Stacy bent down to look at the pieces. “What?”
“There are forty-seven gears in the mechanism. I know, because I spent a few months with them.”
“So?”
“Look at the pieces in the Stomachion. There are eleven triangles, one tetragon, and two pentagons. If you add up the number of all the points, the total comes to forty-seven.”
“Son of a bitch,” Stacy said. “I never would have noticed that.”
“Only the builder of the geolabe would. Tell me some of the numbers etched on the points. They’ve got to mean something.”
“Uh, twenty-four, fifty-seven, four, thirty-two, seventeen-”
“Wait. You said twenty-four, fifty-seven, and thirty-two?”
“And four and seventeen. What do they mean?”
The puzzle will be solved only by the geolabe’s builder.
“The gears!” Tyler shouted before he even realized that it had come out.
“What?”
“Quick! Is there a point with the number thirty-seven?”
Stacy scanned the pieces while Tyler held his breath. If this didn’t work, they were dead.
After an agonizing few seconds, she scooped up a piece. “Got it! Thirty-seven.”
“Okay, give me the piece with twenty-four on it.”
She gave it to him. When he put the pieces together, the numbers aligned perfectly.
“What happened?” she said. “Did you figure it out?”
Tyler nodded. “I hope so. One of the gears had thirty-seven teeth, and one of the gears it meshed into had twenty-four teeth. None of the gears had four or seventeen teeth, so those numbers must be included to throw off anyone looking for a code. Only someone who spent time crafting each gear would think to look for that connection. Now hurry. We’ve only got four minutes left.”
He told her the numbers he needed. He remembered some of them because they were such odd numbers to use in the gearing. He’d have to hope he recalled enough of them so that the others wouldn’t be necessary.
Within a minute, they had assembled the Stomachion into a square. They flipped it over so they could read the letters on the other side.
“It still looks like gibberish,” Tyler said.
“No!” Stacy yelled. “It makes perfect sense now. Notice that some of the letters seem to run in a crude spiral?”
“What does it say?” Tyler’s eyes flicked to the timer on the bomb. Three minutes left.
“Alpha Leo. Beta Libra. Alpha Pisces. Beta Scorpio… There’s twelve in all. They must refer to the signs of the zodiac written on the dials of the geolabe. But I don’t know what the alphas and betas refer to.”
“I do. You couldn’t see it, but the upper knob on the side is labeled alpha, and the bottom is labeled beta. I’m supposed to turn the knobs in sequence to set the dials properly. Read them from the beginning.”
“Alpha Leo,” Stacy said.
“Which one is Leo?” It literally was all Greek to Tyler.
Stacy pointed. “That one.”
Tyler turned the top knob. The hands on both dials rotated simultaneously. Tyler didn’t stop until the top hand rested on Leo.
“Now what?”
“Beta Libra.” She pointed again, and Tyler followed her instruction. They got into a rhythm going through the next seven signs, but the process was still achingly slow.
The timer ticked down to less than a minute.
Stacy waved her hands, prodding him to go faster. “Beta Cancer, Hurry!”
“How many left?” Tyler said as he twirled the knob frantically.
“Two. Alpha Sagittarius.”
Stacy pointed to the twelve o’clock symbol, but Tyler was already turning the dial toward it. “Got it!”
Before Stacy could even say “Beta Aquarius,” his fingers were twisting the bottom knob. Aquarius had to be the zodiac sign at the noon position.
“Fifteen seconds!”
Despite Tyler’s frenzied twisting, the hand on the dial seemed to move in slow motion, like a nightmare where you were running as hard as you could but moved as if you were mired in tar. He raced the timer as it counted down below ten seconds.
“Oh, God!” Stacy screamed. “Go, go, go!”
As all three dials reached the noon position, Tyler felt the knob click.
A piercing series of beeps blared from behind the geolabe. Stacy grabbed Tyler’s arm, digging her fingers into his biceps, but the timer stopped. It read four seconds left.
They both collapsed to their knees, completely drained. There was nothing like the relief of surviving certain death.
Stacy had her head buried in her arms. Tyler put a hand on her shoulder.
“You okay?” he asked.
She looked up and blinked several times before answering. “Peachy.”
Tyler’s phone rang.
“It’s him,” Stacy guessed.
Tyler nodded and answered the call, putting it on speaker so that she could hear.
“Okay, we did what you wanted,” Tyler said. “Are we finished here?”
“Finished?” The gravelly voice was gone, replaced by the smooth tone that he now recognized as Orr’s. “Locke, we are just getting started.”
EIGHT
S herman Locke laughed so hard that everyone at the eight-person table turned to look at him. He ignored them and cut another piece of his steak, still chuckling and shaking his head at Miles Benson’s offer.
The Capital Club had been reserved for senior military officers, key speakers, and sponsors of the Unconventional Weapons Summit to meet and mingle over lunch. Gordian Engineering was a major sponsor, so it made sense that Miles, the company’s president, got his choice of the best table in the restaurant. Sherman had agreed to join him to discuss some business, but this proposal was too ridiculous.
Sherman took a swig of his iced tea and said, “You’re kidding, right?”
“Just hear me out, General,” Miles said.
“Tyler will never go for it.”
“He doesn’t make the hiring decisions at Gordian. I do.”
“Come on, Miles. What makes you think we’d last two weeks in the same company?”
“You wouldn’t even be working in the same city. We would love to have someone of your stature in DC as a liaison for our military contracts.”
“Not everyone would love it.”
With his five years of service as a two-star general in the Air Force complete, Sherman had had no choice but to retire. The total number of generals was capped, so it was either up or out, and no three-star opportunities had come his way. So for the first time in thirty-five years, Major General Locke was looking for a job.
“Has the DTRA made an offer yet?” Miles asked.
Sherman’s last command was as deputy director of the Strategic Command Center for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction. In coordination with the civilian adjunct Defense Threat Reduction Agency, his responsibility had been to develop strategies and tactics for defeating WMDs.
“Not yet,” Sherman said while chewing on his final bite of sirloin.
“Whatever it is, I’ll double it.”
