The Pharos Objective Read Online Free PDF Page A

had finally led them to the
Key
. And now, knowing it was only a matter of time—time measured in years, not centuries—plans were set in motion.
    The Key
.
    Several reliable sources had confirmed that it was clos
e:
one of the members of the Morpheus Initiative had it. Now, it was only a matter of finding out which one and answering the larger question of determining if whoever had it even knew what it was.
    He turned and looked out across the sea, his gaze sweeping the harbor like a lighthouse beacon. Two millennia. Indeed, patience was running out. But still, they had to be careful.
    The Pharos protects itself
.
     

 
     
     
     
    3
     
     
     
    The yacht waited above the dive site, more or less, depending on the drift and the currents that had buffeted Caleb and the other four members of the group that had gone down with him. They had sailed out just a short distance from the promontory at the edge of the Ras el-Tin peninsula, and had anchored just beyond the shadow of the sandstone towers and imposing walls of Sultan Qaitbey’s fifteenth-century fortress—the castle some claimed had been built on the foundation of the Pharos Lighthouse.
    And some, like George Waxman, believed the Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, had crumbled and plunged into the sea at this very spot. And here it remained—or at least, its pieces—preserved in the muck on the earthquake-rattled seafloor, inviting discovery for those with the resources to get past the Egyptian authorities and brave the currents, the treacherous reef’s minimal visibility, and pollution.
    Holding a tumbler of hundred-fifty-year-old Grand Marnier, George Waxman watched from the railing as they hauled Caleb up over the side.
    “Recompression chamber!” Elliot James yelled up to him.
    Waxman stifled the urge to celebrate.
Is this it?
“What happened?”
    “He touched something,” Elliot said, ripping off Caleb’s mask, pulling off the fins, the weight belt and the buoyancy vest. Elliot was a forty-two-year-old diver from St. Thomas, with a scar on the right side of his neck—a souvenir from a brush with a school of young tiger sharks.
    “Looked like the head of a sphinx, or a goddess,” said the other diver, Victor Kowalski. Victor was a New Orleans native, bald and black as night, a veteran Navy Seal, and not without a bit of clairvoyant talent himself. Waxman had found him quite valuable over the years, in more ways than one. Everyone on his team had their talents.
    Victor and Elliot had solid scuba expertise and physical strengths to complement their psychic abilities, while the other team members that comprised the Morpheus Initiative—Nina Osseni, Amelia Gaines, Xavier Montross, Tom Ellis, Dennis Benford and Mary Novaka—were all powerful remote viewers. But the members Waxman really had his eye on were the Crowes. Caleb and his mother, Helen, were here while Caleb’s younger sister, Phoebe, the final member of the Initiative, remained back at their home in Sodus, confined to a wheelchair after an unfortunate accident several years earlier. Even so, she managed to be somewhat useful. At times.
    A whole family of psychics. Talented remote viewers. Just as he had expected when he first recruited them for the Initiative almost fifteen years ago. He had brought in Helen first, knowing that she would only come with her children. And if either child had any hereditary powers, Waxman would be able to discern that along the way. But after the tragic incident in Belize, everything changed. Helen was still more than willing, but Caleb . . . he blamed himself for Phoebe’s injury. Promptly at eighteen, he’d left the Morpheus team and gone his own way.
    Bright kid, scholarship to anywhere he wanted, Waxman recalled. Cruised through Columbia. Teaching now—a professorship in Ancient History. At least he kept that interest alive. And he was here, wasn’t he?
    Of course, that was partly a result of Waxman’s doing. He had pulled some