The Midas Code tl-2

by Boyd Morrison

  Grant blew through South End Avenue, the last intersection before the river. The street was free of cars from here on. He pulled on the truck’s air horn, hoping the cops got the message to get out of the way.

  Then he saw the courtyard bordering the circle. In addition to a few small trees there were more formidable obstacles: seven brick pillars spanning the width of the courtyard. The police cars could go no farther and had stopped directly in front of them.

  There was just enough room separating the last pillar and the apartment building on the left, so Grant aimed the truck between them and opened the driver’s door. The speedometer read thirty-five. He leaned on the horn again to scatter any pedestrians who might not be expecting a forty-ton semi to roar across the Esplanade.

  Then he jumped.

  * * *

  Orr shook off his daze and heard Tyler’s running footsteps. Still lying on the floor, he looked past the stand and saw that Tyler was through the vault door.

  Orr screamed in frustration at being duped.

  “No!”

  He fired the pistol until it clicked on an empty chamber, but Tyler was already pushing the massive door closed.

  Orr got to his feet, picked up the backpack, and ran to the door. He was pushing against it, trying to prevent Tyler from getting it closed all the way, when he saw the lead container near his feet. The bomb was no more than an arm’s length away.

  His eyes widened with terror when he realized that he’d lost track of the time. In disbelief he stared at his watch counting down.

  Eight, seven, six …

  * * *

  Tyler strained against the door, but even though it was well oiled, moving its bulk took time.

  He had heard Orr yell and then the sound of gunshots. Slowly, the door swung closed. When it was flush with the wall, Tyler spun the wheel until it hit its stops. Just as the lock fully engaged, he felt more than he heard the explosion through the door.

  The interior of the vault was now bathed in intense radiation. It would stay sealed shut until a containment team arrived.

  Tyler leaned against the door, but he didn’t expect to hear any pounding from inside. He wondered how he would feel if he did. He decided not to find out and walked outside, turning his thoughts toward the fate of Stacy and Grant rather than toward a criminal who’d made their lives hell for one week.

  Whatever happened in there, Orr got what he deserved.

  * * *

  Grant got plenty of practice cushioning his falls during his wrestling days, but landing on the dirt trim bordering the Esplanade at thirty-five miles an hour was an entirely different experience. His left knee smacked hard as he tumbled, barely missing the trunk of a tree and collecting about a thousand nicks and cuts along the way. He rolled more times than he could count as the truck catapulted into the Hudson with a tremendous splash. He came to rest on the concrete Esplanade in time to see the truck flip over and begin to sink.

  Grant waved for the police officers to get back, then saw two startled joggers, a man and a woman, stop and go to the edge of the Esplanade to watch the truck disappear into the water. He stood, but could put little weight on his leg. He hobbled toward the joggers, yelling, “Get down!”

  They turned and saw Grant’s limping form and more police cars screeching to a stop behind him. They gawked in astonishment but didn’t move.

  The truck was now underwater. Grant had no time to explain. He used his bulk to crash into them and throw them to the ground. Just as they hit the pavement and Grant covered them with his body, an earsplitting boom erupted from the river.

  A wave of water surged over the embankment and drenched them, and parts of the truck pinged on the ground as debris rained down around them.

  It took ten seconds for the water to subside, and the three of them were soaked through. After the last bit of truck landed, Grant rolled off the joggers and sat up.

  Both of them gaped at Grant, who smiled back.

  “Sorry about that, folks,” he said through gritted teeth. “Nice day for a run, eh?”

  * * *

  The lumber pile that had hidden Tyler provided the same protection for Orr when he instinctively dove behind it as the bomb went off.

  Smoke permeated the room but didn’t overwhelm it. Orr, deaf from the blast, rose and saw chunks of lead embedded in the wood.

  Orr knew what that meant. The air he was inhaling was suffused with radioactive dust. Even if he got out immediately, radiation poisoning was a death sentence. He’d seen the pictures of radiation victims. An agonizing end.

