The Midas Code

ONE

“Excuse me,” Carol Benedict said as she raced to the Starbucks counter. “You’ve got my drink.”

The man who was holding her latte already had the lid off, ready to put sugar into her pristine cup of coffee. After her daily six-mile run, no one — but no one — got between her and her caffeine.

The man, a young guy wearing a Redskins cap and a dopey expression, looked down at the coffee and back at her.

“You sure?”

She smiled at him. “Did you order a tall double-shot latte?”

He shook his head and gave her a sheepish grin. “Sorry, seven a.m. is early for me,” he said. He put the lid back and handed it to her.

“No problem,” Carol said, and opened the door to a blast of heat.

By the end of her ten-minute walk back to her apartment, Carol was drenched with sweat. Washington was known for its summer humidity, but Carol had never experienced it until now, her first year taking graduate-level summer classes at Georgetown. She was astounded that it could be so muggy this early in the morning in the middle of June, but her moisture-wicking jogging top and shorts did an admirable job of keeping her from being miserable.

Carol wasn’t a breakfast person, one of her strategies for staying thin. When she entered her one-bedroom apartment, she cranked up the AC, turned on the news, and drained the last of her latte in between her stretching exercises. In the shower, she turned the water as cold as it would go. The cooling spray made her shiver with goose bumps and even get a little light-headed.

She picked a tank top and shorts and put her hair in a ponytail, but she’d have to put a sweater in her bag for class. The classrooms at school were always overly air-conditioned.

A knock came at her door just as she was putting on her shoes. She stood up too fast at the surprising sound, and the headrush nearly made her keel over. She steadied herself against the bureau. The feeling didn’t go away, but it subsided enough for her to walk.

Who could be at her door at 7:30 in the morning?

She peered through the peephole and saw a white man in a suit, stocky frame, not much taller than she was.

“What is it?” she asked without opening the door.

“Ms. Benedict, I’m Detective Wilson with the Arlington Police Department. I need to speak with you.”

“Can you please show me your identification?” Living alone, Carol had learned to be cautious.

“Of course.” He held up an open wallet displaying a badge and an ID with the Arlington PD logo. It looked all right to her, so she swung the door open. She suddenly felt unreasonably fatigued, so she leaned against the doorjamb, her head swimming. If she was getting sick, she’d have to power through it. Missing class could hurt her GPA.

“What’s this about, Detective?” She really had no idea why the police would be here. She hadn’t gotten so much as a parking ticket in her entire life.

Wilson, who had a thatchy unibrow, stared at her with an unreadable expression. “It’s about your sister, Stacy.”

A shot of adrenaline cleared Carol’s head.

“Stacy? Oh, my God! Has something happened?” They had talked just last night, and Stacy seemed fine.

“There’s a hostage situation at her hotel in Seattle. I need to take you down to the station, where we can coordinate with the Seattle police.”

“Is she hurt? Is she okay?”

“She’s unharmed for now, but you’ll need to come with me. I’ll explain the situation on the way.”

“Sure. Sure. Let me get my purse.” She snatched up her keys and her phone, threw them into her bag, and locked the door behind her. Her heart was thudding at the thought of her sister being held at gunpoint.

As she went down the stairs, she stumbled and Wilson caught her.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look pale.”

“I just feel so tired all of a sudden.” Her vision was getting blurrier by the minute.

Wilson held her arm the rest of the way to the parking lot, and she was glad he did, because her knees buckled twice.

Instead of an unmarked car, Wilson steered her to a white panel van. Another man jumped out of the passenger seat and slid the rear door open. Carol’s stomach lurched when she saw that he was wearing a Redskins cap.

It was the man who had taken her latte at Starbucks. The dopey expression had been replaced by the dead-eyed stare of a cobra assessing its prey.

She sucked in a breath to scream, but Wilson’s hand went over her mouth.

“I see you remember my partner,” he said into her ear.

She tried to struggle, but her arms and legs felt like over-cooked spaghetti, and her mind was getting cloudier by the second.

Wilson shoved her into the van, and the door slid closed behind her. He snapped cuffs onto her wrists and ankles as the other man started the van and drove off. She tried to scream again, but it came out as a weak mewl. Her tongue lolled in her mouth as if it were coated in syrup.

“You drugged me.”

Wilson nodded. “Rohypnol is easy to get, with so many university campuses in DC.”

Rohypnol. Otherwise known as roofies. The date-rape drug. He had put it in her coffee.

“Oh, my God—”

“Don’t worry. That’s not what it’s for. We just need you out for a few hours while we take care of some other business.”

“What do you want?”

“We need your sister to do something for us,” Wilson said.

“What have you done to Stacy?” Carol said, slurring out the S in Stacy. She couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer and rested her head on the floor.

“Nothing. She’s going to be more worried about what we’re going to do to you if she doesn’t cooperate. Or if she isn’t able to …”

Wilson kept talking, but Carol’s eyes could focus no longer, and darkness swept her to oblivion.

TWO

Tyler Locke peered at the text message and tried to decide whether it was a joke or some kind of marketing gimmick. He was ten minutes into his one-hour ferry commute to Bremerton, and three times his cell phone had rung with an unknown number. Tyler had ignored the calls, but the text message came soon after, again from an unknown number. The only people who had his cell number were in the phone’s contact list. As a rule, he didn’t answer calls from numbers he didn’t know, figuring that if it was important the caller would leave a voice mail. So far, no new messages.

The boat was only half full, so Tyler had the bench to himself, with his long legs propped up on the facing seat. Any other morning, his best friend, Grant Westfield, would be next to him playing games on his phone, but Grant was planning to beat the afternoon rush hour for a long weekend in Vancouver, so he’d taken an earlier ferry. They’d been making the trip from Seattle to Bremerton three days a week for two months to consult on the construction of a new ammunition depot at the naval base.

The phone rang again. Same number. Tyler drank his coffee and looked out at the receding Seattle skyline. It was eight-forty in the morning, and even though it was June sixteenth the sun was nowhere to be seen. Low clouds and drizzle made it a typical “June-uary” day, as the locals called the cool, overcast weather that usually preceded a sunny July.

Couldn’t be a cold call, Tyler concluded. A telemarketer wouldn’t call him Dr. Locke. Tyler wasn’t an MD. He had a PhD, and the only time anyone called him doctor was on one of his consulting gigs. None of his co-workers used the honorific unless they were making fun of him.

The call might be work-related, but he had fifty emails to plow through before he reached Bremerton, and he didn’t want to be sucked into a long conversation. He again let voice mail handle it and put the phone away. Eventually, the caller would get the hint to leave a message.

A minute after he began working on his laptop again, the phone beeped with another text message. Tyler sighed and pulled the phone from his pocket.

Tyler had to read the message three times to believe what he was seeing. He closed his laptop and sat up straight, taking his feet off the seat. He slowly scanned the passengers around him, but no one seemed at all interested in him.

The phone rang. Same number.

Tyler tapped the screen and said, “Who is this?”

“This is the person who is going to kill everyone on that ferry if you don’t do what I say.”

Tyler couldn’t detect an accent in the gravelly voice on the other end. “Why don’t I just hang up on you and call the police?” he said. “Should make your day when the FBI drops by.”

“You could do that, but what would you tell them? My number? It’s a prepaid phone bought with cash. Believe me, I’ve thought this through.”

For a moment, Tyler considered doing just what he’d threatened: hanging up and calling the cops. But the man was right. He had little to tell them.

“What’s this about?” Tyler said.

“It’s about you, Dr. Locke. Actually, that sounds pretentious. I’ll just call you Locke.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“It may seem like that now, but it won’t in a few minutes.”

Tyler paused. “Why are you calling me?”

“Because you’re exactly who I need. Bachelor’s degree from MIT in mechanical engineering. PhD from Stanford. Former Army captain in a combat-engineering battalion, which makes you an expert in demolitions and bomb disposal. Now chief of special operations at Gordian Engineering. And all of that before you’re forty. You know, you sound very good on paper.”

“So you know who I am. I should take all of this seriously because …?”

“Because I just emailed you a couple of pictures that show how serious your situation is. I know the ferry has Wi-Fi. Take a look at them. I’ll wait. Better hurry, though.”

With the phone propped in one hand, Tyler reluctantly opened his laptop and checked his in box.

One new message from an email address he didn’t recognize. The subject line read 27 minutes left.

Tyler opened the message. The body of the email had no text, just two images.

The first showed a two-axle truck with the name SILVERLAKE TRANSPORT on the side.

The second showed a refrigerator with its door open. Inside was a transparent plastic canister the size of a beer keg filled with a powdery gray substance. Cloth concealed an object on top. A digital timer was mounted on the front of the canister. The water was dead calm outside, but Tyler felt seasick.

“I’m listening,” he said, his mind already racing to how he could warn the passengers to get to a life raft.

“I thought you might. You know a bomb when you see it. In case you didn’t get it, the fridge is inside the truck, which is on the vehicle deck below you. And don’t call the police. I’ll know.”

“You couldn’t have gotten it on board.”

“You think I’m bluffing? Tell me about binary explosives.”

Tyler sucked in a breath before responding. “Binary explosives start as two separate inert compounds, but when they’re mixed together they become highly volatile. They’re often used for target practice by shooting clubs. The explosives can only be set off by a high-powered rifle round or a detonator. You can buy them on the Internet.”

“See? You are good. There’s a hundred pounds of binary in the fridge. Enough to blow a thirty-foot hole in that ferry and set half the cars on fire. I doubt there’d be many survivors.”

“The bomb-sniffing dogs at the dock would have detected it,” Tyler said.

“I took precautions to make sure the taggant odor was sealed in, and I paid some jobless college kid three hundred bucks to drive it on board. What’s bad for the economy is good for me.”

“If you want to blow up the ferry, why warn me?”

“Listen and find out. I want you to go to the truck. It has a padlock on the door. The key is taped inside the left wheel well. Go there now, or the ferry will never reach Bremerton.”

Bremerton. Suddenly, Tyler had a horrifying thought: the naval base. This guy wanted Tyler to drive the truck into a US Navy port using his credentials.

“So you want me to become a suicide bomber for you?” Tyler said, furiously thinking of a way to ditch the truck before he reached the entrance to the base.

The man laughed. “A suicide bomber? Not even close.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Locke, you’re going to be a hero. That bomb is set to explode in twenty-four minutes and thirty seconds. I want you to disarm it.”

THREE

As Byron Gaul waited for the elevator in the lobby of the Sheraton Premiere, he checked his surroundings. He was relieved not to find unexpected security alterations for the conference being held in the hotel. He’d scouted the location thoroughly the week before in preparation for the mission, but given that the hotel was in Tysons Corner, Virginia, just outside Washington, there was always the chance security had been beefed up, especially for a Pentagon-sponsored conference called the Unconventional Weapons Summit.

Two Army majors approached, deep in conversation. When they saw Gaul, he nodded to them, and they replied in kind. Because they were inside with their hats off, his lower rank didn’t require a salute. Gaul was dressed in a class-A Army service uniform with the rank of captain and a name tag that said Wilson. The uniform and all its ribbons and adornments were purchased off the Internet. The hardest part had been finding a size to fit his below-average height and above-average musculature.

He readied himself for questions, but the majors went back to their discussion, ignoring him. Gaul didn’t know if he’d have to use his prepared backstory, but he was ready in case anyone asked. He would say that he was a liaison officer to a Washington think tank called Weaver Solutions, one of hundreds in the city. He was attending the summit to learn about the newest technologies and tactics that might be used against military or civilian objectives. These kinds of military conferences were held virtually every week in the nation’s capital, but this was the only one his target was scheduled to address.

The elevator opened, and Gaul got on with the majors. At the first stop, the door opened to a buzz of activity. It was just after 11:30, the morning sessions over, including his target’s keynote speech. The participants would be breaking for lunch. The majors got off, and two men in civilian attire entered. Gaul glanced sideways at their name tags, which said Aiden MacKenna and Miles Benson.

Both of them seemed to be enhanced by technology out of a science-fiction movie. A black disk was attached to MacKenna’s skull with a wire connected to his ear, as if it were a hearing aid with a direct pipeline to his brain. MacKenna was walking, while Benson was driving a motorized wheelchair like nothing Gaul had ever seen. The chair was balanced on two wheels, apparently in defiance of the laws of physics, so that the eyes of the man in the chair were almost even with his own.

Though Benson wore a suit, Gaul could see that the man had the upper torso of someone who spent time at the gym. He had the intense gaze and close-cropped hair of a former Army officer, so Gaul guessed that he’d been injured in Iraq or Afghanistan. MacKenna looked more like Gaul’s idea of a research analyst, with tortoiseshell glasses and a physique that suggested nothing more strenuous than typing in his daily routine.

“Think he’ll take you up on your offer?” MacKenna said with an Irish brogue.

“I don’t know,” Benson said. “Depends how good my sales pitch is.”

“It was a good keynote.”

“That’s exactly why I want him.”

The elevator door opened at the mezzanine.

“Where is the Capital Club?” Benson said as he drove out of the elevator.

“To the left, I believe,” MacKenna said.

“Okay, we should have a table reserved. We’ll save a seat between us for the general.”

Gaul trailed them around the corner. MacKenna and Benson went through the restaurant’s glass doors, but Gaul didn’t follow. He stopped abruptly, as if he’d gone in the wrong direction, and turned back toward the mezzanine’s conference rooms.

