number of major shipwrecks and dredged from the sea floor. Byzantine artifacts, earthen jars, jewelry, and in one room-sized glass case, a reconstructed merchant ship from the twelfth century BCE. Caleb lingered in the first dimly lit gallery, marveling at the treasures plucked from Neptune’s grasp and stored here for years, at a site partially built from the stones of the greatest tomb in the ancient world.

He wished he still had his ability so he could RV some of these pieces to get a glimpse into the ancient past and see what sort of tragedies had left these relics at the bottom of the sea. But he pressed on, heading toward the section of reliefs that the curator told him were taken directly from the Mausoleum’s ruins in the fifteenth century.

As he descended another set of stairs, he looked out over a lush garden, and further back he saw a minaret atop a Moslem shrine. He had a moment of stillness, of clarity. He thought of Phoebe and Orlando and could almost see out to the section of Bodrum a half mile away where they must be exploring the ancient foundations of the Mausoleum, looking for visions. And clues.

He touched the walls, hoping to get a glimpse into the past, anything to part the veil and burst through the blockage erected by his consuming guilt.

But nothing came, nothing but the empty silence of the dead.

Phoebe and Orlando were at the site, an open hillside, with flowering shrubs and wild grass peeking out from under the fragments of rounded columns and rows of misshapen blocks layered out over the land as they might have been positioned eight hundred years ago, before the devastating earthquakes. All around the site, apartment buildings scaled the hills like ungainly climbers tethered together by a haphazard network of telephone poles and wires. The blaring of horns and creaking of buses sounded sporadically, and the scent of juniper mixed with exhaust fumes.

Phoebe let her hand linger on the stones in passing, watching Orlando do the same. “Well,” she said, taking a seat cross-legged in the middle of a set of broken columns. Pulling out a pad of paper, she smiled as Orlando took out his iPad and powered it up. “Let’s see what we can see.”

Two minutes later she dropped into a trance, tumbled back through the centuries, and opened her eyes to a similar hillside…

… except for the half-finished monolithic construction, the hundreds of workers — carpenters, sculptors, draftsmen and artisans — all laboring on the Mausoleum.

Surveying the work from her porch on a raised platform stands a regal woman with olive skin and melancholy eyes. “How long?” she asks the two men working at a table, studying unrolled scrolls depicting the graphical representations and measurements for the construction, including the statues, the columns and the roof. She points to one robed man, the closest. “Satyros?”

“Another year, My Queen. The structure may be finished by the Saturnalia, but the sculptors will still be finishing their work. So many statues, the reliefs of the Amazon frieze alone will take years. But rest assured, Leochares will get the job done. And the bas-reliefs presenting the battle of the Centaurs—”

“There will be no deviation from my husband’s wishes. Especially regarding the depiction of the centaurs. Or its construction.”

The other man turns around. His eyes look her over. “How is your health, Lady Artemesia?”

“Not your concern,” she responds with a wave, leaning over suddenly and suppressing a cough. “I was strong enough to repel the Rhodians in their attempt to capture Halicarnassus. I will be well enough to see this project finished.” She let her gaze linger on the massive columns, the second tier poised and prepared for the lifting of the roof and the immense golden chariot that would in time house their statues.

“Soon, My King. Soon, we’ll be together again.”

Phoebe blinked and slowly let her consciousness return to the shining sunlit present where mundane elements pricked at her senses. The barking of a dog, the blast of a cab’s horn, the ticking of Orlando’s fingers on his iPad. She opened her mouth to call out to him, but saw his eyes, white, the pupils lolling back in his head. His fingers moving rapidly while his lips moved, whispering something unheard.

“Orlando?”

Overcome by need and immediacy, the fullness of the experience nearly knocked him over. No matter how many times Orlando had experienced this, it always took his breath away with its suddenness. Its raw power, colliding with his psyche, at the same instance gently gliding over his perceptions….

In light chain mail, colorful heraldic symbols blazing on their chests, the knights rise up in a victorious cheer. Under the English tower named the Lion, the men roar and taunt the fleeing soldiers of Sultan Mehmed II.

Cannons smoke and men lean against the walls, dropping their crossbows. Flags wave from the other towers, each one constructed in its own style, and the knights from Italy, Spain, France and Germany cheer each other in repelling this latest offensive. Below, the passages twisting through narrow turns and successfully defended gates bear witness to the strength of this castle’s design. The bodies of the invaders litter courtyards and lie in arrow-pierced piles on the steps.

The captain surveys the fortifications, then eyes the wounded forces retreating into the descending twilight. “They will return,” he says to his men, then points ahead to the smoking holes blown through sections of the walls by the enemy cannon.

