Boyd Morrison - The Midas Code

“A, uh, temperature gauge,” Crenshaw said. “We need to make sure it’s not overheating.”

“And? Did I do it right?” Forcet never did like having the quality of his work questioned.

After a few more passes, the device beeped and Crenshaw nodded. “We’re below safe limits.”

“We’ll need some help getting all this into the van,” Orr said.

“Hey, I’ll throw that in for free,” Forcet said.

The three of them heaved the thermal-insulation container into the van first.

As he strained at the effort, Forcet said, “What’s this thing made of anyway, lead?”

Orr laughed, not because it was a funny joke, but because Forcet was absolutely right. The box had walls of lead three inches thick.

The finned cylinder was next.

Once they got it secured in the van, Forcet wiped his forehead again.

“Sure is hot,” he said. “What the hell is that thing? Some kind of engine?”

Forcet didn’t normally ask questions, but then again this was the first time he’d seen the contents of a crate he’d delivered to Orr. It couldn’t hurt to tell him now.

“It’s a radioisotope thermoelectric generator,” Orr said.

“That’s a mouthful. What’s it used for?”

“For powering remote lighthouses. Totally automated. Can run for twenty years without maintenance.” Orr patted the cylindrical RTG where a yellowed and torn piece of paper was the only remnant of the radiation symbol that should have been there. “This one is from a peninsula on the Arctic Ocean. Took me months to find.” Although not as long as he thought it would. The diminishing summer pack ice along Russia’s northern coast made getting at these legacies of the Soviet Union much easier.

“Looks ancient.”

“Probably thirty years old.”

Forcet laughed. “I don’t know what you’d do with the battery from a thirty-year-old generator, and I don’t want to know.” He put a hand on his stomach. “I’ll need some Pepto-Bismol or something when I get home.”

He turned to climb back into the trailer. Orr drew a pistol from his jacket and shot him twice in the back, causing Crenshaw to jump back and squawk in surprise. Forcet crumpled to the ground. He gurgled blood for a few seconds and then stopped breathing.

“Jesus!” Crenshaw yelled. “You could have warned me!”

“Don’t be stupid,” Orr said. “If I warned you, I’d warn him.”

Orr put the gun away and took a vial of crack cocaine from his pocket and put it in Forcet’s overalls. It would look like a drug-smuggling deal gone bad.

“I’ve just never seen anyone get shot before,” Crenshaw said, backing away from the fresh corpse.

“Now you have. Congratulations.”

The only heavy items left were the pieces of depleted uran ium shielding Forcet had pried away from the RTG, but Orr and Crenshaw could lift them easily. In ten minutes they had the rest of the trailer’s contents in the van, leaving nothing to link them to Forcet.

Before they got back into the van, Crenshaw used the Geiger counter again.

“What’s it reading now?” Orr asked. He wasn’t crazy about getting into a vehicle full of radioactive material.

“About two millirads per hour,” Crenshaw said. “On the drive back to the warehouse, it’ll be less than you’d get from an X-ray.”

They got in. Orr looked at the lead container. The strontium-90 pellets inside would be cooking along at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. “What do you think the reading would be if we opened the lid?”

“In the range of two thousand rads per hour.”

“Perfect.”

As he put the van into gear, Orr glanced at Forcet’s body lying next to the truck, but he felt no guilt. Radiation poisoning was a nasty way to go. The sweating and nausea were just the first signs. Vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, and uncontrolled bleeding would have followed.

To his way of thinking, Orr had done his longtime smuggler a favor. After spending more than two hours in close proximity to the exposed capsules, Forcet would have been dead within a week anyway.

W hen Stacy and Tyler had decided that their next step was to fly to England, she imagined heading back to Sea-Tac Airport and going through all the hassle and pain of eight hours of traveling by commercial airliner to Heathrow. Instead, barely ninety minutes after Tyler had explained to Miles why they needed a plane, she was now taking off from Seattle on her first private-jet flight, lounging in a spacious leather seat, and accompanied by only two other passengers, Tyler and Grant.

Despite the near-death experience on the ferry-or maybe because of it-Stacy reveled in the luxury. She could get used to this.

“You fly like this all the time?” she said to Tyler as the engines spooled up and the plane began its takeoff roll.

“No,” he said. “I’m usually in the cockpit.”

“You’re a pilot, too? I don’t remember that from when I prepared for my interview with you.”

He shrugged as if he thought it was no big deal. “It didn’t seem relevant.”

“Are you kidding? A handsome engineer who’s also a pilot? My viewers would love that kind of detail.”

Grant leaned toward Stacy. “He may have a PhD in mechanical engineering and be able to dispose of bombs and fly jets, but don’t let that fool you. He’s a secret Star Trek nerd.”

“What about you?” she said. “I suppose that in addition to being a former pro wrestler, an electrical engineer with a degree from the University of Washington, and an Army SEAL-”

“Hey, hey, hey. I won’t stand for that kind of insult. SEALs are Navy. I was a combat engineer, then a Ranger.”

“Pardon me. In addition to all that, I suppose you fly jets, too.”

“Me? Hell, no.”

“Thank God. I thought I was in a meeting of Overachievers Anonymous.”

“I just got my license to fly helicopters, though.”

Stacy rolled her eyes. “Maybe we should have you on the show next time.”

The jet lifted off, heading toward cruising altitude. Tyler cleared his throat. “I’d love to add to Grant’s resume by telling you all about his addiction to trashy dating programs-”

“Hey!” Grant protested.

“-but we’d better figure out what our plan will be when we reach London and then get some shut-eye.”

The three of them unbuckled and gathered around a table. They opened a laptop so they could search the file with the translation of the Archimedes Codex.

“What time do we land?” Stacy asked.

“Around 2 p.m. local time,” Tyler said. “Should give us enough time to get something accomplished.”

“I knew you were a workaholic.”

“Just trying to be efficient. In fact, I think we should split up when we get there.”

“Whoa,” Grant said. “Can we just back up here? I came in late at the house. Why, exactly, are we going to England?”

“Do you want the long answer or the short answer?” Stacy said.

“We’ve got a few hours before I can sleep, so I’ll take the long answer.”

“Have you heard of the Antikythera Mechanism?” Stacy asked.

“Tyler mentioned it when he was fabricating the geolabe.”

Through the plane’s Web connection, she brought up a photo of three pieces of corroded bronze, the biggest about the diameter of a grapefruit. In each of the pieces, intricate gearing could be seen.

“Looks like somebody left their clock in the rain for about a thousand years,” Grant said.

“About two thousand years,” Tyler said. When they’d been discussing it earlier, he told Stacy that he’d researched the Antikythera Mechanism because he realized how similar it was to the geolabe he was hired to build.

“They found these bits in the shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900,” Stacy said. “For years nobody paid much attention to them until an archaeologist realized that the gearing predated anything else as sophisticated by fifteen hundred years. Some people refer to it as the world’s first analog computer. It would be like finding an IBM PC hidden in the dungeon of a medieval castle.”