“You guys okay?” Grant asked as they got out.
Tyler nodded, holding his wounded arm. “Nothing that a bandage won’t take care of.”
Stacy steadied herself against the Audi. “After that ride, I feel like I’m bathing in adrenaline.”
“Let’s make a pact,” Tyler said. “I never drive you in a car at two hundred miles an hour again, and you never make me ride another horse.”
She smiled. “You’ve got a deal. Next time we’ll compromise and make it a horse and buggy.”
Tyler groaned playfully, opened the front boot, and saw a case inside. He lifted its lid to make sure the whole car chase hadn’t been for nothing.
There was the geolabe shining brightly at him. He breathed a sigh of relief and was about to close the case when he heard it rattle, as if a piece of metal was loose inside. Then he noticed a protrusion on the side. He turned it over, and his heart sank when he saw what it was.
“Uh, guys,” he said. “We’ve got a new problem.”
“It’s not there?” Stacy said.
“No, it’s here all right. At least, most of it is.”
Tyler held it up to his eye and could see Stacy straight through the bullet hole.
THIRTY-SEVEN
T hey found a clinic that bought Tyler’s story about injuring his arm with a piece of jagged metal. After the doctor put ten stitches into the arm and gave him a tetanus shot, the three of them returned to the Gordian jet. Tyler and Grant had just begun to disassemble the geolabe to assess the damage from the stray bullet when Tyler’s phone rang.
“Is it Orr?” Stacy asked.
Tyler nodded and put the call on speaker.
“How are you doing, Locke?” Orr said. “Found the map yet?”
“We’re working on it.”
“I already know you work well under pressure. You have to meet me in Naples in two days.”
Tyler remembered Cavano’s explanation about beginning her excavation on Monday. There would be no wiggle room in Orr’s schedule, but he had to put up at least a token resistance.
“We need more time,” Tyler said. “There’s no way we can finish our task by Sunday.”
“Find a way, or start making funeral arrangements.”
Tyler hesitated a few seconds for effect. “Fine. We’ll be there. How are we making the exchange? I don’t imagine you’re bringing my father and Stacy’s sister with you to Italy.”
“Have someone ready to confirm their release at the Lincoln Memorial that day at 3 P.M. eastern time. At the same time on Sunday, 9 P.M. in Naples, there’s an outdoor concert taking place on Piazza del Plebiscito before a fireworks show. Meet me there. Both you and Stacy.”
“Just me,” Tyler said.
“Both of you, or don’t bother showing up.”
“We haven’t seen our proof-of-life videos today.”
“I’m sending the video now. When I confirm that you’ve solved the puzzle, I will release Sherman and Carol.”
Hearing Orr use their names as if they were friends made Tyler’s bile rise. He didn’t believe Orr was going to give his hostages up that easily, but they had no choice but to continue playing along.
“How will we find you at the concert?”
“I’ll call you with more instructions then. Just make sure you’re there at 9 p.m.” Orr hung up.
Tyler checked his email. Carol and Sherman looked more haggard than they did the day before, but they seemed uninjured. There wasn’t any more signing to decode, however. This video was from the chest up. Sherman’s hands weren’t in the frame.
“Orr isn’t leaving us many options,” Tyler said to Stacy as he showed Grant the video.
She nodded as if she were expecting it.
“Without any more leads from Aiden,” Grant said, “I think we’re going to have to go through with this.”
Tyler sighed. “I think you’re right.”
Ransom handoffs were notoriously messy for everyone involved. Double-crosses were too easy to pull off. One side would bring the money, but the kidnappers would take off with it without delivering the hostage, sometimes by killing the bagman. Or the kidnappers got nabbed by the police as soon as the hostage was recovered. A successful handoff depended on a degree of trust on both sides, but that was sorely missing in this case. Tyler sure as hell didn’t think Orr was going to let any of them go free.
“So what’s the plan?” Grant said.
Tyler had the start of an idea for how to approach the handoff, but he had to mull it over before he told Grant and Stacy. “Let’s work on that later. First, we need to see if the geolabe can be saved.”
The bullet had gone in through the side of the geolabe and out through the top. If it had been struck through the face, the entire device would have been destroyed, but since only a minor portion was damaged Tyler was hoping it could be salvaged. As it was, though, he’d tried turning the knobs, and something inside was definitely broken.
The outer metal faces of the geolabe were fitted together using tiny screws. Tyler unscrewed them using his Leatherman tool and lifted the single-dial plate. As he’d suspected, there was the tracking device affixed to the inside of the plate with epoxy. He set down the plate so that he could inspect the interior.
He shined a flashlight into the device and saw the problem. The gears meshed together precisely. Any warping or misalignment would cause the teeth to miss each other, rendering the device nonfunctional.
“Crap,” he said.
Stacy leaned forward. “Is it bad?”
The gears could be lifted out one at a time. He took out three, all of which were perfectly intact. Then he reached the main universal gear, the one that drove the entire mechanism.
The bullet had grazed just this one gear. A dozen teeth were missing, and the gear was hopelessly bent.
Stacy picked it up and turned it over in her hands.
“Can it be fixed?” she asked, giving it back to him.
Tyler gave Grant a somber look.
“How long to make that gear?” Grant asked.
“A couple of days. If I had the right equipment.”
“A couple of days?” Stacy said. “Can’t you just buy one?”
“This isn’t an off-the-shelf gear ratio,” Grant said. “It requires precision machining.”
“I’ll call Miles,” Tyler said. “We can send out the specs. He probably knows someone in the US who can whip one of these out quickly.”
“It’s Friday afternoon there. Even if we could get the gear fabricated, it wouldn’t make it over to Europe in time for us to fix the geolabe, use it at the Parthenon, and then get to Naples.”
“There’s got to be some way to get a new one more quickly,” Stacy said. “Too bad we can’t just use Archimedes’ original one.”
Tyler put the damaged gear down. That was it.
“We can get the original,” he said. “The gearing inside the Antikythera Mechanism is very similar to the geolabe’s. Its main gear has exactly the same dimensions as this one.”
Stacy laughed and then stopped when Tyler didn’t join in.
“You mean the one in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens? I was joking. It’s corroded and embedded in a rock. It’ll never work.”
“Not the one they found in the shipwreck. The replica. It might require a few modifications to fit it on the axle, but the diameter, thickness, and number of teeth are identical.”
“Isn’t that one also in the National Archaeological Museum?”