“We must thicken the walls facing the mainland. Take a team in the morning. Gather more stones from the Mausoleum.”

Another flash, and Orlando reeled, reaching out and scraping the flesh of his palm against a greenish-hued stone….

A different commander, with a Fleur-de-lis on his tunic, stands atop the tallest tower. He speaks in French, but the words are understood through some other means. “Suleiman will try again, and the walls are weakening. Gather more blocks from the ancient site and put them to use.”

“There are not many stones left, Grand Master,” says a wide-eyed youth, a knight with blood spatters on his face. “But what of the statues and the reliefs? There are still more that have not been smashed or crushed for lime.”

The Grand Master considers the sprawling layout of the Castle’s interior, the blank walls, empty alcoves. “Take them as well. They deserve a place of honor.”

Orlando half-emerged from the vision, clinging to it just barely, straddling this world and the other, as he reached for the iPad.

Phoebe moved closer, crawling on her good leg, moving around his side to watch. She put a finger to her lips, stifled a gasp, and stared as he drew a chaotic battle scene — what looked like half-men, half-horse creatures savagely attacking townspeople, and getting more than a little amorous with the women.

Just then, her cell phone rang. She flipped it open.

Caleb’s voice. “Phoebe. I’m no good up here. Nothing. I’m not seeing anything.”

“Don’t worry, we’ve got it covered.” She studied the rendition. “Hey, is there some kind of wall carving there? Mythological? With centaurs?”

“Yeah, on a wall in the French section. Hang on, just walked by it.”

“I saw something, and it looks like Orlando’s drawing the same thing right now. He’s still in a trance.”

“Okay, I’m looking at it now, but I don’t see anything obvious. Tried touching it, hoped for a vision, but got nothing. Not even a daydream.”

“What I don’t know is what it means. Why the centaur?”

Caleb took a moment to respond. “The battle symbolized nature versus civilization. Lapithe and Centaures were twin sons of the god Apollo. Centaures was born deformed and later mated with mares, creating half-human, half-horse hybrids. This scene shows a legendary battle between the brothers’ descendents, all started over some alcohol abuse at a wedding.”

“Why would that have anything to do with the Books of Thoth, and those keys?”

“I don’t know, but it might fit — in the sense of reconciling man’s nature, both sides of what we’re seeking here: the raw physicality of what we’ve become versus our psychic potential. This scene represents the conflict and the overthrow of one by the other.”

“Whatever, but we still need to know where the key is. Maybe Orlando can figure it out.”

“He’d better draw fast.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think I’m alone in here.”

Caleb had been kneeling in front of the marble carving of the classic Greek scene, the battle of the Centaurs and the Lapiths, when he heard something. Two heavy scansions and a thick rope set off the ancient artwork from the walkway, but Caleb had stepped over it to scrutinize the carvings more intently. Pulling his fingers away from the most prominent centaur, he snapped the phone shut and backed away toward the northeast corner of the room.

He had heard a step, a scuff, someone trying to be stealthy. He ducked around a corner, into another room with a red coat of arms hanging on the wall and a glass case full of spearheads, axes and maces discovered in a Phoenician wreck. There was one exit straight ahead, which he kept an eye on as he opened the phone and called Agent Wagner.

“Renée here,” she answered. “What did you find?”

Whispering, he said, “Not sure yet, but — are any of your people inside?”

“No, why?”

A shadow flitted across the light in the doorway. “Have them look in on my location. I think I’m being tracked. Someone’s here.”

Caleb backed further into the shadows while keeping a clear view of the corridor.

“Nothing, Caleb. My snipers aren’t seeing a thing, and I’m tracking you with the GPS signal on your phone. We can see you in that room through the western window.

“There’s someone in the hallway behind me.”

“Impossible.”

“Maybe someone hid during the evacuation, or there’s a secret passage or something. Someone waiting for me. Maybe it’s him.” Or worse, Caleb thought. It’s Nina, and I’m as good as dead.

“Okay, listen Caleb. If you think you can chance it, run through the other door and keep running. It’s a long hallway, but with a lot of windows, and—”

Another sound, and a silhouette filled the doorway.

Caleb hoped Renée knew what she was doing. He snapped the phone shut, ducked his head and started to run for the door — just as a dark figure eased into the room before him.

Caleb froze, raising his hands, still holding the cell phone. Completely covered in black like a ninja, the intruder glided toward him. It said something incomprehensible from under a black facemask and then did a strange thing. It stopped, and bowed.

