“But why me?” Demetrius asks, struggling to keep up as Sostratus starts back down. Immediately, he is pleased to find the descent infinitely more comfortable than the climb.
“Patience, my friend. You are about to see.” Sostratus leads the way, and they descend in silence, circling, moving ever deeper with each successive stage. “And before you glimpse into the vault that will house the greatest treasure ever assembled, I ask only for one thing — your pledge to guard its secret with your life.”
Caleb saw it all in a flash, as though time had altogether stopped its forward march while his mind processed the visions breath by breath, full of all the sense and clarity of lived experience.
But then it moved on and everything shifted back into place.
The water slammed him into reality. The bubbles, the currents, the mouthpiece flailing in the spirals of muck rising from his thrashing feet… the statue head falling from his grasp. And then other hands on him, holding him, forcing a spare mouthpiece between his lips. Gagging, choking, coughing.
He kicked away.
Disoriented, his mind still straddling two millennia, he broke free and sped upward, heedless of everything but the need to break the surface, to thrust his head out and see — see if it was true. To see the reality of the vision still locked in his mind’s eye of that glorious spire, that transcendent tower.
The lighthouse.
The Pharos.
Was it really there? A towering colossus dominating the harbor, all of Egypt, just as he had seen it?
He kicked and thrashed and ignored the raging fire burning his skull, in his blood, until a wall of pain halted his ascent. And then, fully believing it would be his final wish, he thought, Phoebe, forgive me! before his lungs died and he fell into a chasm of pain and mindlessness.
For the past ten years Caleb had been waiting for a miracle — for his father to dramatically stride back into their lives with grand stories of adventure and escape from that horrible Iraqi torture cell in the mountains, the one Caleb had seen time and again in his nightmares.
His father had been shot down in an Apache helicopter during the First Gulf War, and his body had never been recovered. It wasn’t long before everyone had moved on — everyone but Caleb, that is — who, although only five at the time, had already started having visions, a power his mother claimed to share, despite never witnessing the same things Caleb had seen every night: his father, very much alive, very much tortured, begging, pleading for help, for acknowledgment, for salvation. Images of things done to him — wooden shards under his fingernails, wires attached to the place between his legs — would wake Caleb screaming. He’d reach for the pencil and pad of paper he kept by the bed and scramble to draw the horrific visions that lingered, clinging to him in the waking world. He’d see…
… some kind of great enclosure, a fence or a gate, and a burning five-pointed star above it. Sometimes an eagle’s head, flying over a sun. And his father’s arms, bleeding from a hundred cruel cuts, reaching out, bloody fingers clasping at nothing, his voice a barely audible whisper, “Caleb… Caleb…”
And then a word he couldn’t make out.
But instead of even the slightest acknowledgment of his remote-viewing talents, his mother had sent Caleb to therapy. That had been the beginning of his split with her. With both of them, even his sister Phoebe, to some extent. His mother had refused to believe that his dreams could be populated by such personal revelations, especially in light of their terrifying nature, so she attributed them to childhood delusions, feelings of paternal loss and grave emotional trauma.
“It’s true!” Caleb had yelled one time when he was twelve, when it had all come to a head. Standing up to her, but only coming to her shoulder. In that moment he’d seen a flicker of fear in her eyes. Or was it a flash of respect?
Her eyes had snapped to the drawings on his bed, and she seemed to deflate, shrinking to his level. She gripped his shoulders. “I don’t see those things,” she whispered, and her eyes softened and seemed to implore, and neither should you.
Tears had spilled down Caleb’s cheeks as he tried to pull away from her. He wanted to shout that she was wasting her talents by drawing stupid old buildings and ancient shipwrecks. Those things didn’t matter. And the people in her so-called ‘psychic’ group, the members of the Morpheus Initiative, who came by the house to sit with her and go into their trances and talk to the spirits or whatever — they were leeches and imposters.
And so was she.
How could she have any real power? How could she be a true remote viewer if she couldn’t even perceive what Caleb, a child, had seen so clearly, if she couldn’t tell that her husband was crying out in pain, a prisoner forgotten by his country, and worse, by his own family? No, instead, his own wife had chosen to spend her time with strangers, helping them find useless old artifacts or sunken wrecks.
Caleb had pushed her away and run out the door. He raced along Sodus Bay in a cool November rain, ran past that decrepit lightship he and Phoebe had affectionately named Old Rusty. He ran until he was too tired to keep running. And then, when he had spent his anger, he turned back and walked to the entrance of their own lighthouse — the historic landmark his family had managed for two generations — and climbed the narrow metal stairs to the very top, where he sat beneath the old burned-out light, the great lamp that had been decommissioned just after his father’s disappearance.
Hugging his knees, he’d stared out over Sodus Bay until the sun finally burrowed beneath the horizon and hid itself for another night.
And now, all these years later, in a rush of frothing bubbles, Caleb burst from the depths of Alexandria’s Eastern Harbor, expelling a lungful of acrid water, coughing as the other divers rushed him to the waiting yacht. He briefly regained consciousness and gasped when he perceived the grand lighthouse as it stood over two thousand years ago, leaning over as if to inspect his condition for itself. And at the very top, at the apex, Caleb imagined he could see someone gripping the railing and peering over the side, a man who looked, not surprisingly, like his father.
2
At the first bend on the promontory, just above a jumble of boulders and red stone rocks rising out of the sea, a man stood, watching. He wore a black tie and Ray-Ban sunglasses. His hair, trimmed short, had gray streaks that flecked his temples, matching the color of his just-pressed Armani suit. He held a paper bag full of stale bread crumbs, handfuls of which he tossed absently into the frothing sea while he stole glances at the scene in the harbor.
“It’s happening,” he said into the wind. Then he cocked his head, listening to the answer returned to a tiny plastic receiver in his left ear.
He tossed a few more crumbs out to birds that warily kept their distance. “Yes, I’m sure,” he said. “The young professor from Columbia. They just pulled him out of the harbor. Probably ascended too fast… No, Waxman’s yacht is right there, and my guess is he’ll have Caleb in the recompression chamber in minutes… If you recall, when we learned Crowe would be diving, a few us felt this possibility was not unexpected, yet our warnings were overruled.” The man paused, listening, then shook his head. “No. I can’t get closer, not without risk.” Another handful of bread crumbs launched into the wind blew back onto his starched pants and his polished leather shoes. “Yes, we have a microphone on the yacht as ordered. Fortunately, it’s in the same room with the hyperbaric oxygen chamber.” He made a scowling face. “Well, at least we did that right.” He nodded, coughed and then tossed the bag, crumbs and all, into the sea. “All right. I’ll wait here and listen in, but I won’t risk exposure. If Crowe has that kind of talent, and he happens to sense something…”