And he thought about the eighth sign. The final key.
He thought of Sostratus and Demetrius, of Alexander, Caesar and Marc Antony. Theodosius and Ptolemy, Hypatia, King Michael and Qaitbey. A hundred names and images drifted in and out of his mind’s eye and brought a smile to his face, as if familiar friends were dropping by. He felt the tug of the other world several times, felt the ripple in the veil, but left it alone. Now was not the time. He breathed deeply and calmly, preserving his focus, waiting and saving his strength.
They landed at Rochester International Airport, and then boarded a private jet to Langley. Again, at first they didn’t speak a single word to each other, sitting in chairs facing one another. Caleb merely smiled at him and stared at a point over his shoulder. Finally, Waxman broke. “How’s my wife?”
“My mother is resting comfortably.”
“That’s good.”
Caleb nodded.
Waxman tapped his fingers together. “Do you know where we’re going?”
Caleb nodded again.
“How long have you known?”
Caleb shrugged. “Not long enough. I never trusted you, but I never asked—”
“—the right questions. I know.” Waxman chuckled to himself smugly. “Don’t worry, for what it’s worth, you’re still the best psychic I’ve ever come across. And I’ve seen a lot of them.”
The plane tilted slightly and Caleb’s stomach compensated. The plane had just cleared a mass of churning clouds and emerged into the stark, cool blue of the heavens, with slanting rays of sunlight dazzling off the wing.
Caleb smiled. “Was Stargate yours?”
Waxman reached for a glass of scotch and ice, looked down, then back up and composed himself again. “It was. It is.”
“I see.” Caleb folded his arms. “Then rumors of its demise were exaggerated?”
“Stargate was far too important to close. And the fools in the Senate didn’t know what they had. They only wanted to cover their re-election chances. They couldn’t fund this kind of research openly, so we had to go underground. You understand.”
“Of course.” Caleb watched him carefully. He saw the way he stole furtive glances, trying to size Caleb up.
I’ve surprised him twice today.
Waxman was probably hoping Caleb didn’t know anything else, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe Caleb had probed deeper into his past. What else had he intruded upon?
“Stargate continues,” Waxman said, “with a smaller scope, a limited budget, and much less interference. They only ask for one summary report a year on my progress, which I purposely keep vague and conflicting so as not to attract any undue attention.” He drained his glass. “You and I both know the phenomenon is real, and we know what it’s capable of. I have bigger concerns than proving its validity to anyone.”
“Bigger even than national security?” Caleb gave a little chuckle. “You could have been using us to see into North Korea or Iran, to find bin Laden or predict the next terrorist bombings.”
“True, but I actually find such distractions useful. Again, political attention is directed elsewhere while I address the true security issues of our world. There is so much more at stake, and I am the one who will preserve us.”
“Really? You’re to be our savior?”
He glared at Caleb. “Imagine if the contents of that vault fell into the wrong hands. Men are basically evil, Caleb. You know this. Your precious alchemy books say as much. Why do you think the old high priests kept the sacred texts away from the masses? Why did they write in hieroglyphics that could only be read by the most educated and privileged? Knowledge must be guarded. Why, later on, was it punishable by death to even own a copy of the Bible?”
“Priests wanted to consolidate their power. Knowledge is power.”
“Yes, but knowledge is also dangerous. Didn’t Pope Gregory the Great say ‘ignorance is the mother of devotion’?” Waxman shook his glass around and the ice chinked as it melted. He had returned the favor and was now surprising Caleb. “Tell me something. If you found your way into that vault, and the treasure was everything you believe it to be—the power of life and death, the power of creation, the power for men to become gods—what would you do with it?”
His eyes locked on Caleb’s, and for the first time in his presence, Caleb felt like a little boy again, afraid to speak. The truth was, he didn’t know what he would do.
