Seven Wonders

by Ben Mezrich

  There was something off about that Wonder of the World—an anomaly in its topography. Something that wouldn’t have been visible at all, without the sophisticated satellite equipment. The sort of thing that his brother, Jack, would want to check out in person; another adventure he could dive headlong into, halfway around the world. Jeremy would have to be content to study it via the safety of electronic packets of information, from a basement laboratory five thousand miles away.

  He quickly transferred the information onto the thumb drive attached to the laptop. Then his eyes returned to the larger screen—to the vivid pair of snakes cavorting in the perfect shape of the double helix. And what would Jack make of this? he wondered. He grinned, thinking about his brother digging through the dirt in Turkey, probably looking for a couple of scuffed coins or rotting bones—while Jeremy, locked up in a basement lab, had just made the discovery of a lifetime. Hell, maybe the discovery of a thousand lifetimes.

  He yanked the thumb drive out of the laptop—the gold-plated scarab keychain attached to the drive clinking with the motion—and snapped it into a USB port on the side of the enormous flat-screen. Three swipes of a mouse against the glass desk, and the packets of data were on their way from the security lab’s computer system onto the drive. As Jeremy waited for the transfer, he turned back to the glowing double helix, swooping up and down through the filtered air. He was so enrapt by the brightly colored pixels, he didn’t notice the figure closing in behind him—until a shadow flickered across the screen.

  Jeremy turned just in time to see a flash of motion, and then something jagged and long was knifing through the air in front of him. There was a sickening sound, like a butcher’s blade going through a block of raw meat, and Jeremy looked down. His eyes went wide.

  Something long and almost impossibly white was sticking out of the center of his chest.

  Jeremy crashed back against the glass desk, sending his laptop clattering to the floor. The figure in front of him was moving forward now, closing the distance between them. Jeremy felt himself sliding to the floor. As his knees touched the vinyl panels, he realized there was something in the palm of his hand. The thumb drive, hanging from the scarab key ring. He must have yanked it from the flat-screen on his way down. He had no idea if the data transfer was complete, but it hardly seemed to matter, because now the pain was starting to work through the shock in searing, gut-wrenching waves, emanating from the thing embedded in his chest. And then he realized that the pain wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that he could no longer breathe.

  As his body crumpled forward, he used his last burst of strength to shove the thumb drive deep into the hollow scarab, hiding it inside the keychain. A second later, his cheek touched vinyl, his eyes rolled up, and all that remained was the afterglow on his dying retinas of a pair of glowing snakes, intertwining in a sea of black.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Okay, Jack. It’s not like this is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done… .

  Jack Grady slid one gloved hand over the high-tensile aluminum rope, rechecking the iron clasps where it connected to his suspension harness. His other hand was straight out in front of him, his wrist working back and forth to steady his body in midair.

  But hell, it’s got to be in the top five… .

  He tried not to look straight down, where his work boots were dangling above a blackness that was both thick and palpable. Likewise, he did his best not to dwell on the fact that the only thing between him and a plunge that would end in certain death was that taut, seemingly floss-thin aluminum rope.

  “Everything okay down there, Doc?”

  The speaker in Jack’s fiberglass crash helmet was the size of a doll’s eye, and still the voice was like a gunshot in his ears, amplified by the sheer rock walls of the pit. Jack fought to keep his body still, but even the slightest tremble was enough to put him into a gentle spin, the yellow cone of light from the flashlight attached to his open visor dancing across the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle of stone that surrounded him.

  “Like a piece of bait on a hook, kid,” he responded.

  There was a laugh on the other end of the speaker. Then the aluminum rope gave a slight jerk, and Jack was inching downward again, into the soupy black.

  He kept his breathing normal as he went, noting that the air had turned markedly cooler since he’d passed the hundred-foot depth marker they’d clipped to the rope. He also noticed that there was a new, musty scent, perhaps some sort of microscopic vegetation or bacteria living in the crags and seams of the nearly sheer rock walls. It didn’t seem likely that anything substantial could live down there, although the pit itself appeared to be naturally occurring—Jack’s best guess, the result of a meteor strike that, according to the local oral tradition and held up by the geological dating, had struck the area around thirteen thousand years ago.

  About time someone came down here to kick the tires and check the oil… .

  Jack gave it another ten minutes, inching downward, his body still revolving in a nearly silent spin, before he reached up and tapped the side of his helmet.

  “Okay, hold up. I’m going to do a splat check.”

  The rope jerked to a stop. He was a good hundred and fifty feet down now, and still the pit appeared exactly the same as it had when they first broke through the limestone mantle beneath the dig site and peered down into the black drop from above.

  Just getting to that moment had been heroic enough. First the plane from Boston, then a connecting flight from Istanbul to Izmir, then a bus ride to the nearby village of Selçuk, where he’d been met by his two grad students for a middle of the night bike ride into the Greek-era ruins of Ephesus.

  Andy, by far the more talkative of his two charges, had grumbled the whole ride over that they should have waited until daylight and that he felt like some sort of grave robber sneaking into an archaeological dig at two in the morning. Dashia, for her part, had pedaled along in silence, trying to stay right behind Jack as they wound beneath the arched Greek ruins and around the Doric columns.

