The Midas Code

Cavano placed the bronze device back into its case and considered what to do about Locke and Benedict as well as Grant Westfield, whose identity had been revealed to her by Oswald Lumley. Orr had chosen his search team well, but he obviously hadn’t told Locke about their connection. The engineer seemed too smart to deliberately deliver himself to her home so conveniently. Locke, Benedict, and Westfield were a mortal threat. If they helped Orr find the Midas treasure before she did, it could ruin her.

That meant she had to find them and persuade them to divulge how she could find Orr. Failing that, she would simply kill the three of them, setting back Orr’s efforts to take what was rightfully hers.

Cavano’s network of informants in European police departments meant that she had eyes and ears everywhere looking for any sign that Locke had surfaced. All she had to do was hold Orr off until next week. The demolition would commence on Monday, with an estimated two days needed to break through to the tunnel. Once she had the gold in her possession, the race would be over, and it wouldn’t matter where Orr and his friends tried to hide. She would have unlimited funds to spend on the vendetta and would spit on each of their graves.

The blood of her dead enemies proved that no one got away with betraying Gia Cavano.

THIRTY

I n the Audi rental sedan provided courtesy of Gordian Engineering, Tyler sat in the passenger seat while Grant drove out of Franz Josef Strauss Airport and onto the A92 autobahn toward Munich. Stacy sat in the back reading her printouts of the writing on the tablet. The flight had taken less than two hours, giving them plenty of time to get to the Boerst building and scout the location before Cavano arrived. He was just glad that his company had the resources to fund this venture, something Orr surely must have known when he picked Tyler for his blackmail scheme.

Stacy had spent the flight poring over Archimedes’ tablet, scraping the beeswax from it as best she could under the circumstances. More than once she’d winced at the process, which destroyed the writing on top, but the only other method would be painstaking analysis using a CT or MRI machine. Tyler had convinced her that they didn’t have that kind of time, and she reluctantly agreed.

Even after millennia, the writing on the bare wood had been preserved remarkably well by the tablet’s layer of beeswax. They took photos of the writing and sent copies to Aiden and several other email addresses for safekeeping.

They had debated whether to bring the tablet with them in the car. Taking the geolabe with them hadn’t gone so well, so they left the tablet behind with the pilots, who would remain on standby with the plane. On any other occasion, Miles would object to the extravagance of that expense, but with Sherman Locke’s life at stake and now a suspicion that strontium-90 was involved, he hadn’t uttered one word of objection.

“Are you ready to tell us what the tablet says?” Tyler asked.

Stacy scribbled a few more lines on her notepad and said, “Just a minute, bunny.”

Grant belched out a laugh. When the rental-car agent had seen Tyler’s last name, she’d snickered. When Tyler asked her why, she told him that the German pronunciation of Locke was a name you’d give to a pet. Grant and Stacy had ribbed him for the past twenty minutes about it.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”

“Let me guess,” Grant said. “We have to find some other old document somewhere.”

“You’re not even close,” Stacy said, and her eyes sparkled with wonder as she handed the translation to Tyler, who read the text aloud:

The spy of King Hieron has brought us a gift that may yet win our war. While seeking an underground path to enter the Roman fortress, the spy came upon the treasure of King Midas, a vault of gold the likes of which has never before been seen. As proof of his find, the spy produced a golden hand of such excellent design, it could not have been fabricated. Three keys-this tablet, a manuscript, and the Parthenon-provide the map for finding the treasure, which cannot fall into Roman hands or they will rule the Earth and all who dwell within it.

Grant gaped at Tyler. “So it’s real?”

“Apparently,” Tyler said. “And Archimedes created this puzzle so that someone other than the Romans would find the treasure. But why didn’t they go after the gold themselves?”

“Because for two years,” Stacy said, “the city of Syracuse, which was a Greek city-state on what is now the island of Sicily, was under siege by the Roman Navy. If the city fell-which it eventually did, resulting in the death of Archimedes-the Romans could have found the map and claimed the treasure, funding their military campaigns for a hundred years. That’s why Archimedes used the Parthenon as the third key. It was the most famous building in the world at the time, but the Romans wouldn’t have access to it.”