She offered the bottle of Orangina and led him out of the plaza. Her fingers caressed his, but he did not return the gesture. He was thinking of Phoebe’s warning, years ago.
A girl with green eyes…
But by the time they arrived back at the hotel, he had cast the incident in a different light. He’d been hallucinating, imagining the worst. He’d been miserable all his life, and now that he had found a shred of happiness, his subconscious had to dredge up reasons for the dream to fail, to engineer his fall. He wouldn’t let it succeed.
He had a renewed purpose. As it happened, that purpose now brought him back on the same path as his mother’s. But he planned not to tell her. Not yet.
This time, the quest is mine, and I have a new partner.
Victor Kowalski sat on a bench beside the fountain and pressed send on his cell phone. Careful not to look back at the departing newlyweds, he held the phone to his ear, fixed his sunglasses and pretended to stare up at the church’s extravagant architecture. He was dressed in a light blue blazer and gray sweatpants, and wore a Yankees cap. Two cameras hung around his neck, and he was chewing three sticks of strawberry gum. Typical tourist.
The ringing stopped and he heard Waxman’s voice. “Yes?”
“She’s made contact.”
“In person?”
“Yes.”
“Then things are getting serious. They must be close.”
“I was positioned near enough to overhear.” Kowalski snapped his gum. “She told our old friend it wouldn’t be long.”
“So they’re headed there next?”
“Yes, although the kid doesn’t know it yet. They’ll be in Alexandria by next week.”
“Good work. Tail Mr. Gregory, but don’t get spotted. I prefer to have them think we’ve given up.”
“So, no action against him until…?”
“Until Caleb gets us in.”
Victor flipped the phone closed. He stood and made his way to the pier, where he hailed a gondola.
He might as well follow in style.
7
“Our meeting in Venice was stupid. Too dangerous,” Lydia said when the man emerged from the shadows in the nightclub alley. Caleb was back at the hotel, a block away, finally resting after nearly two sleepless days of research and work on the codes. They had settled in at Alexandria a month ago, and had started to work immediately.
“I hadn’t expected him to be so paranoid,” Nolan Gregory said.
“He has a right to be,” said Lydia, “after your dramatic appearance in the hospital. Was that necessary?”
“We will see, in time, what was necessary.”
“That’s not something he’ll ever forget.”
“All I know is that we need to keep Caleb on the path. Continue to steer his thoughts and dreams back to the Pharos. Otherwise—”
“Yes, yes I know. Otherwise, we’ll never succeed,” Lydia said impatiently. Then, quietly, with urgency, she added, “But he’s making progress. He’s seen them — the founders! Sostratus and Demetrius. And much more.”
“Good, good. You must now make him see the rest.”
“Why not tell him to the truth about who he is?”
“No. When he finds that out for himself, he’ll understand, and then he’ll lead us to the Key. Any other way could invite a disaster.” Gregory pulled his face back into the shadows. “And another millennium of darkness.”
A cab’s horn blared into the street, and a trio of laughing young women went running out of the club to their ride.
She sighed. “I fear I may have to do something drastic.”
“You have my confidence. I trust you will know the time.”
Turning, Lydia walked slowly east toward the hotel. Cars rumbled past, and the warm air played with her blouse and tickled her neck. Out in the harbor a few lights twinkled. Dim flickering beams cut through the night over Qaitbey’s fortress.
Lydia took her time, walking and thinking. And fighting back her emotions.
She put a hand to her stomach, and began to cry.
8
The advance from Doubleday paid for Caleb and Lydia’s hotel suite for the next month. The first book was still selling well across Europe, but only to limited success in the States, probably because they hadn’t had a chance to do any further promotions there.
Their room overlooked the harbor. And outside, across the Boulevard de la Rosette, they could reach the causeway and walk to Qaitbey’s fortress within an hour. The museum was a short distance away, as were the Municipal Palace and the Zinzania Theater. Near the harbor, where most archaeologists believed the old library once stood, now proudly stood the Bibliotheca Alexandrina — the modern version of the historic library. With construction finishing in 2006, it comprised ten levels, four of which were built underground to further protect the contents from environmental forces. Adjacent to the library was a science museum and planetarium.
But as exciting as all these attractions were, Caleb and Lydia had little time for sightseeing. Caleb had enlarged the photos of the great seal Phoebe had given him for Christmas years ago. He posted them on a wall and tacked up a bed sheet to cover them when he and Lydia went out. They spent hours each day analyzing every inch of the image, studying every carving, every symbol.
He sent Lydia out repeatedly, sometimes several times a day, for journal articles or books they couldn’t access online. Most of these she had to order from contacts at the UK Doubleday offices. They acquired some rare seventeenth-century texts on alchemy — Paracelsus, Geber, Hollandus and Kircher. They consulted works by Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, Madame Blavatsky’s three-volume compendium, and so many other books of arcane knowledge. The trick, as always, was to focus on the truly inspired, those derived from the most ancient writings.
Their hotel suite quickly began to look like Caleb’s boyhood room back in Sodus. Dog-eared copies of books were scattered about, and stacks upon stacks of heavy tomes covered the floor.
One day late in September, while Lydia was taking a nap, face-down on the couch as several fruit flies buzzed around a plate of dates and prunes on the coffee table, Caleb sat cross-legged before the wall, considering the enlarged photographs. He imagined he was there again, before the grand staff and the entwined serpents surrounded by seven symbols.
Those symbols were all familiar now, old friends, after fine-tuning his knowledge of alchemy, immersing himself in the subject for the better part of a year. The first four were Water, Fire, Air and Earth and their corresponding planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus. These were the principles of the denser matter, what the alchemists called the elements of the Below; while the realm of the Above hosted the intangible essences of soul and spirit. The remaining three symbols were the Moon, Mercury and, finally, the Sun, often represented as salt, quicksilver and sulfur, signifying the coming together of Above and Below into a new, immortal form of pure essence. The Gold of the soul, the Philosopher’s Stone. Quintessence.
It took Caleb a long time to finally accept the obvious: that the sequence might be the key. But no matter which way around the staff he read the symbols, they were not in the right order.
When Lydia awoke she found him staring at the sign in the lower left corner.
“It’s a combination lock after all,” he said.
“Great.” She yawned, then perked up. “So what’s the combination?”
Caleb’s eyes were out of focus, and in his mind he pictured a cosmic scene of…
… the planets of our solar system whirling about the sun in their elliptical orbits. He spoke slowly, dreamily. “Working backward from the most distant planet they could see with the naked eye, Saturn came first.”