Waxman grinned. “I’ll tell you what the Keepers would do. What your lovely Lydia and her father would have done. They were going to keep the books for themselves. Create a new order of the elite. They were going to rule. Talk about the corruption of absolute power . . .”
So Waxman wasn’t one of them.
“And you?” Caleb asked. “What will you do with it?”
Waxman smiled and sat back, stretching out his feet. “The only thing that’s appropriate. The only way to protect the balance of life on this planet. The only way to ensure peace and security.” His eyes blazed. “The only way to protect the billions of souls from undergoing the hell you and I experience every day.”
And then Caleb understood.
Waxman made two fists, and his glass shattered. “Those books open the gates of hell, Caleb. Just a glimpse, thousands of years ago, partially restored the connection between spirit and material, between life and death—”
“—above and below.”
“Exactly.” He calmed down and gently picked a glass shard out of his left palm. “The door only opened a fraction, and for two millennia afterwards, the Church and the armies of man have valiantly done their best to slam that door shut again. But once opened, the stubborn influences are hard to put back.”
He kept talking, eyes glazing over and seeing beyond Caleb and the plane itself. “I believe a few intelligent men, kings and priests, understood the threat and tried their best to destroy these elements, or at least alter them so the rest of us wouldn’t be tempted. Witchcraft, demonism, occultism—these were the names given to any study of the esoteric, any attempt to link the two realms and travel from ours to theirs or vice versa. We punished these crimes by torture, death and enslavement, but still the sickness remained, refusing to be eradicated. Secret societies continued the forbidden practices, and kept the fragile link operating, only barely.” He gave a look of disgust. “In time the defenses were weakened, and now we have Ouija boards, séances, crystals, psychic hotlines and palm readings, New Age movements. And people are moving back towards such beliefs.”
Caleb shook his head. “And the sacred texts under the Pharos . . .”
“If released, they will only lead people to eternalmisery and damnation.”
“So what will you do?” Caleb asked, already fearing he knew the answer.
Waxman leaned forward, with unblinking eyes boring right into Caleb’s soul. “Destroy them all. Every tablet, every scroll. Every single letter of every word.”
Caleb couldn’t breathe.
“Do you see? Do you, Caleb? What’s a single terrorist hiding out in the hills? What’s another bombing compared to the widespread, wholesale change in consciousness that will come if these books are released? Our entire way of life will be torn apart. There will be no privacy, no place to hide. And good, honest people will be eternally plagued by the shades of the other world, every day, every hour . . . every minute. Their pasts will be their present, and their sins can never be left behind.”
Caleb found his voice, and decided now was the time to play his trump card. A glimpse he had seen, a flash of something, more like a peek behind a stage curtain just before the change of a set. “What is it you see, George?” He forced himself to smile. “Weren’t you a good child? Mama’s little boy?”
What happened next happened too fast. There was a primal scream, a flash of white hot light as Waxman rocked out of the chair, and suddenly Caleb tasted blood and felt a rush of flaring pain up the side of his face.
Then his world went dark.
2
CIA Headquarter
s, Langley, Virginia
When Caleb awoke, he was lying in something that looked like a dentist’s chair, all stainless steel, with leather straps cinched around his arms and legs and neck. Four silver lamps on coiled stands surrounded the chair. They looked like the mechanical eyes from The War of the Worlds, and just as menacing. He struggled briefly and then relaxed.
“Welcome back,” said a voice from the glare. Caleb squinted, but could only see a pair of black shoes pacing on a white floor. He smelled cigarettes. Menthols.
“Thanks,” he muttered. “Did I miss the in-flight movie?”
“Cute. Listen, Caleb. You know where you are?”
“Not really. It’s a little too bright to see.”
“Don’t give me that. You have other eyes.”
“Yes, but they don’t always work.”
“Lucky for you.” He paced some more. “You’re in my lab at Langley. The only remaining office of the Stargate program. You and I are going to get to work very shortly. I don’t expect this will take long.”
