The Midas Code

He pushed Cavano to go faster. She cursed at him as she nearly tripped. When they tumbled into the cistern that had been their starting point, Grant didn’t stop. He raced into one of the other tunnels and kept going until he was in the next room. Cavano and Sal followed, their faces a combination of fear, anger, and confusion.

Grant came to a halt.

“We should be okay here,” he said. “The smoke should be pulled up the well by the chimney effect. But if we see any headed this way, we should retreat farther.”

“What happened?”

“Orr planted a booby trap in that room. Your boys took the bait and set it off.”

“They’re dead?”

“If they aren’t yet, they’ll wish they were. The burns from white phosphorus grenades are horrific. I’ve used them in conjunction with high explosives. Very effective and vicious. We called it a shake-and-bake op.”

Cavano’s jaw clenched and her brow furrowed with hatred. “What do we do?”

“Nothing we can do right now. Even with a gas mask for protection, it would burn your skin and set your clothes on fire. We’ll have to wait until it dissipates.”

“How long?”

“Maybe ten minutes. Maybe an hour. Depends on how drafty it is.”

Cavano explained the booby trap to Sal, who spewed what sounded like every Italian curse word in existence. Grant didn’t need to speak the language to know that Sal and Cavano had just made a pact to make Orr suffer in the most terrible ways imaginable.

FIFTY-SEVEN

T o Tyler, it seemed as though they’d been in the tunnels for days, but his watch told him it had been little more than an hour. Halfway through, a dull peal, like thunder, had echoed off the walls. It had to be the booby trap Orr had implied when he said he was leaving a nasty surprise for Cavano. Orr even smiled with satisfaction at the sound. Tyler just had to hope Grant had gotten the warning he’d risked writing on a piece of paper torn from the codex translation.

Only a few of the passages were as narrow as the first one, so all four of them often walked through together. At one point, Tyler had caught Orr scratching a mark on the wall of a passageway they’d just come through, presumably so that he could find his way out again. Orr must have been confident that Cavano would be in no condition to trail them, but Tyler made himself believe Grant had survived the explosion and would be following the marks.

Archimedes had made the operation of the geolabe intuitive only to someone who understood his mathematical reasoning. Once Tyler had solved the formula in the codex, the usage of the geolabe was relatively simple, but he wasn’t about to tell Orr that.

Most intersections had four offshoots, but some had three and some had five. To find which direction to go, the top knob would be rotated clockwise so that the top dial would move the same number of zodiac marks as the number of openings at the intersection. The bottom knob would be rotated by the same number, but counterclockwise. Then Tyler would flip the geolabe over, and the dial on the opposing side would show the correct direction to go, with the six o’clock point indicating where they’d come from. After the tenth intersection, Tyler still hadn’t seen the dial point to the six o’clock position. As long as the geolabe wasn’t telling them to backtrack, he was confident that he had interpreted Archimedes’ instructions correctly.

Twice they came across cisterns that were still partially filled with water. Tyler guessed that the tunnels occasionally flooded with rainwater during downpours. Maybe the aqueducts had been filled with water only part of the time, which would have made the trek that much easier for Archimedes’ spy.

As they walked, he kept an eye on Stacy. She had withdrawn, saying only the minimum to keep on the path. Several times she seemed on the verge of saying something to him, but then she closed her mouth and looked away. Embarrassment, anger, fear-Tyler couldn’t tell the reason, but she didn’t need to apologize for anything. In fact, he realized an hour ago that he should apologize to her. After playing the events of today back in his mind, Tyler remembered another event that convinced him of Stacy’s innocence. Tyler would let Orr’s charade continue as long as he could, but at the right time he had to go on the offensive, and when he did, he would need Stacy’s help.

Around the next corner, the passageway ended at the midsection of a steeply inclined tunnel leading up to the left and down to the right. Throughout the walk, the group had gone up or down a few steps, but overall they had stayed on essentially the same level underground. The upward direction of the tunnel abruptly ended at a brick wall.

“What the hell?” Gaul said.

“How old do you think those bricks are?” Tyler asked Stacy.

“At least two thousand years.”

“Maybe they didn’t want anyone to find Midas’s tomb,” Orr said.

“Then why leave the passage we just came through unsealed?” Tyler said.

“I don’t know. You’re the engineer. You tell me.”