Authors: Boyd Morrison
Two months later
T
he blazing August sun roasted Tyler’s skin and forced him to squint even through his mirrored sunglasses, but he wasn’t complaining. After twelve hours in a cramped plane, he was happy to go for a hike in the hills.
Tyler put down the shovels he was carrying and paused to admire the crystal clear Mediterranean. Just a few miles west of Syracuse on the island of Sicily, he gazed at the port, trying to imagine Archimedes’ famous death ray, which supposedly burned the Roman ships assaulting the city during the siege more than two thousand years ago.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Stacy beamed at the view. “I’ve always wanted to come here.”
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?”
“Last week. The Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage asked me to join them in making the announcement to the press, but I told them I had someone better.”
“They want me?”
“If you’re available next week.”
She launched herself at Tyler and planted a big kiss on him. For a moment, he forgot all about why he was here.
Just as abruptly, Stacy pulled away, her eyes lit with anticipation. Tyler was suddenly aware of the camera crew staring at them.
“Come on,” Stacy said. She lowered her voice so the crew couldn’t hear. “Maybe we’ll have even more to celebrate tonight. I have champagne chilling in my room. You’re welcome to share it.”
He didn’t know if she meant the champagne or the room. Maybe both, if he was getting the signals right. Ancient puzzles were so much easier to decipher than women.
“One more thing,” Tyler said. “They want you to talk in more detail about the writing on the chamber’s pedestal.”
“You mean about how Midas was originally from Naples?”
Tyler nodded. “The ministry seemed very interested in that part.”
The pedestal had confirmed the once mythical story that Midas had been a traveler in what was now Turkey and arrived in the ancient country of Phrygia just in time for his father, Gordias, to be dubbed king. Years later, after his own uneventful reign, Midas was riding his horse in the wilds near his palace and came across a previously unknown volcanic spring. He decided to take a swim, but when he got out with the help of one of his courtiers, the man died almost instantly. He fell into the water and turned to gold.
Midas’s ability became legend throughout the world, but he found it to be a curse. He could not even hold his beloved daughter again for fear of killing her.
The king of Persia had heard of the Midas Touch and wanted it for himself, so he set about to conquer the kingdom of Phrygia. Midas’s army was no match for the Persians, so he fled with his court back to his home of Neapolis. During the journey, his daughter fell ill and died, contrary to the myth in which he accidentally killed her. Midas, having heard of a hot spring hidden under the city, thought it would be a suitable tomb befitting his status, because he could adorn it with gold and preserve his daughter for time immemorial. His last loyal subjects excavated the chamber and interred him there when he finally passed.
Now Tyler and Stacy had one final treasure to unearth, but Tyler couldn’t imagine what else Archimedes might have hidden for them. This time, however, he was willing and happy to find out.
A local Sicilian archaeologist met them at the entrance to the tunnels that had already been excavated beneath Eurialo. She would be along to assist Tyler and Stacy and make sure they didn’t disturb anything they found.
The geolabe guided them through the catacombs to a spot that was otherwise unremarkable. The earthen wall they were supposed to dig through looked like all the others.
“You’re sure this is it?” Stacy said.
“Don’t ask me,” Tyler said, pointing at the geolabe. “Ask Archimedes.”
While the crew filmed, they dug into the wall, the archaeologist helping as well. An hour into it, Tyler’s shovel plunged into open air.
He shined a flashlight through the hole and saw some kind of chamber. Reinvigorated by the find, they widened the hole so that it was big enough for them to crawl through.
Tyler went first. As he crept into the hole, his heart pounded at the thought of what might be revealed about one of antiquity’s greatest intellects.
What was Archimedes’ reason for creating this hidden chamber?
When he was through the hole, Tyler stood and focused the light on a treasure as fabulous to him as Midas’s gold chamber.
Fearing eventual defeat at the hands of the Romans, Archimedes must have created this room to secure his most valuable possessions. He’d been right to worry about his legacy. According to the Greek historian Plutarch, when Syracuse was captured a Roman soldier burst into Archimedes’ study. Instead of surrendering, Archimedes defied the soldier and went back to his drawings. The soldier killed him, despite orders to capture the engineer alive.
The room before Tyler held dozens of mechanical devices more intricate and beautiful than he would have thought possible for an inventor of that period. One was a globe that showed the map of the known world at that time. Another device suspended the earth, the sun, and the planets so that they would rotate in their orbits. A third one could have easily been a counting machine, literally the world’s first computer.
Agog at the genius on display, Tyler knew that Orr had been after the wrong treasure all along. The wealth of amazing mechanisms in this one room would alter everything that historians had assumed about the scope of knowledge in the ancient world.
Tyler stopped when he spotted a table holding an exact duplicate of the geolabe, an original version of the Antikythera Mechanism constructed by Archimedes himself. He approached it with reverence. The only difference between the one in his hands and the one on the shelf was the green patina on the ancient version.
Next to the device were documents laid out across the surface. One was clearly a map of Neapolis. Tyler recognized the island where Castel dell’Ovo now stood, as well as the Naples acropolis, the two landmarks that had led him to the well.