Attendees were streaming from the conference seminars to their lunch destinations or milling about in the hall to chat after the sessions. The dress was a fifty-fifty mix of military and civilian clothes. Gaul blended right in.

Gaul wandered down the hall, pretending to study a conference program. He passed by the glass doors of the Capital Club but didn’t see his target. He found a spot near the elevators and had to remind himself not to lean against the wall so that he would stay in character as a ramrod-straight military officer.

His cell phone buzzed. The text message was from Orr.

Gaul texted back,

With nothing more to do but wait while keeping an eye on the elevators and stairs, Gaul went back to scanning the program. He smiled when he saw the title of the keynote address by his target, the former military leader of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The speech was called “The Dangers of Asymmetric Threat and Response: How to Combat Improvised Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Gaul thought the speaker would be surprised by how personal that danger would become.

The elevator emptied three times before Gaul saw who he had come for. The newly retired major general looked a little grayer than in the photo he’d memorized, but the intense gaze and the wrought-iron jaw were still the same. All eyes followed the general as he strode toward the restaurant.

Gaul took out his cell phone to text Orr with the confirmation that he now had Sherman Locke in his sights.

FOUR

Tyler liked the sense of duty, purpose, and camaraderie of the military, but he could do without the threat-of-death part, which was one of the reasons he’d left for civilian life. He took calculated risks, as when he raced cars or worked with explosives on a demolition project, but that was because he was in control. This situation was definitely not under his control.

“I’m back,” the man on the other end of the phone said. “Had other business to attend to. You there, Locke?”

“I’m here,” Tyler said as he descended the ferry’s stairs to the vehicle deck. “Why do you want me to disarm a bomb you put on the ferry?”

“I need someone with your skills for a special job, but before we get started, I need to make sure you can handle it.”

“A job?” Tyler said. “Why didn’t you just hire me?”

“Consider this task your interview. The clock is ticking, so you better get moving. Before you go to the truck, put the keys in the glove box of that little red sports car of yours. Leave it unlocked.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so, and I’m the one with the bomb. Just do it.”

“I’m on my way,” Tyler said. “So if we’re going to be talking to each other on this job, what should I call you?”

“You might be getting ahead of yourself. We could be working together for just the next twenty-two minutes.”

Tyler set his watch to synchronize with the time he had left. “I’m the confident type,” he said, though he felt anything but. Bombs were tricky in the best of conditions. Tyler didn’t know what this guy’s game was, but he didn’t sound stupid.

“I think you’re more cocky than confident,” the man said. “You’ll know what to call me as soon as you get in the truck.”

I already have some ideas about what to call you, Tyler thought. Why do I attract all the crazy people?

He reached the vehicle deck and went to his Viper, tucking the keys in the glove box as ordered. Looking forward from his position at the stern, he could make out several trucks, which were usually boarded first. He trotted in that direction.

Tyler saw the truck marked SILVERLAKE TRANSPORT and angled toward it.

“So what do I have to do?” he asked.

“The instructions are taped to the fridge. It’s all written down for you. Well, not you, but you’ll see what I mean. And remember, no police. I have my eyes and ears on you, and I’ve got a remote detonator, so get busy and behave yourself. Ferry goes boom if SWAT arrives or life rafts start popping over the side.”

“Then what?”

“You’ll know if you’re successful. If you are, I’ll give you a call back. If not, you’ll go down with the ship.”

The man hung up.

Tyler reached the back of the truck and ran his hand under the left wheel well. The key was there, just as the guy had said it was.

He looked around, but apart from an elderly woman walking her dog he was alone.

The key fit the padlock, and Tyler slid the door up carefully. He didn’t think the guy was planning to have the bomb triggered by this, but he checked just in case. Nothing.

Tyler pushed the door just high enough to squeeze in. If there really was a bomb in here, he didn’t want one of the deckhands to see it and sound the alarm.

He thought he was going to have to leave the door open for light, but two lanterns were lashed to the sides of the interior. He switched them both on and closed the door.

Boxes were piled on a sofa, a couple of chairs, and a table. In the middle sat an icebox, one of the old models with a latch. A manila envelope was taped to the front of the door. Tyler examined it and, when he was sure it was safe, tore it away and ripped it open.

The envelope held one page. Tyler pulled it out expecting instructions on what to do next.

The sheet may have had instructions, but they weren’t much help. The numbered paragraphs weren’t written in English. Although Tyler couldn’t read the words, he recognized the letters immediately. He had never been in a fraternity, but he’d used all the letters in equations while earning his engineering degrees.

The page was written in Greek.

Tyler scanned the text to see if there was any hidden code or some other message for him. He searched for a formula, something that would help him defuse the bomb, but he didn’t know what he was looking for. Given how much the guy on the phone knew about Tyler, he would have learned that foreign languages weren’t exactly Tyler’s strength. He could order a beer and ask where the bathroom was in French and Spanish, but even that was pushing it.

The man had mentioned that the instructions weren’t written for him. Then who were they written for?

He racked his brain trying to come up with someone he could call to translate the document, but he was interrupted when the truck echoed with the sound of pounding on the rear door. Tyler froze.

“Is someone inside?” he heard a woman’s voice say.

“I’m okay,” Tyler said, thinking that a crew member was checking on him. “I’m just repacking some items that came loose.”

“Open the door.”

Twenty minutes left. He didn’t have time for this, but ignoring her would just bring more attention than he wanted. He’d get rid of her quickly and focus on how to get the document translated.

He pulled the door up expecting to see someone dressed in the crew’s crisp blue uniform. Instead, he saw a petite woman in her thirties dressed in a black leather jacket, jeans, and stylish but functional boots. Shoulder-length blond hair framed her face, and light makeup accentuated high cheekbones and pillowy lips. It was a no-nonsense, attractive look.

Tyler recognized her immediately. Stacy Benedict, host of the television show Chasing the Past.

He didn’t know where to begin, other than to say, “What are you doing here?”

The woman had been appraising Tyler as much as he had been studying her, and his abrupt demand made her pause. “A man told me someone would be waiting inside this truck for me.”

“Did he have a gravelly voice?”

“That’s him. But he didn’t mention it would be you.” So she remembered Tyler from his appearance on her show. No need for introductions.

The instructions are taped to the fridge, the man on the phone had said. It’s all written down for you. Well, not you, but you’ll see what I mean.

“You don’t happen to read Greek, do you?” Tyler asked.

Stacy’s look told him that the question sounded as ridiculous to her as it did to him, but her answer made it clear that it seemed ridiculous for another reason.

“I have a PhD in Classics,” she said. “Of course I know Greek. Why?”

He gave her the piece of paper. “That’s why.”

As she read it, Tyler could see the blood drain from her face. But she didn’t panic. No screaming. No crying. Instead, her face contorted with barely contained fury.

She looked up from the page and said, “Where’s the bomb?”

FIVE

Stacy boosted herself into the truck. As Tyler closed the door behind her, she read the first line on the sheet again. It was typewritten in modern Greek with awkward phrasing, as though it had been translated from another language by a free Web service. But she got the gist of it.

There is a bomb in the truck. Work with this man to deactivate it. If you don’t accomplish your task, both you and your sister will die.

Only an hour before, she’d been packing for her morning flight back to New York when she received a call from an unidentified man claiming to have kidnapped her baby sister, Carol. Upon seeing the video of Carol bound and gagged, Stacy unleashed a tirade of obscenities so withering that the caller had to calm her down just to tell her what he wanted her to do.

His only command had been to board the 8:30 ferry to Bremerton as a walk-on and wait for further instructions. She’d allowed herself five minutes to react after he’d hung up, but all that came was a fit of shaking. She wasn’t a crier. Neither was her sister. Except for her parents’ funerals, the last time she could recall real tears was when their dog, Sparky, died. She was fourteen and Carol was twelve. Stacy supposed their fortitude had something to do with growing up as the only children on a working Iowa farm.

But that toughness didn’t mean she was a loner. At least now she had a partner in this mess, even if it was a man she barely knew.

Stacy had met Tyler Locke only once, nine months ago, when she had interviewed him for her show that investigated ancient mysteries around the world. He was a big get after his rumored involvement in finding Noah’s Ark. Before the interview, he made it clear that he wasn’t happy being in the spotlight, explaining that his boss had arranged the appearance over Tyler’s objections. In spite of his reluctance, Tyler was naturally engaging when he talked about the engineering of centuries-old mechanisms and could have been a regular if she had been able to persuade him to return.

He was handsome in a rugged sort of way, which made him perfect for TV. His tan face showed just a bit of weathering, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors, but he didn’t have any deep lines on his forehead, so he wasn’t into his forties yet. He was over six feet tall, brown hair, blue eyes, with a jagged scar down the left side of his neck. The wind-breaker, khakis, and hiking boots were professional but casual.

“What does it say?” Tyler asked. “We have less than twenty minutes.”

Stacy examined the paper. The first four lines were in modern Greek, but the rest was in ancient Greek. Not too dissimilar from the modern form, but the punctuation and all caps made it harder to read.

“The refrigerator door has a trap,” she said. “To disable it, flip the switch on the lower part of the door.”

Tyler knelt and ran his hand under the door. “Got it.”

“You should be able to open the door.”

He pulled the latch and inched the fridge open.

All the shelves had been removed from the interior. A clear plastic barrel filled with a grayish powder took up the bottom two-thirds of the interior. The barrel was topped by something covered in canvas, and a drawstring pouch hung on a hook next to it. An LCD timer stuck to the front of the barrel counted down. Nineteen minutes were left.

Wires from the timer snaked into the barrel. They terminated at a device nestled into the powder. Another set of wires disappeared into the covered object.

“I’ve never seen a bomb like this on TV,” Stacy said. Her heart was hammering, but her voice was even. Going to pieces wasn’t going to help her sister.

“There’s a detonator in the powder,” Tyler said. “The powder is a binary explosive.”

“Could it be a fake?” She remembered his credentials from the interview because they were so unusual. He had been a captain in an Army combat-engineering unit, and one of their responsibilities had been to dispose of IEDs.

“Can’t be sure, but I don’t think so,” Tyler said. “And if it’s real, there’s enough to blow a car-sized hole in the deck.”

“So that’s bad? You don’t have to sugarcoat it for me.”

He gave her a wan grin. “Seemed like you could handle it.”

She forced a smile in return. “I’ll freak out later.”

“I’ll join you. What’s next?”

She read the third item on the sheet. “Carefully remove the canvas covering.”

The canvas was tied at the bottom with twine. Tyler loosened it and pulled the cover off to reveal a gleaming bronze box one foot tall and six inches wide.

Stacy moved closer to get a better look. The box had two dials on the front, but it wasn’t a clock. As far as she could see, the hands weren’t moving and the dials were ringed with Greek lettering, not numbers. Each dial was divided into twelve segments and labeled with words spelling out signs of the zodiac. Two small control knobs were attached to its left side.

The object looked brand-new, although its design was definitely not modern. The box was clearly the endpoint of the wires, but she had no earthly idea why it was connected to a bomb.

“What the hell is that?” Stacy said to herself. She was surprised when Tyler answered.

“It’s a replica of a device designed by Archimedes. It’s called a geolabe. Like an astrolabe, but for terrestrial instead of astronomical use.” She could tell that he wasn’t guessing. He plainly recognized it.

She gaped at him. “How do you know that?”

He fixed her with a grim stare. “Because I’m the one who built it.”

SIX

The parking spot along the beach in West Seattle provided a beautiful view of Puget Sound. Jordan Orr would be able to watch the ferry until it turned past Bainbridge Island for the final leg into Bremerton. If the ship made it that far. The bomb was set to go off long before then.

In the passenger seat of their rented SUV, Peter Crenshaw trained binoculars on the ferry, now visible as it passed the north tip of West Seattle.

“If Locke doesn’t disarm the bomb in time,” Orr said, “you won’t need those to know.”

“I’m just checking the deck for unusual activity. Making sure he hasn’t sounded the alarm.”

“He won’t. By now he knows that I meant everything I said.” A jogger approached, and Orr couldn’t tell if she was watching them because she was wearing sunglasses. “Put those down before someone notices. No one’s going to think we’re bird-watching.”

Crenshaw put the binoculars on the seat next to him and went back to monitoring the two video feeds on his laptop. The first was from the camera hidden in the visor of the truck.

The second feed was from the back of the truck. Orr watched Stacy Benedict reading the instructions he’d created while Tyler Locke removed the drawstring pouch, opened it, and poured out the contents: fourteen pieces of a puzzle created more than two thousand years ago.

“How did he sound?” Crenshaw asked in an irritating whine. “Think he can do it?”

“I have faith in Locke,” Orr said. “He’s the best at what he does, and he’s the only one who can help us accomplish our mission.”

“And if he can’t?”

“Then Washington’s going to need a new ferry.”

Orr leaned over to check the GPS tracker and saw that it was operational. It showed the truck in the middle of Puget Sound, right where it was supposed to be.

He caught a whiff of body odor from Crenshaw and rolled down his window. Crenshaw was a skilled bomb designer, but his personal hygiene was atrocious. Given his scruffy beard and greasy hair, Orr wouldn’t be surprised if the pig hadn’t showered in a week. His belly protruded as if he were smuggling a beach ball under his T-shirt, and flecks of powdered doughnut dusted his chin. The man disgusted Orr, but the alliance was necessary.

