Midas Code (6 page)

ELEVEN

T
he van slowed, but with the blindfold on, Sherman Locke couldn’t tell whether it was because they were approaching another turn or because they had reached their destination.

They’d been traveling for over an hour, mostly at highway speeds, which meant they could be in DC, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, or West Virginia. After he was hit with the Taser, a cloth had been stuck in his mouth and his wrists and ankles were cuffed. He was thrown into the back of a panel van, with the fake hotel staffer driving and the phony Army officer in back with him. He was frisked thoroughly, and his car keys, wallet, and phone were taken.

Before the blindfold went on, Sherman saw a girl lying unconscious on the floor of the van. There were no bruises or blood, which made him think she’d been drugged. He didn’t recognize her, so he couldn’t fathom why the two of them had been kidnapped. Blond and in her late twenties, the girl had a runner’s physique. That would be helpful when the time came to make an escape attempt.

His gag had been removed for the drive, but Sherman hadn’t been able to get anything out of his stoic captor, whose sole response was to tell him to shut up or he’d put the cloth back in. But if he was trying to intimidate Sherman, he might as well piss up a flagpole.

As a former fighter pilot, Sherman had taken the Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course, but that SERE training had been decades ago. Now he wished he’d taken a refresher. Maybe he wouldn’t have been captured so easily. At this point, he was more annoyed than anything else.

How he handled the situation would depend on why the two of them had been taken hostage. Was it just a chance to earn some quick cash? Maybe the woman was also involved with the Pentagon and the kidnappers wanted to torture information out of them. The well-executed operation suggested that these men weren’t a couple of hustlers who had hatched this scheme in their crack house. The fact that they had abducted Sherman in broad daylight, exposing their faces to hundreds of witnesses, meant they were either desperate or had a well-thought-out plan. Sherman guessed the latter.

The van came to a stop. Sherman heard the clank of a garage door opening. It was industrial, too large and noisy for a residential garage.

The van nudged forward and stopped, and the engine turned off. His kidnapper waited until the garage door was closed again before he removed the blindfold.

The Taser was trained on him, the threat obvious. It was a dual-operation model that could either be loaded with a single-use cartridge that would shoot the electric leads thirty feet or be used without a cartridge by making direct contact with the subject. Since he was cuffed, the single-use cartridge had been removed.

The van door opened, and the guy calling himself Wilson gestured with the Taser for Sherman to get out.

Struggling against the cuffs, Sherman climbed to his feet and hopped through the door. The sound of his shoes hitting the floor echoed through a warehouse cavernous enough to hold twenty tractor-trailers. Fluorescent lights flickered above the windowless space. With the power active, it was unlikely they were squatters. The building looked as if it was in good repair and was probably in a warehouse district. If Sherman could make it outside, he might be able to find help quickly.

The warehouse was empty of the expected shelves and boxes. Instead, a small grouping of furniture sat near the van: four cots, six large tables, four chairs, and a trash can that had been ignored. Empty pizza boxes and Chinese-food containers were piled on the tables, which held a TV, two laptops, and a wireless router. There was also some metal-working equipment: drills, soldering guns, an arc welder, and a large box of tools. Metal shavings and discarded scraps littered the floor.

Beyond the furniture was a line of twelve steel barrels. Wooden crates were stacked behind them, but Sherman couldn’t see any writing that might reveal what they held. On one side of the warehouse, a peninsula of four rooms jutted from the cinder-block wall, with two doors facing the front of the warehouse and two facing the back. The doors had six-inch-by-six-inch cutouts where windows would normally be, but otherwise the rooms were completely sealed. Sherman could make out the remains of glass squares on the floor. The panes were the size of the cutouts and were cracked but intact because they were held together by wire mesh inside the glass, indicating that the rooms had been secured for valuable items. They’d been removed and replaced with crude metal plates that could be swung back and forth.

Sherman guessed where he’d be staying for the duration.

“What now,
Captain
Wilson?” he asked.

