The Mongol Objective (8 page)

“Care to share?”

“After,” he said, pointing to the neighbors’ house. “Now we need to get to work.”

#

The Hurleys brought coffee for Renée, green tea for Phoebe and Caleb, and located a can of Red Bull for Orlando. “Drink of champions and psychics everywhere,” he proclaimed, grinning at Renée who just frowned and sipped at her coffee.

They were all seated around a ping pong table. The basement was furnished with a circular rug over the concrete floor, a dusty basketball game in the corner next to an equally dusty stair machine and a 20-inch TV.

“Now I’m not so sure about this,” Renée said. She held up a pad of blank white paper and a pencil. “Really, I can just observe and check on my colleagues, see how the search is going for this Xavier Montross.”

“They won’t find him,” Caleb said.

“We’ll have a dossier on the guy in an hour, everything from his favorite TV shows to how often he wet the bed as a kid. We’ve got his picture at all the airports, borders, etc. Anything he does, down to the color of socks he wears, we’ll know.”

“That’ll help,” Orlando said, “if we ever get our laundry mixed up with this nut, but my guess is that if he doesn’t want to be found, then the only chance of finding him is
our
way.”

“And,” said Phoebe, “we tried to find him for years after he left our group. And sorry, but we had better tools than you, and we couldn’t even get a glimpse. It’s like he was a ghost.”

“Or he had some help,” said Caleb.

“What do you mean?” Renée asked.

“Never mind. It’s just a thought. There may be things, or people, who are able to block what we can do, where we can see. I’ve heard anecdotal evidence about it, but I thought that it was more like an excuse for failure. But maybe there’s something to it.”

“Anyway,” Phoebe cut in, “come on, Agent Wagner. Try it. You might have a knack for it. We’ve had successes with the most skeptical of volunteers.”

Renée sipped her coffee. “I don’t think I’ll have any—”

“That’s okay,” Caleb said, his voice wracked with suffering and pain just below the surface. “It’s fine if nothing happens. We normally work as a team, but our team, well, I’m sure you know all about what happened in Antarctica.”

“I know what was on the report, but as far as exactly what the hell happened down there I have no idea. Forgive me for asking this bluntly, but what are you people caught up in?”

“Just research,” Orlando said, hands raised defensively.

Caleb started to answer, but Renée was quicker. “And does ‘just research’ involve globe-trotting adventures into booby-trapped tombs, underwater shipwrecks and other Indiana-Jones-type shenanigans?”

Phoebe and Orlando grinned in spite of themselves and said at almost the same time: “Sometimes.”

#

Twenty minutes later they were drawing. Caleb had given them instructions, what he felt were vague enough so as not to lead anybody, but also give enough direction to focus them on where he thought Xavier might be.

I hope I’m wrong,
he thought, after having them visualize Alexander, where he was now, and where he was headed. To focus on the destination, a place with a tomb.

That was all. To say any more might influence the process too much. What he had given them was enough.

He trusted Orlando and Phoebe, the best of the Morpheus Initiative members, to come up with the right answer, to remote view their destination and confirm his thinking. But for himself, he would attempt a different visionary destination. If he could, if it was at all possible. He was going to focus on Xavier himself. On Montross, the man, the psychic. The FBI might have their methods, but Caleb needed something more direct.

He needed a first-hand experience, a psychic get-to-know-you of his adversary. His wife’s murderer, his child’s abductor.

He wanted to
see
the man he was going to kill.

#

Phoebe finished her sketch first, then stared at it before turning her attention to her brother. Caleb was in a meditative pose, hands on his knees, eyes closed, brow furrowed in frustration. Orlando was drawing on his iPad, shading in what looked like a pillared structure on a hill.

“I still get weirded out,” she said, turning her sketch pad his way, “when we have the same damn visions.”

“Copycat,” Orlando said with a smirk.

Renée looked over from the other side of the table. “So, is this what it’s like?”

“More or less,” said Orlando. “Though usually we have a few more people here, and we can cross-reference details and see what elements get the most hits.”

Renée turned her pad around. “See, I don’t have any talent. I drew some kind of horse and buggy thing.” On her pad was a crude sketch of two horses pulling a cart with two people inside. “Guess my mind was just wandering, but that’s all I saw.”