Orr had trolled Internet sites for months disguised as an anti-tax radical until he met Crenshaw in an underground chat room devoted to rants about the US government. Crenshaw was an electrical whiz whose penchant for building sophisticated pipe bombs got him kicked out of college. He escaped prison on a technicality, but his social inadequacies made him unemployable. Crenshaw still lived in the basement of his mother’s home in Omaha, nursing his hatred of Uncle Sam.

Orr and Crenshaw had started sending private messages about what they could do to strike a blow for the common man. After he’d gained Crenshaw’s trust, Orr suggested that they get together at some property Orr had rented in upstate New York. Orr even paid for Crenshaw to fly out. Together, they shot guns, and Crenshaw showed off by building bombs with materials Orr provided. Shortly after that, Orr had presented his plan to Crenshaw, who readily agreed to participate. The two million dollars Orr promised him had made the decision easy.

As Crenshaw grabbed his sixth doughnut, Orr shuddered at the man’s lack of self-control. Orr couldn’t understand how someone could let himself go like that. Crenshaw had never lacked for food or shelter or a comfortable lifestyle, no matter how much he belly-ached about the government screwing him over. Orr had been through hardship Crenshaw couldn’t imagine, but he didn’t dwell on it. There was only one person he could rely on, and that was himself.

Ever since his parents died when he was ten, Orr had been on his own. Until then, his parents had lived lavishly and spoiled their only son. He’d had everything he could possibly want: a huge house, any toy he asked for, private school, vacations to Europe and Hawaii. But one night his father, an investment banker, crashed into a bridge abutment near their home in Connecticut, killing both himself and Orr’s mother instantly.

The police found no skid marks and his father’s foot was jammed against the accelerator, so the deaths were ruled a murder-suicide. The life-insurance company paid nothing on his father’s policy, and his mother, a housewife, had none. Orr didn’t believe the coroner’s finding until he learned that his father had not only been fired two months before the crash but had also been blackballed by every firm on Wall Street for whistle-blowing on an embezzlement scheme. With their lavish lifestyle, the family had been living a hand-to-mouth existence, spending every dollar his father brought in and more, so the firing left them deeply in debt. Whether the car crash was accidental or intentional, the result was the same. Orr was left penniless.

He was placed in foster care, and went through a succession of low-life guardians who either were hosting him to collect the welfare checks or wanted a kid who could act as a live-in servant. He got back at the world by stealing from his neighbors. At first it was just a buck or two to buy some candy or a comic book, but the amount grew until he was bringing in serious cash. He got caught only once, when he broke into a house not realizing that the husband had come home unexpectedly with his mistress, and the time he spent in juvenile detention made him vow never to let that happen again. When he was sixteen, Orr ran away and started working construction by lying about his age.

For the next ten years, he bounced around the US, taking legitimate or illegitimate jobs, whatever paid. Then, during a bank renovation, one of his co-workers approached him and asked if he wanted to make some easy money. The guy planned to rob the bank, but he was too clever to attempt a daytime heist.

Instead, they sabotaged the wiring for the security equipment and made off with a hundred thousand dollars that night. But Orr had inherited his father’s free-spending ways and blew through most of his share in two months. It was the end of his construction career and the beginning of the more high-risk, high-reward career as a thief.

He absorbed everything he could about the art of breaking into secure facilities, educating himself by reading and working with better burglars than he until he had mastered the profession. The jobs kept getting bigger, with Orr planning the heists down to the most minute detail and assembling crews that could be trusted to do their jobs, but the money never lasted.

For years he lived the high life two months at a time, until the tip about the Archimedes Codex presented the opportunity to find one of the most valuable treasures in history. If the trail really did lead to the lost tomb of King Midas and the fortune he was buried with, Orr could live the rest of his life in the style that had been stolen from him so long ago and at the same time exact his pound of flesh. His dream was within his grasp, and Stacy Benedict and Tyler Locke were going to find it for him or die trying.

Orr reflexively reached for his backpack and felt the codex still inside. He kept it with him at all times.

Crenshaw stuffed the rest of his doughnut into his mouth and nodded at the computer screen. “They’re having a little trouble with the Stomachion.”

Crenshaw’s mispronunciation of the puzzle created by Archimedes grated on Orr. Despite dropping out of high school, he was a voracious reader and considered himself an educated man. It wasn’t “Stuh-muh-CHEE-on,” as Crenshaw pronounced the word. It was “Stoh-MAH-keeon.” Orr sighed but didn’t correct him. “I have faith in them.”

The video feed showed Benedict and Locke going back and forth between the instructions and the puzzle pieces. There were fourteen — eleven triangles, one four-sided piece, and two five-sided pieces — and when the pieces were fitted together properly, they formed a square. According to Orr’s research, the puzzle was originally created by Archimedes to demonstrate some kind of mathematical principle. The version of the puzzle drawn in Orr’s codex had a different purpose: it was a code. The pieces were covered with Greek letters. The only problem was that Orr couldn’t figure out how to solve the puzzle.

Somehow the letters on the Stomachion corresponded to the signs of the zodiac on the face of the bronze geolabe, the ancient device Orr had linked to the bomb. If the puzzle were solved correctly, it would tell you how to use the geolabe, and the geolabe was the key in the search for Midas’s hoard of gold. But Orr had only five days left to locate the treasure, and Locke was his last hope for deciphering how to operate the geolabe.

Crenshaw pointed to his countdown timer, which was synchronized with the one on the bomb. It was down to nine minutes.

“They’re not going to make it,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Orr said. “Archimedes was a clever guy. The puzzle doesn’t have just one solution.”

Crenshaw looked at him in surprise. “How many does it have?”

Orr smiled. “More than seventeen thousand.”

SEVEN

Tyler stared at the pieces of Archimedes’ puzzle hoping to see a pattern, but none was apparent. There were more than seventeen thousand solutions, but fewer than six hundred unique arrangements when equivalent rotations and reflections were subtracted. Archimedes had linked a single particular solution to the geolabe, and that was the one Tyler had to find.

On one side of the fourteen Stomachion pieces, each of the points was inscribed with a number written in Greek. On the other side, the pieces had Greek letters written on them. The puzzle would tell them how to use the geolabe, but unless the pieces were put together in the correct orientation, the results would be gibberish.

According to their written instructions, the bomb would be deactivated when the two dials on the front of the geolabe and the third dial on the back face were all pointing to the twelve o’clock position. Tyler couldn’t just randomly turn the knobs that controlled the motion of the dials, because each twist affected the motion of all three dials simultaneously. The complicated set of forty-seven gears inside the device meant that there were millions of possible orientations. To get the one that would disarm the bomb, they had to solve the puzzle.

“Eight minutes,” Stacy said, the edge in her voice palpable.

Tyler said nothing as he studied the Stomachion pieces.

“Are you thinking or frozen in terror?” she continued.

“My bomb-disposal instructor had a motto,” Tyler said. “‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ Doing nothing doesn’t mean you’re doing nothing.”

“Just checking. What about dumping the whole thing over the side of the ship?”

“Can’t,” Tyler said. “We’re being watched.”

She swung around. “I don’t see a camera.”

“I haven’t had time to search for it, but it’s here. He said he had his eye on us.”

“Who is this guy?” Stacy asked.

“His name’s Jordan Orr.”

“You know him?”

“He’s the one who had me build the geolabe,” Tyler said, glancing at the timer as it clicked below seven minutes. “I’ll tell you all about it if we live through this.”

“So you built this geolabe but you don’t know how to use it?”

“Think of it like the Rubik’s Cube. Just because someone can assemble it doesn’t mean they can solve it. That must be Orr’s problem. He knows that the dials should all point at the noon position, but he can’t figure out how to get them there. But Orr does know that Archimedes encoded the Stomachion with instructions for how to get the dials aligned, so he built the bomb as a test. We need to solve the puzzle in order to operate the geolabe, and that will deactivate the bomb.”

Stacy nodded. “Makes sense that Archimedes would hide the instructions in a puzzle. The Greeks did invent steganography.”

Tyler had heard of steganography, the technique of hiding messages in plain sight, like the microdots hidden behind stamps on postcards during World War II, or the way terrorists cloaked messages in pictures and video posted on public forums like Facebook and YouTube. Not only do you have to know that the message exists; you have to know how to read it.

“Do you remember any specific methods of steganography that Archimedes might have used?”

“The Greeks developed the technique twenty-five hundred years ago,” Stacy said. “Sometimes a message was tattooed onto the shaved head of a courier, who would grow out his hair and then travel with the secret message safely concealed. Secret communications could also be hidden in wax tablets.”

“How?”

“In normal use you would write on the wax itself using a metal stylus. If you wanted to erase it, you’d warm it up and use a tool like a spatula to smooth it over. To send a secret message, you’d write on the wood underneath and then apply the wax and write an innocuous note in the wax. To read the hidden message, you’d just scrape off the wax.”

“So the message wasn’t encoded. You just had to know what to look for?”

“Yes.”

Six minutes left.

Tyler ran his fingers through his hair as he thought through the problem. “When I was building the geolabe, the text of the manual for constructing it said, ‘The puzzle will be solved only by the geolabe’s builder.’ I wondered about that for a long time, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. Now that we have the Stomachion, I see something that’s too strange to be coincidental. It must have been in the codex all along, but Orr never shared those pages with me.”

Stacy bent down to look at the pieces. “What?”

“There are forty-seven gears in the mechanism. I know, because I spent a few months with them.”

“So?”

“Look at the pieces in the Stomachion. There are eleven triangles, one tetragon, and two pentagons. If you add up the number of all the points, the total comes to forty-seven.”

“Son of a bitch,” Stacy said. “I never would have noticed that.”

“Only the builder of the geolabe would. Tell me some of the numbers etched on the points. They’ve got to mean something.”

“Uh, twenty-four, fifty-seven, four, thirty-two, seventeen—”

“Wait. You said twenty-four, fifty-seven, and thirty-two?”

“And four and seventeen. What do they mean?”

The puzzle will be solved only by the geolabe’s builder.

“The gears!” Tyler shouted before he even realized that it had come out.

“What?”

“Quick! Is there a point with the number thirty-seven?”

Stacy scanned the pieces while Tyler held his breath. If this didn’t work, they were dead.

After an agonizing few seconds, she scooped up a piece. “Got it! Thirty-seven.”

“Okay, give me the piece with twenty-four on it.”

She gave it to him. When he put the pieces together, the numbers aligned perfectly.

“What happened?” she said. “Did you figure it out?”

Tyler nodded. “I hope so. One of the gears had thirty-seven teeth, and one of the gears it meshed into had twenty-four teeth. None of the gears had four or seventeen teeth, so those numbers must be included to throw off anyone looking for a code. Only someone who spent time crafting each gear would think to look for that connection. Now hurry. We’ve only got four minutes left.”

He told her the numbers he needed. He remembered some of them because they were such odd numbers to use in the gearing. He’d have to hope he recalled enough of them so that the others wouldn’t be necessary.

Within a minute, they had assembled the Stomachion into a square. They flipped it over so they could read the letters on the other side.

“It still looks like gibberish,” Tyler said.

“No!” Stacy yelled. “It makes perfect sense now. Notice that some of the letters seem to run in a crude spiral?”

“What does it say?” Tyler’s eyes flicked to the timer on the bomb. Three minutes left.

“Alpha Leo. Beta Libra. Alpha Pisces. Beta Scorpio … There’s twelve in all. They must refer to the signs of the zodiac written on the dials of the geolabe. But I don’t know what the alphas and betas refer to.”

“I do. You couldn’t see it, but the upper knob on the side is labeled alpha, and the bottom is labeled beta. I’m supposed to turn the knobs in sequence to set the dials properly. Read them from the beginning.”

“Alpha Leo,” Stacy said.

“Which one is Leo?” It literally was all Greek to Tyler.

Stacy pointed. “That one.”

Tyler turned the top knob. The hands on both dials rotated simultaneously. Tyler didn’t stop until the top hand rested on Leo.

“Now what?”

“Beta Libra.” She pointed again, and Tyler followed her instruction. They got into a rhythm going through the next seven signs, but the process was still achingly slow.

The timer ticked down to less than a minute.

Stacy waved her hands, prodding him to go faster. “Beta Cancer, Hurry!”

“How many left?” Tyler said as he twirled the knob frantically.

“Two. Alpha Sagittarius.”

Stacy pointed to the twelve o’clock symbol, but Tyler was already turning the dial toward it. “Got it!”

Before Stacy could even say “Beta Aquarius,” his fingers were twisting the bottom knob. Aquarius had to be the zodiac sign at the noon position.

“Fifteen seconds!”

Despite Tyler’s frenzied twisting, the hand on the dial seemed to move in slow motion, like a nightmare where you were running as hard as you could but moved as if you were mired in tar. He raced the timer as it counted down below ten seconds.

“Oh, God!” Stacy screamed. “Go, go, go!”

As all three dials reached the noon position, Tyler felt the knob click.

A piercing series of beeps blared from behind the geolabe. Stacy grabbed Tyler’s arm, digging her fingers into his biceps, but the timer stopped. It read four seconds left.

They both collapsed to their knees, completely drained. There was nothing like the relief of surviving certain death.

Stacy had her head buried in her arms. Tyler put a hand on her shoulder.

