“That’s right,” came a voice he recognized only too well from the small intercom speaker on the wall. “Concentrated oxygen to go with the pressure treatment.”
Caleb grunted. “Hi, George.” His voice sounded nasally, cartoonish, a by-product of the oxygen inhalation.
“Hello Caleb. Sorry about your predicament. Lucky I was here, and lucky I brought my own recompression chamber. Saved you a trip to the local hospital, where you’d be more likely to die from something other than what got you there in the first place.”
“Yeah, I’m so lucky.”
“Why’d you rise so fast, Caleb? Did you see something?”
Caleb rubbed his temples. A flash of light, the burning Egyptian sky suddenly turning dark as he stepped into the shadow of the Pharos. He blinked. “Where’s my mother?”
“In talks with the Egyptian Council of Authorities, trying to secure access to the catacombs along the old Canopic Way. Assuring dive permits—”
“A little late for that.”
“We used yours,” Waxman said. Caleb now noticed the face leering in at him from the porthole window. Hair the color of rock salt, wavy and slicked back over a high, triangular forehead; narrow cheekbones and a hard, pointed jaw set below pencil-thin lips. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and from the tip hung a long spindle of ash about to fall. Tendrils of smoke coiled around his face, obscuring his eyes and fogging the window. “Remind me,” Waxman continued, “to thank Columbia for their assistance in our little quest.”
“Your quest,” Caleb corrected, trying to sit up as the pressure chamber did its work. “I opted out of the Morpheus Initiative four years ago. Remember?”
“I seem to recall something about that,” Waxman said with a grin. “And again, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“Tell it to Phoebe.”
“I did. I do… every time I see her.”
Caleb narrowed his eyes. “When do you—?”
“Didn’t your mother tell you? We’ve been using your home on Sodus Bay as our new headquarters.”
“She must’ve left that out,” Caleb said with some bitterness. “But then again, we don’t talk much.” And Caleb didn’t want to ask, So where do you sleep?
“Pity. You’d be proud of your sister. Even from her wheelchair, she’s become quite an asset. Her access to the University of Rochester archives and labs has proven invaluable, and the way she manages the sessions, catalogs the drawings, comes up with the targets and tests the group members… she’s really something.”
“Good for her.” Caleb wanted it to come out sarcastically, but he also meant it. He had known about her success at her first year in the university, but had limited his correspondence with her. The past was too much, the guilt too intense. He wouldn’t even pick up the phone when she called — at first, several times a week, then after his lack of response, once a month. Her messages piled up in the voicemail cache until he would be forced to delete them to free up space.
Waxman tapped on the door. “And something about being there, in your childhood home, with its tiny lighthouse overlooking the bay, I don’t know…”—he grinned and stepped back so only the streaky window remained visible—“it helps focus the visions, directs the team toward the proper mind frame for its mission.”
“And what exactly is the mission this time, George?” Caleb always called him George to his face. Maybe he was being unfair, but the man had inserted himself into their lives, into his family, like a splinter under a fingernail, and so soon after Dad had been lost. At the time, even at such a young age, Caleb had known the story of Odysseus. Enamored by his father’s bedtime tales of Greek tragedies and classical literature, Caleb imagined Waxman as one of Penelope’s suitors to his father’s Odysseus; and he kept alive a fantasy that his father would one day return with vengeance in his heart and rout anyone foolish enough to have tried to take his place.
Waxman’s face returned to the window, and his voice crackled over the knocking sounds. “Our project — our objective, this time — is the search for the perfect testable scenario; an archaeological enigma that, if solved, could once and for all, scientifically prove the validity of remote viewing.” He paused, taking another drag on the cigarette. Caleb could almost smell the menthol through the door. Waxman’s favorite brand, it was the smell he always associated with George’s presence, and with his father’s absence.
Waxman continued. “The Pharos Lighthouse! If we can locate it through psychic means, just think what that will prove. Imagine it: a documented success case, a melding of archaeology and parapsychology. It would open up so many avenues of research, generating interest and—”
“Grants… Money…”
“Yes, of course. But I’m not in it for wealth, Caleb.”
“No? Then what was the Bimini dive all about back in 2003? I seem to recall that Mom and your other psychic crackpots happened to pinpoint the exact location of three sunken ships and quite a bit of salvage.”
“That was different.”
“And what about Belize, George? Why did we go there, if not for the promise of the treasure Elliot drew in one of his trances? Why did we enter Tomb Fifteen?”
George remained silent for a long while. “Caleb, believe me, this is different.”
“Is it?” Caleb stood up, wobbly, biting his lip against the pain surging through his muscles due to the nitrogen narcosis, microscopic bubbles warring in his veins. He staggered and leaned against the wall. “Let me see if I can explain how it’s different. You’re here not to locate one of the lost Seven Wonders of the World or to prove the validity of something we already know is real, but to locate only one thing.”
Waxman was silent.
Caleb inched closer, sliding along the wall until his face was in front of the glass, his eyes locked on Waxman’s. “You know the legends. You’ve studied the same stories I have, the same rumors my mom was always on about, the same stories my dad told me as a kid.” He swallowed, his mouth dry. “You want the treasure. You want the lost treasure of Alexander the Great.”
“I’d be lying,” Waxman said, “if I said that thought hadn’t crossed my mind.”
Caleb sat back down, holding his throbbing head. “Good, finally you’ve said something I can believe.”
“But Caleb, think about it. We can do it! We’re better suited than anyone else. Why? Because we can see, truly see. The other archaeologists, they’re blind, just going on old words, faded texts or ancient relics, some of them two thousand years old. While they’re struggling with government officials and museum curators, we’re seeing beyond it all, far into the past, hoping to glimpse exactly where and how to get to it.”
“If it exists.”
“Caleb, like you said, you’ve read the same texts I have. And you’ve read your father’s notes. I know you have.”
Caleb lifted his head. Yes, his father’s notes. For a moment, he had a flash to a night seventeen years ago, his father in a room surrounded by stacks of old books, newspapers and magazines. And drawings — hundreds of drawings. Some of them Helen’s, some his father’s…
… and there he stands in his military uniform a week before shipping off, looking over his shoulder at five-year-old Caleb standing in the doorway, holding up one sheet of paper — a drawing of the Pharos, at night, besieged by an armada of Roman ships.
Caleb blinked, and he was back in the recompression chamber, listening to Waxman drone on about his father’s research.