“Interesting,” Phoebe noted. “You drew crowns on their heads.”

“I knew it.”

Phoebe looked up. Her brother’s eyes were open, with failure written over his face. But he managed a smile as he looked over Renée’s drawing. “She does have some talent.”

Renée stood up, backing away, still looking at her horses. “What are you talking about? I—”

Suddenly her cell phone rang. “Hang on, just a second.”

She put her ear to the iPhone. “Yeah, what do you got? Okay, I see. Hang on, I’ll call you back, we may have something here that can confirm that.”

She hung up. “NSA traced a coded satellite phone call from Antarctica shortly after the explosion at Fort Erickson. They couldn’t get much after decoding the call, but they confirmed a man’s voice—that of your very own Xavier Montross.”

“Did they get anything else?” Phoebe asked.

“Only a name. He was telling someone where to meet.” Renée looked at them steadily. “‘St. Peter’s’ was all they got.”

Caleb thought for a moment, nodding to himself. Then he pointed to Orlando. “We could do an online photo search match in various databases, comparing those drawings with other pictures, but it would take far too long. Adding the detail of the ‘horse and cart’ would help, but again, we don’t have the time. Orlando, just go to good old
Wikipedia
.”

“Cop-out,” Orlando said as he opened the tablet and used the keyboard.

“Look up ‘Mausoleum.’”

“Where is this going?” Renée asked, her face showing complete confusion.

Phoebe chuckled, shaking her head. “Don’t worry, you get used to Caleb’s roundabout way of getting us all to confirm what he already knows.” She moved back, then whispered to Caleb, “What’s wrong? Didn’t you get anything?”

Keeping his voice low, he said, “I couldn’t even bring about the start of anything. Something’s wrong.” His eyes were bloodshot, his face pale. Lowering his voice still further, he added, “I tried to see Xavier, went at it a couple different ways, with different questions, all focused. I should have seen something, but not a damn thing came up. Just a flickering green haze around a center of darkness.”

Phoebe frowned. “Do you think you’re being blocked? Maybe by the tablet?”

“Maybe, but I fear it’s something worse.”

“What’s worse?”

“Remember when we were kids? Remember Dad? What happened after he was gone, after I thought maybe it was my fault we couldn’t save him?”

“Yeah,” Phoebe said. “Your visions, they didn’t come again for years.”

Caleb sighed. “I need to try again. With a different target, something besides Xavier. Something I should be able to see. If I can’t,”—he met her stare, and she nearly cried seeing the loss, the guilt, so familiar, bubbling inside of his expression—“if I still can’t, then it’s her. It’s Lydia. I killed her, and this is my penance.”

“No, Caleb.”

Orlando cleared his throat, interrupting and bringing them back to the moment. “Ah, this is what he’s talking about.” He turned the screen so the others could all crowd around and see it. “
Mausoleum
. The word derives from the tomb of King Mausolus, the Persian satrap of Caria, whose large tomb, completed in 350 BCE, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. And there’s a picture.”

Renée bent forward to stare at it. “It’s almost the same as what you’ve both drawn.”

They looked at the photo Orlando just enlarged: a huge structure set on a hill overlooking a bayside city, with it had a pyramidal step structure on top of a larger base and two more tiers surrounded by immense white columns and statues.

“And,” said Caleb, “check out the roof.”

“A chariot,” Renée whispered. “Four horses. Two people inside, wearing crowns.”

“Mausolus and his queen, Artemesia,” Caleb said. “He died early into his reign. And Artemesia, so in love and desperate to immortalize her husband, spared no expense for his tomb, bringing in the greatest architects and sculptors in all the world. It was a tourist attraction for centuries, but unfortunately, by the twelfth century, the tomb was destroyed, like the Pharos, in a series of earthquakes.”

“Wonderfully tragic,” said Phoebe. “So we’ve all drawn a tomb that no longer exists. Why? What does this have to do with some castle in Rome?”

“It’s not in Italy,” Caleb answered.

“Turkey,” Orlando said, cutting him off, scrolling down the text. “Come on, let me do something useful here. It says here nothing’s left of it except the foundation, in the town of Bodrum, Turkey, but—”

“—but there’s a castle nearby,” said Caleb, letting a smile form. “Built by the Knights Hospitaller in the fifteenth century.”