“You okay?” he asked.

She looked up and blinked several times before answering. “Peachy.”

Tyler’s phone rang.

“It’s him,” Stacy guessed.

Tyler nodded and answered the call, putting it on speaker so that she could hear.

“Okay, we did what you wanted,” Tyler said. “Are we finished here?”

“Finished?” The gravelly voice was gone, replaced by the smooth tone that he now recognized as Orr’s. “Locke, we are just getting started.”

EIGHT

Sherman Locke laughed so hard that everyone at the eight-person table turned to look at him. He ignored them and cut another piece of his steak, still chuckling and shaking his head at Miles Benson’s offer.

The Capital Club had been reserved for senior military officers, key speakers, and sponsors of the Unconventional Weapons Summit to meet and mingle over lunch. Gordian Engineering was a major sponsor, so it made sense that Miles, the company’s president, got his choice of the best table in the restaurant. Sherman had agreed to join him to discuss some business, but this proposal was too ridiculous.

Sherman took a swig of his iced tea and said, “You’re kidding, right?”

“Just hear me out, General,” Miles said.

“Tyler will never go for it.”

“He doesn’t make the hiring decisions at Gordian. I do.”

“Come on, Miles. What makes you think we’d last two weeks in the same company?”

“You wouldn’t even be working in the same city. We would love to have someone of your stature in DC as a liaison for our military contracts.”

“Not everyone would love it.”

With his five years of service as a two-star general in the Air Force complete, Sherman had had no choice but to retire. The total number of generals was capped, so it was either up or out, and no three-star opportunities had come his way. So for the first time in thirty-five years, Major General Locke was looking for a job.

“Has the DTRA made an offer yet?” Miles asked.

Sherman’s last command was as deputy director of the Strategic Command Center for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction. In coordination with the civilian adjunct Defense Threat Reduction Agency, his responsibility had been to develop strategies and tactics for defeating WMDs.

“Not yet,” Sherman said while chewing on his final bite of sirloin.

“Whatever it is, I’ll double it.”

“I’m considering a lot of positions right now. How do you know you can afford me?”

“General, whatever your price is, you’re worth it. You’ve been involved in some of the biggest weapons-development programs of the last ten years. You know everyone, and they listen to you. Gordian is the largest private engineering firm in the world. We can help with virtually any project the military contracts out to civilian defense contractors. That sounds like a buttload of synergy to me.”

“Does Tyler know you’re asking me?”

“He’d crap a show pony if he knew I was talking to you.” Miles looked him straight in the eye when he said this. Direct. No dancing around. Sherman liked that. He wouldn’t have expected any less from a former Army officer like Miles.

Sherman and his son had a testy relationship at best. Lately, they’d begun to patch things up, but working in the same company might be pushing it, especially in a company that Tyler had co-founded. No doubt he’d see Sherman’s hiring as an intrusion into his space. On the other hand, spending more time together might help them mend some fences, something Sherman wanted to do even more as he got older.

“Okay,” Sherman said. “Just for grins, what would the job be?”

“You would interact with the Pentagon’s senior officers on appropriations that might provide business for Gordian. Part of your duties would be reviewing upcoming weapons-development programs and analyses to determine where Gordian’s expertise would best fit. Of course, you would have a staff, and we would offer you full partnership after two years with the firm.”

“So I’d be a salesman?”

“No. We have guys for that, but I need someone who knows how Pentagon proposals are evaluated and doled out.”

Sherman leaned back and studied the ceiling. He’d commanded fighter wings, the entire First Air Force, and a department of thousands of people tasked with protecting the nation from the most hideous weapons imaginable. The thought of being some kind of glorified paper jockey didn’t sit well with him.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

“Just promise me you’ll think about it. And I know it’s not all about money for you, but the year-end partner bonuses have been spectacular the last few years.”

“So that’s how Tyler affords that cliff-side house.”

“He’s worth every penny,” Miles said. “Takes on the toughest assignments and doesn’t bat an eye. You know, I met him when I was still teaching at MIT. Student of mine. Tyler had a combination of brains, creativity, and guts that was rare. Unique, I’d say.”

“You forgot to mention that he’s also pigheaded and thinks he’s always right.”

“He usually is.”

“And he never listens to his dad.”

“How many sons do? Listen, I know he’s got his faults— he’s a pain in the butt whenever I want him to do some paperwork — but you should be proud of him.”

“I am. He just can’t get it through his thick skull sometimes.”

Sherman felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to see a waiter.

“Excuse me, sir,” the waiter said. “A gentleman has asked to see you. He says that it’s urgent.” The waiter pointed at an Army officer standing in the doorway of the restaurant.

“Will you excuse me, Miles?”

“Of course.”

Sherman stood and walked over to the officer. “Yes, Captain?” he said. The name tag said Wilson. Sherman didn’t know him.

“General, I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch, but I’ve been asked to drive you to a briefing at the DTRA. An issue has come up, and they’d like to consult you about it.”

“Now?”

“They said it was quite urgent.”

“What’s it about?”

“I don’t know, sir. They just told me to come find you.”

“They could have just called. Who’s running the meeting?”

“General Horgan requested your presence.”

“Wonder what Bob’s up to.”

The phrase was rhetorical, but Wilson shrugged anyway. “No idea, sir.”

“All right. I’ll be with you in a minute, Captain.”

Sherman returned to the table to retrieve his briefcase. “Looks like I’m needed elsewhere,” he said to Miles.

“Perhaps we could talk more about the offer over drinks later?”

“If I can make it back, sure. You have my number. Call me when you’re at the bar.”

They shook hands, and with his briefcase in hand, Sherman went back to the door.

“Okay, Captain, lead the way.”

They got on the elevator, and a hotel waiter joined them.

“Parking level, please,” the captain said, and the hotel worker pressed the button.

As they descended, something about the captain’s decorations caught Sherman’s eye. The ribbons on a soldier’s shirt indicated the medals and commendations he had been awarded. For a moment, Sherman couldn’t figure out why one ribbon looked out of place until he remembered what it signified.

The elevator dinged, opening into the underground parking structure. Captain Wilson held the door open, but Sherman didn’t move.

“All right, who are you?” he said. The hotel staff member fussed with his coat as he watched them.

“What do you mean, sir?” the captain said innocently. “You need to come with me.”

“I’m not going anywhere with an idiot who doesn’t know that he’s about forty years too young to be wearing that.” He pointed to the yellow, red, and green ribbon on the alleged captain’s chest. The man looked down in confusion.

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, sir.”

“That’s the ribbon for a Vietnam service medal, genius,” Sherman said. “Did you borrow Daddy’s uni?”

Wilson grinned. “Well, you got me, General. And now I’ve got you.”

Only then did Sherman realize his mistake. He had assumed he was safe with the hotel worker as a witness. But Wilson nodded at the man, who lunged at Sherman. Before he could parry the man’s arm, metal prongs jabbed into his side. Sherman dropped to the floor in agony as fifty thousand volts surged through his chest.

NINE

Grant Westfield tried not to make eye contact as he hustled onto the Bremerton ferry terminal gangway. Disembarking foot passengers were pushing past him before the vehicle ramp was lowered. Even though Tyler’s car was at the stern of the ferry and would offload last, he had only a few minutes to get there before the crew would be looking for the driver.

Tyler had called Grant from the ferry and told him that he had an emergency. He needed Grant to drive his Viper off the ferry, then look for a truck that said SILVERLAKE TRANSPORT on the side. Tyler wouldn’t elaborate on the reason for the strange request, but he had made it clear that his life depended on Grant’s help. Grant agreed without hesitation, walking the short distance from the naval base to the ferry landing. He couldn’t wait to hear the explanation.

Grant passed a crewman watching passengers go ashore. He thought the man hadn’t noticed him, but he got only ten feet before he heard a yell behind him.

“Hey! Hey! We’re not boarding yet.”

Well, that didn’t work, Grant thought as he stopped. Not that he was surprised. No matter how small he tried to make himself, he wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Difficult to ignore a six-foot-tall, 260-pound bald black guy.

Normally he liked the attention, but sometimes, like now, it didn’t pay off. Time for some charm. And lying.

Grant turned and saw a skinny white guy in his thirties with long brown hair and a couple of tattoos peeking out over the collar of his shirt, tagged with the name Jervis. Grant gave Jervis a huge smile.

“Oh, I’m not going to Seattle,” he said. “I just came from there. I left my bag on the seat.”

“I didn’t see you get off.”

“That’s funny. I’m usually hard to miss.”

Jervis raised his eyebrows as if he agreed. “What color is your bag? I’ll have somebody bring it to you.”

Great. The helpful type.

“Don’t bother,” Grant said. “I know where it is. It’ll just take me a minute.”

“All right.” Grant breathed a sigh of relief. “But I better see your ticket.” So much for the sigh of relief.

Grant patted his pockets as if he were trying to find it. “I must have left it in my bag.”

Jervis scrunched his face, deciding what to do. “It’s against the rules to let anyone on without a ticket. They’re pretty strict these days.”

Time was running short before they’d start asking questions about why Tyler’s car was still on the ferry, so Grant resorted to a tactic he loathed: pulling out the celebrity card to get something he wanted.

“Actually, the bag has some important mementos in it from my days as a pro wrestler. Don’t know if you’re a fan, but I used to be called the Burn.”

Jervis studied Grant’s face. Then his eyes widened in recognition. Grant had seen the transformation many times before. People’s entire demeanor changed once they realized they were in the presence of a celebrity. Grant understood. He still talked about the time he ran into Britney Spears at a Starbucks even though he’d rather be set on fire than listen to her music.

“Right, man!” Jervis said. “I remember you. Grant Westley.”

“Right.” Grant didn’t want to embarrass him by correcting the error. When Jervis recounted the meeting to his friends later, they’d tell him it was Westfield and give him crap for it. It was enough that the crewman had heard of him.

“You left it all behind to join the Army. Rangers or special forces. There was a great article about you in Sports Illustrated a few years back.”

Grant didn’t get stopped by fans nearly as much as he used to, but he probably would if he still had the dreadlocks he wore at the height of his fame. He’d left professional wrestling to join the military after 9/11, but a knee injury he got in combat meant that trying to resurrect his pro career after he got out wouldn’t work. He sometimes missed the cheering crowds, and his notoriety occasionally came in handy.

“I swear I’ll only be a minute,” Grant said.

Jervis looked around and waved him in. “You’re fine. Go ahead.”

“Thanks.” Grant waved back and jogged up the gangway. He made his way down the stairs through the now empty ferry. When he got to the vehicle deck, the last of the cars were just driving off.

The only car left was a cherry-red Dodge Viper. A crewman next to it was looking around. Grant ran up to him.

“This yours?” the man said. “I was just about to call the tow truck. Be a shame with a car as nice as this.”

“Sorry I’m late,” Grant said to the man as he opened the driver’s door. “Bad time for a bathroom break.”

He opened the glove box and found the keys Tyler had left for him. He started the car and roared out of the ferry.

Tyler was waiting for him two streets over in the SILVERLAKE TRANSPORT truck. Grant pulled up along the driver’s side. Tyler leaned through the window.

“We can’t get out, partner. Orders.”

“We?”

A beautiful blonde peeked her head around. Grant shook his head. He definitely wanted to hear what that was about.

“Your friend can’t drive a stick?” Grant asked.

“We’re supposed to stay in the truck,” Tyler said. “Just follow us, but not too close.”

“What the hell is going on?”

With his hands out the window, Tyler quickly signed to Grant. The truck has eyes and ears. No calls. Tyler’s deaf grandmother had taught him American Sign Language, and he in turn had taught it to Grant during their stint together in the Army.

Grant nodded, but he had no clue why the truck was bugged. He shook his head and put the Viper into gear to follow.

Tyler drove off, and Grant stayed a respectful distance behind. The rain that until now had only threatened started coming down in a patter that rippled on the Viper’s cloth roof.

For thirty minutes, they drove south and west, eventually turning onto a gravel road. A rotted wooden sign read STILLAGUAMISH STONEWORKS. In less than a minute, the road ended at an abandoned quarry partially filled with water. Tyler stopped the truck at the edge of the pond.

Grant parked, flipped his rain hood up, and got out. He was halfway to the truck when Tyler and his new friend exited the cab.

“Ready to tell me what this is about?” Grant said as he approached.

Tyler waved him back. He had what looked like a canvas sack under his arm. The woman next to him didn’t seem to care about the rain drenching her.

“We’re leaving,” he said. “Pop the trunk.”

Grant hit the button and followed Tyler, who laid the item down carefully.

“What is that?”

Tyler threw the canvas aside to reveal a shiny bronze device. Grant recognized it immediately.

“Isn’t that the geolabe you built?”

“Yup.”

“Now I’m really curious.”

“I’ll explain on the way.” Tyler closed the trunk.

“You want to drive?” Grant asked. The Viper had only two seats. One of them was going to have the woman on his lap.

Tyler squinted at Grant’s bulk and shook his head. “You better.” Tyler turned to the woman. “Sorry, but it looks like it’s you and me.”

The woman brushed Tyler’s apology aside. “To get away from that bomb? Are you kidding? Get in. I’ll try not to crush you.”

No chance of that, Grant thought as he eyed her tiny frame.

They piled into the cramped cockpit, the woman perched on Tyler’s legs. Once they were seated with the doors closed, Grant turned to Tyler. “Did she just say ‘bomb’?”

