The Midas Code tl-2 Page 7

  “You think everyone has to be as sensible and logical as you are.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “The brave do what they can. The desperate do what they must. The crazy do what you least expect. Where do you think I fit in?”

  Tyler mulled that over. Orr seemed to be smart, sane, and rational, but he did want them to find something as outlandish as the Midas Touch. Tyler really didn’t know what was coming next, and the hand still in Orr’s pocket made him nervous, so he had no choice but to continue the status quo.

  “Okay,” Tyler said. “We’re just going to talk. You said you had proof that the Midas Touch exists?” Tyler couldn’t wait to see what constituted proof in Orr’s mind.

  “I do,” Orr said. “But first I have to tell you a story.”

  “A story?” Stacy said. “We know the Midas story.”

  “That’s not the story I’m going to tell.”

  “My point is that you’re sending us on a wild-goose chase,” Stacy said. “The Midas Touch doesn’t exist.”

  “I beg to differ,” Orr said, “and I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve seen it in action.”

  Tyler couldn’t suppress a guffaw. “You’ve seen the Midas Touch? You mean, you actually met the old king himself?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “How?”

  Orr heaved the backpack off his shoulder and lowered it slowly to the ground. By the way it sagged, Tyler guessed it was carrying one item the size of a loaf of bread.

  “When I was nine years old,” Orr said, “my parents took me on a trip to Italy. Naples. The homeland, if you couldn’t guess by looking at me. While I was there, I spent a lot of time roaming the streets with a girl named Gia. It was when we were exploring the tunnels that we found it.”

  “The tunnels?” Tyler asked.

  “Naples is built on volcanic tuff. The Greeks, who founded the city, discovered that the tuff was very easy to carve into. They tunneled into it for building material, but they soon realized that they could dig cisterns and link them to aqueducts carrying water from nearby aquifers and lakes. There are miles of ancient tunnels snaking under Naples, many of which have never been fully explored.”

  “And that’s where you found Midas?” Stacy asked, the contempt in her voice apparent.

  Orr nodded, a fire in his eyes. “I’ll never forget it as long as I live. We found a chamber made entirely of gold, including a solid-gold cube in the center that was six feet on each side. And on top of this cube rested the golden statue of a girl. She was entirely intact except that she was missing one hand.”

  Now Tyler had no doubt the guy was crazy. Why would he walk away from something like that? Wouldn’t he have told someone?

  “So what’s your proof?” he asked Orr. “I don’t suppose you got a couple of photos.” Even if he did, what good was that in the age of Photoshop and special effects?

  “Better. I’ve been waiting all morning to show this to you.” Orr hefted the backpack and held it out to Tyler. “Be careful. And don’t take the contents out of the bag.”

  The bag was heavier than Tyler thought it would be. He gently set the pack on the ground and unzipped it. He knelt with Stacy next to it and peered inside.

  At first the interior of the bag was too dark for them to see anything, so Tyler twisted the bag to let in more light. During the move, he felt the spongy give of Styrofoam, not the hardness he was expecting from an object so dense. Then something reflected the cloudy sky with a yellow metallic glow, and Tyler understood what he was looking at.

  Stacy gasped at the sight.

  Set carefully into the packing material was a golden hand.

  FOURTEEN

  Stacy couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The golden hand ended at the wrist. But what made the hand even more remarkable was that it wasn’t solid.

  Tyler lifted it out of the Styrofoam a few inches so that they could see it more clearly. The exposed veins, ligaments, muscles, and bones in the cutaway of the wrist were shaped with exquisite detail down to the smallest capillary. Every pore and wrinkle on the back of the hand was replicated. Even the marrow of bones was represented in its delicate latticework. It was as if they were looking at a cross-section drawing in an anatomy textbook.

  “The missing hand of Midas’s daughter,” Orr said proudly. “I acquired it last year. It matches the sculpture I saw all those years ago.”

  “This can’t be real,” Tyler said.

