One man who has been silent up until now steps forward. “And if we fail to find him in our lifetime?”
The elder sighs and looks wearily at his feet. “Then the search will continue in the next.”
When Caleb came back into the present, it was with calm, relaxed breaths. His eyes fluttered, and he blinked in the somber light. Phoebe sat in front of him, chewing on a Snickers bar.
“How is it that you’re not fat?” he asked.
She grinned and made a muscle in her right arm. “Tennis, remember? What did you see?”
He told her.
“So, someone had figured out the puzzles, found a way past the traps.”
“Someone with the gift,” Caleb said. “We know Metreisse could remote view, or at least he claimed to have that power.”
“And yet, if he found the treasure, did he really leave it there?”
“Seems like it. Or maybe, having viewed the way past the traps, he never actually opened the door. It sounds like he considered himself bound by his ancestors’ pledge to keep the treasure safe.”
“So how do we use this information? And what did Gregory mean by it?”
“I don’t know,” Caleb said. “It has something to do with me, though. And… what?”
Phoebe was gaping at her laptop screen. “Something just happened. My screen flickered like it does whenever a new program starts up. Weird.”
She bent over the keyboard and moved to a new program. “Just checking something… Oh no!”
“What?” he stood behind her and looked down.
She pointed to the first item on the list. “The file. I had saved all the scanned photos in one big file, and someone just accessed it and deleted it. It’s gone.”
“Where?”
“Checking…” Phoebe pulled up a couple files, checked her emails, then threw up her hands. “I don’t know. It’s not even in the temp folder any more. I could scan everything back in, but-”
“But someone else has it.” Caleb leaned in. “Did they get it all?”
“Yep.”
He cursed. “Who has access to your computer?”
“I don’t know. I was online, so either someone came snooping and grabbed this file, or I had a virus put on my laptop at some point, a virus that let someone else spy in on me and steal what they wanted.”
“That’s just freakin’ great!” he said, throwing his pencil. “The Keepers have it.”
“Maybe,” Phoebe said, frowning.
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’? Who else could it be?”
“I don’t know. But I’m worried that it could be someone in the Morpheus Initiative.”
“Come on, those guys? They…” Caleb stopped and looked at her closely. “But you’re not suspecting them.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You know who I’m thinking about.”
He stood up and grabbed his things.
“Waxman.”
18
After several attempts to reach them and getting only voicemail, Caleb wheeled Phoebe out to the street and a waiting cab. The sixty-mile drive back to Sodus took two and a half hours. The roads were slick. The rain had turned back to snow, and there were cars in the ditches every few miles. Fortunately the cab driver had a four- wheel drive and a strong sense of self-preservation. Even so, they skidded several times and fishtailed twice into traffic, barely missing oncoming cars.
When the cab pulled up to the house, Caleb got Phoebe out of the cab and into her chair, then helped push her through the snow up the driveway.
“No cars,” Caleb observed. “And no lights on inside.”
“Shit,” Phoebe said.
The house was empty.
“I don’t believe this,” Phoebe said once they were inside. “Not Mom too! She wouldn’t just leave us.”
“Unless she believed it was in our best interest not to come along.” He continued looking around the kitchen and the living room, where new drawings hung on the walls and lay scattered about the tables. “I don’t need to RV the scene. I can imagine Waxman telling her that it’s best they go on their own and get a head start without us. I bet he reminded her about what happened in Belize.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Phoebe said. “We’re different now, and besides, look at my condition! For all of Sostratus’s genius, I doubt he was progressive enough to include a handicapped access ramp for me.”
Caleb continued digging through papers, scrutinizing the drawings. Everything lined up for the first six puzzles. “I don’t see anything about the Sun, about that final block. You didn’t-”
“No. The scan was incomplete. Scroll was damaged.”
Caleb turned to Phoebe, and saw her sitting hunched in her chair in the dark kitchen. “Could they have gotten anything from that scan?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Unless Waxman has some proprietary software or something that enhances resolution. There were fragments of the scroll missing, but some of what was there could be legible enough, and maybe a computer program could extrapolate missing letters from the position of the visible ones, and-”
“So you’re saying they could have the answer?”
“Or worse. They might think they have it, and be wrong.”
Caleb pushed his hair off his forehead and cast a reflexive glance around the room, not looking for anything in particular, but hoping-hoping they were overlooking something simple. “Mom wouldn’t have-”
“Caleb,” Phoebe cut him off, “look. A camera.” One of three Helen usually had rolling to document every step of the process.
“What about it? They must have forgotten it in their hurry to get out of here before we got back.”
“I don’t think so. Hook it up to the TV.” Caleb gave her a doubtful look. “Humor me, okay?”
Caleb hooked the camera up to the TV’s input jack and turned it on. He rewound the tape until the time stamp displayed seven thirty, three hours ago, then pressed play and sat on the couch beside Phoebe.
“Maybe we should make some popcorn,” she suggested, without a touch of emotion.
“Shh. No talking during the movie.”
On the screen, the living room sprang to life. Twelve people sat around the table, and at the left side, Helen stood, bending forward and holding up a sheet of paper. It was an enhanced photograph of the seventh stone before the door. The symbol for Sulfur. “Here is your target,” she instructed. “Imagine standing on this sign and then experiencing the door opening. How does it happen? What do you see? Draw what you feel.”
“Alternately,” she said, “think about the hidden vault under the Pharos. Imagine the last puzzle, the final key. See it, and draw what you see.”
Caleb scratched the back of his neck. “Mom seems a little rushed.”
“Desperate,” Phoebe agreed. “Better to let them just focus on the symbol and see where the unconscious leads them.”
“Right, I think she either just confused them or sent them thinking about something else.”
“We’ll see.”
Nothing happened for the next few minutes, as the psychics all sat in various poses, eyes closed or opened. The room was quiet. A few candles flickered in the background.
Caleb fast-forwarded until he saw some movement. Nearly a half-hour had passed. Some people were drawing, but others were talking.
“I saw my fingers covered in gold,” one middle-aged woman with dark bangs said. “And then I reached out and touched the staff. The door opened-”
“I was also covered in gold,” a bald man in his seventies spoke up. “And I shuffled to the door, leaving trails of gold dust sparkling in my path.”
