Boyd Morrison - The Midas Code

Now Tyler had no doubt the guy was crazy. Why would he walk away from something like that? Wouldn’t he have told someone?

“So what’s your proof?” he asked Orr. “I don’t suppose you got a couple of photos.” Even if he did, what good was that in the age of Photoshop and special effects?

“Better. I’ve been waiting all morning to show this to you.” Orr hefted the backpack and held it out to Tyler. “Be careful. And don’t take the contents out of the bag.”

The bag was heavier than Tyler thought it would be. He gently set the pack on the ground and unzipped it. He knelt with Stacy next to it and peered inside.

At first the interior of the bag was too dark for them to see anything, so Tyler twisted the bag to let in more light. During the move, he felt the spongy give of Styrofoam, not the hardness he was expecting from an object so dense. Then something reflected the cloudy sky with a yellow metallic glow, and Tyler understood what he was looking at.

Stacy gasped at the sight.

Set carefully into the packing material was a golden hand.

S tacy couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The golden hand ended at the wrist. But what made the hand even more remarkable was that it wasn’t solid.

Tyler lifted it out of the Styrofoam a few inches so that they could see it more clearly. The exposed veins, ligaments, muscles, and bones in the cutaway of the wrist were shaped with exquisite detail down to the smallest capillary. Every pore and wrinkle on the back of the hand was replicated. Even the marrow of bones was represented in its delicate latticework. It was as if they were looking at a cross-section drawing in an anatomy textbook.

“The missing hand of Midas’s daughter,” Orr said proudly. “I acquired it last year. It matches the sculpture I saw all those years ago.”

“This can’t be real,” Tyler said.

Stacy shook her head slowly. “I’ve seen this hand before.”

Tyler looked at her in shock. “You have?”

“It was all over the news last year,” she said. “Someone broke into a London auction house and cleaned out one of their vaults. The most valuable item taken was a golden hand.” She remembered the theft because the initial inspection of the hand baffled appraisers, who could not even speculate as to how it had been made.

“I told you this was no wild-goose chase,” Orr said.

“You also killed two guards in the process.”

Orr shrugged. “They were in the way.”

Stacy’s lip curled in disgust at his cavalier attitude toward murder.

“But this can’t be a real hand,” Tyler said. “It has to be a sculpture.”

“If you’ll look closely, you’ll see that it would be impossible to sculpt that kind of detail or use a mold to cast it.”

Stacy inspected the hand again and saw that Orr was right. The way the structures overlapped and disappeared into the cavities inside the hand would defy the efforts of even the most skilled craftsman.

“How much would something like this be worth?” she wondered aloud.

Orr answered. “About eighty thousand dollars at today’s prices. Just for the weight of the gold, of course. I’d bet the hand itself would fetch several million at auction. If you could find a buyer, that is. Stolen property is hard to get rid of.”

“Why are you showing this to us?” Tyler asked Orr.

“Because I need you to believe that what you’re searching for really exists. Otherwise, I’m just a crackpot with some idiotic quest that can’t possibly be achieved. You’ll just go through the motions hoping you can figure out some way to find your father, which won’t happen, by the way.”

“You’ve got everything figured out, haven’t you?” Tyler said.

Orr grinned again. “Not everything. That’s why I need you two.”

“All right,” Tyler said. “We’ll do it your way.”

Orr held out his hand. “I’ll take the bag back.” Tyler zipped it back up and gave it to him.

“What now?” Stacy said.

“Suppose we believe your story,” Tyler said. “The Midas Touch existed, and there’s a buried treasure somewhere under Naples. You’ve seen it before. You know where it is. Why don’t you just go get it yourself? Why go to all this trouble?”

“Just because I’ve seen it before doesn’t mean I know how to find it.”

“What does that mean?” Stacy said.

“It’s a long and complicated story, but it boils down to this. There are two ways to get to the treasure. I can’t go the way I’ve been before for reasons that you don’t need to know, which means I need the second way to find it. Archimedes’ way. Using the map he created.”

“Archimedes lived over twenty-two hundred years ago. Do you really think that map still exists? Or that it even still applies? Naples has been built over by the Greeks, Syracusans, Romans, Italians. Not to mention Vesuvius blowing up every once in a while, covering everything with ash.”

“When Gia and I were in the tunnels, we came across one cistern where we saw light coming through a well opening far above our heads. That’s the entry point I’m looking for. Unfortunately, there are thousands of wells in Naples, not all of which are documented, and most of which have been plugged up.”

“Why the test on the ferry?” Tyler said.

“I couldn’t hire you for the job, could I?” Orr said. “You’d turn me in. Now that I know that you can solve Archimedes’ puzzle, I think you can figure out where the map is. And I have a time limit.”

“What’s the deadline?” Stacy said, and cringed when she realized the double meaning.

“You’re funny,” Orr said. “I need to have the map in my hands by Sunday night. In Naples.”

“Are you kidding?” Tyler said. “It’s Wednesday. You want us to solve a twenty-two-hundred-year-old riddle in just four days?”

“I don’t have any choice. If I haven’t found Midas’s tomb by then, the Fox will get it.”

“Who’s the Fox?” Stacy said.

“It’s Gia’s nickname. We’re in a race to find it first. She would kill you in a second if she thought you were anywhere near finding it, so you’ll want to be careful.”

“But we have no idea where to start!”

“You will. The night I acquired the golden hand, I also retrieved an ancient manuscript written by Archimedes himself. Luckily, I was able to get to it before it was photographed and appraised for the auction catalog.”

“That’s where you got the instructions for building the geolabe,” Tyler said.

“Right. I had a translation done by a retired Classics professor, but he was in his eighties and not up to the challenge of a mission like this.”

“Who is he?”

“It doesn’t really matter, because he is currently dead.”

By the look in Orr’s eyes, she doubted that the professor died of old age.

“I’ll be emailing you a file of photographs of the Archimedes Codex as well as the translation,” Orr said. “That should give you a good head start in your search, but I’m sure we missed something. Your job is to figure out what it was. I want daily updates on your progress. If you fail to deliver an update, or I think you’re holding back, I will remove an ear from both Sherman and Carol. Understand?”

Stacy swallowed hard.

“We’ll give you the updates,” Tyler said, “but we want proof that my father and Stacy’s sister are all right.”

“I’ve already sent you proof-of-life videos.”

“I want one every day, with proof that their ears are intact. You miss a day, and this is over.”

Orr thought about it, then nodded. “Fair enough. Once a day.” He looked around at the crowd hustling for one of the four entrances to get into the game that had just started. “It looks like it’s time for me to go. I’ll be in touch.” Orr slung the backpack over his shoulder.