The Midas Code

Tyler explained about the puzzle to deactivate the bomb, that it was some kind of test to prove to Orr that they could carry out his insane quest.

“And how did he know my name?” Grant said. “Who is this guy?”

“You met him once. His name is Jordan Orr.”

“Wait a minute. The guy who hired you to build the geolabe?”

Tyler nodded. “And I’m guessing Stacy knows him, too.”

“Only since this morning,” she said. “I was in town for a fund-raiser, and I get a call that my sister, Carol, was kidnapped. All he told me was to get on the ferry and not to tell you about her or he would hurt her.”

Tyler dug his fingernails into his palms until the knuckles were white. He’d never been angrier in his life than he was at that moment. If he had known about Stacy’s kidnapped sister, he might have been able to warn his father in time. Tyler wanted to yell and scream and pound his fists against the dashboard. But it was Orr he wanted to throttle, not Stacy. She was as much a pawn in this as he was.

Tyler shook his head and took a deep breath until the moment passed.

“It’s good we decided not to talk in the truck with Orr listening in,” he said to Stacy. “We’re going to have to be very careful dealing with him.”

She turned to him, and Tyler saw her face etched with fear. “Just promise me that my sister will be all right. I know you can’t really promise that, but do it anyway.”

Tyler nodded. “I promise. We’ll find a way to get them both back safely.”

“There’s something I want to know,” Stacy said. “If you built that device, the geolabe, how did Orr get hold of it?”

“I was approached by Orr last year, after Miles twisted my arm to go on your show. I mentioned on the program that I had an interest in Archimedes. Orr showed me a translation from an ancient Greek document with instructions for building an object called a geolabe and told me it was from a private collector. It sounded like an intriguing job, so I said yes.”

“And you weren’t suspicious of this mysterious request?”

Tyler nodded. “Mildly, but the project seemed harmless enough. I had one of my guys, Aiden MacKenna, look into the documents to see what he could find, just out of curiosity. Nothing came up. It wasn’t until a month after I delivered the completed project that Scotland Yard released a long-lost photo of a manuscript page that matched my document verbatim. Only then did we realize that it had been stolen.”

“Did you report it to the police?”

“Yes, but by that time Orr had been tipped off and disappeared.”

“How long did it take you to build this thing?”

“About three months,” Tyler said. “Without Gordian’s engineering resources, it would have taken a lot longer to decipher the schematics.”

“That doesn’t make sense, though,” Stacy said.

“Why?”

“Because if he blew up the ferry, the geolabe would have been destroyed along with it. Why did he risk losing something that would take so long to build again if we couldn’t solve that puzzle?”

Tyler’s skin prickled at the thought of how close they had been to becoming permanent denizens of Puget Sound.

“Orr must have decided that you and I were the only people on the planet who could solve the Archimedes puzzle, so if we failed the geolabe was worthless to him. Now that he knows we can operate it, we’ve become indispensable to him. We’re a package deal along with the geolabe.”

“This is crazy,” Stacy said.

Tyler shook his head at the colossal understatement. “Which part? That Orr thinks the Midas Touch exists or that he thinks Archimedes constructed a device that will lead us to it?”

ELEVEN

T he van slowed, but with the blindfold on, Sherman Locke couldn’t tell whether it was because they were approaching another turn or because they had reached their destination.

They’d been traveling for over an hour, mostly at highway speeds, which meant they could be in DC, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, or West Virginia. After he was hit with the Taser, a cloth had been stuck in his mouth and his wrists and ankles were cuffed. He was thrown into the back of a panel van, with the fake hotel staffer driving and the phony Army officer in back with him. He was frisked thoroughly, and his car keys, wallet, and phone were taken.

Before the blindfold went on, Sherman saw a girl lying unconscious on the floor of the van. There were no bruises or blood, which made him think she’d been drugged. He didn’t recognize her, so he couldn’t fathom why the two of them had been kidnapped. Blond and in her late twenties, the girl had a runner’s physique. That would be helpful when the time came to make an escape attempt.

His gag had been removed for the drive, but Sherman hadn’t been able to get anything out of his stoic captor, whose sole response was to tell him to shut up or he’d put the cloth back in. But if he was trying to intimidate Sherman, he might as well piss up a flagpole.