Midas Code (21 page)
Authors: Boyd Morrison
A
fter they dropped Stacy off at the hotel, Grant and Tyler went to a local metalwork and fabrication shop they had rented. Tyler paid the owner a handsome fee to leave them alone for the evening with the grinding, cutting, and welding tools they would need to remove the gear from the Mechanism replica and transfer it to the geolabe.
The approach to constructing the replica was different from the one Tyler had used on the geolabe, so he had to remove the axle from the gear before he could fit it to the geolabe. The entire process took seven hours, and by midnight he had all forty-seven gears of the geolabe back together. The dials spun freely, as if the gear had been in place from the beginning. The geolabe was once again in working order.
“Now we just have to wait until morning,” Grant said, as he gathered up the scattered pieces of the replica. “The Acropolis opens at 8
A.M.
”
“Shouldn’t take us more than ten minutes once we’re up there. Then we can head back to the airport. With the hour time difference, we’ll be in Rome by lunchtime.”
Landing in Naples was too risky. They didn’t know how far Gia Cavano’s influence reached, but Tyler didn’t think it extended to Rome. They’d hire a car and make the one-hour drive down to Naples in time to meet with Orr.
Tyler rubbed his eyes. He needed a good night’s sleep, but he didn’t know if that was going to be possible with his mind racing.
Grant must have seen the worry etched on his face. “Your dad’s going to be okay, you know.”
“I know. He’d want me to be more worried about that nuclear material than about him.”
“I still can’t figure why Orr would want it. It’s bizarre.”
“It has something to do with the gold,” Tyler said. “Why else would he have us hunt for the treasure and prepare his nuclear material simultaneously?”
“If he sets that thing off in DC,” Grant said, “it’ll turn Washington into a ghost town for the next twenty years.”
“Maybe he’s got a grudge against the government.”
“Yeah. He might hate paying taxes even more than I do.”
Tyler placed the geolabe in his backpack, then paused before speaking. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing not calling the FBI into this?”
Grant shrugged. “Man, I don’t know. It could go either way. They do have more resources than we do, even with Aiden’s snooping powers and Miles’s connections. On the other hand, I think you’re right that Orr would find out. The longer he thinks we’re on our own, the longer he doesn’t do anything to the general or to Stacy’s sister.”
“I know. And I know my father’s not going to sit idly by while they hold him hostage. Keeping Orr occupied could give him a chance to break out.”
“You think he’ll try something?”
Tyler nodded. “If we can’t find him first. But Aiden said there’s no way to track the videos Orr is emailing to us. They’re routed through three different anonymizers in Eastern Europe.”
He didn’t have to go through the rest. Grant had seen Aiden’s email. Gordian Engineering was one of the top forensic accident-investigation firms in the world. Miles had assembled a team of volunteers close to Tyler and gone out to the site of the ferry truck explosion to gather evidence, first calling the local sheriff to notify them that they had gotten a tip about the blast.
Under the sheriff’s guidance, they had sifted through the wreckage and found nothing that would lead back to Orr. The truck had been stolen the day before, and all the bomb components could be found at any Radio Shack. The binary explosive was also impossible to track. Without any other leads and with no injuries, the sheriff was already concluding that it was the work of yahoos who got a kick out of blowing up stuff.
Aiden’s efforts to sniff out Orr through the use of his electronic communications had been no more fruitful. Orr’s cell phone was a disposable. The Web site for tracking the geolabe was set up with a false identity. Unless they got a lucky break, their only opportunity to free Sherman and Carol would be to nab Orr himself.
“All right,” Tyler said, hoisting the backpack. “Let’s get back to the hotel. We’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
When they reached their suite, they found Stacy in the living room reading over the Archimedes Codex yet again.
“Does it work?” she asked eagerly.
Tyler smiled. “Like a Swiss watch.”
“I’m going to hit the hay,” Grant said. “I’ll set the alarm for seven. I’ll need a good breakfast.”
He shut the door behind him, leaving Tyler alone with Stacy. Tyler set the backpack with the geolabe on the table and sat down next to her. Suddenly, the pace of the past few days caught up with him. He slumped against the back of the couch and closed his eyes.
“Poor guy,” she said. “You look beat.”
Tyler turned his head toward her and cracked his lids. “You look pretty alert.”
“I took a nap while you were gone.”
He twisted his neck around, the muscles sore from bending over the geolabe for four hours straight with no break.
She pushed him up. “Here. Let me work on those knots.”
Before he could argue, Stacy had grabbed his shoulders. For a small woman, she had strong hands. Tyler had to admit that it felt damn good. He leaned into her thumbs, which found the most gnarled spots.
After five minutes of work, the stress wasn’t completely gone, but his muscles were no longer cramped. Tyler leaned back into the cushion and looked at Stacy. Her eyes searched his.
“What?” she said.
“This situation is tough on you, isn’t it?” she said.
“And it’s not tough on you?”
“Of course it is, but I have faith it’ll all turn out for the best.”
“So do I.”
