Boyd Morrison - The Midas Code

“But what does that mean?”

She shrugged, both frustrated and embarrassed that she didn’t know the answer, particularly with her sister’s life on the line. “My specialty was classical literature, not architecture. That’s why we need an expert. I don’t know how or why, but the third key to finding Archimedes’ map is the Parthenon.”

S herman Locke’s watch had been confiscated, so he didn’t know what time it was when the opening of the garage door woke him. Given that he was still full from the takeout sandwich and water they’d given him for dinner, he suspected it was the middle of the night. He rose from his cot and went to the portal in the door. The room’s single bulb had been turned off for the evening, but the crude covering over the hole left a small crack that let in a sliver of light. Sherman also discovered that it gave him a limited view of the warehouse.

He didn’t know what they were trying to keep him from seeing, but it wasn’t their faces. He’d gotten a good look at both of his captors, which wasn’t very comforting because it implied they had no intention of letting him out of here alive.

That made escape priority number one, both for him and for the girl they’d called Carol. He’d heard her cry out a few times, but the sound was muted, which meant that she’d been placed in the room farthest from his. He’d tried tapping on the wall a few times, but she hadn’t responded. Speaking to her through the cinder blocks wouldn’t work because he would have had to yell so loudly that Gaul would have heard as well.

As he peered through the crack, Sherman saw that another van had just backed into the warehouse next to the one in which he’d been abducted. He watched as two white men got out, the driver trim and dark-haired, the passenger pasty and doughy. They circled to the back of the truck, where they met Gaul and Phillips, who were still rubbing their eyes from their naps on the cots. They stared at something in the back of the van.

“You sure it’s safe to touch, Orr?” Gaul asked. He was speaking to the driver. Their voices were barely audible to Sherman.

“Crenshaw,” Orr said to the passenger, “show them the readings.”

Crenshaw had his back to Sherman, so he couldn’t see what the man had in his hand. Crenshaw motioned his arm back and forth several times and then held up what looked like a voltage meter.

“See?” Crenshaw said. “No problem.”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Do you like two million dollars?” Orr said. Because of the authoritative way Orr said it, Sherman was sure he was the leader of this gang.

“I love two million dollars,” Phillips said.

Two million dollars each? Sherman thought. How much were they asking for him?

“Consider it hazard pay,” Orr said. “Now help us get it on the floor next to that table.”

The four of them lifted something from the van, and just before they disappeared from view Sherman spied a black metal box that couldn’t have been more than a foot on each side. Even though the object was small, they were straining from the load. Whatever was in there was surprisingly heavy.

Once it was down, they went back to the van.

“How are our guests doing?” Orr asked.

“The general was a pain in the ass, but we handled it. The girl is still groggy from the roofies.”

Orr looked directly at the hole in the door, but Sherman didn’t think there was any way he could be seen.

“What about the rest of this crap?” Gaul said.

“Drive the truck to the far end of the warehouse and dump it,” Orr said. “We don’t want some kids to stumble onto it in a junkyard and alert the FBI.”

Gaul and Phillips did as he ordered, stopping the van at the far wall fifty yards away. With the van facing toward him, he couldn’t see what they were tossing out, but pieces of metal clanged onto the concrete every few seconds, with some of the impacts noisier than others.

Orr’s and Crenshaw’s voices lowered, so Sherman could hear only snippets of their conversation. “… truck… by Monday… enough dust… bank… thirty years…”

That was all he could make out before the van started up again and returned to its original parking spot.

With the van out of the way, Sherman could now see what they’d tossed out. One of his greatest assets as a fighter pilot was his vision, and although he needed reading glasses now, his distance acuity was as good as ever.

His eye was drawn to a green cylinder with fins around its core lying on its side. Something about it was familiar. At first he thought it was an unusual compressor design, but then he saw the stenciled Cyrillic letters on the base and realized where he’d seen a photo of it.

During his final three years in the Air Force, Sherman had been the deputy director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, whose mission was to determine ways to counter weapons of mass destruction. As the agency’s highest-ranking military leader, he had been briefed on every major risk to national security posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. In fact, his keynote address the previous morning had been on unconventional tactics that could make the effects of these weapons more widespread and deadly.

Two years ago, he was part of a team that went to Moscow to discuss the security of rogue nuclear weapons and materials. The fear was that terrorists would be able to get their hands on uranium or plutonium to fashion their own crude atomic bombs, then smuggle them into American cities.

As part of the discussion, they also talked about other sources of nuclear material. One potential hazard was from radioisotope thermal generators, similar to the power sources used in American space probes like Voyager. Russia had hundreds of unmanned lighthouses and signal stations ringing the coasts of the country in locations so remote that maintaining them on a regular basis was costly. So, instead of conventional diesel generators that would have to be fueled and repaired routinely, the Soviets constructed RTGs to power them and provide guideposts for their Navy. Then they forgot about them.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent cost cuts in the military, little emphasis had been placed on safeguarding these power plants, and they were abandoned. Because they were unmanned, they made tempting targets for thieves hoping to scavenge the metal for profit. In taking the devices apart, the thieves would sometimes expose the core capsules that held the radioactive strontium-90 power source.

In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, three villagers had either stolen or come across two of these capsules containing ten pounds of the highly dangerous material. The capsules generate their power using heat, so the men thought they would make a good replacement for their campfire in the winter cold.

Within hours, they became sick with radiation poisoning and would have died without immediate care. Two of them were hospitalized for months and never fully recovered. The only reason they didn’t die within days was that the capsules were still partially shielded by lead. The entire town of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, had been permanently evacuated for a radiation reading lower than the output of one of these unshielded capsules.

The green object sitting a hundred yards away looked exactly like one of the RTGs his DTRA team had been shown during the trip to Moscow. Now Sherman understood why the container they’d been carrying was so heavy. It was made entirely of lead.

For whatever reason they had taken Sherman and Carol, this was no simple kidnapping. His captors had something far grander planned. He had to get a message to Tyler, had to make him understand the deadly danger they faced.