Beside the map were a series of drawings. Without touching them, Tyler inspected them more closely. They looked like sketches of statues. One of them was familiar, and then he realized what it was: the statue of Herakles from the east pediment of the Parthenon, drawn in incredible detail, which would be nearly unrecognizable to anyone who had seen the eroded and handless remnant in the British Museum. There were dozens and dozens of drawings, some of them long-distance views of the ancient temple, some of them close-ups.
“My God,” Stacy said as she came through the entry hole and gawked at the wealth of drawings. “Do you realize what this will do for our understanding of ancient Greece? No one has ever found drawings of what the Parthenon looked like two thousand years ago.”
“Archimedes must have drawn these pictures himself and then used them when he designed the geolabe.”
The rest of the group entered the room, all agape at the treasure trove. While the archaeologist gesticulated wildly and spoke rapid-fire Italian, Stacy directed the camera crew as to how she wanted to document the once-in-a-lifetime discovery.
Tyler, who smiled as he recognized Stacy in her element, stepped back, happy to be out of the spotlight. It was time again for Archimedes to speak from the past and change history.
E
xploring the history, settings, and technologies that I drew on for
The Midas Code
was almost as much fun as writing the book itself—sometimes even more fun when it meant racing down the autobahn at 150 miles per hour in the name of research. The world has a wealth of astonishing places to visit and mysteries to delve into, which made it difficult to choose just a few to include in the novel. It might surprise the reader to know how little I had to make up for this story.
Although the geolabe is fictional, its real-world cousins, the Antikythera Mechanism and its replica, are on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The display cases for them are just as I described, and a security camera in the room with the Antikythera Mechanism really was missing the day I visited. Although theories abound as to the function of the Antikythera Mechanism, the best guess is that it was used to predict the motion of the sun, the stars, and the planets. For more on the Antikythera Mechanism, I recommend the intriguing
Decoding the Heavens,
by Jo Marchant.
Who built the Antikythera Mechanism is also open to argument, but many archaeologists believe its design could have originated from antiquity’s greatest scientist and engineer, Archimedes. His long-rumored treatise,
On Sphere-Making,
has eluded historians for more than two thousand years, but if it ever comes to light we may discover that Archimedes’ genius was even greater than we imagined.
In fact, Archimedes’ manuscript may still exist somewhere. As recently as 1998, a codex called the Archimedes Palimpsest was purchased at auction, the Greek writing hidden for hundreds of years under the text of a thirteenth-century prayer book. If you’d like to read more about that fascinating story and about Archimedes’ puzzle, the Stomachion, I highly recommend
The Archimedes Codex,
by Reviel Netz and William Noel.
The Greeks invented steganography and did hide messages under the wax of writing tablets. Another real method of concealing communications was to shave a messenger bald, tattoo the message onto his head, and wait for the hair to grow back before sending him on his mission. Slow, yes, but it got the job done.
As of today, the British Museum in London and the New Acropolis Museum in Athens continue to spar over the fate of the Elgin Marbles.
I have yet to park my own car in a robotic parking garage, but the structures do exist in many European countries. They’re starting to make their way into crowded downtown areas in the United States, so I may get to try one out someday.
If you ever want to eat in a real bank vault, there are several restaurants in New York City offering that unique experience.
Naples is a beautiful city, and it’s hard to believe that a vast world of subterranean tunnels and caverns exists under the bustling metropolis. Every year more underground passageways are discovered, so I’m sure we’ll continue to learn more about their Greek and Roman excavators. To get a feel for the dark and claustrophobic spaces, take a tour of the tunnels at Napoli Sotterranea, near Piazza San Gaetano, the next time you’re in Naples.
The Camorra has been entrenched in the Naples area for more than a century, and women are starting to take over some of the crime families. For a sobering exploration of the Camorra, read
Gomorrah,
by Roberto Saviano.
The bizarre true tale of Louis Dethy’s booby-trapped home needed no embellishment from me.
The strontium-90 nuclear fuel from radioisotope thermoelectric generators is a real threat to international security. Many of the devices have gone missing since the collapse of the Soviet Union, raising the specter of the radioactive material being used in dirty bombs. Security analysts around the world are already searching for them, and some were found when the thieves turned up with severe radiation sickness.
While the Midas Touch is a fantasy, distilling gold from water is not. Extremophiles, which are microbes called archaea, thrive around hot springs and black smokers on the ocean floor, and some species consume the heavy metal dissolved in the water before excreting it as a solid. No one has yet figured out how to profitably extract the tiny concentrations of dissolved gold from seawater, but billions of ounces of it are waiting for whoever can.
The legend of Midas is just that—a legend. But, as with most legends, there is some historical basis for the characters involved. Scholars do think that Midas was a king of Phrygia in modern-day Turkey, but to this day no one has found his birthplace or tomb. If and when someone does find his final resting place, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that a huge cache of gold was buried with Midas. I hear that guy was rich.