She casually brushed his hair. “No, you don’t. You want to
make
it turn out all right. That’s why it’s so hard for you. You hate not being in control. I saw you during that car chase on the autobahn. You were in your element. You were certain it would go exactly as you planned, and even if it didn’t, you had confidence that you could react to whatever was thrown at you.”
Tyler looked at her but said nothing.
“That story about getting injured by that horse when you were a kid,” she continued. “You weren’t afraid of being killed. You were afraid of being paralyzed.”
Tyler was shocked at how close Stacy had gotten to the truth. But paralysis wasn’t his fear. Miles was proof that life didn’t end in a wheelchair. A coma was what scared him, the idea that he would be a vegetable the rest of his life, dependent on others, contributing nothing.
“Why are you telling me this?” Tyler asked her.
Stacy put both her hands on his. “Because I want you to know that you’re not alone in this. One way or another, we’re going to get through this. All of us.”
The air seemed to be sucked out of the room, and Tyler got tunnel vision. He was focused solely on Stacy’s bright blue eyes. His breathing came to a standstill.
She leaned closer, her gaze passing from his lips to his eyes. Her grip on his hands tightened. If he moved even an inch more toward her, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself.
Instead, as if they both sensed how wrong what they were contemplating would be, given that Sherman and Carol were still being held prisoner, the moment passed. Tyler turned away, one of the hardest things he’d ever done. He dropped her hands and stood.
“Well,” he said, “I, uh, I should probably get some sleep.”
She stood and crossed her arms, blushing in embarrassment. “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea.”
“So … good night.”
“You, too. I mean, see you in the morning.” She gave a halfhearted wave and retreated to her room. “Night.” She closed the door.
Despite the gravity of the situation, it seemed that a tiny portion of the weight on Tyler’s shoulders had lifted. He quickly brushed his teeth and stumbled into bed.
As he closed his eyes, a feeling of serenity settled over him at having Stacy and Grant by his side. No matter what the next day held, they would all be facing it together.
A
damo Cavano climbed the path to the Acropolis with Dario and two other cousins Gia Cavano had added to their ranks when she heard about the theft at the Greek National Archaeological Museum the night before. Some kind of box. Adamo didn’t care. All he knew was that he’d get another shot at that black bastard who had decked him and Dario outside the British Museum.
After arriving in Athens at six in the morning, the first thing they did was buy four pistols and ammo from a local supplier the family knew. Now it was eight, and they could get up to the Acropolis. They bought four tickets and began the long walk up to the summit of the famous hill.
Many who had never been to Athens thought that the Acropolis and the Parthenon were one and the same. In reality, the Acropolis referred to the entire massive rock plateau, while the Parthenon, a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena, was one of several ancient buildings atop the Acropolis. Adamo knew that the buildings were even older than those in his hometown of Naples, but the stone walls and ruins didn’t impress him. It looked like a mess. From this vantage point, the Parthenon was literally a shell of its former glory. The entire thing looked as if it would collapse at any moment.
The sun was already beating down hard, and there was little shade to be found. None of them had really thought about what to wear. Adamo had on his slacks, Ferragamos, and a loose silk dress shirt to hide the gun tucked into his belt. Every tourist they passed was in shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals or sneakers. Adamo and his crew stuck out like flies on a ball of mozzarella.
Nothing they could do about that now. Two of them would take up post at the entrance, while the other two stayed at the ready, nearby. With only one entrance to the Acropolis, Locke and his friend Westfield would have to pass them.
Adamo kept an eye out as they approached the Propylaea, the narrow staircase that led through the portico and onto the main expanse of the Acropolis.
The stairs were already crowded with a group of tourists.
How could that be?
Adamo and his group had been the first ones through the gate. Then he saw more visitors approaching from his left, and he realized that the path they’d taken wasn’t the only way up to the entrance.
They had each memorized what Locke, Westfield, and Benedict looked like. The three of them were distinctive and wouldn’t be hard to spot. Adamo checked out the tourist group. None of them matched the photos.
He looked around for a good place to sit down. It was going to be a long day, and he didn’t want to be on his feet the whole time. But first he supposed that for the sake of thoroughness he should check the Acropolis to make sure Locke hadn’t arrived first.
He pulled Dario and the other two aside.
“We don’t want any trouble up here,” he said in Italian. “If we spot Locke, take him as quietly as you can. The other two we take for a ride and cap them in the garbage dump. And remember, Westfield is for me and Dario.”
“What if they don’t come so quietly?” Dario said.
“Then Gia said we leave the Greeks some corpses next to the Parthenon, but make sure you get whatever they’re carrying. Dario, you’re with me. We’re going to get the lay of the land.”
Adamo passed the crowd and went up the steps. He squinted at the sun.
If they were going to be up here all day, he would have to get a bottle of water before he settled in.
Because they’d taken the shorter route up, Stacy thought she, Tyler, and Grant would be the first ones on the Acropolis plateau, but that notion was disabused when she saw workmen moving heavy marble blocks with the help of a gantry crane. She was surprised to see them on a Sunday morning, but then she remembered a guide they had passed saying that there was some rush to get part of the restoration completed for an event happening later in June.
