The Pharos Objective Read Online Free PDF

strings with Columbia’s Board, then maneuvered Caleb into a slot on a research dive in Alexandria during the same time the Morpheus Initiative would begin phase two of their Pharos Project. Once he’d arrived, Helen had been more than persuasive and convinced Caleb to at least take advantage of Waxman’s offer to use his boat and resources to conduct his own research. Together again. And if Waxman got his way, it would just be the start. He needed Caleb, but he wasn’t about to let on just how much.
    Waxman finished his drink and headed down into the lower level, where Victor and Elliot were just closing the door, sealing the tank and setting the dials on the recompression chamber. They stepped away, breathing heavily, and dripping all over his hardwood floors. Scowling, Waxman handed Victor his empty glass. “Fill that.” He approached the chamber and peered inside at Caleb’s twisted body on the cot. The kid’s eyelids were flickering.
    Still dreaming? Still seeing visions?
“We need to know what he saw. How long is he going to be in there?”
    “Six hours at least today,” said Elliot. “And probably a few hours each for the next couple days until—”
    Waxman waved away the details. “He can hear me?”
    “Yep, just hit the intercom switch.”
    He moved in closer, then turned back. “Oh and Victor, when you return with my drink, bring Caleb a pad of paper and a box of pencils.”
    Waxman pulled up a chair and yelled over his shoulder, “And find me that statue’s head!”
     

 
     
     
     
    4
     
     
     
    Caleb awoke with a wheezing, breathless gasp and immediately sat up but reeled suddenly as his head spun in flaring pain. He was in what looked like the inside of a space capsule
:
all white and padded, one narrow cot to sleep on, and a tiny porthole window. A pad of paper, thick, with about a hundred sheets, lay on the floor next to his uncomfortable sleeping accommodations along with a dozen sharpened pencils, all bundled together with a rubber band.
    The he heard it:
knock, click, knock, click
. He looked up and nearly blacked out again. He put his head back down and groaned. The air was thin, pure, almost cold.
    “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