“I couldn’t tell you on the phone,” Tyler said, “but there’s enough binary explosive in that truck to jump-start a volcano.”

While Grant processed that bit of news, he turned the Viper around and sped toward the exit. Tyler tapped the screen on his cell phone and put it on speaker. After one ring, a man answered.

“Are you in your car with Grant Westfield?” the man said, to Grant’s surprise. “I knew you’d get him involved at some point anyway, so I thought he should join in the fun.”

Grant shot Tyler a pointed glance, but Tyler put up a hand that said, “I’ll tell you later.”

“He followed me to the quarry just like you instructed. And we disconnected the geolabe from the bomb.”

“Drive back to the ferry. I’ll take care of the truck.”

“Why are we going back to the ferry?” Tyler asked. “Another bomb?”

“No,” the voice on the phone said. “Just that one.”

As they reached the quarry’s sign, Tyler said, “Before we go anywhere else, I want to—”

A tremendous blast shook the car. All three of them ducked instinctively. Grant mashed the pedal to the floor, throwing a plume of gravel behind him. In the rearview mirror he saw a cloud of black smoke that was already being dissipated by the pouring rain. The sound of the explosion would have been heard for miles, but no one would be able to tell where it came from. It might even be mistaken for a crack of thunder, though lightning storms were rare in the Pacific Northwest.

Grant kept driving. There was no reason to stop and go back to the truck. The only thing they’d see was tiny pieces. He wouldn’t be surprised if the whole truck had been blown into the water.

“What the hell is wrong with you, you maniac!” the woman shouted.

“Good,” the voice said. “You’re still alive.”

“Your concern is touching,” Tyler said.

“Do you think that explosion would have been big enough to sink the ferry? Be honest.”

“Yes. What’s your point?”

“So, Locke, if that’s what I was willing to do to a boat full of innocent people, imagine what I’m willing to do to your father.”

TEN

Tyler looked at Grant and saw the same flash of alarm on his face that he felt in his gut.

“What does that mean?” Stacy said.

“Now to your mission—” Orr continued.

Tyler hung up. He had to warn his father, but the certainty in the caller’s voice made him fear that he was already too late.

He found his dad’s number and called. The phone was answered on the second ring.

“Dad, it’s Tyler—”

“Nope,” Orr said. “I thought you’d be calling, so I had my colleagues forward his phone to mine.”

Tyler gripped the phone so hard that he nearly crushed it. “If you hurt my father in any way, my mission will be to hunt you down and drain the life out of you one drop at a time.”

“Yes, you’re upset, but I’m not going to harm him unless you decide not to help me. Or if you call the FBI.”

“Do you have any idea who you’ve kidnapped?”

“Of course I do, because I’m not a grade-A moron. Major General Sherman Locke is newly retired and looking for work, so he’s not going to be missed right away by anyone but you.”

Tyler thought about that and knew he was right. If Sherman had still been in the Air Force, the Pentagon would have contacted the FBI within hours of his disappearance, not least because he was a military officer with access to top-secret information. But out of the military he was just another civilian who was free to do as he pleased. If he took off without telling anyone where he was going, that was his business.

“How do I know he’s all right?” Tyler asked.

“He’s unavailable to talk at the moment because he’s being taken to a secure location, but when he’s safe and sound, I’ll send you verification that he’s fine.”

“What do you want?”

“First, put the phone back on speaker. Stacy should hear this, too.”

Tyler switched it on. “Go ahead.”

“I did what you asked, you bastard!” Stacy yelled. “Now you hold up your end of the bargain!”

“I’m not letting your sister go just yet,” Orr said.

Tyler and Grant looked at each other in confusion, then at Stacy.

“Sister?” Tyler said.

“Good. Stacy followed her instructions and didn’t tell you about Carol. For that, Stacy’s sister will get to keep all her fingers.”

“No! You let her go!”

“Not so fast,” Orr said. “Now that you’ve passed your test, I have a mission for you.”

“What mission?” Tyler asked.

“I want you to find the location of the Midas Touch for me.”

Tyler wasn’t sure what Orr meant. “Is that the code word for something?”

“No code word. No metaphor. No brand name. I mean the actual Midas Touch that can turn objects to gold.”

Grant snorted in disbelief. Tyler could only gape. That was about the last thing he would have guessed Orr was going to say. Tyler thought the kidnapping was going to be about paying a ransom or maybe even using his top-secret clearance to gain access to government files.

But the Midas Touch? It was ridiculous. Everyone knew it was a myth about the corrupting power of greed. King Midas was given the wondrous ability to turn anything he touched into gold, which he initially thought was a blessing. But when his feast of celebration became inedible at his touch, Midas realized that this talent was a curse. He begged the gods to rid him of it, and they did, but not before he accidentally turned his own daughter into gold.

“Say that again,” Tyler said.

“You heard me right,” Orr said. “The Midas Touch. The two of you are going to find it, or your father and Stacy’s sister are dead. If you find it, I’ll make a trade with you.”

“Are you serious?”

“Deadly. I promise you that the Midas Touch does in fact exist.”

“Okay,” Tyler said slowly. He was already wondering how he could give the impression of going along with this wild-goose chase while figuring out how to find his father.

“I’ve seen it for myself, and I can prove it to you.”

“If you’ve seen it, why do you need us to find it?”

“That’s a story better told in person. Meet me at 1 p.m. outside the southwest corner of Safeco Field and I’ll tell it to you. Just you and Stacy. No police and no Westfield, or both your father and her sister are gone.”

The Viper’s clock read 10:10. There had to be a ferry back to Seattle before noon.

“We’ll be there,” Tyler said. He hung up and closed his eyes, trying to absorb the news of his father’s abduction. He concentrated on breathing, because it felt as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him.

They were all quiet for a moment until Grant broke the silence.

“By the way, I’m Grant Westfield,” he said. “I’ll be your chauffeur back to the ferry today.”

He held his hand out to Stacy, who gave it a firm shake. “Stacy Benedict.”

“Yeah, you’re from Chasing the Past. I didn’t recognize you at first.”

“Thanks for picking us up.”

“Anything for Tyler. But would you mind telling me why some lunatic just blew up a truck you were driving?”

Tyler explained about the puzzle to deactivate the bomb, that it was some kind of test to prove to Orr that they could carry out his insane quest.

“And how did he know my name?” Grant said. “Who is this guy?”

“You met him once. His name is Jordan Orr.”

“Wait a minute. The guy who hired you to build the geolabe?”

Tyler nodded. “And I’m guessing Stacy knows him, too.”

“Only since this morning,” she said. “I was in town for a fund-raiser, and I get a call that my sister, Carol, was kidnapped. All he told me was to get on the ferry and not to tell you about her or he would hurt her.”

Tyler dug his fingernails into his palms until the knuckles were white. He’d never been angrier in his life than he was at that moment. If he had known about Stacy’s kidnapped sister, he might have been able to warn his father in time. Tyler wanted to yell and scream and pound his fists against the dashboard. But it was Orr he wanted to throttle, not Stacy. She was as much a pawn in this as he was.

Tyler shook his head and took a deep breath until the moment passed.

“It’s good we decided not to talk in the truck with Orr listening in,” he said to Stacy. “We’re going to have to be very careful dealing with him.”

She turned to him, and Tyler saw her face etched with fear. “Just promise me that my sister will be all right. I know you can’t really promise that, but do it anyway.”

Tyler nodded. “I promise. We’ll find a way to get them both back safely.”

“There’s something I want to know,” Stacy said. “If you built that device, the geolabe, how did Orr get hold of it?”

“I was approached by Orr last year, after Miles twisted my arm to go on your show. I mentioned on the program that I had an interest in Archimedes. Orr showed me a translation from an ancient Greek document with instructions for building an object called a geolabe and told me it was from a private collector. It sounded like an intriguing job, so I said yes.”

“And you weren’t suspicious of this mysterious request?”

Tyler nodded. “Mildly, but the project seemed harmless enough. I had one of my guys, Aiden MacKenna, look into the documents to see what he could find, just out of curiosity. Nothing came up. It wasn’t until a month after I delivered the completed project that Scotland Yard released a long-lost photo of a manuscript page that matched my document verbatim. Only then did we realize that it had been stolen.”

“Did you report it to the police?”

“Yes, but by that time Orr had been tipped off and disappeared.”

“How long did it take you to build this thing?”

“About three months,” Tyler said. “Without Gordian’s engineering resources, it would have taken a lot longer to decipher the schematics.”

“That doesn’t make sense, though,” Stacy said.

“Why?”

“Because if he blew up the ferry, the geolabe would have been destroyed along with it. Why did he risk losing something that would take so long to build again if we couldn’t solve that puzzle?”

Tyler’s skin prickled at the thought of how close they had been to becoming permanent denizens of Puget Sound.

“Orr must have decided that you and I were the only people on the planet who could solve the Archimedes puzzle, so if we failed the geolabe was worthless to him. Now that he knows we can operate it, we’ve become indispensable to him. We’re a package deal along with the geolabe.”

“This is crazy,” Stacy said.

Tyler shook his head at the colossal understatement. “Which part? That Orr thinks the Midas Touch exists or that he thinks Archimedes constructed a device that will lead us to it?”

ELEVEN

The van slowed, but with the blindfold on, Sherman Locke couldn’t tell whether it was because they were approaching another turn or because they had reached their destination.

They’d been traveling for over an hour, mostly at highway speeds, which meant they could be in DC, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, or West Virginia. After he was hit with the Taser, a cloth had been stuck in his mouth and his wrists and ankles were cuffed. He was thrown into the back of a panel van, with the fake hotel staffer driving and the phony Army officer in back with him. He was frisked thoroughly, and his car keys, wallet, and phone were taken.

Before the blindfold went on, Sherman saw a girl lying unconscious on the floor of the van. There were no bruises or blood, which made him think she’d been drugged. He didn’t recognize her, so he couldn’t fathom why the two of them had been kidnapped. Blond and in her late twenties, the girl had a runner’s physique. That would be helpful when the time came to make an escape attempt.

His gag had been removed for the drive, but Sherman hadn’t been able to get anything out of his stoic captor, whose sole response was to tell him to shut up or he’d put the cloth back in. But if he was trying to intimidate Sherman, he might as well piss up a flagpole.

As a former fighter pilot, Sherman had taken the Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course, but that SERE training had been decades ago. Now he wished he’d taken a refresher. Maybe he wouldn’t have been captured so easily. At this point, he was more annoyed than anything else.

How he handled the situation would depend on why the two of them had been taken hostage. Was it just a chance to earn some quick cash? Maybe the woman was also involved with the Pentagon and the kidnappers wanted to torture information out of them. The well-executed operation suggested that these men weren’t a couple of hustlers who had hatched this scheme in their crack house. The fact that they had abducted Sherman in broad daylight, exposing their faces to hundreds of witnesses, meant they were either desperate or had a well-thought-out plan. Sherman guessed the latter.

The van came to a stop. Sherman heard the clank of a garage door opening. It was industrial, too large and noisy for a residential garage.

The van nudged forward and stopped, and the engine turned off. His kidnapper waited until the garage door was closed again before he removed the blindfold.

The Taser was trained on him, the threat obvious. It was a dual-operation model that could either be loaded with a single-use cartridge that would shoot the electric leads thirty feet or be used without a cartridge by making direct contact with the subject. Since he was cuffed, the single-use cartridge had been removed.

The van door opened, and the guy calling himself Wilson gestured with the Taser for Sherman to get out.

Struggling against the cuffs, Sherman climbed to his feet and hopped through the door. The sound of his shoes hitting the floor echoed through a warehouse cavernous enough to hold twenty tractor-trailers. Fluorescent lights flickered above the windowless space. With the power active, it was unlikely they were squatters. The building looked as if it was in good repair and was probably in a warehouse district. If Sherman could make it outside, he might be able to find help quickly.

The warehouse was empty of the expected shelves and boxes. Instead, a small grouping of furniture sat near the van: four cots, six large tables, four chairs, and a trash can that had been ignored. Empty pizza boxes and Chinese-food containers were piled on the tables, which held a TV, two laptops, and a wireless router. There was also some metal-working equipment: drills, soldering guns, an arc welder, and a large box of tools. Metal shavings and discarded scraps littered the floor.

Beyond the furniture was a line of twelve steel barrels. Wooden crates were stacked behind them, but Sherman couldn’t see any writing that might reveal what they held. On one side of the warehouse, a peninsula of four rooms jutted from the cinder-block wall, with two doors facing the front of the warehouse and two facing the back. The doors had six-inch-by-six-inch cutouts where windows would normally be, but otherwise the rooms were completely sealed. Sherman could make out the remains of glass squares on the floor. The panes were the size of the cutouts and were cracked but intact because they were held together by wire mesh inside the glass, indicating that the rooms had been secured for valuable items. They’d been removed and replaced with crude metal plates that could be swung back and forth.

Sherman guessed where he’d be staying for the duration.

“What now, Captain Wilson?” he asked.

“Call me Gaul,” the man said, disregarding Sherman’s sarcasm. “And before we show you to your room, we have some business to take care of.” He pulled Sherman to a chair set in front of a bare concrete wall and said, “Sit.”

“What am I, a dog?”

“Funny. In the chair.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll tase you again, and then you’ll sit anyway.”

