Free The Mongol Objective by David Sakmyster Page A

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