  Stacy shook her head slowly. “I’ve seen this hand before.”

  Tyler looked at her in shock. “You have?”

  “It was all over the news last year,” she said. “Someone broke into a London auction house and cleaned out one of their vaults. The most valuable item taken was a golden hand.” She remembered the theft because the initial inspection of the hand baffled appraisers, who could not even speculate as to how it had been made.

  “I told you this was no wild-goose chase,” Orr said.

  “You also killed two guards in the process.”

  Orr shrugged. “They were in the way.”

  Stacy’s lip curled in disgust at his cavalier attitude toward murder.

  “But this can’t be a real hand,” Tyler said. “It has to be a sculpture.”

  “If you’ll look closely, you’ll see that it would be impossible to sculpt that kind of detail or use a mold to cast it.”

  Stacy inspected the hand again and saw that Orr was right. The way the structures overlapped and disappeared into the cavities inside the hand would defy the efforts of even the most skilled craftsman.

  “How much would something like this be worth?” she wondered aloud.

  Orr answered. “About eighty thousand dollars at today’s prices. Just for the weight of the gold, of course. I’d bet the hand itself would fetch several million at auction. If you could find a buyer, that is. Stolen property is hard to get rid of.”

  “Why are you showing this to us?” Tyler asked Orr.

  “Because I need you to believe that what you’re searching for really exists. Otherwise, I’m just a crackpot with some idiotic quest that can’t possibly be achieved. You’ll just go through the motions hoping you can figure out some way to find your father, which won’t happen, by the way.”

  “You’ve got everything figured out, haven’t you?” Tyler said.

  Orr grinned again. “Not everything. That’s why I need you two.”

  “All right,” Tyler said. “We’ll do it your way.”

  Orr held out his hand. “I’ll take the bag back.” Tyler zipped it back up and gave it to him.

  “What now?” Stacy said.

  “Suppose we believe your story,” Tyler said. “The Midas Touch existed, and there’s a buried treasure somewhere under Naples. You’ve seen it before. You know where it is. Why don’t you just go get it yourself? Why go to all this trouble?”

  “Just because I’ve seen it before doesn’t mean I know how to find it.”

  “What does that mean?” Stacy said.

  “It’s a long and complicated story, but it boils down to this. There are two ways to get to the treasure. I can’t go the way I’ve been before for reasons that you don’t need to know, which means I need the second way to find it. Archimedes’ way. Using the map he created.”

  “Archimedes lived over twenty-two hundred years ago. Do you really think that map still exists? Or that it even still applies? Naples has been built over by the Greeks, Syracusans, Romans, Italians. Not to mention Vesuvius blowing up every once in a while, covering everything with ash.”

  “When Gia and I were in the tunnels, we came across one cistern where we saw light coming through a well opening far above our heads. That’s the entry point I’m looking for. Unfortunately, there are thousands of wells in Naples, not all of which are documented, and most of which have been plugged up.”

  “Why the test on the ferry?” Tyler said.

  “I couldn’t hire you for the job, could I?” Orr said. “You’d turn me in. No
w that I know that you can solve Archimedes’ puzzle, I think you can figure out where the map is. And I have a time limit.”

  “What’s the deadline?” Stacy said, and cringed when she realized the double meaning.

  “You’re funny,” Orr said. “I need to have the map in my hands by Sunday night. In Naples.”

  “Are you kidding?” Tyler said. “It’s Wednesday. You want us to solve a twenty-two-hundred-year-old riddle in just four days?”

  “I don’t have any choice. If I haven’t found Midas’s tomb by then, the Fox will get it.”

  “Who’s the Fox?” Stacy said.

  “It’s Gia’s nickname. We’re in a race to find it first. She would kill you in a second if she thought you were anywhere near finding it, so you’ll want to be careful.”

  “But we have no idea where to start!”

  “You will. The night I acquired the golden hand, I also retrieved an ancient manuscript written by Archimedes himself. Luckily, I was able to get to it before it was photographed and appraised for the auction catalog.”

