Boyd Morrison: The Midas Code

For years he lived the high life two months at a time, until the tip about the Archimedes Codex presented the opportunity to find one of the most valuable treasures in history. If the trail really did lead to the lost tomb of King Midas and the fortune he was buried with, Orr could live the rest of his life in the style that had been stolen from him so long ago and at the same time exact his pound of flesh. His dream was within his grasp, and Stacy Benedict and Tyler Locke were going to find it for him or die trying.

Orr reflexively reached for his backpack and felt the codex still inside. He kept it with him at all times.

Crenshaw stuffed the rest of his doughnut into his mouth and nodded at the computer screen. “They’re having a little trouble with the Stomachion.”

Crenshaw’s mispronunciation of the puzzle created by Archimedes grated on Orr. Despite dropping out of high school, he was a voracious reader and considered himself an educated man. It wasn’t “Stuh-muh-CHEE-on,” as Crenshaw pronounced the word. It was “Stoh-MAH-keeon.” Orr sighed but didn’t correct him. “I have faith in them.”

The video feed showed Benedict and Locke going back and forth between the instructions and the puzzle pieces. There were fourteen-eleven triangles, one four-sided piece, and two five-sided pieces-and when the pieces were fitted together properly, they formed a square. According to Orr’s research, the puzzle was originally created by Archimedes to demonstrate some kind of mathematical principle. The version of the puzzle drawn in Orr’s codex had a different purpose: it was a code. The pieces were covered with Greek letters. The only problem was that Orr couldn’t figure out how to solve the puzzle.

Somehow the letters on the Stomachion corresponded to the signs of the zodiac on the face of the bronze geolabe, the ancient device Orr had linked to the bomb. If the puzzle were solved correctly, it would tell you how to use the geolabe, and the geolabe was the key in the search for Midas’s hoard of gold. But Orr had only five days left to locate the treasure, and Locke was his last hope for deciphering how to operate the geolabe.

Crenshaw pointed to his countdown timer, which was synchronized with the one on the bomb. It was down to nine minutes.

“They’re not going to make it,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Orr said. “Archimedes was a clever guy. The puzzle doesn’t have just one solution.”

Crenshaw looked at him in surprise. “How many does it have?”

Orr smiled. “More than seventeen thousand.”

T yler stared at the pieces of Archimedes’ puzzle hoping to see a pattern, but none was apparent. There were more than seventeen thousand solutions, but fewer than six hundred unique arrangements when equivalent rotations and reflections were subtracted. Archimedes had linked a single particular solution to the geolabe, and that was the one Tyler had to find.

On one side of the fourteen Stomachion pieces, each of the points was inscribed with a number written in Greek. On the other side, the pieces had Greek letters written on them. The puzzle would tell them how to use the geolabe, but unless the pieces were put together in the correct orientation, the results would be gibberish.

According to their written instructions, the bomb would be deactivated when the two dials on the front of the geolabe and the third dial on the back face were all pointing to the twelve o’clock position. Tyler couldn’t just randomly turn the knobs that controlled the motion of the dials, because each twist affected the motion of all three dials simultaneously. The complicated set of forty-seven gears inside the device meant that there were millions of possible orientations. To get the one that would disarm the bomb, they had to solve the puzzle.

“Eight minutes,” Stacy said, the edge in her voice palpable.

Tyler said nothing as he studied the Stomachion pieces.

“Are you thinking or frozen in terror?” she continued.

“My bomb-disposal instructor had a motto,” Tyler said. “‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ Doing nothing doesn’t mean you’re doing nothing.”

“Just checking. What about dumping the whole thing over the side of the ship?”

“Can’t,” Tyler said. “We’re being watched.”

She swung around. “I don’t see a camera.”

“I haven’t had time to search for it, but it’s here. He said he had his eye on us.”

“Who is this guy?” Stacy asked.

“His name’s Jordan Orr.”

“You know him?”

“He’s the one who had me build the geolabe,” Tyler said, glancing at the timer as it clicked below seven minutes. “I’ll tell you all about it if we live through this.”

“So you built this geolabe but you don’t know how to use it?”

“Think of it like the Rubik’s Cube. Just because someone can assemble it doesn’t mean they can solve it. That must be Orr’s problem. He knows that the dials should all point at the noon position, but he can’t figure out how to get them there. But Orr does know that Archimedes encoded the Stomachion with instructions for how to get the dials aligned, so he built the bomb as a test. We need to solve the puzzle in order to operate the geolabe, and that will deactivate the bomb.”

Stacy nodded. “Makes sense that Archimedes would hide the instructions in a puzzle. The Greeks did invent steganography.”

Tyler had heard of steganography, the technique of hiding messages in plain sight, like the microdots hidden behind stamps on postcards during World War II, or the way terrorists cloaked messages in pictures and video posted on public forums like Facebook and YouTube. Not only do you have to know that the message exists; you have to know how to read it.

“Do you remember any specific methods of steganography that Archimedes might have used?”

“The Greeks developed the technique twenty-five hundred years ago,” Stacy said. “Sometimes a message was tattooed onto the shaved head of a courier, who would grow out his hair and then travel with the secret message safely concealed. Secret communications could also be hidden in wax tablets.”

“How?”

“In normal use you would write on the wax itself using a metal stylus. If you wanted to erase it, you’d warm it up and use a tool like a spatula to smooth it over. To send a secret message, you’d write on the wood underneath and then apply the wax and write an innocuous note in the wax. To read the hidden message, you’d just scrape off the wax.”

“So the message wasn’t encoded. You just had to know what to look for?”

“Yes.”

Six minutes left.

Tyler ran his fingers through his hair as he thought through the problem. “When I was building the geolabe, the text of the manual for constructing it said, ‘The puzzle will be solved only by the geolabe’s builder.’ I wondered about that for a long time, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. Now that we have the Stomachion, I see something that’s too strange to be coincidental. It must have been in the codex all along, but Orr never shared those pages with me.”

Stacy bent down to look at the pieces. “What?”

“There are forty-seven gears in the mechanism. I know, because I spent a few months with them.”

“So?”

“Look at the pieces in the Stomachion. There are eleven triangles, one tetragon, and two pentagons. If you add up the number of all the points, the total comes to forty-seven.”

“Son of a bitch,” Stacy said. “I never would have noticed that.”

“Only the builder of the geolabe would. Tell me some of the numbers etched on the points. They’ve got to mean something.”

“Uh, twenty-four, fifty-seven, four, thirty-two, seventeen-”