“It’s good to have realistic goals,” Caleb whispered, straining his neck muscles. His head throbbed and he felt sick to his stomach.
“It’s a simple goal,” Waxman said. “An easy target.”
“The last door,” he said.
“It had that crazy symbol on it, and what looked like a keyhole. Nothing else in the room. Nothing on the walls, ceiling or floor.” Waxman paused. “But then again, I’m guessing you already saw it. Am I right?”
“Yes.” He thought now wasn’t the time to be difficult. Not yet. He had to think, to see a way out of this. Unfortunately every scenario he imagined came up with him dead and Waxman entering that vault as a bringer of destruction. Caleb imagined the firemen of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 coming with flamethrowers to incinerate all the forbidden knowledge of the ages.
His success, my failure, will be the final triumph of darkness over light, of ignorance squashing truth, he thought. It would be the last surrender of a noble plan designed to protect the one great secret, the answer to every aspect of our suffering and all our earthly yearning.
“So what’s it going to be?” Waxman asked. “Help me willingly, or do I do what I’m best at?”
Caleb swallowed, and for an instant, a drawing popped into his thoughts: one of his earlier ones, of his dad in a cage, poked at with blood-red spears, while that symbol hung overhead.
And then he got it.
Finally. Completely. He understood.
With an agonized cry, twenty years of emotion erupted at once. His chest heaved, his muscles strained. He kicked and struggled and screamed and howled into the void.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Waxman shouted. “I haven’t even touched you yet.”
“Dad,” Caleb whispered, choking on the sobs. “Dad. You were here.”
And the room fell silent. The pacing stopped. Even the humming of the electric lights seemed to fade into a soundless abyss.
Finally, Waxman spoke. “I thought I had that covered. He had no idea.”
Caleb forced himself to breathe, to calm down, to concentrate, to go with the clue Waxman had just left him. “Dad never went to Iraq!” Caleb knew he was right. “You brought him here, but tried to convince him—what, that he had been shot down?”
After a full minute of silence, Waxman let out a deep sigh, like it contained a painful secret he had been dying to tell for years. “One of my many subjects in the early years was a man named Howard Platt. Worthless as a seer, he never followed directions and never located a single target. But one time, when I asked him about the greatest threat to our security, he spoke of the Pharos Lighthouse, something I hadn’t even known about at the time. His ramblings were strange, but just a little too detailed to pass over. I had to follow up on it.”
Waxman lit up another smoke and puffed out a thick cloud that filtered into the bright light. “My team of analysts rounded up all the information on the subject, and what came back as a possible hit was a certain thesis written by one Philip Crowe.”
Caleb could only watch and listen.
“And that is how I came into your life, Caleb. At first, I had no idea of your father’s psychic talents. I only wanted his knowledge of the lighthouse. Then I learned what he could do, and how he could be used. But first, he spilled his guts. He told me of Sostratus, of the library. Of the Keepers, and most importantly, the existence of the traps.”
“But not how to bypass them.” Caleb said, already admiring his father and thinking of ways he might be able to follow his lead, ways to give Waxman only enough rope to hang himself. Certainly Dad hadn’t revealed the right order of the first seven traps. Or maybe he had deliberately misled him and said Water was first, hoping Waxman would try it and be killed in the process. If Dad had managed to keep that secret, then surely he hadn’t mentioned the eighth puzzle, the final key.
Waxman grunted. “Philip was tough, I give him that. But he broke when I needed him to. He gave me the purpose I had been looking for, the way out of my personal hell. And he showed me the way to redemption—the redemption of the whole human race. Platt’s ramblings led me to your father, and your father led me to the Pharos. And by God, I will destroy those books and save us all.”
Caleb had to laugh. “I pity you.”
“Pity, hatred, fear—whatever you feel about me—I don’t care, so long as you give me what I need.”
Caleb struggled again, then gave up and looked around. “So he was here for how long?”