“Call me Gaul,” the man said, disregarding Sherman’s sarcasm. “And before we show you to your room, we have some business to take care of.” He pulled Sherman to a chair set in front of a bare concrete wall and said, “Sit.”

“What am I, a dog?”

“Funny. In the chair.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll tase you again, and then you’ll sit anyway.”

Sherman shuffled over to the chair and sat. “What do you want?”

“From you? Nothing. This is just a little proof for your son, to show that you’re still breathing.”

So this
was
about money. If Tyler would be seeing this, Sherman had to get him whatever info he could.

Gaul went to the van and removed a duffel bag. At one of the tables he took out a ski mask, newspaper, and a video camera.

“Phillips,” he said. The other man, who had now changed into a black sweater, took the ski mask and the front page of the newspaper from Gaul.

Phillips moved behind Sherman and put the blindfold back on him.

“Am I going somewhere else?”

“We know you were in the Air Force,” Gaul said, focusing the camera, “so we’re just making sure you don’t blink any messages by Morse code. You’ll answer my question and nothing else. This isn’t going out live, so don’t bother trying to blurt out anything. Phillips, start over here so I can get a close-up of the paper.” After a moment, Gaul said, “Good. Now move back so we can see the paper beside the general.”

Phillips did so until he was standing behind Sherman.

“What is your name?” Gaul said.

“Are you asking me or Phillips?” Sherman said. He heard Gaul make a disgusted grunt.

“Apparently I wasn’t clear,” Gaul said. “Give him a ride.”

Sherman jerked as a jolt of electricity shot through him. His hands clenched in agony until the shock abated, and he slumped in the chair.

“Now let’s keep going. I can edit that out. Name?”

“Sherman Locke,” he said through clenched teeth.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it? That’s all I needed.”

The blindfold came off. Phillips wrenched Sherman to his feet and led him to a room facing the rear. Gaul opened the door, pushing Sherman inside without taking the cuffs off. He slammed it shut and locked it with a dead bolt that had no keyhole on the inside.

The room was the size of a prison cell. The ceiling and walls were made of cinder blocks. The only contents were a cot bolted to the floor and a bucket. One bulb jutted from the ceiling out of reach. Sherman had stayed in worse conditions, but not for long.

“Here’s how this is going to work,” Gaul said, peering through the hole in the door. “You’re going to be staying in this room for the duration.”

“Which is how long?” Sherman said.

“That’s up to your son.”

“And I don’t even get to take the cuffs off?”

Gaul tossed the keys through the hole. Sherman had to squat to pick them up. After he uncuffed himself, Gaul demanded the keys and the cuffs back.

“When we want to bring you out,” Gaul said, “you’ll cuff yourself again. If you don’t, you get another ride. You can scream all you want, but all you’ll do is make yourself hoarse. We aren’t near any occupied buildings. When we eat, you eat. Any questions? No? Good.” The plate covering the hole slammed shut.

“It’s Carol’s turn,” Gaul said, and his footsteps retreated.

Massaging his wrists, Sherman started plotting his escape.

TWELVE

S
tacy agreed with Tyler that Orr’s warning to come alone should be taken seriously. After dropping Grant off at the naval base so that he could tie up some loose ends on the ammunition depot project and get his car, she and Tyler headed back to the dock, where they made it in time for the 11:10 ferry to Seattle. Stacy sat in the Viper’s passenger seat as Tyler idled in the rain, waiting for the ferry to empty. She found the metronomic beating of the wipers soothing, reminding her of sleepy childhood rides in her father’s pickup after he’d taken his daughters to a movie on a drizzly evening.

“More comfortable now?” Tyler asked.

While she had been sitting on his lap during the drive back to the ferry, she noticed that Tyler had respectfully kept his hands to the sides, but he was so much bigger than she that his arms had still enveloped her. Whether it was intended or not, being ensconced like that had given her a sense of security.