  “That’s where you got the instructions for building the geolabe,” Tyler said.

  “Right. I had a translation done by a retired Classics professor, but he was in his eighties and not up to the challenge of a mission like this.”

  “Who is he?”

  “It doesn’t really matter, because he is currently dead.”

  By the look in Orr’s eyes, she doubted that the professor died of old age.

  “I’ll be emailing you a file of photographs of the Archimedes Codex as well as the translation,” Orr said. “That should give you a good head start in your search, but I’m sure we missed something. Your job is to figure out what it was. I want daily updates on your progress. If you fail to deliver an update, or I think you’re holding back, I will remove an ear from both Sherman and Carol. Understand?”

  Stacy swallowed hard.

  “We’ll give you the updates,” Tyler said, “but we want proof that my father and Stacy’s sister are all right.”

  “I’ve already sent you proof-of-life videos.”

  “I want one every day, with proof that their ears are intact. You miss a day, and this is over.”

  Orr thought about it, then nodded. “Fair enough. Once a day.” He looked around at the crowd hustling for one of the four entrances to get into the game that had just started. “It looks like it’s time for me to go. I’ll be in touch.” Orr slung the backpack over his shoulder.

  “That’s it?” Stacy said.

  “Understand that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me, so I take it very seriously. You should, too. I’ll be in Naples on Sunday. If you can’t be there with the solution to my problem, don’t bother coming.”

  As the skies opened up with another downpour, Orr melted into the sea of humanity. Stacy wanted to run him down and pound his head into the pavement, but that wouldn’t help her sister, and she’d get blown up in the process.

  “I want to kill him,” she said. “I’ve never said that before about a person and really meant it.”

  Tyler, who was also staring at Orr, just nodded. They kept watching until Orr walked around the corner and disappeared.

  FIFTEEN

  Tyler was eager to read the documents that Orr had emailed to them, but Stacy insisted on stopping at her downtown hotel first to get into dry clothes. The plan was to then go back to Tyler’s house, where they had more room to spread out. While she changed, Tyler went to Gordian’s headquarters to print out the documents and check out a hunch he had about the geolabe. An hour later, he was back at her hotel.

  Stacy came out wearing the same jacket and boots, but a fresh shirt and jeans. Tyler expected her to be carrying nothing more than her briefcase, so he was surprised to see her carry-on trailing behind as well.

  “Pop the trunk,” she said as she reached the back of the Viper.

  Tyler swung around in his seat. “What are you doing?”

  “If we’re going to be working on this all night, there’s no sense in bringing me back here. It’ll just waste time.”

  “So you’re just inviting yourself to stay at my place?”

  “Relax. I’m not planning to throw myself at you. I’m being efficient, that’s all. Besides, it’s not like you’re married.”

  Tyler glanced down at his ringless hand. He had been married once and wore the ring for a long time after she died, but it now sat in his nightstand drawer. His love for Karen would never diminish, but he’d decided to treasure her memory by moving forward with his life.

  He looked back up at Stacy. “How do you know I don’t have a girlfriend?” Tyler didn’t object to her staying at his place. He was just amused by her brazen forwardness.

  “Oh,” Stacy said as if she’d never even considered that. “Do you?”

  Tyler had had one relationship since he became a widower. He’d really wanted the long-distance affair with Dilara to work out, but maintaining their connection through phone calls and emails had been difficult. Most of the time she was in Turkey excavating Noah’s Ark, while he was all over the rest of the world. They kept in contact, but developing a relationship wasn’t in the cards when they were separated by ten thousand miles most of the year.

  “No,” he said with feigned indignation, “but you don’t have to seem so surprised.” He clicked the trunk release.

  “Sorry,” Stacy said as she lifted her bag in. “I just figured you were like me. Driven. Workaholic. No time for romantic entanglements.”

  “It’s like talking to a mirror.”

  She picked up the thick folder of papers from the passenger seat and got in.

