The Midas Code

She looked better than ever, despite the injury she’d suffered in Naples. She wore a black tank top and shorts, and her blond hair had grown longer since then. Tyler liked the change.

He had feared the worst when he heard that Carol Benedict was calling with news, but she wanted to tell him that Stacy had come through the surgery and was asking about him as soon as she woke. Her recovery had been arduous, with weeks of rehab before she was back on her feet, but she soon lobbied to get back to work so that she could tell her story to her viewers. When she was at full strength, Tyler agreed to meet her in Syracuse to investigate Archimedes’ final puzzle.

Stacy had picked him up from the airport when he arrived that morning, and they drove straight out to the dig site. The three guys who made up her camera crew trailed behind them, but they weren’t filming yet. Stacy had already agreed to Tyler’s one rule: he was not to appear on camera, and she would cut him out of the broadcast. The publicity from the show last time had resulted in his defusing a bomb on a ferry, and he didn’t feel like tempting fate again.

“I bet you never thought this thing would be what brought you here,” he said, pointing at the new geolabe in his hands.

Because Tyler still had the codex translation, he was able to rebuild the geolabe after he’d lost the original in the Midas chamber, and, with his experience building it the first time, the new one took only a month to construct. It was clear now that the geolabe and the Antikythera Mechanism were one and the same. The original reproduction had been missing some pieces because the meager remnants of the shipwreck artifact were incomplete. Tyler was generously donating the new geolabe to the Athens National Archaeological Museum to replace the replica that had been so callously stolen.

But before it went to the museum, it had one more use.

Tyler consulted the instructions he’d put on his smartphone and twisted the knobs on the geolabe. The dials turned and pointed in a new direction.

“This way,” he said.

They headed toward Eurialo Castle, a fortress built by Dionysius the Elder and then modified by Archimedes. It was claimed that the castle had never been conquered, thanks to Archimedes’ engineering skills, one of which was building a series of tunnels underneath the castle as a first line of defense against burrowing invaders.

“How’s your father doing?” Stacy asked as they walked.

“As ornery as ever and completely healed. Miles still wants him to join Gordian, but I’m not so sure about that.”

“I’m glad to hear things are back to normal,” she said. “I’m sorry Grant couldn’t be here.”

“Don’t be. He said he’s had enough of tunnels for a while. Besides, he’s eating up the challenge of designing a display case for the only radioactive museum pieces in the world.” After some legal wrangling over ownership, it was decided that the Archimedes Codex and the golden hand would become part of a traveling exhibit that would go first to the British Museum. Grant, whose torn knee ligament was nearly healed, was working with Oswald Lumley and his staff on how to properly preserve it.

The codex had become irradiated along with Jordan Orr while it was sequestered inside the Manhattan vault until the time-lock release. By then, Orr had suffered a lethal radiation dose. The doctors called it the worst case they’d ever seen and documented the horrifying details for medical journals. Orr lasted five excruciating days before finally succumbing.

The Midas hand survived the explosion intact, but the extremophile microbes did not. Apparently, radiation was the only extreme they couldn’t withstand. With Midas’s body now underwater, the king’s magical touch was gone forever.

But it was the codex that yielded a final secret, thanks to its being in Orr’s pack when the radioactive bomb had gone off. The radiation had caused some previously invisible text to fluoresce under UV light. It was a final set of instructions left by Archimedes, seemingly scrawled and then erased by the scribe before it was overwritten.

The instructions indicated that Archimedes had hidden something in Eurialo Castle, in a specially constructed tunnel that he had reserved for his own use. The geolabe would lead them to it.

“I know you’re a charming guy,” Stacy said. “But how in the world did you persuade the Italian authorities to let us dig at one of their historical sites?”

Tyler smiled. “Well, the FBI recovered a video from Peter Crenshaw’s email system. Apparently, it’s narrated by you and shows a chamber made entirely of gold somewhere under Naples.”

“And they believed the video? The chamber was flooded with boiling acidic water. Nobody can dive into it to confirm its existence.”

“Gordian happened to develop an undersea robot that can survive under those exact conditions.”

Stacy stopped. “You proved to them that it exists?”