“It’s good we decided not to talk in the truck with Orr listening in,” he said to Stacy. “We’re going to have to be very careful dealing with him.”
She turned to him, and Tyler saw her face etched with fear. “Just promise me that my sister will be all right. I know you can’t really promise that, but do it anyway.”
Tyler nodded. “I promise. We’ll find a way to get them both back safely.”
“There’s something I want to know,” Stacy said. “If you built that device, the geolabe, how did Orr get hold of it?”
“I was approached by Orr last year, after Miles twisted my arm to go on your show. I mentioned on the program that I had an interest in Archimedes. Orr showed me a translation from an ancient Greek document with instructions for building an object called a geolabe and told me it was from a private collector. It sounded like an intriguing job, so I said yes.”
“And you weren’t suspicious of this mysterious request?”
Tyler nodded. “Mildly, but the project seemed harmless enough. I had one of my guys, Aiden MacKenna, look into the documents to see what he could find, just out of curiosity. Nothing came up. It wasn’t until a month after I delivered the completed project that Scotland Yard released a long-lost photo of a manuscript page that matched my document verbatim. Only then did we realize that it had been stolen.”
“Did you report it to the police?”
“Yes, but by that time Orr had been tipped off and disappeared.”
“How long did it take you to build this thing?”
“About three months,” Tyler said. “Without Gordian’s engineering resources, it would have taken a lot longer to decipher the schematics.”
“That doesn’t make sense, though,” Stacy said.
“Why?”
“Because if he blew up the ferry, the geolabe would have been destroyed along with it. Why did he risk losing something that would take so long to build again if we couldn’t solve that puzzle?”
Tyler’s skin prickled at the thought of how close they had been to becoming permanent denizens of Puget Sound.
“Orr must have decided that you and I were the only people on the planet who could solve the Archimedes puzzle, so if we failed the geolabe was worthless to him. Now that he knows we can operate it, we’ve become indispensable to him. We’re a package deal along with the geolabe.”
“This is crazy,” Stacy said.
Tyler shook his head at the colossal understatement. “Which part? That Orr thinks the Midas Touch exists or that he thinks Archimedes constructed a device that will lead us to it?”
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.”