She was also surprised to see an elderly man who was pushing his wife in a wheelchair, thinking he must be very spry to get up there so fast.
Stacy had been to the Acropolis a dozen times, but the sight was always breathtaking. Despite the destruction over the millennia, the Parthenon had lost none of its grandeur. Some architects thought it was the most perfectly proportioned building on earth, and she would be hard-pressed to argue with them. The columns were imperceptibly tapered like a cigar to counteract the optical illusion in which parallel straight lines appear to bow toward each other. In addition, to give the Parthenon the appearance of strength the columns leaned inward, but so slightly that they would meet only if they were extended one mile into the sky.
The brilliance of people dead for thousands of years continued to awe her.
As they took a direct route toward the opposite end of the Acropolis, Tyler and Grant couldn’t help but gawk at the array of immense marble columns that supported the remnants of the temple’s roof. Stacy wished she were seeing it for the first time, as they were.
She yelped as she lost her footing on one of the many slick marble slabs that were exposed in the gravel path. Tyler caught her before she could fall.
“You okay?” he said.
“I always forget about the stupid marble. One time I went down on my butt. It’s like standing on inclined ice.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
He looked at her and smiled before walking one. She had awakened late, so she hadn’t had a chance to talk to him about their brief connection last night, but there really wasn’t much to say. She supposed the attraction was the result of the stressful situations they’d faced together. Under the circumstances, however, acting on it was not only inappropriate but a serious distraction they didn’t need.
As they walked next to the temple, she said, “Isn’t it amazing?”
Tyler just nodded.
“How long has it been here?” Grant asked.
“Since 2500 B.C. Back then, all the relief sculptures that ringed the temple would have been painted in bright colors.”
“I can’t imagine that.”
“Most people see the pictures and think it was always white, but spectrography tells us differently now, even though weather has wiped almost all traces of the paint away.”
“Where are the sculptures that England didn’t get?”
“At the New Acropolis Museum built at the southern base of the Acropolis. The old museum is over there.” She pointed at a tired building on the western side of the Parthenon. Wires stretching around it made it clear that the building was closed.
“Looks like it’s seen better days.”
“It was too small and antiquated to house the treasures properly, so they built the new museum not only as a state-of-the-art showpiece but also to counter the British Museum’s insistence that the Elgin Marbles were safer in London.”
“And the Greeks don’t agree, apparently.”
“It’s been a sore point for two hundred years, but the Greeks didn’t have much of a case until the new museum was built.”
They passed the eastern end of the Parthenon. The east pediment was almost completely destroyed, with just the slanted edges of the roof visible on each side. The only statue on the pediment was the reclining Herakles on the left end. With the original still in the British Museum, the Greeks had constructed a reproduction to show what it would have looked like in place. Eight columns supported the roof. Counting from the left, Herakles was between the second and third columns.
Stacy took out a printout of the pediment as it would have appeared in ancient times. Aphrodite’s feet would have been just to the left of the seventh column.
Tyler took another few dozen steps and removed the geolabe from his backpack. Stacy had helped him recalibrate it at the hotel using the Stomachion puzzle, so the dials all pointed to the noon position once again. He turned it on its side as Archimedes had instructed and held it up. Stacy could tell they were too close. It blotted out the entire structure, including the pediment. They would have to back up until it barely covered the columns from end to end, with the top of the geolabe lined up along the base of the pediment.
They stepped back until they were near the edge of the Acropolis, behind a small stone wall surrounding a raised circular platform. Now the geolabe lined up perfectly. While Stacy steadied it, Tyler rotated the first knob until the left-hand dial pointed to Herakles’s rump. Then he flipped the geolabe over and read off the reading from the notches etched in the dial.
“Thirty-two degrees.”
Grant jotted it down. “Got it.”
Tyler flipped the geolabe back and repeated the steps by pointing the right-hand dial where Aphrodite’s feet would be.
“Seventy-one degrees.”
Grant took out a map of Naples and laid it on the stone railing. He traced the lines at those angles from the Castel Dell’Ovo and the Castel Sant’Elmo until they intersected.
“And here we are. The entrance to the tunnels leading to the Midas chamber is going to be somewhere in the vicinity of Piazza San Gaetano.”
He pointed to a square in the heart of Naples. There was no Roman fortress in the vicinity, but it could have been razed thousands of years ago. Or the Syracuse spy just got lost in the tunnels.
Stacy looked up, amazed at how quickly they’d completed their task.
“Really?” she said. “Could it be that easy?”
“It’s not,” Tyler said. His eyes were riveted on something to the right of the Parthenon. “Don’t make any sudden movements.”
“Why?”
“Grant, does that look like a tourist to you?”
Stacy moved only her eyes and saw a man sauntering toward them dressed in a shiny silk shirt and dark pants. Grant slowly turned his head and got the barest glimpse before turning back.
“Nope,” Grant said. “Not a tourist. He’s one of the Italian meatballs I punched out at the British Museum.”