The Midas Code tl-2

by Boyd Morrison

  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.”