The Midas Code

Air-handling systems would exacerbate the effect, sucking in the microscopic particles and making them an integral part of every building in the vicinity. The buildings would never be cleaned of the radiation. They would all have to be destroyed to make sure the radioactivity was gone. Even if the authorities claimed that a building was below the level of harmful radiation, who in their right mind would ever want to occupy it again?

After the warehouse was nothing but wreckage, the plan was for Crenshaw and Phillips to drive the truck and the van to their destination, and when Orr wired the payments to their accounts, they would park the semi in the pre-designated location, drive away in the van, and detonate the bomb.

By Monday evening the United States would be changed forever. The stock market would be in ruins, the economy would take a nosedive when the world’s financial hub was no longer inhabitable, and trillions of dollars would vanish overnight.

Amid a crisis the likes of which the world had never before seen, only one certainty among the chaos would remain: tangible goods. Commodities. And the most important commodity in the world was gold.

When the stock and bond markets crashed, investors would flee to gold, causing its value to skyrocket. James Bond’s nemesis Goldfinger had the right plan-nuke the gold reserve to make his own gold more valuable-but by targeting Fort Knox he’d chosen the wrong location.

Yes, the US had a huge stockpile of gold at its disposal at Fort Knox in Kentucky, but it wasn’t the largest depository of gold in the country. That claim to fame belonged to the Federal Reserve Bank, which held more than ten percent of the world’s gold reserves. Depending on the daily close, its value was around $300 billion.

After tomorrow, those reserves would be worthless.

Although the bank’s vault was eighty feet below street level, the building’s air-handling system wouldn’t be able to scrub the radiation from the dust motes circulating through the structure. Five thousand tons of gold would become radioactive.

And what amplified the impact was the fact that the Federal Reserve Bank was located in the same square mile as the New York Stock Exchange, along with all the other investment firms and brokerages that made downtown New York the single greatest concentration of wealth on earth.

At least, it would be for one more day. Then everything would change. And, merely by blowing up a single semi trailer full of sawdust, Crenshaw would eventually be remembered as the man who transformed lower Manhattan from a shining beacon of unholy greed into a desolate wasteland.

FORTY-SEVEN

T hirty thousand feet above the Mediterranean, Tyler, Grant, and Stacy were huddled around the laptop so they could see Miles Benson and Aiden MacKenna on the video chat via satellite. Their Gulfstream jet would arrive in Rome in an hour. Miles and Aiden were on their own plane, heading to Washington to confirm Sherman’s and Carol’s release.

Tyler had expected to have a hard time persuading his boss to go this alone without intervention by the authorities, and he was right.

“I don’t like this plan,” Miles said. “We should have the Feds ready to nab whoever drops off your father.”

“If we do that,” Tyler said, “we’ll have to tip them off to everything, and I’m not ready to take that chance. If I thought there was any danger for you, I wouldn’t go this route.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about. I want to keep you three safe. What about the Italian national police?”

“We can’t call in the Carabinieri. As far as they know, Orr hasn’t done anything wrong in Italy.”

“Yet.”

“Four specialists from Neutralizer Security should be able to handle taking down Orr on our end,” Grant said, referring to the private security contractor Tyler had hired for the job. “I’ve worked with them before. They’re pros.”

“Then why didn’t you hire them in Greece?” Miles said.

“My fault,” Tyler said. “I didn’t expect Cavano’s men to show up at the Parthenon.”

“None of us did,” Stacy said.

“Cavano’s persistent, I’ll give her that,” Grant said.

Aiden pushed his way in for a closer look. “For four billion dollars’ worth of gold, she’d probably take on the entire Carabinieri herself.” Aiden was talking about the cube of gold that supposedly sat in the middle of the chamber.

Miles shook his head. “You see what you’re up against, Tyler? They’ll kill all of you without hesitation to get that money.”

“The strontium adds a new variable to all this,” Tyler said. “If Orr really has a dirty bomb, he’s going to use it. We have to stop him.”

“Are you sure he has it?”

“No, which is another reason we’re not going to the authorities just yet. Once we have Orr, we’ll make him tell us everything.”

“How?”

“We’ll have plenty of bargaining chips, but they’ll be useless until he’s in our hands.”

“So what’s the plan?”