  Along the way, Jack hadn’t even bothered to try and respond to his lead student’s whines; Andy Chen was a wise-ass, but he was one of the smartest students Jack had ever met. He’d graduated at the top of his class at Princeton at sixteen, completed a Fulbright at Oxford before deciding to letter in anthropology, and since then, he’d become indispensable to Jack’s operation.

  At the moment, Jack was certain Andy’s complaining was more for Dashia’s benefit than for his. Though his second grad student had proved over the past six months that she could hold her own in the brains department—a transplant from Harvard, a triple major in biology, anthropology, and computer science—Dashia Lynwood was surprisingly straight-laced.

  To be sure, Andy knew full well why they couldn’t wait until morning, and it wasn’t just the oppressive heat that would swelter through the swampy field around the Temple of Artemis dig site, now a hundred and fifty feet directly above him. The truth was, Jack and his students were interlopers here. That they’d even managed to get permission from the Turkish Board of Antiquities for a late night survey of the area was a testament to Jack’s persuasiveness and his department’s prestige. This was an archaeological dig site; an anthropology fellow and his two precocious grad students shouldn’t have been let within a hundred yards of the place.

  Of course, if the Antiquities Board or the team from the British Museum who were running the dig had realized what Jack was really up to, he might have been on his way to a stay in a Turkish prison rather than lowering himself into an ancient abyss.

  “Ignition in three, two, one!” Jack said, yanking one of the chemical flares from a compartment in his harness.

  He pulled the cord on the end of the flare, and a burst of bright orange flame cut through the blackness. Jack leaned forward until he was parallel with the empty drop beneath him, the aluminum rope stringing out above him like a spider’s web. He let the flare go, and counted quietly to himself as he wa
tched the flame pinwheeling downward, spinning end over end.

  He was still counting more than twenty seconds later, when the speaker croaked in his ears.

  “Dashia wants to know why we call it the splat test.”

  Jack grimaced, certain that Andy would find the most inelegant way to explain it to her. It was mildly unsettling to think they’d been in enough situations like this over the past couple of years to have come up with a term for the test. Basically, if Jack’s harness broke, they now had some idea how long it would take before Andy heard a splat. In this case, as far as Jack could tell, the torch was still spinning through the darkness.

  But Jack wasn’t thinking about the bottom of the pit anymore; in that first few seconds after the flare had gone off, he’d noticed something extremely interesting about thirty yards down from where he was hanging, along one curve of the circular pit walls. It might have been nothing—a trick of shadows, a discoloration in the stone—but Jack thought he’d seen an opening, at least the size of a six-foot-tall anthropologist.

  “Andy, bring me down another three clicks.”

  Jack used his legs and arms to keep himself steady as Andy complied; he was still hanging parallel to the drop, a floating starfish, the flashlight on his helmet focused in the direction he’d seen the opening. The seconds passed in silence, broken only by the soft creak of the leather straps of the harness.

  “Christ,” Jack whispered as the opening suddenly came into view. “Stop!”

  The aluminum rope jerked tight. Jack trained the flashlight directly ahead of him.

  He’d been right. There was an opening in the rock, and it was even bigger than he’d thought. Arched, taller than him at its peak, with a floor that looked like it was sloping downward. It appeared to be the entrance to some sort of cave. Even more fascinating, it looked man-made. Not only were the edges smooth and the dimensions precise and symmetrical, in each corner of the opening, standing about a foot and a half tall, was a matching carved statue.

  “You’re not going to believe what I’m looking at,” Jack said.

  “Is it Artemis?” Andy joked. “She down there waiting to take you up to Mt. Olympus, introduce you to the family?”

  Not a bad guess, Jack thought to himself as he shined the flashlight over the twin statues. They were both decidedly female. But where the Greek goddess Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, was usually depicted holding a spear or bow and arrow, sometimes on a horse, these statues were thematically different. The two carved women were naked from the waist up and appeared to be covered in dozens of chiseled stone eggs. Furthermore, both of the statues had only a single breast; it appeared that on each one, the right breast had been removed.

  “You’re off by about three thousand years,” Jack said, half to himself. His heart was beating hard, and there was a familiar feeling moving up through his spine.

  It was the feeling he got when he was about to do something really stupid.

  He began shifting his weight back and forth against the harness, causing his body to swing forward and back—inches at first, but steadily gaining in speed, his body arcing through the air like the metal weight at the end of a pendulum.

  “It’s a natural assumption,” he said, reflexively shifting into teaching mode as he swung, rocking himself faster and faster, “that the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was built by the Greeks to worship Artemis. And at least three of the iterations of the great Wonder—which was destroyed four times—were indeed built for the goddess of the hunt.”

  Certainly the version of the Temple described in most textbooks was dedicated to Artemis. It had once been twice as long as the Parthenon, the first building ever constructed entirely of marble, and had taken a hundred and twenty years to build. If the Goths hadn’t burned most of it down in 268 AD, it might very well have remained one of the most impressive buildings in the world.