  He didn’t want to go out that way. His life would soon be over, but at least he could end it himself, the way his father had. He raised the revolver to his head and pulled the trigger.

  It clicked. He pulled the trigger again. Nothing. The cylinder was empty. He’d used all his rounds shooting at Tyler.

  He dropped the gun and sagged to the floor. Orr opened the backpack, took out the container with the Midas hand, and wept bitter tears for all that had been taken from him.

  * * *

  Tyler was sitting in the back seat of Riegert’s FBI vehicle when a police car pulled up and Grant got out. With a distinct limp, his clothes sodden and torn, and dozens of scratches and bruises on his face and arms, he shuffled over to the car and plopped down.

  “You okay?” Tyler said.

  “Feels like a torn ligament,” Grant said, holding his knee. “Nothing a little arthroscopic surgery won’t take care of. How about you?”

  “My side hurts like hell, but otherwise I’m fine. The bomb?”

  “At the bottom of the Hudson. No one hurt. Except me, that is. And yours?”

  “In the vault when it went off. The time lock won’t let us open it for twelve hours.”

  “Did they catch Orr?”

  Tyler looked back at the bank. “He’s in the vault, too.”

  “Think he survived the blast?”

  Tyler shrugged. He realized now that he just didn’t care. “Either way, we’ll get the whole story about his plan. Crenshaw’s already talking, hoping to cut a deal.”

  “Any other news?” Grant asked gingerly.

  Tyler knew that he meant Stacy. The last time they’d seen her, she was being wheeled away in critical condition. Tyler shook his head.

  Ambulances had taken away the two cops Orr had injured getting into the vault, so they sat there in silence as they waited for another officer to arrive and take Grant to get his leg examined. After five minutes, Special Agent Riegert walked over, his phone in hand.

  “You guys did good today,” Riegert said. Grant and Tyler both nodded a simple acknowledgment.

  Riegert held the phone out for Tyler. “Got a call for you.”

  “Who is it?” Tyler said, taking the phone.

  “Carol Benedict from the hospital in Naples,” Riegert said, his face impassive. “She has something to tell you.”

  EPILOGUE

  Two months later

  The blazing August sun roasted Tyler’s skin and forced him to squint even through his mirrored sunglasses, but he wasn’t complaining. After twelve hours in a cramped plane, he was happy to go for a hike in the hills.

  Tyler put down the shovels he was carrying and paused to admire the crystal clear Mediterranean. Just a few miles west of Syracuse on the island of Sicily, he gazed at the port, trying to imagine Archimedes’ famous death ray, which supposedly burned the Roman ships assaulting the city during the siege more than two thousand years ago.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” Stacy beamed at the view. “I’ve always wanted to come here.”

  She looked better than ever, despite the injury she’d suffered in Naples. She wore a black tank top and shorts, and her blond hair had grown longer since then. Tyler liked the change.

  He had feared the worst when he heard that Carol Benedict was calling with news, but she wanted to tell him that Stacy had come through the surgery and was asking about him as soon as she woke. Her recovery had been arduous, with week
s of rehab before she was back on her feet, but she soon lobbied to get back to work so that she could tell her story to her viewers. When she was at full strength, Tyler agreed to meet her in Syracuse to investigate Archimedes’ final puzzle.

  Stacy had picked him up from the airport when he arrived that morning, and they drove straight out to the dig site. The three guys who made up her camera crew trailed behind them, but they weren’t filming yet. Stacy had already agreed to Tyler’s one rule: he was not to appear on camera, and she would cut him out of the broadcast. The publicity from the show last time had resulted in his defusing a bomb on a ferry, and he didn’t feel like tempting fate again.

  “I bet you never thought this thing would be what brought you here,” he said, pointing at the new geolabe in his hands.

