T yler wasn’t happy about having to wait for a shower when he and Stacy rendezvoused as planned with Grant at the Heathrow Airport Marriott. For convenience, they’d reserved a suite with a living area between a king room for Stacy and another one with double beds for the guys. Grant was already in the bathroom, so Tyler had to endure the smell of horse and river muck for a little longer. Tyler had their luggage sent over from the plane, and the clean clothes beckoned from his suitcase. After Grant finished, Tyler took his turn, feeling grateful for the invention of indoor plumbing.
After they ordered dinner from room service, Grant regaled them with his findings at the museum and his fight with Sal. Gia Cavano must have sent her men in London to abduct Grant as soon as she heard from the curator.
In turn, Tyler and Stacy recounted their visit to Cavano’s estate. When Stacy came to their escape from the mansion, she began to tease Tyler with wicked glee.
“And when we got to the stable,” she said, “it was obvious the only way we were going to get out of there was on horseback, but Doctor Fraidy Pants here almost blew it because he’s scared of horses.”
“I am not scared of horses,” Tyler protested. “Not any more. Now I just hate them.”
“You looked scared to me.”
“Wait a minute,” Grant said, pointing at Tyler. “You got him to ride a horse today?”
“Why is that so hard to believe?” Stacy asked.
“Weren’t you almost killed by one when you were a kid?” Grant asked Tyler. “I thought you said you’d never get on one again.”
“I didn’t have much choice,” Tyler said.
“Hold on. What’s this about almost getting killed?”
Tyler sighed. He didn’t enjoy telling the story. “When I was ten, my father took me and my sister to a ranch for a weekend. I was big into go-karts and motocross, not horses. I hadn’t been to a farm in my entire life until that morning.”
“I can’t even imagine that,” Stacy said. “I’ve been riding since I was four.”
“Well, I’d never seen a horse up close until I got to that ranch. I was a little hesitant at first. Those things are even bigger when you’re a kid. We got lessons for a couple of hours-walking, trotting, cantering-and I was feeling okay. Not loving it like my sister was, but okay. As I was dismounting, I put my foot in the stirrup by accident and for no good reason the horse spooked.”
“That can happen.”
“Not with a car, it can’t. My Viper has never decided to hit the gas after I opened the door to get out. Anyway, the stupid horse took off running with me dragging alongside, bouncing around like a can tied behind a honeymooner’s car. After a couple of spins around the corral, my boot finally came off, but not before I bashed my head on a fence post. I spent three days in the hospital with a concussion and a torn ACL. Needless to say, I hadn’t been on a horse again until today.”
“And now you’re cured?” Grant said.
“Very funny. Next time I hope we get stuck with a couple of ATVs instead.”
“Still, we couldn’t have gotten away without them,” Stacy said.
“My horse didn’t have to jump off the bridge to do it.”
Tyler told Grant about their ride through the fields and the river incident.
“Sounds like more fun than my day,” Grant said.
“Why didn’t you tell me that story this afternoon?” Stacy asked Tyler.
“We didn’t have time,” he replied. “Besides, would it have made any difference?”
A knock at the door stopped her from answering. Tyler checked to make sure it really was their dinner and let two busboys in. The feast spread out across three serving carts.
As they ate, they tried to figure out their next move.
“The most important priority is to get the geolabe back,” Tyler said. “Without it, we’re still missing one of the three keys of Archimedes’ puzzle to find the map.”
“Can’t you just make another geolabe?” Stacy said.
“It would take weeks to forge all those gears,” Grant explained. “They require delicate machining. Tyler had to find a bronze specialist to make it the first time.”
“And we only have another four days. We need that one back, so we’ll have to figure out a way to get back into Cavano’s estate and liberate it.”
“We can’t. She’s leaving tonight.”
“How do you know that?”
“Cavano either assumed I didn’t understand Italian or she didn’t care. When she gave the geolabe back to her bodyguard, she said, ‘Put it in the trunk. We’ll take it to Munich with us.’”
“Crap,” Tyler said. With Cavano on the move, it would be exponentially more difficult to get the geolabe back. “Okay. I had Aiden send me an audio recording of the call from Pietro’s phone in Cavano’s office. I was hoping we’d get some intel about when they’d be out of the house, but maybe it’ll tell us about her travel plans instead. Intercepting them en route is our only option. We’ll have you listen to it and see if there’s anything useful.”
Tyler’s own phone had been drenched and was ruined. Before they reached the hotel, they had stopped at a cellular-phone store and gotten a replacement, transferring his number and his backed-up contact list to it.
“What about the text on the tablet?” Stacy said.
“And all the stuff about the Parthenon?” Grant said.
“None of that matters if we can’t get the geolabe back. I’ll talk to Aiden and see if they’ve been able to decode the tracker signal from the geolabe.”
