The Midas Code

“Well?” Cavano said.

“I have no idea.” The truth was always the best lie, and Grant wasn’t going to volunteer that Tyler had sent him a secret message.

Cavano stared at him a moment, then let it go. She watched Sal descend from above.

Grant wondered why she’d come along on the expedition. Maybe she was desperate. She was definitely running out of trusted soldiers. With three men lost in Munich, and then another two in Athens and a couple out of action at the galleria, her forces had dwindled quickly. Sure, she could find more grunts, but she might not trust them to keep their mouths shut about what they found. And he’d seen the glint in her eye. She wanted to see the gold again herself.

A bodyguard called to her in Italian as he came out of one of the tunnels leading from the cistern. He was holding what looked like a crinkled gum wrapper.

“Another clue, perhaps,” Cavano said. She took it from him, unwrapped it, and took a sniff. “It’s fresh. I can still smell the mint.”

She gave orders in Italian, then said to Grant, “Rodrigo goes first ahead of us. When he gets to the next room, he calls for us to enter, with you, me, and Sal going last. That way, if Jordan is waiting for us, he only takes out one of my men.”

“Does he know he’s cannon fodder?” Grant said, tilting his head toward Rodrigo.

“He does what I tell him to do. You walk in front of me. I want to see where you are. Sal, you bring up the rear.”

Rodrigo entered the tunnel, followed by the others. Grant had a flimsy plastic flashlight, not heavy enough to do any damage.

They wended their way through the tunnel until Rodrigo reached the next chamber. They halted while he searched for signs that there was no welcoming committee. He gave the all-clear, and they started moving forward again.

As Grant walked, he turned Tyler’s message over in his mind. Louis Dethy. It was obviously a name they both knew, but it was no one at Gordian or in the Army. Then he thought about the last name: Dethy. Grant wondered if he’d been a client of Gordian’s. No, they hadn’t met him. He’d heard about Dethy when they were researching bomb-disposal case studies.

Then it was as if a laser pierced his fog-shrouded brain.

Louis Dethy-trap.

In 2002, Louis Dethy, a seventy-nine-year-old Belgian retired engineer, was found in his own home killed by a gunshot wound to the neck. The police had assumed it was a suicide until one of the investigating detectives opened a wooden chest and barely missed being blasted by a shotgun.

The story was well known in Tyler and Grant’s combat-engineering unit because the police called in military engineers to defuse or disarm nineteen ingenious explosive devices and trick-wired shotguns Dethy had designed. Dethy had killed himself when he’d set one off accidentally. It took the engineers three weeks to clear the house, and Grant’s Army company had nicknamed his home the Dethy-trap.

Tyler was warning him that Orr had left behind a booby trap.

Grant instinctively looked down for any sign of trip wires or pressure plates, but he realized that they would already have been set off by the three men who’d gone before him. He was just glad he wasn’t in front.

As he approached the opening into the next chamber, Grant saw two of the men huddled around some object in the middle of the room, while the third kept his gun trained on Grant. A flashlight played over a partially opened knapsack.

It was the oldest trick in the book. In Iraq and Afghanistan, insurgents would place grenades inside an apparently harmless object and hope that a soldier would be curious enough and stupid enough to pick it up without inspecting it.

Cavano’s men fit that description. They’d never been through war, so it didn’t occur to them not to touch something that was lying around.

Rodrigo bent over and reached for the knapsack. Grant shouted “No!” but it was too late. Rodrigo picked up the sack. Grant turned and ran back into the tunnel, but Cavano was in his way. She lifted her weapon at the threat, but a blast concussion knocked both of them down.

The two men next to the bag had to have been killed instantly, but the third man was too far away from it to be severely injured if it was just a fragmentation grenade. Yet he suddenly began to cough, and then he began to scream.

“Sono infiammato! Sono infiammato!”

White smoke roiled toward Grant, and he pulled Cavano to her feet.

“What happened?” Cavano said. “He’s on fire?”

Grant knew immediately what it was. “Phosphorus! Get back! Go! Go! The smoke is poisonous! Hurry!”

Cavano cried out to Sal, who shuffled back as fast as his big frame could move. The smoke was piling toward Grant. If they got caught in it, they’d be coughing up blood for weeks, their lungs singed by the phosphorus, which burns when exposed to air.