“Construction started during the Crusades in 1402,” Orlando clarified. “Knights from four different countries helped build this castle, using many of the blocks and pillars from our friend Mausolus’s tomb. It wasn’t finished until around 1480. And they called it the
Petroneum
.” He looked up, eyes shining. “Or the Castle of St. Peter.”

Caleb steeled his jaw, closed his eyes, and felt a tingle—a familiar stirring at the base of his spine, one that would often shoot upwards, triggering a flood of visions. But this time, it fizzled, leaving greenish sunspots in the corner of his eyes. He had to focus, had to keep trying, but not now. Now, he would have to rely on his sister and Orlando, and on the skills of the FBI. They had to find Alexander.

“That,” he said, pointing to the castle on the screen, “is where he’s taken my son.”

8.

Bodrum, Turkey, 11 PM

Alexander woke to a feeling of his ears popping. He sat up in his tiny bunk, the sole cot in a room no bigger than the old downstairs bathroom in his house. The dream had returned, smashing at the inside of his skull like a nightmare trying to get out. The smell of burnt hair and flesh, sulfur and death.
Mom
. . . He leapt out of bed, wobbled unsteadily on his feet, then went for the door.

Locked.

After a moment, he remembered the submarine. Being herded down the tight stairwell, his battered Nikes thumping along behind the shoes and boots of the other men ushering Xavier Montross down into the sub’s metal belly. Two men had locked him in this room, after first giving him “something.” Alexander didn’t even consider that they might have drugged the glass of water they left for him, but within ten minutes of submerging, feeling queasy enough from the descent, he fell onto the cot and was fast asleep.

It felt like the craft was surfacing. He wished he had a porthole window, or access to the periscope, to see where he was. He got up, fought a dizzy spell, then tried the door. Still locked.

Again he thought of the
Incredibles
. If only he could be like Dash.

Just as he was thinking about creating a diversion to get the door open, like setting something on fire and tripping the alarms, then running out in a blaze of speed, something clicked and the door pulled outward.

A pretty, dark-skinned woman in a black suit stood there. She crossed her arms. Looked him up and down. “I guess you look like your father. Come on.” She moved aside and motioned him out. “I’ve been sent to collect you.”

Alexander blinked at her as if she were some kind of mirage. “Where are we?”

“Where we need to be. Now, move it.”

#

Alexander stepped out into the night and immediately felt the difference: the humidity and the glare of the city streets, the boats twinkling in the bay, the lit-up stucco and red-tiled houses on the hills, and the blaring, techno-beat music from a nearby disco. But the imposing sight straight over his shoulder that made him turn and gasp was something out of a fairy tale book.

A castle.

Huge reinforced walls were lit with multi-colored lights that made it look like a model on a movie set. Three square towers were visible, equally bright, presiding over the rocky shore and the small armada of boats tethered to the piers.

Impressed with the sight of the medieval castle, Alexander almost didn’t see Montross at the prow, a pack over his shoulder. He was dressed all in black, blending into the night, except for his exposed head of red hair.

“Ah,” he said, “Nina and our little guest. How did you sleep, kid?”

Alexander felt his attention wavering back to the castle. “Bad dreams.” Then he had a thought, a flicker of a memory that grew into something bigger. Something he remembered all of a sudden about his dreams. “A nightmare, about my mom dying. But you know all about what that’s like, don’t you?”

Montross flinched, and suddenly Nina’s hand shot out and spun Alexander around by the shoulder. She was kneeling now, her eyes swallowing his vision as if they were miniature black holes. “What did you see?”

Grimacing, trying to be strong and not cry out, Alexander wriggled in her grasp.
Bad idea
, he thought.
Should have kept that to myself.
“Just a wreck, a car crash.” His eyes glazed over and suddenly he was there. “A woman . . .”

. . . reaching for the man at the wheel, the man holding his chest and staring at her as if she had just wounded him
.

“
How did you keep this from me? You bitch. You little lying bitch.”

And then he turns the wheel—hard—toward an oncoming truck, just as his eyes lose all emotion and the woman screams . . .