The Mongol Objective (3 page)

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 . . .