TWENTY-NINE
S eated in the Business Premier car of the Eurostar high-speed train, Gia Cavano ate a light breakfast while her three bodyguards kept watch on the other passengers around her. As the French countryside flashed past the window at 186 miles per hour, she occasionally twirled the knobs on the device Tyler Locke had stowed in his vehicle. The dials spun in a seemingly random fashion; she could divine no purpose for their movement.
It was a beautiful piece of engineering, both in design and in construction. Perhaps it was something Locke had built. Once she had the Midas treasure, she would track him down and ask him before she killed him.
Cavano had considered flying to Munich directly from London, but her new toy was too tempting to ignore. Ever since she had acquired the Ferrari 458 Italia from a German buyer who’d been higher on the waiting list, she had been itching to unleash it on the autobahn, the only freeway system in the world that had no speed limits. The specifications listed the Ferrari’s top end at 202 miles per hour, and she had every intention of reaching it.
As punishment for letting Tyler Locke and Stacy Benedict escape, Pietro had been relegated to cargo duty and sent ahead with the truck carrying the Ferrari and a BMW M5 sedan on an overnight trip to Brussels. He would join the other three in the BMW and try to keep up with her on the drive to Munich, which normally took seven hours. If it took them more than four hours, it would be because of traffic.
She caught an older businessman looking at her, perhaps longing to spice up his Thursday morning by striking up a conversation about the unique object on the table in front of her, but he wouldn’t dare approach with her cousins all around her. One of the benefits of having an intimidating family. They kept paunchy executives like him from making pathetic advances.
Tyler Locke, on the other hand, was just the kind of man who excited her. Tough, handsome, intelligent, resourceful. Ungraceful on a horse, but that could be corrected. Not many men stood up to her the way he did, and that was a quality hard to come by for a woman in her position.
For six years she’d been the head of the Cavano family, growing it from a small player in the Naples Camorra. Few women, especially one in her thirties, headed families in the Camorra. The macho society of the Mafia rarely tolerated it, but she’d maintained her position through cunning, using brutality when it was necessary to make a point. Her late husband, Antonio, had been murdered by the capo of the rival Mezzotta family for infringing on their concrete-supply business. In response, Gia Cavano ordered the deaths of every member of the Mezzotta clan, and as a result of her careful planning, most of them were now stinking up a landfill outside San Marco. The rest of the corpses had been dumped in strategic locations to show that she was now in charge.
Unable to have children because of a series of miscarriages, she encouraged her cousins to build families themselves, promising to bring them wealth as long as they remained loyal to her. They stayed by her side because she delivered on her promises, and some of them had married into families from Albania, Libya, and England, expanding her reach into the arms, drug, and financial sectors. She had pushed into legitimate businesses that allowed her and her extended family to maintain a lifestyle far better than that of her rivals, who had to hide in the Naples fortress neighborhoods of the Secondigliano. Plummeting profits had recently begun to jeopardize her position, though.
Now she was facing new assaults on the expansion of her businesses. Chinese and Russian gangs were supplying other families with arms and men. Without a radical change in the situation soon, she would become a bit player in the Camorra.
But she had something none of the other families had: the secret to finding the Midas vault, a treasure so vast that she would be able to elevate her stature in Naples and become the new “boss of bosses.”
And that’s what this trip to Munich would allow her to accomplish.
Hans Rodel, the vice president of Boerst Properties and Investments, was negotiating her purchase of the building along Piazza Cavour that had been out of her grasp for so long. She was going through a German firm so the Italian authorities wouldn’t know that the new owner was going to be a Camorrista. She had been trying to buy the Ministry of Health building for the past six years and only now was about to close the deal, allowing her to tear apart its foundation and probe into the tunnel that she and Orr had found as children.
Rodel would help her sell the gold on the market once she began recovering it. It had to be done quietly, or the Italian government would seize her property, claiming it as a national treasure. She would die before she let that happen.
Cavano placed the bronze device back into its case and considered what to do about Locke and Benedict as well as Grant Westfield, whose identity had been revealed to her by Oswald Lumley. Orr had chosen his search team well, but he obviously hadn’t told Locke about their connection. The engineer seemed too smart to deliberately deliver himself to her home so conveniently. Locke, Benedict, and Westfield were a mortal threat. If they helped Orr find the Midas treasure before she did, it could ruin her.
That meant she had to find them and persuade them to divulge how she could find Orr. Failing that, she would simply kill the three of them, setting back Orr’s efforts to take what was rightfully hers.
Cavano’s network of informants in European police departments meant that she had eyes and ears everywhere looking for any sign that Locke had surfaced. All she had to do was hold Orr off until next week. The demolition would commence on Monday, with an estimated two days needed to break through to the tunnel. Once she had the gold in her possession, the race would be over, and it wouldn’t matter where Orr and his friends tried to hide. She would have unlimited funds to spend on the vendetta and would spit on each of their graves.
The blood of her dead enemies proved that no one got away with betraying Gia Cavano.
THIRTY
I n the Audi rental sedan provided courtesy of Gordian Engineering, Tyler sat in the passenger seat while Grant drove out of Franz Josef Strauss Airport and onto the A92 autobahn toward Munich. Stacy sat in the back reading her printouts of the writing on the tablet. The flight had taken less than two hours, giving them plenty of time to get to the Boerst building and scout the location before Cavano arrived. He was just glad that his company had the resources to fund this venture, something Orr surely must have known when he picked Tyler for his blackmail scheme.
Stacy had spent the flight poring over Archimedes’ tablet, scraping the beeswax from it as best she could under the circumstances. More than once she’d winced at the process, which destroyed the writing on top, but the only other method would be painstaking analysis using a CT or MRI machine. Tyler had convinced her that they didn’t have that kind of time, and she reluctantly agreed.
Even after millennia, the writing on the bare wood had been preserved remarkably well by the tablet’s layer of beeswax. They took photos of the writing and sent copies to Aiden and several other email addresses for safekeeping.
They had debated whether to bring the tablet with them in the car. Taking the geolabe with them hadn’t gone so well, so they left the tablet behind with the pilots, who would remain on standby with the plane. On any other occasion, Miles would object to the extravagance of that expense, but with Sherman Locke’s life at stake and now a suspicion that strontium-90 was involved, he hadn’t uttered one word of objection.
“Are you ready to tell us what the tablet says?” Tyler asked.
Stacy scribbled a few more lines on her notepad and said, “Just a minute, bunny.”
Grant belched out a laugh. When the rental-car agent had seen Tyler’s last name, she’d snickered. When Tyler asked her why, she told him that the German pronunciation of Locke was a name you’d give to a pet. Grant and Stacy had ribbed him for the past twenty minutes about it.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”
“Let me guess,” Grant said. “We have to find some other old document somewhere.”
“You’re not even close,” Stacy said, and her eyes sparkled with wonder as she handed the translation to
