Boyd Morrison: The Midas Code

Answer your phone, Dr. Locke. You don’t have much time left.

T yler Locke peered at the text message and tried to decide whether it was a joke or some kind of marketing gimmick. He was ten minutes into his one-hour ferry commute to Bremerton, and three times his cell phone had rung with an unknown number. Tyler had ignored the calls, but the text message came soon after, again from an unknown number. The only people who had his cell number were in the phone’s contact list. As a rule, he didn’t answer calls from numbers he didn’t know, figuring that if it was important the caller would leave a voice mail. So far, no new messages.

The boat was only half full, so Tyler had the bench to himself, with his long legs propped up on the facing seat. Any other morning, his best friend, Grant Westfield, would be next to him playing games on his phone, but Grant was planning to beat the afternoon rush hour for a long weekend in Vancouver, so he’d taken an earlier ferry. They’d been making the trip from Seattle to Bremerton three days a week for two months to consult on the construction of a new ammunition depot at the naval base.

The phone rang again. Same number. Tyler drank his coffee and looked out at the receding Seattle skyline. It was eight-forty in the morning, and even though it was June sixteenth the sun was nowhere to be seen. Low clouds and drizzle made it a typical “June-uary” day, as the locals called the cool, overcast weather that usually preceded a sunny July.

Couldn’t be a cold call, Tyler concluded. A telemarketer wouldn’t call him Dr. Locke. Tyler wasn’t an MD. He had a PhD, and the only time anyone called him doctor was on one of his consulting gigs. None of his co-workers used the honorific unless they were making fun of him.

The call might be work-related, but he had fifty emails to plow through before he reached Bremerton, and he didn’t want to be sucked into a long conversation. He again let voice mail handle it and put the phone away. Eventually, the caller would get the hint to leave a message.

A minute after he began working on his laptop again, the phone beeped with another text message. Tyler sighed and pulled the phone from his pocket.

Dr. Locke, unless you answer my call you will be dead in twenty-eight minutes.

Tyler had to read the message three times to believe what he was seeing. He closed his laptop and sat up straight, taking his feet off the seat. He slowly scanned the passengers around him, but no one seemed at all interested in him.

The phone rang. Same number.

Tyler tapped the screen and said, “Who is this?”

“This is the person who is going to kill everyone on that ferry if you don’t do what I say.”

Tyler couldn’t detect an accent in the gravelly voice on the other end. “Why don’t I just hang up on you and call the police?” he said. “Should make your day when the FBI drops by.”

“You could do that, but what would you tell them? My number? It’s a prepaid phone bought with cash. Believe me, I’ve thought this through.”

For a moment, Tyler considered doing just what he’d threatened: hanging up and calling the cops. But the man was right. He had little to tell them.

“What’s this about?” Tyler said.

“It’s about you, Dr. Locke. Actually, that sounds pretentious. I’ll just call you Locke.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“It may seem like that now, but it won’t in a few minutes.”

Tyler paused. “Why are you calling me?”

“Because you’re exactly who I need. Bachelor’s degree from MIT in mechanical engineering. PhD from Stanford. Former Army captain in a combat-engineering battalion, which makes you an expert in demolitions and bomb disposal. Now chief of special operations at Gordian Engineering. And all of that before you’re forty. You know, you sound very good on paper.”

“So you know who I am. I should take all of this seriously because

…?”

“Because I just emailed you a couple of pictures that show how serious your situation is. I know the ferry has Wi-Fi. Take a look at them. I’ll wait. Better hurry, though.”

With the phone propped in one hand, Tyler reluctantly opened his laptop and checked his in box.

One new message from an email address he didn’t recognize. The subject line read 27 minutes left.

Tyler opened the message. The body of the email had no text, just two images.

The first showed a two-axle truck with the name SILVERLAKE TRANSPORT on the side.

The second showed a refrigerator with its door open. Inside was a transparent plastic canister the size of a beer keg filled with a powdery gray substance. Cloth concealed an object on top. A digital timer was mounted on the front of the canister. The water was dead calm outside, but Tyler felt seasick.

“I’m listening,” he said, his mind already racing to how he could warn the passengers to get to a life raft.

“I thought you might. You know a bomb when you see it. In case you didn’t get it, the fridge is inside the truck, which is on the vehicle deck below you. And don’t call the police. I’ll know.”

“You couldn’t have gotten it on board.”

“You think I’m bluffing? Tell me about binary explosives.”

Tyler sucked in a breath before responding. “Binary explosives start as two separate inert compounds, but when they’re mixed together they become highly volatile. They’re often used for target practice by shooting clubs. The explosives can only be set off by a high-powered rifle round or a detonator. You can buy them on the Internet.”

“See? You are good. There’s a hundred pounds of binary in the fridge. Enough to blow a thirty-foot hole in that ferry and set half the cars on fire. I doubt there’d be many survivors.”

“The bomb-sniffing dogs at the dock would have detected it,” Tyler said.

“I took precautions to make sure the taggant odor was sealed in, and I paid some jobless college kid three hundred bucks to drive it on board. What’s bad for the economy is good for me.”

“If you want to blow up the ferry, why warn me?”

“Listen and find out. I want you to go to the truck. It has a padlock on the door. The key is taped inside the left wheel well. Go there now, or the ferry will never reach Bremerton.”

Bremerton. Suddenly, Tyler had a horrifying thought: the naval base. This guy wanted Tyler to drive the truck into a US Navy port using his credentials.

“So you want me to become a suicide bomber for you?” Tyler said, furiously thinking of a way to ditch the truck before he reached the entrance to the base.

The man laughed. “A suicide bomber? Not even close.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Locke, you’re going to be a hero. That bomb is set to explode in twenty-four minutes and thirty seconds. I want you to disarm it.”

A s Byron Gaul waited for the elevator in the lobby of the Sheraton Premiere, he checked his surroundings. He was relieved not to find unexpected security alterations for the conference being held in the hotel. He’d scouted the location thoroughly the week before in preparation for the mission, but given that the hotel was in Tysons Corner, Virginia, just outside Washington, there was always the chance security had been beefed up, especially for a Pentagon-sponsored conference called the Unconventional Weapons Summit.

Two Army majors approached, deep in conversation. When they saw Gaul, he nodded to them, and they replied in kind. Because they were inside with their hats off, his lower rank didn’t require a salute. Gaul was dressed in a class-A Army service uniform with the rank of captain and a name tag that said Wilson. The uniform and all its ribbons and adornments were purchased off the Internet. The hardest part had been finding a size to fit his below-average height and above-average musculature.