If the crew of her TV show heard that, they wouldn’t believe it. The globe-trotting adventurer who would eagerly crawl into dark, spider-infested tombs needed a hug.

“I must have sounded idiotic back there,” she said.

“What sounded idiotic?”

“When I asked you to promise that Carol would be all right. It’s just that the thought of losing her is something I’ve never faced before.”

“I know how you feel,” Tyler said. “I have a sister, too.”

“Why did he take my sister but your father?”

“My sister is hiking in Patagonia right now. I don’t even know if
I
could find her.”

“So you’re not going to try to reach her? Tell her that your father’s been kidnapped?”

Tyler shook his head. “She’d want to get the FBI involved. Orr warned us not to.”

“Do you think Orr would really kill them if we brought in the FBI?”

“He’s been totally unpredictable so far. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“But the FBI may be able to find them.”

“They might find them dead. We can go it on our own for a while. My company, Gordian, has extensive resources, and Grant will help us. If we call the FBI, we lose control. The Feds will be running the show. If this were a simple money drop, I’d bring them in. But this situation is far more complicated. And it would be almost impossible to keep Orr from finding out that the FBI was involved. It would be a risk, and once we called them, we wouldn’t be able to undo it.”

“I don’t like that. Losing control. And if the press gets wind of this, it’ll become front-page news. One of the pitfalls of celebrity.”

“Then we play along. For now. Is that okay with you? If we’re going to get through this, we need to work together.”

Stacy nodded. “Play along for now.”

The cars started loading onto the ferry, and Tyler put the Viper into gear. They left it on the vehicle deck, and Stacy took a detour to the restroom on the passenger deck.

As she washed her hands in front of the mirror, she didn’t like the defeated look of the woman staring back at her. It wasn’t the wet, bedraggled hair and the lack of makeup that bothered her. She’d looked worse on many episodes of her show, and viewers seemed to like her willingness to reveal that TV hosts actually sweat and get dirty. But she prided herself on keeping a positive attitude at all times on camera, and at the moment she looked anything but positive.

She took a deep breath and stood straighter. Orr wasn’t going to beat her that easily. She was taking back control. When she returned to their seats, she found Tyler putting his phone away.

“Any news?” Stacy asked.

“That was Gordian’s president, Miles Benson,” Tyler said. “He had lunch with my father.”

“Today? When was your father kidnapped?”

“Must have been right after that. I asked Miles if anything unusual happened. He said my dad was called away on urgent business by an Army officer, but he didn’t get a good look at who it was. He’s going to question the staff discreetly and fly back here this evening.”

Stacy leaned toward him, her elbows on her knees, a pose she often took when her production crew was brainstorming ideas for upcoming episodes.

“The question is, how are we going to play along with Orr?” she said. “The Midas Touch is a Greek fable. To consider it a true story is ridiculous.”

“Sometimes legends have a basis in reality,” Tyler said with a faraway look.

“True. Some scholars believe Midas was a real person. There’s speculation that he was a king in Phrygia—part of modern-day Turkey—although he wasn’t born there.”

“Where was he from?”

“Some stories say Macedonia. Some say even farther away. No one really knows. But they say that Midas arrived as the son of a peasant at the exact moment that an oracle prophesied that the next leader of Phrygia would appear on a humble wagon. They dubbed Midas’s father king on the spot.”

“Lucky him.”

“And you’ll like this: the king’s name was Gordias. When Midas succeeded his father as king, he dedicated the wagon to Zeus for bringing him this good fortune and declared that whoever could untie the fiendishly complicated knot on its yoke would rule all Asia.”

“You’re talking about the Gordian knot. Alexander the Great was the one who solved the puzzle. Except he simply cut it instead of trying to untie it.”

Stacy smiled. “I assume your company Gordian Engine ering is named for the Gordian knot.”

“It is. The seemingly unsolvable problem with a bold solution. But I didn’t know that Midas was the one who’d tied it.”

“You learn something new every day. That’s why I love my job.”

“What happened to Midas?”

