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.”