Caleb didn’t know how to react. Should he run, laugh or return his bow? Instead, he shifted a foot to his right, concealing the scansion behind his back.

When the stranger’s head raised, his gloved hands rose, and were now holding long curved daggers.

Caleb reached behind him, gripping the cool metal. “Wait, let’s talk a sec.”

The attacker leapt. Caleb ducked and spun around, hauling the heavy scansion up with him and taking his unaware foe in the chest.

A dagger dropped as he grunted, fell, but then sprang right back up. Only two feet away, the dagger beckoned within Caleb’s reach as he let go of the scansion, but he had already made his move toward the door and the long passage.

He ducked and lunged forward, just as something clanged off the granite wall where his head had just been. Then he was sprinting, weaving slightly side to side. Panting, passing each window and getting a glimpse of the towers and walls, the trees, the hills.

Come on, somebody take a shot.

The footsteps behind him were gaining. Maybe preparing another knife for the back of his head. Caleb crossed in front of another window, the last one before the next doorway and a steep winding staircase inside the German tower.

He lunged like an Olympic sprinter at the finish line just as he heard the distant pop and, as he skidded into the tower, angling for the stairs, he heard a grunt and a flopping sound.

Behind him, his pursuer was down, his mask half-blown off, brains and bits of skull obscuring what was left of his face.

Caleb turned, biting his hand and wheezing for breath. He reached for the cell phone, flicked it open. “Good shot,” he said when he finally found his breath. “Thanks.”

“That’s it. We’re getting you out of there. Sit tight, there may be more.”

He glanced out the windows where he half-expected to see the Sultan and half the Moslem army massed at the front gate. “I’ll be back in the Centaur room. Give me cover and another ten minutes.”

“It’s not safe, we have to—”

He hung up, then was about to redial Phoebe when he saw something on the assassin’s neck, above the collar and the torn mask: a gold tattoo that looked like a trident, except with nine flowing things attached to the staff. Frowning, Caleb stared at the configuration for a moment before positioning his phone, pressing the camera function, lining up the shot and taking a picture.

He stood up, then called Phoebe as he stepped over the body and headed back down the hallway. “Sis?”

“Yeah, you okay? Feared we lost you there.”

“I’ll be better if you tell me you’ve got something.”

“About the centaurs? Hang on.”

He kept walking, past the windows where now he saw agents converging, running over the ramparts, seeking out hiding places, working their way toward him.

“Big brother?”

“Yeah?” He entered the room and stepped back to the bas-relief of the Centauromachy.

“Orlando’s just coming out of it, and — what? Ah, all right, here.”

“Hey, boss. You there?”

“Yeah, Orlando, but as I said before, I’m not your boss.”

“You pay me for this gig, so that makes you a boss in my book.”

“Then I’m going to fire you if you don’t tell me what you saw.”

“Okay, do you see the main centaur, the big one raising his arms?”

“Yep.”

“Is the head still intact?”

“Yes, but not all of the body. Rear legs are broken off.”

“Not a problem. I think you’re good to go. See his right horn?”

“Yes.” Caleb moved in closer and stared. It was slightly larger than the left, about the width of two fingers, and maybe six inches in length. But it was a little darker, greener than its mate, as if the sculptor had used a different material, something only noticeable up close. “Wait, this frieze was originally on the second tier, rather high up if I recall. Even if visitors came to admire it, they’d need a ladder to see the discoloration.”

Orlando coughed. “You need to trust me here.”

“Go on.”

“Twist the horn clockwise; it should release.”

Footsteps approached, agents with submachine guns drawn, coming from both entrances. Caleb moved quickly, turning the horn, which at first refused to budge. But then it gave, turned and screwed off. Caleb turned it upside down, looked into the hollow space inside. He held the phone between his ear and his shoulder, then tapped the horn against his palm.

“Is the key in there?” Orlando asked.

Agent Wagner came to a skidding halt, leading two agents from the eastern passage. She held a gun with both hands and wore a bullet-proof vest. “You find it?”

Caleb showed her his palm, which held only a single rolled up piece of paper. He tugged at the edge and flattened it out. Then his heart sunk, along with his hopes to save Alexander, as he saw the words written there in fresh red ink.

10

“They were here,” Caleb told her. “We missed them.”

Renée holstered her gun, a black Walther .45 with a walnut grip, a weapon Caleb had noticed earlier and thought was a little flashy for an FBI agent. “So,” she said, “Montross managed to do in minutes what Alexander the Great failed to do all his life?”

Caleb offered a weak smile. “The Great Conqueror didn’t have our gifts.” Well, at least Phoebe and Orlando still have access to those gifts.

