The Midas Code

He was placed in foster care, and went through a succession of low-life guardians who either were hosting him to collect the welfare checks or wanted a kid who could act as a live-in servant. He got back at the world by stealing from his neighbors. At first it was just a buck or two to buy some candy or a comic book, but the amount grew until he was bringing in serious cash. He got caught only once, when he broke into a house not realizing that the husband had come home unexpectedly with his mistress, and the time he spent in juvenile detention made him vow never to let that happen again. When he was sixteen, Orr ran away and started working construction by lying about his age.

For the next ten years, he bounced around the US, taking legitimate or illegitimate jobs, whatever paid. Then, during a bank renovation, one of his co-workers approached him and asked if he wanted to make some easy money. The guy planned to rob the bank, but he was too clever to attempt a daytime heist.

Instead, they sabotaged the wiring for the security equipment and made off with a hundred thousand dollars that night. But Orr had inherited his father’s free-spending ways and blew through most of his share in two months. It was the end of his construction career and the beginning of the more high-risk, high-reward career as a thief.

He absorbed everything he could about the art of breaking into secure facilities, educating himself by reading and working with better burglars than he until he had mastered the profession. The jobs kept getting bigger, with Orr planning the heists down to the most minute detail and assembling crews that could be trusted to do their jobs, but the money never lasted.

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.”

SEVEN

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.