Sherman shuffled over to the chair and sat. “What do you want?”

“From you? Nothing. This is just a little proof for your son, to show that you’re still breathing.”

So this was about money. If Tyler would be seeing this, Sherman had to get him whatever info he could.

Gaul went to the van and removed a duffel bag. At one of the tables he took out a ski mask, newspaper, and a video camera.

“Phillips,” he said. The other man, who had now changed into a black sweater, took the ski mask and the front page of the newspaper from Gaul.

Phillips moved behind Sherman and put the blindfold back on him.

“Am I going somewhere else?”

“We know you were in the Air Force,” Gaul said, focusing the camera, “so we’re just making sure you don’t blink any messages by Morse code. You’ll answer my question and nothing else. This isn’t going out live, so don’t bother trying to blurt out anything. Phillips, start over here so I can get a close-up of the paper.” After a moment, Gaul said, “Good. Now move back so we can see the paper beside the general.”

Phillips did so until he was standing behind Sherman.

“What is your name?” Gaul said.

“Are you asking me or Phillips?” Sherman said. He heard Gaul make a disgusted grunt.

“Apparently I wasn’t clear,” Gaul said. “Give him a ride.”

Sherman jerked as a jolt of electricity shot through him. His hands clenched in agony until the shock abated, and he slumped in the chair.

“Now let’s keep going. I can edit that out. Name?”

“Sherman Locke,” he said through clenched teeth.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it? That’s all I needed.”

The blindfold came off. Phillips wrenched Sherman to his feet and led him to a room facing the rear. Gaul opened the door, pushing Sherman inside without taking the cuffs off. He slammed it shut and locked it with a dead bolt that had no keyhole on the inside.

The room was the size of a prison cell. The ceiling and walls were made of cinder blocks. The only contents were a cot bolted to the floor and a bucket. One bulb jutted from the ceiling out of reach. Sherman had stayed in worse conditions, but not for long.

“Here’s how this is going to work,” Gaul said, peering through the hole in the door. “You’re going to be staying in this room for the duration.”

“Which is how long?” Sherman said.

“That’s up to your son.”

“And I don’t even get to take the cuffs off?”

Gaul tossed the keys through the hole. Sherman had to squat to pick them up. After he uncuffed himself, Gaul demanded the keys and the cuffs back.

“When we want to bring you out,” Gaul said, “you’ll cuff yourself again. If you don’t, you get another ride. You can scream all you want, but all you’ll do is make yourself hoarse. We aren’t near any occupied buildings. When we eat, you eat. Any questions? No? Good.” The plate covering the hole slammed shut.

“It’s Carol’s turn,” Gaul said, and his footsteps retreated.

Massaging his wrists, Sherman started plotting his escape.

TWELVE

Stacy agreed with Tyler that Orr’s warning to come alone should be taken seriously. After dropping Grant off at the naval base so that he could tie up some loose ends on the ammunition depot project and get his car, she and Tyler headed back to the dock, where they made it in time for the 11:10 ferry to Seattle. Stacy sat in the Viper’s passenger seat as Tyler idled in the rain, waiting for the ferry to empty. She found the metronomic beating of the wipers soothing, reminding her of sleepy childhood rides in her father’s pickup after he’d taken his daughters to a movie on a drizzly evening.

“More comfortable now?” Tyler asked.

While she had been sitting on his lap during the drive back to the ferry, she noticed that Tyler had respectfully kept his hands to the sides, but he was so much bigger than she that his arms had still enveloped her. Whether it was intended or not, being ensconced like that had given her a sense of security.

If the crew of her TV show heard that, they wouldn’t believe it. The globe-trotting adventurer who would eagerly crawl into dark, spider-infested tombs needed a hug.

“I must have sounded idiotic back there,” she said.

“What sounded idiotic?”

“When I asked you to promise that Carol would be all right. It’s just that the thought of losing her is something I’ve never faced before.”

“I know how you feel,” Tyler said. “I have a sister, too.”

“Why did he take my sister but your father?”

“My sister is hiking in Patagonia right now. I don’t even know if I could find her.”

“So you’re not going to try to reach her? Tell her that your father’s been kidnapped?”

Tyler shook his head. “She’d want to get the FBI involved. Orr warned us not to.”

“Do you think Orr would really kill them if we brought in the FBI?”

“He’s been totally unpredictable so far. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“But the FBI may be able to find them.”

“They might find them dead. We can go it on our own for a while. My company, Gordian, has extensive resources, and Grant will help us. If we call the FBI, we lose control. The Feds will be running the show. If this were a simple money drop, I’d bring them in. But this situation is far more complicated. And it would be almost impossible to keep Orr from finding out that the FBI was involved. It would be a risk, and once we called them, we wouldn’t be able to undo it.”

“I don’t like that. Losing control. And if the press gets wind of this, it’ll become front-page news. One of the pitfalls of celebrity.”

“Then we play along. For now. Is that okay with you? If we’re going to get through this, we need to work together.”

Stacy nodded. “Play along for now.”

The cars started loading onto the ferry, and Tyler put the Viper into gear. They left it on the vehicle deck, and Stacy took a detour to the restroom on the passenger deck.

As she washed her hands in front of the mirror, she didn’t like the defeated look of the woman staring back at her. It wasn’t the wet, bedraggled hair and the lack of makeup that bothered her. She’d looked worse on many episodes of her show, and viewers seemed to like her willingness to reveal that TV hosts actually sweat and get dirty. But she prided herself on keeping a positive attitude at all times on camera, and at the moment she looked anything but positive.

She took a deep breath and stood straighter. Orr wasn’t going to beat her that easily. She was taking back control. When she returned to their seats, she found Tyler putting his phone away.

“Any news?” Stacy asked.

“That was Gordian’s president, Miles Benson,” Tyler said. “He had lunch with my father.”

“Today? When was your father kidnapped?”

“Must have been right after that. I asked Miles if anything unusual happened. He said my dad was called away on urgent business by an Army officer, but he didn’t get a good look at who it was. He’s going to question the staff discreetly and fly back here this evening.”

Stacy leaned toward him, her elbows on her knees, a pose she often took when her production crew was brainstorming ideas for upcoming episodes.

“The question is, how are we going to play along with Orr?” she said. “The Midas Touch is a Greek fable. To consider it a true story is ridiculous.”

“Sometimes legends have a basis in reality,” Tyler said with a faraway look.

“True. Some scholars believe Midas was a real person. There’s speculation that he was a king in Phrygia — part of modern-day Turkey — although he wasn’t born there.”

“Where was he from?”

“Some stories say Macedonia. Some say even farther away. No one really knows. But they say that Midas arrived as the son of a peasant at the exact moment that an oracle prophesied that the next leader of Phrygia would appear on a humble wagon. They dubbed Midas’s father king on the spot.”

“Lucky him.”

“And you’ll like this: the king’s name was Gordias. When Midas succeeded his father as king, he dedicated the wagon to Zeus for bringing him this good fortune and declared that whoever could untie the fiendishly complicated knot on its yoke would rule all Asia.”

“You’re talking about the Gordian knot. Alexander the Great was the one who solved the puzzle. Except he simply cut it instead of trying to untie it.”

Stacy smiled. “I assume your company Gordian Engine ering is named for the Gordian knot.”

“It is. The seemingly unsolvable problem with a bold solution. But I didn’t know that Midas was the one who’d tied it.”

“You learn something new every day. That’s why I love my job.”

“What happened to Midas?”

“No one knows, but there are several theories. One is that he’s buried in Turkey. Someone even claims to have found his tomb. Another theory is that he was driven out by invading Persians. The myth says that Midas offended one of the gods and was afflicted with the ears of a donkey for his crime. He fled Phrygia in shame and was never heard from again.”

“All of that makes for a great story,” Tyler said, “but you’re right that the part about the Midas Touch is absurd. Alchemists have tried to create their own version of the Midas Touch for centuries by transmuting lead into gold. They failed every time, because it’s physically impossible.”

Stacy hadn’t taken a science course since high school, so her grasp of chemistry was rudimentary at best.

“Why is it impossible?” she asked. “Maybe it’s some hidden formula that we’ve never found.”

Tyler laughed. “Unless the hidden formula involves a fission reaction, it won’t work.”

“Fission as in nuclear?”

“Lead has a higher atomic weight than gold, meaning it has more protons, so the only way lead can become gold is if it sheds protons. Removing protons from an atom’s nucleus is the definition of a nuclear reaction. I suppose you could accomplish that in a nuclear reactor, but it would be so expensive it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.”

“So you think Orr is crazy?”

“Certifiable if he believes in magic.”

“I can see why he wants you in on this. You built the geolabe. But why me? There are a thousand other PhD classicists out there.”

“My humanities studies weren’t a real priority in college,” Tyler said. “What are Classics, exactly?”

“The study of classical Greece and Rome.”

“Which is why you know Greek. Latin, too?”

“I got my undergraduate degree in linguistics. I’m fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and German.”

Tyler whistled. “That’s amazing. I wish I knew some foreign languages. Just don’t have a knack for it, I guess. Unless you count ASL. My grandmother was deaf. I also taught it to Grant.”

“Sign language counts,” Stacy said, “but I can’t sign. Just verbal languages.”

“So why Classics?”

“I grew up on a farm near Des Moines. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, so we never traveled except to go camping in Minnesota. I always wanted to see all those wonderful cities in Europe, so I thought getting a Classics degree would help me do that. Halfway through grad school, I realized research wasn’t my calling. I forced myself to finish anyway, but I still had a hundred thousand in student loans to pay back, so when I heard about auditions for Chasing the Past I signed up. I’m not an actress, but they wanted someone with solid credentials rather than some bimbo reading a teleprompter, so I got the job. I paid my loans off in one year.”

“Your parents must be proud. They still in Iowa?”

“They’ve passed away. They were both smokers. Cancer got them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s just me and my sister now. She was in law school. Is in law school, dammit.”

Tyler gave her knee a squeeze. Just a small gesture of sympathy, but she appreciated it.

His phone pinged. “Probably Grant,” he said, but when he looked at the screen, his expression became grim.

“What?” she asked.

“It’s Orr. He says to check my email.”

After a few taps, he leaned in closer and expanded a video on the screen. Stacy heard some words, but she couldn’t make them out.

Tyler angled the phone so that Stacy could see it and restarted the video. The opening frame was centered on a newspaper with today’s date. Then it receded until she could see a man in a black ski mask standing next to another man sitting in a chair. The seated man appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties and was dressed in a suit. His wrists and ankles were cuffed, but he didn’t look injured. In fact, he looked incredibly fit, and not just for his age. He was blindfolded, but his strong jaw and short brown hair left little doubt that she was looking at Tyler’s father.

A voice in the video said, “Name.” The picture changed slightly, as if it had been edited. The seated man then confirmed her suspicions.

“Sherman Locke,” he said with a sonorous baritone, reminiscent of Tyler’s voice but deepened with age.

The proof-of-life video abruptly ended. Stacy closed her eyes and saw in her mind a replay of a similar video she’d received this morning of Carol bound and unconscious.

She shook it off and looked up at Tyler expecting to see rage. To her amazement, he was smiling.

“That son of a bitch,” he said with a chuckle. “Something tells me he’s not going down without a fight.”

THIRTEEN

Tyler could tell Orr was no fool by the spot he’d picked for the rendezvous. Only fifteen minutes remained until the Wednesday-afternoon baseball game started, and a crowd of fans massed outside the southwest entrance to the stadium waiting to get in to see the hometown Mariners take on the Angels. Street vendors barked “Programs!” every few seconds, and the sweet smell of kettle corn drifted over them. The worst of the rain had passed, but the roof of the steel-and-brick Safeco Field was closed to shield the fans from the occasional drizzle.

On a normal day, the trip from the ferry dock to the stadium would take just a minute, but the stop-and-go traffic extended the drive by a factor of fifteen. By the time Tyler parked the Viper in the garage, it was 12:30. He bought a couple of hot dogs and some drinks from a street vendor to eat while he and Stacy waited. Neither of them was particularly hungry, but Tyler had learned in the Army that you had to keep up your strength even more than usual in stressful situations.

“So what’s Orr look like?” Stacy asked between bites. “Dark hair,” he said. “Naturally tan. Brown eyes. A little shorter than I am. Roman nose broken and not put back together right. Missing the tip of his left pinkie. Not the prettiest guy to look at.”

“Can’t wait to meet him.”

Twenty minutes went by. They leaned against the wall next to the ticket window, Stacy looking in one direction, Tyler in the other. Twice Stacy pointed out someone that fit the description, but neither of them was Orr.

Right on time, Tyler saw Orr approach from around the corner. He looked just as Tyler remembered, wearing a bulky Mariners jacket and cap, with a backpack slung over his shoulder. His hands were in his pockets. He fit right in with the fans still streaming past.

No one was with him. He came to a stop just out of arm’s reach. They appraised each other for a few moments. Tyler fought the urge to strangle the life out of his smug eyes.

“We came alone,” Tyler said.

“I know,” Orr said with a grin. “I’ve been watching. You really shouldn’t wolf down your food like that.” His eyes went to Stacy. “You look even hotter in person.”

“Screw you,” Stacy said.

“Don’t I wish.”

“How about we make a deal?” Tyler said. “You release my father and Stacy’s sister right now, and I won’t kill you.”