  “Are these the pages Orr sent?” she said.

  Tyler nodded and put the car in gear. “I made two English copies for us, plus the original in Greek for you.”

  Within ten minutes they had entered the Magnolia neighborhood. He turned into the driveway of his two-story Mediterranean-style villa perched on a cliff overlooking Puget Sound and downtown Seattle. He pulled the Viper into the middle bay of a three-car garage, a Ducati motorcycle next to a workbench on the right, and a Porsche SUV with a flat tire on the left.

  Tyler pointed at the Porsche’s tire and said, “That’s why we were crammed into the Viper today. I don’t normally take it out in the rain.”

  When they got inside, Stacy walked over to the windows. “Carol would love this view.”

  Tyler set her bag down in the hall. “You can have the spare bedroom on the right. The sheets are reasonably clean.”

  Stacy shot him a get-real look.

  “Kidding,” he said. “I wash them daily.”

  “I’ll assume it’s somewhere in between.”

  She took a spin around the living room, then checked out the kitchen, running her hands over the granite countertop and the cherry cabinets. “This is some house. Gordian must pay pretty well.”

  Tyler took a seat and pulled out the three packets of paper. “You don’t have much of a filter, do you?”

  “I’m just saying it’s not like you’re hiding the fact that you make money. A mansion. Red sports car. Porsche. Motorcycle.”

  “As a partner in the firm, I am adequately compensated, and I enjoy the fruits of my labor.”

  “Good for you, Dr. Locke.”

  “Shall we get started, Dr. Benedict?”

  “Got anything to drink?”

  Tyler nodded toward the fridge. “Help yourself. I’ll take a Diet Coke.”

  Drinks in hand, Tyler first showed Stacy the other side of the geolabe, which had been hidden from her when it was connected to the bomb. While the front had two dials with Greek writing labeling the discrete points on each dial, the opposing face had a single dial that was divided evenly into 360 individual notches and numbered every thirty notches, like the points on a compass. Tyler didn’t know what they were for, and Stacy suggested that the answer might lie in the manuscript.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon reading the translation of
the Archimedes Codex, with Stacy referring often to the photocopy of the original Greek. Tyler had seen some of the document before while he was building the geolabe, but most of the pages were new to him.

  The dense Greek writing was sprinkled with drawings and mathematical proofs. There were 247 folios in the original document, each page a treasure in itself, revealing the genius of antiquity’s greatest engineer. Tyler wished he could study every one of them, but only thirty-eight of the pages referred to Midas and the geolabe, a word coined by Archimedes. At one point, Archimedes even mentioned that he’d seen the golden hand, supporting Orr’s claim that the codex really had been written to lead someone to Midas’s treasure. Tyler found no explanation for the purpose of the notches.

  After going over the copy of the original document, Stacy told Tyler that the codex seemed to end abruptly, which could mean either that some pages were missing or that Archimedes hadn’t completed the manuscript. The reading was slow going, with Tyler stopping often to ask Stacy questions, but by seven o’clock Tyler had completed a first pass-through. After Stacy made a few phone calls, it was clear what their next step had to be.

  At seven on the dot, there was a hammering at the door that startled Stacy. Tyler recognized the cadence and yelled, “Come in!”

  The lock jiggled as a key went through the motions, and Grant threw open the door. He was by himself.

  “Where’s Aiden?” Tyler asked.

  “He was with Miles in DC. They should arrive in about an hour.”

  “You gave my regrets to the team at Bremerton?”

  “I told them you were unavoidably detained on an urgent matter.”

  “Good.” The project wasn’t at a critical point. He wouldn’t be missed for five days. Stacy’s show was on hiatus for the summer, so her schedule was easy to clear.

  “Have you heard from your father?” Grant said.

  When Tyler showed him the video, Grant smiled. “He’s a tough hombre,” he said.

  “Which is great for the military, but try being his son.” Tyler tried to smile at his own weak joke, but all he could think of was his dad blindfolded like a prisoner of war.