  Because Tyler still had the codex translation, he was able to rebuild the geolabe after he’d lost the original in the Midas chamber, and, with his experience building it the first time, the new one took only a month to construct. It was clear now that the geolabe and the Antikythera Mechanism were one and the same. The original reproduction had been missing some pieces because the meager remnants of the shipwreck artifact were incomplete. Tyler was generously donating the new geolabe to the Athens National Archaeological Museum to replace the replica that had been so callously stolen.

  But before it went to the museum, it had one more use.

  Tyler consulted the instructions he’d put on his smartphone and twisted the knobs on the geolabe. The dials turned and pointed in a new direction.

  “This way,” he said.

  They headed toward Eurialo Castle, a fortress built by Dionysius the Elder and then modified by Archimedes. It was claimed that the castle had never been conquered, thanks to Archimedes’ engineering skills, one of which was building a series of tunnels underneath the castle as a first line of defense against burrowing invaders.

  “How’s your father doing?” Stacy asked as they walked.

  “As ornery as ever and completely healed. Miles still wants him to join Gordian, but I’m not so sure about that.”

  “I’m glad to hear things are back to normal,” she said. “I’m sorry Grant couldn’t be here.”

  “Don’t be. He said he’s had enough of tunnels for a while. Besides, he’s eating up the challenge of designing a display case for the only radioactive museum pieces in the world.” After some legal wrangling over ownership, it was decided that the Archimedes Codex and the golden hand would become part of a traveling exhibit that would go first to the British Museum. Grant, whose torn knee ligament was nearly healed, was working with Oswald Lumley and his staff on how to properly preserve it.

  The codex had become irradiated along with Jordan Orr while it was sequestered inside the Manhattan vault until the time-lock release. By then, Orr had suffered a lethal radiation dose. The doctors called it the worst case they’d ever seen and documented the horrifying details for medical journals. Orr lasted five excruciating days before finally succumbing.

  The Midas hand survived the explosion intact, but the extremophile microbes did not. Apparently, radiation was the only extreme they couldn’t withstand. With Midas’s body now underwater, the king’s magical touch was gone forever.

  But it was the codex that yielded a final secret, thanks to its being in Orr’s pack when the radioactive bomb had gone off. The radiation had caused some previously invisible text to fluoresce under UV light. It was a final set of instructions left by Archimedes, seemingly scrawled and then erased by the scribe before it was overwritten.

  The instructions indicated that Archimedes had hidden something in Eurialo Castle, in a specially constructed tunnel that he had reserved for his own use. The geolabe would lead them to it.

  “I know you’re a charming guy,” Stacy said. “But how in the world did you persuade the Italian authorities to let us dig at one of their historical sites?”

  Tyler smiled. “Well, the FBI recovered a video from Peter Crenshaw’s email system. Apparently, it’s narrated by you and shows a chamber made entirely of gold somewhere under Naples.”

  “And they believed the video? The chamber was flooded with boiling acidic water. Nobody can dive into it to confirm its existence.”

  “Gordian happened to develop an undersea robot that can survive under those exact conditions.”

  Stacy stopped. “You proved to them that it exists?”

  “Last week. The Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage asked me to join them in making the announcement to the press, but I told them I had someone better.”

  “They want me?”

  “If you’re available next week.”

  She launched herself at Tyler and planted a big kiss on him. For a moment, he forgot all about why he was here.

  Just as abruptly, Stacy pulled away, her eyes lit with anticipation. Tyler was suddenly aware of the camera crew staring at them.

  “Come on,” Stacy said. She lowered her voice so the crew couldn’t hear. “Maybe we’ll have even more to celebrate tonight. I have champagne chilling in my room. You’re welcome to share it.”

  He didn’t know if she meant the champagne or the room. Maybe both, if he was getting the signals right. Ancient puzzles were so much easier to decipher than women.

  “One more thing,” Tyler said. “They want you to talk in more detail about the writing on the chamber’s pedestal.”

  “You mean about how Midas was originally from Naples?”

  Tyler nodded. “The ministry seemed very interested in that part.”

