Boyd Morrison - The Midas Code

Orr would become rich beyond belief, while the people who’d made his life hell would lose everything. He relished the poetic justice of it.

Gaul sat next to him watching a movie, while Phillips and Crenshaw were back in the US completing their part of the plan. There was no sense discussing the mission with Gaul until they got to Italy, not with so many potential eavesdroppers around them.

Orr had the entire sequence in his head. With all the heists he’d pulled in the past, meticulous preparation was second nature to him. Of course, he’d had to put it all down on paper for Gaul, Phillips, and Crenshaw, but he made sure they’d burned all the evidence once it had been committed to memory.

After they arrived in Rome, it would be only an hour and ten minutes on the Frecciarossa high-speed train to Naples. There he’d rent a car and pick up the items he’d sent by overnight service-items that would have gotten him arrested if he’d checked them on an airline flight.

Orr hadn’t been to Naples in five years, but he remembered it well enough. At a population of more than four million for the Greater Naples metropolitan area, the sheer size of the city would let him do his business without alerting Gia Cavano. Cavano was well-connected in the city, but Orr had cultivated a wide range of aliases to travel under, only one of which she knew besides his real name.

That meant he could get into Naples a day early, put everything into motion, and wait for his bigger problem: Tyler Locke.

Was Locke really accomplishing his task? Orr suspected that he was at least trying. The tracker showed the geolabe first in England, then in Munich. What information Locke and Benedict were gleaning in those locations Orr couldn’t guess, but it didn’t really matter. He was results-oriented, and Locke was the type who delivered.

If Locke and Benedict failed, Orr had a much less lucrative but simple backup plan. He’d let Cavano know that he would reveal the existence of the gold chamber to the Carabinieri, Italy’s national police force, unless, of course, she cut him in on the deal and shared the take. The Italian authorities would never let her get away with looting a national treasure if they knew about it. Sharing the spoils with Cavano would be a bitter consolation prize, but it was better than nothing. She wouldn’t care much for it, either, since he was the one who’d double-crossed her originally.

Orr had every confidence in himself, but where plans often had the potential to go awry was with his partners in crime. That’s why he’d chosen the participants in this job so carefully. Gaul and Phillips were solid. Not that they didn’t have their faults. Gaul was a gambler, always in debt, but that made his need for money useful. Phillips’s weakness was women, throwing away thousands at upscale S and M clubs. Orr shuddered at the thought of the diseases he must be afflicted with, although he didn’t worry about leaving Phillips with Carol Benedict. Phillips was the masochistic type. He wouldn’t be interested in a helpless woman.

On the job, Gaul and Phillips were total professionals. Orr had worked with each of them many times before, and they’d never let him down.

Crenshaw was the wild card. A brilliant bomb-maker, but squirrelly enough to be a prospective liability. Phillips would take care of him when the time came.

Orr had no doubt that Gaul and Phillips would eventually blow through their two-million-dollar shares and become threats, but by that time he would be safely ensconced in the lifestyle that a billion dollars could provide. If those two so much as implied that they would blackmail him, he would have many tools at his disposal to silence them.

When he’d first formulated his long-term plan all those years ago, he’d debated whether to go into an arrangement with Cavano. The discovery of the Archimedes Codex had made the uneasy alliance pay off. She’d needed his expertise, and she had the resources to make the theft possible. Returning the manuscript to her, however, would have made Orr another of her minions, sharing in the proceeds, but nothing more than a bit player.

That wasn’t enough for him. When his parents died, he had given the authorities the name of his relatives in Naples. But Cavano’s father had made it clear that they would not help him. He felt that the suicide of Orr’s father was a disgrace and the murder of his mother dishonorable. Whether Cavano had been aware of her father’s refusal to take him in Orr didn’t know and didn’t care. She had to pay for the sins of the father.

But Orr wouldn’t kill her. He had discovered how close she was to losing her position as the head of a Camorra crime family and that the Midas treasure would reverse her financial slide, making her one of the most powerful leaders in Naples. So he would take the fortune they had found together and make it his own. She wouldn’t see a single ounce of the gold.

Orr guzzled the last of his champagne and leaned the chair back to the full sleeping position. To help him doze off, he entertained the wonderful thought of her world crumbling around her. Cavano would lose the status she had grown accustomed to, just as Orr had all those years ago.

Then the other Camorra families would take her down and finish the job for him.

A s soon as the National Archaeological Museum in Athens opened its doors on Saturday morning, Grant bought three tickets and went inside. While he cased the museum, Tyler and Stacy went out shopping for supplies. They’d left the tracker from the geolabe in the airplane to give Orr as little information as possible about their movements.

The flight from Munich the night before had taken only a couple of hours, so the three of them had spent the rest of the evening thinking about how to steal the replica of the Antikythera Mechanism. It was a risk they all agreed to take, but it would really be Tyler putting his neck on the line despite Grant’s objections.

Using photos and a map of the museum they’d found on the Web, Tyler sketched out a plan for getting the replica out. It wasn’t foolproof by any means, but it seemed solid if the layout of the museum matched their information. There was minimal possibility of anyone getting hurt, except for Tyler if he got caught.

The classically designed building was laid out with marble-floored halls wrapped around two central open-air courtyards. The only way to the Antikythera Mechanism was to wind through the maze of exhibits toward the rear of the building and then walk back through an outer hall, where the pathway ended at a tiny room on the north face of the museum. Without the map, Grant would have been totally lost. Greeks and their labyrinths, he thought.

Grant took photos as he walked, as if he were just a tourist gawking at the bronze and stone statuary on display. He made only a token gesture to point the camera at the art objects, instead focusing most of his attention on the location of the cameras and attendants in each hall. Most of the attendants looked like young, casually dressed college students, one to each room.

Sweat soaked Grant’s shirt. He’d never before been in a museum that lacked air-conditioning. He thought respite from the heat outside was one of the benefits of visiting a museum in the summer, but the National Archaeological Museum was stifling. He couldn’t feel much of a breeze. The visitors seemed to be moving most of the air.

Grant passed a few display cases containing ancient gold jewelry and pottery fragments. Each of the cases was attached to the ceiling by a coiled cord. That would be the electricity for the lighting and the alarm system.

It was ten minutes before Grant saw his first guard. The man in a blazer was chatting with one of the pretty young attendants. The only thing he was armed with was a walkie-talkie. A key chain dangled from his belt attached by a retractable cord. Grant made sure to get a picture of him.