The Midas Code

“You’re all right now,” Tyler said. “You did it. The water’s draining.” Then he whispered into her ear. “It’s time. Be ready.”

Gaul dropped the belt on top of her and backed away to join Orr at the opposite end of the room as they watched the barrier slowly drop.

“Put it on her,” Gaul said, with the Taser leveled at them. “I want to hear it click shut.” Tyler complied and looped it around her waist, snapping it closed.

A wave of heat washed over them, as if someone had opened the door on a broiling oven.

They all moved to the other side of the room as the cool air from the tunnels rushed in to replace the stifling damp air coming from beyond the descending barrier.

In five minutes the wall had sunk all the way to the bottom, and the air temperature had dropped enough for them to venture in.

They walked across the threshold, through a small antechamber, and emerged at a balcony overlooking a cavern far bigger than any they’d come through in their journey.

Stacy gasped. Nothing could have prepared her for the sight in front of her. This had to be the tomb of Midas, because from floor to ceiling every surface was made of gold.

FIFTY-NINE

T he lustrous golden finish reflected the lanterns so that the luminous power was amplified far beyond their meager outputs. The room stretched out before Tyler as if he were standing on the doorstep of El Dorado. The floors, walls, and ceiling were all made of gold, which ended in tendrils reaching for the chamber’s entryway like a creeping mold.

The entry platform to the one-hundred-foot-long by fifty-foot-wide room was a balcony with a solid railing along its length. The chamber seemed to have been excavated from a contiguous mass of volcanic tuff, and the balcony overlooked a massive ten-foot-deep pit that took up more than half the room’s length. Stairs to Tyler’s left led down to the pit, and in the middle of the pit was the statue of a girl lying on a cubical pedestal of gold, just as Orr had described, her left hand missing. The golden pedestal, six feet on each side, had lines of Greek lettering chiseled into it.

A spout of water poured from an opening in the wall into a bubbling pool that ran along the far end of the pit behind the pedestal. The water must have been supplied by a hot spring deep under the crust, superheated by the immense magma chamber that fed Mount Vesuvius. Clouds of steam rose from the pool. The room would have been unbearably hot with the barrier closed.

Another set of stairs led to a ten-foot-high terrace at the opposite end of the chamber, but those stairs were on the right side of the chamber, just past where the pool of water ended. The terrace didn’t have a golden railing as the entrance balcony did, so Tyler could clearly see a gold sarcophagus placed on it in a regal center position atop a platform overlooking the rest of the chamber.

There were no other golden objects in the chamber, so Midas must have been confident that the golden room itself was impressive enough to secure him a heavenly afterlife with the gods.

Tyler observed all of this in just a few seconds. He’d been preparing for the last hour, thinking about how to disable Orr and Gaul without getting tasered or blown up. Now that they had reached their objective, he and Stacy had exhausted their usefulness to Orr. If Tyler didn’t act soon, the two of them would be killed for sure. It was incredibly risky, but he could either try something now and go down fighting or die with a push of Orr’s detonator button.

Gaul and Orr had been so careful to keep an eye on both him and Stacy during the entire journey that he’d had no clear opportunity to strike. Either he would have been killed in the attempt or he would have been defeated and tipped his hand. Tyler knew that he would have only one chance, and he counted on this being the time when Orr and Gaul would be the most distracted, the moment they laid eyes on all that gold.

When they had walked through the entrance, Tyler had angled to position himself so that the two men were on either side of him, with Stacy behind them. As they stood at the balcony of the golden cavern, Orr and Gaul were clearly mesmerized by the bounty the chamber offered.

Tyler took his chance.

Without warning, he pushed Stacy backward out of his way. He used the geolabe to smack the Taser out of Gaul’s hand, and it went flying into the pit below, where it skidded into the pool. With a kick, he sent Gaul crashing down the stairs.

Tyler whirled around, trying to smash Orr’s head with the device, but it only hit him in the back. Orr bent over, his right hand caught between his body and the stone railing. Tyler grabbed his left wrist and tried to wrench the detonators off by undoing the two Velcro clasps.