Renée led Caleb back to the dead body. Her men had removed the assassin’s mask. “Recognize him?”

“You mean by what’s left of him.”

She shrugged. “Sorry. He’s Asian. We can tell that much, but he’s got no ID.”

“Nothing but that tattoo,” another agent pointed out.

“Wait,” Caleb said. He took out his phone, brought up the photo and sent it as a picture message to Phoebe’s phone. Then he called her.

Renée frowned. “What are you doing?”

Caleb held up a hand. “Following a hunch.”

“Another one?”

“Yeah. This thing looks familiar, and I’ve got a weird feeling that it’s important. Phoebe?”

The phone crackled. “Yeah, we’re packing up here. Did you get it?”

“We got screwed. Again. Montross and Nina beat us to it. But listen, I just sent a picture to your phone. Load it into Orlando’s tablet and have him do his magic on it. Find a match.”

“We’re on it,” she said. “Call you right back.”

“What are you thinking?” Renée asked as they walked back to the room with the weaponry and the ancient ship reproductions. “Isn’t this guy just another one of Montross’s thugs, like those he used back at Sodus?”

“I don’t think so,” Caleb replied. “There was just something about the killer’s demeanor. He actually bowed to me before he attacked.”

“He what?”

“It was reminiscent of how someone else treated me when I was trying to uncover the secret of the Pharos. Someone who had been sworn to protect it. It was the same. Like he admired my efforts, but couldn’t let me get any closer.”

“Okay, but why would he have been protecting something that Montross had already taken?”

Caleb thought for a moment. “Maybe he didn’t know it was gone. Montross might have done it quickly, using diversion or just blending in earlier with the other tourists, and this guy — its protector — would have been on the alert only for a direct attempt.”

Renée rubbed her forehead. “Like what we did just now.”

Caleb’s phone rang and he answered at once, putting the call on the speaker. “Orlando, what do you have?”

“An itching for a raise, boss.”

“Just tell me.”

“All right, but are you sure you don’t want to guess first?”

Caleb groaned. “Okay, it’s an ancient symbol. Something Chinese, or…” He blinked, suddenly the emblem on a flag, a waving flag on a pole, or a spear, one spear among hundreds, thousands, massed on a battlefield.

“…Mongolian.”

“Bingo!” Orlando cried with impatience, bridling in his voice. “It’s the banner of the nine ox tails, the standard symbol of the one and only…”

Caleb mouthed it just as Orlando said the name.

“…Genghis Khan.”

“So if I was confused before, now I’m certifiable,” Renée said. “What does Genghis Khan have to do with any of this?”

Keeping the speakerphone connection on, Caleb started pacing, aware that he was treading on the same stones the knights had walked on during the Crusades. “It could have a lot to do with all this. Genghis Khan, whose real name was Temujin, surpassed even Alexander the Great’s conquests by ruling a territory four times as large, creating a vast empire across Asia, sweeping through the Middle East, marching even to the doorstep of Europe. But what many don’t know was that he wasn’t just a savage tyrant; he was a seeker of truth, much like Alexander. And also like both Alexander and Cyrus, he was tolerant of all religions, respecting that in their hearts all faiths were driven by the quest to understand the will of heaven.” He thought for a moment. “And there are myths, legends that Temujin even sought out relics of Alexander’s legacy, artifacts that would solidify his hold on power and on life itself.”

The phone crackled with Orlando’s voice. “But he didn’t get too far in that respect. In his old age he fell off a horse or something and never recovered from his injuries. Died like all rulers and tyrants — just like the rest of us.”

“Knock it off,” came Phoebe’s voice. “We don’t need your anarchy speech here.”

“I’m just saying, in the end we’re all the same: dead meat.”

“It’s a good point,” Caleb said, “and where I was going next. He died on a way to another battle, a campaign to put down a revolt at Xi-Xia in 1227 CE. But his passing left behind one of the greatest archaeological mysteries of all time.”

Renée blinked at him, waiting. “Which is…”

Caleb gave her a weak smile. “Where is he buried?”

Noting her impatience, he continued. “His body was taken somewhere in secret, as was the custom with all Mongolian rulers. Different theories about the whereabouts of his tomb have circulated ever since. There was a cryptic anecdote from Marco Polo, then some observations from visiting dignitaries decades later. And then some subtle clues surfaced, based on the Mongolian epic work written shortly after his death: The Secret History of the Mongol People.”

“Well, does any of it help us here?” Phoebe asked.