“I’m going to have to pass on that fine offer.”

“Or maybe we’ll make a swap.” Tyler nodded to two patrol officers working the intersection. “I bet those policemen over there would give me a hand.”

Orr waggled a finger at him. “You know I wouldn’t have come here without thinking of that. Remember that binary explosive? I’ve got about ten pounds of it under this jacket and a trigger in my other pocket. What happened to that truck could happen here if you try something stupid.”

Stacy gasped and glanced at the crowds of families around her. “You wouldn’t.”

“Honey, you have no idea what I’d do.”

“I agree with her,” Tyler said. “If I put as much planning as you did into this operation, I wouldn’t literally blow it like this.”

Orr pursed his lips. “I don’t know you very well, Locke, but I can already see what your weakness is.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“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. Now 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.

“He’ll be okay.” Grant slapped Tyler on the shoulder. “Now, what’s for dinner? I’m so hungry I could eat a buttered monkey.”

“We’ll have to order out,” Stacy said. “Except for some drinks, the fridge is empty. Not a chef?”

“I like to cook,” Tyler said, “but I haven’t been shopping lately.”

Grant snorted. “When he says he likes to cook, he means he can throw a piece of fish on the grill. He makes it sound like brain surgery. As they say at NASA, it ain’t rocket science. I’ll order us some pizzas.”

An hour later, they’d had their fill of pepperoni-and-green-pepper thin crust, and Grant was up to speed on what had happened at Safeco Field.

At 8:15, there was another knock at the door. This time Tyler got up to open it. Waiting outside were Miles Benson and Aiden MacKenna. Miles was in his iBOT wheelchair, but it was at normal level, on all four wheels, instead of balanced on two.

Aiden was an Irishman with glasses and bushy black eyebrows. Tyler hadn’t yet seen the new addition to his appearance, a black device affixed to his skull with a lead going to a plastic object tucked behind his ear.

“How’s the cochlear implant working for you?” Tyler asked him.

“Huh?” Aiden said.

Tyler raised his voice. “I said, how long until that joke gets old?”

“Never.”

Tyler ushered them in. Aiden made a beeline for Stacy.

“And who is this blond beauty?” he said, taking her hand in both of his.

“Stacy Benedict,” she said. “I love your accent.”

“That’s very kind. And I’m glad to hear yours as well. I’m still getting used to this ugly contraption on my noggin that lets me hear such beautiful sounds.”

“All right, Aiden,” Tyler said, feeling a pang of jealousy. “That’s plenty from you. Stacy, you’ve already met Aiden MacKenna, our resident software expert and database guru. And I’d like you to meet Gordian’s president, Miles Benson.”

They shook hands and got down to business. Miles had struck out finding any more information about Sherman’s abductors before flying back to Seattle that afternoon. Tyler told Miles and Aiden about Sherman, Carol, Orr, and the mission to find the Midas Touch. The two of them were incredulous at first, just as Tyler had been, but when he showed them the video of his father, the doubts ended.

“This has to be completely off the books,” he said. “No police. No FBI. Not even official Gordian involvement. That’s why I wanted to meet here instead of at the office. But I’ll still need some Gordian resources to find my dad.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Miles said.

“Stacy and I have talked it over, and we think Orr will go through with his threat if he finds out the Feds are involved.”

Miles eyed Stacy, who nodded her agreement.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll keep this to ourselves. Any and all Gordian resources are at your disposal.”

“Count me in too,” Aiden said. “My time is yours.”

“Thanks, guys.” He didn’t have to ask Grant. In fact, it would be insulting. Tyler knew that his best friend would be there to watch his back as he had in their Army days.

“I don’t understand why Orr would let you go off on this hunt for the Midas treasure by yourselves,” Miles said. “Seems like he’s taking an awful risk just handing the geolabe over to you and sending you on your way.”

“I thought so too,” Tyler said. “I also thought the timing of the explosion on the truck was convenient. He didn’t detonate it until we were far enough away to be safe.”

Grant narrowed his eyes in realization. “He knew where we were.”

“That was my guess, so I took the geolabe to the RF isolation room back at Gordian.”

“What’s that?” Stacy asked.

“It’s a room for testing electronic emissions from cell phones and other communication devices. It’s completely isolated from all outside radio-frequency sources.”

“You found a signal coming from the geolabe,” Grant said.

Tyler nodded. “It’s equipped with a GPS tracker. That’s how Orr is planning to keep tabs on us.”

“Did you decrypt the signal?” Miles asked.

“Not yet, but I recorded two burst transmissions from it with every detector we have.”

“I’ll get our comm guys to work decoding it. With any luck, we’ll be able to track it back to Orr.” Miles began typing a message on his phone.

“What can I do?” Aiden said.

“We need to ferret out Jordan Orr. Find out anything you can about him. If we get a lead that’s actionable, then we’ll call in the FBI.”

“I’m on it.”

“Great,” Tyler said. “Now, Stacy has a theory about the Archimedes device, the geolabe. Before the codex was sent to the auction house, it was separated from a wax tablet that had been found with it. She thinks the wax tablet may have a message that will be the key to deciphering the purpose of the geolabe.”

“How do you know that?” Grant asked.

“We’ll explain once we get in the air.”

“In the air?” Grant said. “Are we taking a trip?”

Tyler turned to Miles. “I was happy to hear you say that we could use any Gordian resource, because we need one of the company jets. We have to go to England.”

SIXTEEN

Orr took another swig of coffee and stifled a yawn as he drove the van into the vacant lot near Baltimore Harbor. With Crenshaw next to him, snoring for the entire five-hour flight from Seattle to Baltimore/Washington International, he’d napped only a few minutes at a time. Now, at 2:15 in the morning, Crenshaw was alert in the passenger seat, and Orr was ready to get back to the warehouse. But this excursion was crucial to the operation, and it had to be done tonight.

A semi was already waiting for them. A beefy black man in blue overalls leaned against the back of the trailer, sweating even though there was a cool breeze coming in off the water. For three years, Greg Forcet had smuggled goods for Orr out of a local shipping warehouse, but the delicate nature of this project meant they wouldn’t be working together again.

Orr put the van into park and looked around. Satisfied that they were alone, he got out, and Crenshaw did the same. As they approached, Forcet eyeballed Crenshaw.

“Who’s this?” he said.

“A friend,” Orr said.

“You never brought friends before.”

“He’s okay.” Crenshaw nodded, but said nothing.

“If you say so,” Forcet said.

“Is the package ready?”

Forcet wiped his brow. “Just like you asked. Real bear taking that thing apart. Took me a couple of hours. That’ll cost you another two grand.”

“You got it. Any problems?”

“No, but I’m glad you warned me to bring those heat-resistant gloves. Those capsules was superhot.”

“That’s the chemical reaction I was telling you about. These kinds of batteries can overheat if you’re not careful. That’s why we had you put them in the thermal-insulation container we gave you. Is it sealed?”

“Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

“Then let’s take a look,” Orr said.

Forcet raised the trailer’s door, revealing his night’s efforts. Nearest to them was the black metal box that Orr had called the thermal-insulation container. He noted with satisfaction that the lid was secure. Behind the box was a cylindrical lime-green object that Forcet had taken apart to get at the capsule. The cylinder was about four feet tall, with Cyrillic characters on the base, and it was designed with projections around the exterior that acted as cooling fins. Metal fixtures, fittings, and tools littered the floor. The sides of the crate that the item came in lay against the trailer wall.

Crenshaw held up an electronic device and waved what looked like a microphone in front of the open door.

“What’s that?” Forcet asked.

“A, uh, temperature gauge,” Crenshaw said. “We need to make sure it’s not overheating.”

“And? Did I do it right?” Forcet never did like having the quality of his work questioned.

After a few more passes, the device beeped and Crenshaw nodded. “We’re below safe limits.”

“We’ll need some help getting all this into the van,” Orr said.

“Hey, I’ll throw that in for free,” Forcet said.

The three of them heaved the thermal-insulation container into the van first.

As he strained at the effort, Forcet said, “What’s this thing made of anyway, lead?”

Orr laughed, not because it was a funny joke, but because Forcet was absolutely right. The box had walls of lead three inches thick.

The finned cylinder was next.

Once they got it secured in the van, Forcet wiped his forehead again.

“Sure is hot,” he said. “What the hell is that thing? Some kind of engine?”

Forcet didn’t normally ask questions, but then again this was the first time he’d seen the contents of a crate he’d delivered to Orr. It couldn’t hurt to tell him now.

“It’s a radioisotope thermoelectric generator,” Orr said.

“That’s a mouthful. What’s it used for?”

“For powering remote lighthouses. Totally automated. Can run for twenty years without maintenance.” Orr patted the cylindrical RTG where a yellowed and torn piece of paper was the only remnant of the radiation symbol that should have been there. “This one is from a peninsula on the Arctic Ocean. Took me months to find.” Although not as long as he thought it would. The diminishing summer pack ice along Russia’s northern coast made getting at these legacies of the Soviet Union much easier.

“Looks ancient.”

“Probably thirty years old.”

Forcet laughed. “I don’t know what you’d do with the battery from a thirty-year-old generator, and I don’t want to know.” He put a hand on his stomach. “I’ll need some Pepto-Bismol or something when I get home.”

He turned to climb back into the trailer. Orr drew a pistol from his jacket and shot him twice in the back, causing Crenshaw to jump back and squawk in surprise. Forcet crumpled to the ground. He gurgled blood for a few seconds and then stopped breathing.

“Jesus!” Crenshaw yelled. “You could have warned me!”

“Don’t be stupid,” Orr said. “If I warned you, I’d warn him.”

Orr put the gun away and took a vial of crack cocaine from his pocket and put it in Forcet’s overalls. It would look like a drug-smuggling deal gone bad.

“I’ve just never seen anyone get shot before,” Crenshaw said, backing away from the fresh corpse.

“Now you have. Congratulations.”

The only heavy items left were the pieces of depleted uran ium shielding Forcet had pried away from the RTG, but Orr and Crenshaw could lift them easily. In ten minutes they had the rest of the trailer’s contents in the van, leaving nothing to link them to Forcet.

Before they got back into the van, Crenshaw used the Geiger counter again.

“What’s it reading now?” Orr asked. He wasn’t crazy about getting into a vehicle full of radioactive material.

“About two millirads per hour,” Crenshaw said. “On the drive back to the warehouse, it’ll be less than you’d get from an X-ray.”

They got in. Orr looked at the lead container. The strontium-90 pellets inside would be cooking along at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. “What do you think the reading would be if we opened the lid?”

“In the range of two thousand rads per hour.”

“Perfect.”

As he put the van into gear, Orr glanced at Forcet’s body lying next to the truck, but he felt no guilt. Radiation poisoning was a nasty way to go. The sweating and nausea were just the first signs. Vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, and uncontrolled bleeding would have followed.

To his way of thinking, Orr had done his longtime smuggler a favor. After spending more than two hours in close proximity to the exposed capsules, Forcet would have been dead within a week anyway.

SEVENTEEN

When Stacy and Tyler had decided that their next step was to fly to England, she imagined heading back to Sea-Tac Airport and going through all the hassle and pain of eight hours of traveling by commercial airliner to Heathrow. Instead, barely ninety minutes after Tyler had explained to Miles why they needed a plane, she was now taking off from Seattle on her first private-jet flight, lounging in a spacious leather seat, and accompanied by only two other passengers, Tyler and Grant.

Despite the near-death experience on the ferry — or maybe because of it — Stacy reveled in the luxury. She could get used to this.

“You fly like this all the time?” she said to Tyler as the engines spooled up and the plane began its takeoff roll.

“No,” he said. “I’m usually in the cockpit.”

“You’re a pilot, too? I don’t remember that from when I prepared for my interview with you.”

He shrugged as if he thought it was no big deal. “It didn’t seem relevant.”

“Are you kidding? A handsome engineer who’s also a pilot? My viewers would love that kind of detail.”

Grant leaned toward Stacy. “He may have a PhD in mechanical engineering and be able to dispose of bombs and fly jets, but don’t let that fool you. He’s a secret Star Trek nerd.”

“What about you?” she said. “I suppose that in addition to being a former pro wrestler, an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Washington, and an Army SEAL—”

“Hey, hey, hey. I won’t stand for that kind of insult. SEALs are Navy. I was a combat engineer, then a Ranger.”

“Pardon me. In addition to all that, I suppose you fly jets, too.”

“Me? Hell, no.”

“Thank God. I thought I was in a meeting of Overachievers Anonymous.”

“I just got my license to fly helicopters, though.”

Stacy rolled her eyes. “Maybe we should have you on the show next time.”

The jet lifted off, heading toward cruising altitude. Tyler cleared his throat. “I’d love to add to Grant’s résumé by telling you all about his addiction to trashy dating programs—”

“Hey!” Grant protested.

“—but we’d better figure out what our plan will be when we reach London and then get some shut-eye.”

The three of them unbuckled and gathered around a table. They opened a laptop so they could search the file with the translation of the Archimedes Codex.

“What time do we land?” Stacy asked.

“Around 2 p.m. local time,” Tyler said. “Should give us enough time to get something accomplished.”

“I knew you were a workaholic.”

“Just trying to be efficient. In fact, I think we should split up when we get there.”

“Whoa,” Grant said. “Can we just back up here? I came in late at the house. Why, exactly, are we going to England?”