  “The Temple before that was nearly as grand,” Jack continued, breathing hard now as he rocked through the air, tilting his body so that he was facing the opening dead on, “but was much better known for how it had been destroyed. A local narcissist named Herostratus wanted to be famous and figured the way to fame was to burn the building to the ground. For his efforts, he was tortured to death; then the town leaders made a law that anyone who even mentioned his name would also be put to death.”

  It was that iteration of the Temple that the British Museum team had been studying when they had discovered the limestone mantle thirty feet beneath the base of the column that had been built from fragments of all four sets of ancient ruins—a memorial to the incredible feat of architecture that had once stood in this place.

  “And even before that, the Temple was decidedly a Greek monument; there are writings from all over the Ionic empire lauding the people of Ephesus, who were diligent in their Artemis worship. But go back another few thousand years and that’s where this place gets really interesting.”

  Jack took a deep breath of the cool, musty air that was now whipping against his cheeks. This seemingly bottomless pit, the dark opening in front of him—if he was right, the team from the British Museum had stumbled onto something much more ancient than the Greek monument they had been searching for.

  “Uh, Doc,” Andy’s voice cracked through his helmet. ““What are you doing? The rope seems to be swinging kind of crazy.”

  Jack focused on the opening as he swung through the darkness. He couldn’t be certain, but at the end of the arc on his pendulum path, he guessed he was about ten feet away. There seemed to be ample space between the two statues although he didn’t know how steep the pitch was on the other side.

  Not that it mattered; Jack’s mind was already made up.

  “Andy, that’s because I’m about to do something a little foolish.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the speaker.

  “Chief Jack foolish?”

  Jack grinned. It was shorthand that Jack was sure Andy was proudly in the process of explaining to Dashia. It dated back three years before, when the two of them had spent four months living with the Yanomami, the legendary Fierce People who lived deep in the jungle on the Venezuelan-Brazilian border. During a hunting expedition, Jack had somehow insulted a minor chieftain, and the man had challenged him to a duel. Jack had foolishly accepted, and they had fought using ritual long spears tipped with scorpion stingers. Thankfully, the scorpions in that region weren’t deadly—but the sting was immensely painful and caused debilitating hallucinations that could last up to thirty-six hours.

  Jack had lost the fight, but both men had been pricked in the process. When they’d finally come out of their delirium, everyone in the village was calling him Chief Jack. To this day, Jack wore a pouch filled with the scorpion stingers on a leather necklace beneath his shirt to remind him where his bravado had gotten him.

  “At the very least. When I give the signal, I want you to give me slack. Ten yards should do it.”

  “Doc—”

  “Ten yards, kid. On my mark.”

  Andy knew better than to argue. Over the past few years, he had accompanied Jack on field expeditions all over the world. Before the Yanomami, there had been the Swat Pukhtun, the sometimes-violent nomads of the remote valley of Northern Pakistan. Before that, a tribe of mountain people in Tibet who lived so high up the rear face of Everest, their skin had turned a permanent shade of blue.

  In Jack’s mind, the best field anthropologists didn’t ply their trade sitting in stuffy classrooms; they went out and took risks, submerging themselves in cultures that often seemed utterly alien.

  Jack tightened his jaw, making his body straight like an arrow as he approached the height of the pendulum arc, aiming his arms out toward the opening—

  “Now!”

  And he was sailing forward, the slack aluminum rope trailing out behind him. For a brief second he was weightless, his legs windmilling in the darkness, and then he was angling down, right between the two statues. His boots touched dirt and a plume of dust erupte
d around him, momentarily blinding him. Then he was skidding down a forty-five-degree angle, dirt and gravel sliding with him. He was about to topple forward when the rope behind him went taut and he gasped, the harness digging into his chest and shoulders. He coughed, hard, and the dust finally began to settle around him, the orange cone from his helmet light painting the scene in shifting, momentary glimpses.

  As he’d suspected, he was now in some sort of chamber, carved right out of the limestone. The sloping ramp he was on led down to a semicircular cave that appeared to be about fifteen feet high at its peak and maybe ten feet deep. The walls and ceiling were smooth, but when he looked more carefully, he could see hair-thin seams between carefully chiseled segments of stone.

  Nothing primitive about the craftsmanship here, Jack thought to himself. He turned carefully on his heels, trying not to dislodge too much gravel as he shifted back toward the two statues at the lip of the cavern.

  Up close, the statues were even more incredible. The details on the women’s faces were precise, the features carefully crafted; both women were quite beautiful, with vaguely African features and braided hair. Looking at them—at the eggs that speckled their bodies, at the missing breast on each of their chests—Jack’s heart rate began to quicken.

  “I’m not hearing any screaming,” Andy’s voice broke the silence. “So I’m gonna assume you made it.”

  Jack turned away from the statues, back toward the descending slope. He was about to answer when his helmet light flashed on something directly across from him—something that seemed to flash right back.

  “I’m going to need ten more yards,” he said.

  He made his way down the slope carefully, not wanting to upset more of the gravel. The cavern felt stable, but he was pretty certain now that he was in a man-made place that was much, much older than the marshy ruins high above.