Waxman made a dismissive motion with his hand. “Seven, eight years? And he was convinced he was in Iraq. We had film on the walls, sand everywhere, we pumped in the sounds of the desert, battle. Brought in Middle Eastern men to perform the beatings and torture, it was all perfect.”
“But he was my dad,” Caleb whispered, and a smile formed out of his rage. “He knew, and he tried to tell me, but I was too young to understand.” I wasn’t ready. Caleb thought again of his last vision of the sea and the waves, and a boat forever on the move. And suddenly, with a chill, he understood. “So, you knew all along. Knew it wasn’t Alexander’s gold.”
“Of course.”
“Then, my father knew . . .” Again Caleb saw that boat from his most recent vision and the father talking to his son. In a flash, he saw another boat, then a ship, then a galley, then a swift clipper—a succession of maritime vessels down through the centuries, all with some form of white and red coloring, at different ports, on different seas. Sometimes at night, with burning lanterns on their masts, lighting the way, always moving, always afloat.
“You’re sure slow, kid.”
Caleb’s heart was thundering, his flesh crawling. He was slow. How had he missed it? With all the focus on his mother, and caring for Phoebe, he didn’t realize what the visions were showing him.
“It’s me,” Caleb said at last. “You wanted me, after Dad died.”
Waxman’s voice shifted lower. “Unfortunate that he couldn’t survive . . . the stresses.”
“Or did he make you mad?” Caleb asked. “Maybe give you the wrong sequence for the codes?”
Waxman ignored him, and by his refusal to respond, Caleb knew he was right.
Good for you, Dad!
Finally, Waxman spoke. “For a time I’d hoped your father had chosen Phoebe. She would have been much easier to deal with, and just as capable—”
“—of keeping the secret,” Caleb finished. I can’t believe it. Dad left me all his work, all those documents, maps and drawings. And the stories, all those stories. “It’s us,” he said at last. “We’re the Keepers. The true Keepers. The descendents of Metreisse.”
“Your grandfather was one,” Waxman said. “Then he passed the secret on to your Dad, and he should have given it to you.”
“But he didn’t.” Caleb tried to glare through the light. “You took him too soon, and he didn’t have time.”
“Sorry about that, but I wasn’t getting any younger, and your Dad resisted too mu
ch. Something I hope you won’t do, for your sake, and for your sister’s.”
There it was. The threat he had been anticipating, but dreading. His time in the Alexandrian prison had been sufficient preparation for anything, he thought, and he was confident he could coax his consciousness from his body to escape whatever physical agony Waxman could inflict for as long as necessary. But he couldn’t protect Phoebe. And he had to. He couldn’t let her be hurt again.
“So, kid. What’s it going to be?”
Caleb made up his mind. Dad’s shown me the way. He would trust in fate. He would trust in the lighthouse. Smiling, he told Waxman he knew where the eighth key was, and he would take him to it. All the while, he kept repeating to himself the one mantra he could now call his own.
The Pharos protects itself.
3
Sodus Bay—December 17
Hide the secret in plain sight.
Caleb stood on the hill overlooking the bay at dawn. The small farmhouse lay covered in a thin layer of snow, and icicles hung from the lighthouse railing, forty feet up. Phoebe sat in her chair in the kitchen, and Caleb could see her through the open door, watching carefully. Two men stood at her sides, wearing dark glasses. Caleb got the message, loud and clear.
“Your dad never spoke of a ship,” Waxman said, squinting through his own dark glasses down the hill to the ice-covered bay glinting with sunlight, sparkling in the frosty air.
“Maybe,” Caleb said, his lips curling up, “you never asked him the right questions.”
Waxman turned his head and glowered. “Well? Are we going?”
Old Rusty creaked and groaned as Caleb set foot upon her deck, treading carefully on the icy surface, with Waxman following. His breath cascaded around his face, and his hands shivered in his coat pockets. But his soul was soaring despite the threat to Phoebe. And he smiled.
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