The Midas Code

“And you think that’s what the Midas Touch is?”

“As ridiculous as it sounds, yes. I have researched this my whole life, and that’s my theory. I think Midas’s skin was somehow afflicted with this kind of microbe, perhaps exposed to it during a visit to a hot spring somewhere, but he was immune to its effects. I discovered that many people live with chronic skin diseases. Believe me, you don’t want to see the photos.”

“So how does he turn things to gold?”

“Any object he touched would become contaminated with this microbe. If the object was then submerged in a solution with dissolved gold in it, the object would be transmuted to gold by the microbe.”

“So you think you’ll get rich if you can recover this microbe?” Tyler said. “What makes you think it’s still alive?”

“Over twenty years ago, in that chamber somewhere below us, I saw a man turn to gold in front of my eyes.”

He must have meant the drug runner from Cavano’s childhood tale who chased her and Orr into the chamber. Tyler recalled her saying that the man had touched something inside the golden coffin, something that had caused him excruciating pain. If that was truly the Midas Touch, the king himself may have been immune through some divine providence, but anyone else who came in contact with it would experience mind-bending agony, maybe even death.

“These archaea can remain dormant for thousands of years under the proper conditions,” Orr continued. “Whatever they used to embalm Midas could have preserved the microbe.”

However far-fetched Orr’s theory sounded, he believed it. He almost had Tyler convinced.

“You said the Midas chamber had a pool with a hot spring in it,” Tyler said. “How do you know that’s not the source of this magical ability?”

“I don’t, but I have a way to test it. I have two vials of water with me, one with water containing an acidic mixture of dissolved gold, and another with seawater. If the Midas Touch is real, it will work with those samples as well.”

“Seawater?”

The call came up from Gaul that Stacy had reached the bottom. Orr gestured for Tyler to go next.

As Tyler climbed over the lip of the well and attached his harness, Orr said, “Seawater has minute amounts of gold dissolved in it. If the Midas Touch proves to be as effective as I think it is, you could extract huge quantities of gold from the oceans.”

Tyler’s mind reeled at how much gold that could be. “We’re talking millions of ounces, then.”

Orr shook his head. “You’re thinking way too small. I’ll give you a hint. There are over a billion cubic kilometers of seawater in the world, and the average solubility of gold is thirteen parts per trillion. Now get going.”

Tyler began climbing down. Steadying himself wasn’t too challenging, and the mindless activity allowed him to calculate the staggering sum that was driving this whole venture. Aiden had been far off when he’d guessed that Orr and Cavano were each after a block of gold worth four billion dollars. Tyler went through the math twice and came up with the same stunning figure both times.

If what Orr told him was true, even the most conservative estimate would put the value of all the gold in the world’s oceans at twenty-five trillion dollars.

FIFTY-FOUR

O rr watched as Tyler and Stacy huddled over the geolabe, the copied pages of the codex he had given them, and a lantern to see by. As Tyler talked, Stacy made notes on the copy with a pencil. Tyler had refused to work with her until Gaul gave him a taste of the Taser.

Those three pages he’d held back had been Orr’s ace in the hole. Without them, he knew Tyler and Stacy couldn’t have found the Midas chamber on their own. Not in the maze that faced them.

The floor of the cistern, the chamber that would have held the water supplying the well, sat 150 feet below the church, and its ceiling soared three stories above them, where it was pierced by the well opening. The cistern’s floor was sunk ten feet from the surrounding tunnels, so that a pool would have formed. Now that the aqueducts were shut off, the chamber was dry. Crude steps led up to each tunnel.

Orr ran his hand over the light gray tuff that made up the walls of the room. The solidified volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius, which had erupted regularly since humans first settled in Naples, was so easy to work that the earliest Greek settlers had excavated tons of it for building material. They soon realized that the tunnels could be used as aqueducts to transport water for the city dwellers. The network of tunnels grew as the Romans, who wrested the city from the Greeks in the third century, mined the tuff to make the finest cement in Europe, creating structures that were still intact more than two thousand years later.