The Mongol Objective Read Online Free Page B

suspected the truth—that Caleb had stolen the tablet and lied about its absence. And lied again and again when Robert and Lydia had asked him and the Morpheus Initiative to remote view it, find where it might have been taken before the Pharos vault had been sealed up.
    Caleb hadn’t told Lydia, knowing her convictions belonged with her brother in this case, and while she spent the better part of each year back in the new Library at Alexandria, cataloguing and studying the collection of recovered scrolls, Caleb had fashioned his own secret vault below the Sodus lighthouse, modeled after the original architect’s design, the Pharos’s creator, Sostratus of Knidos. Caleb designed a similar set of traps that he hoped someday only his son Alexander could bypass. When he was ready to be a Keeper himself. When he had learned what he needed to know. Even Caleb hadn’t spent much time with it, afraid of its power, its ability to enhance his visions and stimulate other powers. Powers he didn’t need, or want, just yet.
    Until then, the tablet would wait inside.
    And of course, there was the problem of its translation. What exactly was recorded? Instructions for incomparable power or eternal youth? Or a recipe for something much worse?
    Caleb struggled against the ice, but it was no use. The cold was penetrating, painfully seeping through his layers, and as the darkness pressed in, he had no choice but to stop fighting.
    He tried to relax, pull away from the cold and pain, from the stiffness and pressure. To draw his mind away, set it free. He had done this once before, in an Alexandrian jail where his body had all but deteriorated and wasted away until his spirit had been released, exposed to a new realm of sight, revealing what he needed to see.
    So now he let go, released his hold on the flesh, and hoped that once set free, his mind—and his abilities—would discover something worth seeing.
    #
    Leaping from the chopper onto the deck of the ice-rigger, Nina Osseni pulled back her hood and lifted the satellite phone to her ear. She paused for a moment to watch the station burn along the ridge. And she smiled.
    Goodbye, Phoebe.
    Colonel Hiltmeyer and his team left the helicopter as the blades slowed, and they rushed past her into the cabin. Nina could feel the engines revving up, the rigger turning, heading north. She waited, feeling the snowflakes slowing, the wind then blasting them away along with the clouds. The night sky, revealed in its sparkling glory, turned the ice shoals below a crystalline blue.
    She pressed the redial button on her satellite phone. After one ring, a man’s voice answered. “Is it done?”
    “Yes, they’re dead. Phoebe and Caleb and the other members of the Morpheus Initiative.”
    “I somehow doubt that,” returned the voice.
    “What do you mean?”
    “It doesn’t matter. Just a vision I had a short time ago.”
    “I had no such vision.”
    “Maybe, as your old boyfriend liked to point out repeatedly, you weren’t asking the right questions. In any case, they’ll be delayed long enough for me to get what we came for.”
    Nina frowned, still scanning the ice cliffs and plateaus. “Any resistance?”
    “None so far, but I wasn’t expecting any. Not until we approach the vault.”
    “You’ve got your drawings?”
    “I do, but I don’t need them.”
    Nina eyed the flickering wreckage on the shore, then glanced back to the helicopter. “If there’s a chance Caleb survived, I could go back and wait for him to show.”
    Silence for a moment. “No, I don’t think it would do any good. I’ve had other visions—stronger ones—of meeting him again. It was worth a shot, but in this case I don’t think we can change fate. Go back to the rendezvous point, meet me at Saint Peter’s Castle, and I’ll join you once I have the prize.”
    “Very well.” She shut off the phone, still gazing at the shore, considering her options.
    How did they survive? she wondered.
    But another part of