The Midas Code

“Makes sense,” Grant said. “Lumley said the facade of the Parthenon was build in the shape of a golden rectangle.”

“And if the geolabe is also in the shape of a golden rectangle, it would be a perfect match.”

“But we need to be at the Parthenon to use it,” Stacy said. “I get it now. Only a Greek would be able to go to Athens and see the Parthenon in person. Even if you had the other two keys, they would be useless if you couldn’t get to the Parthenon.”

“Right. We have to actually be standing there, knowing where the seat of Herakles and the feet of Aphrodite would be, and then twist the knobs until the dials point to those locations. That’s what the three hundred and sixty notches on the third dial of the geolabe are for. They’ll give us the correct triangulation angles. Then we transpose those to the island of Megaride and the Parthenope acropolis.”

Tyler read the last paragraph:

Thus, the combination of directions will reveal the well from which you will begin your journey. From that point, marked by the sign of Scorpio, the geolabe will show the way.

“So the triangulation will lead us to a well?” Grant asked.

“Many of the points of entry into the Naples underground are wells leading to the cisterns and aqueducts that carry water into the city,” Stacy said. “The spy must have come out of the Midas treasure chamber and wended his way through the tunnels until he found an exit. Droughts were not uncommon, which would make it possible for him to walk through the tunnels that served as aqueducts and were normally filled with water. The spy marked his exit well with the sign of Scorpio so that he could find it again. Maybe the mark on the well will still be there.”

“So all we have to do to find this well,” Tyler said, “is go to the Parthenon with the geolabe, turn it on its side, twist the knobs to get the angles of triangulation, and transfer them to a map of Naples.”

“Sounds easy when you put it that way,” Stacy said. “But we need the geolabe to do it. Then the triangulation will lead us to the map.”

“Wait a minute,” Grant said, snapping his fingers. “There is no map.”

No map? Tyler thought. There had to be a map. How else would they find the treasure?

From that point, marked by the sign of Scorpio, the geolabe will show the way.

Up until now, Tyler had just assumed that a map was hidden somewhere, possibly in this well. But Grant was right. The map wouldn’t be hidden in the tunnels. The spy would have brought his drawn map back with him to Syracuse, and Archimedes would have destroyed it to keep it from falling into Roman hands.

Tyler sucked in a breath at Archimedes’ boundless ingenuity.

The geolabe will show the way.

The geolabe wasn’t leading to a map that would show them how to find the Midas treasure. The geolabe was the map.

THIRTY-ONE

A fter two days cooped up in his cell, Sherman Locke was spending most of his time trying not to go stir-crazy. He’d persuaded his captors to let him read the newspaper they used in the proof-of-life video, but the copy of USA Today could have been purchased anywhere, so it didn’t tell him anything about his location. With a diet of Subway sandwiches and McDonald’s hamburgers, he could be anywhere. He spent the majority of his time doing calisthenics. When his chance at escape came, he would need to be ready.

The only time they let him out of the cell was to record the daily proof-of-life video. His two choices were to escape when he was brought out for the video or to break out of the cell. With just the one crude window in the heavy steel door, the cell was virtually impregnable. That left overpowering two or more guards while he was shackled at his wrists and ankles, then breaking Carol out before escaping the building.

The odds were slim, but he had a plan. The only question was when to try it.

On his first day, only two men had been there to make the video. Sherman would have tried his plan on the second day, but three of them had been present. There was no way he could take out three men. It had to be when there were only two recording him.

He had the means to get out of the handcuffs, but the problem was the short time he had to put them on after they handed him the cuffs through the hole in the door. If they weren’t paying attention, he just might be able to make his plan work, but it would require split-second timing, and he’d get only one chance.

The garage door opened, letting in reflected rays of the dawning sun through the crack in the portal.

Sherman rose and went to the door. Through the sliver of space, he saw the second van return and pull in next to the semi they’d brought in the day before. The trailer of the semi was the same steel gray it had been when they brought it in, but Gaul had pasted a new logo saying WILBIX CONSTRUCTION onto the blue cab’s door over the old logo saying DWIGHT’S FARM SERVICES. Sherman hadn’t seen any clue to what the trailer might contain.