“Right next to the original.”
“Wait a second,” Grant said. “You think they’re going to let us borrow their replica of the Antikythera Mechanism, take it apart, and use a piece of it in our own reconstruction?”
Stacy shook her head. “Museums are stingy with their display objects. Even for a respected institution, it would take months of negotiations to get a loan approved by the cultural ministry. For us, there’s no chance.”
“That’s if we asked,” Tyler said.
Grant scowled. “You’re kidding.”
“We’re only going to borrow it. We’ll give it back.”
Tyler expected Stacy to protest, but she stared at the ceiling. He could see that her mind was churning with the implications of his proposal.
“Are you on board?” Tyler asked her.
Stacy’s eyes focused on him. He’d never seen a more serious and determined expression.
“I just saw a video of my sister in handcuffs,” she said. “The question isn’t if we should steal that thing, but how.”
SATURDAY
THIRTY-EIGHT
O rr asked the flight attendant for another glass of champagne, and she brought it to him within seconds. He winked at her and got a dazzling smile in return. With a good six hours left on the flight to Rome, he saw no reason not to toast the culmination of years of planning. He even thought Alitalia’s name for first class fit his mood: Magnifica.
He put the footrest up and closed his eyes, but he wasn’t the least bit sleepy. After all this time, he was nearing his final retribution. He visualized Midas’s vault of gold that had haunted his dreams for the past twenty years, running his hands over the gleaming metal that would make him richer than Midas himself could ever have imagined. But, more than the impending wealth, he savored the thought of vengeance for a life snatched from him. His targets would know what it was like to have comfort and prosperity ripped away and replaced by misery and poverty. They would have to scratch and claw out of the abyss the way he had.
Orr would become rich beyond belief, while the people who’d made his life hell would lose everything. He relished the poetic justice of it.
Gaul sat next to him watching a movie, while Phillips and Crenshaw were back in the US completing their part of the plan. There was no sense discussing the mission with Gaul until they got to Italy, not with so many potential eavesdroppers around them.
Orr had the entire sequence in his head. With all the heists he’d pulled in the past, meticulous preparation was second nature to him. Of course, he’d had to put it all down on paper for Gaul, Phillips, and Crenshaw, but he made sure they’d burned all the evidence once it had been committed to memory.
After they arrived in Rome, it would be only an hour and ten minutes on the Frecciarossa high-speed train to Naples. There he’d rent a car and pick up the items he’d sent by overnight service-items that would have gotten him arrested if he’d checked them on an airline flight.
Orr hadn’t been to Naples in five years, but he remembered it well enough. At a population of more than four million for the Greater Naples metropolitan area, the sheer size of the city would let him do his business without alerting Gia Cavano. Cavano was well-connected in the city, but Orr had cultivated a wide range of aliases to travel under, only one of which she knew besides his real name.
That meant he could get into Naples a day early, put everything into motion, and wait for his bigger problem: Tyler Locke.
Was Locke really accomplishing his task? Orr suspected that he was at least trying. The tracker showed the geolabe first in England, then in Munich. What information Locke and Benedict were gleaning in those locations Orr couldn’t guess, but it didn’t really matter. He was results-oriented, and Locke was the type who delivered.
If Locke and Benedict failed, Orr had a much less lucrative but simple backup plan. He’d let Cavano know that he would reveal the existence of the gold chamber to the Carabinieri, Italy’s national police force, unless, of course, she cut him in on the deal and shared the take. The Italian authorities would never let her get away with looting a national treasure if they knew about it. Sharing the spoils with Cavano would be a bitter consolation prize, but it was better than nothing. She wouldn’t care much for it, either, since he was the one who’d double- crossed her originally.
Orr had every confidence in himself, but where plans often had the potential to go awry was with his partners in crime. That’s why he’d chosen the participants in this job so carefully. Gaul and Phillips were solid. Not that they didn’t have their faults. Gaul was a gambler, always in debt, but that made his need for money useful. Phillips’s weakness was women, throwing away thousands at upscale S and M clubs. Orr shuddered at the thought of the diseases he must be afflicted with, although he didn’t worry about leaving Phillips with Carol Benedict. Phillips was the masochistic type. He wouldn’t be interested in a helpless woman.
On the job, Gaul and Phillips were total professionals. Orr had worked with each of them many times before, and they’d never let him down.
Crenshaw was the wild card. A brilliant bomb-maker, but squirrelly enough to be a prospective liability. Phillips would take care of him when the time came.
Orr had no doubt that Gaul and Phillips would eventually blow through their two-million-dollar shares and become threats, but by that time he would be safely ensconced in the lifestyle that a billion dollars could provide. If those two so much as implied that they would blackmail him, he would have many tools at his disposal to silence them.
When he’d first formulated his long-term plan all those years ago, he’d debated whether to go into an arrangement with Cavano. The discovery of the Archimedes Codex had made the uneasy alliance pay off. She’d needed his expertise, and she had the resources to make the theft possible. Returning the manuscript to her, however, would have made Orr another of her minions, sharing in the proceeds, but nothing more than a bit player.
That wasn’t enough for him. When his parents died, he had given the authorities the name of his relatives in Naples. But Cavano’s father had made it clear that they would not help him. He felt that the suicide of Orr’s father was a disgrace and the murder of his mother dishonorable. Whether Cavano had been aware of her father’s refusal to take him in Orr didn’t know and didn’t care. She had to pay for the sins of the father.
But Orr wouldn’t kill her. He had discovered how close she was to losing her position as the head of a Camorra crime family and that the Midas treasure would reverse her financial slide, making her one of the most powerful leaders in Naples. So he would take the fortune they had found together and make it his own. She wouldn’t see a single ounce of the gold.
Orr guzzled the last of his champagne and leaned the chair back to the full sleeping position. To help him doze off, he entertained the wonderful thought of her world crumbling around her. Cavano would lose the status she had grown accustomed to, just as Orr had all those years ago.
Then the other Camorra families would take her down and finish the job for him.
THIRTY-NINE
A s soon as the National Archaeological Museum in Athens opened its doors on Saturday morning, Grant bought three tickets and went inside. While he cased the museum, Tyler and Stacy went out shopping for supplies.