  The pedestal had confirmed the once mythical story that Midas had been a traveler in what was now Turkey and arrived in the ancient country of Phrygia just in time for his father, Gordias, to be dubbed king. Years later, after his own uneventful reign, Midas was riding his horse in the wilds near his palace and came across a previously unknown volcanic spring. He decided to take a swim, but when he got out with the help of one of his courtiers, the man died almost instantly. He fell into the water and turned to gold.

  Midas’s ability became legend throughout the world, but he found it to be a curse. He could not even hold his beloved daughter again for fear of killing her.

  The king of Persia had heard of the Midas Touch and wanted it for himself, so he set about to conquer the kingdom of Phrygia. Midas’s army was no match for the Persians, so he fled with his court back to his home of Neapolis. During the journey, his daughter fell ill and died, contrary to the myth in which he accidentally killed her. Midas, having heard of a hot spring hidden under the city, thought it would be a suitable tomb befitting his status, because he could adorn it with gold and preserve his daughter for time immemorial. His last loyal subjects excavated the chamber and interred him there when he finally passed.

  Now Tyler and Stacy had one final treasure to unearth, but Tyler couldn’t imagine what else Archimedes might have hidden for them. This time, however, he was willing and happy to find out.

  A local Sicilian archaeologist met them at the entrance to the tunnels that had already been excavated beneath Eurialo. She would be along to assist Tyler and Stacy and make sure they didn’t disturb anything they found.

  The geolabe guided them through the catacombs to a spot that was otherwise unremarkable. The earthen wall they were supposed to dig through looked like all the others.

  “You’re sure this is it?” Stacy said.

  “Don’t ask me,” Tyler said, pointing at the geolabe. “Ask Archimedes.”

  While the crew filmed, they dug into the wall, the archaeologist helping as well. An hour into it, Tyler’s shovel plunged into open air.

  He shined a flashlight through the hole and saw some kind of chamber. Reinvigorated by the find, they widened the hole so that it was big enough for them to crawl through.

  Tyler went first. As he crept into the hole, his heart pounded at the thought of what might be revealed about one of antiquity’s greatest intellects. What was Archimedes’ reason for creating this hidden chamber? When he was through the hol
e, Tyler stood and focused the light on a treasure as fabulous to him as Midas’s gold chamber.

  Fearing eventual defeat at the hands of the Romans, Archimedes must have created this room to secure his most valuable possessions. He’d been right to worry about his legacy. According to the Greek historian Plutarch, when Syracuse was captured a Roman soldier burst into Archimedes’ study. Instead of surrendering, Archimedes defied the soldier and went back to his drawings. The soldier killed him, despite orders to capture the engineer alive.

  The room before Tyler held dozens of mechanical devices more intricate and beautiful than he would have thought possible for an inventor of that period. One was a globe that showed the map of the known world at that time. Another device suspended the earth, the sun, and the planets so that they would rotate in their orbits. A third one could have easily been a counting machine, literally the world’s first computer.

  Agog at the genius on display, Tyler knew that Orr had been after the wrong treasure all along. The wealth of amazing mechanisms in this one room would alter everything that historians had assumed about the scope of knowledge in the ancient world.

  Tyler stopped when he spotted a table holding an exact duplicate of the geolabe, an original version of the Antikythera Mechanism constructed by Archimedes himself. He approached it with reverence. The only difference between the one in his hands and the one on the shelf was the green patina on the ancient version.

  Next to the device were documents laid out across the surface. One was clearly a map of Neapolis. Tyler recognized the island where Castel dell’Ovo now stood, as well as the Naples acropolis, the two landmarks that had led him to the well.

  Beside the map were a series of drawings. Without touching them, Tyler inspected them more closely. They looked like sketches of statues. One of them was familiar, and then he realized what it was: the statue of Herakles from the east pediment of the Parthenon, drawn in incredible detail, which would be nearly unrecognizable to anyone who had seen the eroded and handless remnant in the British Museum. There were dozens and dozens of drawings, some of them long-distance views of the ancient temple, some of them close-ups.