“I honestly can’t say how much we can rely on. The more colorful legends state that all those who labored on his crypt were massacred, and any unfortunate souls who had come across the funeral procession were put to the sword. And when his procession finally arrived, returning back across the Gobi Desert to his ancestral home in northeastern Mongolia, another force of soldiers were waiting to kill those who had escorted the Khan’s body. Some estimates put this burial-related death toll at over twenty thousand, all to ensure Temujin would have an undisturbed afterlife. Archaeologists and treasure-hunters have sought his resting place for centuries, certain there would be tremendous wealth buried inside his crypt with him.”

On the other end of the line, Orlando made a choking sound. “How tremendous are we talking?”

Caleb shrugged. “The spoils of all the conquests he had made, all the treasure acquired from the kingdoms he conquered. None of it has ever been found, so the speculation is that it’s all still there somewhere, with him or his descendents, whose graves are also unaccounted for, but rumored to be in the same area.”

“Like the Valley of the Kings in Egypt,” Phoebe said, and then giggled. “Only it’s the Valley of the Khans.”

“Okay,” Renée snapped. “But if no one knows where this place is…”

“Well, there is a mausoleum for him.”

Her eyes narrowed, and she sighed. “Another mausoleum?”

Caleb’s voice pitched excitedly. “Ceremonial only, built in 1954 in Erdos City, now part of China, as a place for Chinese and Mongolians alike to honor their national hero.” He lowered his head. “And now I’m thinking when Montross said we’d meet again at the mausoleum, he might not have meant this, Mausolus’s ancient Wonder of the World. He may have been referring to another tomb — the tomb of Genghis Khan.”

“Or,” Renée said sarcastically, “maybe some other mausoleum? One of the Roman emperors? Or hell, Grant’s tomb?”

Caleb gave her a look. “I thought you were a believer.”

Renée blinked at him, then looked away. “This is too much. We’ve got nothing to go on, and meanwhile your son’s in danger. Let’s do this my way.”

“Hang on,” Orlando chimed in, excitement in his voice. “That symbol, I traced some more references and found that somebody’s still using it. One group of people, actually.”

“Using it how?”

“As body art.”

Renée frowned. “Who?”

“They’re called the Darkhad. And their function, get this, is to conduct the ceremonies and rites around honoring the great Khan, and also to protect his mausoleum.”

“I remember now,” Caleb said. “That force of loyal soldiers who waited for the Khan’s body to return? They were from the clan known as the Darkhads.”

“Yeah,” Orlando continued tersely, taking back the spotlight. It sounded like he was reading again. “Originally there were eight mausoleums, then more, set up in portable white tents that moved around the Mongolian steppes. Some actually held relics like his saddle or his sword, but they were chiefly designed to inspire the continued worship and adoration of old Genghis. The Darkhad families, descendents of his two favorite generals, were given special privileges by Temujin — freedom from any other civil duties, freedom from taxes, the right to raise money on their lands — all so they could care for the mausoleums. Originally there were over five hundred Darkhad, and that number swelled to the thousands in later centuries. But during the 1950s the Communist government abolished the roving mausoleums and allowed just one, which housed all the relics. And the Darkhad dropped in number to only eight. And then during the Cultural Revolution, the Commies cracked down even more on any worship of their non-Communist past. All the cherished cultural elements were destroyed, the mausoleum sacked by angry punks, and the Khan’s relics were broken or burned. Only recently did the Darkhad rebuild the mausoleum and create replicas of the more significant artifacts.”

“Thanks for the history lesson,” Caleb said. “But that only strengthens my theory that this assassin, if he was one of these Darkhad, was guarding the key. Mausolus’s key. A key that could open one of the locks guarding the Books of Thoth. Why would he be guarding that unless—”

“—unless,” came Phoebe’s voice, “he knows where there’s another one, because he’s been sworn to protect it. Genghis must have found one, or both. Maybe he was the one who looted Alexander’s grave?”

“And maybe,” said Orlando, “he wanted to leave this one here as bait, to see who came looking.”

Caleb nodded. “I think we can safely guess that if Montross has this key, then he’s off to find the others.”

“But,” said Renée, “if all the Khan’s relics were destroyed and his body isn’t even at that mausoleum in Erdos City, then what?”

“Then,” Caleb said solemnly, “it looks like we’ve found our next RV target. One that will provide our greatest test since the Pharos.” He took a breath. “If we succeed, it’ll make us the envy of archaeologists everywhere, and quite possibly the enemy of billions of people who might not want to have their demigod dug up.”

He sighed and met Renée’s stare before giving a nervous smile.

“We need to find the tomb of Genghis Khan.”