“Do that,” Phoebe said. “Because I felt she was bad news. Some kind of threat to you. That’s all.” She rode down the walkway as frosted leaves blew across her path and great elm trees swayed toward her. The morning clouds hung pregnant and low, dark but complacent.
“Merry Christmas!” Caleb called out, and just then his mother’s head appeared from the other side of the car. He saw her face, her lips moving, mouthing an apology or an accusation, Caleb wasn’t sure. But suddenly he saw something he hadn’t seen in three years — a huddled figure, a man trembling in a tattered green coat, long stringy hair over his face. He was standing across the street, by the corner of the brick building. The shadows seemed deeper around him, as if he had enlisted them to his side. He stared at Caleb. With the door open, shivering against a renewed blast of cold air, Caleb stood motionless. He smelled gunpowder, or fireworks, and imagined hearing a band playing a somber dirge on the field. The figure in the green coat raised its hand. At first Caleb thought it was pointing to him, but then he realized the finger was directed toward the car.
Toward Waxman.
Caleb heard mumbled words and realized it was Phoebe saying goodbye. He blinked, opened the door all the way and was about to come out when the light shifted, the shadows scattered, and the man was gone, as if he had been inhaled into the earth.
Caleb retreated into the lobby and stared at the gift in his hands. When he looked up, the car had driven off, and only the swaying trees and the courtyard lawn and the eight guys playing touch football remained.
Back in his room, he peeled open the wrapping paper. He stared inside the box for a long time. Then he cursed them — cursed his mother, cursed Waxman, and even Phoebe, although he didn’t really mean it. She had framed the three photographs he had taken down there. The inside of the Pharos chamber — three panels of the great seal, cropped and edited so the entire wall appeared seamless, along with the symbols and the images that had stymied their advance and killed most of the team.
If Caleb had ever wanted to get back into the hunt, Phoebe had just given him the means to take the first step.
2
Nolan Gregory sat in a wicker chair on his son’s seventh-floor balcony. The apartment, while somewhat light on luxury, had a strategic view from its western side, at least for certain interested people. Nolan had observed this very scene every night for almost two decades, beginning with every move the bulldozers had made below, every truck carrying away the ruined pieces of old warehouses, apartments and abandoned shacks. Now, he gazed with pride at the glass domed rooftop of the massive library, marveling at the crowds, the tourists, the scholars.
“It’s been five hours,” his son said from inside the screen. “Can I at least get you another drink?”
Nolan shook his head as he continued to watch. “No, Robert. I’m fine. I should be going.” In his mind he visualized the layout below the dome, remembering the excavation of the sub-levels, the laying of the foundations, the steel girders. He thought of the precision needed to connect to their sub-level, already in place one hundred feet below. So much to think about, so much to supervise. All from behind the scenes of course. A dozen firms had been brought in, capital from so many organizations, interested benefactors, governments and private donors. Consultants, architects, linguists, sociologists.
Such a project. It had easily consumed the last twenty years of his life. Two decades that had seen his children grow from precocious teenagers to successful adults, each with their own lives — his son here, his daughter overseas.
But each of them Keepers. Valued colleagues.
The screen opened and Robert came out, leaned on the ledge and looked down. His blond hair rippled in the soft breezes. His piercing blue eyes followed his father’s gaze, looking down at the structure with something more like jealousy and impatience. “I’m uncomfortable with your plans for the Key’s retrieval,” he said.
“I know,” Nolan replied, “I know. But it’s the only way. We’ve been lucky so far. Lucky the son has turned his back on his talents, and lucky he’s distanced himself from his family. He’s given us time.”
“Must we move now?” Robert asked. “Waxman is getting nowhere. He’s given up.”
“Wishful thinking. He’s only biding his time, still hoping the other psychics can help him. Fortunately, Helen and Phoebe Crowe haven’t succeeded, but it’s only a matter of time at this point. One of them will find the Key if we don’t get it first.”
Robert lowered his head as the smell of curry and raisins filtered out from the kitchen, where his mother was busy making their evening meal. “So it has to be this way.”
“Yes.”
“And she has agreed?”
Nolan sighed, again gazing at the shimmering reflection of the sun’s setting light off the glass dome, and he told himself that whatever the personal risks, it was worth it. “She’s ready.”
3
The remainder of Caleb’s research, six months before a fury of writing and revisions, passed in a blur of old books, dank library archives, endless hours in museums and the rare book sections of various universities. He needed his own place, needed the isolation and quiet to see the project through. And so he holed up in a Manhattan 72nd Street studio apartment, one where he just barely met the rent payments by clerking in the Classics section at the New York Library during the summer. But that was all about to change.
Six months ago he had secured an agent, a publisher, and a $50,000 advance on a work entitled The Life and Times of the Alexandrian Library. It was the culmination of reams of notes, anecdotes, theories and research. Advance praise was extraordinary; it was being hailed as “a classic with epic non-fictional characters that seem so lifelike it’s as if Caleb Crowe has actually stepped back in time and observed the places and events in person.”
There was, of course, some truth to the statement. Although he had sworn off using any form of psychic abilities since Nina’s death, sometimes his subconscious, overwhelmed with the intensity of the research and late-night writing, took over with its own agenda. It would yank him into a waking dream to stroll among philosophers in white robes, their voices echoing off the alcoves as they spoke to rapt pupils. He would wander the ten colossal chambers of learning, savoring the breath of ancient truth exuding from the scrolls held therein. He would peer out the windows, looking past the dark silhouette of the Pharos Lighthouse and up into the heavens where his fellow scholars had mapped out the trails of the gods.
He had rubbed shoulders with Euclid, drunk wine with Claudius Ptolemy, dissected corpses with Aristarchus, charted the cycles of Venus with Hipparchus, and tinkered alongside Heron. And all of those experiences — the sights and sounds, the flavor of those revered halls and the luxurious museum grounds — they all made their way into his book as revelations and wonders and theories that modern scholars and critics were fast to admonish; yet something about his forceful style and the strength in his words proved irresistibly satisfying to readers.
Today was his first book signing, at a trendy café in Soho on a late October afternoon. A steady, drizzling rain tapped against the windows, and the cabs squealed out front while shoppers scurried by. The thick aroma of coffee permeated the air. Caleb’s stomach was tangled up in binding knots, and his voice was on the verge of cracking. More than forty people had packed the small room, a host of multicolored umbrellas and rain slickers — and one bright orange shawl beneath a grinning face.