“No one knows, but there are several theories. One is that he’s buried in Turkey. Someone even claims to have found his tomb. Another theory is that he was driven out by invading Persians. The myth says that Midas offended one of the gods and was afflicted with the ears of a donkey for his crime. He fled Phrygia in shame and was never heard from again.”

“All of that makes for a great story,” Tyler said, “but you’re right that the part about the Midas Touch is absurd. Alchemists have tried to create their own version of the Midas Touch for centuries by transmuting lead into gold. They failed every time, because it’s physically impossible.”

Stacy hadn’t taken a science course since high school, so her grasp of chemistry was rudimentary at best.

“Why is it impossible?” she asked. “Maybe it’s some hidden formula that we’ve never found.”

Tyler laughed. “Unless the hidden formula involves a fission reaction, it won’t work.”

“Fission as in nuclear?”

“Lead has a higher atomic weight than gold, meaning it has more protons, so the only way lead can become gold is if it sheds protons. Removing protons from an atom’s nucleus is the definition of a nuclear reaction. I suppose you could accomplish that in a nuclear reactor, but it would be so expensive it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.”

“So you think Orr is crazy?”

“Certifiable if he believes in magic.”

“I can see why he wants
you
in on this. You built the geolabe. But why me? There are a thousand other PhD classicists out there.”

“My humanities studies weren’t a real priority in college,” Tyler said. “What are Classics, exactly?”

“The study of classical Greece and Rome.”

“Which is why you know Greek. Latin, too?”

“I got my undergraduate degree in linguistics. I’m fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and German.”

Tyler whistled. “That’s amazing. I wish I knew some foreign languages. Just don’t have a knack for it, I guess. Unless you count ASL. My grandmother was deaf. I also taught it to Grant.”

“Sign language counts,” Stacy said, “but I can’t sign. Just verbal languages.”

“So why Classics?”

“I grew up on a farm near Des Moines. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, so we never traveled except to go camping in Minnesota. I always wanted to see all those wonderful cities in Europe, so I thought getting a Classics degree would help me do that. Halfway through grad school, I realized research wasn’t my calling. I forced myself to finish anyway, but I still had a hundred thousand in student loans to pay back, so when I heard about auditions for
Chasing the Past
I signed up. I’m not an actress, but they wanted someone with solid credentials rather than some bimbo reading a teleprompter, so I got the job. I paid my loans off in one year.”

“Your parents must be proud. They still in Iowa?”

“They’ve passed away. They were both smokers. Cancer got them.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s just me and my sister now. She was in law school.
Is
in law school, dammit.”

Tyler gave her knee a squeeze. Just a small gesture of sympathy, but she appreciated it.

His phone pinged. “Probably Grant,” he said, but when he looked at the screen, his expression became grim.

“What?” she asked.

“It’s Orr. He says to check my email.”

After a few taps, he leaned in closer and expanded a video on the screen. Stacy heard some words, but she couldn’t make them out.

Tyler angled the phone so that Stacy could see it and restarted the video. The opening frame was centered on a newspaper with today’s date. Then it receded until she could see a man in a black ski mask standing next to another man sitting in a chair. The seated man appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties and was dressed in a suit. His wrists and ankles were cuffed, but he didn’t look injured. In fact, he looked incredibly fit, and not just for his age. He was blindfolded, but his strong jaw and short brown hair left little doubt that she was looking at Tyler’s father.

A voice in the video said, “Name.” The picture changed slightly, as if it had been edited. The seated man then confirmed her suspicions.

“Sherman Locke,” he said with a sonorous baritone, reminiscent of Tyler’s voice but deepened with age.

The proof-of-life video abruptly ended. Stacy closed her eyes and saw in her mind a replay of a similar video she’d received this morning of Carol bound and unconscious.

She shook it off and looked up at Tyler expecting to see rage. To her amazement, he was smiling.

“That son of a bitch,” he said with a chuckle. “Something tells me he’s not going down without a fight.”