“Do you want the long answer or the short answer?” Stacy said.

“We’ve got a few hours before I can sleep, so I’ll take the long answer.”

“Have you heard of the Antikythera Mechanism?” Stacy asked.

“Tyler mentioned it when he was fabricating the geolabe.”

Through the plane’s Web connection, she brought up a photo of three pieces of corroded bronze, the biggest about the diameter of a grapefruit. In each of the pieces, intricate gearing could be seen.

“Looks like somebody left their clock in the rain for about a thousand years,” Grant said.

“About two thousand years,” Tyler said. When they’d been discussing it earlier, he told Stacy that he’d researched the Antikythera Mechanism because he realized how similar it was to the geolabe he was hired to build.

“They found these bits in the shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900,” Stacy said. “For years nobody paid much attention to them until an archaeologist realized that the gearing predated anything else as sophisticated by fifteen hundred years. Some people refer to it as the world’s first analog computer. It would be like finding an IBM PC hidden in the dungeon of a medieval castle.”

“What does it compute?” Grant asked.

“Debate has raged for years, but most scientists think it was used for astronomical prediction of some sort. Planetary movements, solstices and equinoxes, perhaps even solar eclipses. Ancient planting cycles and religious worship depended on knowing important calendar events, and this device might have been used to calculate them.”

She brought up another photo, this time of a shiny bronze mechanism behind a protective glass. The face of the device had two circular dials like a clock, and a knob on the side. The sides were transparent, so that you could see the gearing inside. Some of the points on the dials were etched with Greek lettering.

“That’s a replica at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens,” Tyler said. “Built from what they could glean from X-rays of the recovered pieces.”

“Looks like the geolabe you built,” Grant said.

“They’re very similar, but the markings on the face of mine are complete, and it has two knobs on the side instead of one.”

“So this codex seems to be an instruction manual for building an Antikythera Mechanism,” Stacy said.

“Or something along those lines,” Tyler said. “But the most exciting part is that the codex provides evidence that Archimedes may have been the one who designed it.”

Grant grinned. “You mean, the guy who yelled ‘Eureka!’ when he created the Archimedes Death Ray?”

Stacy could tell by his smirk that he knew very well he was conflating two well-known stories about the inventor, engineer, and mathematician. “You are so close,” she said.

According to legend, Archimedes was in the bathtub pondering how to solve a problem for the king of Syracuse, his patron on the island now called Sicily. The king was given a crown that was supposedly made of gold, but he wanted to verify the claim without destroying the gift. When Archimedes realized that the material’s displacement in water could be used to discern its density, he ran into the street stark naked yelling, “Eureka!” which translates to “I found it!”

The king also called on Archimedes to design weapons of war to repel a Roman siege during the Second Punic War in 214 B.C. Historians of the time recount a death ray Archimedes invented that focused the sun’s light with such intensity that it made the enemy ships in the Syracuse harbor burst into flames. His feat couldn’t be duplicated in spite of many attempts, including experiments by students from Tyler’s alma mater, MIT, and TV’s MythBusters, so it’s assumed that the claims were exaggerated.

Nonetheless, Archimedes’ reputation as an inventor and scientist was so great that even such wild assertions were given credence.

“Not only does the codex describe how to design the geolabe,” Tyler said, his excitement obvious, “but it could be the only known copy of his long-lost treatise called On Sphere-Making. It has designs for dozens of mechanisms, not just the geolabe.”

Stacy wished she could be as excited as he was, but she was more worried about how they could use the geolabe to free her sister.

“This is all very cool stuff,” Grant said, “but what in the hell does it have to do with old King Midas?”

Tyler glanced at Stacy, and she shrugged for him to answer.

“We think the geolabe somehow leads to a map — a map that will show us where the treasure of King Midas is buried.”

Stacy pointed at the laptop screen. “This line says, ‘He who controls this map controls the riches of Midas.’”

“Ah, treasure!” Grant said, rubbing his hands together. “Now we’re talking. How does it work?”

Stacy leaned back and laced her hands behind her head. “We don’t know. There are two pieces of the instructions missing.”

“Remember when we were building that Swedish modular home-entertainment center you bought?” Tyler said. “The one with the missing instruction page? Same problem.”

“It’s good we’re engineers, otherwise it would’ve taken us more than a half hour to realize we’d put it together backward.”

“In this case, the missing pieces explain how to operate the device,” Stacy said. “The first step was to get all three dials pointed to the noon position, like calibrating a scale. Solving the Stomachion told us how to do that, but now we don’t know how to proceed. The codex talks about how there are three keys to deciphering the geolabe, and that they form some kind of safeguard so that the owner of the codex wouldn’t be able to find the map without the other two keys.”

“Like a password and fingerprint scanner on the same security system,” Tyler said.

“So the first key is the instruction manual for building and calibrating the geolabe, which we think may also be a version of the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism?” Grant said.

She nodded. “Now that we have the device built and we figured out how to calibrate it, we need the other two keys to operate it.”

“And the other two keys are …?” Grant said.

Stacy highlighted another section. “This part talks about a message that’s hidden. This word is steganos, which means ‘covered,’ and this one is graphein, which means ‘writing.’”

“Steganography.”

“Literally, ‘concealed writing.’ Whatever the message is, it’s concealed, and I think I know where.”

“The wax tablet that was separated from the codex before the auction,” Tyler said. “That’s the second key.”

“Let me guess,” Grant said. “The tablet’s buyer lives in England.”

“Right. The tablet was bought by a holding company called VXN Industries, which also happens to lease an estate in Kent.”

“Think the buyer will let you take a look at it?”

“That’s what we’re hoping. Stacy and I will drive out there to make our plea in person.”

“While I look for clues in as many pubs as possible?”

Stacy liked these guys. Even in a situation as dire as this, they lightened the mood to keep their spirits up.

“You wish,” she said, joining in. She scrolled to another part of the codex. “Here’s where it mentions the third key.”

“So what’s that mean for me?”

“You’re going to the British Museum,” Tyler said.

“A museum?” Grant said, as if he’d been asked to wade through a Dumpster full of trash. “What for?”

“Orr said that the tomb of Midas is somewhere under Naples,” Stacy answered. “The codex says that the third key will be revealed by ‘the room of the ancestor of Neapolis.’ Neapolis is the Greek name for Naples.”

“Is the British Museum the best place to learn about Naples?” Grant asked.

“Not necessarily, but it does have experts on the Elgin Marbles.”

“So?”

“The Elgin Marbles are marble statues and sculptured panels that were taken from the Parthenon in the early 1800s by Lord Elgin. They’re currently on display at the British Museum.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I think Archimedes was being clever,” Stacy said. “Neapolis was originally called Parthenope, making Parthenope the ancestor of Neapolis. So when Archimedes said ‘the room of the ancestor of Neapolis,’ he could have meant ‘the room of Parthenope.’ Parthenope means ‘the virgin city,’ so we can further reduce it to ‘the room of the virgin city’ or more simply ‘the room of the virgin.’”

“I think I’ve got it,” Grant said. “The third key will be revealed by ‘the virgin’s room.’” He thought about it for another second and shook his head, “Nope. I still don’t get it.”

“The Greek word for a ‘virgin’s room’ is Parthenon.”

Grant laughed in disbelief. “As in the temple on top of the Acropolis in Athens?”

Stacy pointed to the manuscript. “In essence it says, ‘Take the geolabe to the Parthenon. The seat of Herakles and the feet of Aphrodite will show the way.’”

“But what does that mean?”

She shrugged, both frustrated and embarrassed that she didn’t know the answer, particularly with her sister’s life on the line. “My specialty was classical literature, not architecture. That’s why we need an expert. I don’t know how or why, but the third key to finding Archimedes’ map is the Parthenon.”

EIGHTEEN

Sherman Locke’s watch had been confiscated, so he didn’t know what time it was when the opening of the garage door woke him. Given that he was still full from the takeout sandwich and water they’d given him for dinner, he suspected it was the middle of the night. He rose from his cot and went to the portal in the door. The room’s single bulb had been turned off for the evening, but the crude covering over the hole left a small crack that let in a sliver of light. Sherman also discovered that it gave him a limited view of the warehouse.

He didn’t know what they were trying to keep him from seeing, but it wasn’t their faces. He’d gotten a good look at both of his captors, which wasn’t very comforting because it implied they had no intention of letting him out of here alive.

That made escape priority number one, both for him and for the girl they’d called Carol. He’d heard her cry out a few times, but the sound was muted, which meant that she’d been placed in the room farthest from his. He’d tried tapping on the wall a few times, but she hadn’t responded. Speaking to her through the cinder blocks wouldn’t work because he would have had to yell so loudly that Gaul would have heard as well.

As he peered through the crack, Sherman saw that another van had just backed into the warehouse next to the one in which he’d been abducted. He watched as two white men got out, the driver trim and dark-haired, the passenger pasty and doughy. They circled to the back of the truck, where they met Gaul and Phillips, who were still rubbing their eyes from their naps on the cots. They stared at something in the back of the van.

“You sure it’s safe to touch, Orr?” Gaul asked. He was speaking to the driver. Their voices were barely audible to Sherman.

“Crenshaw,” Orr said to the passenger, “show them the readings.”

Crenshaw had his back to Sherman, so he couldn’t see what the man had in his hand. Crenshaw motioned his arm back and forth several times and then held up what looked like a voltage meter.

“See?” Crenshaw said. “No problem.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Do you like two million dollars?” Orr said. Because of the authoritative way Orr said it, Sherman was sure he was the leader of this gang.

“I love two million dollars,” Phillips said.

Two million dollars each? Sherman thought. How much were they asking for him?

“Consider it hazard pay,” Orr said. “Now help us get it on the floor next to that table.”

The four of them lifted something from the van, and just before they disappeared from view Sherman spied a black metal box that couldn’t have been more than a foot on each side. Even though the object was small, they were straining from the load. Whatever was in there was surprisingly heavy.

Once it was down, they went back to the van.

“How are our guests doing?” Orr asked.

“The general was a pain in the ass, but we handled it. The girl is still groggy from the roofies.”

Orr looked directly at the hole in the door, but Sherman didn’t think there was any way he could be seen.

“What about the rest of this crap?” Gaul said.

“Drive the truck to the far end of the warehouse and dump it,” Orr said. “We don’t want some kids to stumble onto it in a junkyard and alert the FBI.”

Gaul and Phillips did as he ordered, stopping the van at the far wall fifty yards away. With the van facing toward him, he couldn’t see what they were tossing out, but pieces of metal clanged onto the concrete every few seconds, with some of the impacts noisier than others.

Orr’s and Crenshaw’s voices lowered, so Sherman could hear only snippets of their conversation. “… truck … by Monday … enough dust … bank … thirty years …”

That was all he could make out before the van started up again and returned to its original parking spot.

With the van out of the way, Sherman could now see what they’d tossed out. One of his greatest assets as a fighter pilot was his vision, and although he needed reading glasses now, his distance acuity was as good as ever.

His eye was drawn to a green cylinder with fins around its core lying on its side. Something about it was familiar. At first he thought it was an unusual compressor design, but then he saw the stenciled Cyrillic letters on the base and realized where he’d seen a photo of it.

During his final three years in the Air Force, Sherman had been the deputy director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, whose mission was to determine ways to counter weapons of mass destruction. As the agency’s highest-ranking military leader, he had been briefed on every major risk to national security posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. In fact, his keynote address the previous morning had been on unconventional tactics that could make the effects of these weapons more widespread and deadly.

Two years ago, he was part of a team that went to Moscow to discuss the security of rogue nuclear weapons and materials. The fear was that terrorists would be able to get their hands on uranium or plutonium to fashion their own crude atomic bombs, then smuggle them into American cities.

As part of the discussion, they also talked about other sources of nuclear material. One potential hazard was from radioisotope thermal generators, similar to the power sources used in American space probes like Voyager. Russia had hundreds of unmanned lighthouses and signal stations ringing the coasts of the country in locations so remote that maintaining them on a regular basis was costly. So, instead of conventional diesel generators that would have to be fueled and repaired routinely, the Soviets constructed RTGs to power them and provide guideposts for their Navy. Then they forgot about them.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent cost cuts in the military, little emphasis had been placed on safeguarding these power plants, and they were abandoned. Because they were unmanned, they made tempting targets for thieves hoping to scavenge the metal for profit. In taking the devices apart, the thieves would sometimes expose the core capsules that held the radioactive strontium-90 power source.

In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, three villagers had either stolen or come across two of these capsules containing ten pounds of the highly dangerous material. The capsules generate their power using heat, so the men thought they would make a good replacement for their campfire in the winter cold.

Within hours, they became sick with radiation poisoning and would have died without immediate care. Two of them were hospitalized for months and never fully recovered. The only reason they didn’t die within days was that the capsules were still partially shielded by lead. The entire town of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, had been permanently evacuated for a radiation reading lower than the output of one of these unshielded capsules.

The green object sitting a hundred yards away looked exactly like one of the RTGs his DTRA team had been shown during the trip to Moscow. Now Sherman understood why the container they’d been carrying was so heavy. It was made entirely of lead.

For whatever reason they had taken Sherman and Carol, this was no simple kidnapping. His captors had something far grander planned. He had to get a message to Tyler, had to make him understand the deadly danger they faced.

Escape was no longer Sherman’s highest priority.