Stacy’s head snapped up. “Oh, my God! If Orr figures out that we lost it, he might hurt Carol and your father.”
“Then we need to make sure he doesn’t find out.” He looked at his watch. “Speaking of which, it’s time for our daily check-in. Ready?”
He dialed and put the call on speaker. Orr answered immediately. “Right on time. How is the search going?”
Tyler ignored the question. “Are Carol and my father all right?”
“You go first. Then I send the proof-of-life.”
Tyler told him about the tablet and its link to the Parthenon, but he left out the details. All Orr had to know was that they were making progress.
“Where are you off to next?” Orr asked, as if he were talking to a friend about his vacation plans.
“Munich,” Tyler said. “We’ve tracked down a document there that we think might be helpful.”
“Good. Then carry on. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”
“What about your end of the deal?”
“Check your email.” Orr hung up.
Tyler opened the laptop and pulled up his email app. In addition to the recording Aiden had sent, he had another message from Orr. Two videos were attached.
Stacy put her hand to her mouth when she saw the first video, which showed Carol sitting in a chair, her wrists and ankles cuffed, the man with the ski mask and newspaper standing next to her. Carol was alert and wore no blindfold. She looked terrified but unharmed.
Tyler squeezed Stacy’s arm. “Are you okay?”
Stacy nodded but said nothing.
Tyler dreaded seeing his own video, but Sherman Locke sat in the same chair in seemingly good shape, though he was blindfolded and grizzled stubble dusted his face. Tyler checked the USA Today Web site just to make sure of the date on the front-page story.
Then Tyler saw Sherman’s hands, and he ran the video again, freezing it when his father’s fingers were contorted in a particular orientation for just a second. He showed it to Grant and Stacy.
“Another message?” Grant asked.
“I think so.”
Stacy frowned. “What do you mean, another message?”
Tyler hadn’t told her about the first message when he received it because he didn’t want to raise false hopes that his father might be able to free Carol.
“You were surprised yesterday when I said he wasn’t going down without a fight,” he said to Stacy.
“No, I thought you were nuts.”
Tyler brought up the previous day’s video. “Look at his hands. He sent me a message.”
Stacy peered at the video, and then her eyes went wide. “Sign language.”
“If you weren’t looking for it, you’d think he was just straining against the cuffs.”
“What did he say yesterday?”
“He couldn’t do full signs because they require motion, so he just formed letters. Two sets. The first two letters were M and K. I think he was saying ‘I’m okay.’”
“And the second set?”
“ F and M. ”
Stacy thought about it for a moment and then laughed. “Eff ’em?”
“Right. His way of saying that he was planning to fight back.”
“What did he say today?”
Tyler played the second video again. “Today’s message is a little harder to figure out. Again two sets of letters. Actually, the first are letters and the second are numbers.”
“Maybe he’s trying to tell you how many kidnappers there are,” Stacy said.
“I doubt it. The numbers are nine and zero. Ninety.”
“And the letters?”
“ S and R. ”
“SR 90?” Stacy clapped her hands together in triumph. “State Road 90! He’s telling you where he is!”
Tyler didn’t share her enthusiasm. “Possibly. But that wouldn’t help us narrow down the search very much. There must be hundreds of miles of State Road 90s in the US. It’s got to be something else.”
“I’ll see what Google comes up with,” Grant said as he tapped on his own laptop. His face fell when he saw the results. “This is not good.”
“Why?” Tyler said.
“Because the first result that comes up for SR 90 is an entry for strontium-90.”
Tyler shuddered as a chill ran up his spine. Given that his father used to head up the agency responsible for rooting out weapons of mass destruction, it wasn’t a huge leap to guess that strontium-90 was what he meant. Grant rubbed his forehead as if he were massaging a headache.
“What’s strontium-90?” Stacy asked.
“It’s a highly radioactive isotope,” Tyler said. “My father could be saying that Orr has gotten hold of some Sr-90.”
“How radioactive is it?”
“Sr-90 is one of the key constituents of the radioactive dust from the Chernobyl disaster.”
“Where could Orr get his hands on something like that?”
“Radioactive materials are available on the black market,” Grant said. “It says here that Sr-90 is found in spent nuclear fuel. It’s also used as a power source in old Soviet thermal generators.”
“And if Orr has some,” Tyler said, “he could be planning to make a dirty bomb.”
“Which is what?” Stacy asked.
“It’s also called a radiological weapon. A poor man’s nuclear bomb. You set off a conventional bomb along with some radioactive material and it coats everything around it with fallout dust. The radiation could be dangerous enough to render a major city uninhabitable for decades. For some reason, Orr may be in possession of a weapon of mass destruction.”
“And both my sister and your father were kidnapped in-” A gasp caught in Stacy’s throat. “Oh, God.”
Tyler slowly nodded. The last time anyone had seen Sherman and Carol was in Washington, DC.